Product details
- ISBN 9786164510821
- Weight: 1272g
- Dimensions: 250 x 230mm
- Publication Date: 23 Apr 2024
- Publisher: River Books
- Publication City/Country: TH
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Tracing human interactions with the world’s most famous tropical timber species, The Social Life of Teak maps worlds revolving around teak forests, trees and wood.
What gives Tectona grandis such a powerful aura, stoking desires and capturing imaginations? How has teak shaped people’s lives, driving fortunes and impacting futures? What has happened to the teak forests and what is their destiny?
In this illustrated anthology of oral histories, people connected personally or professionally to teak speak of survival, change and learning, creativity and destruction, growth and demise. Woven together, these experiences bring to light the ways that teak has been sought, crafted, cultivated, traded and prized over time.
Animist beliefs, creative expression, scientific invention, economic viability, imperialist expansion, peak luxury, violent repression, ecological disaster and the regenerative power of nature all find a home in this global intergenerational tale.
Charting the domestication of wilderness and exposing the era of extinction of a feted natural resource, this book seeks to stimulate conversations about our role as nature’s most troublesome offspring.
New Zealander Virginia Henderson has been based in Southeast Asia since 1990 and is an oral historian with a doctorate in heritage management. Tim Webster is a documentary photographer specialising in theatre, dance and architectural heritage photography.
