RG: First, for readers who might not be familiar with it, what is the theme of your new book? 

GMS: My book examines obstacles to the forest conservation effort in Madagascar through the lens of labor. It centers on the role and perspective of low-wage workers in conservation projects, and on the significance of manual labor in producing protected areas and biodiversity hot spots.

The book historicizes the conservation-and-development model, and it does so from a “subaltern” vantage point. By this, I mean that I try to tell a history of land degradation and conservation through the eyes of Malagasy worker-peasants, who have consistently been targeted by conservation officials because they practice “slash-and-burn” agriculture in the rain forest. My book begins by taking the reader back in time about 100 years, when France conquered Madagascar. The first half of my book is weighted in the past – an ethnography of the colonial archive – tracing how Malagasy “underlings” confronted (and carried) French colonialists as they organized space and life in such a way as to make Malagasy wildlife and Malagasy people’s “nature” valuable according to specific criteria.  Although I compare the moral economies of capitalism and subsistence agriculture, my focus is really on the middle ground, on the people who straddle both worlds and who are caught between them. The second half of my book is weighted in the contemporary period and focuses on low-wage workers of an integrated conservation and development project (ICDP). I believe that looking at the ways Malagasy workers have negotiated the structure, and shifts in the ideological content, of conservation institutions over time reveals a lot about why peasants still burn forest and why quick fixes through the usual institutional models are elusive.

RG: How does your book address broader questions in environmental anthropology?

GMS: Environmental anthropologists have been taking stock of conservation and development interventions into poor countries since the late 1980s, when the sustainable development model took hold.  Following the lead of a number of ethnographers, I explore the social life of an ICDP, a kind of “key symbol” of neoliberal foreign aid. Those of us adopting a political ecological approach investigate: 1) how people in postcolonial contexts receive and interpret interventions such as ecotourism development, the creation of national parks, environmental education, community conservation efforts, agroforestry training, “green” commodification, and so on, and 2) what have been the social, economic, and ecological effects of conservation interventions on postcolonial peoples and landscapes.

RG: When you were doing research for your book, how did you engage with different communities—for example, with local people, with scientists, with other scholars?

GMS: When I went to Madagascar to do fieldwork for my dissertation, I relied on my close friendship with a Merina family who I had gotten to know through prior fieldwork. Merina is the politically dominant ethnic population of Madagascar; however, the island’s coastal populations, including the Betsimisaraka (the group I focus on in my ethnography) generally do not trust Merina.  Despite these social tensions, I ended up living with members of the Merina family I knew. They had a home in the town of Mananara-Nord, also the location of the headquarters for the UNESCO biosphere reserve and its ICDP that I studied. I stayed in Mananara-Nord with my Merina friends between my forays into Betsimisaraka villages in the biosphere reserve.  My alternating residence in villages and in town was illuminating in many ways. What I feared might be a liability (living with a Merina family) in getting to know the Betsimisaraka workers of the ICDP became, after a while, an asset, offering me a deeper glimpse into the politics of ethnicity there.

While in the field, I was in contact with Malagasy academics, villagers, expatriate conservation representatives and Peace Corps volunteers, as well as tourists and scientists passing through the biosphere reserve.  At the time, my field site did not have telecommunications. However, times have quickly changed–cell phones, internet, and social media networks are now more widely available, at least in larger Malagasy towns.  I am gearing up to go to Madagascar briefly this summer after a long hiatus, and I very much look forward to my fieldwork, and to connecting with people virtually too.

I stay in touch with Malagasy contacts, read posts on the Madagascar Environmental Justice Network – a listserv run by Barry Ferguson – and communicate with conservation scientists and practitioners affiliated with the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo, which manages a protected area in Madagascar. I also treasure any opportunity to talk with doctoral students and recent PhDs who have worked in Madagascar.

RG: What is the key message or key point you hope people take away from reading your book? 

GMS: I hope to convey two key messages. First, that history matters deeply. And, second, given the acceleration of species extinctions, climate change, and habitat loss, it is high time for a redistribution of aid to further the global conservation effort.

Money needs to reach the people most affected by the degradation of biodiversity hotspots, such as subsistence farmers. I think the “direct payment” approach to conservation (payment for well-defined and measurable inputs or outcomes) is probably the most persuasive way to get a lot of people to support conservation very quickly. Direct payment for conservation services has been done to some extent by organizations who deliver community development projects in exchange for conservation practices—even the mining company, Rio Tinto, has endorsed this approach, ironically. When I discuss a “direct payment” approach, I mean making direct cash payment to individuals in regions where biodiversity is rich and vulnerable, and where erosion is severely depleting people’s livelihoods.

