Swamplife: People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades

by Laura A. Ogden

Little in North America is wilder than the Florida Everglades—a landscape of frightening reptiles, exotic plants in profusion, swarms of mosquitoes, and unforgiving heat. And yet, even from the early days of taming the wilderness with clearing and drainage, the Everglades has been considered fragile, unique, and in need of restorative interventions. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork with hunters in the Everglades, Laura A. Ogden explores the lives and labors of people, animals, and plants in this most delicate and tenacious ecosystem.


Today, the many visions of the Everglades—protectionist, ecological, commercial, historical—have become a tangled web of contradictory practices and politics for conservation and for development. Yet within this entanglement, the place of people remains highly ambivalent. It is the role of people in the Everglades that interests Ogden, as she seeks to reclaim the landscape’s long history as a place of human activity and, in doing so, discover what it means to be human through changing relations with other animals and plant life.


Ogden tells this story through the lives of poor rural whites, gladesmen, epitomized in tales of the Everglades’ most famous outlaws, the Ashley Gang. With such legends and lore on one side, and outsized efforts at drainage and development on the other, Swamplife strikes a rare balance, offering a unique insight into the hidden life of the Everglades—and into how an appreciation of oppositional culture and social class operates in our understanding of wilderness in the United States.

Genres: Nonfiction, Anthropology, Ethnography, Nature, Environment, Science, Ecology

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Tatiana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eh. Not exactly what I was expecting. It is basically about rural whites in the Everglades and how they murdered alligators and then people came to protect the Everglades and so these hunters became poachers and tried to get around the law, so on and so forth.

My sense is that this is an ongoing issue; environmentalists and naturalists vs poor and rural whites.

I dont know who this book is for but it was very informative, it's not very long and was very well written.

[Megan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Way too academic. Stylistically, she spends a lot of time describing what she is going to do and how she is doing something as opposed to telling a good story and weaving her ethnographic analysis through it.

[Bri · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I appreciate about this is how well Ogden explains herself. I noticed some reviewers complained of academic b.s., which I tend to loathe as well, but I really felt she does a good job explaining theory and not harping on it overly much. It's an interesting story, as the histories of national parks often are, and it focuses on a fascinating ecology and history. Americans are often so oblivious to the notion that national parks are not these sites of pristine, untouched wilderness, so it's an important story to tell. I would teach this ethnography and plan to someday. I even let my mom borrow it so perhaps it could explain what kind of work I'd like to do as an environmental anthropologist.

[Frida · Rating 2 out of 5]

Vad ville författaren ha sagt? Vad var poängen? Ingen vet.

Lär mig hur jag som framtida antropolog ska skriva för att tråka ut mina fellow anthropologists till döds.

[Maggie Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m being so serious when I say this was a really fascinating breakdown of swamp politics. Very interesting insights into the concept of a rhizome both as a biological structure and a metaphor for the construction of knowledge etc. Helpful in mentally situating my own research. I feel like the academic style was pretty useful and added a lot of complexity and depth of thought, and gave me some good vocabulary that I could use in future discussions.

I will say, I found it a little repetitive at times, and although it states that Seminole practices are outside of the scope of the project, I felt like that was a perspective that was seriously lacking. They seem like a very interesting case of land use, being so similar to the white rural inhabitants

[Christine Stamey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Swamplife is a special type of ethnography that's equal parts narrative storytelling and history account of the Everglades' history. Each chapter is an eye opening experience that shows the dangerous overlaps between environmental health, culture, society, and class that changes the way Americans view the "redneck south." I loved reading this book, and absolutely recommend it to anyone just dipping their toes in the ethnographic genre (or seasoned vets, there's a lot of good juicy content to analyze, too).

[molly]

for a class. so boring but unfair to rate it.

[Maren Loveland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely stunning—Ogden’s writing shines with immense love and meticulous knowledge.

[Lyndsey Knicely · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Madeline]

very interesting meditation on something that I really never thought about before. Political Ecology, my beloved.

[Braden Harris · Rating 2 out of 5]

When people try really hard to act smart and thoughtful for 150 pages, it doesn’t work. You exhaust me Laura—darn you.

[Larry Perez · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is admittedly not for the faint of heart, given the abundance of theory presented and the volume of academic language Ogden uses. However, for those willing to brave these waters, the work OVERFLOWS with thought-provoking ideas regarding the conceptualization of nature in the Florida Everglades.

Ogden is a well-respected anthropologist in south Florida with deep personal ties to the landscape she writes so eloquently about. She skillfully tackles questions and thoughts that--throughout the overabundance of writings about the Everglades--are either entirely overlooked or purposely avoided. How did the academic branding of the area as "tropical" eventually influence land use? Did the sharing of traditional local knowledge in service to academics ironically disbar traditional local uses in time? What is the role of mobility and freedom of movement (or lack thereof) in defining landscapes? And how deeply intertwined were the worlds of alligators and humans prior to their eventual protection?

There are no easy answers here, though this fine book moves us along a path for considering some differing interpretations. Perhaps one day we'll all better acknowledge the social creation of nature but—until then—I’m glad there are people like Ogden in our midst to give us frequent reminders.

[Craig Pittman · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing and insightful book that, unfortunately, tends to be written in an academic style that makes it difficult to digest. Laura Ogden is the daughter of one of Florida's top ornithologists and a keen-eyed anthropologist in her own right. She grew up amid the Gladesmen who inhabited the River of Grass before it became national park, and she absorbed their lessons -- and then spent another decade of fieldwork collecting their stories and putting them into a broader context. In this book she tells those tales about big snakes and bigger gators, moonshine stills and bank robbing gangsters, poachers and lawmen fighting a battle of wits amid the sawgrass marsh. She also has some interesting ideas about the relationship of the people to the land and to each other that I found intriguing to contemplate. I just wish it had been written in a more accessible style rather than one that makes parts of it seem like a Ph.D. thesis. I've got Ogden's other book, "Gladesmen," which she co-wrote with longtime Everglades inhabitant Glen Simmons, and I hope that one makes for an easier read.

[Brenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a good book to read for my Cultural Anth class because it stimulated a lot of interesting discussion. I really liked reading about alligators and the Everglades because it felt really tangible and at least somewhat relevant to my life - it was more relatable than some of the other ethnographies I've read. I also really enjoyed reading about the history of the Everglades and the Ashley Gang, that added a lot of interesting information that helped give the book some more substance. What I didn't like is that it all seemed somewhat random in regards to her organization, everything Ogden talked about was related to the Everglades somehow but the chapters didn't always seem cohesive or relevant to each other which I don't really prefer in an ethnographic book!

[Bart Bickel · Rating 4 out of 5]

a maker's eye view on the everglades landscape

[Tori]

Read for Environmental Theory Class. Really love the way the author set the whole book up with a story background and the rhizomatic set-up.