Instituting Nature: Authority, Expertise, and Power in Mexican Forests

Abstract

Andrew S. Mathews’s Instituting Nature is an excellent addition to a growing list of books that examine the dynamic relationship between the Mexican state and rural communities through an environmental lens. By following the twentieth- century history of the forests of Oaxaca’s Sierra Juárez, Mathews, an anthropologist, draws innovative conclusions about the nature of bureaucracy and the intricacies of institutional knowledge. He argues that official knowledge is neither merely a “power- laden discourse” nor “the result of a project of legibility” (p. 201) imposed by an all- powerful state. Rather, it is coproduced at the intersection of bureaucracy and its allied social groups. Expertise thus operates on the axis of social power, simultaneously creating silences and ignorance that, Mathews notes, are integral components of knowledge production, not its opposites. At the heart of this work lies a cogent critique of development and state studies, which tend to overestimate the reach of bureaucracies and to unreservedly accept the generalizations and claims that states make.The monograph is composed of a historical section (chapters 2 – 5) and an ethnographic section (chapters 6 – 8). Mathews begins his narrative in the 1930s, when foresters brought the science of conservation to the Oaxacan countryside. Far from a blank slate upon which foresters could enact their designs, the forest of the Sierra Juárez was an agent in its own right with a long history of diverse campesino uses. For Mathews, the agency of both nature and people framed the encounter between the forest service and Oaxaca’s forests. Foresters condemned campesino use of fire in agriculture — despite evidence of its role in forest regeneration — but struggled to impose their imagined order on the forests. By midcentury, the state conceded Sierra Juárez’s forests to two lumber companies, dispossessing supposedly irrational peasants of their woodlands. Ironically, technocratic forestry gave campesinos the tools with which to challenge company control. Peasants, in abandoning swidden agriculture to work as company employees, adopted the state’s conception of fire as the enemy of forests. Campesino workers were thus able to present themselves to the state as the true protectors of the forest against company avarice. During the 1980s, with the implementation of community forestry, a new official narrative emerged in which the companies were responsible for environmental degradation and only forest communities could properly manage this essential resource. The suppression of the memory of fire by both campesinos and the state was key to this shift. Public knowledge was thus coproduced “at the interface between state and community” (p. 141).The ethnographic part of the book tracks the production of knowledge about Mexico’s forests through the interactions between forestry officials and communities. By interviewing officials, Mathews shows that concealment and exaggeration are essential to bureaucratic practice. He thus debunks the forest service’s public claims of impartiality, reason, and transparency. Community resistance, limited resources, and the concealments and silences they entail make for an unstable situation in which subordinates can challenge official knowledge through highly charged corruption accusations. Mathews reveals how skilled officials balance their precarious careers by “carefully interpreting policy mandates and regulations and deciding whether to act on them or to ignore them discreetly” (p. 180). Mathews then follows knowledge production into the community of Ixtlán, which had forged an alliance with the state around forest management. Knowledge practices depended on community planning and record making. Neither an imposition on nor a seamless translation to different localities, the science of conservation, Mathews argues, has been negotiated and challenged by functionaries and communities.Mathews presents Oaxaca’s forests as an agent in their own right, but it is not always clear how such agency fits into his larger narrative about communities’ interactions with the state’s knowledge claims. When he mentions how the different regeneration processes of pine and oak adversely affected lumber companies’ profits, the reader is left craving a more concrete analysis of the ways in which human and nonhuman actors have forged the politics of Mexico’s forests. Just as Mathews identifies regeneration as an exemplary case of nature’s agency, early foresters elaborated a theory of conservation in which forests, by regulating the hydrological system, played an active role in human health. This environmental understanding of forests, Mathews asserts, fell out of favor during the 1940s. Yet, as his own evidence on community politics suggests, he disposes of this theory much too quickly. For scientists and communities alike, the environmental theory of forests remained a powerful weapon in forestry politics beyond the 1940s. More research is needed into how environmental theories of forests have affected knowledge production. Despite these concerns, Instituting Nature is theoretically rigorous, empirically rich, and well written. It is an invaluable contribution to environmental history and to the anthropology of science and the state. Moreover, Mathews’s theoretical framework is readily transferable to institutions in other times and places.