cepek, michael l. foucault in the forest - questioning environmentality in amazonia

MICHAEL L. CEPEKUniversity of Texas at San Antonio

Foucault in the forest:Questioning environmentality in Amazonia

A B S T R A C TIn this article, I analyze the encounter between theField Museum of Natural History and AmazonianEcuadors Cofan people to question the concept ofenvironmentality: the idea that environmentalistprograms and movements operate as forms ofgovernmentality in Michel Foucaults sense. I arguethat, although the Field Museums communityconservation projects constitute a regulatoryrationale and technique, they do not transformCofan subjectivity according to plan. By exploringCofan peoples critical consciousness ofenvironmentalist interventions, I aim to cast doubton the governmentality paradigms utility foranalyzing the complexities of cultural difference,intercultural encounter, and directed change.[governmentality, environmentality, indigenousconservation, environmental management, Amazonia]

The inspiration for this article stems froma reaction that I believe tobe familiar to many anthropologists who struggle to combine nu-anced ethnography and theoretical critique with practical aid totheir research populations. As an academic who collaborates withindigenous peoples and Western environmentalists in Amazonia,

I am often struck by a pair of opposing perspectives. After decades of failedprojects and frustrated intentions, many conservationists who work withindigenous communities wonder whether their interventions accomplishanything at all. In contrast, theoretically ambitious academics suggest thatcommunity-based management projects transform the entirety of indige-nous being through the forms of discourse, practice, and knowledge thatMichel Foucault (1991) calls governmentality. In other words, the actorswhowant towork toward indigenous conservationismoften feel utterly im-potent, whereas the analystswho critique themgrant a near-magical powerto their intentions and actions.

In this article, I offer an ethnographic account of an encounter be-tween science, conservation, and indigenous culture and practice in theAmazonian homeland of Ecuadors Cofan people, an ethnolinguistic groupthat numbers approximately two thousand and lives on both sides of thecountrys Colombian border. My main objective is to question the analyt-ical and political utility of what Arun Agrawal (2005b) calls environmen-tality, or the idea that environmentalist logics, projects, and movementsare forms of governmentality in the Foucauldian sense (see also Darier1999; Luke 1999). More broadly, I aim to provoke thought on the impact ofFoucaults work on all ethnographic attempts to understand the complex-ities of cultural difference, intercultural encounter, and directed change. Isuggest thatmany analysts who employ the governmentality paradigm un-derestimate the degree to which people are capable of forging a critical,self-aware, and culturally framed perspective on collaborative projects forsocioecological transformation.

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 501515, ISSN 0094-0496, onlineISSN 1548-1425. C 2011 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01319.x

American Ethnologist Volume 38 Number 3 August 2011

My material comes from more than ten years of workwith two sets of actors: the Cofan inhabitants of Zabalo, acommunity of approximately 175 individuals in far north-eastern Ecuador, and the employees of the Field Museumof Natural Historys Office of Environmental and Conser-vation Programs (ECP), which has been pursuing conser-vation objectives in Zabalo and other Cofan communitiesfor more than a decade.1 When one is confronted withthe extent of the ECPs efforts in Zabalo, it is not diffi-cult to understand the temptation to identify a form ofpower that operates through the calculated and system-atic conduct of conduct (Foucault 1991). The ECP dividesthe forest and the rivers into a segmented landscape ofcensus trails, distance markers, and resource zones. Withinthese sectors, Cofan monitors perform structured tasksto track wildlife populations and harvesting trends. Theytransform masses of quantified information into comput-erized databases and graphic representations. In the lan-guage of text, table, and diagram, individuals environ-mental practices become available to the surveillance ofboth community members and distant officials, includ-ing government bureaucrats, Western academics, and NGOagents.

I argue that although the ECPs program of scien-tific conservation is a regulatory regime par excellence,it does not succeed in remaking the beliefs, desires, val-ues, and identities of Cofan participants. In other words,although the ECP program of scientific conservation en-tails the performance of novel institutions and actions, itdoes not transform the Cofan into environmental sub-jects (Agrawal 2005b:xiv). Rather than merging their senseof self with the logic of a governmental scheme, Cofanpeople experience participation in ECP projects as a formof alienated labor, to use a broad interpretation of KarlMarxs (1964) concept. From this perspective, Cofan peoplemaintain a critical consciousness of the activities, social-ity, equipment, and products of scientific conservation, andthey view their participation in relation to their political as-pirations and cultural background rather than the aims andrationales of the ECP.

I basemy conclusions on a long history of researchwithCofan people and the Field Museum. I began to work withthe Cofan in 1994, and I spent a full year in Zabalo dur-ing 2001 and 2002, when I conducted focused and holis-tic ethnographic work and acquired functional fluency inAingae (the Cofan language, which remains unclassified).2

In total, I have completed approximately three years of im-mersed research with Cofan people. During my initial stayin Zabalo, I also began to work as a volunteer on ECPprojects. Given my linguistic and cultural knowledge, theField Museum hired me as an anthropological advisor from2004 to 2006, and I continue to serve as an unpaid fellow inthe museums Division of Environment, Culture, and Con-servation.

All of my work with the ECP focuses on protectingthe ecological integrity and legal status of Cofan peoplestraditional territory. I have spent hundreds of hours in-teracting with Cofan project workers and ECP extensionagents during dozens of sessions in Zabalo, other Cofancommunities, and Chicago, the home of the Field Museum.Although much of my work consists of cultural and lin-guistic translation, the museum asked me to provide anethnographic perspective on the means and ends of theirCofan-related projects.3 This article represents a step in thatdirection. I intend my insights to open up a space for dia-logue onnewpossibilities for collaboration between indige-nous people, Western scientists, and global environmentalorganizations. More modestly, I hope that my account re-flects Cofan peoples optimistic stance on the potential forcreating a truly just and effective form of indigenous con-servationism.

I begin with a review of Foucaults work on gov-ernmentality and the ways in which anthropologists andother scholars use his thought to investigate environmen-tal politics and community-based conservation projects.I then provide an ethnographic account of Cofan peo-ples environmental relations, focusing specifically ontheir participation in and interpretation of ECP-supportedwork. I conclude with a brief discussion of the broaderramifications of Foucauldian anthropology, which, I ar-gue, risks misunderstandingand even denyingthe dis-course, practice, and politics of the people with whom wework.

Governmentality and environmentality

The person most responsible for popularizing the term en-vironmentality is Arun Agrawal, who made it the title of abook (2005b) and of a Current Anthropology article (2005a).Six years earlier, however, Steven Luke (1999) used the wordin his chapter forDiscourses of the Environment,which EricDarier compiled in hopes of bringing Foucaults thoughtto bear on issues of environmental criticism (see Darier1999:4). In his discussion of the political discourse on sus-tainability in the United States, Luke coined environmen-tality to articulate his claim that most environmentalistmovements now operate as a basic manifestation of gov-ernmentality (1999:121). Wikipedia now has an entry forecogovernmentality,which it uses as a synonym for environ-mentality and associates with the work of Agrawal, Darier,Luke, and a number of other scholars (Braun 2000, 2003;Rutherford 1999).

