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6 In November 2000, I attended a convention on community forestry in a hotel on the outskirts of the city of Oaxaca. For three days, government officials, scientists, and the occasional NGO representative occupied an elevated stage and presented their views on the state of Oaxaca’s forests before an audience of indigenous community representatives. Officials and NGO representatives were easy to spot; they got to sit on stage, they participated confidently in debates, and they wore clearly “modern” clothes—polished street shoes, button down shirts, or occasionally the plaid shirts preferred by many urban Mexicans who work in the countryside . Although indigenousness was seldom discussed, most of the people on stage were clearly paler skinned than their audience. All of the community representatives who I talked to spoke Spanish, but many had the characteristic clipped accent often heard in indigenous communities where Spanish was only recently, or not yet, the language of daily life. Some community members were also clearly office workers or professionals and wore the appropriate “modern” clothes, but many wore baseball caps or the plastic-coated straw hats popular among rural Mexicans. One of the stated goals of the convention was to elicit the views of community members about forest management and forestry regulation in a state where most forests were owned by indigenous communities. However, it became increasingly clear that a much more important objective was to build political support for the forest service, SEMARNAP,1 and for a World Bank-funded forestry project, PROCYMAF, which sought to increase industrial forestry in indigenous communities. In an inaugural address, the director of SEMARNAP for the state of Oaxaca announced that a principal objective of the convention was: “to let society know that communities protect their forests, that they generate jobs from the forests, and generate environmental services” (fieldnotes, The Mexican Forest Service: Knowledge, Ignorance, and Power 148 Chapter 6 November 8, 2000). He went on to describe the “advances which society should know,” reciting figures about timber production, areas of forest under management, and the numbers of community members involved in fire fighting. Critically, he declared, “Only 2% of burned areas are in communities with forests under management”; violations and environmental degradation took place mainly in unlogged forests. Project leaders and forestry officials were trying to bolster support for logging by producing a representation of community forestry that would visibly demonstrate the political power of the forestry sector to a hostile governor and to his environmentalist allies.1 Officials wished to enlist forest communities and to stage manage a representation of successful forestry development that could link the pine forests of Oaxaca, the legal boundaries of forest communities, the bodies of the community representatives in the room, and global scale World Bank development agendas. The convention therefore provided a theatrical stage on which forms of knowledge and reasoning could be performed; this stage was permeated by the uneven power relations between officials and their audience, by cultural assumptions about the forms of reason that officials had to display, and by unspoken norms about what could be said in public and by whom. Both audience and performers at the convention shared the assumption that public knowledge was an illusion that masked the real and dangerous workings of power: As we shall see, at all levels in Mexican society, publicly contradicting official knowledge is considered to be dangerous. This strong cultural association of public knowledge with illusion and danger leads forestry officials themselves to refrain from officially delivering bad news to their superiors: Public knowledge is controlled by senior officials and politicians, while credible knowledge is framed as being produced in more intimate conversations. This forestry convention may seem remote, far away, and banal: Many of the speeches were certainly quite dull. However, it is in fact precisely in such rather ordinary places and moments that the hard work of performing the state is done. Bureaucratic performances, whether in Mexico or at other places and times, are precisely about producing shared public facts, collective understandings of what the state is, of how technical knowledge is to be produced and assessed, and of the proper role of the public, as witness or critic. This is a coproduction of the political and the technical (Jasanoff 2004), a simultaneous making of things and ways of knowing, ontologies and epistemologies. Understanding the state as the potentially unstable product of a performance that may go awry is potentially radical; it makes us see state-making and related projects of [3.15.235.196...

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