MOUNTAIN OPENING

Every year in July a small group of people gather on the summit of Ontake-san, a 3,067-meter volcanic mountain in the central Japanese prefecture of Nagano, to ceremoniously open it for the summer season. They do so with prayers to the gods, or kami, who dwell on the mountain. After Shinto priests have welcomed the kami with chants and offerings, representatives of several local constituencies come forward to offer prayers; included among them are employees of Japan’s national Forestry Agency and officials from local government and business offices.

Shinto priests conduct a mountain-opening ceremony on the summit of Ontake-san. (photo by Eric J. Cunningham)

Though my knowledge of and relationship with Ontake-san began much earlier, my engagements with the spiritual ecology that encompasses the mountain began in July 2008 when I climbed to its summit and joined in that year’s mountain opening ceremony. After the formal ceremony ended, I followed other participants into a mountain hut near the summit shrine. Outside, cold winds whisked clouds over Ontake-san’s rocky slopes. Inside, the mountain hut was warm and inviting. The head priest of Ontake-jinja, a shrine dedicated to the gods of the mountain, thanked us for our participation in the ceremony and made a brief speech. In particular, he emphasized the importance of Ontake-san for the local community, suggesting that as long as the mountain was cared for those who inhabited its foothills would be fine. He then led us in a toast of ritually sanctified sake, called o-miki. And, with that, the ceremonious morning quickly gave way to merriment.

The annual mountain-opening ceremony, or kaizanshiki, which takes place in the rarified air of Ontake-san, stands in stark contrast to other images often associated with modern Japan—those of high technology, cute characters, and densely packed urban cores. It is a wonder that people go to so much trouble to climb a mountain that many in Japan have never heard of to give offerings and prayers to the deities who inhabit its rocky slopes.

In this post, I offer this ceremony as one among many other localized human-mountain interactions that constitute a local response to broader changes currently taking place in Japanese society. My focus in on Otaki, a village community located at the base of Ontake-san, where I conducted research for 24 months between 2008 and 2010. For residents of Otaki, I argue, the mountain is embedded in symbols, meanings, and practices that contribute to community perseverance within the increasing turbulence of late capitalist Japan.

OTAKI

Otaki is located at the back of a box canyon that runs along Ontake-san’s southeastern flank. With a population of fewer than one thousand (and shrinking), the village is less than a pinprick within the national geography of Japan. Otaki belongs to the larger Kiso Region, which, though famed for its lush pine forests that once brought prosperity, is today economically depressed and generally considered a social, economic, and political backwater. The vast majority of land in Otaki is also forested, but roughly 87% of this is designated as national forest, meaning that local residents have no formal role in forest governance. Government-sponsored forestry once enlivened the village economy (albeit while ravaging its environments), but post-war decreases in demands for domestic timber brought those days to an end. More recently, water resource development has played a large role in shaping the Otaki landscape, with two major dams and several minor ones located within the village.

In these terms, Otaki is representative of rural communities across Japan for which the nation’s post-war “economic miracle” has by and large been experienced as a period of  social and economic decline. There have been limited successes—development of tourism and other light industries—but overall the pattern has been one of marginalization, with rural communities struggling to survive off the scraps that fall from Japan’s mega-cities.

OYAMA

Otaki has also long been an integral part of a spiritual ecology that revolves around Ontake-san, linking together human, non-human, and supernatural beings. The village is known as Otaki-guchi, meaning “Otaki entrance,” and comprises the first of ten stages of pilgrimage that lead to the mountain’s summit. Thus, in addition to forestry, life in Otaki has for generations been economically, socially, and politically oriented around Ontake-san as a sacred mountain.

Ontake-san photographed from Otaki village. (photo by Eric J. Cunningham)

Otaki’s position within the folded slopes and ridgelines that form the broad base of Ontake-san makes it so that the summit of the mountain is often unseen. Depending on one’s own movement in the landscape, Ontake-san seems to suddenly appear, its rounded form popping out from the forested hillsides like a child playing hide and seek. Residents often expressed feelings of calm or reassurance when conveying their experiences of seeing Ontake-san suddenly emerge from the landscape. As one resident stated, “When I catch a glimpse of the mountain, I feel a kind of relief.”

