The livelihood of crab collecting, practised for generations in the Sundarbans forest of India, has undergone a radical moral makeover in recent years. Largely landless crab fishers are now the subject of frequent public denunciations by local authorities for their supposed greed and reckless endangerment of the entire ecosystem. While greed and its related category of need emerge from a local moral ecology of the region, internationally funded conservation campaigns and recent disruptions in the global crab supply chain reveal how accusations are activated and the means through which they play out amidst pre-existing village hierarchies. This article accounts for the political, economic, and moral shifts that underpin these accusations. In counterpoint, I present the defences of the accused, and explore crab collectors’ notions of a sufficient life and the rich moral distinctions they themselves make between greed (lobh), need (aubhav), desire (chahida), and habit (swabhav). I then step back to show the broader political contours that shape the discourse of ‘greedy’ crab collectors. I argue that both the conservation movement and allied state actors have distorted the material and moral resources intended to combat climate change and other environmental threats by scapegoating the politically disenfranchised: local fishers. Powerful stakeholders, as a result of their own political impotency, are deployed in a game of crab antics that fails to address the underlying environmental catastrophe while displacing the psychic burden of greed onto the poor.

中文翻译：

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螃蟹滑稽动作：印度淹没的孙德尔本斯三角洲贪婪指控的道德和政治经济学

捕蟹生计在印度孙德尔本斯森林世代相传，近年来经历了彻底的道德改造。大部分没有土地的捕蟹者现在经常受到地方当局公开谴责的对象，因为他们认为贪婪和鲁莽地危害整个生态系统。虽然贪婪及其相关类别的需求来自该地区的当地道德生态，但国际资助的保护运动和全球螃蟹供应链最近的中断揭示了指控是如何被激活的，以及它们在预先存在的村庄等级制度中发挥作用的方式. 本文解释了支持这些指控的政治、经济和道德转变。相反，我提出被告的辩护，lobh）、需要（aubhav）、欲望（chahida）和习惯（swabhav）。然后我退后一步，展示塑造“贪婪”螃蟹收藏家话语的更广泛的政治轮廓。我认为，保护运动和联盟国家行为者都通过将政治上被剥夺权利的当地渔民作为替罪羊，扭曲了旨在应对气候变化和其他环境威胁的物质和道德资源。强大的利益相关者由于自身的政治无能，被部署在一场螃蟹滑稽游戏中，未能解决潜在的环境灾难，同时将贪婪的心理负担转移到穷人身上。