Andrew S. Mathews, “Unlikely Alliances: Encounters between State Science, Nature Spirits, and Indigenous Industrial Forestry in Mexico, 1926-2008,” Current Anthropology 50, no. 1 (February 2009), 75-101.

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• 75 – “Indigenous community leaders and conservationists in Oaxaca, Mexico, believe that deforestation causes streams to dry up and threatens rainfall, authorizing popular mobilizations against industrial logging. This belief was produced by a combination of indigenous beliefs in nature spirits and early twentieth-century state-sponsored desiccation theory, which was brought to the Valley of Mexico in the 1920s. Desiccation theory acquires political significance because it allows rural people to build political and epistemic alliances that bypass industrial forestry institutions and find sympathetic urban audiences and environmentalist allies, undermining state claims to reason and scientific authority. These alliances require the skillful translation and mistranslation of local environmental concerns by activists and conservationists, who link the concerns of urban audiences with those of rural people. Popular beliefs about climate and forests in Mexico structure the authority and credibility of the state and will powerfully affect efforts to protect forests to mitigate climate change.”
• “The theory that deforestation causes declines in rainfall and streamflow, the drying up of springs, and distastrous flooding, which was a globally travling scientific theory during the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, has come to be part of popular beliefs about nature, cementing political alliances across enormous divides of livelihood, culture, and place.”
• 75-76 – “Desiccation theory has historically been used by the Mexican state in order to justify government control and regulation of forests, pitting the state against the livelihood practices of rural people. Other environmental discourses continue to depict rural Mexicans as the authors of environmental destruction, as when rural people are represented as ignorant and environmentally destructive fire setters.”
• 76 – “How then has the belief that deforestation causes climate change come to be so different? Why have rural people been able to make use of this theory as agents who can build alliances with outsiders rather than as the subjects of state projects of governmentality and control of natural resources?”

 

• “In this article I will describe how the internationally circulating scientific theory of desiccation was brought to Mexico in the early twentieth century and how it was used to drive state efforts to control forest and people, first in the Valley of Mexico and then in the southern state of Oaxaca. Desiccation theory was official science, justifying the Mexican state as the controller of reason and knowledge of forests, which were represented as being degraded by the irrational rural poor.”

• “Before the arrival of state desiccation theory and industrial forestry in the 1930s, the Zapotec indigenous people of the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca had quite a different understanding of nature and of forests and streams. They believed in nature spirits who had to be placated, and they made little mention of environmental degradation. Over the course of the twentieth century, these beliefs in nature spirits have been submerged by narratives of environmental degradation, and desiccation theory has been appropriated as part of a powerful popular scientific belief deployed in political conflicts over forests. Indigenous beliefs in nature spirits did, however, create powerful associations between mountains, streams, and forests, so that the places where forests are now protected for water are the same places once associated with the supernatural spirits who controlled rain and water.”

 

• 78 – “His audience was similarly polity — a few mintues later the elder Epifanio Perez thanked Gomez and me profusely four our expertise and then told a story that undermined our defense of logging by insisting on local knowledge and agency. ‘Knowledge is not just cutting trees,’ he said, recounting the role of a community leader in insisting on protecting streams when logging began in 1948. ‘That was the situation that I lived,’ he said, ‘and I interpret very well what you tell us.’ Perez was not against logging per se, but he insisted on community knowledge, and he was politely criticizing our expert authority. How did this difference of opinions between conservative community leaders and outside experts such as Gomez and me arise? Why did locals so tenaciously and politely defend environmental theories that were contrary to the accepted scientific point of view? And how did they feel authorized to contest the authority of science?”

 

• “I suggest that it is by a close study of the practices of state making and the construction of authoritative knowledge that we can understand the ways in which institutions push new theories about nature on the subjects of rule, how these theories come to be added to preexisting understandings of place and landscape to help form new identities, how new forms of nature and landscape are produced, and how these understandings of place and nature can produce new identities, new practices, and new networks of alliances that can bypass or penetrate the state.”

 

