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Paper short abstract

The focus of this presentation are the continuities between the initial stage of political forest's evolution in the village of Drežnica, Croatia in the 17th century and contemporary management practices, with special reference to how they reflect in the community’s living with/beside the forest.

Paper long abstract

This presentation is based on long-term ethnographic research in the village of Drežnica (Croatia). Situated in a densely forested region, the village is and was throughout its history deeply reliant on the forest. The turning point in the genealogy of the political forest (Peluso and Vandergeest 2001) in the region, which was part of the Habsburg military frontier, was the appropriation of the forests by the Habsburg court in the 17th century. In order to better use the forest resources, they had to be mapped and described, the space had to be abstracted, as the fundamental undertaking of nature commodification in capitalism (Mrozowski 1999: 154). Forest legislation devised during Habsburg rule marks the consolidation of thinking about forests as resource that is the basis of present management policies, as most forested surface in Croatia (76 %) is owned by the state and managed by the state-owned company, Hrvatske šume d.o.o. (Croatian forests limited company). One of the company’s mottoes is “Green Forever! In the service of sustainable management”, which signifies the predominant official framework of imagining the forest - a resource to be managed exclusively using the tools of scientific forestry.

This presentation continues my previous research on work and the political forest in Drežnica (Grgurinović 2024). Here I want to focus on the continuities between the initial stage of the evolution of the political forest in the 17th century and the contemporary management practices, with special reference to how these processes reverberate in the community’s living with/beside the forest.