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- Convenors:
-
Knut G Nustad
(University of Oslo)
Marianne Elisabeth Lien (University of Oslo)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Monday 25 October, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel explores how state bodies (including large NGOs) and people affected by conservation are constituted relationally through nature practices. We especially welcome papers that mobilise ethnographies for the purposes of comparison along a North-South dimension.
Long Abstract:
Conflicts over conservation have often been explored with an emphasis on how nature is cast as external to local people, thereby justifying processes of dispossession. While building on such scholarship, this panel shifts the focus to how state bodies (including large NGOs) and people affected by conservation are constituted relationally through nature practices.
The politics of conservation are not only shaped by pre-existing notions of relational identities as regards natural resources (indigenous, colonial, peasant, squatter, citizen, etc.). Conservation also shapes identity formation, deepening some distinctions while glossing over others. In much of Southern Africa, for example, state conservation authorities cast people infringing on protected areas as poachers, foreign immigrants or squatters. In the Nordic Arctic, conservation efforts are justified through notions of commons, casting all citizens as equally benefitting in a way that disregards differences of senses of ownership and local ecological knowledge.
Different histories of state formation in relation to land ownership and use enable as well as preclude sets of identities. These identities thus emerge at the intersection of processes of conservation, identity and state formation. We invite papers that explore the relational and mutually constituting processes of people and state actors (including NGOs) in politics of conservation. We specifically welcome papers that mobilise ethnographies for the purposes of comparison along a North-South dimension, by paying specific attention to how relations between state formation, identities, conservation and nature practices have been constituted historically and continue to have effects today.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 25 October, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Concentrating on the comparatively recent appropriation of the notion of “the indigenous” Pakistan, this paper highlights activist approaches to instrumentalize the language of indigenous sustenance, land and customary rights to articulate voice for otherwise silenced and marginalized communities.
Paper long abstract:
Along with rising consciousness about climate change and massive environmental destruction in the Anthropocene, the archetypical notion of “the indigenous” has come to embody the ultimate Other to settler colonialism, industrial modernity, capitalism, and the modern state. In this discourse, Indigenous Peoples are sacralized as potential saviours of the Planet, as “ecologically noble savages”, who represent an alternative role model for the coming generations, from which to learn by going back to the “roots”.
Based on several years of teaching experience and research in Pakistan, this paper concentrates on the comparatively recent appropriation of the notion of “the indigenous” by Pakistani activists and NGOs. In the context of increasing awareness about the effects of land grabbing, displacement, water scarcity, flooding, salination and the loss of species, the globalized language of indigenous sustenance, land, and customary rights is instrumentalized in order to articulate voice for otherwise silenced and marginalized fishing and farming communities. It is thus worthwhile to inquire into the particular ways in which indigeneity is appropriated for social justice projects: Who and what is rendered and represented as indigenous and how are such notions of indigeneity understood by the actors themselves? Which are the terms that are in local use and how might these overlap and diverge from, often fashionable, globalized notions of indigeneity? In which ways do colonial notions of tribalism, tradition, primitivism, and rurality – all perceived as antidotes to modernity – intersect with contemporary modes of representing marginal communities as “indigenous” and “sustainable”?
Paper short abstract:
The paper studies everyday practices of forest conservation in upland central India. Through ties of patronage and protection with indigenous villagers, state actors are involved in a long-term exercise of remaking land and community that has contributed to identity formation among upland residents.
Paper long abstract:
The critical scholarship on conservation bureaucracies and their relations with forest communities has focused on the asymmetries of power and the material and symbolic struggles over knowledge, resources and conservation. However, state officials exercise a governmental rationality in forests that goes beyond the objective of ‘translating conservation policies into action’. Taking the case of forest villages and their adivasi (indigenous) residents in upland central India, I argue that the forest bureaucracy has been involved in a long-term exercise of remaking land and community that is at odds with its stated objectives of conservation and (participatory) forest management.
The work of subordinate forest officials includes protecting and harvesting valuable teak timber, regulating tenure and villagers’ access to forest land and ‘government through community’ (Rose, 2004; Li, 2007). In the process, they forge ties of exploitation, patronage and protection with village forest protection committees, "hill farmers" and landless "encroachers" on forest land. This paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Madhya Pradesh, India, focuses on such informal and everyday practices of conservation and their implications for subject formation among adivasi residents of forest villages. In conversation with anthropological scholarship on the postcolonial and developmental state, I aim to theorise (and position) the state in political forests beyond the long-held binaries of exclusion and participation, injustice and rights, and conservation and development.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes a provincial conservation authority’s dealings with three types of landowners in their roles as members of the state-run biodiversity stewardship initiative. We argue that the authority’s apolitical approach undermines the meaningfulness of stewardship for poor rural communities.
Paper long abstract:
Ranking as the third most biodiverse country globally, South Africa is obliged to prioritize conserving its natural habitats. However, the degradation of biodiversity continues to take place and the limited scope to enlarge state-owned protected areas means that conservationists are increasingly appealing to private landowners to assist in reaching global conservation targets. The provincial government-implemented Biodiversity Stewardship Programme (BSP) is one such initiative that encourages landowners, including communities practicing communal tenure, to enter into formal agreements to protect and manage land in biodiversity priority areas thereby contributing towards the expansion of protected areas in the country. Focusing on three land tenure types involved in the BSP, this paper explores how the programme is experienced by differently-situated members whom the state provides with equal opportunity and support to participate as custodians of biodiversity on their land. The three cases used in the ethnography are freehold, land reform and communal tenure. Together, these cases illustrate that state constituted land ownership arrangements continue to be impacted differently even in the postapartheid era. At the root of these differences in the mode of operation is social power – landowners practicing freehold tenure possess economic advantages and knowledge while the other two tenure types lack such crucial ingredients for efficient participation. The programme’s apolitical approach to governance results in negative impacts for social life in cases involving rural communities.