anthropological engagements with environmentalism

Analyses and Interventions: Anthropological Engagements with EnvironmentalismAuthor(s): J. Peter BrosiusReviewed work(s):Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 40, No. 3 (June 1999), pp. 277-310Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for AnthropologicalResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/200019 .Accessed: 03/07/2012 21:49

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Analyses andInterventions

Anthropological Engagementswith Environmentalism1

by J. Peter Brosius

Recent years have witnessed the rapid proliferation and growthof local, national, and transnational environmental nongovern-mental organizations (NGOs), national bureaucracies concernedwith environmental management, and transnational institutionscharged with implementing various forms of global environmen-tal governance. This proliferation and recent theoretical trendswithin the discipline have contributed to a dramatic upsurge ininterest among anthropologists in analyzing this phenomenon.The present discussion is an attempt to take stock of this cur-rent research trend within anthropology and to contextualize itwithin a larger set of topical and theoretical concerns. I examinesome of the theoretical and practical sources of our interest in en-vironmentalism and review a series of recent trends in the an-thropological analysis of environmental movements, rhetorics,and representations. I also identify a set of other issues that I be-lieve a critically informed anthropology might address in the pro-duction of future ethnographic accounts of environmental dis-courses, movements, and institutions.

j. peter brosius is Associate Professor of Anthropology at theUniversity of Georgia (Athens, Ga. 30602-1619, U.S.A.). Born in1954, he was educated at California Lutheran University (B.A.,1976), the University of Hawaii (M.A., 1981), and the Universityof Michigan (Ph.D., 1992). His research interests include en-vironmental discourses, political ecology, and community-basednatural-resource management. Among his publications are‘‘Endangered Forest, Endangered People: Environmentalist Repre-sentations of Indigenous Knowledge’’ (Human Ecology 25:45–69),‘‘Prior Transcripts, Divergent Paths: Resistance and Acqui-escence to Logging in Sarawak, East Malaysia’’ (ComparativeStudies in Society and History 39:468–510), (with Anna Tsingand Charles Zerner) ‘‘Representing Communities: Histories andPolitics of Community-Based Natural Resource Management’’(Society and Natural Resources 11:157–68), and ‘‘Green Dots,Pink Hearts: Displacing Politics from the Malaysian Rainforest’’(American Anthropologist, in press). The present paper was sub-mitted 17 iii 98 and accepted 3 vi 98; the final version reachedthe Editor’s office 15 ix 98.

1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a panel entitled‘‘Human Dimensions of Environmental Change: Anthropology En-gages the Issues’’ (Carole Crumley, organizer) at the 1996 annualmeetings of the American Anthropological Association in SanFrancisco, Calif. I wish to acknowledge Anna Tsing and CharlesZerner, both of whom, in a series of discussions over the past sev-eral years, have had a profound influence on my thinking about en-vironmentalism and environmental discourses. I must also thankSteve Rayner, Kate Sullivan, and two anonymous referees for theirextensive and very helpful comments on an earlier version of thismanuscript. Finally, I want to thank my wife, Ellen Walker, for the

277

Recent years have witnessed the rapid proliferation andgrowth of local, national, and transnational environ-mental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), na-tional bureaucracies concerned with environmentalmanagement, and transnational institutions chargedwith implementing various forms of global environ-mental governance. What has emerged is a ‘‘globalizedpolitical space’’ (Smith 1994:15) in which new forms ofpolitical agency are being invented and contestedagainst both established and newly reconfigured struc-tures of domination. If ever there was a rich site of cul-tural production, it is in the domain of contemporaryenvironmentalism: a whole new discursive regime isemerging and giving shape to the relationships betweenand among natures, nations, movements, individuals,and institutions.

Both this proliferation and recent theoretical trendswithin the discipline have contributed to a dramatic up-surge in interest among anthropologists in analyzingthis phenomenon. Scores of anthropologists are work-ing and publishing in this area,2 and anthropology de-partments throughout the country are training graduatestudents interested in studying indigenous eco-politicsin Brazil, NGOs in Nepal, community-based conserva-tion in East Africa, and environmental racism in EastLos Angeles.3

The present discussion is an attempt to take stock ofthis current research trend within anthropology and tocontextualize it within a larger set of topical and theo-retical trends. More important, however, I wish to iden-tify a set of other issues that I believe a critically in-formed anthropology should address in the productionof future ethnographic accounts of environmental dis-courses, movements, and institutions. My suggestionsfor future forms of scholarly engagement with environ-mentalism are premised on the belief that anthropologyhas a critical role to play not only in contributing to ourunderstanding of the human impact on the physical andbiotic environment but also in showing how that envi-ronment is constructed, represented, claimed, and con-tested. As environmental concerns have come to oc-cupy a central place in local struggles, national debates,and international fora, there is an important place foran analytical enterprise which seeks to bring a criticalperspective to bear on these diverse, often contested, vi-sions of the environment, environmental problems, and

many insights she provided on the material presented here and forher superb editing.2. For instance, see Milton (1993) and Kempton, Boster, and Hartley(1995).3. One could also cite a number of anthropology departments inthe United States and elsewhere that are currently engaged inefforts to develop programs with an ecological/environmentalfocus, among them, in addition to my own department at theUniversity of Georgia and Rutgers University’s long-establishedinterdisciplinary Program in Human Ecology, the University ofWashington, the University of Hawaii, the University of Arizona,the University of Kent at Canterbury, and the University ofGeneva. The recent establishment of the Anthropology and Envi-ronment Section of the American Anthropological Association isalso an exemplar of this trend.

278 current anthropology Volume 40, Number 3, June 1999

the forms of agency such discourses conjure into (or outof) being.

My approach is based on the premise that discoursematters—that environmental discourses are manifestlyconstitutive of reality (or, rather, of a multiplicity ofrealities). In their constitutiveness they define vari-ous forms of agency, administer certain silences, andprescribe various forms of intervention. It is impor-tant that we examine the assumption that there existself-evident environmental problems requiring someequally self-evident set of rational solutions. Anthro-pologists might stimulate those engaged in environ-mental debates to problematize the vocabulary withwhich they frame both environmental issues and solu-tions. At the same time, we are currently witnessingan increasingly earnest backlash which denies theexistence of an environmental crisis or promotes theidea that environmental problems can best be amelio-rated by market forces. National elites and transna-tional capital interests—at times working in concertwith mainstream environmental organizations—areengaged in attempts to displace the moral/politicalimperatives that galvanize grassroots movements witha conspicuously depoliticized institutional apparatusthat is by turns legal, financial, bureaucratic, and tech-noscientific. It is imperative that we bring a criticalperspective to bear on the discursive foundations ofsuch efforts and show how, in the process, variousstructures of domination are constituted and perpetu-ated.

Studies of environmental movements, rhetorics, andrepresentations provide a tremendously fertile site forexploring and extending any number of current theoret-ical discussions within and beyond the discipline of an-thropology: how we approach the task of ethnographicwriting in multi-sited contexts (Marcus 1995), how wediscern articulations between the local and the global(Kearney 1995), how we understand emerging forms ofpolitical agency (Escobar and Alvarez 1992, Lipschutzand Conca 1993, Taylor 1995), how we view the inter-sections between issues of identity and notions of hy-bridity and authenticity (Bhabha 1994, Garcıa Canclini1995, Gupta and Ferguson 1992), and how we analyzesystems for the production of knowledge (Buttel et al.1990, Escobar 1995, Saurin 1993).

In this discussion, the term ‘‘environmentalism’’ isused in the widest possible sense, referring to a broadfield of discursive constructions of nature and humanagency. Stressing this broader conception of environ-mentalism represents an attempt to avoid thinkingabout it merely within the limited purview of socialmovements. Indeed, any attempt to understand the so-cial-movement aspects of environmentalism must nec-essarily frame them within a larger set of questionsabout this wider discursive domain and examine thecomplex relationship which exists between historicaland contemporary forms of domination, existing oremerging structures/institutions, the politics of repre-sentation, processes of discursive production, andemerging forms of political agency.

Sources of Anthropological Engagementwith Environmentalism

The recent trend toward anthropological engagementwith environmentalism was not at all inevitable.Rather, it is the result of a series of particular historicalcontingencies, both practical and theoretical. I will pref-ace my brief consideration of some of these4 with twoobservations. First, there is a rather sharp discontinuitybetween the ecological anthropology of the 1960s andearly 1970s and what some are calling the ‘‘environ-mental anthropology’’ of the present. Drawing its in-sights primarily from the field of ecology, the former ischaracterized by a persistent interest in localized adap-tations to specific ecosystems and by an abiding scien-tism: to the extent that cultural or ideational factors en-ter into analyses of this sort, they are viewed primarilywith respect to their adaptive significance. The latterdraws its insights from a range of sources: poststructur-alist social and cultural theory, political economy, andrecent explorations of transnationalism and globaliza-tion, among others. Contemporary environmental an-thropology is therefore more alert to issues of power andinequality, to the contingency of cultural and historicalformations, to the significance of regimes of knowledgeproduction, and to the importance of the acceleration oftranslocal processes. With the exception of a few indi-viduals, there is very little overlap between those whoplayed a role in the ecological anthropology of the pastand those who are participating in the environmentalanthropology of the present.5 Second, relative to thosein other disciplines, anthropologists have come ratherlate to the study of environmental movements.6 In

4. I recognize that my attempt to provide a genealogy for our inter-est in environmentalism is to some degree conditioned by my owntheoretical perspective. Those whose work on environmentalismderives from other theoretical sources might have other stories totell about the basis for our interest in this phenomenon.5. Bonnie McCay, Benjamin Orlove, Stephen Brush, Roy Rappa-port, Conrad Kottak, Leslie Sponsel, Tim Ingold, Robert Rhoades,Roy Ellen, and Emilio Moran come to mind as individuals whohave spanned this divide. In drawing this distinction between1960s–’70s ecological anthropology and contemporary environ-mental anthropology, it is not my intention to suggest that thismore recent approach renders the insights of an earlier ecologicalanthropology irrelevant. To the contrary, I believe that ecologicalanthropology laid the groundwork for much of the present valoriza-tion of indigenous knowledge (Brush and Stabinsky 1995, Orloveand Brush 1996) and deserves considerable credit for advancing ef-forts to promote community-based natural-resource management(Western, Wright, and Strum 1994). It also seems to me that RoyRappaport stands as a particularly pivotal figure in linking thesetwo perspectives. This is most evident in his 1992 DistinguishedLecture in General Anthropology entitled ‘‘The Anthropology ofTrouble’’ (Rappaport 1993), where with typical clarity he brings thesystems perspective developed in Pigs for the Ancestors (Rappaport1968) to bear on his concern with the way in which economics hascome to supply contemporary ‘‘society with its dominant socialdiscourse’’ (Rappaport 1993:298) at the expense of fundamentalecological concerns.6. Two conspicuous exceptions here are Mary Douglas (Douglasand Wildavsky 1982) and Luther Gerlach. Gerlach’s interest insocial movements dates back to the late 1960s, and he publishedseveral pieces on environmental movements in the 1970s and

brosius Engagements with Environmentalism 279

fields such as political science and sociology, the studyof environmental movements has a rather long history;the extensive literature on ‘‘new social movements’’(Offe 1985) and ‘‘environmental sociology’’ (Dunlap andCatton 1979) is testimony to this fact.

In assessing what lies behind the rather strikinggrowth in interest in environmentalism among anthro-pologists, I would cite three factors. The first is simplythe more general trajectory of growth in environmentalscholarship across a wide range of disciplines, a processwhich accelerated in the late 1980s. Indeed, the past de-cade has witnessed a remarkable florescence in environ-mental scholarship and the emergence or growth ofa host of new subdisciplines: environmental history,environmental ethics, environmental economics, en-vironmental law, environmental security, and politicalecology, to name just a few. To the extent that anthro-pologists have developed an interest in environmen-talism, then, we are participating in a larger, transdisci-plinary process. One of the things that makes thecurrent moment so promising is the degree to whichscholars from a range of disciplines—geography, politi-cal science, history, legal studies, science and technol-ogy studies, media studies, and others—are engaged inprojects that converge on an interest in environmen-talism. This is a period with great potential for buildingrich transdisciplinary intersections, and many anthro-pologists appear to be doing that. One might go so faras to claim that, in the study of environmentalism atleast, the boundaries between disciplines are eroding toa degree not seen before.

A second factor leading to the present anthropologicalinterest in environmentalism is the simple fact that somany of us have witnessed the emergence (or arrival) ofenvironmental movements at our field sites. Environ-mental NGOs have become highly visible players in theterrain that we once thought we could claim as ourown—the rural/remote community. As this has oc-curred, we have seen local communities mobilize oradopt elements of transnational environmental dis-course in ways we had not witnessed before (Brosius1997a, b; Fisher 1997; Turner 1991).

A third element that has engendered an interest in en-vironmentalism among anthropologists has been a se-ries of recent theoretical trends both within our disci-pline and beyond. This is a rather complicated scenario,with a considerable degree of overlap between variousareas of theoretical and empirical focus. Most notable,perhaps, has been the trend since the mid-1980s towardwhat Marcus and Fischer refer to as ‘‘the repatriation ofanthropology as cultural critique’’ (1986:111). Uncom-fortable with the way we see otherness essentialized inindigenous rights campaigns, acculturative processeselided in an effort to stress the authenticity of indige-nous peoples, and concepts such as ‘‘wilderness’’ de-ployed in environmentalist campaigns, we have takenit as our task to provide critical commentary.

1980s (Gerlach 1980, Gerlach and Hine 1973, Gerlach and Meiller1987).

On the face of it, critiques such as this may not ap-pear to be very good examples of ‘‘repatriation,’’ giventhat they so often focus on movements occurring in de-cidedly non-Western contexts. However, such studiesare often premised on the assumption that the forms ofrepresentation which social movements partake of in-corporate discursive elements that are derived fromWestern/metropolitan contexts and therefore not trulyautochthonous. That the messages deployed by thesemovements are often communicated to Western audi-ences by Western environmental organizations onlyserves to reinforce this assumption.

More significant than Marcus and Fischer’s call forthe repatriation of anthropology have been a series ofinsights into the intersections of discourse/power/knowledge (Foucault 1972, 1980b). Particularly signifi-cant for the present discussion have been insights de-rived from Foucault’s discussions of governmentality(1991) and bio-power (1980a). The ways in which theseinsights have been refracted into other concerns is animportant part of the story of our engagement with en-vironmentalism.

One could point to a number of other theoreticaltrends that have been of significance in contributing toour present interest in environmentalism. Of centralimportance have been a number of innovative examina-tions of the phenomenon of resistance (Comaroff 1985;Gaventa 1980; Guha 1989b; Ong 1987; Scott 1985,1990). Equally influential has been the work of a num-ber of writers interested in theorizing nature (Cronon1995, Escobar 1996, Beck, Giddens, and Lash 1994, Har-away 1991, Rabinow 1992, Strathern 1992); much ofthis work is premised on the idea that any attempt tounderstand human interventions into nature must be-gin with an effort to rethink the terms by which wehave conventionally described how we place ourselvesor are placed within or outside it. Allied with this hasbeen the emerging field of science studies, a broad effortto theorize the bases upon which we presume to knowabout nature in the first place (Franklin 1995; Haraway1989, 1994; Latour and Woolgar 1979; Rabinow 1996);this work has important implications for our thinkingabout ecology, environmental science, and other fieldsconcerned with the production of scientific knowledgeabout the planet.7 Also of importance in contributing toour interest in environmentalism has been the work ofa series of writers interested in critical examinations ofcontemporary discourses of development (Escobar 1995,Ferguson 1994, Parajuli 1991, Pigg 1992, Sachs 1992);this work has been particularly influential in demon-strating how large institutions such as the World Bankcan have a transformative effect on the discursive con-tours of the issues they are designed to address and howby creating certain kinds of subjects they lay thegroundwork for their own interventions. Efforts to un-derstand the phenomenon of globalization and the

7. For a response to science studies and other ‘‘deconstructive’’ en-terprises as they pertain to conservation biology, see Soule andLease (1995).


forms of articulation between ‘‘the local’’ and globaliz-ing processes (Appadurai 1996, Featherstone 1990, Han-nerz 1996) have also been of significance. Feminist the-ory, particularly a series of debates around issues offeminism, essentialism, and Third World women/women of color (Agarwal 1992, Biehl 1991, Braidotti etal. 1994, Carlassare 1994, Carney 1993, Diamond andOrnstein 1990, hooks 1984, Jackson 1993, Mies andShiva 1993, Sturgeon 1997), has infused recent discus-sions of indigenous peoples and indigenous rightsmovements (Beckett and Mato 1996, Jackson 1995, Lat-tas 1993) that intersect with environmentalism in nu-merous ways. Much more diffuse though no less impor-tant has been the influence of cultural studies (During1993, Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler 1992); to the ex-tent that environmentalism today is a rich site of cul-tural production, it is fertile ground for analyses of thissort (Slack and Berland 1994). The attempt to addressthe relationship between representation, knowledgemaking, subject making, and domination in postcolo-nial theory (Guha and Spivak 1988, Williams and Chris-man 1994) has been equally significant, particularly inshowing how the ‘‘Third World’’—the site of manyforms of environmental intervention—continues to beauthored and scripted in terms of Northern forms ofrepresentation (Escobar 1995, Sturgeon 1997). Finally, Iwould note the importance of a broad transdisciplinaryeffort to define the nascent field of political ecology, anenterprise concerned with understanding the ways inwhich the environment serves as a locus for the enact-ment and perpetuation of patterns of inequality (Blaikieand Brookfield 1987, Greenberg and Park 1994, Peet andWatts 1996).

