Working with Nature in Aotearoa New Zealand: An Ethnography of Coastal Protection Book
- Author
- Gesing, Friederike
- Year
- 2016
- Publisher / Organisation
- Transcript Verlag
- Pages
- 332
- ISBN / ISSN
- ISBN 978-3-8376-3446-4 ISBN 978-3-8394-3446-8
- Keywords
- Sociology, Human, Ecology, Cultural, Geography, Ethnology, Ethnography, Sociotechnical, Imaginaries, materiality
- Summary
- This book employs ethnography for the analysis of emerging soft coastal protection practices in Aotearoa New Zealand1. My goal is to understand coastal protection projects as situated, material practices of making coastal natures that are meaningful in a specific cultural, social and political context. In the limited space of the coast, erosion emerges as a sociomaterial phenomenon that is neither fully attributable to a natural sphere outside human influence, nor to human actions, values and perception alone. In this book, I develop a take on coastal natures as naturecultures (Haraway 2008; Choy et al. 2009; de la Cadena and Weiss 2010) while I analyse exemplary practices of soft coastal protection situated in Aotearoa New Zealand. Drawing upon a formulation I encountered in the field (Trade Publications Ltd 2003), I argue that the discourses and practices emerging beyond hard coastal protection can be understood as a new “sociotechnical imaginary” (Jasanoff and Kim 2009; 2013; 2015). This imaginary provides a shared vision about the common future that is framed as ‘working with nature’ (and not against it).