Before providing a more detailed account of Agrawalsargument on forest management in rural Indiawhich isthe most pertinent work on environmentality for ethno-graphers who study conservation interventions in non-Western settingsI offer a brief summary of Foucaultsthought on governmentality. Although his 1978 lecture is his

502

Foucault in the forest American Ethnologist

definitive statement on the topic (see Foucault 1991), mostcommentators find the origin of the idea in the notion ofbio-power, which Foucault introduces in the last chapterof volume 1 of The History of Sexuality (1978). Foucault op-poses bio-power to sovereignty, a form of control with alonger history that operates negatively through processes ofrestriction and removal (e.g., of property, of taxes, and of lifeitself). Bio-power, in contrast, is productive in that it func-tions positively through knowledge, management, and for-mation of the totality of human life. According to Foucault(1978:139), bio-power operates at the level of both the indi-vidual (through the anatamo-politics of the human body)and the aggregate (through the bio-politics of the popula-tion).

Foucaults work suggests that bio-power achieved anearly theoretical articulation in the art of government, apolitical discourse that he identifies in a set of Europeantreatises from the 16th century onward that advise rulerson the proper manner of governing subjects. Most schol-ars associate the rise of govermentality with the growthof modernity, liberal democracy, and contemporary formsof political-economic practice (Agrawal 2005b:216216;Gordon 1991:3; Rose 1999:6). As states respond to ne-oliberal calls for privatization and decentralization, theproliferation of NGOs has become a prime topic for an-thropologists interested in governmentality (Fisher 1997).Nevertheless, even though the balance of forces has shifted,Foucault (1991:102) is careful to state that sovereignty con-tinues to function alongside both discipline and govern-ment as a form of power.

In the most basic terms, Foucault defines governmen-tality as the conduct of conduct. It can refer to the govern-ment of oneself, of souls and lives, of children, and of thestate itself (Foucault 1991:8788). In general, writes NikolasRose, government . . . refers to all endeavors to shape,guide, direct the conduct of others (1999:3). What makesgovernmentality a distinctly modern form of power is thatit is a pluralized (Gordon 1991:36) control that operatesthrough the efforts of amultiplicity of state andnonstate ac-tors, who work with relative autonomy. Governmental ac-complices (Agrawal 2005b:217) do not act as dominatorsto enforce control from above. Instead, they presuppose theagency of their subjects, whom they guide implicitly by act-ing on their hopes, desires, or milieu (Inda 2005:6).

Rather than crushing the freedom of preconstitutedsubjects, government works by forming subjectivitiesthrough intimate forms of knowledge and management.Even more insidiously, governmental power inhabits boththe facilitators and the targets of its interventions. It is be-cause of the pervasive presence of governmentality, com-mentators suggest, that one should take its agents at theirword. Governmentality, after all, aims for the welfare ofindividuals and populations rather than the aggrandize-ment of the principality, the state, or the ruling class. As

Rosewrites, it attempts to promote thewell-being of its sub-jects, their good order, their security, their tranquility, theirprosperity, health and happiness (1999:6). In Tania MurrayLis words, governmentality mobilizes the will to improve,and the sincerity of its spokespeople is not in question: Theydo not knowingly exploit or deceive their subjects, and ob-jective interests do not lurk behind their stated motives(Li 2007:89). Accordingly, one can see governmentality atwork in schemes for betterment in myriad domains: insur-ance, health, hygiene, medicine, education, development,crime, poverty, risk, security, and environmental conserva-tion and management (Agrawal 2005b:217; Darier 1999:22;Gordon 1991:36; Rose 1999:7).

In an impressively clear and comprehensive articlethat uses Foucaults thought to outline an anthropologyof modernity, Jonathan Xavier Inda (2005) highlights threedimensions of governmentality for ethnographic analy-sis. First, Inda identifies the reasons, or rationality, ofgovernment, which consist of the forms of knowledge,expertise, and calculation that make humans intelligibleand susceptible to management. Governmental rationali-ties comprise discursive fields of conceptualization and jus-tification, which articulate problems that demand expertintervention. Second, Inda discusses the technics of gov-ernment, or the mechanisms, instruments, and measuresthat authorities use to guide action. Governmental tech-nics, which also include the discursive formation of projectsand programs, make objects visible, calculable, and pro-grammable. Finally, Inda describes the subjects of govern-ment, or the selves, persons, actors, agents, or identities(2005:10) that develop from and figure into governmentalprojects and processes. With the last category, Inda aimsto pinpoint the ways in which governmentality forms thedeepest levels of subjectivity, including individual capaci-ties, values, and desires.

In Environmentality, Agrawal adopts the last of Indasfoci as his central theme. In his words, Explaining why,when, how, and inwhatmeasure people come to develop anenvironmentally oriented subject position is the ultimatetarget of this books arguments (Agrawal 2005b:23). In hisexploration of more than 150 years of humanenvironmentrelations in the Indian region of Kumaon, Agrawal tracksthe processes by which rebellious hill men were trans-formed into individuals who participate in a decentralizedgovernment-in-community inscribed on modern forests(2005b:11). For Agrawal, environmental subjects are peoplewho relate to the environment in a specific manner: Theythink and act toward it in new ways (2005b:xiiiiv),it exists for them as a critical domain (2005b:16) and aconceptual category (2005b:164), and it becomes an ob-ject that requires regulation and protection (2005b:226).In general, Agrawal argues that environmental subjects areindividuals who have been environmentalized (2005b:17)by governmental projects, programs, and processes. For

503


such subjects, the environment is the axis around whichmuch of their thought and action revolves, including theirbeliefs, desires, interests, and agency.

As do authors of other monographs on the relation-ship between governmentality and such topics as eco-nomic development and environmental conservation (e.g.,Escobar 1994; Ferguson 1994; Li 2007; Sawyer 2004),Agrawal excels in his meticulous discussion of a complexhistory of policy changes, which he tracks through in-depthtextual analysis. He covers a long history of shifting rela-tions between forests, individuals, communities, colonialpowers, and the Indian state. Part 1 of Environmentalitytraces the increasing importance of numbers and statis-tics in making Kumaon forests visible, profitable, and gov-ernable. Part 2 examines how decentralized environmentalregulationespecially after the creation of the Forest Coun-cil Rules of 1931led to changes in three relationships:between the state and communities, between communityforest councils and community members, and between in-dividual subjects and the forest.

Whereas Agrawals main argument follows the logicof other works on governmentality, he states that his spe-cific contribution is the conclusion that practice is thekey mediator between power and imagination in subjectformation (2005b:198199). According to his data, partic-ipation in such forest council activities as monitoring re-source use and enforcing community regulations endowsindividuals with the desire to protect their environment.Through such engagement, Agrawal argues, villagers ac-quire the sense that they are working toward sui generisinterests: They assume that their actions are defined lo-cally, they act in pursuit of goals that they imagine as theirown, and they believe that they operate with an imaginedautonomy (2005b:197). In truth, however, Kumaon resi-dents who speak and act in the name of forest protectionare governmental accomplices. They embody an exogenouslogic, and the deepest level of their subjectivityespeciallytheir desire to conserve their forestsis the product of theiractive immersion in expanding networks of governmentalpower.