Trends

Having considered some of the primary influences lead-ing to the present anthropological interest in environ-mentalism, it can be said that the forms that our en-gagement has taken are quite varied. There are,however, three trends that have been particularly con-spicuous with respect to our treatments of environmen-talism: (1) a sustained critique of romantic, essential-ized images, (2) an emphasis on contestation, and (3) aninterest in globalization and in the transnationality ofthese movements and discourses. In briefly discussingeach of these, my intent is to identify both how theyhave furthered our understanding of environmentalmovements and how they have caused us to elide muchof what is interesting and significant about them.

I have previously noted the degree to which the studyof environmentalism is a transdisciplinary undertaking.Indeed, in many cases it seems that identifying a partic-ular contribution as ‘‘anthropological’’ or as belongingto another discipline is a product not of content but ofwhere it is published and the institutional affiliation ofthe author. Therefore, though my focus is on the contri-butions of anthropologists, I deliberately take note of

the work of individuals from other disciplines. Thismerely serves to stress the degree to which our presentprojects involve issues that are being debated across arange of disciplines.

essentialized images

Whatever else they aim to do, environmental move-ments or organizations are concerned with efforts tovalorize natural or cultural communities that have his-torically been disregarded, subjugated, and in otherways denied standing. That process of valorization de-pends on the deployment of images to a broad audience.When anthropologists (or others) turn their attentiontoward the examination of a particular environmentalmovement, often one of the first things that catchestheir attention is the images they see being deployed.Such images may, for instance, assert the ‘‘natural con-nections’’ between indigenous peoples and the environ-ment. Whether because, as the result of long experience‘‘in the field,’’ we recognize them to be idealizations or,because of our theoretical commitments, we are con-cerned with the ways in which essentialisms have his-torically been employed to perpetuate systems of in-equality, anthropologists tend to be put off by suchimages.

Certainly in my own work on the transnational cam-paign against logging in Sarawak, East Malaysia (Brosius1997a, b), I was profoundly disturbed by the images Isaw being purveyed by Euro-American environmental-ists. This campaign, which began in 1987 and continuedthrough the early 1990s, involved numerous environ-mental organizations not only in Malaysia but through-out North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia. Muchof the rhetoric of this campaign was focused on thePenan, a group of hunter-gatherers who have beendeeply affected by logging. The images used in the cam-paign presented a portrait of Penan that was over-whelmingly obscurantist and romantic. My concern hasbeen that such images objectify and dehumanize thePenan, making them FernGully icons rather than au-thentic political actors. More often than not, such im-ages obscure rather than reveal existing structures ofdomination. Examples of this kind of critique of essen-tialized images are particularly to be found in work fo-cused on preservationist campaigns of one sort or an-other, whether aimed at cetaceans, baby seals, rainforests, wilderness, or indigenous peoples (Einarsson1993, Freeman and Kreuter 1994, Kalland 1993, Zerner1994).

Compelling though it may be for us to produce suchcritiques, I cannot help but feel that doing so is some-thing of a dead end. For one thing, we seem to forgetthat not all essentialisms are the same. We need to givemore thought, for instance, to the distinction betweenromantic and strategic essentialisms. Critiques of es-sentialism developed in conjunction with our efforts tounderstand how such representations create and sup-port patterns of inequality. It is thus rather ironic that


just at the moment that anthropologists have embracedsuch a critical perspective, historically marginalizedcommunities have begun to recognize the political po-tency of strategically deployed essentialisms. Thuswhatever theoretical commitments may lead us to pro-duce such critiques, doing so compromises us politi-cally. It is incumbent upon us to confront this irony di-rectly. Another problem is that in focusing on thecritique of obscurantist essentialisms we ignore themore pernicious discursive moves of those who woulddeny any sense of enchantment with nature whatso-ever, putting in its place ‘‘commonsense’’ solutions pro-moting passionless, technoscientifically based manage-ment initiatives that elide every trace of politics or thatreduce every form of engagement with nature to an ex-tension of capital.

contestation

The second trend—an emphasis on contestation—is, ofcourse, part of a more general turn within the disciplineand beyond. All one need do is look at the titles of anumber of recently published books from a range of dis-ciplines: Going Wild: Hunting, Animal Rights, and theContested Meaning of Nature (Dizard 1994), ContestedFrontiers in Amazonia (Schmink and Wood 1992), Con-testing Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and Postmoder-nity (Zimmerman 1994), and Contested Lands: Conflictand Compromise in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens (Mason1992). While this emphasis on contestation has pro-vided us with a number of important insights, it is be-coming increasingly formulaic. The irony here is thatin the very process of trying to foreground the existenceof zones of contestation, the analytical apparatus weemploy in describing such zones has the effect of rou-tinizing and naturalizing contestation. We need onlyconsider the degree to which the bureaucratized versionof the idea of contestation—that is, the notion of‘‘stakeholders’’—has become a dominant motif in alarge number of contemporary analyses and interven-tions.

transnationality

As any number of recent commentators have observed,the discursive regime of contemporary environmen-talism is global in scale. At a time when the preserva-tion of biodiversity and the rights of indigenous peopleshave become global concerns, localized movementshave found common ground outside national borders.Such groups, while asserting locality, simultaneouslylegitimate local concerns with reference to global dis-courses and are increasingly brought into transnationalinformational and funding networks. At the same timeNorthern NGOs disseminate local discourses, gener-icizing them so that they partake of globally valorizeddiscourses. Often it is no longer clear what is local andwhat is not: the origins of representations are obscuredin the processes of translation and distribution.

This state of affairs has given rise to the third trendin the analysis of environmental movements: an inter-est in processes of globalization and the linking of localenvironmentalisms to transnational, metropolitan dis-courses (Conklin and Graham 1995, Princen and Finger1994, Turner 1991). Globalization and transnationalityare, of course, ideas being spoken about a great dealwithin the field of anthropology and beyond. Whenthese ideas are brought to bear on environmental move-ments, we see attention being paid to the processes bywhich environmental discourses are deployed, appro-priated, transformed, circulated, and recirculated byvariously positioned actors, as well as the ways inwhich environmental imperatives are framed and de-ployed with respect to claims about local authenticity,national sovereignty, or global significance.

Elements for Future Engagement

Having considered some of the sources for and presentforms of engagement with contemporary environmen-talism, I would like to address a series of concerns thatI believe anthropologists might address in future efforts.Central to my argument is that we need to problematizethe vocabulary with which we frame our engagementswith environmentalism, particularly to the extent thatour engagements extend beyond pure scholarship to thepromotion of ameliorative projects. Bringing a criticalperspective to bear on environmental discourses is it-self, I would argue, an important form of environmentalpraxis.

Several of the topics and concerns I discuss below arecurrently being addressed in work outside the disci-pline, and I take note of this where appropriate. Mycomments are based on the premise that, whatever isbeing done in other disciplines, anthropology can makea distinctive contribution to the study of these issues,extending and enriching such inquiries with the partic-ular kinds of insights that an ethnographic approach canprovide.

topologies

One of the more urgent tasks in the analysis of contem-porary environmentalism is to understand the ways inwhich particular topologies—constructions of actualand metaphorical space—are discursively produced andreproduced. Such topologies are not incidental to envi-ronmentalism but in fact constitutive of it. Indeed, onecould argue that the emergence of particular topologiesis at the very heart of the growth of environmentalismin the latter half of the 20th century. Such topologiesprovide the discursive stage for assessing the state of theplanet, create subjects, and presume to describe theways in which particular categories of subject affect theenvironment. They lay the groundwork for interven-tions by defining the political and institutional space ofenvironmental debates, by prescribing certain forms of


environmental amelioration, and by identifying themost appropriate agents to undertake such interven-tions. It is therefore critical that anthropologists inter-ested in contemporary environmental discourses bealert to the constitutive power of such topologies.

The discursive production of topologies is not, ofcourse, a practice limited to environmentalists. Indeed,in our own analyses of contemporary environmen-talism we too engage in this practice. Thus, a task ofequal urgency is to understand how our own analyticalcategories are likewise constitutive of particular topolo-gies.

Perhaps the clearest example of an emergent topologyis that of globality, whether in the form of ‘‘global envi-ronmental governance,’’ the Gaia hypothesis, claims ofglobal heritage and global citizenship, or our own con-cern with globalization. Numerous observers have re-cently remarked on this trend, and both activists andacademics have provided critical analyses and commen-taries (Ingold 1993, Lipschutz and Conca 1993, Milton1996, Ross 1991, Sachs 1993, Taylor and Buttel 1992,Thompson and Rayner 1998). Another topology that hasreceived a considerable degree of attention in recentyears is the idea of wilderness (Cronon 1995; Guha1989a; Nash 1967; Oelschlager 1991, 1992; Proctor andPincetl 1996). In addition to these two topologieswidely recognized by anthropologists and others, how-ever, there are a number of others that seem to meequally critical for any attempt to understand contem-porary environmental discourses but have been virtu-ally ignored.

As Euro-American environmentalism has increas-ingly been subjected to the criticism that it ignores so-cial justice (Broad 1994, Guha 1989a, Kothari and Para-juli 1993, Shiva 1993) and as global environmentalgovernance has increasingly established itself as the pri-mary vehicle for the amelioration of environmentalproblems, the distinction of ‘‘North’’ (Western Europe,North America, Japan, Australia) and ‘‘South’’ (all therest, excepting the former Soviet bloc) has emerged asone of the central topologies of contemporary environ-mentalism. Yet it remains curiously unexamined.There are steps being taken in this direction, but theyare as yet rather oblique. To the extent that ‘‘the ThirdWorld’’ often stands in for ‘‘the South,’’ Escobar’s En-countering Development: The Making and Unmakingof the Third World (1995) is an exemplary attempt tounderstand the genesis and consequences of this partic-ular topology. Though not explicitly concerned with en-vironmentalism, Doty’s Imperial Encounters: The Poli-tics of Representation in North-South Relations (1996)is a highly perceptive analysis of the significance of rep-resentational practices as they apply to the categories‘‘North’’ and ‘‘South.’’

Yet another critical topology for anthropologists toattend to in their examinations of environmentalism isthe many ways in which the idea of the ‘‘local’’ is en-coded. Our current interest in local/global articulationscertainly represents progress in this direction, but there

seem to me to be dimensions of locality, or of the waysin which the local articulates with wider entities (thestate, global agents/institutions/discourses), that areescaping us. For instance, we frequently contrast ‘‘top-down’’ and ‘‘bottom-up’’ approaches to development,we are attentive to how conservation programs affectpeople ‘‘on the ground,’’ and we characterize some ac-tivists as working ‘‘close to the ground’’ or at the ‘‘grassroots.’’ More conventionally, perhaps, we take the no-tion of ‘‘community’’ as unproblematic, as when wetalk about ‘‘community-based natural-resource man-agement.’’ There are yet other, more oblique ways inwhich the language we use produces the topology of lo-cality: one example might be the current vogue, in envi-ronment and development circles, of ‘‘participation’’ or‘‘participatory management’’ (Rahnema 1992, Ribot1996, World Bank 1996). Attempts to examine dis-courses of locality are as yet uncommon, though thereare a few notable recent efforts (Brosius, Tsing, andZerner 1998, Li 1996, Peters 1996, Zerner 1994).

Related to this larger project of critically analyzingtopologies is the need to understand more clearly therelation between topologies and the creation of certainkinds of subjects, whether as targets for interventionistprojects, as agents designated to effect such interven-tions, or as topics for our own research efforts. Thus,the emergence of concern about the destruction of trop-ical rain forests has resulted in the valorization of par-ticular categories of subject who we feel should live inthem: indigenous peoples (how often have we heardthem referred to as ‘‘guardians of biodiversity’’?).8 Ex-cluded by this topos are categories of people who shouldnot live in rain forests: peasants and migrants from ur-ban areas.

There is at present exemplary writing emerging fromother fields that can provide anthropologists with somedirection in approaching the relationship betweentopologies and subject making. Most significant per-haps is work being done in the field of geography on theproduction of space and on the intersections betweengeographical knowledge and technologies for the in-scription of that knowledge and how these articulatewith structures of domination (Harvey 1996, Sibley1995, Smith 1984, Soja 1989). Of equal interest is workbeing done in the field of critical geopolitics (Dalby1991, O’Tuathail 1996, Routledge 1996), an emergingarea of enquiry concerned with understanding ‘‘the poli-tics of writing global space’’ (O’Tuathail 1996).

8. The concept of biodiversity is one of the more interesting con-cepts in the lexicon of contemporary ecology and environmen-talism. Apparently describing an objective reality, this concept si-multaneously contains a sense of crisis. It constructs the threat tothe environment in a certain way, constructs how that threatshould be ameliorated, and lays the groundwork for prescribing therole that certain kinds of actors—scientists, NGOs, indigenouspeoples, Western consumers—should play (see Martınez Alier1996, Takacs 1996, Weizsacker 1993, Zerner 1995).


temporalities and dynamics

If, in our studies of environmentalism, we are con-cerned to understand the processes by which emergingforms of political agency are constituted, it defeats ourpurpose to consider these debates merely a matter ofmultivocality—of differently positioned actors givingvoice to contested representations. In fact, certainvoices may change what they are saying, certain voicesmay succeed in edging others out, certain voices maybe co-opted, and certain voices may be judged irrele-vant. How does the process of forcing open spaces fornewly emerging political agents occur? How or why dosuch spaces close for others? These processes are, atbase, temporal. Understanding the diverse forms oftemporality that underlie the ways in which particularenvironmental issues unfold must form a central partof any anthropological account of environmentalism.

For one thing, it is important that we grasp somethingof the dynamism of particular environmental debates.In laying out the perspectives of various actors in ourdescriptions, we tend to assume their interests and theforms of representation upon which those interests arebased to be relatively fixed. We therefore fail to considerthe extent to which those interests and representationsmay be subject to reformulation, whether in responseto critique, because new linkages are recognized (for in-stance, between race and the locating of toxic wastesites), or because of changes in the positioning of vari-ous actors. This both hinders our ability to recognizethe dynamism that characterizes environmental move-ments and discourses and obscures the agency of theactors involved.

If there is one thing that characterizes environmentaldiscourses, it is the rapidity with which they—and thecounter-discourses which they provoke—evolve. Un-derstanding something of the complexity and dyna-mism of the relationship between representations andthe process of discursive production places us in a betterposition to comprehend the emergence (or submer-gence) of particular agents. Such agents are not just po-sitioned but may reposition themselves or be reposi-tioned; environmental debates are not merely zones ofcontestation but zones of constantly shifting position-ality.9

An example of this kind of dynamism can be foundin the Sarawak campaign. Early in the campaign muchof the rhetoric, from Northern NGOs in particular, cen-tered on the imperative to ‘‘save’’ the Penan. This, itwas believed, could be achieved by concerted interna-tional pressure on Malaysia. Direct action aimed at rais-ing the profile of the Penan was viewed as the best wayto realize this end, and numerous such actions oc-curred. But Malaysia talked back, and in so doing it fun-damentally changed the terms by which environmental

9. The approach described here is consonant with what Rosaldo,borrowing a term from the Manchester school of anthropology,called a ‘‘processual analysis’’ (1989:92).

issues are debated between North and South. What wasonce a fairly simple issue—from the Northern perspec-tive a morality play—was transformed into somethingmuch more complex. The campaign was transformedfrom a singular focus on the imperative to stop the prog-ress of bulldozers to one forced to contend not only withpowerful Malaysian counterarguments but with the Ur-uguay Round of GATT, post-UNCED conventions, theInternational Tropical Timber Organization, ‘‘criteriaand indicators’’ of sustainability, and the North-Southdebate. As this occurred, Northern NGOs could not de-cide among themselves what the central issue was: thePenan alone, indigenous rights in Sarawak, Malaysia’sforestry practices, the tropical timber trade, timber mar-kets more broadly, Northern consumption, or someother thing. Perceptions of ‘‘the issue’’ were fundamen-tally conditioned by the positionality of individualactors. It is with respect to these types of transforma-tions, reevaluations, and repositionings—and the rela-tions between them—that the story of the internationalSarawak campaign raises a series of compelling issuesconcerning how we might approach the analysis of en-vironmental discourses. A campaign such as this is notmerely the sum total of a series of points of contestationamong actors with a diversity of perspectives. What Ihave attempted to show in my more recent work (Bro-sius 1995, n.d.) is some of the shifting historical, rhetor-ical, and institutional contours of this campaign as ithas evolved over time.

