Displacing (in)formality: endangered species, endangered city, and unstable grounds of comparison

Abstract

AbstractIn this article, which is based on ethnographic fieldwork among fog oasis conservationists in Lima, Peru, I show how emergent ethics of conservation become enmeshed with discourses on (in)formality. I demonstrate this by framing contemporary concerns about the endangerment of species endemic to Lima against the background of more long‐running understandings of informal urbanization as a threat to the city itself. However, whilst serving as a means to inhibit the proliferation of informal settlements, fog oasis conservation simultaneously affords a set of techniques for squatters to circumvent marginalization. Further, whereas actors engaged in land seizures are thought to mimic conservation practices to avoid eviction, conservation occasionally entails the adoption of illicit methods, which render conservationists themselves susceptible to denunciation by the very collectives they aim to marginalize. I argue that these momentary displacements of (in)formality unsettle the perspectivalist terms of comparison between self and other upon which anthropological analyses of informality sometimes rely.