Agrawal is very clear that governmentality is the keyfactor in producing people who orient their action to-ward care for the environment. He directly criticizes ac-counts that rely on such concepts as cultural form andsymbolic system, and he refuses to accept the relevanceof such static categories as caste, gender, or location(Agrawal 2005b:197). He argues that attention to commonanthropological objects will only obscure the processesthrough which subjects are made (Agrawal 2005b:197198). Of course, even though he is in dialogue withanthropology, Agrawal is a political scientist, and manyethnographers might question his methods. Apart from hisimpressive archival work, most of his data come from a sur-vey with forest council headmen and two rounds of short,

structured interviews, which included such questions asDo you agree with the statement, Forests should be pro-tected (indicate level of agreement from 1 to 5) (Agrawal2005b:173, 183184). Many of his anecdotes are interestingand relevant, but participant-observation was not his mainmethod. At the end of Environmentality, one is left wonder-ing whether the people of Kumaon even have a term withthe same semantic span as environment.

Agrawals book forces readers to acknowledge the dif-ficulty of answering the question of why, when, how, andin what measure people come to value the environment(2005b:23). It asks us to consider the power of regula-tory regimes that originate outside of the communities thatpractice them. Agrawal suggests that governmental logicsand techniques are responsible for producing people whowant to conserve their environment, regardless of the cul-tural background from which they emerge. In making hisargument, however, he appears to give short shrift to nu-ances of sociocultural form, which do not play a role in hisidentification of the origin or the content of environmentalsubjectivities.

Other scholars of governmentality are clear about theepistemological and methodological specificities of theirapproach. Rose argues that the analytics of governmen-tality should not focus on the real of governmentalrule or on what happened and why (1999:20). Insteadof interpreting such a reality, Rose calls for embracingsuperficialityan empiricism of the surface, of identify-ing the differences in what is said, how it is said, and whatallows it to be said and to have an effectivity (1999:5657).From a similar perspective, Inda states that an anthropol-ogy of governmentality should not plumb thick descriptionsof places and peoples to find meaning; rather, it should fo-cus on uncovering the concrete manifestations of moderngovernment (2005:1112).

In slicing off a certain section of reality for observationand critique, these scholars appear to be interested in onlyone storythat of governmental power as the substanceand cause of what researchers see (or, at the very least,what we attend to in our work). Even Li, who argues explic-itly against Roses methodology in favor of an ethnographicfocus on situated practices (2007:2728), locates the ori-gin of perspectives on schemes for improvement within themessy conjunctures of governmental powers themselves(2007:282283). And, similarly to Agrawal, she suggests thatmuch of the way in which people think and act in relationto environmental management is the subtle inducement oftrustees rather than a reflection of their own sociocul-tural or sociopolitical positions (Li 2007:45).

A number of scholars question the governmentalityparadigm, and I share their concerns. Pat OMalley, LornaWeir, and Clifford Shearing (1997) argue that many whowork within the tradition embrace an overly mental senseof rule, thereby ignoring the social relations through which

504


technologies of control are formed, exercised, contested,and critiqued. From the perspective of ethnography, Don-ald Moore (2000) and Andrew Kipnis (2008) voice similarcriticisms. In Moores words, analysts of governmentalitydownplay the historical trajectories, cultural complexities,and micropolitical struggles that inflect intervention. Heterms the failure ethnographic anemia and historical am-nesia (Moore 2000:659). Kipnis holds that if researchersconceive governmentality as merely a work of thought, aregime of truth speaking, or a mentality of rule, we willnever be able to assess the effects of attempts to implementgovernmental rationalities. He suggests that only concretestudies of interrelations among written plans, official pro-nouncements, off-the-record comments, and observed so-cial practice (Kipnis 2008:285) can determine the degree towhich governmental programs alter local subjectivities.

Reviewing the literature on governmentality and en-vironmentality, I am left with a set of misgivings. I worrythat researchers will be unable to understand a popula-tions perspective on such issues as conservation if we sac-rifice open-minded attention to the sociocultural form ofits members discourse and practice. And I fear that we willsuffer from a political and methodological bias if we beginour research with the assumption that their environmen-tal positions are manifestations of governmental logics andtechniques. Pace Rose (1999:20), if we do not investigatewhat happen[s] and why, how can we know whether gov-ernmentality has any power to refigure values, desires, andidentities?

The Cofan case supportsmy skepticism. Cofan peopleslong-term involvement with collaborative conservation ini-tiatives does notmake their environmental perspectives thesimplistic subject effects of environmentality. Even thoughthey perform a set of governmental technics with precision,they continue to maintain a critical consciousness of theirpractice. Indeed, Cofan participants in ECP projects viewtheir action in terms of their political agendas and their cul-tural perspectives rather than the rationales of ECP agents.

In summary, if ethnography reveals that a populationsengagement with a regulatory practice exhibits an origin, aform, a commentary, and a utility that can only be under-stood in terms of a local backgroundwhether historical,cultural, or political in naturethen researchers have rea-son to doubt the analytical possibilities of the environmen-tality approach. In the next section, I substantiate this claimwith an account of Cofan peoples participation in and un-derstanding of ECP projects.

Science and conservation in Zabalo

The Cofan are no strangers to attempts at political con-trol. Before the Spanish arrived, they resisted the incur-sions of the Inca Empire. Later, they rebelled against thecolonial forces that invaded their land in search of gold.

Catholic missionaries began entering their territory in thelate 1500s, and there are records of violent Cofan reprisalsthrough the 18th century. By the time Ecuador achieved in-dependence fromSpain, however, theCofan nationhad suf-fered dramatic reductions due to epidemic disease. Afterthe first two decades of the 20th century, only a few hun-dred Cofan survived. They attracted little attention fromthe Ecuadorian state, whose control of the region was rel-atively weak. Sporadic missionary campaigns too bore lit-tle fruit. By the 1960s, the Summer Institute of Linguisticshad set up Aingae-language schools, which the state tookover in 1980. Schooling in Cofan territory, however, has apoor record. Few Cofan people feel adept in the language,knowledge, or ways of national Ecuadorian society. Reflect-ing on their questionable mastery of external sociopoliti-cal domains, many Cofan feel great anxiety when contem-plating todays threats: a rapacious oil industry, waves ofAndean and coastal migrants, and the spillover of violencefrom Colombias civil war and drug trade.

The community of Zabalo faces many of the sameproblems as Ecuadors other Cofan villages. Its rela-tive isolation, however, gives its residents a partial re-prieve. Its boundaries encircle 140,000 hectares of lowlandAmazonian forest near the countrys borders with Peruand Colombia. Its formation dates to the late 1970s, whena group of Cofan began to look for an area free fromthe colonization and oil contamination that characterizedthe land surrounding their home community of Doreno(Kimerling 1991; Little 1992; Vickers 2003). Perhaps themost important individual in Zabalos history is RandyBorman, a son of North American missionary linguistswho grew up with Cofan people, married a Cofan woman,and became an important Cofan leader. He was one ofZabalos first residents, and he acted as its president formuch of its early history. From 1991 to 1994, Bormanserved as the elected president of the Cofan ethnic fed-eration. By the end of the decade, he spent most of histime in Quito, where he continues to work as a Cofanactivist. Currently, he serves as the director of territoryfor the Indigenous Federation of the Cofan Nationalityof Ecuador, and he manages two Cofan-affiliated NGOs. Aswith other contemporary and past leaders (Cepek 2009),Bormans identity is somewhat ambivalent. Nevertheless,most Cofan accept his claim to Cofanness, and I view himas an essential player in the development of Cofan politicalconsciousness. (For detailed accounts of Bormans position,see Cepek 2006, 2008a, 2009.)

