So welcome to the third week of this series, where we again is going to look at an absolute classic
In environmental anthropology and this is the critique of conservation, there has been a long debate
between anthropologists and conservationists where anthropologists have claimed that conservation
interest do not pay a sufficiently attention to people when they
they set out to save nature. That debate has moved quite a lot in recent years again exemplified
by some of the writings of Anna Tsing and colleagues but today we're going to look at some of the
more classic critiques of conservation at least in the first article by Brosius and then a slightly
different take on that with the article by Li and then I'm also including a newer
article by myself just to show you some of the more contemporary thinking about these issues, but first to
Brosius and Li then.
Brosius argues that anthropology and anthropological studies of environmental organisations are missing an
important aspect which he calls how these organizations are not just voluntary NGOs outside the
state but they are pretty much part of what Foucault would call an apparatus of control and
Surveillance. Now this is
pretty much the standard critique of environmental NGOs and development NGOs at the time when
Brosius is writing, we touched on that a bit last week I mentioned this framework to you, you
don't necessarily need to go into that literature to understand what he's saying here but just let
me recap briefly. He builds on a realist
seminal study by someone called James Ferguson who wrote a book in 1990 I think it was
called the anti politics machine, where he argues that development interventions do much more than
just fail which they he says obviously do because we are not getting rid of poverty they do
something else they make poverty manageable by removing politics from it
the kind of Foucauldian argument that is made here is that in failing to solve development issues
development institutions at the same time do something else they make poverty
manageable. Brosius do something really similar here, he argues that
because of the way that discourses of environmentalism work it's a move away from moral and
politics to technical solutions and it gives a really good empirical example of that which is
important that you try to follow.
this happens he says is not that surprising because since the Brundtland commission in the late 1980s
development and environmental concerns have been merged to a large extent, this then creates in a very Foucauldian
Way then an apparatus for producing knowledge about environments about the third world and
so on, and this apparatus then privilege certain actors
somebody is able to speak or the people are not able to speak we will touch a bit on that in the
next article by Li as well and it frames what is possible to do more concretely in this case we will
see it takes or frames a moral political issue as a technical one of therefore also displaces what
is possible to do we do this kind of issue he tries to argue. He uses a really famous example from
environmentalism to argue this and this is a case that those of us that were around in the
1980s really remember the case of forestry of huge cutting down the forest and indigenous
rainforest in Borneo and elsewhere so what happened here is that a situation where you have a
what used to be a
hunter-gathering nomadic people that had been for years settled or try to settled and
ordered by state into settlements so that it was only about 5% that remained nomadic. These people
were not recognized as indigenous people in any meaningful way by the government by the Malaysian
government they were more seen as primitives that needed help and need to be developed into more modern
members of state now this area where they were living had a huge amount of hardwood, they were one of the main
suppliers of tropical hardwoods from the 1980s onwards. The deforestation in the area
was really quite severe and of course for the 5% of the nomadic dependent that still remained,
this had extremely grave consequences when their livelihoods were
basically disappearing. In 1987 this really hit international media when the east of Panem the
nomadic part of the Panem erected roadblocks they had created statements translated into English and
Japanese and the press coverage of this was really massive, when we were presented with
indigenous people in indigenous
Attires standing up creating roadblocks to huge machine to capitalist exploitation and deforestation
and these images traveled around the world really important in mobilising a mass campaign against
a different station in Malaysia.
