Thinking through nostalgia in anthropologies of the environment and ethnographies of landscape

The chapter examines the treatment of memory in ecological and environmental anthropology. Though increasingly acknowledged, its role has not always been explicit. In this context ecological nostalgia is understood as the selective use of memory to create potent and evocative valuations of particular scenarios impacting on how people store, represent and use environmental information. The chapter shows how specific ecological nostalgias are dependent on the ways people make their environments, both physically and conceptually, and through a process in which science, governments, stakeholder citizens, heritage specialists and traditional peoples may all in different ways be complicit. The argument is illustrated using two case studies, the first surrounding research linked to national park development in Brunei during the mid 1990s, and the second concerning Nuaulu people on Seram, during the period 2000-2015 as they mobilized support in negotiations with the Indonesian government to establish an independent devolved administration. I show how the complexities of historical process prevent any easy definition of what constitutes 'ecological nostalgia' in both instances, arguing that this is essentially positional