In my book, I have a chapter that discusses how rural Betsimisaraka people in the early 20^th century preferred doing “piecework” to regular wage work. One colonial French entrepreneur had great success in finding Malagasy workers, compared to his competitors because he would pay per log felled, rather than the normal fixed, miserly wage to men working in the timber concessions. As a result, this entrepreneur was never short of labor, while the others complained incessantly of the labor shortage. I think the piecework payment approach for reforestation, though administratively complicated, would be popular and would achieve positive ecological and ideological outcomes very quickly.

RG: What are the broader contributions of your book to public and policy discussions about environmental conservation projects?

GMS: Despite the complaints one often hears by conservation practitioners that academics criticize their projects but do not offer concrete recommendations for changing their practices, I see critical scholarship as a driving force behind policy changes in conservation programs. In particular, critical scholarship has prompted the conservation community’s re-orientation toward poverty alleviation, as compared to the colonial era. I am hopeful that my attempt to resurrect the concept of “labor” in conservation policy discourse will someday lead to positive change. Interestingly, by the 1990s, the term “labor” had been entirely suppressed in political discourse, including, not surprisingly, discussions about environmental conservation.

RG: What are the broader contributions of your book to public and policy discussions about social and environmental justice?

GMS: My book aims to expose the deep contradictions of implementing “participatory” and community conservation via entrenched hierarchies that operate nationally and globally.  The contradictions are not just moral problems but also practical ones: they exacerbate species endangerment, human poverty, and conflict.  I focus on low-wage, locally-hired workers of an ICDP because to me their position epitomizes the contradictions of the bureaucratic hierarchy of conservation and development. These men felt that their ICDP salaries, given the difficulty of their tasks and all the moral and social tensions inherent in the work of cracking down on their friends and neighbors for breaking rules of the national park, were not adequate compensation.  To make ends meet, and to maintain their social bonds, they either practiced or relied on the fruits of slash and burn agriculture and hunting in the reserve, the very things they were supposed to police and transform.  They constantly had to make compromises (if they did one thing, they jeopardized their ICDP jobs; if they did another, they were scorned by their fellow villagers).

A biologist named Joe Peters suggested a while back that a voluntary civilian conservation corps like that of the Roosevelt administration be tried in Madagascar.  Instead of organizations hiring a small contingent of under-paid guards to police reserves and villagers, a conservation corps, perhaps paid according to measurable units of reforestation or agroforestry work, would open up opportunity for a much larger population of able-bodied individuals seeking additional income.  This would offset the precariousness of subsistence agriculture in the current environment.  In my view, this approach is a much better way to spread the conservation message. I would love to see it tried in Madagascar and elsewhere.

RG: How is your book being used beyond the academy?

GMS: In December 2012, I was invited to talk at a conference sponsored by the Kenan Institute for Ethics and the Duke Lemur Center at Duke University. The conference was invigorating because it brought together a mix of conservation experts, activists, and social scientists to discuss the illegal plunder of rosewood and other precious timber out of Madagascar’s national parks (including my former field site) since the 2009 coup, as well as more enduring obstacles to forest conservation. The looting of endangered hardwoods by what the press has called a “rosewood mafia” has shifted global attention from slash-and-burn agriculture to illegal timbering in Madagascar. In addition, the recent expansion of mining by transnational corporations along the Malagasy rain forest belt has ushered in what I see as a post-conservation era. It’s not that conservation has been abandoned, but increasingly it is mediated and managed by the mining corporations. Meanwhile the de facto state has been collaborating with the mining corporations and the timber merchants.  The expansion of mining deepens the problems of soil erosion, pollution, species loss, and social disruption.  The consequences of the mining boom remain to be seen given the time lag of extinction debt and the eventual depletion of profitable minerals.  A number of Madagascar scholars have been investigating the ways in which mining is transforming the management of nature and Malagasy societies. It seems as though the new scramble for African resources, at deeper geological strata and in smaller fragments of forest, has brought together scholars and conservation practitioners in common purpose like never before. Yet, I believe that the insights of my study for long-term conservation, and how they might be applied, will stay on the backburner until a new presidential election happens (the coup regime is still in power). We’ll see.

RG: That concludes our interview.  On behalf of ENGAGEMENT and its readers, thank you so much, Genese Marie Sodikoff, for your time and insight.

Genese Marie Sodikoff is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Professionally and academically, Dr. Sodikoff has focused on rain forest conservation and international development in Africa, specifically the Comoros (1989-1991) and Madagascar (1994-2002). In addition to her current book, Dr. Sodikoff has edited a volume entitled The Anthropology of Extinction:  Essays on Culture and Species Death (Indiana University Press, 2011). Her teaching and research interests include political ecology, conservation and international development, extinction (both biological and cultural), human-animal relations, historical anthropology, Africa, and the Indian Ocean islands. She is beginning a project on mining and future perception in Madagascar.