It really really focused how a little group of people were able to stand up to big
international interest and the state, so the kind of image that they had a primitive indigenous
people living in harmony with nature that was then being destroyed by capital interest and a ruthless
state, also there was a lot of people who sort of signed up for that campaign
it was made famous by a Swiss environmental activist called Bruno Manser who had lived with
Them for a long time and also help them to orchestrate an international campaign to help them but
also Malaysian NGOs bands such as the Grateful Dead and Prince Charles really got behind the
campaign and it was framed as being extremely urgent. We
Were told that these forest operations kept on going for 24 hours a day and large football fields were
disappearing like every hour or so we really needed to do something now to stop this massive
destruction of tropical forests. Wo what I have here then is a typical clash in a sense, the Malaysian
response to this the official response from the government
was quite aggressive, they were saying that who are you to tell us what to do you're
a Primitive backward people that we are trying to help in the first place you do
not have any moral rights to tell us what to do when you have a long history of imperialism and you
have forgotten what you have done to your own native people and then sort of branded this as a way
of new colonialism and eco-imperialism. On the other side was an
equally strong moral argument the picture we were presented with as I said was about destruction
destroying indigenous societies and destroying pristine nature so the important point here
is that both sides for now argued in moral and political terms this was a moral issue and it was
all to do about the politics of either developing an backward nation and making it into a modern
first
Nation that the Malaysian said or about greedy capitalist and state officials destroying our common
Heritage in an indigenous forest so this was a moral and political battle more than anything
else.
The first response were also quite crude when for instance when a Malaysian government official were
confronted with the view that deforestation would change the climate so that you would have less
rain he said that well this is some brilliant thing because it means that the rain will not interrupt my golf
and they also try to sort of crude critiques which like saying that well this is really
all sponsored by the
northern forestry operations who field the competition from us so that was sort of a response that
didn't work well because it was so crude and banal in a sense but then something interesting happens
from the 1990s onwards. The shift then in argument was not about what the Malaysian government was
doing with the people and the forest but more about the links between the North and
the South
so they began to present argumentations like well why should be have a sustainable
logging of tropical timber When the Northern countries do not have a sustainable use of their
resources
number one also that well the main problem here is that it's people in the north who buy this
hardwood so it's not a consumption it's you people who complain that is part of the problem, and then of
course into the wider discourses about north-south relations how the north had underdeveloped the
South and who are you to tell us not to make an industrial Development now that we are finally
beginning to
catch up with with you, so that shifted the argument from just
internal to the Malaysian side to the relationship between the North and the South, and
it was not only the Malaysian government that did this but also Malaysian NGOs which made it really
hard for the northern NGOs to ignore that argument and part of which they were in agreement
with anyway when they have been going on about consumerism as being part of an environmental problem
themselves so this was an argument that could not be ignored.
There was a shift then in campaigning against the logging, activists then shifted to consumption
in the north and advocated a full ban on all hardwoods and I remember this growing up that you should
not really have teak in your house that was a bad thing because this most came mostly came from
unsustainable forces but the debate
was then should this really be completely banned and this is crucial or can we get a system in
place that ensures that we only have sustainable use of hardwoods, so the importers and the
sellers of hardwood from the south said that fine we will agree to a ban or stop importing this if
you help us get a system in place where we can certify that
this product is then sustainably sourced, so the NGO found themselves eventually caught up or being
becoming part of a system of certification of responsible use of hardwood
so this came about both as a result of the Malaysian government's response
how they shifted the relationship to North-south and how they shifted their focus to western consumerism
and that the northern NGOs because of that had to re-assess the situation.
And then something happens as he points out, the Malaysian then were able to say that
well we have actually a long history of sustainable forest management and they could point to
documents talking about sustainable forest management from the 1970s onwards but what is interesting
Brosius points out is that nobody defined what sustainable meant in this setting
so when the Malaysian government talked about sustainable forest management in the 70s that meant
economically sustainable management i.e. only use resources to such an extent that we have an
economic gain on in the future, there was no mention of indigenous people and looking after the
ecosystem but by just keeping that word you were able to sort of say that this is something we have
done for a long time.
