| This dissertation analyzes the cultural, social, and political significance of the emergence of environmental discourses and practices in Hong Kong, a post-colonial port city historically central to the global circulation of capital, culture, and knowledge. As the environmental effects of the city's rapid urban development become increasingly subject to local and international scrutiny, Hong Kong provides a critical site in which to study not only environmentalism's transnational movement, but also specific histories, appropriations, and interpretations of what is often assumed to be a culturally "Western" field of practice.; Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic research in environmental activist networks, among environmental consultants and engineers, and among laypeople in Hong Kong's urban and rural areas, I consider a series of moments where environmental knowledges, practices, and objects move across Hong Kong's cultural worlds. I suggest that, in these moments, new and reworked forms of expertise-production, cultural identification, and political mobilization have emerged. In particular, I highlight practices of translation and articulation in the formation of counter-knowledge in an NGO-village collaboration, modes of cosmopolitan self-fashioning among environmental activists, the discursive production of natural and cultural endangerment, and the material poetics through which Hong Kong's air comes to matter as a locally and translocally meaningful substance. I suggest that the power of such emergent forms---all of which work through a network of examples rather than through a singular truth or ethic---might tentatively allay some fears voiced recently about the viability of politics after foundationalism.; As an ethnography of environmental emergences, this work pushes beyond the purifying practices of scientific research into the accumulative and assembling techniques of political claim-making. This shift in scope requires a more diverse set of methods than most ethnographies of science. At the same time, I argue, the question of how epistemic claims come to be relatively stable and reliable in and through cultural and social practices---not despite them---has been one particularly well researched and theorized by ethnographers of science, making the anthropology of science a particularly good starting point for thinking about the making of contingent political stabilities. |