In response to the forces that threaten their existence,the Cofan developed a rich tradition of environmental pol-itics. The people of Zabalo committed themselves to con-servation, or tsampima coiraye (caring for the forest), inde-pendently of NGO or state interventions. Before the arrivalof the ECP, no outside agents made significant attemptsto transform Cofan environmental subjectivity. Rather than

505


being a product of immersion in expanding networks ofgovernmental power, Cofan conservationism is the result ofa gradual and organic process of community-internal dis-cussion in a specific historical, political, and ecological con-juncture.

As I describe in another article (Cepek 2008b), theCofan began to appreciate the relationship between resi-dence in an ecologically intact environment and a valuedsocioexistential state when petroleum-based developmentdestroyed the forest surrounding Doreno. Their traditionalforms of hunting, fishing, and gathering transformed theirshrinking patches of forest in new and destructive ways. Inaddition, a steady stream of colonists created a socionatu-ral landscape that Cofan people learned to associate withsickness, hunger, conflict, and anxiety. Together, these dy-namics convinced the people of Zabalo to form their newcommunity in a more pristine area,4 to resist the entranceof oil companies onto their land,5 and to create a systemof community sepicho (prohibitions) that would serve tomaintain the favorable condition of their rivers and forests.

In the mid-1980s, the people of Zabalo decided to re-strict the hunting of large game animals that were suscepti-ble to overharvesting. By the beginning of the next decade,they had created a comprehensive systemof sepicho. Theyused natural landmarks to construct a spatial system thatdivided their territory into sections with permitted and pro-hibited activities; they limited their use of certain species onthe basis of season, location, and reproductive state; theyceased hunting other animals altogether; and they decidedto prohibit the marketing of nearly all forest products.

In annual meetings, the people of Zabalo discuss andmodify their regulations through majority voting, and theypunish rule breakers with fines. They base their decisionson a collective knowledge of environmental conditions,which they gain through direct experience and second-hand reporting. Although I have not conducted a biologi-cal inventory of Zabalos forests, I do know that communitysepicho play an important role in structuring everyday ac-tion. Zabalo residents do not doubt that their knowledgeand rules ensure the desirable ecological state of their ter-ritory.

In 1991, the Cofan of Zabalo achieved legal control overtheir land, which overlaps with the Cuyabeno Wildlife Re-serve. To comply with Ecuadorian law, they had to formu-late a management plan for the Ministry of Agricultureand Ranching, which later became the Ministry of the En-vironment. According to Borman and other Cofan leaders,the short document was simply an abbreviated descriptionofwhat the people of Zabalowere already doing. No govern-ment bureaucrats or NGO practitioners came to the com-munity to teach residents to act in new ways or to check ontheir compliance with the plan.

The sepicho system ismainly oral in nature. It exists inthe set of intimate, face-to-face relations that compose so-

cial life in Zabalo. All households know its basic elements.The rules derive much of their force from their articula-tion with long-standing elements of Cofan culture and so-cial structure, including a complex systemof activity and di-etary prohibitions that follows the logic of shamanic powerand local concepts of maturation and illness; a relativelyflexible division of labor that produces a more or less gen-eralized state of ecological knowledge; a strong emphasison egalitarian social and economic relations, which facili-tates shared norms of conduct among different householdgroups; and the overall importance of the tsampi (forest)in supplying the color and content of a valued lifeworld.Cofan people call themselves tsampini canjensundeccu(forest dwellers), and most find it difficult to imagine howone could be Cofan without living in a relatively intactAmazonian environment. Although Zabalos conservationsystem is by no means an ancient Cofan tradition, it doesrepresent the encounter of substantive sociocultural fea-tures with a present characterized by ecological crisis andpolitical mobilization. Over the last two decades, otherCofan communities have taken Zabalos lead in construct-ing their own sepicho systems. Cofan people move fre-quently between villages, and ideas and institutions travelwith them.

The people of Zabalo developed their capacity fortsampima coiraye by themselves and for themselves. Nev-ertheless, two groups of outsiders have shown a key inter-est in their environmental practices: Western scientists andconservationist NGOs. Although individuals in Zabalo haveacted as guides and hosts for scientific researchers for morethan two decades, the ECP has been the most consistentoutside presence in Zabalo since the late 1990s. The ECP isthe wing of the FieldMuseum that works explicitly on con-servation action, as summarized in its introductory web-page statement:

Environmental and Conservation Programs (ECP) wasestablished in 1994 to direct The Field Museums col-lections, scientific research, and educational resourcesto the immediate needs of conservation at local, na-tional, and international levels. ECP is the branch ofthe Museum fully dedicated to translating science intoaction that creates and supports lasting conservation.Through partnerships with research institutions, con-servation organizations, local communities, and gov-ernment agencies, ECP catalyzes science-based actionfor conservation. [Field Museum 2005]

For various biographical and strategic reasons, the ECPfocuses most of its work on the Amazonian regions ofEcuador, Peru, and Bolivia, although it also has done workin Cuba, China, and central Africa. Debby Moskovitz, thefounder and head of the ECP, learned of Randy Borman andthe Cofan of Zabalo through publicity of their opposition tooil development and their experience in community-based

506


conservation. She subsequently worked to help Borman re-ceive the Field Museums prestigious Parker/Gentry Awardfor Conservation Biology in 1998. Since that time, the ECPhas become deeply involved with projects in Zabalo andother Cofan communities. ECP staff members hope that theexperience of Zabalo will lead to the creation of globalmod-els for community-based conservation. Although the ECPwants to use science to improve Zabalos sepicho system,it also wants to document what the Cofan were doing priorto its entrance so as to publicize the possibility of indige-nous conservationism to a world that has grown skepticalof indigenousenvironmentalist alliances (see Chapin 2004;Flavin 2005).

ECP personnel think of themselves as enabling techni-cians rather than convincing proselytizers. Their work pre-supposes a common endenvironmental conservationbut seeks to introduce newmeansscientific methods andtechnological instrumentstoward the pursuit of that end.Even though the knowledge produced by these means is,like all science, capable of traveling across social lines inthe universalizing language of number, table, and diagram,the ECP views much of its work in a local light. In itscommunity-based conservation projects, the main gap itis interested in traversing is between Cofan environmentalpractice and Cofan knowledge of that practice.6 With trueself-knowledge, ECP personnel believe that the people ofZabalo will be able to manage their resources in a rationaland successful way.