This shift then Brosius points out came about not by a coincidence but when the Malaysian realized
that they needed to redefine the debate they used two of the most famous public relations
firms at the time, which then stress the science along sustainability
and they helped set up a whole
research and conference apparatus as he calls it to produce this new kind of knowledge about how do
we solve how do we make sure that timber is now produced sustainably in this new meaning this was
just not rhetoric Brosius points out but it created a new kind of institution, institutions where
the solution moved from being
political and moral to being technical, technical in a sense of how do we set up these kind of
apparatus
A set up a way of giving a certificate to certain producers who say that this has been
sustainably produced and the forest Stewardship Council which some of you might have heard of came
out of this, so the NGOs found themselves on a completely different arena rather than being able to
say that we need to stop this
terrible destruction of indigenous societies and indigenous forests and we need to mobilise now, they
Found themselves as conveners of conferences of new organisations that put in control mechanisms on
sustainable use of forest
and this of course created a shift from the focus on politics to a focus on science and management.
so rather than mobilizing morally against against the destruction of forest one would now meant
to set in to be part of a larger more technical apparatus right, and this Brosius and many others
have happened with environmental management more generally and it's a huge
debate in environmental circles whether this is a good thing or not, what has happened since this
time
is there's been a concentration of power in a few some call it the big five environmental
organisations such as the WWF for instance who are massive multi-million corporations who work
closely with what earlier environmentalist would have seen as enemies like Shell and so on
In order they argue to work from the inside and try to
change things there, and you have had initiatives such as PES payment for ecosystem services which is
exactly the same thing right it's taking what Ingold and others would call an over environment and
turning it into a commodity and putting a price to it so that it can be managed within a capital
system and as I said it's a lot with discussion within environmental organizations whether this is
good
or not read the Norwegian initiative to save the rainforest by putting a price on it as well and
paying people or governments not to cut down trees is a similar initiative. You can debate and talk
and discuss whether this is a good thing or not but Brosius point which links back to the
Foucauldian argument is that the debate has shifted we started out with moral about
and politics about greedy capitalists about the bad government destroying its own force and its
Own people to more instrumental discussions about what is happening or how to best solve
technically these kind of issues so the whole debate has shifted, and whether that is a good thing or a
bad thing is debatable. Brosius and other people with him think that this takes the politics out
of the
equation and that since this is a deeply fundamentally deeply a moral and political issue this is a
huge problem.
Li has a similar argument but with a different twist she really discusses when you remember from
from Brosius how the Panem was seen as backward people who needed to be saved by the
Malaysian government and as indigenous people and that shifted a bit she moves into that
process a bit more by talking about rural people in
Suhato a quite homogeneous set of people actually had different opportunities for
invoking different strategies such as being labeled tribal in Indonesia and the Suharto regime the
position was similar pretty similar to what we saw in Malaysia there were no indigenous people in
Indonesia was official
position rather it was a lot of poor people or traditional people living in the countryside which
needed help and be helped to be settled and to be modernized but they were not recognized as
indigenous people in the sense that Northern or Western NGOs for example did in Malaysia
so this creates a situation Li argues when after Suharto when this politics is opening up who are
able to sort of claim to be an indigenous people and she has a long theoretical argument there
about using Stuart Hall who's a critical Marxist to discuss that you don't need to go into
all the details there the important thing is that
He and she is trying to strike a balance and the balance is between saying that this is predetermined
by who the people are either you are a tribal group or you are not or you are a poor peasant or
you're not and the opposite argument perhaps following from Fredrik Barth and this more actor oriented
theories of ethnicity where there's a lot more choice when you can choose to present yourself as
tribal or you can choose
To present yourself as a peasantry for instance how he is arguing a bit of both
you have room for maneuver as she call it within structures but these structures are not equal to all
and that is a point she wants to make it in this article.
the state programs had two different Suharto which sort of reflected something that looked
like indigenous identities more than the other, first one called Masyarakat Terasing
was sort of programs directed at what they saw as not indigenous people but primitive
Nomadic cultural people and these are people that needed help to
Be settled and be part of the Modern Nation so that was sort of seen as a problem that they
lacked a world religion that they lacked some kind of civilizing components.
The other kind of program was what they called Orang Kampong Village People where much more
straightforward development programs we used to try to help them and ethnicity and
difference didn't really play a role in this so the official state programs had these two kind of
categories but quite interestingly as Li is saying most people in the countryside could be either, as
as long as you are outside Java so it's not really a characteristic of the people themselves whether
they should belong in either of these two categories. Then comes the
NGOs with a third category of the indigenous people at the time right, which is what we
recognize as as modern environmentalism where indigenous people are seen as being tied to the place
they live have a long intimate history with that place to have to live in a sustainable way and to
have a culture that is based on the wisdom of their environment
now she argues that with these three different categories and the two different programs of the
Indonesian State and the NGOs rural people had the opportunity to place themselves in
relation to this but not as they self wished they were constrained by their history and by the
situation and also by the choice to a certain degree.
