ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes two seminal pieces by the environmental historian William Cronon to question American stories about and ideas of nature, and an ethnographic article by the British anthropologist Roy Ellen in which local concepts of nature in outer-island Indonesia change dramatically. Cronon and Ellen are significant because they each organized conferences that became books, at a moment in the early 1990s when postmodernism began to stimulate environmental historians and anthropologists in the US and Great Britain. Both volumes question ideas of nature and the nature–culture dichotomy in a way that was radically new at the time. Cronon’s work was very controversial among conservationists; Ellen’s was not.