Another aspect of the temporality of environmentalcampaigns that deserves our attention is the somewhatchimeric but no less real quality of momentum. As Ihave interviewed those involved in the Sarawak cam-paign, this quality has been mentioned with remarkablefrequency by a surprising number of participants. Thehistory of this campaign can in part be written as oneof increasing and then decreasing momentum. Nearlyall those involved in the campaign agree that there wereperiods when the possibility of success seemed certain,enthusiasm was high, and events followed one after theother. At some point in the early 1990s this momentumbegan to dissipate. Different participants have varyinginterpretations of why this is so. Some are confusedabout where it went; others recognize, as Wade Davisobserved (personal communication), that ‘‘every cam-paign exists on a bell curve.’’

Not only do the contours of particular debates changebut the larger phenomenon of environmentalism istransformed as well. Environmental discourses arechanging in response to critiques of elitism, to chargesthat they ignore social justice issues, to accusationsthat they are a form of neocolonialism, and to criticismsthat they ignore North/South imbalances. Institutionsare emerging and evolving. Things are moving very fast.

Thus, for instance, arguments about preserving therain forest are very different today from the argumentsof a decade ago. There is a much greater sense of aware-ness among Northern NGOs concerning the appropri-ateness of campaigning in certain ways in the South.


Notions of political space are given more thought thanpreviously, and there is a much more clearly articulatedconception of here-ness and there-ness with respect tothe geographical/political space of environmental ac-tion. When we speak today of political agency, we needto remember that agency exists in political space andthat we must be more explicit in defining where and un-der what circumstances environmental praxis is pre-scribed by differently positioned actors within thatspace. Issues such as this, along with particular cam-paigns or debates, are embedded within a broader tem-poral stream.

One of the sources of this temporal dynamism in en-vironmentalism is the so-called green spectrum (Gott-lieb 1993, Sale 1990) between radical and mainstreamenvironmentalists. Radical environmentalists concen-trate their efforts on direct action, tend to be relativelynonhierarchical, stress the role of the committed indi-vidual in bringing about change, and focus on attractingmedia attention. They see their primary role as con-sciousness raising. Mainstream groups, such as theWorld Wide Fund for Nature, place a much greater em-phasis on long-term, cooperative institutional solutionsto environmental problems and on establishing goodworking relationships with elites. The relationship be-tween these two can be problematic. Mainstreamgroups are considered by direct-action groups to beoverly accommodationist, hidebound, bloated, andmore concerned about institutional survival than aboutproducing change. Direct-action groups are consideredby mainstream groups to have little appreciation forlong-term goals and little understanding of the need toestablish working relationships with opponents in orderto produce real change. They are thought to be short-term actors, nomadic subjects (sensu Deleuze and Guat-tari 1987), as likely as not to disappear after stirringthings up. What is significant here is that in the contextof any environmental debate, as well as at a broaderscale, the balance between these tends to shift overtime, usually from early consciousness raising by radi-cal groups to environmental management in whichmainstream groups play a larger part. One of the mostcritical dynamics of a campaign is not merely the exis-tence of tensions or disagreements—points of contesta-tion—but the shifting pattern of marginalizations andprivilegings that occurs as the terms of a debate shift.Who is listened to or ignored, and in which contexts?Who is it useful to be engaged with, and who is it neces-sary to establish distance from? Such questions are atthe center of any campaign and are a central element inits dynamics.

Another source of dynamism in environmentalismhas been the process by which discursive and institu-tional linkages evolve between environmental concernsand other issues or debates. Environmentalism has en-countered a series of different conversations, particu-larly in the past decade, and in many cases this hasshifted the discursive contours around which environ-mental issues are debated. In our efforts to understandenvironmentalism, anthropologists need to attend more

carefully to the ways in which these linkages have oc-curred, recognizing that they are a function not only ofabstracted, decontextualized discourses but of dis-courses subscribed to or contested by particular politi-cal agents. Among the most significant discursive inter-sections have been between environmentalism andindigenous rights (Baviskar 1996, Burger 1990, Durning1992, McNeely 1995), environmentalism and social jus-tice (Bullard 1993, Di Chiro 1995, Kothari and Parajuli1993, Szasz 1994), environmentalism and gender (Agar-wal 1992, Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter, and Wangari1996, Shiva 1994), and environmentalism and develop-ment (Escobar 1995, Peet and Watts 1996, Redclift1987, Sachs 1992, World Commission on Environmentand Development 1987).

environmental risk and peril

Underlying the dynamics of the development of any en-vironmental issue is a series of conceptions, often im-plicit, about the nature of the risk to humans (or, per-haps, cetaceans) or the peril to the environmentresulting from some particular state of affairs: the exis-tence of a toxic waste site, the persistence of whaling,or the rate of logging in some rain forest. To a degreethat I do not think has been sufficiently appreciated, en-vironmental debates often turn on the concerns and pre-dictions that arise from such conceptions, particularlywith regard to differences in the degree of urgency feltby various actors and the different forms of ameliorativepractice that are prescribed as a result. As much as thegreen spectrum referred to above, these set the stage forcontestation or solidarity on any environmental issue.Anthropologists must be alert to the ways in whichsuch concerns are encoded, deployed, contested, andperhaps transformed.

Thus, for example, in the Sarawak campaign, the con-cerns of many Northern environmentalists were framedin terms of great urgency: that there were six monthsor two years or five years left before the forests of Sara-wak were completely destroyed. It was precisely thissense of urgency, supported by figures on logging rates,that was used so effectively to mobilize support for in-digenous communities in the international Sarawakcampaign, to frame the prescription of ameliorativemeasures, and to justify the intervention of a particularset of agents. But it was also this sense of urgency thatframed the Malaysian government response to the cam-paign. It is a very short distance from a rhetoric of ur-gency that draws its force from statements about ratesof logging to measured discussions about what an ap-propriate sustainable rate of logging might be, shiftingthe debate from the domain of moral imperative orapocalyptic urgency to one of composed, well-adminis-tered sustainable forest management. Along with thisshift comes a set of assumptions about the appropriate-ness or inappropriateness of certain agents’ acting invarious ways (Brosius n.d.a).

Differences in the degree to which prescriptions forimmediate action must be submerged in the interest of


larger institutional imperatives also lie at the heart ofthe green spectrum. The irritation of radical environ-mentalists with mainstream organizations often arisesfrom their frustration that such groups are complicit inill-advised efforts to manage apocalypse—in efforts thatobscure the acuteness of a particular threat.

Several anthropologists have, in fact, examined thephenomenon of environmental risk. Indeed, some of theearliest anthropological engagements with environ-mentalism focused on the ways in which the perceptionof environmental risk is culturally constructed (Doug-las 1972, Douglas and Wildavsky 1982, Downey 1986,Gerlach 1987, Gerlach and Rayner 1988, Rayner andCantor 1987).10 Interesting work on the perception ofenvironmental risk continues (Cole 1993, Konstantinov1995, Kottak and Costa 1993, Rappaport 1996, Rayner1992, Schwarz and Thompson 1990), though, perhapsbecause this work has an applied bent and tends towardmethodological formalism, it does not enjoy wide rec-ognition. Anthropologists interested in environmen-talism would do well to consult this body of literaturein their efforts to understand the shape that particularnotions of risk give to environmental mobilizations, in-stitutions, and interventions. We should also be cogni-zant of a developing body of literature inspired by Ul-rich Beck’s articulation of the concept of ‘‘risk society.’’Beck and others are concerned with the attempt todevelop a theory of ‘‘reflexive modernization’’ linkingthe various forms of economic, technological, and in-stitutional rationality that characterize contemporaryindustrial society with a more politicized conceptionof risk (Beck 1992, 1996; Beck, Giddens, and Lash1994; Lash, Szerszynski, and Wynne 1996). This bodyof work provides anthropologists a rich foundation fromwhich to develop an innovative course of ethnographicinquiry.

nations, nativisms, natural connections

The publication of Imagined Communities (Anderson1983) was a watershed in scholarly interest in the studyof nations and nationalism. For the most part, however,anthropologists have not subsequently done a very goodjob of making sense of the nation-state.11 This is partic-ularly the case with respect to environmentalism. Ourinterest in the ‘‘local’’ has been either truly localized,rarely extending to the metropole or the nation, orlinked to the transnational realm. We have been sofixed on local social movements, transnational NGOs,and globalizing processes that we seem to have forgot-ten about the need to understand how national politicalcultures might mediate between these.

Such national political cultures have a strong envi-ronmental component. On the one hand, they have as

10. See Thompson (1980) and Thompson and Wildavsky (1982) formore general attempts to develop a cultural theory of risk.11. However, see Fox (1990) and Gellner (1983). Recent work in-formed by postcolonial theory is also something of an exceptionhere.

their basis particular topologies, not just of the largernational ‘‘geo-body’’ (Thongchai 1994) but of zones ofinclusion and exclusion within that geo-body. What arethe appropriate spaces (intensively cultivated plains vs.sparsely populated upland rain forests) and occupations(urban dweller, peasant farmer, shifting cultivator,hunter-gatherer) for citizenship in the nation-state? Towhat extent are government decisions about the sitingof mines, dams, plantations, or timber concessionspremised on assumptions about communities that existin those areas? Such is the stuff of national environmen-tal ideologies. Anna Tsing’s discussion of marginality inIndonesia (1993) is perhaps the best ethnographic treat-ment of a national topology of citizenship to date.12 Re-cent work on what Rosaldo (1994) has termed ‘‘culturalcitizenship’’ also holds great promise for understandingnational topologies.

Another aspect of national environmental ideologiesconcerns the matter of blood-and-soil essentialisms. Towhat degree, and in what ways, do national govern-ments purvey images of timeless rootedness, and towhat extent do such images serve to include or excludecertain categories of people? At a time when conserva-tion is increasingly tied up with identity politics andthe line between the potentially emancipatory and thepotentially reactionary is no longer clear, understandingthe discursive linkages between national communitiesand natural communities is critical (Malkki 1992, Zim-merman 1994).13

the circulation of images

Environmentalist mobilizations and the countermobili-zations deployed against them are today as much aboutimages of the environment as they are about the envi-ronment itself. That is to say, environmentalism isthoroughly enmeshed in the global circulation of im-ages, a state of affairs mediated by the mass media.Though anthropologists have in recent years begun torecognize the importance of theorizing the publicsphere (Habermas 1991), they have yet to make muchprogress in extending Habermas’s insights about thesignificance of the mass media in shaping public opin-ion, particularly with respect to environmental issues.There are a number of ways in which such projectsmight be undertaken.

First, in the context of environmental campaigns, weneed to understand much more about the bases uponwhich strategic decisions are made concerning the de-ployment of images. In the first instance, it is problem-atic to take the images deployed in a campaign at facevalue. Environmentalists may be quite self-criticalabout the kinds of representations they purvey, recog-

12. Michael Dove has produced a number of insightful studiesof official conceptions of rural/indigenous communities (1983,1986).13. A great deal of interesting work has also recently been done onNational Socialist environmental ideologies: Bramwell (1985,1989), Dominick (1992), Ferry (1995), Pois (1986), Schama (1995).


nizing them to be romanticized or in some other waywanting. Yet foremost for them is the imperative toraise public consciousness about a particular issue andthereby effect change. Furthermore, the kinds of imagesdeployed in a campaign may be revised and reformu-lated as a result of critique, internal or external. For in-stance, the essentialized image of Penan as wide-eyed,forest-dwelling innocents in need of saving was thedominant one in the initial stages of the Sarawak cam-paign. What became of that image as various critiqueswere directed at it (and its deployers) and as the centerof gravity in the campaign shifted from the imperativeto stop bulldozers to a campaign more mired in thecomplexities of transnational capitalism and postcolo-nial global politics?

Second, at a time when environmental journalismhas become a specialty in its own right, we have a greatdeal more to learn about the practices and politics of en-vironmental reporting and about the mass media in gen-eral. The momentum of an environmental campaign isto a large extent an artifact of the amount of media cov-erage that it is able to attract. What are the factors thatdraw media attention to a particular issue in the firstplace? In what ways are the terms of a campaign or issuetranslated into media accounts? What accounts for themedia’s loss of interest in an issue? In what ways do themedia gauge public eagerness for, or satiation with, ac-counts of a particular issue? Certainly some work is be-ing done in the field of media studies and elsewhere(Hansen 1993, Killingsworth and Palmer 1992, LaMayand Dennis 1991), but research that is ethnographicallyinformed would contribute a great deal to our under-standing of the relationship between the media, envi-ronmental discourses, and environmental politics.14

Third, anthropologists interested in the study of envi-ronmentalism must recognize that environmental de-bates are not simply sites of cultural production, notjust zones of contestation, and not simply reported inthe media. At a time when environmental concerns arecirculating widely within the public sphere, leading tolaws and regimes that place a higher priority on envi-ronmental protection, environmentalism is perceivedas a threat by many industries and governments. As aresult, in the past few decades we have witnessed an in-creasing tendency for public relations firms contractedby governments and industry to engage in the deploy-ment of images in order to sway public opinion. Suchefforts at what has been termed ‘‘greenwashing’’ aregeared toward manufacturing uncertainty about envi-ronmental threats, for instance, about the reliability ofthe scientific evidence for global warming (Athanasiou1996, Karliner 1997, Stauber and Rampton 1995). Thus,for instance, in the case of logging in Sarawak, the Ma-

14. See Spitulnick (1993). It should also be noted that there is anemerging literature by anthropologists on indigenous appropria-tions of media technology: Ginsburg (1991), Turner (1992), Weiner(1997). As significant as this literature is, I am urging attention byanthropologists to the broader domain of environmental media, es-pecially that not mediated by subaltern communities.

laysian government has retained the services of the pub-lic relations firms Burson-Marsteller and Hill & Knowl-ton to reassure a concerned Euro-American public thatlogging in Sarawak is being carried out on a sustainablebasis. In other cases, industries have supported the for-mation of ‘‘astro-turf’’ organizations (in other words, ar-tificial grassroots organizations), which then emerge as‘‘stakeholders’’ or as spokespersons for an ostensibly lo-cal pro-industry constituency (Helvarg 1994, Shabecoff1993). We need to remember that not all actors speaktheir minds. The question for us is how to deal ethno-graphically not only with strategic solidarity but alsowith sophistry, evasion, deflection, spin, outright de-ception, and the like. How does one interpret a dis-course that is generated by a public relations firm thatdescribes its goal as ‘‘orchestrating effective campaignswhich motivate the right behaviors’’?15

Finally, I would point to the need for further attentionto more subtle forms of discursive displacement. An ex-ample of this is the official environmentalism of theMalaysian government. Since the late 1980s—preciselythe time that Malaysia was receiving worldwide atten-tion for destruction of forests in Sarawak—the govern-ment and the media (which are closely controlled by thegovernment) have increasingly deployed a rhetoric of‘‘greening.’’ The Malaysian media today carry environ-mental stories, once virtually absent, on a daily basis.To a large extent, once however, these stories deal withmatters such as the planting of trees along highways orefforts to clean up polluted rivers. What is not touchedupon—or is addressed only from an official perspec-tive—is, among other things, the dispossession re-sulting from the establishment of timber concessions orplantations. This narrative of greening is, in short, a res-olutely aestheticized, nonpoliticized discourse closelytied to a broader official discourse of development. An-thropologists would do well to examine similar displac-ing narratives in other national contexts.

managing nature: from movementsto institutions

To the extent that we equate environmentalism withenvironmental movements and campaigns, we are ig-noring a crucial contemporary development: the pro-gressive envelopment of environmental politics by in-stitutions for national and global environmentalgovernance (Caldwell 1996, Haas, Keohane, and Levy1993, Litfin 1994). An immense institutional apparatusis descending on the environment much as it once didon development—and is, in fact, becoming increasinglyenmeshed in the existing transnational ‘‘sustainable-development’’ apparatus (Escobar 1995:192–99). Suchinstitutions, whatever else they may do, inscribe cer-tain discourses. They simultaneously create certainpossibilities and preclude others. The political impera-

15. This statement can be found at the Burson-Marsteller website:http://www.bm.com/files/per/PER-R02.html.


tives that spawned environmental movements are in-creasingly excluded by bureaucratic and technoscien-tific forms of institutional intervention. This process isoccurring across a range of environmental issues.

It is only in the past few years that a critical literatureon environmental institutionalization has begun toemerge, drawing to a considerable extent (though notexclusively) on Foucauldian notions of governmentalityand bio-power (Darier 1996, Eder 1996, Lipschutz andMayer 1996, Luke 1995, Myerson and Rydin 1994,Rutherford 1994, Sachs 1993, Smith 1996). Anthropolo-gists have an important role to play in understandingthe dimensions of this proliferation of institutionalstructures and extending this critical perspective.