ENGAGEMENT editor Rebecca Garvoille recently caught up with 

Andrew S. Mathews

RG: First, for readers who might not be familiar with it, what’s the theme of your new book?

AM: Well, it looks at how forestry—as an internationally circulating science of how to manage forests, extract resources from them, and bring them into the future—arrived in Mexico in the early twentieth century, and how it encountered landscapes and indigenous people in Mexico.  I focus particularly on a certain part of Mexico, the southeastern state of Oaxaca, with the idea that this could give some insight into how the science of forestry got incorporated into how people understand forests and then how indigenous people learned about forestry and reworked it and ultimately came to turn it back in some measure against the authority of the state.  So it’s about the domestication of a globally traveling science and how that science modified landscapes, and how the science of forestry turns out very surprisingly not to be a very helpful ally for state intervention.  Forestry turned out to be a much less hegemonic or friendly tool for powerful people than we might assume it to be.

RG:  How does your book address broader questions in environmental anthropology?

AM: There were a number of different things that I wanted to do in this book.  One of them was that I had been reading the classic political ecology when I went to the field, and I was interested in questions of control over landscapes and resources.  Nevertheless, I felt that the ecological aspect of a bunch of political ecology hadn’t been developed as much as I would have liked it to be.  And of particular concern to me was this idea that different kinds of politics come into being in relation to ecologies.  So the ecology of pine forests and pine-oak forests in Oaxaca actually engendered particular forms of politics.  This inspired me to pay attention to non-humans as actors who actually produce different kinds of politics.  So that was one part.  The second part came when I was writing the book, when I really became aware of work in science studies on political culture and epistemic culture and how these two relate.  And I found this wonderfully fruitful set of connections between classic work on state-making and politics and Mexican anthropology, and much more recent work in science-and-technology studies which engages with the ways in which knowledge is constituted in different societies.  And that combination worked really well for me because I could focus very closely on how the Mexican forestry bureaucracy worked and how it had to respond to multiple audiences and how, rather than being this solid structure or authoritative agency, it was really much more timid and hesitant and episodic and fragmentary than I thought it was going to be. I thought that bureaucracy was this big thing that did things in the world, and the longer I work on it the more I’ve come to realize it’s much more of a rather theatrical performance where many of the people involved are only partly convinced of the whole business.

RG: Your work draws on political ecology. How do you see political ecology intersecting with the concerns of environmental anthropologists?

AM: I actually don’t think of myself as being a political ecologist.  To me political ecology is one part of the vast range of work by geographers and historians and anthropologists and science-and-technology studies people who are interested in the ways humans and non-humans collaborate to make worlds.  I actually draw upon many domains of scholarship for my work. For instance, I read environmental history quite seriously, partly because I love telling stories about landscape change, partly because history is a wonderful method for sliding through or past apparently authoritative states.  And what I mean by that is that government institutions claim to be a certain thing that exists in time and to be very enduring, very solid.  But when you look at them over a long period of time they turn out not to be anything like that.  And somehow following the history of, say, pine forests or a landscape and how it slips past and only partly connects with human efforts to control it really helps you understand what kinds of affordances landscapes have for political projects, what kinds of weaknesses states have for controlling landscapes, how they engage or don’t engage, how they slip past each other on many occasions.

RG: When you were doing research for your book, how did you engage with different communities—for example, with local people, with scientists, with other scholars?

AM: That’s a great question.  Well, in some measure, I had different personas.  First of all, I’ll start with the indigenous communities in the Sierra Juárez.  I ended up working mainly in the Ixtlán de Juárez, although I did go to some other places also.  And I was really working with the forestry technicians and foresters—I actually went into the field with them a lot.  So clearly my identity was tied in with them.  Therefore, I know that people who were wary of them were probably also wary of me.  And that just goes with the terrain of doing fieldwork in a small town.  But I had of course to get permission from the indigenous community leaders to be there.  So I did quite a lot of work around communicating what I was doing, including a poster that I gave to people, and I gave a presentation toward the end of my time there.  So I engaged in quite a lot of communication with local people. I told them I’m writing the history of the forest here, and people really understood that as being a sensible project and something they could make sense of.  I thought that was helpful.