The cover of a 2001 tourism booklet published by Otaki’s village office offers a similar sentiment in the following lines:

The snowmelt water of O-yama

flows cool and clear.

Again today there is O-yama.

Silently watching over us.[i]

Although the Chinese characters for Ontake-san are used in the passage, written above them in hiragana (a Japanese phonetic script) is the word “O-yama.” O-yama is a local name for Ontake-san largely unknown and unused outside of Otaki. It literally translates as “the mountain” or “honorable mountain” and conveys a sense of respect, but also familiarity. Otaki residents often referred to other landscape elements in relation to Ontake-san, using “Ontake-san” and “O-yama” interchangibly along with the particle no, meaning “of” or “belonging to.” For example, I often read or heard Ontake-san no sato (village of Ontake-san) in reference to Otaki; or O-yama no mizu (water of the mountain) in relation to the mountain waters that flow ubiquitously through the landscape.  In addition, Ontake-san was often depicted as a central (if not THE central) element of the village landscape in pictures and photographs. These various verbal and visual clues reflect the central position that Ontake-san holds in the mental geographies of Otaki’s residents, who continue to create and reinforce a strong sense of individual and community connection to the mountain.

Map of Otaki village drawn by a junior high school student. Ontake-san is the mountain prominently featured. (photo by Eric J. Cunningham)

Not only did Otaki residents often reference O-yama, but they spoke of it as a stable, benevolent, and even guiding entity. Just as the Shinto priest did in his speech in the mountain hut, they often referred to the mountain as a central part of village life and discussed it as something that must be respected and protected. They appealed to O-yama and its enduring qualities in ways that reflected multiple, and at times contradictory, anxieties concerning the future of the village. For instance, during mura-zukuri or “village-making” meetings, residents and I discussed the ties between the village community and Ontake-san. At the beginning of one meeting in the fall of 2008, the leader of a village revitalization group explained that:

Otaki is a village that has walked hand in hand with the history of the sacred mountain Ontake-san. However, in recent years, in the midst of a very severe situation never experienced before, returning to financial health and creating vitality in which citizens live in health and well being have become new topics for the village.

In this quote, “severe situation” refers to financial troubles that had recently plagued Otaki. By invoking Ontake-san in this way, the speaker was giving voice to more general feelings of anxiety among residents.

As a symbol of endurance and even permanency for Otaki’s residents, Ontake-san helps throw into sharp relief the rapid changes that have been part of Japan’s modernization and, more specifically, the processes of resource exploitation, environmental degradation, economic decline, and depopulation that have accompanied modernization in Otaki.

MOUNTAIN MOVEMENTS

One cool spring morning in 2010 I visited an exhibition of Ontake-san-related materials in the gymnasium of Otaki’s run-down community center. The exhibition mostly included old scrolls with prints of deities, various talisman, and small statues made of wood or bronze. What caught my attention, however, was a collection of guidebooks about Ontake-san covering the span of the last century.

A sweep of 20th century media depicting Ontake-san. (photo by Eric J. Cunningham)

Early guidebooks from the beginning of the 20^th century had covers portraying religious pilgrims set against the form of Ontake-san, with photographs and captions depicting ascetic activities and sacred sites. Then, in those from the middle of the century, I noticed a shift. One small pamphlet from 1953 titled shinkou to kankou no kiso ontake he (“Off to Kiso Ontake, [the mountain] of faith and tourism”) consisted almost exclusively of pictures of religious activities and sites, but also included a photo of a dam and reservoir. Later materials in the collection, dating from about 1955 to 1965, offered images of a desacralized Ontake-san, empty of pilgrims and worshipers. These later pamphlets also included hiking maps and bus schedules.

