Industrial extraction of natural resources has led to degraded ecosystems, loss of biodiversity, and species extinction. Improved management of resources is now an urgent concern. In Arctic Fennoscandia the effects of resource extraction are of particular concern. In this chapter we use examples from indigenous Sámi reindeer herding in northern Sweden and salmon fishing in the Kemijoki river valley in northern Finland. We show how the emergence of industrial mega systems has led to accumulating industrial land use that now severely encroaches on the ecosystems that reindeer and salmon depend on. The negative effects from encroachments is also further exacerbated by climate change. As a result, the culture-bearing activities of reindeer herding and salmon fishing that have shaped identities in Arctic Fennoscandia for centuries are facing rapidly deteriorating conditions. There are large-scale plans in northern Sweden and Finland to increase mining, wind energy production, and forestry. To avoid, or at least mitigate, long-lasting effects on the ecosystems represented by reindeer and salmon, adequate assessments of cumulative effects from industrial developments are urgently needed.

This essay offers an overview of literature and culture in Manaus between 1870 and 1930. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, Manaus grew from a remote outpost in the Brazilian Amazon to one of the capitals of the rubber boom – a bustling port where British bankers mingled with Turkish traders and opera companies from Italy sang at the opulent Teatro Amazonas. By World War I, however, the rubber trade had shifted to southeast Asia and the city entered what is typically portrayed as a long decline. Most accounts of the boom depict Manaus as a place where “culture” was just another import and object of conspicuous consumption. In contrast, this essay shows how the social and economic relations, international influences, and cultural infrastructure established during the heyday of rubber were essential to the postboom emergence of a regionalist movement and efforts to articulate an explicitly Amazonian identity.

Chapter 4 analyzes Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s “Jashn-e Farkhondeh” ("The Auspicious Celebration"), set in the 1930s, drawing on the 1936 police-enforced unveiling decree of Reza Shah. The narrator’s father, a cleric, has been invited to Reza Shah’s organized event for the Emancipation of Women where he will have to take his wife unveiled. To avoid this, he decides to contract a sigheh for two hours with a friend’s more modern daughter, so he can attend without violating the royal command, but able to disobey the state’s unveiling decree by not attending it with his formal wife. Al-e Ahmad shows how female sexuality is regulated and the female body is exploited under a religious façade to the benefit of the sociocultural, religious, and political institutions during the early years of the Pahlavi regime. Al-e Ahmad addresses the issue of modernization, how it intersects with anxieties over losing or sacrificing indigenous culture, and the role of women within this new nation-state, which is heading toward a Western model of modernization. In so doing, “Jashn-e Farkhondeh” depicts how modern Iranian womanhood came to be defined through the struggle between religion and politics, as well as the interaction between modernity and tradition, among other factors.