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FOREWORD Anthropologists—and area specialists—never tire of pointing out the inadequacies of stereotypes through which public understandings of regional cultures or problems of social change in specific locations are formed. Such critiques may have started out as the assertion of particular exceptions to ready rules of cultural reckoning and social analysis—“That’s not the way it is/was in my village‚”—but they have not remained as mere challenges from the worm’s eye perspective or native point of view. In the last two decades environmental anthropologists and anthropologists of development have thoroughly examined the relations of power in which all conservation and development activities are conducted . Scholars have analyzed the cultural processes and political actions through which powerful modes of representation take shape, endure, and have serious consequences for the lives of poor people enmeshed in the making of assertive nation-states and in the formation and circulation of global discourses of economic development or environmental conservation. This new scholarship, starting in the early 1990s, has generated fruitful collaboration among anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, cultural critics, and the occasional historian and has redirected scholarly attention from apparently self-evident cultures and societies designated by names of countries or peoples. Not only as anthropologists of environment or development, but participating in a broader movement interrogating the relationship of culture to place, these scholars have embarked on the more difficult task of providing a nuanced cultural analysis of the multilevel social conflicts and connections in which these collective identities and entities come to attain a recognizable shape and stability. vii The forceful and evocative work in this volume by Tim Forsyth and Andrew Walker participates in these newer scholarly trajectories, but it also has a larger ambition. Informed by debates in the sociology of knowledge and science, Forest Guardians, Forest Destroyers proposes alternate approaches to the study of environmental problems and policies, with a view to both generating new theory and new practical possibilities. With admirable clarity and attention to apposite detail, Forsyth and Walker show how environmental politics and environmental knowledge are simultaneously constructed as fields of human conflict and enterprise. Their mastery of literature and data is impressive, yet lightly worn, and their argument rolls off the tongue smoothly in spirited prose. Moving between social classification and ecological processes, they discuss vividly issues such as the interrelationship of rainfall and deforestation, and the public misunderstandings of forest hydrology that inform policy and popular debate. One of the attractions of this work is the way it travels across scales of analysis. The large-scale treatment of national and international discourse on forests, hill tribes, floods, and so on, is combined with finegrained case studies at the village and watershed level that actually provide substance to the critique initiated more broadly. Forsyth and Walker question livelihood stereotypes associated with specific tribes. They also effectively challenge ideas about forest hydrology as process and as historically recorded outcomes. These threads of skepticism are woven together in the study of village-level changes in agriculture, water use, and labor process. In similar fashion the authors discuss soil erosion, chemicals in agriculture, and biodiversity, presenting and challenging prevalent crisis narratives. A sobering insight of this study is that the people blamed (usually poor, upland tribal communities) are themselves most at risk from the problems they have supposedly created for others. It is rare for authors to combine deep area knowledge (in this case a lifetime of working in northern Thailand), sophisticated grasp and application of many theoretical perspectives, and prose that is compelling without being strident. When such a combination occurs, as in this book, the reader is instructed, kept absorbed, and left with much to ponder. k. sivaramakrishnan Yale University September 2007 viii Foreword ...

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