The need exists, first of all, to understand more aboutthe relationship between emerging forms of politicalagency—particular environmental movements, NGOs,and the like—and continuing processes of environmen-tal institutionalization. NGOs, for instance, are veryaware that in the real world their goals are most likelyto be achieved when they can be incorporated into theworkings of institutions, and consequently they areconcerned that they be given a voice in the develop-ment and operation of such institutions. At the sametime, they are aware that one of the best ways tocounter their efforts is to establish institutions whichobstruct meaningful change through endless negotia-tion, legalistic evasion, and compromise. Many envi-ronmentalists are profoundly concerned that moral andpolitical imperatives are excluded by the process of in-stitutionalization.16 They are also cognizant of the factthat NGO participation can give progressively envel-oping institutions a degree of legitimacy that theywould otherwise lack and that NGO participation maybe sought for that purpose alone. The question that con-cerns them—and divides them—is at what point theyshould turn down the chance to get their issues on theagenda by having a place at the table. At what pointdoes participation become co-optation?

Associated with this is the matter of theinstitutional/organizational space of environmentalpraxis. Institutions, be they governments or organiza-tions such as the ITTO, are both enabling and limiting.Defining themselves as filling particular spaces of dis-course and praxis, institutions in effect redefine thespace of action; they privilege some forms of action andlimit others, they privilege some actors and marginalizeothers. This proliferation of institutional structures, abureaucratization designed—if I may echo the work ofMichael Herzfeld (1992)—to produce and maintain en-vironmental indifference, is occurring across a widerange of environmental issues. We see it, for instance,in the emerging domain of community-based natural-resource management (Brosius, Tsing, and Zerner1998). What began as a diffuse transnational movementis increasingly being appropriated as multilateral aid

16. Ferguson (1994) describes precisely this process in the contextof development in Lesotho.

agencies adopt the language of ‘‘community’’ and ‘‘par-ticipation’’ and invest large amounts of money in proj-ects formulated around these concepts throughout Af-rica, Asia, and Latin America.

Conclusions

Theoretical discussions in disciplines such as ours gen-erally aim at one of two things. Some attempt to pro-vide comprehensive models by which we might achievemore adequate descriptions of the phenomena we areinterested in studying. Others are more concerned withthe attempt to interrogate our own categories. The for-mer are aimed—rather unselfconsciously—at produc-ing a better understanding of ‘‘them,’’ while the latterare more concerned with trying to understand what wethink we know about ‘‘them’’ and why we should wantto ask about them in the first place.

It is useful to keep the distinction between these twoorders of inquiry in mind as we think about our engage-ment with environmentalism. I am not at all concernedabout our ability to produce ‘‘better’’ descriptions of en-vironmental movements. The danger does exist that thepresent proliferation of studies will result in the kind ofroutinization that led so much of the discipline to aban-don ecological anthropology in the 1970s. Nevertheless,given the remarkable transdisciplinarity of the mo-ment, I am confident that environmentalism will con-tinue to be a productive zone of inquiry. What mostconcerns me is a series of questions that foreground ourrole in the study of environmental movements. Suchquestions are, at base, political in nature, and they ur-gently require our attention. Thus, while there is greatpromise in the current moment, there are also reasonsto step back, take stock of what we are doing, and askourselves why we are doing it.

Environmentalism, broadly defined, is a series oftransformative discourses. Our analyses, to the extentthat they impinge upon the transformative possibilitiesof those discourses, are nothing less than direct inter-ventions. We need to attend to the question not only ofthe circulation and contestation of images and dis-courses that link local, national, and transnationalforms of environmentalism but also of how our ownworks enter into that equation, possibly to the detri-ment of those whose struggles we are trying to makesense of. My concern has less to do with the ‘‘politicsof representation’’ than with the politics of representingthese movements—and the discourses they produce—in the first place.

In many instances, environmental debates are tied tobroader struggles for democratization and rights. Thelanguage of environmentalism has increasingly come tobe deployed by local communities as part of an effort tochallenge traditional structures of domination (Gerlach1991), often against destructive resource extractionpractices or forms of resource exploitation that do nottake account of local rights. These are discourses in-


tended to empower historically disempowered commu-nities, to preserve biodiversity, or to secure lives freefrom the threat of pollution. When we describe thesemovements we are mapping terrains of resistance andmaking public what Scott (1990) has termed ‘‘hiddentranscripts.’’ We thereby give an airing to that whichwas never intended to be aired and provide maps whichmight be used to the detriment of those whose effortswe study.

Further, the production of meanings and identities istoday occurring in a global political space in whichclaims to authenticity are a critical dimension of legiti-macy. To the extent that environmental movementsrepresent an attempt to renegotiate the terms by whichpolitical agency has been exercised, their primary taskhas been to legitimate their efforts through assertionsof authenticity. In that sense, environmental strugglestoday are irrevocably tied up with identity politics. As-serting their authenticity with reference to timelesscultures and blood-and-soil essentialisms (at timescounter to national rhetorics of blood and soil), indige-nous voices are being heard and local communities arebeing allowed to assert control over the management ofresources.

There is great irony in all of this: as I noted previ-ously, at the very moment that subaltern voices are atlast being heard, anthropologists have taken to sub-jecting those voices to ethnographic scrutiny. We do soon the basis of a series of theoretical commitments thatcenter around a profound dissatisfaction with the tradi-tional anthropological concept of culture or, indeed,with any kind of concept that denies agency by assum-ing that individuals or categories of persons are to bedefined by some essential nature or by membership insome naturally bounded community. This is somethingthat we should be very nervous about. Not only is it un-clear what impact our commentaries might have onthese movements and discourses but also it is no longervery clear what is emancipatory and what is potentiallyreactionary, either in the movements we wish to studyor in our own commentaries on those movements. Itwould be comforting to think that we might be able toresolve this merely by interrogating the nature of ourauthorial presence or the position from which we write,but I am not sure that that is possible. In short, we haveto think very hard about the relationship between thetypes of conceptual apparatus that we bring to bear onthese issues and the possible outcomes of our analyticalinterventions.

Having said this, I also believe that there is the poten-tial to regain some of the emancipatory promise of ananthropology engaged in the study of environmentalismto the extent that we are able provide analyses that re-veal how various forms of environmentalism are beingdiscursively transfigured by powerful actors: nationalgovernments, industries, public relations firms, multi-lateral agencies, and the like. The process of environ-mental institutionalization and multiple forms of dis-cursive incarceration continue apace. There is much

work to be done to understand the precise dimensionsof this ongoing process.

Comments

amita baviskarDepartment of Sociology, University of Delhi, Delhi110007, India ([email protected]). 20 xi 98

Brosius’s essay is a pithy and comprehensive review ofthemes in environmental anthropology rendered espe-cially significant by its attention to the politics of aca-demic intervention. As Brosius argues, ‘‘we need toproblematize the vocabulary within which we frameour engagements with environmentalism, particularlyto the extent that our engagements extend beyond purescholarship to the promotion of ameliorative projects.’’I shall address my comments to his concern about theimplications of our analyses for environmentalism as atransformative discourse.

A brief excursus before I begin: Although environ-mental anthropology has concentrated on interrogatingthe categories through which we constitute the world,this process has not been as thoroughgoing as it mightbe. Brosius points to some topologies, such as ‘‘locality’’and the ‘‘North-South divide,’’ which remain largelyunexamined by environmental anthropologists. Tothese I would suggest adding ‘‘rurality.’’ The environ-ment is still fundamentally constituted in rural land-scapes that seem to present themselves as self-evidentstates of ‘‘nature.’’ While some recent research hashighlighted the constructed character of rural land-scapes by focusing on state practices of classificationand on the transformative power of technological inter-ventions, the parallel movement of making visible theevacuation of ‘‘nature’’ from ‘‘industrial’’ and ‘‘urban’’landscapes has still not occurred within the frame of in-quiry of environmental anthropology. The unwittingassumption that environmental anthropology is not rel-evant to urban-industrial topologies needs to be exam-ined more carefully.

Brosius points out that, in focusing on the productionof meanings and identities through discursive practices,environmental anthropology conforms to the centralpreoccupation of anthropologists with interrogating re-ceived categories of thought. However, while it is im-portant to see categories as dynamic and contested con-structs, highlighting their contingent character is notenough. The heuristic need for stable topologies, refer-ence points, and boundaries cannot be denied. Thisneed is felt not only by members of environmentalmovements but by everyone engaged in meaningful ac-tion. Practice demands working assumptions, tempo-rary certitudes, and acts of faith. Where do we anchorpractice if our conceptual shores keep shifting? For in-stance, a social movement’s claim that indigenous com-


munities’ rights to forests have priority over distant ur-ban consumers may be criticized for constructing aproblematic topology around locality, closed commu-nity, nativism, subsistence, and so on. But if we takeaway these concepts, what are we left with? What alter-native analytical categories do we use to support strug-gles against the structures of domination? The dilemmaof interrogating categories even as one continues to usethem is not exclusive to environmental anthropologistsbut shared with everyone who is sensitive to the politi-cal implications of academic practice.

Brosius presents a clear exposition of the political pre-dicament confronting anthropologists when their theo-retical dissatisfactions threaten to compromise emanci-patory efforts. He makes a compelling case for givingpriority to the emancipatory project by arguing that the‘‘strategic essentialisms’’ of historically marginalizedcommunities should not be interrogated, especiallysince they are already fighting against overwhelmingodds. However, interrogation need not necessarily be amove away from praxis. When we deconstruct our sub-jects’ practices only in order to speak to a separate audi-ence which does not include those subjects, our cri-tiques may be rightly attacked for pandering toacademic vanities to the detriment of academic politics.Implicated as we are in creating representations, webear responsibility for addressing the concerns of oursubjects and their self-images and for creating legiti-macy for complex self-representations which are nottrapped by the demand for a spurious ‘‘authenticity.’’Though the anthropological representation of environ-mental movements can be a political minefield whereaccusations of sabotage and betrayal may explode withdeadly effect, it is possible to rescue a dialogical rela-tionship between anthropologist and subject. WhileBrosius feels that a critique of the essentialisms of so-cial movements leads to a dead end, I would prefer tobelieve that such critiques are an important way of re-fining political practice, provided that we engage sin-cerely with the broad emancipatory goals of socialtransformation.

The political implications of the critiques engenderedby environmental anthropology become clearer whenwe examine to whom and what we are accountable. Ac-countability is shaped not only by political allegianceto emancipatory projects but also by the institutionalimperatives which drive academic work. Brosius dis-cusses the ‘‘bureaucratic and technoscientific forms ofinstitutional intervention’’ which seek the participa-tion (and co-optation) of their opponents. The anthro-pologist is also drawn into the circuit of legitimation,especially through the mechanisms of research funding.When an anthropologist is simultaneously an ‘‘expert’’on a government committee, a consultant to a develop-ment agency, a lobbyist for an NGO, and an activist,there is a spilling over of roles and loyalties which needsto be examined. Development agencies, for instance,enforce their own logic in terms of demanding ‘‘policyapplications,’’ ‘‘recommendations,’’ and other tips for

social engineering. Once again, critique alone is notenough. Development agencies, just like social move-ments, are actors that need to commit themselves to‘‘problematic’’ positions and categories. This need ac-quires greater momentum because of the intractabilityof ‘‘the environment’’ and the fact that, culturally con-structed though it may be, ‘‘nature’’ imposes its ownlogic and limits which must be reckoned with. Walkingthe tightrope, balancing critique with social commit-ment, is the difficult but not impossible task before an-thropology.

eeva berglundDepartment of Anthropology, Goldsmiths College,University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW,England. 10 xi 98

The feature that strikes me most about this paper is itsrather abrupt shift of gears towards the end. After en-thusiastically supporting critical work on the environ-ment and environmentalism by anthropologists, Bro-sius concludes with a set of ambivalent remarks: weshould be aware of our motives, of potential misuses ofinformation, and perhaps, although it remains implicit,of the tremendous stakes.

Yet the shift does not surprise me. Elsewhere, too, theanthropology of environmentalism and nature displaysthe same kinds of ambivalences and hesitations (e.g.,Escobar 1999). From my own experience I know onlytoo well the anxious self-reflection in the wake of un-flattering feedback from environmentalists whose ac-tivities and lives I have sought to capture in part for pre-dominantly anthropological uses (e.g., Berglund 1998).Clearly, it will not do, in the present climate of co-opta-tion in the name of ‘‘participation’’ and ‘‘choice,’’ toprovide ‘‘maps which might be used to the detriment ofthose whose efforts we study.’’ I do not see, however,that because of this concern understanding ‘‘them’’ andinterrogating ‘‘our’’ categories should be kept distinct.The entanglement of description and theory is unavoid-able but not inevitably debilitating, as, for instance,Donna Haraway’s (1997) recent work shows. Also, ask-ing ourselves as anthropologists why we are doing anyproject has to be part of the whole enterprise, and theanthropology of environmentalism should be no differ-ent from any other subfield. Of course, if it is different,the reasons for this should become a prime reason forforegrounding the interrogation of ‘‘our’’ categories andtheir shortcomings.

To move on, I particularly appreciate Brosius’s evoca-tive use of the term ‘‘momentum’’ in reference to cyclesof intensity in protest. It not only captures well the factthat things are, indeed, moving very fast but also hasmade me consider the possibility that there is patternin the highs and lows of activism which scholars wouldbe better placed than those at the centre of the politicalaction to document. Activism is often successful whenit intellectualizes ecological relations. And resistance


in an age of technologies such as information super-highways and video cameras is bound sometimes to re-sult in the same kinds of out-of-control accelerations ofinformation exchange that afflict other domains. Is thiswhere anthropological expertise could be made to count?

I think my two principal reactions on reading the pa-per in its present form (having already devoured an ear-lier draft) are related. I would suggest that my secondobservation might help me accept, if not quite resolve,the ambivalence that prompted the first. My sugges-tion, however, hinges on the acceptability or otherwiseof seeking systematic pattern(s) as a principle for schol-arly practice. Much as context needs emphasizing inthese globalized times, I believe that anthropological in-sights can be extended to searching for systematicityacross contexts without totalizing. Poststructuralist an-thropology together with innovative political actionhas already shifted the meaning of ideas of universalismand comparison so that they pose less of a threat of one-worldism or technomanagerialism than they used to. Ata more concrete level, how many times have we read orheard colleagues’ accounts from totally different geo-graphical and social locations and responded with ac-knowledgements of familiarity and commonality of ex-perience? There are huge similarities not only in theplatforms but in the dilemmas faced by environmental-ists. Why not build on this? The momentum of anti-en-vironmentalist forces is awesome, posing a real threatof misuse of our information, but the dangers of silenceseem to me at least as worrisome.

Ethnographic study itself has undergone significantchange, and I think that this in fact puts us in a betterposition to make statements about the interrelation-ships of global circuits of exchange of all kinds—of car-bon dioxide as much as humans, bytes, or commodities.In fact, I sense that the reconstructed ethnography thatis being called for here is only contingently place-bound(the proverbial village hardly constitutes the locus, letalone the focus, of contemporary fieldwork) but is nec-essarily embedded in regional, national, and global net-works. Unruly as these are, they do suggest themselvesas places to look for systematicity and deep transforma-tions. My assumption is that comparisons of similari-ties and differences at the surface can help generatesuch knowledge. I would be delighted if more field-work-based material on environmentalism as a politicalcommitment were available with the help of which Icould begin to consider anthropology (along with disci-plines such as cultural geography and media and com-munication studies) as compelling in its claims aboutenvironment-focused anxieties. The concept of mo-mentum suggests one promising way for discerningconnections between unique situations and systematicoutcomes.

Finally, what allows each anthropologist to decidewhich ‘‘maps’’ to display and which to protect is some-thing that cuts across any division into ‘‘us’’ and‘‘them,’’ namely, the ability and the responsibility tomake judgements. My hope is that the grounds that in-

fluence those judgements will be not the politics of theacademy but something far more important.

michael r. doveSchool of Forestry and Environmental Studies, YaleUniversity, New Haven, Conn. 06511-2189, U.S.A.11 xii 98

‘‘Analyses and Interventions’’ is far more than a reviewof anthropology’s current engagement with environ-mentalism; it is an unusually subtle analysis of thequestions—historical and theoretical, practical and eth-ical—that are raised by this engagement. I will com-ment briefly on three of the most important of thesequestions, the first of which pertains to the history ofecological anthropology. Brosius notes that we are nowwitnessing a remarkable florescence of environmentalscholarship in anthropology (among many other fields)after a lengthy hiatus of interest in this subject in thewake of the ecological anthropology of the 1960s and1970s. What Brosius properly calls the ‘‘sharp disconti-nuity’’ between the two traditions of study is of inter-est. The early ecological anthropology waned just asMarxist/political economic approaches were waxingwithin anthropology, and it is still popularly character-ized, as Brosius notes, by (in part) inattention to issuesof power and inequality.