Beginning in 1999, ECP personnel traveled to Zabalomultiple times each year to teach the use of technologi-cal instruments (e.g., notebooks, computers, and measur-ing devices), to create a basic infrastructure (e.g., a centralproject meetinghouse and a system of census trails), and tocommunicate the utility of scientific understanding. Theyworked to develop five project activities: terrestrial censusesof Zabalos forest animals, household tabulations of hunt-ing takes, visual censuses of river turtles (Podocnemis ex-pansa and Podocnemis unifilis), beach monitoring of riverturtle nests, and headstarting of river turtle hatchlings inartificial ponds and nests. During my main fieldwork yearsof 2001 and 2002, eight men, who represented the com-munitys main household groups, worked regularly on ECP-supported projects, and they received a monthly salary fortheir efforts.7 The ECP initiated three of the activities (theturtle visual census, the terrestrial census, and the huntingtabulations), and it modified the others (beach monitoringand headstarting).8

All of the ECP-supported activities depend on pro-cesses of spatiotemporal unitization, practical regulariza-tion, and linguistic standardization and entextualization.Spatially, rivers are marked off in 250-meter sections forvisual census work and in five broad areas for beach-monitoring work. Census and hunting trails are dividedinto 50-meter segments. Temporally, project work is coordi-

Figure 1. Project worker with P. unifilis hatchlings (photo by MichaelCepek).

nated according to basic divisions of the calendar year (e.g.,six months each for turtle work and forest census work).Work cycles are structured both by year (e.g.,measuring andreleasing turtle hatchlings in specific seasons [see Figure 1])and by month (e.g., conducting censuses a certain numberof days eachmonth). Practically, the ECP has labored inten-sively to make sure that project workers move, collect, con-struct, and perceive in uniform ways on the river and in theforest. (Without one standard mode of action, it would beimpossible to compare the results of different monitors andto ensure that turtle hatchlings receive equal treatment.)

Semiotically, all of the activities depend on the cre-ation of text artifacts in written Aingae and the standardWestern number system, which enables their incorpora-tion into computerized databases. The ECP has worked foryears tomake sure that all project participants use the samespecies names, spelled in the same ways. Turtle sightingsare recorded according to a size systemsmall (less than20 cm), medium (2030 cm), and large (greater than30 cm)that has no correlate in Aingae. For the hunt-ing tabulations, a true effort has been made to create asystem of numbered and standardized place-names that

507


monitors can use to pinpoint hunting locations on an ac-curate map. In addition, participants must maintain a setof written records: weights and measurements of turtlehatchlings, dates and locations of monitored turtle nests,and temperatures and feeding details for the turtle ponds.

For the ECP, rigorous data collection and exact compu-tation and representation present a decisive advantage overpreexisting modes of environmental knowledge. All of theinformation compiled by monitors can be put into textualforms, which display how absolute numbers (e.g., of turtlenests protected, peccaries killed, or toucans seen) vary ac-cording to calendar year as well as to spatial location (e.g.,of marked-off river section, numbered hunting site, or seg-mented census trail). Andwhen absolute quantities or com-puted averages do not suffice to communicate a trend, to-tals of varying kinds can be placed chronologically next toeach other in a chart, which allows the ups and downs ofa single line to tell the years-old story of an entire terri-tory. Quantified, uniform, and synoptic, scientific represen-tations allow for the discernment of patterns with a level ofexactness that is shared by neither everyday subsistencenor collective community debate.

Zabalos sepicho system depends on culture- andcontext-bound discussions about shifting environmentalconditions. Scientific conservation involves an entirely dif-ferent kind of object: stable, portable documents with num-bers, tables, names, and maps that anyone, anywhere, canhold in his or her hand and that speak in the same wayabout the same things to a Western scientist, a govern-ment official, an oil company executive, or a Cofan leader.With scientific representations in hand, any individual is asknowledgeable as any other. There is no confusion aboutwhat the forest contains, what Cofan people are taking fromit, and what the community should do if it wants to con-serve its resources. For the ECP, the benefits of scientificrepresentations are self-evident. They depend neither onthe memory and objectivity of particular, isolated individ-uals nor on the localized trust and sociodiscursive confu-sion of community discussions. For Cofan people, however,the yields of scientific knowledge are not convincing in thesame way.

On a few occasions, project participants have engagedECP personnel in direct conversations about the logic be-hind their activities. In one interaction, a Cofan workerquestioned an ECP staff member about the meaning of theterm evidencia. The scientist explained the word by posingan opposition between census-produced datos (Spanish fordata) and informacionwhich are numeros and thereforeprecisoand opiniones, vague senses about which there isnot always consenso. The opposition between fact and opin-ion is highlighted in a Spanish and Aingae pamphlet thatthe ECPdeveloped to document and communicate Zabalosexperience with the terrestrial census. A question is posedat the beginning: Why do we do a census program of the

animals in our community? Then, an answer is suggested:A terrestrial census program can help us to obtain informa-tion for making decisions. One page is dedicated entirelyto communicating the fallibility of opinion, with differ-ent Cofan individuals pictured as wondering to themselves,I want to know how things truly are. What should I be-lieve? The booklet portrays the techniques used in Zabalo,with a running commentary on the utility of science: Thereareways of finding answersdoing regular censuses. Doingregular censuses can help us to discover tendencies. Scien-tists use methods like this in order to test their ideas and toknow whats happeningand we can do it, too. The book-let portrays the desired end point with an image of a Cofanman andwomanpointing to diagrams, numbers,maps, andpapers with ten years of census results in their hands. Inconclusion, it suggests, Now we base our decisions on realinformation, not on opinions.

The ECPs efforts in Zabalo meet the accepted criteriaof a governmental program. Using Indas (2005) terminol-ogy, the governmental reason is to remedy a perceivedshortcoming of local practicethe lack of precision andcertainty inCofanmodes of knowing their environment andtheir resource use. The technics of ECP interventions areall of the practices and instruments I describe above. In-deed, Indas conceptualization of the tool kit of governmen-tality bears a striking resemblance to the multiple elementsof the ECP approach:

These instruments encompass such things as: meth-ods of examination and evaluation; techniques ofnotation, numeration, and calculation; accountingprocedures; routines for the timing and spacing of ac-tivities in specific locations; presentation forms suchas tables and graphs; formulas for the organizationof work; standardized tactics for the training and im-plantation of habits; pedagogic, therapeutic, and puni-tive techniques of reformation and cure; architecturalforms in which interventions take place (i.e., class-rooms and prisons); and professional vocabularies.[Inda 2005:9]

Finally, ECP projects aim to create a specific kind ofsubject: people who value the ecological integrity of theirforests and the importance of science in effective commu-nity conservation. After nearly a decade of collaboratingwith the ECP, however, Cofan people remain critical of thework required to produce scientific knowledge as well as ofits overall utility. Instead of instilling in Cofan actors exoge-nous logics, desires, and values, participating in ECP workcreates a sense of the strange, burdensome, and indirectlybeneficial quality of collaborative projects with scientistsandWestern conservationists.