• “Much recent theorizing on the nature of state power has hinged on the insight that the state is fragmented and often conflicted and that the unity of the state is itself an ideological construct deployed by powerful elites.”
• “This critique has shifted the analytical focus to the mundane ‘everyday forms of state formation’ . . .. Attention to the mundane practices of state making also allows a focus on connections between the documentary and discursive exercise of bureaucratic power and deep cognitive structures such as national identity and kinship.”
• “Attention to the micropolitics of state making has been particularly fruitful in the field of studies of governmentality, focusing on the ways in which a constellation of discourses, institutions, and practices leads to the formation of new subjectivities . . ..”
• 79 – “As suggestive as this is, the literature on state making pays relatively little attention to the importance of nature in practices of state making nor to how representations of nature come to gain cognitive, political, or material power. This is surprising as ideologies of reason, science, and nature protection are central to the rhetorical presentation of modern states. It therefore becomes critically important to understand how reason and the production of scientific knowledge are implicated in the production of political order.”
• “A number of scholars of science and technology studies (STS) have argued that the authority of scientific knowledge is linked to that of the state through practices of public reason, expertise, and witnessing (Jasanoff 2005; Shapin and Schaffer 1985) and that the boundary between science and nonscience is itself contested, shifting, and culturally produced (Gieryn 1995), so that boundary-making practices are critical to asserting the contours of the state itself. The idea of the state, which is the product of so much work, therefore also contains understandings about reason and science that are used in attempts to produce political order.”
• “These arguments have resonance with environmental anthropologists, who have long drawn attention to the ways that encounters with nature produce political and social identities and how representations of nature and people can come to gain political or social power; however, they have been perhaps more concerned with the assertion of state of scientific discourses of nature than with how people contest, subvert, or evade these official representations. How, then, can local environments and knowledges be brought within the same frame of analysis as apparently authoritative global sciences?”
  • [so how does this apply, instead of for environmental anthropology, but to the history of science? Is there room in the history of science for the story of “how people contest, subvert, or evade these official representations”? Would that just be the history of “not science” instead of the history of science? Or the history of anti-science? Do I want to frame my paper in those terms? Is there an important distinction to be made between subverting official knowledge and supporting a different kind of knowledge? What does “same frame of analysis” mean?]
• “ANT approaches emphasize the materiality of knowledge and make clear that science and technology provide alternative bases for authority beyond the state itself. Nevertheless, in some ways, earlier formulations of ANT substituted the structurally unified state with a unified actor-network, without ever explicitly confronting the role of state power in stabilizing scientific knowledge or the normative and political conflicts that exist within networks.”
• “. . . look less at the network and more at the nodes, at the places and moments where the network is performed, where facts about nature and its human allies are made manifest. These are the ‘articulated assemblages’ described by Donal Moore, where various visual technologies, institutional power, material objects, discourses, and identities are brought together to make places. Crucially, the theories and practices through which places are made also produce different natures — place making is a kind of production of nature.”
• 82 – SECTION: ZAPOTEC ENVIRONMENTAL BELIEFS AND THE ARRIVAL OF INDUSTRIAL LOGGING
• “However, Julio de la Fuente’s (1949) classical ethnography Yalalag: Una Villa Zapoteca Serrana contains detailed accounts of Sierra Zapotec understandings of agriculture, forests, and climate immediately before the arrival of industrial logging, strongly suggesting that present-day beliefs in desiccation and environmental degradation are the product of encounters with logging and state desiccation theory.”
• 87 – “In addition to deploying desiccation theory and biodiversity, Sergio often used the language of indigenous ecological wisdom and spirituality in his efforts to build alliances with outside institutions. As we have seen, no one in Ixtlan claimed to protect forests in the name of nature spirits: in fact, it was only intermediaries such as Sergio, or even outright outsiders, who made this claim. Sergio was keen to argue that Ixtlan’s desire to protect nature arose from the indigenous ecological knowledge and spiritual beliefs of elders. He told me on my first visit in 1998 that the Zapotec are also known as the ‘Cloud People’ and that the community elders protected ‘the place where the water is born’ because of their spiritual beliefs and concern to protect nature. This was probably a recycling of the international discourse of indigenous ecological wisdom described by Peter Brosius in Malaysia or by Tania Li in Indonesia. An intermediary such as Sergio had to be alert to urban and international environmental discourses if he was successfully to engage the interest of outsider institutions and traveling researchers such as myself.”
  • [does this apply to the reaction to the green revolution? That discourses of “indigeneity” and “TEK” were wielded more so by non-indigenous intermediaries driven by their own, non-necessarily collinear, agendas?]

 

• “For the present, it seems that most people in Ixtlan prefer to claim practical knowledge and science, rather than spirituality or indigeneity, as the basis for their knowledge of nature. They have succeeded in domesticating the science of forestry within relatively stable community institutions, and they have been able to build solid relationships with outside institutions such as SEMARNAT. For now at least, in Ixtlan, popular science trumps spirituality and indigenous ecological wisdom.”

 

• • This depends on a particular constrained and static view of indigenous knowledge, to consider “nature spirits” to be the “indigenous knowledge” way and “technical” explanations the fall under the category of “practical knowledge and science.” Simply because the the townspeople of Ixtlan provide naturalistic explanations does not mean those explanations are not rooted in indigenous knowledge or attitudes, even if that naturalistic explanation was initially provided by the state. The fact that it is no longer the consensus scientific opinion that deforestation causes aridity further strengthens the claim that the opinions of the people of Ixtlan are an alternative knowledge outside of western technoscience.

 

• “However this is the product of a specific articulation between local practices of nature making through logging and marking stand boundaries, community forestry institutions, their identities as forest managers, traveling scientific theories, and outside institutions. It is perfectly conceivable that broader discursive and institutional shifts would bring to the fore specifically indigenous knowledge within Ixtlan.”

• 88 – “The currently popular belief that deforestation causes declining streamflow and rainfall combines former state environmental theories with preexisting indigenous theories about the relationship between mountains, forests, nature spirits, and waters. Although nature spirits are no long much discussed in Ixtlan, ritual practices of rainmaking on mountaintops and in caves appear to be widespread in other parts of Oaxaca and possibly in other parts of Mexico. It seems likely that the former association of spirits of water and rain with forested watersheds made desiccation theory attractive to Zapotec people and explains why these theories were so rapidly accepted in the 1920s and 1930s.”

• “Popular beliefs in climate/forest connections in Mexico are of more than local significance; they structure the texture of encounters between state and civil society, they affect the ways that scientific knowledge and expertise are asserted, contested or denied, and they alter understandings of the very nature of state power.”

 

• “Foucauldian understandings of power would perhaps emphasize that although there is contestation, the deep structure of epistemes nevertheless tends to strengthen states and bureaucrats over indigenous people and peasants. Similarly, discourses of indigeneity represent Western imaginings of the ‘other’ — and various authors have worried that indigenous peoples’ appropriations of indigeneity may give too much power to extra-local actors, who retain control of conceptions of modernity.”