The Nature of Spectacle: On Images, Money, and Conserving Capitalism by Jim Igoe (review)

In The Nature of Spectacle, Jim Igoe provocatively argues that nature conservation and tourism are produced through circuits of spectacular capitalism. Igoe carefully illustrates how nature is both mediated and produced by images. “This vision is derived from spaces that are inflected by tourism and designed to deliver standardized experiences and encounters. These largely depend on alienation because, to be standardized, they must eschew the diversity and uncertainty of local lifeworlds” (41). Igoe links representational repertoires with how we come to know and manage nature, and with whose expertise counts. Drawing on Guy Debord and Anna Tsing, Igoe shows how images conjure particular forms of nature that become visible and “exchangeable” through capitalism. The book makes significant contributions to debates about the commodification of nature and what if anything is unique about nature-society relations in the contemporary “neoliberal” moment. Igoe carefully explores how particular kinds of nature, in this case the rangelands and savannahs of northern Tanzania, are grafted onto ideas about universal nature. Building on scholarship that connects the discursive and material production of nature (see Adams & McShane 1992; Neumann 1995, 1998; Carrier & West 2009; Büscher 2014), this well-written and relatively short book brings new arguments about the centrality of spectacle and capitalism through a compelling archive and narrative.

For Igoe, spectacle is no metaphor but rather a set of practices, techniques, and imaginaries that have co-produced nature alongside modern nature conservation (6). Some of the techniques explored in the book include spectacularization and gigantification. Igoe draws on Lefebvre’s (1991:286) definition of spectacularization as a practice through which “a part of the object and what it offers comes to be taken for the whole” (11). And following Slater (2002:220), he explains gigantification as a process “whereby a selected fragment comes not just to represent, but to erase the larger whole to which it belongs” (11). Igoe wields these theoretical tools to explain how contemporary nature becomes detached from the lifeworlds of people who share those very landscapes. This is a nuanced and important argument that leads Igoe to explore alternative political strategies that have more to do with imagination and collective action than with employing the tools of capital for so-called mutual benefit.

The first three chapters carefully explore how tourism and conservation have historically shaped the landscapes of northern Tanzania. Igoe tells the story of Austrian zoologist and conservation icon Bernhard Grzimek, who marketed “affordable” package tours to the Serengeti before there were companies to provide such services. Grzimek believed the demand would spur a tourism industry and vitalize an economic argument for conservation. The book questions the conventional wisdom about tourism by illustrating how the sublime and contemplative associations with nature are internally related to nature’s value as a commodity and a landscape. The book links post-WWII German guilt for the Holocaust with the idea of “escaping” to Africa, where tourists could connect with nature and their true selves. Escape from the mundane existence of the bourgeois experience and finding oneself become an essential part of the nature experience in Africa, part of its universal and exchangeable quality. Igoe introduces readers to the manner in which the popular tourist circuit in East Africa works to conjure a standardized landscape, as a space of translation “through which elements of diverse lifeworlds are turned into circulating and exchangeable forms of representation” (41).

In chapter two, Igoe describes a landscape carved from a colonial district into an ecological unit described by its conservation benefactors as the Maasai Steppe Heartland. The prevalent win-win discourse of community conservation is a technique that helps to conjure landscapes that appear whole, obscuring the ongoing practices of enforced separation. The heartland designates an area with both wildlife and people, connecting two relatively small national parks. It is the “relative smallness” of this space that makes it a “serviceable space of translation. Not...