After witnessing, implementing, and analyzing scien-tific conservation for the past ten years, I view Cofanparticipation in ECP-supported activities as a form of

508


alienated labor, to use a concept that Marx elaborates inThe Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1964).Marx argues that labor in capitalist society is alienatedbecause workers do not view their actions, instruments,products, and fellow laborers as organic extensions of theirpractical being.9 Instead, they experience their work as theexpression of an alien power. As a theoretical concept,alienated consciousness is the polar opposite of govern-mental subjectivity. Rather thanmerging their sense of selfwith the logic of a regulatory practice, alienated laborersunderstand their work as the means and end of an exter-nal and potentially antagonistic force. In short, they do notview their action as an expression of their own capaci-ties, desires, and needs. Although Cofan project workers arefar from fully proletarianized laborers, I believe that Marxsconcept has a broader analytic relevance and that it canhelp elucidate Cofan perspectives on their relationshipwiththe ECP and other Western institutions.

Participation in ECP-supported projects fits the firstform of alienationthat of workers from their activityrather well. Projects takemonitors through the same spacesthat they pass throughwhile hunting and collecting, but themoment-to-moment flow of their activity differs substan-tially from that of daily subsistence. For example, an indi-vidual might hunt in a territory traversed by a census trail.The forms of sensing and moving through that territorywhile conducting censuses, however, differ from the starts,stops, zigzags, and varying durations of hunting trips, whichdirect attention toward traces and bodies rather than pen,paper, and mental distance calculations. Monitors must re-produce the same structure of action on each outing. Theystay on the trail at all times, and 50-meter distance markersfunction as cues to stop, to listen, and to watch. When theydetect an animal, theymust pause to take out their note padand record the encounter (see Figure 2), which they enterinto a workbook when they return to their home. Learn-ing and performing censuses requires substantial effort. Itis neither intuitive nor easy, and workers understand it asthe command of ECP personnel rather than an inherentlyuseful or rational type of action.

Participation in ECP projects also exhibits the secondform of alienation: that of workers from the sociality ofthe labor process. Problematic relations occur on three lev-els: betweenworkers, betweenworkers and the community,and between workers and the ECP. The main difficulty ofnegotiating project relations is their dependence on socialdynamics suppressed in Cofan culture, namely, power dif-ferentials, evident inequality, and open criticism.

Relations between workers demand constant compar-ison and critique. Monitors inhabit equivalent positions,and, ideally, they perform standardized actions. The out-comes of their actionswrittenwords and numbersallowindividual capacities to be measured against one anotherin a public framework. In collective data-entry sessions, for

Figure 2. Project worker conducting a terrestrial census (photo by MichaelCepek).

example, less educated individuals are confronted withtheir relative ignorance, on which project coordinatorssometimes remark. Often, participants become frustratedand embarrassed. Some of them find it easy to laugh off thedifficulties, but others show intense discomfort when theirfailures are recognized.

Relations between workers and the community canalso be difficult. The river turtle repopulation effort is acase in point. In return for finding nests and communicat-ing their existence to project personnel, community mem-bers receive a small payment that varies with the numberof surviving hatchlings. For people with few sources of in-come, the revenue is highly appreciated, and it generatessubstantial community support for the project. Neverthe-less, worker control over community income places par-ticipants in a difficult position. If a flooding river destroysa marked nest because of monitor negligence, the identi-fier loses the compensation. Such incidents lead to angrycalls for worker dismissal and project termination. Whenconfronted with community ega afacho (bad talk), workersexpress their desire to quit the project altogether. Neitherresource conservation nor steady salaries are worth the ten-sion that inevitably results from resentment, jealousy, andinequality.

509


Relations between workers and the ECP can also bestressful. Participants understand ECP coordinators as theirnasu (bosses). Some ECP personnel are gentler than oth-ers in dealing with Cofan participants. Nevertheless, Cofanpeople are prone to see antagonism and hostility whenWesterners see only helpful instruction. When ECP offi-cials train and evaluate participants, Cofan people expe-rience the interactions as painful exercises in public em-barrassment. The critical questioning can be intense: Whyhasnt all of the data been entered into the computer?Why doesnt a monitor know how long a census trail is?Where are the receipts for the gasoline that was boughtto fuel the project generator and water pump? Workersfear ECP recriminations, and the power structure makesthem keenly aware of the emotional reactions of ECP per-sonnel. The most sensitive workers drink an extra bowl offermented manioc mash before meetings with the ECP, asthey are not accustomed to the hierarchy and anxiety of theinteractions.

In addition to alienated activities and relations, partici-pants identify a third form of alienation in ECP-supportedprojects: that of themselves from the means of scientificknowledge production. All of their work depends on expen-sive and exotic instruments, including binoculars, comput-ers, and GPS devices. Even as participants learn how to usethe instruments, the equipment arouses anxiety becauseof its high cost and fragile nature. Even more importantly,the assumed necessity of high-tech instruments convincesCofan people that they could never sustain the projects ontheir own. They realize that they can neither produce norpurchase such objects in their rain-forest homes, especiallywith their meager incomes. As with many scientists, ECPpersonnel are entranced by the precise and efficient oper-ations that technology enables. Nevertheless, a simpler toolkit would better serve their goal of convincing the Cofan toaccept scientific practice as a helpful addition to commu-nity conservation.

Perhaps the most important form of alienation in-volved in Cofan performance of scientific conservation isthat of workers from the forms of knowledge they produce.Paradoxically, whatmost interests the ECP in Zabalo is whatmost complicates its efforts, namely, Cofan peoples pre-existing practices of community conservation. Long beforeECP representatives arrived in Zabalo, the Cofan structuredtheir subsistence toward the end of caring for the forest.Even though their sepicho system depends on practicalknowledge, oral communication, and trusting familiarity,Cofan people do not doubt their ability to knowand toman-age their forests. Their confidence raises the question: Whydid they collaborate with the ECP in the first place?

In general, Cofan people see little community-internal use for the numbers, words, and charts that theECP projects produce. Similar to historian of accountingTheodore Porter (1999), Zabalo residents understand

formalization and quantification to bemost useful in trans-porting knowledge across, rather than within, establishedlines of culture and power. Accordingly, they deny sciencesability to improve community-internal practices. Instead,they believe that science transforms their knowledge intoa good that can be understood and used by non-Cofanoutsiders.

Although the Cofan have a long history of peaceful in-terethnic cooperation, they are sick to death of 500 years ofunequal relations with Westerners. In the 21st century, theydo not believe that any Westernerenvironmentalist, hu-manitarian, or otherwould come to their communities ifnot motivated by self-interest and profit. The Cofan main-tain a strong set of expectations for such encounters: thatoutsiders will attempt to make money off of them, that themost altruistic foreigners see them as objects ofmissionary-like charity, and that their only sensible option is to try toget a fair share of the economic resources that Westernerspossess and produce. With regard to the ECP, Cofan ex-pectations of exploitation are exacerbated by participationin projects that depend on alien activities, relations, andequipment to produce a form of knowledge that is of moreuse to the outside world than to the Cofan themselves.

No matter how much idealistic practitioners protestto the contrary, the people of Zabalo believe that Westernconservationists derive value from Cofan lives and Cofanforests. Obviously, they are right. ECP personnel earn a pay-check for their efforts. They treasure the biodiversity ofCofan territory. And they hope to transform Zabalo experi-ences into a general model for community-based conserva-tion. From the Cofan perspective, all of these benefits rep-resent the extraction of a surplus from Cofan activity.