Working with forestry officials was kind of different, partly because I was then at the Yale School of Forestry, and I’m actually trained as a forester.  I was situated between forestry and anthropology.  So my identity as a forester was extremely helpful in making initial contacts within government agencies.  After that it really has a lot to do with personal chemistry and who finds your work interesting.  A number of forestry officials were themselves extremely troubled about their own institution, so they actually were excited to talk to somebody whom they could tell their stories of discomfort and to share that with me as a fellow forester who actually understood the technical terms. So indeed my identity as a forester was very helpful in allowing me to have certain kinds of conversations with forestry officials.

And finally there was sort of a middle ground of environmental NGOs and environmental activists, who were intermediaries between the state and indigenous communities.  With them it was a pretty comfortable fit because most of them were around my age, it seemed like, though some were a little older.  And they were all also trying to do some of the same kind of work that I was doing, which was traveling between indigenous communities in forests and bureaucracies in town.  So there were some similar kinds of pilgrimages that we were making in a way.

RG: How did your fieldwork spark lasting collaborations or engagements in your study site?

AM: One of the things I tried do was to go back in 2008-2009.  For various reasons, it’s been a bit hard for me to travel back. And the most surprising part of it for me actually is that… well, I have very personal connections with people I worked with in Sierra Juárez, which I haven’t chosen to write about in many ways but which matter a great deal to me.  With forestry officials, when I returned in 2008-2009, they were just happy to see that I was carrying on, doing my work, and they were happy that the book was coming out.  I have one Spanish language article, where I say some critical things about the Mexican Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT), and I thought they would be upset about it.  But actually they were really happy about it.  So their attitude has been much more of, “we’re glad that someone is writing about our world” rather than worrying that I’m saying something impolite.  That was a very pleasant surprise. My more recent work has actually been looking at how climate change and forests are getting packaged together, and quite a few of the people involved in that world were working in forests when I was working there for my long-term fieldwork. So it turns out that personal connections are tremendously important for ongoing research relationships.

RG: You mentioned that some of the forestry officials were receptive to your critique.   Have you had any further engagements with them?  For example, have they invited you to speak?

AM: Yes, actually.  There was a conference on pulling together all the research on Oaxaca’s forests last spring (put together by David Bray at FIU), and there were a lot of people from indigenous communities there.  I talked about a classic environmental anthropology point, which I made in a forthright way by defining forests in Oaxaca as a product of histories of fire and of agricultural abandonment.  Therefore, I argued, these were deeply anthropogenic forests.  And the thing that really struck me was how this point resonated with the indigenous activists and community leaders in the audience.  I was really happy about this is turning out to be helpful.  In fact, that’s coming out in a conference proceedings…  So there are these ongoing relationships with what I call the environmental practitioner-activist community in Oaxaca.

RG: What is the key message or key point that you hope people take away from reading your book?

AM: One key point would be that ethnographically we find that knowledge bureaucracies like the Mexican Forest Service (but there are many, many others around the world) are usually very fragmented, they’re often uncertain, they have to build alliances with a whole set of different actors: officials above, critics, publics, all kinds of clients; and that this has really huge effects for what kinds of things they know and don’t know.  The kinds of things that become official knowledge about forests in the Mexico case depend very greatly upon the nitty-gritty details of encounters between officials and non-officials.  So, the argument I make is really that it turns out that if you’re going to know something about what happens in distant forests you have to have very good alliances with the indigenous communities who live there.  Which is kind of the opposite of much of the argument that you might hear about how official knowledge gets made.  It’s not this sort of dominating gaze of the state.  It’s rather this state that has to find allies and get them to sign on for a certain way of seeing the world.  And I think it’s rather contrary to much of what we think about states.  And I hope that my argument based on my fieldwork in Mexico will be a kind of invitation for other people who work on conservation or climate change or many other environmental fields to think about how their institutions also might have these similar kinds of processes taking place.

RG: What are the broader contributions of your book to public and policy discussions about environmental conservation projects?

AM: I think that there is some literature in environmental anthropology which paints conservation institutions as authoritative bad guys. I think that this is partially true, but I also think it greatly overstates how powerful these institutions are.  Instead of looking at discourses of conservation, we need to pay attention to the nitty-gritty detail of who is doing conservation management—how many people, where they are, what they’re doing, how often they’re there.  Because it seems to me that much conservation is so fragile and episodic that it just can’t possibly be this authoritative actor that some versions claim it to be.  And that’s just a question of empirical method.  If you actually trace institutions and careers and where people are, you come up with a very different account of conservation, for example, than if you trace conservation discourse in official documents, which is absolutely valuable, but needs to be supplemented with this who-what-where-when part of conservation.

RG: What would you say are the broader contributions of your book to public and policy discussion about social and environmental justice?