Moving through the exhibit I began to realize that the artifacts presented a stratigraphy that spoke to Ontake-san’s transitory existence as something created and shared among people—in the past primarily at a local level, but more recently at a national level. Though O-yama seems solid, unmovable, and permanent, there before my eyes on that morning was evidence of an evolution from sacred to recreational space over the span of a century. Within this evolution, which is enmeshed in broader processes of modernization, Onake-san has shifted from a centralized position within a regional spiritual ecology to a position in the oku—the “back” or “margins”—of Japan’s national geography.

UNCERTAINTY AND (MOUNTAIN) FAITH

Through their varied relationships with Ontake-san, many in Otaki recognize their position at the margins of the Japanese nation. At the same time, many (if not most) also continue to exhibit a profound sense of connection to the mountain they call “O-yama,” as well as to the spiritual ecology of spirits, gods, animals, rocks, rivers, trees, and people embodied within its broad slopes. Ontake-san remains a meaningful marker of the vitality and perseverance of both the Otaki community and landscape, albeit one that continues to evolve through the broader set of social, political, and economic processes within which it is enmeshed.

To varying extents and in diverse ways, residents of Otaki continue to work towards maintaining their connections to Ontake-san and all that it represents in their lives. The mountain remains central to life in Otaki and finding a way to protect it while sustaining livelihoods is their continuing struggle. It is a struggle that I too am now thoroughly engaged in. Unfortunately, the terms of the engagement are difficult to define as I, like my friends in Otaki, are only small parts of the larger spiritual ecology of the mountain. How are we to articulate the importance of such a humbled position within a global economy of knowledge that increasingly values expertise, facts, and certainty?

During my time in Otaki, I introduced residents to the resilience thinking approach to environmental management. Though receptive, I found that people had a hard time understanding the resilience concept and were at a loss for how to implement the approach. I too backed away from resilience thinking in my own research for a time, though I have recently returned to it as a way to think about my research in Otaki. What brought me back was the centrality this approach gives to uncertainty. As a state in which knowledge is lacking, uncertainty calls for humility, caution, and reserve. What I have learned from my friends and colleagues in Otaki is that uncertainty positions us as inhabitants who must practice humility and learn to respect the greater ecologies of which we are but small parts. Through their relationships with O-yama, people in Otaki are made to understand that there exist forces greater than them and that these must be honored. I wonder, how would the management of national forests in Otaki differ if such an understanding was present at an institutional level?

In their own humble way, the Otaki community has persevered through many uncertainties—forest overexploitation, dam building, economic decline, depopulation—and there are more to come. I suggest that their and my engagement with these uncertainties is often inspired by O-yama and a belief that, if cared for, the greater community of beings to which we belong will endure. It is often a subdued engagement, but one that I, and many I work with in Otaki, continue to have faith in.

An Otaki resident explores a statue at a sacred site on Ontake-san. (photo by Eric J. Cunningham)

Eric J. Cunningham is Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at Earlham College. His research focuses on cultural representations of nature and the political dimensions of forest governance in Japan

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[i]　御嶽山の雪どけ水が

  清冽に流れていきます。

  今日もそこにあります。

  静かに私たちを見守っています。

  Oyama no yukidoke mizu ga

  seiretsu ni nagarete ikimasu.

  Oyama ha kyou mo soko ni arimasu.

  Shizuka ni watashitachi wo mimamotte imasu.

When I began researching honey collecting in the Philippines, I never anticipated that making visual collections of objects and images associated with marketing honey was going to become a powerful way of stimulating discussion about my study.  But the clues were there all along. Collections are things brought together, in so many senses of the term. Such assemblages have a capacity for telling stories about how different products make their ways through the world, and into our homes, bodies and lives. Honey collecting, like other forms of forest harvesting or hunting, tends to evoke ideas about a bound type of thing moving in one direction – out of the forest and into a market (wherever that might be).  But what happens when a ‘natural forest’ honey supposedly harvested on an island in the Philippines is manufactured and sold in Manila?  And when this honey’s association with nature and forest environments is hardly natural, but needs to be made apparent by literally rendering the final product green?  How do such commodities relate to the forest honeys actually being harvested by Indigenous experts as part of their livelihoods and lifeways, and being marketed by non-government organizations?  In attempting to discuss the issues that arose from my research, I found that bringing together a range of honey products that had different, yet related, trajectories could be a wonderful prompt for talking about the social and spatial disjunctures that often occur within efforts to add value to certain types of natural resources.