Interestingly she shows for the two cases she's looking at it is a people who were more directly in
A world with the Dutch colonialists you had to therefore come up with an idea of own traditional and
identity which therefore place them in a position to sort of play the indigenous card sort of put
more effectively than other people the Dutch colonialists had
also codified some people and they recorded that traditional culture in a certain way much like a
British colonialists did as well, so they had a much stronger sense of their own identity because of
their engagement with an outsider.
The first groups she discusses is Lajue, they were mountain people with
but hadn't really been part of much interest from the modern state or from the colonialist
and therefore they did not really have a collective identity. They tend to be ruled
indirectly as well the state related to The Nobles who lived down by the coast
and these Nobles again found important people in the inlands which they sort of pointed out as
Their deputies but it was not a celebration of indigenousness either from the aristocracy or from
the people rather the aristocrats were ashamed about their more primitive background of their of the
four barriers in the mountains
so the way they related to the state was within it, they wanted more development help more resources
resources and also a lot of conflict by all means but it was within the frame
of State development why do we not get more resources more buildings more schools Etc and the sort
of quite cynical about the state and corruption but they did not confront the state
as an ethnic identity rather they saw himself as being ignored by the state because of their status
the Lindu is a completely different case again they reached International recognition through a
development project and this was the opposition to a dam project, they were in the at least the
English-speaking press portrayed as a Sulawesi tribe
and they could show and argue and identify a tribal identity they had were able to present themselves
as having a traditional economic political logical knowledge a unique culture that needed to be
be protected they had tribal elders and so forth and their livelihood and culture was
strongly seen as being linked to a place so if this
a place were destroyed by a dam they would disappear as a culture and this was a strong argument
against the Indonesian State who wanted to relocate them to another area which you could have done
with a peasantry without the same kind of problem. They had a very different history which explains
why they were able to make this point, they had been settled by the Dutch quite early and therefore
had to relate to outsiders
from an early stage, they had had a struggle with resources from the Dutch and later the
State and therefore also had a strong local leadership who lived among them unlike the
other group so the conditions were already there for articulating an Indigenous identity and then
this was actually helped by the work of NGOs who then helped them
formulate the claim as a claim based on their indigenous identity towards the
state, so she's not saying that this had to happen in that case but it had a different set of
opportunities compared to the first group they had a possible claim to a traditional land to a
traditional culture to a place to our knowledge to our history
that ordinary villagers could not claim in the same sense. It also helps that it was easier for
The Lindu to access outsiders because of this kind of history right and Li herself
experience this quite clearly she has worked with the first group of people for a long long long
time and really just visited this area the Lindu
as a comparative case and was then flown into the area presented with material that describe
them as an indigenous people their fight so it was almost a packaged case that really fit
what she calls the tribal shot in this case so what she is
really trying to argue here is that
identities like these are not given, they are presented as opportunities that are more or less easy
to use by the different different groups, it was a lot easier for this second group to claim an
identity as indigenous than the first and likewise if you look at the case of Malaysia that
Brosius talked about there's again you had a very similar starting point
in indigenous people being destroyed by capital and greedy government which then the
government managed to shift the argument to to being about technical solutions and control
about environmentalism right. So in their way the both talk about environmental organizations Brosius
making the point that there's been an unfortunate shift
in a move from politics to more Technical Solutions which he believes is also destroying what the
environmental organization are trying to do, and in the Li case that an idea of
indigenous people being destroyed by development actually fix some groups of people better than
Other and it's not that the first group is not as deserving and in as much need of help as
The latter but it's that articulation as she calls it between Western NGOs ideas and the situation on the
ground that made the one case work and the other not work.