AM: Anthropologists have long been saying, “look, there’s all of this important local detail that matters: local ecological knowledge, indigenous knowledge about forests, indigenous ways of understanding the world.”  And they say, “what happens when outside actors like conservation institutions or government policies come in is that they don’t pay attention to these details.”  And it’s absolutely true that this is the case.  However, this is exactly what any government official would tell you, or any conservation official.  In other words, the way that bureaucracies work is by bleaching out local context and coming up with big simplifications.  So we tend to get stuck in a situation of saying, “we see for the local against the power of the global or the outside.”  And I’ve kind of tried to invert that and say, “look, there are moments when details matter a great deal because how conservation gets done affects the careers and the stability of forest institutions or government officials.”  So I’ve tried to look for the back path, the ways in which humans and non-humans but especially publics affect the stability of these institutions because government officials will say, “well, we’re so sorry we can’t pay attention to details of what happens in your village, but that’s how it is.”  But if we tell them stories about how people like them lost their jobs because they didn’t pay attention to the details, then they’re interested.  So my long-term hope is really to say, “look, the details matter to people like you,” meaning officials, and maybe they’ll be receptive to that kind of argument.  Certainly in conversation, I think, they are receptive because most of them feel under enormous pressure.  They’re really stressed out. They have an agenda of twenty things they’re supposed to do, and they’re struggling with how to make sense of a very confusing landscape.  So we can cultivate our understanding of their predicament; maybe cultivate a little bit their fears of why their predicament is unstable; maybe make them a little more receptive to other ways of understanding the world.  This is actually what Sheila Jasanoff calls “technologies of humility,” which, I think, is not a bad metaphor.  Technology has to be created, but it has to be more humble and more willing to consider alternatives.

RG: You were talking before about how your work is being read by forestry officials in a particular area of Mexico, in Oaxaca, where you work.  So it does sound like, in that sense, your work may be actively shaping the management of nature in your study site.

AM: I would say very modestly.  People are very busy.  They don’t necessarily have time to read the kinds of things that we write. I think it’s actually our job to write very simple, bold, one-page summaries of what we have to say.  We have to become more comfortable with the simplification of our work.  Because we have to tell stories that people can take away with them to explain the world to themselves.  For instance, towards the beginning of my book is this image of a person walking off a cliff as they’re blinded by a newspaper in their face.  I think that an image like that with a brief accompanying text about how it links to the lifeworlds of officials is worth a great deal.  The agenda of a bureaucrat is infinitely long, and they have to pick up which things from the agenda they can actually respond to.  So thinking of a really good story or image to anchor a really simple point we have to make is actually quite valuable. My hope is that the thing that will attract their attention is the sense that people like them have in the past suffered when they did not pay attention, that the kind of stuff we love—ethnographic detail—matters in certain ways to people like them.  Maybe that’s the hook.  I can’t say that I’ve managed to do this in huge ways, but that’s certainly my approach to trying to make anthropology meaningful and relevant to these kinds of actors.

RG: That concludes our interview.  On behalf of ENGAGEMENT and its readers, thank you so much, Andrew S. Mathews, for your time and insight.

Laura Ogden, author of the new book Swamplife

EE: What is the theme of your new book?

LO: First, I would like to thank you for this opportunity to talk about my book and to have a conversation about engagement.  My book has several themes – but the main concern is to try and think about how the Everglades, as a landscape, comes into being through the shifting dynamics of multiple species, including people (hunters and scientists), alligators and mangroves.  As part of this central concern, I was interested in using some ideas from philosophy (particularly Deleuze and Guattari) to experiment with writing landscape ethnography.  I was also interested in doing justice to the lives of rural, working-class people who are associated with the Everglades, while at the same time playing a bit with the myth of the Everglades outlaw.

EE: How does your book address broader questions in environmental anthropology?

LO: My work lies at the intersection of political ecology and science studies.  Like many environmental anthropologists, I am very interested in mapping the ways in which nature’s politics foster the inclusion and exclusion of certain people and certain other species.  I have extended traditional concerns in political ecology by asking about the politics of other species and, in doing so, about what constitutes the human.

EE: How did you engage with different communities while you were doing the research for your book?

LO: My book is based on collaborations with several different groups of people associated with the Florida Everglades.  Certainly my book would not have been possible without my close ties to alligator hunters in the Everglades.  I spent about ten years interviewing hunters, starting with an oral history I wrote right after I finished my MA in anthropology.  This was a collaboration with a dear friend, who was like a grandfather to me.

