Book reviews Erratum In the review of Efram Sera-Shriar’s The making of British anthropology, 1813-1871 (JRAI 20: 4, 792-3), the author was mistakenly referred to as ‘her’. We apologize for any embarrassment caused by this error. Environment and ecology Evans, Brad & Julian Reid. Resilient life: the art of living dangerously. 240 pp., bibliogr. Cambridge: Polity, 2014. £16.99 (paper) The rise of ‘resilience’ has been hard to miss in recent years, particularly within environmental circles. Talk of sustainability, with its implications of system stasis and reproducibility over long periods of time, no longer commands the interest it once did. The project of producing resilient subjects, systems, and societies – those capable of surviving then adapting to uncontrollable shocks – is increasingly discussed as a top priority for both institutions and individuals. In Resilient life, Brad Evans and Julian Reid present a robust theorization of the ways this discourse and its attendant imaginaries of ecological catastrophe now circumscribe political subjectivity and possibilities. Early chapters trace resilience discourse’s emergence from the environmentalist critiques of mainstream economic development of the 1980s and 1990s. Rapprochements between ecological theory and crisis-orientated economics led to a dramatic reimagining of vulnerability, one foregrounding the fragility of and dangers faced by contemporary political subjects, particularly those living in poverty. Within this discourse, a threatening climate and deteriorating biosphere now fundamentally compromise the ability to secure human life from nature’s threats. Rather than providing security from shocks, then, building subjects’ ability to withstand perturbation (increasingly framed as inevitable) should be the highest goal of states and NGOs, and maintaining baseline functionality in the face of such shocks should be the aspirational horizon for individuals. As such, resilience thinking represents an extension and intensification of neoliberal logics and biopolitics rather than a meaningful challenge to neoliberal systems and structures. The dangerous result of this discourse, to Evans and Reid, is a powerful debasement of the political subject. The authors contend that this mode of apprehending the world can only stymie radical politics and projects. The resilient subject, tasked with constant vigilance for her own survival, is also the weak, anxious subject, preoccupied with protecting herself from coming harms. She learns to measure her success by her continued ability to function within unstable conditions, rather than by her ability to transform the systems that contribute to her vulnerability. Remaking the world, its economic and political structures and conditions of possibility – these possibilities are not part of the paradigm within which she operates. How, then, might a contemporary citizen think beyond such catastrophic imaginaries and the limited political possibilities they offer? For Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 473-500 C  Royal Anthropological Institute 2015