Drawing on recent poststructural reconceptions ofpower, however, the political character of this earlierscholarship is beginning to be reassessed. In the contextof the then-prevailing deprecation of indigenous socie-ties under the aegis of high-modernist development the-ory, the detailed descriptions of vernacular technologyand knowledge central to early ecological anthropologycan now be read as politically empowering counterdis-courses. As a strategic part of such counterdiscourse,the borrowing and use of such otherwise dubious high-modernist conceptual tools as cybernetic theory can bereassessed as well. A better understanding of this intel-lectual history is important for what it can tell us aboutthe nature of politically engaged scholarship. It mayalso shed light on a related matter, the politicallycharged succession of paradigms that has characterizedour field in recent years. Brosius suggests that early eco-logical anthropology succumbed, in part, to ‘‘routiniza-tion.’’ We need greater understanding of the processesby which creative, paradigmatic movements are madebut then normalized (or routinized), something that hastended to draw more of our attention when it occurs ata distance from us (e.g., in high-tech labs) as opposed towithin our own discipline (Dove 1999a).

The politics of scholarship lie at the heart of a secondand related question raised by Brosius, involving the cri-tique of essentialism that has increasingly character-ized our discipline in recent years. The essentializedimages of people and environment that dominate cur-rent environmentalist writings have not been sparedthis critique, but, as Brosius notes, ‘‘not all essen-


tialisms are the same.’’ It seems particularly importantto distinguish between the essentialisms of oppressorand oppressed and to recognize that in relations ofpower the only way to counter one essentialism may bewith another (Dove 1999b). The need for greater reflec-tion in this regard has been dramatized for me in gather-ings of First and Third World anthropologists, where theformer are often critiquing as disempowering for indige-nous peoples the same conceptual generalizations thatthe latter are attempting to employ in defense of thesepeoples.

The existence of this sort of difference in scholarlyprojects brings me to a final point of Brosius’s on whichI wish to comment in passing, concerning our study ofenvironmental movements. There is increasing anec-dotal evidence circulating within the discipline of con-flicts stemming from such studies. The potential forconflict stems from the fact that, as Brosius notes, suchstudies make public what were ‘‘hidden transcripts.’’These studies close the space between theory and prac-tice in unexpected ways with which the current genera-tion of anthropologists seems often ill-prepared to deal.

In summary, current anthropological work on the en-vironment challenges us with critical questions con-cerning the ethics and politics of scholarship, the rela-tionship between practice and theory, the nature ofrepresentation, and the evolution of theory. To the ex-tent to which such issues are foregrounded in our envi-ronmental work, the current ‘‘florescence’’ may proveto be longer-lasting than some that have occurred in thepast. We can be grateful to Brosius for so eloquentlyframing these problems and prospects for us.

arturo escobarDepartment of Anthropology, University ofMassachusetts, Amherst, Mass. 01003, U.S.A. 8 xii 98

This is an eloquent and constructive statement on thecurrent state and possible future paths of ecologicallyoriented anthropologies. The argument weaves togethera diagnosis of contemporary forms of engagement be-tween anthropology and environmentalism with a pro-grammatic statement for further efforts in this crucialarea of collective scholarly, social, and political en-deavor. Focusing on environmentalism as a discourse—echoing a project also articulated recently by Milton(1996)—the author underscores the rapidly evolvingand contested nature of this discourse as a powerful in-terface between nature and culture.

Brosius’s approach exhibits two distinctive features.The first is its unambiguous poststructuralist stance,that is, the theoretical position that language and dis-course are constitutive of reality and that forms ofpower are introduced in the socio-natural ordersthrough the production of discourse. This is a positionthat I largely share but that leaves unattended certainaspects of ecologically oriented anthropology that donot emerge from such a framework. The second is a fo-

cus on social movements as privileged spaces for theproduction and contestation of discourses of nature andculture. Although social movements continue to be un-derstudied in anthropology, it is imperative, as Brosiusargues, that this be remedied as far as the environmen-tal arena is concerned. All over the world, environmen-tally inspired social movements are at the center of un-precedented forms of identity, novel ethnic and genderpractices, political agency, and alternative proposals fornature/culture construction, among them some con-cerning seemingly intractable questions such as sus-tainability and alternatives to development. Socialmovements are key actors in the production of environ-mental discursive regimes and should thus be a primaryfocus of anthropological investigation. I find this secondfeature of Brosius’s argument very timely and perti-nent.

Brosius’s division of ecological approaches in anthro-pology between the ecological anthropology of the1960s and 1970s (which was an eclectic array itself, in-spired by many trends from cybernetics and culturalmaterialism to ecosystems ecology and political econ-omy), and the poststructuralist-inspired ‘‘environmen-tal anthropology’’ of the 1980s and 1990s is not boundto please everyone. This is a distinction that makessense from an epistemological perspective between thelargely positivist or interpretivist approaches of the1960s and 1970s and the profoundly constructivist ap-proaches of the present. There are, however, rich formsof ethnographic constructivism that cannot be de-scribed in poststructuralist terms, since they are in noway couched in terms of discourse and power. Examplesof this include the work of many of the contributors tothe Descola and Palsson (1996) volume on culturalmodels of nature and the growing and, in my mind, ex-tremely interesting phenomenology of landscape andplaces in archaeology (Tilley 1994, Bender 1998), an-thropology (Feld and Basso 1996), geography, and otherdisciplines. In these areas, Brosius’s map needs to bedrawn with more shades and contours. I do concur,however, with a broad distinction between poststruct-uralist approaches and those that are not. The firstmight appear as a relatively unified set, although withdifferences among them—for instance, between femi-nist and nonfeminist approaches or between those pri-marly concerned with dominant discourses and thoseintent on articulating forms of grassroots environmen-talism. It is important but insufficient to list all of theinfluences that have gone into poststructuralist envi-ronmentalism (from science studies to postcolonial the-ory); how do these trends influence distinctive ap-proaches to specific issues and questions? At the sametime, one of the most pressing questions that non-poststructuralist and nonphenomenological approachesstill pose is that of science. This is particularly true ofthose forms of environmental anthropology moredeeply rooted in biology and ecosystems ecology. In arecent piece (Escobar 1999) I emphasized the need for arenewed dialogue among the various ecological ap-


proaches along the science-discourse divide. This needfor dialogue also applies, in a different way, to the ma-jority of Marxist and political-economy approaches thathave made only superficial overtures towards the post-structuralist concerns with power, knowledge, and dis-course. These differences would also have to be mappedinto Brosius’s landscape of discursive regimes on thenature/culture interface.

Brosius has been among the first to raise the issue ofthe critique of essentialized images in connection withenvironmentalism (see also Conklin and Graham 1995for an early example). In the present paper he rightly ex-tends his critique to the increasingly formulaic charac-ter of ‘‘contestation studies.’’ He also underscores theimportance of environmentalism for an anthropology ofglobalization. All of these are important trends. Thereare two additional trends that I see as already importantas far as environmentalism is concerned. The first is an-thropologists’ contribution to alternative views of con-servation and sustainability. This trend involves a notinsignificant number of anthropologists doing disserta-tion research at the grassroots or nongovernmental or-ganization (NGO) conservation/development nexusand a growing number of practicing anthropologists op-erating at the same interface. What new forms of an-thropological practices are being crafted there? Whatnew analytical and theoretical contributions are theseanthropologists making? A second and related trendconcerns anthropologists’ attempts to articulate the en-vironmental discourses currently being developed bysocial movements. Through their political strategy, so-cial movements for the defense of place, nature, andculture can be seen as elaborating an entire politicalecology. Do we have a role to play in this intellectualand political project? I agree with Brosius’s cautionarycall about the need for and risks of critiques of essen-tializing processes. Seen from the perspective of socialmovements, this warning can become a positive pre-scription for theoretico-political work on our part inconjunction with social movements. These two trendshighlight the importance of reexamining applied an-thropology, advocacy anthropology, and the anthropol-ogy of public policy on more sophisticated theoreticaland political grounds than they have incorporated in thepast. There is a great challenge at this level, one that isbeing confronted head-on by many students in theirown field situations.

My previous two comments have already begun to ad-dress the last part of the paper, its ‘‘elements for futureengagement,’’ all of which I find eminently reasonableand constructive. I would like to offer some comple-mentary perspectives to each of the items under consid-eration. The call for examining the construction oftopologies is, of course, related to what has been calledthe spatialization of social theory, that is, renewed at-tention to the role of space and power in the makingof reality. Brosius also contends that we need to lookcritically at the construction of spatial categories. Thecase could be made more forcefully, given that ‘‘the en-

vironment’’ is in fundamental ways about space. As anumber of mostly feminist geographers have been ar-guing recently, however, the concern with space has ledto a marginalization of place that has consequences forhow we think about culture, nature, development, andthe like (see, for instance, Massey 1994). It would be im-possible even to summarize this argument here, save formentioning that what emerges from it is the need to ar-ticulate a defense of place, which is also a way to speakabout a defense of local natures and local discourses ofthe environment (see Dirlik 1998 for a statement onglobalism and the politics of place). Anthropologistshave been largely absent from this revival of place assite of theory and politics, perhaps for good reason, butwe need to address the question in earnest. A comple-mentary perspective to the issue of ‘‘temporalities’’—Brosius’s second important category of future engage-ment—is the concept of network. If it is true that ‘‘envi-ronmental debates are not merely zones of contestationbut zones of constantly shifting positionality,’’ this isin large part because they are increasingly producedthrough/by networks that connect many sites with dif-ferent cultures, temporalities, and political stakes. Anumber of authors (from Latour to Castells, plus femi-nist scholars of science and technology such as RaynaRapp, Donna Haraway, and Deborah Heath) havepointed to the centrality of networks in contemporarysociety, especially those linking technoscience withsocio-natural practices. Connectivity and interactivitythrough networks and apparatuses linking natures andcultures have important temporal effects, particularlywhen they bring together real-time technologies withother types of temporality arising from place-basedpractices. The pervasive transformation of nature bytechnoscience should also be an active site of ethno-graphic and theoretical research.

The importance of studying anthropologically theemerging regimes for managing nature cannot be em-phasized enough. Brosius is right in highlighting theusefulness of the Foucauldian concept of governmen-tality—the progressive appropriation by state and ex-pert knowledge appararatuses of ever-larger domains ofthe cultural background and daily life of collectivities—in this regard. Governmentality is fundamentally amodern process, while the production of nature inmany parts of the world takes place partially outside ofand against modern modes. The growing governmen-talization of nature needs to be analyzed critically andresisted. A related development is the emphasis on risk.If it is true that risk is a growing idiom in environmen-talism, it is not without its problems. The concept ofrisk is being chiefly imported from sociological sciencestudies, where it has had its productivity. There is,however, a critical perspective on the rise of risk andinsurance technology in the history of the productionof the social in the 19th century, chiefly in France andLatin America around the work of Francois Ewald andJacques Donzelot, among others (see Burchell, Gordon,and Miller 1991 for an introduction to this literature).


This critical perspective needs to be incorporated intoanthropological perspectives on risk in environmen-talism (Chaia Heller, a student in our department, iscurrently doing dissertation research on French biotech-nology focused on risk and how ‘‘risk’’ is constructedby various constituencies).

To conclude, I would reiterate Brosius’s call for an-thropological engagement with environmentalism asone of the most powerful and complex arenas for theproduction of culture in the late 20th century. Environ-mentalism, as he effectively demonstrates, goes wellbeyond questions of nature and even science; it incorpo-rates issues of power, identity, representation, spaceand place, and the global and the local. It is not a coinci-dence that the defining and long-standing concern inanthropology with the relation between nature and cul-ture is coming back to haunt the discipline with unsus-pected force. As Haraway does not tire of reminding us,the question of what counts as nature, for whom, andwith what consequences is one of the central questionsof our epoch. Anthropology’s contribution to this ques-tion has to come from its specific location: what kindsof natures-cultures are various peoples throughout theworld constructing, through what practices, and withwhat ecological and social consequences? As Bro-sius adds, this is a deeply political process in which ‘‘itis no longer clear what is emancipatory and what is po-tentially reactionary.’’ Who does the constructing, how-ever, makes a big difference.

ramchandra guha22a Brunton Rd., Bangalore 560025, India. 28 x 98

Brosius has written a wide-ranging and thoughtful as-sessment of the past and likely future of anthropologi-cal studies of environmentalism. I especially like hisplea for a transdisciplinary approach. The accident of bi-ography or the territoriality of the academy may neces-sitate a primary identification as an anthropologist, butenvironmental problems are generally unmindful ofsuch disciplinary demarcations. Years ago, the Indianscholar Radhakamal Mukerjee urged the formulation ofa social ecology, an integrative analytical frameworkdrawing on the human as well as natural sciences, for abetter understanding of the dynamics of socioecologicalchange in the modern world (Mukerjee 1942; see alsoMukerjee 1926).

I agree with a great deal of what Brosius says and havelearnt much from his discussion. His analysis of thepromise as well as pitfalls of the transnationalization ofenvironmental campaigns is most suggestive and help-ful. There remain, however, one or two points of dis-pute. I think he insufficiently acknowledges the contri-butions of older traditions—not just the ecologicalanthropology of the sixties, which he mentions, butalso the cultural ecology of the fifties, which he doesnot. (A striking omission in an otherwise impressive

bibliography is the work of Harold Conklin [see, espe-cially, Conklin 1957].) New-style environmental an-thropology may be more theoretically astute and politi-cally savvy, as Brosius writes, but this sophisticationhas come at a cost. Few of its practitioners can claim tohave done the kind of meticulously exhaustive field-work that was the hallmark of the old ecological an-thropology. Indeed, at times fancy theory and politicalposturing seem to serve as a (poor) substitute for carefuldescription.

Having read his empirical work on the Penan, I knowthat Brosius himself is a fine fieldworker. There are,nonetheless, some comments in the present article thatmay currently qualify as good politics but that I reckonto be bad science. Such, for instance, is the implicationthat while scholars need to scrutinize romantic essen-tialisms, strategic essentialisms are somehow exemptfrom analysis or criticism. Scholars should not be sub-ject to such exceptions, which stem from an exagger-ated respect for activists. I worry also when Brosiuswrites, ‘‘I am not at all concerned about our ability toproduce better descriptions of environmental move-ments.’’ Surely the production of better—that is, moreaccurate and comprehensive—descriptions is the an-thropologist’s primary task? One reason for his curiousremark could be the fear that a better description willbe used in counterinsurgency, such that (as he writes)scholars will end up providing ‘‘maps which might beused to the detriment of those whose efforts we study.’’Again, I believe his worry to be exaggerated. Commis-sars and policemen do not read learned essays and books(one doubts, for example, that the present issue of cur-rent anthropology will find its way into the head-quarters of the Malaysian police), and in any case theyhave their own sources. Certainly this fear should notinhibit the pursuit of the truth, which in my old-fash-ioned way I still regard as the essence of the scholarlyvocation.

What makes Brosius’s argument particularly vulnera-ble is the fact that in any environmental movementthere are almost always competing factions offeringcompeting interpretations. Which one of these does theanthropologist then defer to? To illustrate from per-sonal example, when I began studying the Chipkomovement I was told (by different people) that it wasa Gandhian, feminist, or environmentalist movement.There were also two highly charismatic men competingfor the title of the real leader of Chipko. The partisanmight have accepted the label and leader most conge-nial to his or her politics, but the scholar’s job was toendeavour to produce the better description that Bro-sius seems to deride. Through an analysis of its prehis-tory and a reconstruction of its origins and trajectory, Iwas able to locate Chipko in the specific social historyof the Uttarakhand Himalaya, something that general-izing labels (Gandhian, feminist, etc.) and leader-cen-tered accounts would disallow (cf. Guha 1999 [1989]).Some partisans and activists were displeased by the un-packing, but the risk had to be run.


alf hornborgHuman Ecology Division, Lund University, Finngatan16, 223 62 Lund, Sweden. 12 xi 98

Brosius has outlined a sophisticated and sensible posi-tion with respect to the difficult balance between con-structivism and critique that we need to achieve in an-thropology and other social sciences. This does notmean that all the problems have evaporated. Under-standing ‘‘the human impact on the physical and bioticenvironment’’ remains a project of a different kind from‘‘showing how that environment is constructed, repre-sented, claimed, and contested.’’ How do we reconcile,for example, Mary Douglas’s cultural analysis of riskperception with Brosius’s scientistic references, albeitin passing, to the ‘‘physical and biotic’’? At the sametime, is it really Brosius’s intention to join the crowd ofanthropologists sneering at the notion that indigenouspeoples can be ‘‘guardians of biodiversity’’ or that sav-ing rain forests is an ‘‘urgent’’ matter? The recent surgeof academic interest in environmentalism no doubt re-flects the professional progress of a generation of peoplewho were students in the seventies but a majority ofwhom, like the post-Marxists, have chosen to turn theirbacks on what they now perceive as an embarrassingnaivete. As Richard Lee (1988:253) observes, in the cur-rent climate of opinion ‘‘no one is going to go broke’’by appealing to cynicism. It is not merely an ironic co-incidence that anthropologists have turned skeptical‘‘at the very moment’’ that indigenous voices are gain-ing a popular audience. Anthropologists, too, engage inidentity politics compelling them—as almost everyoneis becoming an advocate of the indigenous Other—todistinguish themselves from journalists, globetrotters,and NGOs.

