Instituting Nature: Authority, Expertise, and Power in Mexican Forests

Notes

Notes Chapter 1 1. Author transcription and translation. The screenplay records a slightly different version of this scene (Zavattini 2005). 2. This also clarifies the awkward conundrum of discursively powerful but materially weak conservation and development institutions. Earlier work on international conservation/development noted the seamlessness of conservation /development discourse. More recently, researchers have noted that conservation and development institutions face local opposition and are often quite weak. 3. For a similar argument about the power of financial markets, see Karen Ho’s description of Wall Street investment bankers (Ho 2005). 4. Beginning in the early 1980s, community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) aroused enormous academic and policy interest around the world. This was the result of a conjunction of popular environmental protests against coercive state bureaucracies, with declines in state resources in the face of neoliberal reforms. Ostrom describes the theoretical basis for CBNRM (Ostrom 1991); for a comprehensive review of common property research, see Agrawal (2001). 5. Western/Northern understandings of indigeneity are often based not on real indigenous people but derived from the presumed opposition between indigenous people and modernity (Brosius 1997; Li 2000). 6. In this book all names are pseudonyms unless I clearly state to the contrary. 7. FAPATUX is the initials of Fábricas Papeleras de Tuxtepec (i.e., the Tuxtepec Paper Factories). 8. For a discussion of state-making in Mexico, see Joseph and Nugent (1994). For an excellent recent review of the literature on state-making, see Sharma and Gupta (2006). 9. On the idea of development as a neutral technical process, see Ferguson (1994). 252 Notes 10. For a classic exposition of this actor-network theory of scientific knowledge, see Latour (1987). An elegant example of this kind of analysis is found in Timothy Mitchell’s discussion of malaria in Egypt (Mitchell 2002:19–53). 11. The term “epistemic community” was introduced by Peter Haas (Haas 1990) to refer to the international community of environmental scientists working on the Mediterranean in the early 1970s. 12. The institution or institutions responsible for forests has changed repeatedly over the last century. For convenience I will use the term “forest service” to describe the federal bureaucracy responsible for forests. However, at the time of my fieldwork in 1998–2001, the primary government agency was SEMARNAP, the Secretaría de Medio Ambiente, Recursos Naturales y de Pesca (Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources and Fisheries). 13. See, for example, the rich literature on audit cultures in the UK (Power 1997; Strathern 2000). 14. I owe this insight to the art historian Alex Nemeroff. 15. The idea of public illusions that conceal the dangerous reality of politics is also highly developed in Italy, where the term dietrologia (“behindology”) describes the rich trove of stories about what lies “behind appearances.” 16. Foucauldian-inspired studies of governmentality typically fail to pay serious attention to Foucault’s emphasis that governmentality is about “governing the relation between men and things” and to consider precisely how it is that things get made. In so doing, materiality disappears with nature, and bureaucratic logics come to seem all powerful, hermetic, and closed. Chapter 2 1. For further details, see Mathews (2004) and the massive survey of Mexican environmental history by Antony Challenger (Challenger 1998) (unfortunately this valuable book is not available in English). 2. The dominant account of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) is of an agrarian revolt. Although this was an important component, participants’ motivations were more complex and varied (see Joseph and Nugent 1994). 3. The Mexican state created two forms of rural community. The first form was the comunidad, created by either formally recognizing communities with existing and solid land titles (often indigenous communities with colonial era legal titles) or restitución (restitution) to communities that had recently lost their land. Most land awarded by the postrevolutionary agrarian reform process was the second form of community, the ejido, which was titled through dotación (gift). The glacial pace of the restitución process forced many communities to settle for dotación as ejidos even when they were actually prerevolutionary comunidades (Craib 2004:242–252; Joseph 1994a). For the remainder of this book, I will lump comunidades and ejidos together as “communities,” although there are legal differences (Turner and Taylor 2003). Notes 253 4. By 1940, around 18% of forest land was in community or ejido hands (Klooster 2003a). 5. Estimates of forest area in Mexico are confused by the...