""Wild Profusion" is a beautifully crafted ethnography of natures in the making in the Togean Islands of Indonesia. Through lively prose and a brilliantly executed analytics of power, Lowe takes the reader into the complex world of biodiversity conservation in action. Along the way, we meet Indonesian scientists who promote national development projects and negotiate their relations to Euro-American conservation experts, Togean subjects who struggle to assert their own place in the landscape of biodiversity knowledge, and all of the flora and fauna brought to stunning visibility in the dream world of a national park. Lowe also provides us with a bold philosophical meditation on questions of universalism and the particular, the natural and the social, the nation and the colony. Wild Profusion will quickly emerge as a classic text in the new ethnography of conservation science and contested environmentalisms."--Ralph Litzinger, Duke University
"This is an extraordinary book: both eloquent and elegantly argued. It presents a clear and compelling argument about 'reason' at the boundaries of the West, and striking portraits of scientists and lay people working at this boundary."--Anna L. Tsing, University of California, Santa Cruz, author of "Friction" and "In the Realm of the Diamond Queen"
