Full Description
Based on nine years of research, this is the first book to offer an in-depth ethnographic study of a transnational environmentalist federation and of activists themselves. The book presents an account of the daily life and the ethical strivings of environmental activist members of Friends of the Earth International (FoEI), exploring how a transnational federation is constituted and maintained, and how different people strive to work together in their hope of contributing to the creation of "a better future for the globe." In the context of FoEI, a great diversity of environmentalisms from around the world are negotiated, discussed and evolve in relation to the experiences of the different cultures, ecosystems and human situations that the activists bring with them to the federation. Key to the global scope of this project is the analysis of FoEI experiments in models for intercultural and inclusive decision-making. The provisional results of FoEI's ongoing experiments in this area offer a glimpse of how different notions of the environment, and being an environmentalist, can come to work together without subsuming alterity.
Contents
1. Introduction: Environmentalism, globality and anthropology in the common world 2. Proposing an Imaginary: Fields of Forces, Vectors and Direction of Attention 3. Field Methods, Emplacement and Scale: Where is Friends of the Earth International? 4. Chronological history and organic time: Being Introduced to FoEI 5. Striving for an exemplary life :Becoming an Environmentalist 6. Rhythms of globality: Developing a sense of belonging to FoEI 7. Communication Technologies and Presence: Being in touch in FoEI 8. The effectiveness of structure: Vectors at work in a transnational federation 9. Experiments with political form and process 10. Epilogue: An Experiment Appendix
