Event details

This talk draws on work in progress on the burgeoning theme-park-like gardens, parks, and public spaces in contemporary India whose figuration of what we call “nature” returns us to basic questions about what such figuration can mean and do. At these sites, a range of post-Enlightenment and post-Romantic ideas, including global discourses of ecology or environmentalism, encounter other vernacular logics of presenting and representing nature. Engaging Lorraine Daston’s insights into nature’s recalcitrant links with morality, I describe how, in such spaces, logics of cosmic efficacy and social order (not least the order of caste) render plastic the prefix “eco”.