I have also been very fascinated by what used to be called the natural sciences.  Even though I belong to the generation of anthropologists who were trained at the height of the science wars, and I have written critically about scientific metaphors, I just love what scientists do – the fieldwork, the obsessions with algae, forest canopy ecology, wading birds, etc.  I have been very lucky to be able to learn about how science makes the world in specific historically constituted ways. I really cherish my collaborations with scholars in the N.S.F. Long-Term Ecological Research Program – they have helped me understand ecology from the “inside” and avoid some of the easy assumptions we tend to make about science in the abstract.

EE: What is the key message or key point you hope people take away from reading your book?

LO: Well, that depends on the reader.  But, in general, I hope to humanize the Everglades a bit.

EE: What are the broader contributions of your work to debates over environmental conservation and its implications for social and environmental justice?

LO: My work with Everglades hunters has been important to those communities in ways I never anticipated.  Over a decade ago, I used the term “gladesmen” to describe the white hunting culture associated with the Everglades (I published a book with that title).  Over the past few years, the term has become fairly political in that hunting groups and others now use it to assert their rights to the landscape and as a way of forcing a place at the decision-making table.  “Gladesmen” was not a term people used traditionally – it just worked for me.  Now, there are clubs of self-described gladesmen, websites, and the like.  While this has been gratifying in some ways, it also has contributed to public discussions about culture that are not particularly helpful.  These discussions feel, to me at least, like an ongoing effort to establish an “authentic” Everglades history and culture – which seems static and exclusionary as well.  Still, poor people have really paid an enormous price so that we can have national parks, including those in the Everglades, and I am grateful if my work can remind us of that price.

EE: How is your book being used beyond the academy?

LO: Each thing we create (books, films, articles, talks, etc.) we do for different reasons and different audiences.  I wrote Swamplife because I wanted to think about some ideas about animals and humans, and I also wanted to write it like the kinds of books I like to read.  The books I like tend to be ethnographic, about ideas, and also attentive to writing – I love Kathleen Stewart’s book Ordinary Affects, as an example.  So, this book was not really intended as a book that speaks to policymakers or conservation organizations.

I have several projects that engage conservation organizations in the US and in Chile, where I am working now.  Those collaborations will shape the outcome of my next book, which is going to be about ethics and what I am calling “animal diasporas.”

Thank you again.

Paige West during fieldwork for her new book – Florence, Italy, 2006

RG: What is the theme of your new book?

PW: One theme, and a theme that I have also explored in other work, is the connection between places that are often imagined as far from modernity to places that are imagined as the center of industry and commerce.  Coffee is a commodity that has travelled around the world for literally thousands of years.  And it’s a commodity that we tend to associate with a rather urban lifestyle.  You know, you go a café in Hamburg, you go to a café in New York City, you go to a café in Sydney, and you have a cup of coffee—it’s something that we associate with a very particular kind of lifestyle.  Coffee and its circulation are one of the things that have for hundreds of years tied Papua New Guinea, a place that is almost always configured as stuck in the past or as the last bastion of a very different kind of lifestyle, to a modern global economic system.  So one of the themes of the book is the way in which commodities tie seemingly out-of-the-way places and seemingly less-than-developed people to very urban areas and to the industrialized world.

Another theme of the book is seemingly “ethical” consumption.  I ask what it means to try and create a kind of progressive politics around consumption and whether that politics is productive for people who are growing coffee and whether it’s productive for the people who are assuming that they’re enacting ethical, political choices through the act of buying. With a lot of certified coffee, with a lot of the fair-trade or organic coffee, with a lot of this notion of ethical consumption— the people in the coffee industry who are most often discursively constructed by advertising, marketing, and other forms of representation are growers.  And there are a lot of growers in the coffee industry, and they’re a very important part of the industry.  But one of the things I do in the book is expand our notion of who’s bringing coffee from Papua New Guinea to places like Hamburg, Sydney, and New York City.  So I look at the lives of growers, of people who process the coffee, of the people who work for shipping companies, of the people who import coffee, of the people who market coffee, and I really try to flesh out the global commodity chain for coffee so that the simple portrayal of poor rural growers and wealthy western consumers gets a little more muddy for people.

RG: Beyond what you’ve already hinted at, how does your book address broader questions in environmental anthropology?

PW: One of the things that my friend, colleague, and sometimes collaborator Molly Doane and I have been talking about for years is the fact that political ecology has not taken seriously the global consumption and circulation of commodities.  So many of the environmental ravages that we see today, so much of the environmental dispossession in the places where we work, is caused by the extraction of commodities. For political ecology to have a robust understanding of environmental and social change, we have to take commodities seriously.  Now this has happened with mining and oil.  The people who look at those forms of extraction do a really wonderful job of this.  But with agricultural commodities—things like coffee, sugar cane, and oil palm—we as political ecologists and environmental anthropologists really have to take this seriously, and through that we have to take very seriously the literature on circulation and commodification.