Brosius’s worries about the impact of our deconstruc-tive and deessentializing discourse are as commendableas those of Marshall Sahlins (1993), to which he mighthave connected them. He rightly seems to ask whetherskepticism in the end is not a greater problem than es-sentialism. Equally justified is his concern with the pol-itics of discursive co-optation and what Hajer (1995)calls ‘‘ecological modernisation.’’ To understand theseprocesses—what Raymond Williams and David Harvey(1996) refer to as the ‘‘politics of abstraction’’—we needto develop a phenomenological perspective on the riftbetween local (indigenous) lifeworlds and abstract sys-tems (Hornborg 1994, Gooch 1998). The asymmetric re-lationship between the local/experiential and theglobal/discursive is crucial not only to defining the con-cept of ‘‘indigenous’’ but to conceptualizing modernityitself. It also relates in important ways to the phenome-nology of modern personhood (Evernden 1985, Horn-borg 1998a). Anti-modernist environmental sentimentshave occasionally acquired a brownish hue (cf. Brosius’sn. 13), but this should not serve to immunize modernityagainst critique of its sociological fundamentals. Moneyand the abstractions of economics are cultural vehiclesof exploitation and should be quintessential targets foranthropological analysis and critique (cf. Hornborg

1998b, 1999). Such cultural categories intervene in verytangible ways in the ‘‘physical and biotic’’ environ-ment. They are but the most recent additions to the se-miotics of ecosystems (Hornborg 1996). Brosius touchesonly in passing on how we might rethink ‘‘how weplace ourselves’’ in relation to nature, but this is at thecenter of several recent anthropological studies of hu-man–environmental relations which he does not men-tion (Croll and Parkin 1992, Descola and Palsson 1996,Ellen and Fukui 1996). Perhaps European anthropologydoes not suffer from the same clear-cut dichotomy be-tween ‘‘ecological’’ and ‘‘environmental’’ anthropologythat he identifies in the United States. In Europe, muchof the recent anthropological concern with human–en-vironmental relations (e.g., the articles by Tim Ingoldin the above-mentioned collections) is neither ‘‘scien-tistic’’ nor simply a study of environmentalism but atheoretical attempt to transcend Cartesian dualismssuch as mind/body or culture/nature. On the whole,however, I am impressed with Brosius’s command ofthe issues and the literature and with his persuasive ar-gument for more sensitive, moral commitment in envi-ronmental anthropology.

søren hvalkofNordic Agency for Development and Ecology(NORDECO), Copenhagen, Denmark. 9 i 99

Writing a comment on this article has turned out to bemuch harder than I had anticipated. Most articles in CAput forward a particular position, standpoint, or criticalattitude that makes it possible for commentators to en-ter a polemical mode of discussion or to add ideas orcritical spinoffs. Brosius’s article is not of that order. Itseems to be mainly a catalogue—a comprehensive list-ing of issues and topics that have been or can be linkedto ‘‘environmentalism’’ in the social sciences and be-yond—and a kind of programmatic statement on con-ceivable poststructural approaches to ‘‘environmen-talism’’ and ‘‘environmentalist’’ discourses. Sorting,bunching, and categorizing different contemporary con-tributions, it leaves few stones unturned as it coverscritical and analytic perspectives on the diverse andcontested views of the environment and associatedproblems, criticizing green capitalist market solutionsand making connections with the Foucauldian anthro-pology of power and knowledge production. It reviewsemerging forms of agency, cross-field analyses of hy-bridity, authenticity, and identity, and eco- and identitypolitics, touching upon institutional co-optation, bu-reaucratization, and techno-environmental manageri-alism. As for the problems within anthropology, it high-lights contradictions in our theoretical scrutiny of andthe ‘‘political potency’’ in essentialization as well as inarticulating the local and the global in transnationalpolicy discourses. It questions the vocabulary and idiomof applied research, pinpoints the constituent effects of‘‘discursive topologies,’’ and reminds us of the hyperdy-namics and temporalities of environmental issues. Few


articles are so packed with references as this one, andas such it is an excellent review article for anyone de-veloping syllabuses, teaching courses in current ecolog-ical and environmental anthropology, and supervisingor writing on such subjects. But beyond its utilitarianaspect, I could not escape the thought that much ofBrosius’s warranted emphasis on dynamic and multiplediscourse analyses would have been equally valid for anumber of other approaches and topics. Why environ-mentalism? What was the message? In its enthusiasticattempt at justifying the central relevance of a discur-sive environmentalist approach in current anthropol-ogy, to which I am absolutely sympathetic, the article’sencyclopedic zeal tends to flood the deliberation withglobal intellectual noise, drowning out or blurring somevery important points.

One of the problems is situating anthropology inBrosius’s environmentalist universe. The focal point ofthe paper is environmentalism, defined in ‘‘the widestpossible sense, referring to a broad field of discursiveconstructions of nature and human agency.’’ In thisbroad conception ‘‘environmentalism’’ is fully congru-ent with many other new ecological approaches in thesocial sciences often referred to generically as politicalecology, and Brosius’s tasks for anthropology might aswell be accomplished by other disciplines such as cul-tural studies, geography, philological and semioticfields, history of ideas, philosophy, political science,and sociology. As usual, most of the theoretical inspira-tion and ballast for the anthropological discussion comefrom other disciplines and academic fields. Anthropol-ogy is not a major theoretical contributor here butrather a skilled theoretical articulator. What is it, then,that legitimizes anthropology as a separate discipline,apart from institutional inertia, and what is our specificcontribution to this ‘‘environmentalist’’ meta-dis-course? One immediate answer would be that anthro-pology’s legitimacy is grounded in ethnographic inquiryand description and that fieldwork as a personal, subjec-tive engagement of phenomenological nature is the coreof this. Filtering off the article’s encyclopedic academicambition and keeping anthropology’s ethnographic sub-stance in mind, a much more radical and concernedcontribution emerges in which ‘‘environmentalism’’ isa heuristic device for readdressing an urgent problem inanthropology: the pursuit of social and political ac-countability in our practice of the discipline. Not onlydoes it criticize headless agency and poorly contextual-ized ethnography, it also takes on a critique of headlessdeconstruction, emphasizing its social consequences.Discourse and our analysis of it matter, and it definitelymatters how this is informed. Read in this filtered way,Brosius’s contribution in several respects resembles thecritical positions put forward in Dell Hymes’s classic1969 collection Reinventing Anthropology. Brosiussupplies a contemporary, postmodern, and sophisti-cated parallel to Laura Nader’s argument for studyingup through institutionalized power hierarchies, EricWolf’s call for reflecting global processes in the histori-cal construction of power in anthropological analysis,

and Gerald Berreman’s concern with the sterilizationand depoliticization of anthropology caused by institu-tional technicalization, to mention a few of the 16 con-tributions to Hymes’s vintage volume. The present ‘‘en-vironmentalist’’ theme seems to be a suitable catalystfor the reinitiation of such critical intervention. Thus Iprefer to appreciate Brosius’s article as a 30-year markerof such self-reflexive debate in anthropology and notonly as an attempt to outline a politicized environmen-talism and ecology but, more important, as an urgentcall for the politicized and accountable anthropologythat is so much needed in our postmodern era of relativetruths. Focusing on this could be a good start.

benjamin s. orloveDepartment of Environmental Science and Policy,University of California, Davis, Calif. 95616, U.S.A.([email protected]). 11 xi 98

This article—a fresh view on familiar topics, withmany rich and original insights—locates itself in theself-reflexive globalized present (how appropriate, Ithought, for this article to appear in current anthro-pology, which has had a stronger commitment to aninternational anthropology than any other major jour-nal published in the United States). From this vantagepoint, it looks back to describe major trends in the tran-sition from ecological to environmental anthropologyand forward to propose directions for future work. Itssynthetic character leaves me wishing for fuller treat-ment of certain themes that it raises but does not dis-cuss as fully as others. The title itself offers clues:‘‘Analyses and interventions,’’ it states; how are theseto be distinguished? Once anthropology confronted thegrounding of claims of realism within strategies of rep-resentation, it became difficult to oppose thought andaction, to separate word and deed. But one of the appealsof environmentalism itself is that, in its focus on thesimultaneous givenness and constructedness of the nat-ural world, it offers suggestions for a way beyond theduality of names and things. This view, in turn, makesme unwilling to take analysis simply as a form of inter-vention and to wish for a treatment of interventions asfull as the treatment of analyses. For all that I acceptBrosius’s discussion of the valuable contributions of en-vironmental anthropology in directing attention to thesubtle and often hidden ideological work of images, I donot want such unmaskings and other analyses to substi-tute for other forms of intervention, forms that I would,with due caution, be willing to call concrete. This no-tion, in turn, leads me to the question of ‘‘anthropologi-cal engagements’’: how is one to decide what counts asan engagement?

Drawing on themes that Brosius discusses, I see thatthe analyses and the interventions provide two generalthemes of such engagements. It seems to me that an-thropologists might fruitfully consider not only the na-ture of our analyses but the audiences as well. This firsttheme of audiences for our analyses does not often


come to the foreground in the article, perhaps becauseit appears in a journal directed at an anthropologicalreadership; where it does appear, Brosius is often con-cerned that our writings will be co-opted and usedagainst the people with whom we study and work. Hewarns us, for example, of the dangers of showing thatindigenous identities are contingent and historical.However, there are ways in which our writings can in-fluence broader debates in many social contexts. In-deed, our recording of lives of the poor and the margin-alized offers an important balance to other dominantviews, as Scheper-Hughes argues for her research in theshantytowns and slums of Northeast Brazil (1992). Wehave the option of writing for different audiences, in dif-ferent voices, and even in different languages. Ourteaching as well is not directed exclusively to under-graduate majors and graduate students who form part ofanthropological communities but often to many othersas well. There are opportunities for team teaching, foroffering courses outside anthropology departments andprograms. Though our analyses may be framed in con-ventional academic forms of professional writings andof teaching, they can reach broader audiences and thusconstitute a kind of wider engagement.

The second theme stems from the first. The colleges,universities, professional societies, journals, and booksin which we present academic interventions are onlyone of the many sites in which we become involvedwith environmentalism. This second theme of the sitesof our interventions also is not treated as directly assome others in the article, in part because of limitationsof length. In his respect and admiration for grassrootspolitics, Brosius may exclude other forms of politicalaction in which anthropologists may intervene more di-rectly. We may serve as advocates, as advisers, as inter-mediaries, as liaisons; we may work with NGOs, withenvironmental scientists, with agencies (Orlove andBrush 1996). Another broad contribution of environ-mentalism, as Brosius notes, is to contribute to debatesover the constitution of public space and public dis-course; there are many portions of public space inwhich anthropologists can participate.

This concern for sites led me to note Brosius’s treat-ment of the question of what counts as politics. He sug-gests that ‘‘national elites and transnational capital in-terests—at times working in concert with mainstreamenvironmental organizations—are engaged in attemptsto displace the moral/political imperatives that galva-nize grassroots movements with a conspicuously depo-liticized apparatus that is by turns legal, financial, bu-reaucratic, and technoscientific’’ and echoes this pointelsewhere in his discussion of the ‘‘green spectrum’’that runs from ‘‘mainstream’’ to ‘‘direct action’’ groups.If the line between analysis and intervention seems in-sufficiently clear to me, this separation of politics anddepoliticization strikes me as excessively firm, this sin-gle axis of forms of politics too simple. Climate issuesoffer examples in this regard. I share the concern overclaims such as that global warming is a purely technicalproblem and that once the kinks are worked out of the

details of greenhouse gasses, we can develop marketsfor carbon emission permits and eliminate the problemas efficiently as possible. But I also recognize that in thecase of ozone depletion, complex interactions of activistgroups with conventional government agencies and sci-entific experts have led to international accords thathave greatly reduced threats to the integrity of the at-mosphere and the biosphere (Benedick 1991). In thiscase, it is difficult to draw these lines so neatly.

It is a sign of the strength rather than the weaknessof the article that it can raise these issues of audienceand site in environmental anthropology. Its syntheticoverview highlights the importance of future work. I ea-gerly await Brosius’s further writings on the Penan andon environmental anthropology.

dianne e. rocheleau and claudia radelGraduate School of Geography, Clark University,Worcester, Mass. 01610, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 2 ii 99

Brosius raises a series of questions that emanate fromrecent encounters between critical anthropology andenvironmental discourses and movements. Drawingupon insights from feminist theory, we propose to ex-pand and enrich these questions as they relate to inter-sections of identity and environmental movements,policy, and positionality. Brosius’s analysis of researchon environmental social movements, discourse, andimages repeatedly touches on the complex processes ofidentity and representation. Perhaps most striking is hisimplicit dichotomization of essential and strategicidentities. Our comments first focus on the issue of en-vironmental essentialisms, their deployment by variousactors, and their potential unmasking by researchers.We then raise the issue of researcher positionality interms of purpose, policy engagement, and relationshipto the researched.

The dilemma of the article—to unmask or not—isbased on a relatively fixed and essential notion of iden-tities, both environmental and cultural. Brosius is con-cerned with fallout from training our critical gaze onthe very people and organizations whose struggles wewish to support. The fear is that if we expose the politi-cal and intentional nature of environmental socialmovements’ claims of ‘‘Green’’ identity we will under-mine their effectiveness. This is premised on under-standing identity and its representation as either essen-tial or strategic and equating the former withauthenticity, the latter with sham. In contrast, Mouffe(1992, 1995), Harding (1998), Haraway (1991), and Fraser(1997) theorize identities as contingent and relational,discarding essentialisms both politically and analyti-cally. Mouffe understands identities as partial fixationsto ‘‘nodal points,’’ one of which, we suggest, embodiesenvironmental stewardship. A group’s identity may betemporarily and partially fixed to this node within aparticular context and a particular set of extragroup so-cial relations. If we approach Green identities as shift-


ing, contingent, and relational, we can understand themas both strategic and authentic. The dichotomy be-tween essential and strategic Green identity is false.

In addition, the concept of strategic identity bearscloser examination. We argue that strategic Greenclaims arise from various and multiple sources. Theymay be principled, contingent, and/or instrumental, re-flecting (1) Green values intrinsic to the group sense ofidentity or way of living (principled), (2) honestly heldbeliefs or interests that intersect with environmentalistagendas but are subject to change depending on context(contingent), and (3) coincidental or invented Green in-terests intended to maintain the group and its place inthe world (instrumental). The source of identity claimsdoes not, however, obviate the need for their carefulanalysis. Social scientists can help to clarify a givengroup’s strategy and to predict its consequences for thegroup and others. For example, as Brosius notes, ‘‘blood-and-soil’’ arguments are especially vulnerable to the un-masking of some of the group as not ‘‘native,’’ ‘‘naive,’’or ‘‘natural’’ enough to justify absolutist claims. Claimsneed to be considered in less absolutist and more vari-able and ambiguous terms. Yet Lohmann (1998) notesthat retreat to uncritical pluralism can be equally dam-aging. He warns of the creation of new publics through‘‘stakeholder’’ analyses, participatory processes, andconflict resolution protocols that construct all ‘‘actors’’and all stakes—from ancestral claims, cultural continu-ity, and local livelihoods to national security and corpo-rate profits—as equal.

The question of whether to unmask or not vanishes,but important methodological issues of the social scien-tist’s relation to the researched group remain. Feministethnographers grapple with many of these issues. Forexample, Ong (1996) and Spivak (1988) address the ap-propriateness and feasibility of subaltern identity andinterest representation. Behar (1993) and Warren (1993)explore political and ethical dimensions of life historiesand testimonials. Others discuss reconciling distinctprofessional, political, and personal ethical positions,confronting issues of trust and betrayal, and co-con-structing knowledge (Visweswaran 1994, Nagar 1997,Tsing 1993).

We must also consider the self-positioning of the re-searcher. Policy analysis, among critical social scien-tists, is likely to be of one of three kinds. Applied re-search directly informs policy formulation by nation-states and international organizations. Many of us en-gage in this activity, often in a reformist capacity. Thesecond, critical academic work on environment, cul-ture, and social justice, aims to influence national or in-ternational policy indirectly or to hold policy-makersaccountable for their actions’ consequences. The third,rarely acknowledged as policy analysis, tries to informthe groups about which we write or to influence NGOsand social movements acting in solidarity with them.We seek to shape their strategies and actions—in aword, their policy. Often we are unclear about our self-positioning and potential conflicts between distinctpolicy perspectives. Roe (1994, 1998) uses applied narra-

tive analysis and complexity theory to trace a viablepath between the theoretical domain of scholarship, theethics of planning, the practical realm of applied work,and the political terrain of policy consequences. We alsoneed to clarify what kind of policy analysis we proposeto conduct, to determine for whom, with whom, andabout whom we conduct such analysis, and to examineour reasons for doing so.

