In his collection, Culture and the Question of Rights: Forests, Coasts, and Seas in Southeast Asia, Charles Zerner brings together eight individually authored essays that deftly demonstrate the ways in which cultural performances and practices like poetry, song, and storytelling are intimately connected to the politics of nature, property, and rights. All of the essays describe and examine the moments when these social acts, sometimes acts of great spiritual importance and sometimes mundane day-to-day acts, become claims to the environment. They are also concerned with challenging representations of human uses of the environment as simply neutral, rational, and economic. Instead, they show that actions often seen as “resource use” are aesthetic, full of morality, feeling, poetics, and bodily experience. The six ethnographic essays in the book are bracketed by an introduction by Zerner, who employs his fluid prose to ask the reader to think about the essays in the context of a world in which nature is understood to be both materially and symbolically constructed, and by two concluding essays, in which Donald Brenneis and Jane Monnig Atkinson give different readings of the conceptual grounding and political importance of the ethnographic essays.

Zerner’s introduction examines the ways that people articulate knowledges, desires, and rights and the acts of translation that make these articulations legible to others. His discussion of the politics of translation is excellent. It raises questions about the role of translation professionals (anthropologists, lawyers, sociologists) in the complicated and volatile landscape of political claims based on articulations of practice, belief, and understanding that often come from outside the group or groups of people engaged in what is being translated.

The first of the ethnographic essays, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, is the most direct challenge in the volume to translations that code environmental actions as “resource use.” Using a minor forest product (honey) and its collection by Meratus hunters, Tsing challenges the frameworks through which people and nature are made by economists, ecologists, and the Indonesian state. Zerner’s own ethnographic essay, which follows, is a reading and analysis of three kinds of political and poetic texts: Mandar fishing calls, a marine-related court ruling, and ethnographic interviews with Mandar fishers. In his discussion, the multiple ways of making livelihood, rights, territory, culture, and the sea become clear. In the third ethonographic essay, Marina Roseman writes about Temiar rain-forest dwellers who create, learn, and remember their landscapes through song. These aural maps are multitextured; they are historical, personal, ecological, and more. Roseman juxtaposes these living maps with the mapping practices of the colonial and postcolonial Malaysian state in a way that complements the Tsing and Zerner essays, in that local poetic practice and the politics it engenders are seen next to state practices of translation.

In what is the most unusual, and in some senses because of this, the most intriguing essay in the collection, Stephanie Gorson Fried explores the ways that Bentian Dayak authors write about identity, rights, nature, land, and use. Fried shows the ways in which Dayak life and belief are translated for the larger Indonesian public by the authors. In the essay Dayaks are objects and subjects, a productive and disarming tension that works to connect the essay to Zerner’s articulate discussion of the politics of translation.

The final ethnographic essay, by Nancy Lee Peluso, a classic reprinted here in an abbreviated form, is an examination of the nature of anthropogenic forests and tree planters in West Kalimantan. In it, Peluso makes clear that landscape, forest, rights, and history are all in process and that setting them temporally or legislatively works to erase them as they are understood and known by the people who made and lived them.

As a contribution to anthropology, Zerner’s collection works to bring rich and thick ethnography and an appreciation for aesthetics to the forefront of political ecology without reinscribing cultural performance as some sort of anthropological curio and marker of Otherness. Although giving voice to the policies, discourses, structures, and agents that could be thought of as global (e.g., capitalism, development discourses, NGOs), much contemporary political ecology, perhaps because of influences from political economy, fails to give voice to local politics that are expressed in forms not used at the macro level. In each contribution to this volume, the lives of people who gather honey, go fishing and hunting, plant and manage trees in dense forests, and conduct other ordinary social practices in nature, albeit often with extraordinary accompanying performance, shine through discussions of the larger politics that often threaten to erase these social lives from view and from existence. The book would work well in both upper-level undergraduate seminars in anthropology, geography, environmental studies, and conservation biology and in graduate seminars.