RG: When you were doing research for your book, how did you engage with different communities of local people, of scientists, of coffee growers? 

PW: One of the interesting things about this book is that it’s a very long-term project that in earnest began many years ago.  When I was finishing up my PhD project, I asked the people I work with in rural villages in Papua New Guinea what they thought an interesting second project would be.  They all said coffee because they live in this place where everyone thinks—or used to think—that conservation was a form of development.  It’s 1998, and I’m about to leave the village – maybe forever, nobody knows – and I say to a guy named Philip and a guy named Jonah, “So what’s a good research project?”  We’re looking out over Philip’s dad’s coffee groves, and they say, “Well, really the only development we have here is coffee and Christianity.  So maybe you should look at coffee and Christianity.”  I thought about it and decided that coffee was an interesting thing to look at, so the book project itself was generated from the engagements I already had with rural people living in the Lufa district of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea.

The project became complicated in terms of the types of relationships I had with the people I was working with because the global commodity chain for coffee literally stretches globally.  With the rural farmers who grow the coffee that I write about, I have a long-term ethnographic relationship.  I go back to Papua New Guinea every year and spend time with them.  I speak their language, and I know a lot about local ontology and epistemology.  That kind of social relationship was very different from the kind of social relationship I had with, say, the people in Goroka, the mountain town where most of the coffee is processed.  Most of those people I knew socially because there’s a whole social world of middle-class Papua New Guineans and expatriates in Goroka, and before I ever knew I would do work on coffee, I was part of that social world.  So I had to approach people whom I already had a social relationship with and say, “Look, I’m doing this book on coffee, it would be great if I could interview you, it would be great if I could spend time at your factory.”  The initial part of the book—the rural research—was very ethnographic.  I mean ethnographic in the true sense—living in a village, spending all day everyday with people for months and years on end.  The sort of middle part of the commodity chain in Goroka and then in Lae and Port Moresby, two other urban areas in Papua New Guinea, a lot of it was ethnographic work, but also a lot of it was interview work.  I lived with people, I spent time in factories, but I also interviewed people.  And then as I moved farther away from the source of coffee, the project became much more interview based.  If you’re talking to, say, a head of one of the largest coffee importers in the world, you can’t go live with them.  You can’t really afford to spend seven months in Hamburg.  And so the part of the project that is about distribution and the international marketing of coffee, that’s much more interview-based.  I feel like I had a range of relationships with people—everything from the very traditional ethnographic to the much more interview-based style of ethnography that many people practice today.

RG: In the course of your fieldwork for this book and in your ongoing research, how has your work sparked on-the-ground engagements with projects that are meaningful to local communities?

PW: I have a couple of different projects now.  The coffee project is basically finished in terms of my research, but one of the things that came out of it is that I got connected with a lot of people in the coffee industry who do really interesting work around social justice.  One of the things I was recently able to do was bring a group of researchers from a large international coffee company to the villages in the Eastern Highlands to get them talking to the people about ways to have more money flowing into communities and less money slipping out along the commodity chain.  It has led to some really positive engagement.  One of the other things that’s come out of the coffee work is that pretty much everybody in the coffee industry in Papua New Guinea is reading the book, and I think that there’s an ongoing conversation now about ethical trade and ethical consumption and whether that’s actually benefitting people in rural areas that I have helped to generate.  And so I feel like I’ve contributed to a national conversation about coffee in Papua New Guinea in addition to connecting these rural growers with some really wonderful people in the coffee industry.

It’s interesting how, once you become an “expert” on something, you find people contacting you to ask you for advice.  Someone whom I interviewed and spent quite a bit of time with in London, and who owns five small coffee shops, recently contacted me to say, “Hey, I want to source some fair-trade, organically certified coffee from Papua New Guinea, and I want to do it from a great company.”  I was able to connect him with a locally owned company, with a company that is owned and run by Papua New Guineans, and they now have a relationship where he is sourcing all of his coffee from them.  And so in some ways I’ve been able to connect people with the rural growers whom I know so well.  And in some ways I’ve also been able to connect some of the people who get constructed as middlemen.  That’s another thing about the book that I think is important.  In the narratives that we hear in the Global North about coffee and all sorts of things, there’s this notion of the middleman as a kind of evil character who takes money away from the poor growers and who doesn’t add any value.  What I do in the book is show that the middleman in Papua New Guinea is actually a Papua New Guinean who is really trying to make a living as an ethical part of the industry and who is usually someone that has connections to growers, very intimate connections to growers, and also connections to these international houses that can buy the coffee.

