Nature in the Global South

Paul Greenough

Description

A nuanced look at how nature has been culturally constructed in South and Southeast Asia, Nature in the Global South is a major contribution to understandings of the politics and ideologies of environmentalism and development in a postcolonial epoch. Among the many significant paradigms for understanding both the preservation and use of nature in these regions are biological classification, state forest management, tropical ecology, imperial water control, public health, and community-based conservation. Focusing on these and other ways that nature has been shaped and defined, this pathbreaking collection of essays describes projects of exploitation, administration, science, and community protest.With contributors based in anthropology, ecology, sociology, history, and environmental and policy studies, Nature in the Global South features some of the most innovative and influential work being done in the social studies of nature. While some of the essays look at how social and natural landscapes are created, maintained, and transformed by scientists, officials, monks, and farmers, others analyze specific campaigns to eradicate smallpox and save forests, waterways, and animal habitats. In case studies centered in the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia, and South and Southeast Asia as a whole, contributors examine how the tropics, the jungle, tribes, and peasants are understood and transformed; how shifts in colonial ideas about the landscape led to extremely deleterious changes in rural well-being; and how uneasy environmental compromises are forged in the present among rural, urban, and global allies.Contributors:Warwick AndersonAmita BaviskarPeter BrosiusSusan DarlingtonMichael R. DoveAnn Grodzins GoldPaul GreenoughRoger JefferyNancy PelusoK. SivaramakrishnanNandini SundarAnna Lowenhaupt TsingCharles Zerner

Sujets

• South Asia
• Southeast Asia

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 29 août 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822385004
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

PAUL GREENOUGH AND ANNA LOWENHAUPT TSING,EDITORS

N A T U R E I N T H E G L O B A L S O U T H

E N V I R O N M E N T A L P R O J E C T S I N S O U T H A N D S O U T H E A S T A S I A

Nature in the Global South

Paul Greenough and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, editors

N AT U R E I N

T H E G LO BA L S O U T H

Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia

Duke University Press

Durham & London 2003

∫2003 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper$

Designed by C. H. Westmoreland

Typeset in Sabon with Twentieth Century display

by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Data appear on the last printed page of

this book.

Sponsored by the Southeast Asia Program

of the Social Science Research Council and the

American Council of Learned Societies

C O N T E N T S

Preface vii Paul Greenough and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing/ Introduction

PART I

Scales, Logics, and Agents

Tropical knowledges

1

Warwick Anderson/ The Natures of Culture: Environment and Race in the Colonial Tropics 29

Charles Zerner/ Dividing Lines: Nature, Culture, and Commerce in Indonesia’s Aru Islands, 1856–1997 47

Roger Jeffery and Nandini Sundar, with Abha Mishra, Neeraj Peter, and Pradeep J. Tharakan/ A Move from Minor to Major: Competing Discourses of Nontimber Forest Products in India 79

Rural landscaping

Michael R. Dove/ Forest Discourses in South and Southeast Asia: A Comparison with Global Discourses 103

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing/ Agrarian Allegory and Global Futures

Ann Grodzins Gold/ Foreign Trees: Lives and Landscapes in Rajasthan 170

PART I IToward Livable Environments: Compromises and Campaigns

States of nature / states in nature

124

Paul Greenough/ Pathogens, Pugmarks, and Political ‘‘Emergency’’: The 1970s South Asian Debate on Nature 201

Nancy Lee Peluso/ Territorializing Local Struggles for Resource Control: A Look at Environmental Discourses and Politics in Indonesia 231

K. Sivaramakrishnan/ Scientific Forestry and Geneaologies of Development in Bengal 253

Uneasy allies

Amita Baviskar/ Tribal Politics and Discourses of Indian Environmentalism 289

J. Peter Brosius/ Voices for the Borneo Rain Forest: Writing the History of an Environmental Campaign 319

Susan M. Darlington/ Practical Spirituality and Community Forests: Monks, Ritual, and Radical Conservatism in Thailand 347

Bibliography

Contributors Index 413

vi

Contents

367 411

P R E F A C E

Discursive Environments

for Environmental Discourses

The essays in this volume were gathered in a conference entitled Environ- mental Discourses and Human Welfare in South and Southeast Asia held in Hilo, Hawaii, in December 1995; they were subsequently revised by the authors, to whom the editors tender their apologies for a substantial ∞ delay in publication. One of the several purposes of the Hilo conference was to discuss the unexpected agency of nature, which sometimes rises up against our most careful schemes and plans, and so it is perhaps fitting that from the first many things did not go as we expected. The history of the gathering that produced this particular set of essays is then of some interest in explaining the shape and composition of the volume. The conference owed its form to the then current organization of the Social Science Research Council (ssrc), New York, which sponsored the conference not only financially but intellectually. At that time, ‘‘joint committees’’ of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council were organized by world regions; one of the tasks of these committees was to bring together interdisciplinary con- ferences within and occasionally across regional specialties to explore new scholarly directions. In the spirit of these committees, our confer- ence was planned as a discussion between humanists and social scientists about multiple discourses on environmental issues; we further hoped to make use of the common knowledge of South Asian and Southeast Asian specialists, respectively, at the same time as we began a dialogue across these two regions. Yet none of these things was simple. Humanists and social scientists have been talking to each other for decades, but every newly imagined domain offers a tug-of-war; ‘‘environmental discourses’’ was no exception. The topic, indeed, had first been conceptualized as ‘‘environmental narratives,’’ but humanists in the joint committees objected that this conceptualization required specialized disciplinary knowledge that social scientists who came together to talk about the environment would not have. We changed the frame and rewrote the

