Aparna Rao

Michael J. Casimir

South Asia is home to the world's largest nomadic population. Focusing on nomadic societies in the region, this reader brings together essays, which illustrate how large sections of rural South Asians have long been dynamic, mobile, and resilient. The essays look at a wide variety of ecological, economic, and political settings. They cover three types of nomads--animal husbanders, including hunters and gatherers, peripatetic traders, and entertainers. Treating migration as their core point of reference, the authors cover a wide range of issues and approaches, from historical to contemporary ethnographic perspectives. They also discuss what it means to be nomadic today and the future possibilities for such societies.

Nomadism in South Asia

In the Himalayas of the Indian part of Kashmir three communities depend on the ecology of the Dal lake: market gardeners, houseboat owners and fishers. Floating Economies describes for the first time the complex intermeshing economy, social structure and ecology of the area against the background of history and the present volatile socio-political situation. Using a holistic and multidisciplinary approach, the author deals with the socioeconomic strategies of the communities whose livelihoods are embedded here and analyses the ecological condition of the Dal, and the reasons for its progressive degradation.

The Cultural Ecology of the Dal Lake in Kashmir, India

Floating Economies

Today human ecology has split into many different sub-disciplines such as historical ecology, political ecology or the New Ecological Anthropology. The latter in particular has criticised the predominance of the Western view on different ecosystems, arguing that culture-specific world views and human-environment interactions have been largely neglected. However, these different perspectives only tackle specific facets of a local and global hyper-complex reality. In bringing together a variety of views and theoretical approaches, these especially commissioned essays prove that an interdisciplinary collaboration and understanding of the extreme complexity of the human-environment interface(s) is possible.

Michael J. Casimir

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