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7. The Acrobatics of Transparency and Obscurity: Forestry Regulations Travel to Oaxaca
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7 State mandates to control forests and protect nature do not travel smoothly through the world. On the contrary, knowledge is continually remade, a practice in translation, rather than an item that travels smoothly from a forestry laboratory or a government office. In the end, a small number of officials and technicians who work in a few office buildings have to build and sustain a web of documents that reaches into distant forests. Returning to Oaxaca from Mexico City, we shall see how forms of official authority and knowledge of forests were sustained by an ecology of relationships among officials, foresters, environmentalists , and forest communities, requiring officials to carry out skilled translations, silencings, and deliberate avoidances. When I was in Oaxaca in 2000–2001, the federal agency responsible for forests was the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAP).1 Most officials worked at the state headquarters in the city of Oaxaca in a modest four-story building in the modern Reforma district, well to the north of the city center. It was a pleasant place to visit: In the late spring, the jacaranda trees that lined many streets would bloom, creating a purple haze over the city. It was often in this neighborhood that I would talk to private foresters (servicios técnicos), meeting in cafés or in their offices that were so conveniently near to SEMARNAP headquarters. Although anthropology of the state has paid considerable attention to the fragmented and contradictory nature of state power, it is only relatively recently that similar attention has been paid to the spatiality of institutions and their projects of place-making, to looking closely at where officials, offices, cars, and management plans are located in space and time (but see Bebbington 2004; Gupta and Sharma 2006; Moore 1998, 2005). All knowledge institutions that seek to reach out into landscapes and societies face a structural distance between sweeping goals The Acrobatics of Transparency and Obscurity: Forestry Regulations Travel to Oaxaca 180 Chapter 7 and limited means, between the goals of scientific knowledge systems and the reality of weak webs of human and material allies, who may sustain or undermine knowledge practices. As new projects of protecting forests in the name of biodiversity protection or carbon markets become fashionable, it is worth considering just how it is that knowledge about forests is made, sustained, or silenced. As we shall see, practices of silencing were central to the production of official knowledge about forests, not as a kind of defect, but as a direct result of the practice of making official knowledge. In order to understand the extent to which forestry officials in Mexico or in other places succeed in projects of place-making and authoritative performances of official knowledge, we need to map out the contours of the state, to look at where officials are and what they do when they are at work. In Oaxaca, state efforts to link power to place through forest management plans, maps, and documents were implemented by a fragmented and spatially dispersed institution that had little support from other ministries. Officials’ efforts to assert authority and knowledge were haunted by their awareness of institutional weakness, their lack of resources, and their sense that the forests were too remote and too vast to oversee properly. SEMARNAP officials in Oaxaca had to bridge a yawning gap between detailed and unenforceable regulations and local practices, between the enormous scope of their job description and the reality that they had limited resources, too many documents to manage, and not enough time to visit forests. New regulations kept being issued and passed down from Mexico City, but it was impossible to comply with all of them. Officials had to judge how to accommodate regulations that sought to make society and nature transparent, legible, and controllable , while dealing with their own limited resources and likely political opposition. Successful officials did this by a skilled acrobatics that made use of silences, omissions, and concealments, carefully interpreting policy mandates and regulations and deciding whether to act on them or to ignore them discreetly. As we shall see, this was not easy: Some officials were successful in these tricky acrobatics, whereas others slipped and lost their jobs. Institutional Ecologies in Oaxaca Officials were supposed to control the 5.1 million hectares of forests in the state (SEMARNAP 1997a:87), divided into 570 municipalities.2 In practice, the majority of their attention was given to the commercially [44.200.141.122] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15...