proposal as ‘‘environmental discourses’’; this time it was the social scien- tists on the joint committees who objected that discourse was a humanist preoccupation not grounded and hardheaded enough for environmental concerns. We rewrote the proposal again and again and finally slipped by with ‘‘environmental discourses and human welfare.’’ Although a con- ference proposal may never have been rewritten quite so many times, it is a positive testament to the joint committee system that it allowed this long discussion to happen, opening a space of study and reflection that is ≤ still new in environmental studies. However carefully crafted, the pro- posal was far from the end of the line; there was still the conference, which was plagued with technical crises. In consultation with thessrc staff, we agreed to hold the conference in Hawaii, as it was economically situated among the three locations of most participants: the U.S. main- ≥ land, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Yet as unexpected costs mounted we came under fire for picking a vacation spot instead of a more serious Third World university location. A few weeks before the conference, one participant went into political exile and could not attend; another was confusingly told not to attend by a staff member. To cap off our prob- lems, a partisan struggle in the U.S. Congress led to the shutdown of the entire federal government only a few days before the conference, leaving us without our meeting rooms and lodgings in the federally managed Volcano National Park near Hilo. Last minute arrangements were hec- tic, and we lost one participant, briefly, who flew to the wrong island. One of two general discussants—who we hoped would craft the frames to hold the conference together—called from the airport to tell us of a family emergency that stopped her from getting on her flight; another participant, said by the hotel management to be resting in his room, turned out to be in a hospital in London. Many papers, which we had asked participants to distribute a month in advance, of course came in at the last minute. In this hectic scene, it was difficult for the organizers to tell exactly what was happening intellectually. One thing was clear: few of the participants were convinced by the ‘‘environmental discourses’’ framework. Although as organizers we had tried to explain what we meant by the term in the proposal, some partici- pants who mentioned the term in their initial papers wanted it to mean something else. As much as we had insisted that we used the termdis- courseto refer to categorizations with material effects, some participants wanted to use it to refer to insincere political rhetoric. Of those who understood the term in the way we intended, some felt tired of the con- cept. One, ironically, suggested that it would be more up-to-date to speak of narratives. Others felt hostile to the term, arguing thatenviron-

viii

Preface

mental discoursesadded nothing to the classical sociological concepts of ∂ interests, institutions, and ideologies. The cross-regional conversation was also rather different than what we had imagined. It turned out that, unselfconsciously, we had allowed South Asianists and Southeast Asianists to constitute regions in entirely different ways. The South Asianists were mainly scholars of India, and most were of Indian origin. They immediately fell into detailed conversa- tions and debates involving the history and geography of particular In- dian events and locations. In contrast, the Southeast Asianists, largely non–Southeast Asian, worked in four separate countries with markedly different histories; their conversations assumed little prior historical knowledge of the cases they described and instead tended toward com- parative and theoretical debate. Regional knowledge meant something so different in each case that the South Asianists were dumbfounded when one participant (Michael R. Dove) not only attempted a cross- regional comparison but also, against all precedent, centered his South Asian case on Pakistan. In hindsight, we see that the dialogue between South and Southeast Asianists drew from the distinctive legacies of each. Each region, indeed, offers a particular perspective with which to think about what ‘‘regions’’ might mean for scholars. A term likeSoutheast Asiarequires one to think about the artificiality—and creative genius—of regionalisms because very few scholars have ever tried to imagine a Southeast Asia disciplined by cultural, political, or historical continuities; regional scholarship has depended instead on picking up theoretically stimulating differences, unexpected parallels, and moments of convergence, syncretism, or col- laboration among varied colonial, national, cultural, ethnic, class, and community histories. South Asian studies offers a different perspective for rethinking regionalisms. Scholars from this region have raised ques- tions about the colonial discourses through which ideas about regional ‘‘cultures’’ were elaborated, about the intraregional differences made by subaltern class, caste, religious, gender and ethnic status and about the worldwide spread of diasporic imaginative worlds. To talk compara- tively about South and Southeast Asia in the present, then, is to draw on distinct critical legacies. Rather than opening the window on a singular ‘‘South and Southeast Asian’’ region, we have leapt into the middle of ongoing conversations about imagined geographies to find provocative comparisons, transregional similarities, and debates over appropriate ∑ and inappropriate matters of scale. Yet for all this divergence and debate, we did learn something, several somethings, which have gone into the revision of all the essays, making

Preface

ix