ABSTRACT
In Chapter 20 of the Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity, Dahake introduces an ethnographic study in India focusing on coexisting civic, religious, and institutional standpoints of environmentalism in Nashik city, a place identified by its river of sacred and environmental importance. Drawing from the urban political ecological framework within critical geography, Dahake deliberates upon the growing scholarship on the current phase of the urban environmental awakening in India to analyze: first, the production of environmental subjectivities within a specific socio-political and cultural urban landscape; second, the performance and negotiations of the state and non-state actors in an ecologically distressed urban situation; and, third, how urban environmental politics figure within the global metanarrative of the Anthropocene. The author argues that, within the framework of ecocultural identity, such critical and socially embedded accounts of the Anthropocene can inform policy frameworks from local to global, integrating diverse social settings and various stakeholders.
