State Making, Knowledge, and Ignorance: Translation and Concealment in Mexican Forestry Institutions

Abstract

ABSTRACT Officials in the Mexican environmental protection agency, the Secretaria de Medio Ambiente, Recursos Naturales y de Pesca (SEMARNAP), deploy representations of agropastoral fires set by rural people to find urban allies, whereas officials and rural people in Oaxaca avoid mentioning fire and firewood cutting. Rigorous fire and firewood regulations are largely unenforced, producing official ignorance of burning and firewood cutting, partially because of the absence of fire and firewood forms within SEMARNAP and partially because of collusion and collaboration at the state level. This is compared with official knowledge of logging in indigenous forest communities in the state of Oaxaca to argue that official knowledge can be the product not of state‐imposed projects of legibility but, rather, of alliances and entanglements between the state and politically powerful interlocutors. Practices of silencing and concealment are not the result of inadequate Mexican forestry institutions but are inherent to the process of knowledge production.