Andrew Mathews – Instituting Nature

2 – this book about the effort to produce a regime of transparent knowledge in mexican forestry
3 – bureaucracy as performance
4 – Paradoxical authority and vulnerability
“Uncertain authority”, vulnerability — not just for bureaucrats and officials but also for historians?
6 – “. . . I show that state power does not rely on knowledge alone but also on ignorance, and I argue that official knowledge and various forms of ignorance ar coproduced in encounters between officials and their audiences.”
11 – connection between fragility of the state and fragility of scientific/technical expertise
20 – STS – vision/seeing as power
24 – jasanoff’s civic epistemologies – publics involved in coproduction of knowledge and politics – does this apply to post-Green Rev. case?
26 – nature as agentive not mere social construct
“In contrast, most social science accounts of society implicitly neglect nature as an actor, either ignoring it or depicting it as a social construction. This problem is of central interest to any environmental anthropology or environmental history, to any study of science and society. In a real sense, a study of social and environmental change without an active and intransigent nature is a drama stripped of its principal actors. How can we make sense of the lives of people who struggle to make their livings from forests and fields if we do not pay attention to the material/ideological conditions of that struggle, if we end up saying that what really matters is their relationship with the state, with each other, but not with their fields and tress?”
Many methods to destabilize the power of any one method and to reveal limits of each form of knowledge
27-8 – it’s the stubborn resistance, autonomy, unpredictability — the lively agentive quality of beings — that makes them interesting and makes writing about them interesting
56 – opacity of local knowledges and practices to the state
65 – “I have tried to avoid this appearance of structural forces imposed on passive local places by combining political economy, politics, and fire ecology in order to thing about environmental history in another way, as knowledge of a lively nature produced by multiple instruments of knowing, and as the partial engagement among markets, politics, and species, each moving through time at its own pace and with its own logic, affecting one another and yet never fully determining each other.”
101 – “Once we begin to look at how many people were involved in applying the regulations, it becomes apparent that regulatory activities are concentrated in space, as around cities, and in time, as at festivals such as the Dia del Arbol.”
119 – at some point (in this case by turn of millennium) locus of blame for environmental degradation shifted from remoteness of forests from technocratic control and remoteness of campesino epistemology from scientific truth to closeness of government and logging corporations to forests — can this shift be applied to my case?
235 – “This book has described how the science of forestry traveled to Mexico, how it came to be institutionalized by the expanding Mexican forest service, and how, ultimately, forestry was domesticated and turned against the state by particular indigenous forest communities in the state of Oaxaca.”

Tags: Latin American Environmental History

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Andrew Mathews – Instituting Nature

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