Wheeler, William Morton (Author)
UCL Press
Physical Details: 288
Language: English
The Aral Sea is well known for its devastating regression over the second half of the twentieth century, and for its recent partial restoration. Environment and Post-Soviet Transformation in Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea Region is the first book to explore what these monumental changes have meant to those living on the sea’s shores.Following the fluctuating fortunes of the pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet fisheries, the book shows how the vast environmental changes the region has undergone cannot be disentangled from the transformations of Soviet socialism and postsocialism. This ethnographic perspective prompts a critical rethinking of the category of environmental disaster through which the region is predominantly known. Tracing how the sea’s retreat and partial return have been apprehended by diverse local actors in the former port of Aral’sk and surrounding fishing villages, as well as by scientists, bureaucrats and international development workers, William Wheeler draws out the multiple meanings environmental change acquires within different contexts. This study of how people make their lives amidst overlapping ecological and political-economic upheavals is rich in ethnographic detail that is both rooted in Soviet legacies and alive to the new transnational connections that are reshaping the region.Offering a rigorous political ecology of Soviet socialism and after, the book is a major contribution to the nascent environmental anthropology of Central Asia. It will be of interest to environmental anthropologists, environmental historians, and scholars of all disciplines working on Central Asia and the former USSR.
...MoreReview Sarah Cameron (2023) Review of "Environment and Post-Soviet Transformation in Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea Region: Sea changes". Environment and History (pp. 449-451).
Similar Citations
Book
Michaels, Paula A.;
(2003)
Curative Powers: Medicine and Empire in Stalin's Central Asia
(/isis/citation/CBB000301621/)
Article
Elie, Marc;
(2013)
Coping with the “Black Dragon”: Mudflow Hazards and the Controversy over the Medeo Dam in Kazakhstan, 1958--66
(/isis/citation/CBB001200562/)
Book
Jennifer Keating;
(2022)
On Arid Ground: Political Ecologies of Empire in Russian Central Asia
(/isis/citation/CBB945713862/)
Book
Adrienne Edgar;
(2022)
Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia
(/isis/citation/CBB737096327/)
Article
Soens, Tim;
(2013)
Flood Security in the Medieval and Early Modern North Sea Area: A Question of Entitlement?
(/isis/citation/CBB001421393/)
Article
Galloway, James A.;
(2013)
Coastal Flooding and Socioeconomic Change in Eastern England in the Later Middle Ages
(/isis/citation/CBB001421392/)
Article
Timothy Cooper;
(2023)
'A Kind of Sensory, Strange Thing to Experience': Speaking Environmental Disaster in the Sea Empress Project Archive
(/isis/citation/CBB715935317/)
Book
Togzhan Kassenova;
(2022)
Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb
(/isis/citation/CBB500034528/)
Book
Andy Bruno;
(2016)
The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History
(/isis/citation/CBB001811907/)
Article
Philip Slavin;
(2023)
The Birth of the Black Death: Biology, Climate, Environment, and the Beginnings of the Second Plague Pandemic in Early Fourteenth-Century Central Asia
(/isis/citation/CBB277653666/)
Book
Eric A. Cheezum;
(2024)
Chessie: A Cultural History of the Chesapeake Bay Sea Monster
(/isis/citation/CBB619889441/)
Article
Antony Adler;
(2020)
Deep Horizons: Canada's Underwater Habitat Program and Vertical Dimensions of Marine Sovereignty
(/isis/citation/CBB981240817/)
Article
Arunabh Ghosh;
(2018)
Lies, Damned Lies, and (Bourgeois) Statistics: Ascertaining Social Fact in Midcentury China and the Soviet Union
(/isis/citation/CBB399530810/)
Article
Diana Kurkovsky West;
(2020)
Cybernetics for the Command Economy: Foregrounding Entropy in Late Soviet Planning
(/isis/citation/CBB931819752/)
Book
Alexey Golubev;
(2020)
The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia
(/isis/citation/CBB886155448/)
Book
Michael Kaasch;
Joachim Kaasch;
Torsten K. D. Himmel;
(2018)
Biologie in der DDR: Beiträge zur 24. Jahrestagung der DGGTB in Greifswald 2015.
(/isis/citation/CBB682224284/)
Article
Viktor Pál;
(2023)
Toward Socialist Environmentalism? Scientists and Environmental Change in Modern Hungary
(/isis/citation/CBB781258575/)
Thesis
Victor Petrov;
(2017)
A Cyber-Socialism at Home and Abroad: Bulgarian Modernisation, Computers, and the World, 1967-1989
(/isis/citation/CBB289456387/)
Thesis
Gabrielle Cornish;
(2020)
Sounding Socialist, Sounding Modern: Music, Technology, and Everyday Life in the Soviet Union, 1956-1975
(/isis/citation/CBB077352934/)
Thesis
Smith, Jenny Leigh;
(2006)
The Soviet Farm Complex: Industrial Agriculture in a Socialist Context, 1945--1965
(/isis/citation/CBB001561283/)
Centaurus: International Magazine of the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology
Environmental History
History of the Human Sciences
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History
Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Be the first to comment!