Drawing on the work of Black feminist scholars, this review suggests “intersectional ecologies” as a method for critically engaging anthropology's relationship with the environment across subfields, intellectual traditions, and authorial politics. Intersectional ecologies helps us trace how a broad coalition of scholars represents and accounts for the environment within shifting planetary arrangements of bodies, sites, practices, and technologies. Our basic argument in this article is that because the environment is a malleable and contingent social fact, it matters who is analyzing its formation and how they are analyzing it. To this end, the scholarship we review comes from a diverse array of authors. The three themes we have identified—materiality, knowledge, and subjectivity—are central to bringing this diverse scholarship into dialogue while putting into focus anthropology's uneven commitments to the environment as a concept. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 50 is October 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

This article analyzes the restoration of Jordan's UN Dana Biosphere Reserve cottages for ecotourism and home building in the neighboring village of Qadisiyya as competing land projects. Whereas a multimillion-dollar endowment from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) restores Dana's houses as a “heritage” village for a tourist economy, families in Qadisiyya build houses with income from provisional labor to shore up a familial future. Each act of home building articulates a political claim to land. This article argues for attention to the architecture of the environment in the comparison of two, once-related villages. A comparative analysis of Dana and Qadisiyya reveals the competing socio-political objectives of home building for the future of Jordan and the implications of environment in that struggle.

In August 2003, Iraqi exile Zaid Kubra returned to Baghdad to restore and conserve the country’s marshes, once drained by Saddam Hussein, as the signature emblem for the new state. Under Kubra’s leadership Iraq’s marshes conservation initiative became the ‘success story of the war’. Photographic images of Iraq’s restored marshes were potent markers of this success, used by more than 75 news articles since 2003 to fuel special interest good news reportage. Through a comparative of occupation imagery with the Iraqi canon of literary and visual arts centring on the marshes, the article analyses how Iraqi exiles cultivated an occupation aesthetics of the marshes that deployed images of wetlands’ nature – its towering reeds and its soaring birds – to advance the occupation.

What makes a certain people a 'diaspora?'" and "Where is the homeland?" are principal questions Axel asks in The Nation's Tortured Body. Axel chronicles the formation of Sikh communities and the fight for Khalistan, an autonomous Sikh nation, and questions whether sharp distinctions can be made between diasporas and homelands. In fact, he argues, the limitations of some contemporary scholarship theorizing diasporas has been the tendency to treat the homeland as a point of origin. Such work is flawed, he asserts, because the paradigm in which it operates requires one to reduce the diaspora to that which is inauthentic, a replica. Challenging this logic, Axel inverts the paradigm and asserts that it is through the diaspora that the homeland is constituted. In this regard, he restores a sense of motion to theorizing the circulation of ideas, information, and, yes, bodies between diasporas and homelands. Yet, despite his criticism, Axel firmly insists that there are limitations to questioning the categories diaspora and homeland. In this way, Axel attempts to distance his work from scholars who have argued that homelands and diasporas are "imaginary"-work that he argues has resulted in an odd spatiotemporal duality, wherein the homeland is understood to be a lost relic of a past time, and the diaspora a present configuration-while also disputing the utility of constructing such firm distinctions.Just as boundaries are inscribed on the homeland, Axel asserts, so they are on the body. Beginning with his title, which nicely juxtaposes nation and body, Axel beautifully weaves the two together throughout the book. Through both archival and ethnographic analysis, he demonstrates how the body not only carries the markings of sociopolitical and cultural change but also acts as an agent of these transformations. The politics of place, he suggests, meets the politics of body in the dialectical relation of the total body, which he identifies as the amritdhari (unwounded) man's body, whose images were first circulated in colonial portraiture, and the tortured body, images of which began circulating on the internet as violent actions taken against Sikhs in India became common practice. The body thus signifies more than Sikh subjectivity; changes in representations of the Sikh body, Axel asserts, reflect the formation of the diaspora itself. His consideration of the relationship between the body, the diaspora, and the nation could have been enhanced by drawing more closely upon the richness of his fieldwork. Overall, however, Axel's book is an impressive work that should be widely read among scholars of identity, nationalism, diaspora, or South Asia.---Bridget Guarasci 214

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