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Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects. Arun Agrawal. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 325 pp.
Using Foucauldian poststructuralist theory to inform his exquisitely detailed ethnographic research concerning the forestry practices of the Kumaon region of northern India, Arun Agrawal's Environmentality offers readers in the fields of anthropology, environmental studies, and history a useful and interesting case study. In this thought-provoking book, Agrawal argues that "in Kumaon the government of nature led to the birth of the environment" (p. 201). By this statement he suggests that the development of an environmental ethos among Kumaoni villagers, most visible in the literature and popular media of the late 20th century through reference to the Chipko movement, was in fact a product of the management strategies of the British colonial forestry program. Agrawal shows in particular that the increasing collection and utilization of statistical information by the colonial government beginning in the middle of the 19th century "transformed...