Sarah Webb talking with a honey street vendor in Metro Manila

In the Philippines, Palawan[1] honey is one such ‘value-added’ forest product.  Indigenous experts[2] seasonally harvest honey mainly from Apis dorsata beehives in forested areas on Palawan Island.  For the Indigenous Tagbanua families I worked with, honey is not only a part of their livelihood but also an important source of nutrition, sweetness, medicine and cultural identity.  Within the Philippines, many people are interested in buying Palawan honey because it is a highly valued product with a reputation for purity and quality[3], particularly because of its association with Palawan’s iconic forests and ‘natural wonders’, such as the Puerto Princesa Underground River.  Local Indigenous representatives who market honey promote non-timber forest products (NTFPs) such as honey because these products support their current goals for sustainable forest livelihoods.

The notion that NTFPs, like honey, can contribute to sustainable forest livelihoods has influenced international development projects, policies and research initiatives – especially since studies began to suggest that the economic value of NTFPs might exceed that of timber.  ‘Value adding’ NTFPs often means building up markets of more highly valued forest products as an alternative to logging and mining.  The idea is to provide income for forest harvesters, while maintaining the resource base.  However, ongoing research makes apparent the need to approach the potential of NTFP commercialization for sustainability agendas with caution.  Scholars have demonstrated that merely providing more valuable resources will not necessarily address the socio-economic marginalization of forest harvesters, or the concerns of sustainable livelihoods (however these might be conceptualized).  Important research in environmental anthropology has documented how value-adding incentives can pay insufficient attention to the reasons forest harvesters do not have access to valuable forest resources – or why they no longer have such access[4].

Drawing upon this line of research, I examined how the politics of capturing value is a part of the social processes of making products valuable in the Philippines. When I began searching for Palawan honeys sold in Manila, I found that it was not only those interested in sustainable forest livelihoods who were ‘adding’ to honey in order to make it a valuable product.

Adding to Palawan Honey

The reputation of Palawan honey as ‘natural’ and ‘pure’ gives it certain market appeal, but has also inspired a burgeoning range of imitation products.  Different ‘fake’ Palawan honeys are made by adding water and sugar, the name of Palawan, and even green food coloring to honey of dubious origin.  On Palawan, campaigns have targeted adulterated honey, which is made by adding water to increase volume, and sugar or kalamansi (native lime) juice to disguise the diluted taste.  In Manila, experts on the honey trade assert that the volume of honey claimed to originate from Palawan exceeds both Palawan estimates for local production and state records of honey transported from the island. Green honey is an expensive[5] product (supposedly rare and medicinal) identified as coming from Palawan when sold across boutiques and farmers’ markets in Manila.  However, according to testing conducted by Dr. Cervancia of the University of the Philippines Los Banos, ‘green’ honey is made green by mixing yellow and blue pigments into the honey – additions which she contends change its composition in such a way that it should no longer, technically, be called honey.

A manlalbet (honey harvester) indicates the location of a hive

So what does a black market for green Palawan honey in Manila mean for Indigenous Tagbanua harvesters? Firstly, Indigenous peoples are often blamed for adulterating local honey.  Although this practice is more likely conducted by transitory middle traders[6], these rumors cause some to shy away from purchasing honey directly from Indigenous harvesters on Palawan.  Some local buyers use such rumors to negotiate a lower price for the honey they buy from Tagbanua families, claiming the honey is of a lower or ‘reject’ quality.  Secondly, my use of the term black market is somewhat facetious. While practices of ‘fake’ honeys are widely considered undesirable, and have been banned by Palawan local government, branding or labeling honey as coming from Palawan (even when it does not) is not regulated at a national level.  At the same time, honey from Palawan does not easily make its way from Indigenous harvesters to Manila.  State permits are required to transport honey, and seasonally driven, local production means that a relatively low volume of honey from Palawan enters the Manila marketplace.

