Forest Futures: Global Representations and Ground Realities in the Himalayas

In the 1970s and 1980s, struggles over forest rights in the Garhwal Himalayas drew worldwide attention via the Chipko movement. To a large extent, this also entailed a subsuming of local experiences under global discourses: many of the messages and meanings of the Chipko movement's varied struggles were homogenized, changed, and rewritten.

Antje Linkenbach persuasively argues that global representation took away narrative control from local actors and removed Chipko from the specificity of its locale, from its village contexts. She attempts to relocate forest issues and struggles by revisiting the perspectives of leading activists and local residents and discusses prominent representations of Chipko in relation to local histories of resistance, local representational contestations, and local forest practices-all set against a backdrop of local reflections on Chipko and its aftermath. It is of ultimate importance that the issues of forest control and sustainable forest use be seen in the context of concerns about social and economic development, regional autonomy, and imaginations of preferred futures among people actually resident in the region.

Built on an impressive edifice of fieldwork, this volume will be of interest for ecologists, environmental historians, social anthropologists, and political scientists.

About the Author:
Antje Linkenbach is a social anthropologist and sociologist and has taught at the universities of Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Tubingen and Zurich