This brings us full circle to the question of identity,that of the researcher. We must consider who we arewhen we engage in research (despite Brosius’s reticenceon this point). We refer specifically to the way in whichresearchers and social movements position themselvesrelative to each other. Are we writing with, for, or aboutenvironmental social movements? On what basis dothe movements participate in our analyses throughtheir (non)cooperation with our efforts? What are thepolitical affinities between us? We propose that we, asresearchers, explicitly address the entanglement of ouranalyses and our politics and accept at least partial re-sponsibility for our works’ political and practical conse-quences. This carries with it a cost—the loss of the uni-versal ethnographic mask. The consequence of suchtransparency is nothing less than the revelation of our-selves, our purposes, and our personal, professional, andpolitical relationships to the place, people, and issueswe address in our work. The major unmasking may beour own.

susan c. stonichDepartment of Anthropology, Environmental StudiesProgram, University of California, Santa Barbara,Calf. 93106, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 29 x 98

Reading Brosius’s timely and thoughtful article broughtto mind an incident that occurred during a recent inter-national meeting on conservation and development inwhich I participated. During the conference, a leader ofa network of grassroots nongovernmental organizationsfrom a nation-state in the South candidly revealed thepolitical agenda underlying the coalition she repre-sented. She explained that the network members identi-fied themselves as ‘‘environmentalists’’ to obfuscatetheir true character as a resistance movement deter-mined to raze the current regime and replace it with aform of governance that reflected their own values andvisions of the future. She went on to state that if theyopenly proclaimed this agenda the government and itsallies would squelch them immediately. Being identi-fied nationally and internationally as ‘‘environmental-ists’’ they had created a political space in which to miti-gate the abuses of the state while also garneringessential support from Northern environmentalists andothers. The leader’s statements concretely demon-strated the potential for integrating environmental con-cerns into broader movements promoting livelihoodsand social justice, linking local ecologies and transna-tional environmental agendas, and articulating civil so-ciety and global environmental governance. While mar-


veling at this revelation, I was grateful that no suchcandid public statement had been made by any of themembers of the global network of NGOs with which Ihave been working recently. Had such a statement beenmade I would have been forced to make a profound pro-fessional, personal, and ethical decision about what todo with the information. Such knowledge would cer-tainly have been central to my scholarly objectives, butincluding it in reports or academic articles could havebeen devastating to coalition members and their activi-ties. Further complicating my decision would have beenmy somewhat ambiguous role as both an anthropologistconducting research on the global network and an aca-demic adviser to the coalition. Fortunately, I have notyet been faced with such a situation.

Brosius is correct to urge those of us who study envi-ronmentalisms and social/environmental movementsto confront the implications and repercussions of ourwork. It is difficult to resist the siren songs of theseemerging phenomena. They are theoretically compel-ling in areas of long-standing interest to anthropologists(e.g., conceptualizations of ‘‘community,’’ the ‘‘local,’’and ‘‘participation’’) as well as in emerging and exceed-ingly challenging concerns (e.g., articulations betweenthe local and the global, civil society networks as actorsin transnational governance, resistance and backlash,the role of advanced information and communicationstechnology in facilitating and/or hindering global resis-tance networks, etc.). Brosius is absolutely accurate inpointing out that when we choose to study these phe-nomena we place ourselves squarely in the midst of di-verse and contending political interests, agendas, andactions. By assuming a seemingly apolitical positionand not confronting and dealing effectively with this re-ality we run the risk of having our work co-opted, mis-represented, and deployed against the groups withwhich we are most closely aligned and sympathetic.

What can we do? First, we can directly confront thepolitical context of our work. As in my case, this maydemand that we take an explicit political position re-garding our area of inquiry and the groups with whichwe work. For academic anthropologists this may haveserious consequences not all of which are positive,given that (in my opinion) the reward systems of manyacademic institutions and departments undervalue theefforts of scholars engaged in work aimed at under-standing and ameliorating real-world problems. Themarginal position and relatively low esteem accordedapplied anthropology is a good example. Yet, in my ex-perience as someone trained in applied anthropology, itis applied (and development) anthropologists who havedone the most thinking (and writing) about these issuesand have dealt with them the most effectively. Appliedand development anthropologists have been at the fore-front of defining new roles for anthropologists as truecollaborators with groups formerly conceived as ‘‘re-search subjects,’’ ‘‘research populations,’’ and/or ‘‘keyinformants.’’

From a theoretical and methodological perspective,we also must find ways to integrate the political

(broadly conceived to include power and power rela-tions) and the material into our studies of environmen-talisms. Although I heartily concur with Brosius’sclaims regarding the importance of understanding thediscourse(s) of environmentalism, it is important topoint out that environmentalisms and movements areconcerned not with discourse per se but with advocacy,practice, and political action. Here I think that recentdevelopments in political ecology, the boundaries ofwhich have been pushed by the realities of environmen-tal movements as well as by the influences of discoursetheory and poststructuralism, are particularly signifi-cant. The edited volume by Peet and Watts (1996) citedby Brosius and my own work (Stonich 1998) are exam-ples of political ecological analyses of environmen-talisms and social/environmental movements whichare both materialist and discursive. The theoretical,methodological, and practical constraints faced by an-thropologists studying environmentalisms and relatedphenomena are matched with equal potential. Anthro-pologists can contribute significantly to understandingthese phenomena as well as to promoting (and hinder-ing) political action.

j im weilDepartment of Anthropology, Hamline University, St.Paul, Minn. 55104, U.S.A. ([email protected]).17 x 98

As a survey of imminent tendencies in a prominent do-main of current anthropological practice, the article byBrosius resembles contributions to the Annual Reviewof Anthropology. It differs by incorporating a set of com-mentaries from other practitioners who might wish todefine the boundaries differently, shift the emphasisamong topics studied, or treat the results according toother theoretical or ethical criteria. Before addressingthese points I want to say how interesting and usefulBrosius’s efforts have been in accomplishing his statedobjective: to survey a rapidly expanding body of re-search on contemporary environmentalism as a ‘‘richsite of cultural production’’ and ‘‘a whole new discur-sive regime’’ on ‘‘the forms of relationship between andamong natures, nations, movements, individuals, andinstitutions.’’ I especially appreciate the comprehensivetreatment of environmentalism as one kind of socialmovement engaging in effective activism during a pe-riod otherwise characterized by much political exhaus-tion.

Perhaps I am reading Brosius within a conceptualframework he does not share. Is his construction of ‘‘en-vironmental anthropology’’ mainly concerned with thestudy of environmentalism per se, or is he treating it asthe latest approach to the broader realm of specializa-tion generally considered under the rubric of ‘‘ecologi-cal anthropology’’? If the former is correct—bridgingthe enterprise over to political anthropology and cul-tural studies—then the following comments will betangential. Brosius may indeed be claiming the heritage


of ecological anthropology, however, when he writes,‘‘My suggestions for future forms of scholarly engage-ment with environmentalism are premised on the beliefthat anthropology has a critical role to play not only incontributing to our understanding of the human impacton the physical and biotic environment but also inshowing how that environment is constructed, repre-sented, claimed, and contested’’ (emphasis added). Inthe research being reported, I find the ‘‘not only’’ sideof the equation much less prominent than the ‘‘butalso’’ side.

In the long, rich, and constantly transforming subdis-ciplinary and transdisciplinary tradition of ecologicalanthropology, this kind of ‘‘environmental anthropol-ogy’’ seems to represent a shift in the balance from whathas been labeled the etic dimension to the emic dimen-sion of ethnographic description. The work reported issimultaneously more concerned with exposing omni-scient, totalizing tendencies in outsiders’ objectifyingaccounts and more eager to recognize the validity of lo-cal knowledge of biophysical (and social) environments.This trend has brought a narrowing of ethnographic at-tention from the full range of daily activities in identi-fiable social units to cognitive activity, especially in re-gard to the identity politics of social movements.

Attribution of a ‘‘persistent interest in localized adap-tations to specific ecosystems’’ to the ongoing legacy of‘‘the ecological anthropology of the 1960s and early1970s’’ is fair (insofar as ‘‘adaptation’’ is understood tosubsume cases of maladaptation); linking this researchtradition unequivocally to ‘‘an abiding scientism’’ isnot. But I commend Brosius for including favorable ref-erences to predecessors in ecological anthropology (in n.5). He might have cited additional examples of relevantrecent research that document a continuity of interestsand soften the impression of a paradigm shift (for exam-ple, among those mentioned, by Leslie Sponsel). In anycase, the development of ecological anthropology hasbeen cumulative. It retains more from, in particular, Ju-lian Steward’s original formulation of cultural ecology(demonstrating the embeddedness of a way of life in itsresource base) than has been jettisoned, and, while theextreme swing of the human-ecology pendulum treatedhumans as just another biological population, that tooserves as a valuable heuristic benchmark. An ecologicalanthropology textbook by Emilio Moran that estab-lished this historically cumulative approach has just ap-peared in a revised edition (1999 [1982]).

If my sense of a narrowing ethnographic purview isaccurate, then what might be the reason? Perhaps thelabor-intensive fieldwork practices of such paragons ofholistic ecological anthropology as Roy Rappaport areno longer viable in the academic marketplace, whichmay resemble other industries in its emphasis onquickly changing styles of packaging. Yes, ‘‘discursiveregimes’’ reveal much about the cultural globalizationwe all are experiencing; but will that conceptual appara-tus still be employed for environmental analysis, say,20 years from now? Brosius’s framework does enablehim to make cogent remarks that expand on many fas-

cinating points. Thus, ‘‘claims to authenticity are a crit-ical dimension of legitimacy,’’ with the result that sub-altern groups must essentialize their cultures andestablish transcendental relationships to territory. Likethe need for affirmative action to promote social equity,this demonstrates how far we still remain from a ho-meostatic global ecosystem. I share his sense of ironyabout contradictory consequences of identity politicsand would add only that such critical wedges have char-acterized the best moments in anthropology since thetime of Boas.

Reply

j. peter brosiusAthens, Ga., U.S.A. 12 ii 99

Reading the reactions of commentators to my articlehas been a singularly enriching experience, and I havelearned a great deal from their observations and in-sights. It has been particularly interesting to see themultiple ways in which my argument has been inter-preted, paraphrased, summarized, and extended in newdirections. Berglund’s discussion of ‘‘momentum’’ isparticularly incisive, taking this idea in a direction I hadnot previously considered. I share her concern for find-ing ways of ‘‘seeking systematic pattern(s) as a principlefor scholarly practice . . . without totalizing’’ and, in atime of reactionary antienvironmentalism, see thevalue in this as a form of engaged scholarly praxis. Esco-bar also makes a number of very interesting suggestionswith respect to ‘‘elements for future engagement.’’ Bavi-skar urges us not to forget ‘‘rurality’’ as a concept deeplyimplicated in the constitution of the natural and urgesus to attend to the question of how nature is evacuatedfrom that which is ‘‘industrial’’ and ‘‘urban.’’ Orloverightly chides me for too firmly separating politics anddepoliticization; we do need to be more careful in howwe assess the ways in which various forms of politicalagency are constituted, and the process may be morecomplex than we have allowed. Dove properly stressesthe need for more careful assessment of the emancipa-tory impact of an earlier ecological anthropology. Horn-borg is correct to remind us that ‘‘anthropologists, too,engage in identity politics’’ as we strive to distinguishourselves from journalists and others concerned withrepresenting terrains of environmental activism or in-stitutionalization. Rocheleau and Radel argue for amore complex view of identities as a way of thinkingabout the dilemma of critiquing essentialism and nego-tiating the divide between ‘‘authentic’’ and ‘‘strategic’’essentialisms. Guha shows how exemplary scholarshipcan provide alternative ways of thinking about the sto-ries we tell ourselves about the history, or histories, ofenvironmentalism.

In the following, I will first address a series of com-mon themes: (1) the characteristics of, and relationship


between, ecological and environmental anthropology,(2) the relationship between constructivism and cri-tique and the question of our accountability in thestudy of environmentalism, (3) the nature of the rela-tion between analysis and intervention, and (4) thedefinition of political ecology. Then I will address a se-ries of minor points.

A number of commentators have remarked upon mytreatment of the distinction between the ecological an-thropology of the 1960s and 1970s and the nascent ‘‘en-vironmental anthropology’’ of the present and of the na-ture of the relation between them. I was well aware thatmy brief mention of some of the differences betweenthe two would not be satisfactory to those familiar withthis history, but it was not my purpose to provide acomprehensive account of it.

With respect to my portrayal of ecological anthropol-ogy, Guha remarks that I do not sufficiently acknowl-edge ‘‘the contributions of older traditions’’ and that Iignore the work of key figures such as Harold Conklin.I did not intend to disparage an earlier ecological an-thropology or to deprecate the work of any particularindividual. Having done my first anthropologicalfieldwork with a Philippine upland society (Brosius1983, 1990), I have nothing but admiration for the workof Conklin, whose detailed studies influenced me in nu-merous ways and—to amplify a point made by Dove—whose efforts to document the richness of Hanunoo(and Ifugao) knowledge systems did much to lay thegroundwork for challenges to modernist assumptionsabout indigenous subsistence systems.1 Further, as astudent of Roy Rappaport I have an abiding respect forthe ethnographic richness of his work and for the singu-lar elegance of the ideas he developed most notably inPigs for the Ancestors (1968). At the same time, I findWeil’s defense of an apparently unadulterated Stew-ardian ecological anthropology unconvincing, and I donot see how anyone could question the scientism ofthat approach. One does not have to be a poststructura-list to recognize that the valorization of anthropologyas a science, long a prominent element in our disciplin-ary self-identification (recall Radcliffe-Brown’s effortsto establish a ‘‘natural science of society’’), reached akind of rhetorical apogee in 1960s–1970s ecological an-thropology as we borrowed one concept after another—ecosystem, adaptation, niche, carrying capacity—fromecology. I also think it uninformative to try to force thedistinction between ecological and environmental an-thropology into the timeworn etic/emic dichotomy.

With respect to my characterization of environmen-tal anthropology, Escobar notes that I leave ‘‘unat-tended certain aspects of ecologically oriented anthro-pology that do not emerge from . . . a [poststructuralist]framework’’ and suggests that my ‘‘map needs to bedrawn with more shades and contours.’’ Hornborg, too,suggests that I ignore much of significance in recent en-vironmental anthropology. I can only agree with them

1. See also Brosius (1988). In writing this piece I drew extensivelyon Conklin’s Ethnographic Atlas of Ifugao (1980).

here. Environmental anthropology is as yet only looselydefined (but see Blount 1997, Biersack n.d., Kottak n.d.).However one chooses to define it, it covers a very broadrange of topics: historical ecology, symbolic ecology,political ecology, studies of indigenous knowledge sys-tems, studies of conservation and community, andmore. While an interest in environmental movementsand discourses has been a key element in the develop-ment of environmental anthropology, it is but one areaof focus among many. My purpose was merely to sketchsome of the broad outlines of this perspective as a wayof moving into a discussion of anthropological engage-ments with environmentalism. Further, to suggest as Idid that environmental anthropology is very much in-formed by poststructuralist social theory is not to saythat that is all there is to it. Finally, it would be mis-guided to suggest that environmental anthropology issomehow immune to the routinization to which eco-logical anthropology succumbed. Part of my purpose indescribing contemporary trends in the anthropologicalstudy of environmentalism was to suggest that we arealready faced with a degree of routinization. Dove’s callfor more attention to understanding the processes bywhich ‘‘creative, paradigmatic movements are madebut then normalized’’ is of particular interest in thisconnection.

With regard to my treatment of the relation betweenecological and environmental anthropology, Dove be-lieves the appearance I give of a ‘‘sharp discontinuity’’between ecological and environmental anthropology tobe exaggerated, while Weil suggests that I ‘‘might havecited additional examples of relevant recent researchthat document a continuity of interests and soften theimpression of a paradigm shift.’’ Hornborg suggests thatEuropean anthropology does not suffer from the sameclear-cut dichotomy between ‘‘ecological’’ and ‘‘envi-ronmental’’ anthropology that he identifies as existingin the United States. In tracing the continuities andidentifying the discontinuities between ecological andenvironmental anthropology we need to balance ac-counts focused on the work of particular individuals(Conklin, Rappaport, McCay, Orlove), the complex andshifting careers of certain key concepts (adaptation, car-rying capacity), and the histories of particular contro-versies (protein capture in the Amazon, the nature ofthe potlatch). An adequate account of the relationshipbetween ecological and environmental anthropologywould have to achieve some synthesis of these. My in-tent was simply to identify a degree of historical discon-tinuity between them. However one judges the value ofecological anthropology or positions oneself theoreti-cally, it seems to me undeniable that while many indi-vidual anthropologists continued to do work in thisarea, ecological anthropology as a whole experienced adecline in the late 1970s and 1980s as the theoreticalcenter of gravity within the discipline shifted towardstructural Marxism, political economy, interpretive an-thropology, and, somewhat later, poststructuralism andother perspectives. ‘‘Rather sharp discontinuity’’ wasperhaps not a good choice of words to describe this situ-


ation. We should, I agree, be cautious in allowing thisdistinction to displace our sense of the continuities thatexist between the ecological anthropology of the pastand the environmental anthropology of the present. Allthe same, it is important to recognize the differences be-tween them. I think there is value in trying to articulatewhat is new and what sorts of common themes areemerging in environmental anthropology today, and Itake the comments here as a challenge to do this in amanner that does credit to the diversity of approachesbeing pursued.