As these forest products are made valuable, particularly through their association with iconic forest environments, a space has emerged for creating even more expensive ‘fake’ honey products.  Such cultural politics are part of, rather than external to, the processes of making products valuable.  Those manufacturing and purchasing such products are actively involved in creating social and economic values of not only honey, but also the ideals of nature through which consumers position their tastes and health in relation to the environments of Palawan and the livelihoods of Indigenous peoples.

Taking Away from Added Honeys: Understanding Commodity Flows and Values through Material Culture

As I investigated these politics of valuing honey, I initially collected products[7] because I was interested in the actual objects of honey marketing.  That is, not only was I interested in what people had to say about honey, or how they behaved during sales encounters, but I also wanted to know what these material objects themselves said about honey production. I was fascinated by the material transfer of honey from the large plastic gallon jugs used during harvest to smaller containers for resale, the colors or textures of the honey itself – indicative of different qualities and tastes – and, of course, the product labels that communicated both explicit and implicit messages to potential customers.  All of this material culture supplemented, furthered, or contradicted what different people told me, and it was in making sense of those relationships and tensions that I was able to understand how Palawan honey is made valuable. But during ethnographic fieldwork, I also noticed collections everywhere I looked – from displays of product samples at non-government organization (NGO) workshops, to samples of ‘fake’ honeys being tested in university laboratories, to the ways people arranged important objects in their homes.  And this made me realize that what I had collected might be of interest to others too, and so the collection became the basis of workshops conducted at the end of my fieldwork.

Sarah Webb and research assistant Mr. Rogelio Rodrigo at a honey collection workshop

For workshops with Tagbanua families, I prepared descriptive labels for honey and beeswax products that included information about the price and provenance, as well as photographs of different contexts of sale.  My research assistants and I arranged these into displays, and talked about the different products, answering any questions participants had.  After doing so, we passed the different objects around, and sampled each – trying on beeswax cosmetics, and smelling and tasting honeys.  At their request, a group of harvesters ran their own tests on the honeys we presented to determine for themselves whether they considered any ‘fake’, and to ascertain differing levels of quality.

Tagbanua families are only too familiar with what they describe as the dangers of ‘fake’ honey – particularly, they fear being blamed for the production of such ‘fakes’, and the resultant punishment by the state or low prices from buyers.  Most Tagbanua people are aware that a fraudulent ‘green honey’ is sold.  But the complex connections and distances between the existence of such commodities and their own experiences can be difficult for any of us to talk about.  When these differently sourced, made, packaged, and promoted honey products were brought together, they provided us with the means of discussing the bigger social stories surrounding the journeys of Palawan honey to the marketplace.

The fate of my collection of honey products was important to me; I hoped that it would remain together, and be able to support ongoing research engagements. To this end, I was thrilled to hand the collection over to NATRIPAL, the Indigenous peoples’ federation of Palawan, as an addition to their own display of sample products collected during their research and marketing activities. In the offices of the organization, we installed the display of honey products and conducted an additional workshop to discuss the collection’s relationship to my research and the federation’s ongoing work. Apart from their nationally and regionally awarded efforts to provide more favorable market relations for Indigenous people and to develop the brand of Palawan honey, NATRIPAL has lobbied intensively for the land and livelihood rights of Indigenous peoples across Palawan.

There are many challenges for environmental anthropologists to work through in considering how collections can be used as forms of engagement.  But there is great potential for harnessing approaches to objects, which have traditionally resided within the fields of material culture studies or museology, for research in environmental anthropology. Visual collections are not just symbolic of what we do throughout our research activities, or simply representative of the issues we are exploring.  They can also act as a means for thinking and talking through pressing social and environmental issues in ways that draw from the experiences researchers and those they work with already have.  And perhaps most thrilling, there is a possibility that such collections might have a vibrant life beyond the intentions of researchers. This is, of course, only one of many innovative pathways for collections to act as powerful tools of engagement.

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.