When pressed, most people in Zabalo admit ignoranceabout why outsiders come from so far away to work onconservation. Currently, most Cofan explain their under-standing of the word cientista or cientfico (Spanish for sci-entist) by extension (i.e., by naming ECP personnel). Themost experienced project workers suggest that a scientistis one who oshachoma atesusu (learns everything) aboutmacaen jinchocho (how things are) and mingae dajecho(how things become). Although many ECP personnel arefar too routinized in their work to evince touristlike fascina-tion with wildlife, somesuch as Debby Moskovitz, whomall project workers recognize as the true ECP nasuexhibitenthusiastic attachment to the tsampi. They watch birds;they wander through the forest alone; and they express sin-cere concern for environmental destruction. In the wordsof one worker who has known Moskovitz for years, Shereally hates the idea of hurting animals. She really hateseverything like that. She really loves the tsampi. Her true de-sire is for the tsampi. The house of her heart is the tsampi.She really loves it. The tsampi as well as animals, every-thing, turtle, woolly monkey, everything. All that is of thetsampi.

510


Even when they recognize outsiders earnest attach-ment to their environment, the people of Zabalo cannotimagine any scientist coming to their territory withoutearning a living by doing so. The Cofan know that scien-tific conservation is the semamba (work) of ECP personnel.Moreover, they are perpetually aware that Westerners arefar wealthier than they, who are but pori ai (poor Cofan).The Cofan find it most convincing to use cash as the surestmeans of calibrating values across deep social divides. Nomatter how much Cofan people believe that the ECP andothers appreciate the tsampi, and nomatter howmuch theyunderstand outsiders as idealistic individuals who want tohelp them, they cannot imagine non-Cofan conservation-ists doing anything without making money. In the words ofone project worker,

Why would you just do this work if I were the onlyone being paid? Lets say you look for a project. Andthen $10,000 comes to you. You receive it, and you giveme $500, $500, $500, everything to me. With nothing,would you work? No, you wouldnt. My thought is likethis. The museum people dont have other work. Be-cause of that, they want to work with the Cofan, to helpthe Cofan, and to help other people and other lands.With that, I, too, will take some [of the money]. Sothat they can live. Thinking like that, the museum peo-ple want to work here.

This interpretation, more than anything else, explainswhy Zabalo residents understand ECP-supported projectsas work that they perform for the outside worldand forwhich they deserve a paycheck. Some Cofan are beginningto understand that only numeros can communicate theirintact environment and sustainable modes of resource useto an encroaching oil company or a vigilant state environ-mental ministry. Nevertheless, they have never had to of-fer such justifications for their land claims. Moreover, theirknowledge of the raw power relations and basic unfairnessof state machinations leaves them uncertain that they willever have toor that it would do any good. And if theportable forms of knowledge produced through scientificconservation are of little direct use to them, they are evenmore certain that their project participation obeys a logicthat is very different from that of their preexisting system offorest care.

In contrast to Zabalo residents, ECP personnel believethat the activities they support are to be done by the Cofanand for the Cofan. They find it difficult to understand whythe people of Zabalo have not embraced scientific knowl-edge production as a helpful addition to community con-servation activities. Not surprisingly, the ECP has sufferedmounting frustration at what it interprets as the Cofansfailure to conceptualize the project activities as theirs.By the end of 2005, in fact, the ECP began to shift itsCofan-centered work from community-basedmanagement

projects toward large-scale biological inventories of poten-tial conservation areas in threatened Cofan territories.

Despite their questioning of conservationist intentionsand actions, Cofan people see great potential for their rela-tionship with the ECP and other outside institutions. Eventhough most environmentalist NGOs understand paymentto play a minor role in community conservation, the savvi-est Cofan leaders hope to construct amuch larger system ofcooperation on the basis of political-economic reciprocity.They realize that their forestsmatter toWesterners. Further-more, they know that Cofan people are becoming increas-ingly adept at producing scientific knowledge, which theywant to make available to outside researchers as long as theexchange is balanced.

In short, Cofan activists want to convince the worldthat Cofan people are the best custodians and investiga-tors of the Amazonian environment. Instead of negotiat-ing short-term interventions aimed at the unrealistic goal ofproject self-sufficiency, Cofan leaders seek to create perma-nent partnerships that recognize the reciprocal costs andbenefits of scientific research and conservationist practice.In return for protecting and analyzing their forests, they ex-pect steady but modest compensation as well as the politi-cal aid that will help them to solidify control over their tra-ditional territory.

Cofan leaders hope to take over many of the rolesthat are currently inhabited by better-paid and more se-curely employed outsiders, whether NGO workers, aca-demic scientists, or state enforcement agents. To date, theyhave made significant strides toward realizing their vision.With a force of approximately fifty state-accredited parkguards, the Cofan nation is directing the management andprotection of approximately 430 thousand hectares of for-est. In communities such as Zabalo, Cofan individuals re-ceive coauthorship recognition on peer-reviewed researcharticles written by ECP scientists (e.g., Townsend et al.2005). According to Randy Borman, Cofan peoples intimateknowledge of and dependence on the forest make them theperfect agents of effective research and conservation. In hiswords, theCofan are ready toworkwith and for theworld onrain-forest protection. All they request are the right kinds ofcompensation, recognition, and resources:

The whole point of our trying to get control over theselarge national park areas, to manage these conserva-tion areasthe whole point of doing that is becausewere the best possible people to do it. Its not becausewe have any special racial characteristics that make itthat way, or something like that. Its that a whole cul-ture has developed to do exactly this particular job, andall we need to do is modify that slightly and we have anincredible force to do exactly what the world claims itwants to do in those areas . . . Weve got these uniqueabilities. Come on, lets use them!10

511


Conclusion

Alex Callinicos once described Foucault as the most elo-quent advocate of the intellectual movement that seeks todemote the subject from constitutive to constituted sta-tus (1989:87). For much of its history, anthropology hasexplored the sociocultural mediation of subjectivity, whichoverlaps with more familiar notions of value, desire, be-lief, and identity. Ethnographers investigate the ways inwhich individuals acquire embodied perspectives throughprimary and secondary processes of enculturation, whichintersect with larger movements of history and politics.For most of us, the concept of a constituted subject is anessential element of our theoretical foundation. We havenever accepted the idea that people are born with a uni-versal, timeless, and fully formed stance toward the world.Foucaults intervention was to make a demiurge-likepower (Turner 1994:35) the central player in subject forma-tion. In Arturo Escobars words, Foucault envisions a worldin which power-saturated articulations of discourse andknowledge produce permissiblemodes of being and think-ing while disqualifying and evenmaking others impossible(1994:5).

In this article, I have questioned the Foucauldian ap-proach to subject formation as articulated in the literatureon governmentality and environmentality. In my ethno-graphic analysis of scientific conservation in Zabalo, I havedemonstrated that a governmental project did not engen-der an environmental subjectivity in Cofan participants.Nor did it preclude a specifically Cofan understandingof science, conservation, and environmental politics. Thetechnics of ECP programs affect Cofan stances toward theirforests and their environmental practices but not along thelines of ECP rationalities. Rather than adopting an externallogic as their own, Cofan project workers maintain a crit-ical consciousness of the activities, relations, instruments,and products of scientific conservation. They view their col-laboration with Western institutions as part of a larger ex-change with a world that values the environments that theyknow and inhabit. As long as they receive some portion ofthe political-economic resources that they seek, Cofan peo-ple are more than willing to devote themselves to a form oflabor that they continue to experience as burdensome andoriented to community-external rather than community-internal logics and needs.