In terms of other work, my first book is, in part, a critique of environmental conservation projects, and one of the things that has come out of that book is really sustained engagement with small, local NGOs.  I helped found an NGO called the Papua New Guinea Institute of Biological Research, and we work to get young Papua New Guineans who are interested in anthropology and biology into PhD and masters programs, and then help support their research.  So that’s one way that my work has led to engagement.  One of the critiques in that book is that conservation can’t always be this kind of western construct that gets put down on top of people in Papua New Guinea, so one way that I’ve tried to help move that idea along is to work with these young Papua New Guinean scientists.

My current research is in New Ireland, a province of Papua New Guinea, where I work with an NGO called Ailan Awareness.  We work with twenty small communities, and those twenty small communities all have teeny-tiny protected areas created using traditional conservation techniques.  These are communities who have decided they want to do something positive for the environment.  They want to work with some people like us, some external actors, but they want to have control over their conservation projects, and so I’ve helped a lot with that process.

RG: It’s interesting that people in the coffee industry in PNG are reading your book.  There is certainly a larger conversation to be had about the meanings of environmental-anthropology books beyond the academy.

PW: I’m an academic anthropologist.  My waged labor is to produce knowledge and teach people.  And I’m thrilled that the knowledge I’ve produced has an effect in the world and that people outside of the academy can learn from my work, benefit from my work.  But I think of myself very much as an academic, and I think that, if you’re an academic, your work can still have this much broader significance.

RG: What is the key message or key point that you hope people take away from reading your book?

PW: There are a couple of them.  One of them is that any commodity that you buy has an entire social world that lives within it.  And if you want to be an informed consumer, then you should understand that social world.  It’s more complicated than poor rural growers and evil middlemen and western consumers doing ethical politics through buying stuff.  If you really want to understand the world of commodities, you should understand the complicated nature of commodities.  Another theme in the book is a critique of the constant production of the idea of the primitive as it’s connected to Papua New Guinea—to New Guinea broadly, but to Papua New Guinea specifically.  And I end the book with a set of questions about the images used to sell coffee and their connections to ideas of pre-modernity and primitivity—how those images end up slipping from the selling of commodities into political discourse that negatively affects Papua New Guineans.  With any production of an image of others, we have to think very carefully about the life of that image after it leaves the commodity. Another key point is that when we connect images to commodities, given the rapidity of time and space in late capitalism, those images get marketed and sold very quickly.  What happens when those images are no longer valuable to marketers and thus no longer sold to the public as meaningful?  What happens when the lives of rural growers are no longer important to people buying coffee?  Do they get thrown by the wayside?  I think that’s something very important when we think about tying images of people and lifestyles to commodities.

RG: Finally, what are the broader contributions of your book to public and policy discussions about social and environmental justice?

PW: What I would hope is that my book raises questions about how we think about and talk about others.  And I hope it shows very clearly that the images that are associated with the production of coffee—while they may make money for people who sell fair trade and organic certified, while they may make money for coffee for people who sell non-certified coffee—that these images have real material effects, and we have to think about that.

In terms of public policy, I’m well connected with some people in government in Papua New Guinea, and I’ve talked with a lot of people in government in Papua New Guinea about the book.  I gave talks about the book at the U.S. Embassy and at the National Research Institute of Papua New Guinea.  And the former governor of the Eastern Highlands Province has read the book and has thought a lot about coffee production.  So I’ve had a good set of conversations with people in Papua New Guinea.  In terms of other policy, I’ve worked pretty extensively with this major, gigantic coffee company to help them understand how their work in places like New Guinea can be more ethical, how their work can take into consideration rural people in robust ways.  In terms of international policy, I’ve talked to EU people quite a bit, but it’s been really informally.  I would say that a lot of the policy-related work we do as anthropologists is through these informal social relationships that we make while we’re in the field.  You know, you meet someone who works for the EU while you’re in line at the airport in Port Moresby, and they say, “Oh, well, I’d love to read your book.”  Then you send a copy of the book, and they email you back.  So our contribution to policy doesn’t just have to be sitting at a NOAA roundtable or sitting on a NASA panel.  Our contribution to policy can be in these more informal situations where we can actually do what we do best— have sustained social interactions with people.  We help them understand the ethnographic worlds that we’re privileged to take part in.

RG: Is there anything you would like to add?

PW: I would just add that I feel really lucky to be part of a growing community of scholars that’s working on issues of global commodity circulation and political ecology.  In particular, if you are interested in coffee, Molly Doane and Sarah Lyon have done extraordinary work in Mexico and Guatemala respectively.