At the same time, just as I am concerned about reify-ing the distinction between ecological and environmen-tal anthropology, I worry that there is a certain dangerin trying to provide too definitive an account of thisemerging paradigm. I think we are observing somethingthat usually passes unnoticed: the early stages of the es-tablishment of a grand narrative. For all the guidancethat such efforts can provide, this is something weshould be cautious about. While one can usefully offeran overview of certain trends to guide readers to a seriesof theoretical connecting points through a very broadtransdisciplinary literature, any attempt to circum-scribe it too definitively may contribute to the creationof a narrative that limits the types of questions thatmight be asked in the future. It is always a struggle tonegotiate the path between the desire for clarity and theenervating effects of totalization. This is an excitingtime, with a great deal of highly original transdisciplin-ary work in progress, and I worry about our desire todiminish ambiguity in what counts as environmentalanthropology.

A second issue that several commentators raisetouches on my discussion of our accountability asscholars engaged in the study of environmentalism—what Hornborg glosses as the relationship between con-structivism and critique. I am much in agreement withtheir efforts to extend my observations, though I thinksome clarification of particular points is in order.

A vigorous debate has emerged in recent years overthe question of essentialism and what Lattas (1993) hastermed the ‘‘politics of authenticity’’ in assertions of in-digenous identity (Beckett and Mato 1996; Conklin1997; Friedman 1992a, b, 1996; Hanson 1989, 1991;Jackson 1989, 1995; Jolly 1992; Keesing 1989; Keesingand Tonkinson 1982; Lattas 1993; Linnekin 1991, 1992;Ramos 1994; Rogers 1996; Sahlins 1993). I believe thisto be one of the most pressing issues that anthropolo-gists engaged in the study of environmental or indige-nous rights movements face, whether the images we ex-amine are the self-essentializations of indigenousmovements or the romantic essentialisms of Euro-American environmentalists. Baviskar touches on thecore of this issue in noting that those ‘‘engaged in mean-ingful action’’ have a ‘‘heuristic need for stable topolo-gies, reference points, and boundaries.’’

Baviskar and Guha take my expression of uneasinessas an assertion that such essentialisms should be ex-empt from analysis, but this is not at all what I am ar-guing. My intention here is simply to raise what I con-

sider to be a troubling issue and ask whether there isany way out of this dilemma. Hvalkof suggests that inraising the matter of our accountability I am simply re-stating a long-standing concern. To be sure, anthropolo-gists have attempted to articulate their concerns aboutthe ‘‘unintended consequences’’ of their work and theircomplicity in structures of domination for some timenow (Asad 1973; Berreman 1968; Gough 1968a, b;Huizer and Mannheim 1979; Hymes 1969; Scheper-Hughes 1995). But it would be wrong to conclude thatthere is nothing new in our concerns about the critiqueof essentialisms or other discursive practices in our en-gagements with environmentalism. This in fact issomething that I and others consider in great detail aforthcoming special issue of Identities: Global Studiesin Culture and Power addressing these and broaderquestions concerning the implications of our efforts toprovide ethnographic accounts of contemporary envi-ronmental and indigenous rights movements. Some ofthe broad outlines of my argument in that volume(Brosius n.d. b) may be sketched as follows:

Traditional conceptions of ethnographic practice arepremised on what might be termed a topology of ‘‘sim-ple locality’’—a topology which defines the task of theethnographer as one of representing for an anthropologi-cal audience some actually existing place. The conve-nience of such a topology lies in the fact that the in-tended or unintended consequences of the act ofrepresentation can be measured by the degree of actualor potential impact on a particular place and on thosewho live there. Where we are concerned about the po-tentially harmful effects of our attempts at representa-tion, our tendency has been to avoid negative conse-quences through disguise: change the name of thecommunity, change the names of informants, or per-haps delete any mention of what we might know aboutthe occurrence of illegal activities. The topology of sim-ple locality, then, is a strategy for discursively consti-tuting a focalized ‘‘there,’’ and like the ‘‘ethnographicpresent’’ (Fabian 1983) it is nothing more than a conve-nient fiction—our construction of the political spacesin which and about which we write rather than any ac-tually existing configuration of space or place. If our to-pologies for imagining the consequences of our work areproblematic in traditional ethnographic research con-texts, those problems multiply exponentially in theconvergence between our interest in the study of subal-tern social movements and other forms of mobilizationand the multisitedness of contemporary research con-texts.

Social movements are in essence dedicated to chal-lenging traditional configurations of power, and whatwe disclose about them in reporting our findings—in-house conversations, strategy meetings, anxieties ex-pressed—provides a map for these who seek to suppressthem. In short, we undercut resistance when we showhow it works (Said 1989:220). The disguise that may beeffective in the context of traditional ethnographic re-search is utterly ineffectual in the study of social move-ments. While we can perhaps change the names of par-


ticular activists and therefore possibly insulate themfrom arrest or other explicit forms of repression, we laythe groundwork for forms of counterresistance that maybe much more consequential. The threat to socialmovements is not simply that they may face repressionbut that their efforts may prove ineffective because ofthe effectiveness of efforts to counter them, and our eth-nographic presence may contribute to that. What mostdetermines the outcome of their efforts is whether theyare able to communicate a set of moral/political imper-atives in the face of efforts to deploy counterimageswhich displace them. To the extent that we reveal theinner workings of such movements we provide the rawmaterial for opponents to construct counterimages,thereby increasing the likelihood that they will be un-able to effect change.

The multisitedness of contemporary ethnographic re-search projects focusing on social movements is ofequal consequence for imagining the consequences ofour work. According to Marcus (1995:96), multisitedethnography ‘‘moves out from the single sites and localsituations of conventional ethnographic research de-signs to examine the circulation of cultural meanings,objects, and identities in diffuse time-space.’’ However,the growing effectiveness of various forms of capitalistpenetration, the increasing ubiquity and effectivenessof technologies of state power, and continually globaliz-ing processes of cultural production all contribute to aproliferation of ‘‘chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, orjuxtapositions of locations’’ (1995:105) that constitutesa condition of multisitedness.2 Acknowledging thiscondition suggests that we must also acknowledge thatour topologies for describing any situation and identi-fying the threats that may arise from our attempts atrepresentation of that situation are always incomplete.The agents that may impinge on the sites we are study-ing may be completely outside our field of vision, eitherby virtue of the inherent complexity of contemporarymultisitedness or by their conscious design. These arepowerful actors who are vitally interested in what we aredoing precisely because they are charged with counter-ing the efforts of the kinds of movements we study.3

Taking all this into consideration, Guha’s dismissalof my concerns on the grounds that anthropologistsseem to have an ‘‘exaggerated respect for activists’’ andthat succumbing to this leads to bad science seems tome unsupportable. A central tenet of anthropologicalpractice is that we should do no harm to those westudy. Obviously in the study of social movements,where we may be engaged both with movement mem-bers and with those who would oppose them, adheringto such an injunction is not always easy, but we must

2. See also Gupta and Ferguson (1997), an important recent inter-vention into traditional anthropological understandings of ‘‘thefield’’ and the practice of ‘‘fieldwork.’’3. See Herman and Chomsky (1988) and Stauber and Rampton(1995). An example of the power and strategic invisibility of thesefirms can be seen in the central role that Hill & Knowlton playedin shaping American public opinion during the Gulf War (Stauberand Rampton 1995:167–75).

avoid making poor choices about what we reveal. WhileGuha argues that ‘‘commissars and policemen . . . havetheir own sources,’’ the fact that they might should beenough to give us pause. In any event, it may be delegi-timization or displacement rather than explicit repres-sion that is of the greatest consequence for the move-ments we study. One need only read the dismissivenews bulletins in the Malaysian Timber Bulletin, dis-tributed to municipal governments throughout Europeand North America, to recognize that somebody is fol-lowing Malaysian rain-forest politics very closely. Tosuggest that ‘‘fear should not inhibit the pursuit oftruth’’ is equally dangerous. Rising above fear for one’sown welfare is one thing, but disregarding the fate ofthose we study in pursuit of ‘‘the truth’’ is quite an-other. Inconvenient as it may be, we must forever askwhat the impact of our analyses might be.

Another point raised by a number of commentatorsis the nature of the relationship between analysis andintervention. Orlove seems willing to accept that cer-tain forms of analysis can be viewed as interventionsbut asks whether analyses can also be something else.Stonich appears to view these as different orders of phe-nomena when she mentions the need to ‘‘integrate thepolitical . . . and the material into our studies of envi-ronmentalism’’ and says that ‘‘environmentalisms andmovements are concerned not with discourse per se butwith advocacy, practice, and political action.’’ The im-plication is that an emphasis on discourse overlooks the‘‘real stakes’’ for actors. To this I can only say that theentire point of a great deal of poststructuralist theory isthat discourse does matter—that it plays a key role increating the grounds on which ‘‘real stakes’’ are defined.Whether analyses necessarily constitute interventiondepends on the type of analysis. In traditional ethno-graphic studies this may not be the case, but in thestudy of social movements analyses can influenceevents, thereby reconfiguring the very context being ob-served.4 Thus, to the extent that our analyses impingeupon the streams of rhetoric, policies, actions, and con-structions of reality that are the stuff of environmentaldiscourses and debates, they do constitute interven-tions of a very substantial sort. The modernist scien-tism that reached its apogee in 1960s–1970s ecologicalanthropology and continues to dominate some sectorsof the discipline provides anthropologists with the con-venient fiction that analysis and intervention are dis-tinct orders of practice and that the latter belongs to ap-plied anthropology, action anthropology, consultancy,or the like. However, as Orlove trenchantly reminds us,‘‘Once anthropology confronted the grounding of claimsof realism within strategies of representation, it becamedifficult to oppose thought and action, to separate wordand deed.’’ We must simply accept that this is one out-come of our decision to turn our attention to the studyof social movements.

What, then, should we do? Certainly it is not enoughjust to address our strategies of representation and re-

4. See Hymes (1969) and Turner (1991).


treat to a ‘‘politics of textuality’’ (Said 1989:209). As Fa-bian argues, ‘‘Hanging the walls full with reflexive mir-rors may brighten the place but offers no way out’’(1991:260). Nor, as some have suggested, should wesimply cease all efforts at representation.5 Rather, weneed first to locate ourselves (both for ourselves and forour research subjects) within the ‘‘concrete contexts ofpower’’ (Fabian 1991:256) we are attempting to repre-sent. This task is far from simple, but it is critical foran anthropology aware of its complicity in structures ofdomination and alert to the power of its visualizingpractices.

We can, of course, take steps of one sort or anotherto support emancipatory projects. Dove describes howecological anthropology provided ‘‘politically empow-ering counterdiscourses’’ against the ‘‘deprecation of in-digenous societies under the aegis of high-modernist de-velopment theory,’’ and Escobar notes the contributionof anthropologists to ‘‘alternative views of conservationand sustainability.’’ Orlove, through an insightful ren-dering of the ideas of ‘‘audience’’ and ‘‘site,’’ argues forthe value of ‘‘concrete’’ interventions. Describing howwe write for different audiences and how we might doso at many different sites, he reminds us of the ‘‘waysin which our writings can influence broader debates inmany social contexts.’’

Baviskar raises the important point that ‘‘interroga-tion need not necessarily be a move away from prac-tice’’ and concludes hopefully that ‘‘it is possible to res-cue a dialogical relationship between anthropologistand subject.’’ Similarly, Escobar asks whether anthro-pologists ‘‘have a role to play in this intellectual and po-litical project’’ in which social movements are engaged,and Stonich envisions a role for anthropologists as ‘‘truecollaborators.’’ Rocheleau and Radel urge us to askwhether we are writing with, for, or about environmen-tal social movements. Adopting a strategy of dialogismmay work in certain contexts, but to the extent that ourprojects are multisited, it becomes difficult to discernwhat a dialogic relationship is and with or for whom weare writing. Further, while I would never discount thepossibility that much good can come of various formsof articulation between anthropologists and the formsof environmentalism they study and while we know ofmany cases in which anthropologists have been soughtout by indigenous communities or subaltern socialmovements, it is still usually we who seek articulation,perhaps out of a real sense of commitment or perhapsmerely as a way to persuade ourselves that our work hassomething other than academic value. Although thereare many domains in which we have had a positive in-fluence on public policy, in our efforts to articulate withenvironmental social movements I think we suffer froma kind of naive optimism. We need to face up to the factthat this may be a domain in which our analyses/inter-ventions are not needed.

Hvalkof, Rocheleau and Radel, Stonich, and Escobarsuggest that ‘‘political ecology’’ might provide us with

5. See Enslin (1994), Fabian (1990, 1991), and Fox (1991).

the conceptual tools for addressing these issues. WhileI have great admiration for much of the work being doneunder this rubric (Durham 1995; Schroeder 1993; Gorz1993; Sheridan 1988; Stonich 1993; Greenberg and Park1994; Bryant 1992; Escobar 1996, 1999; Moore 1996;Neumann 1992; Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter, andWangari 1996; Schmink and Wood 1987), at times I findmyself questioning the rubric itself. As I have noted(Brosius 1999:17), there are at least two approaches inanthropology for which the label ‘‘political ecology’’ isclaimed, one representing a fusion of human ecologywith political economy and the other informed bypoststructuralist social theory. However valuable thesestudies are, the fact that different writers mean very dif-ferent things by ‘‘political ecology’’ raises the questionhow coherent or helpful the rubric really is.

Weil appears to interpret my argument as disparagingquality research in favor of gratuitous, self-indulgenttheorizing, asking whether the current conceptual appa-ratus will still be employed for environmental analysis20 years from now. My position is anything but that im-plied by Weil. I very much doubt that in 20 years wewill be employing the same theoretical apparatus thatwe employ today; I have already raised the specter ofroutinization, and one can sense other theoretical shiftsin the making. Unquestionably, though, whatever weare doing in 20 years will at least be informed by thequestions we are posing today. It is quite certain thatwe will never again return to the sort of cultural ecologythat Weil appears to have such nostalgia for.

Guha also seems to think that I am suggesting thatsound scholarship does not matter, but that was not myintent at all. I merely meant to say that we are produc-ing very good accounts of environmental movementstoday and are likely to continue doing so—that insteadof worrying about this we should be concerned aboutour role in the study of environmental movements.Guha further believes my argument vulnerable in thatenvironmental movements almost always have com-peting factions offering competing interpretations:‘‘Which one of these does the anthropologist then deferto?’’ This is a good question but one which I believe myargument and a good deal of contemporary theory ad-dress. What lies behind our interest in contestation isthe idea of regarding no perspective or account as au-thoritative but viewing each in the context of a muchlarger set of engagements, conversations, discourses,and other forms of negotiation. For those of us engagedin anthropological studies of contemporary environ-mentalism, it is the very diversity of perspectivesamong and between various kinds of actors and theshifts that we continually see occurring in their per-spectives and positionings that makes this such a com-pelling topic of research.

Hvalkof, who characterizes the article as a ‘‘cata-logue,’’ asks whether, ‘‘beyond its utilitarian aspect,’’the approach I take here would have been valid for do-mains other than environmentalism. In a period whenmany anthropologists are engaged in studies of environ-mentalism, it seems quite reasonable to examine some


of the sources of our interest, to try to discern presenttrends, and to try to identify a series of issues that mightbe examined in future research. Whether the perspec-tive I bring to bear on environmentalism is valid for ad-dressing other domains—development, medicine, tech-nology—is beside the point. Hvalkof seems annoyedthat I take my ‘‘theoretical inspiration and ballast’’from other fields, but I cannot imagine that an anthro-pologist whose theoretical direction came exclusivelyfrom within the discipline would have very much newor interesting to say. The transparency of disciplinaryboundaries that characterizes a great deal of recentwork may not be healthy for us institutionally, but itmakes eminent sense intellectually and is well worththe risk.

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Wanted

For a documentary series in preparation by two journal-ists on ‘‘other-gendered’’ people in cultures around theworld, referrals to relevant books, articles, journals, pa-pers, films or videos, archival footage, personal con-tacts, and other sources on Native American ‘‘two-spirit people,’’ the Balkan hommasse or tobelija,the Indian hijras, the xanith in Oman, the acault inBurma/Myanmar, the basaja in Indonesia, the Tahitianmahu, and the sererr of the Pokot in Kenya, among oth-ers. Although our approach throughout the series willbe character-driven and contemporary, based on a fewindividuals in each place, we hope to learn as much as

possible about the history and context of people livingoutside of binary ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female’’ classifications indifferent cultures. By portraying people whose genderidentities do not fit that dichotomy, whether throughinstitutionalized alternatives or through intermediateroles which allow a broader range of gender identitiesin their societies, we intend to raise questions aboutdefinitions and conceptions of gender. Please write usat aRTwORKS, Democratiestraat 30/2, 1070 Brussels,Belgium, or contact us by e-mail: Leslie Asako Gladsjo([email protected]) and/or Estelle Slegers ([email protected]).

anthropological engagements with environmentalism

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informed anthropology

current anthropology

wennergren foundation

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