Instituting Nature: Authority, Expertise, and Power in Mexican Forests (review)

The key motif that runs through Mathews’ account of the interactions between government agencies and forest-dependent communities in Mexico is the state as theatre, co-performed by both sets of actors. He explains aspects of the formation of the Mexican state through a study of forestry law and regulations, and policies and practices, in the state of Oaxaca over the twentieth century. He questions naive assumptions of state hegemony and the related belief that a global environmental initiative rolled out by a state and its global partners can determine what really happens in faraway local places.

Mathews shows how the combination of the “uncertain predicament of foresters themselves” (p. 55) and resistance by forest communities, resulted in the modification of various state modernization projects such as prohibitions on forest burning and the introduction of industrial forestry. He provides a good synthesis of the distinction between public knowledge and credible knowledge: public knowledge is official and on-stage, while credible knowledge is synthesized by interactions between officials and knowledgeable locals and occurs off-stage. Local communities and foresters are jointly complicit in what gets recorded in national forestry statistics, so both regard public presentations with disbelief. Mathews could have usefully expanded on his explanation for why public knowledge is not challenged here or in similar contexts globally: the fear of punitive action by state officials with the power to withhold logging or removal permits, loss of subsidies, and so on.

Mathews suggests that a great deal of environmental anthropology and history tends to see nature as the canvas on which humans inscribe history. He ascribes more agency to forests, and usefully illustrates “the unruly obstinacy and liveliness of Nature” (p. 26). Pine forests existed in mutually constitutive socio-natural assemblages with the rotational farming practices of the area, which required seasonal burning. In periods when farming was important, communities continued to burn surreptitiously; later, when local dependence on wage earning from forestry superseded farming, local people were transformed into fire suppressors. Participation in fire fighting was a necessary element for government recognition of community membership. “Performance” of this type is as much a part of the fabric of community as of state formation. What emerged was a hybrid understanding of forests: “Official environmental knowledge was a traveling scientific theory that people gradually used in their encounters with trees and fields, eventually remaking their understandings of nature, of who they were, and of what kinds of politics they could engage in” (p. 95).

The case study of community forestry in Ixtlan suggests that success in this area was directly linked to its adoption of the discursive strategies and scientific techniques of forest management. Even so, following decades of indoctrination in fire-fighting and official objection to the open spaces created by rotational farming in forest areas, community foresters now tend to follow selective logging practices rather than opening up the clear cuts necessary for pine regeneration. The Ixtlan case is less about the triumph of local knowledge, and more about accommodation, so that “representations of controlled burning and fuelwood cutting failed to travel because they lacked powerful networks of human and nonhuman allies and were silenced by powerful representational alliances between senior functionaries, politicians, urban audiences, and forestry legislation” (p. 168).

This book would have benefitted from an early chapter giving a straight description of the origins, composition, structures, and functions of the different agencies and actors in this series of narratives. The reader will have to consult other sources to find out how the timing of advances and reversals in forestry was linked to national and local political currents and factional interests. Mathews references but fails to develop the importance of Ixtlan as a power base for Presidents Benito Juarez and later, Porfirio Diaz, during the second half of the nineteenth century, connections to national government over decades that allowed these local communities to hold outsiders at bay more successfully than other ejidos (statutory indigenous communities) were able to do. The timeline could have been extended further...