Questioning Collapse
Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire
£35.99
- Editors:
- Patricia A. McAnany, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
- Norman Yoffee, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
- Date Published: November 2009
- availability: Available
- format: Paperback
- isbn: 9780521733663
£
35.99
Paperback
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Questioning Collapse challenges those scholars and popular writers who advance the thesis that societies - past and present - collapse because of behavior that destroyed their environments or because of overpopulation. In a series of highly accessible and closely argued essays, a team of internationally recognized scholars bring history and context to bear in their radically different analyses of iconic events, such as the deforestation of Easter Island, the cessation of the Norse colony in Greenland, the faltering of nineteenth-century China, the migration of ancestral peoples away from Chaco Canyon in the American southwest, the crisis and resilience of Lowland Maya kingship, and other societies that purportedly 'collapsed'. Collectively, these essays demonstrate that resilience in the face of societal crises, rather than collapse, is the leitmotif of the human story from the earliest civilizations to the present. Scrutinizing the notion that Euro-American colonial triumphs were an accident of geography, Questioning Collapse also critically examines the complex historical relationship between race and political labels of societal 'success' and 'failure'.
Read more- Accessible to lay persons, students, and scholars; appropriate for classroom use
- Broad geographical and temporal coverage yet deeply contextualized analyses; transdisciplinary in approach
- Emphasizes resiliency of human society and includes indigenous voices in the telling of history
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'Essential summer reading …' New Statesman
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×Product details
- Date Published: November 2009
- format: Paperback
- isbn: 9780521733663
- length: 392 pages
- dimensions: 226 x 152 x 20 mm
- weight: 0.52kg
- contains: 91 b/w illus. 22 maps
- availability: Available
Table of Contents
1. Why we question collapse and study human resilience, ecological vulnerability, and the aftermath of empire Patricia A. McAnany and Norman Yoffee
Part I. Human Resilience and Ecological Vulnerability:
2. Ecological catastrophe, collapse, and the myth of 'ecocide' on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) Terry L. Hunt and Carl P. Lipo
3. Did the medieval Norse society in Greenland really fail? Joel Berglund
4. Calamities without collapse: environment, economy, and society in China, c.1800–1949 Kenneth Pomeranz
Part II. Surviving Collapse: Studies of Societal Regeneration:
5. Marketing conquest and the vanishing Indian: an indigenous response to Jared Diamond's archaeology of the American southwest Michael Wilcox
6. Bellicose rulers and climatological peril? Retrofitting 21st century woes on 8th century Maya society Patricia A. McAnany and Tomas Gallareta Negrón
7. Collapse in ancient Mesopotamia: what happened, what didn't Norman Yoffee
Part III. Societies in the Aftermath of Empire:
8. Advanced Andeans and backward Europeans: structure and agency in the collapse of the Inca empire David Cahill
9. Rwandan genocide: towards an explanation in which history and culture matter Christopher C. Taylor
10. 'Failed' states, societal 'collapse', and ecological 'disaster': a Haitian lesson on grand theory Drexel G. Woodson
11. The power of the past: environment, Aborigines, archaeology, and a sustainable Australian society Tim Murray
12. Excusing the haves and blaming the have-nots in the telling of history Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz
Part IV. Reflections on Sustainability:
13. Sustainable survival J. R. McNeill.
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