Although Cofan approaches to science and conser-vation can reveal a great deal about the particularity ofWestern values and assumptions, they are highly specificin terms of their origin and content. The Cofan under-standing of scientific conservation as an indirectly benefi-cial form of alienated labor has a set of social, cultural, his-torical, and political conditions of possibility. It is easy toimagine how another Amazonian peoplenot to mentionpopulations at other ends of the geographic and political-

economic spectrumwould have a completely different re-action to ECP interventions. The Cofan of Zabalo have prac-ticed community conservation for decades. They do it ina way that depends intimately on their culture and socialstructure as well as their experience of petroleum-based de-velopment. Cofan difficulties with ECP-supported activitiesare generated by a clash between accepted forms of socialand environmental relations and the necessities of regu-larization, formalization, and intercultural knowledge ex-change. The benefits that Cofan people do hope to attainby cooperating with Western scientists and environmental-ists only make sense in relation to the strategizing of Cofanleaders, who creatively rework Cofan resources into a pro-posal for a new form of NorthSouth collaboration.

Without engaging the sociocultural subtleties of Cofanpeoples discourse, practice, and politics, I never wouldhave understood as much as I do about the ways in whichscientific conservation does and does not transform theirenvironmental understandings. From my perspective, im-mersed and open-minded ethnography is essential to anyadequate investigation of governmental projects, especiallyin contexts of cultural difference and intercultural en-counter. By devoting the bulk of our analytic attention tothe rationalities that governmental agents bring to bear ontheir work, as researchers, we grant them a power that theydo not possess. In our implicit acceptance of the slippagefrom rationale and technique to subjective effect, we do adisservice to the critical capacities of the people with whomwe work, and we commit an error that is both intellectualand ethical in nature.

I mention one more potential problem of the govern-mentality paradigm. In addition to its naive stance on in-terveners ability to transform subjectivities, it risks over-estimating the grip that governmental rationalities have ongovernmental agents themselves. After years of experiencewith Zabalo workers and residents, ECP personnel beganto understand Cofan perspectives on their programs. Al-thoughmany of the projects that I have described continueto function, other NGOs have stepped in to finance them.After 2005, ECP officials decided that the Cofan vision of sci-entific conservation did not match their own. Rather thanabandoning their partnership with Cofan people, however,the ECP returned to its traditional strengthorganizing bi-ological inventories that can influence states to create pro-tected areas with the cooperation of local populations.11

After a FieldMuseum inventory helped to convince theEcuadorian government to declare the Cofan-Bermejo Eco-logical Reserve (RECB) in 2002, the ECP decided to con-duct more inventories in Cofan territory, the most recentof which occurred in 2008. Both the ECP and Cofan lead-ers know that the authoritative reports of a prestigiousNorth American institution can help Cofan people to con-solidate control over their threatened lands. Even if theydo not see to eye to eye with the Cofan on questions of

512


community-based conservation, ECP officials would muchrather see western Amazonias natural landscapes in thehands of the Cofan nation than under the control of oilcompanies and cattle ranchers.

Importantly, ECP efforts to create indigenous-controlled reserves entail substantial shifts in politicalpower. The RECB is Ecuadors first indigenous ecologicalreserve. As in other reserves, indigenous residents collab-orate with state agents on comanagement activities. Whatis special about the RECB, however, is that Cofan peoplehave actual rights of coadministration. They are legallyempowered to create the reserves governing structure, tocoordinate its operations according to their own culturaland political perspectives, and to disburse the fundingthat makes the work possible. More than ineffective paperparks or externally imposed sociospatial structures, coad-ministered reserves are essential elements of the Cofannations campaign for increased political-economic powerand effective conservation strategies (Cepek 2008b).

On a smaller scale, other interesting collaborationshave developed out of the CofanECP partnership. Aftera long series of conversations with Cofan students andleaders, I began to work with Field Museum fellows DanBrinkmeier and Clark Erickson on the Cofan HistoricalMapping Project. Building on many of the same instru-ments employed by the ECPGPS technology, satellite im-agery, and mapmaking programsa joint Field Museumand Cofan team traveled throughout Cofan territory in 2007to collect data on culturally significant features of the land-scape. At the same time, we trained a group of young Cofanmen in video, audio, and interview techniques. In 2008, twoof them traveled to Chicago to transform the compiled ma-terial into a five-hour Aingae-language DVD, which putsthe territory-related knowledge of Cofan elders into a formthat can be used to teach Cofan schoolchildren.With the in-formation, our team also produced a large-scale and high-quality map, which offers a portrayal of Cofan territorialclaims that can counter official representations of north-eastern Ecuadors social history. With this image, Cofan ac-tivists have a new weapon in contentious meetings withcolonists, corporations, and hostile government ministries.

The Cofan Historical Mapping Project might just be, inLis words, one more recipe for how improvement can beimproved (2007:2). Rather than view it as another man-ifestation of governmentality, however, I prefer to under-stand it as the hard-won result of years of difficult but ulti-mately successful attempts at intercultural communicationacross a deep geopolitical divide. Western conservationistsare slowly realizing what does and does not work in theirinvolvements with indigenous people. Indigenous peopleare conceptualizing novel ways in whichWestern technolo-gies and collaborators can help them to pursue their objec-tives. And many anthropologists are moving past the polit-ical paranoia of a popular theoretical perspective to listen

to the people with whom they work as they contribute toprojects that actually might do some good.

Notes

Acknowledgments. Drafts of this article profited from exchangeswith a number of colleagues: Debby Moskovitz, Dan Brinkmeier,Alaka Wali, Clark Erickson, Terence Turner, Andrew Gilbert, ChrisKrupa, Jill Fleuriet, Jamon Halvaksz, Jerry Jacka, John Kelly,DonaldDonham, and three anonymous reviewers. In addition, I re-ceived helpful feedback from participants in my graduate seminaron Culture, Environment, and Conservation as well as attendeesof the Workshop on Culture, Society, and Environment at the Uni-versity of Texas at San Antonio. For their financial support of myresearch, I thank the University of Chicago, Macalester College, theFieldMuseumof Natural History, theNational Science Foundation,the Tinker Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and theMellon Foundation. Finally, I want to express my deep gratitude toall of the Cofan people with whom I continue to work in Quito andeastern Ecuador.1. Shortly after I defended my dissertation in 2006, the ECP

joined the Field Museums Center for Cultural Understanding andChange (CCUC) under the newly created Division of Environment,Culture, and Conservation (ECCo). A few years later, the CCUCmerged with the ECP. ECCo is now the official designation for themuseumbranch that continues thework of the ECP. I retain the for-mer label in this article because it was the only term used by bothCofan people andmuseumpersonnel duringmyfieldwork. In addi-tion,manymuseum employees continue to use the label to identifythemselves and their work in unofficial contexts.2. Aingae is the primary language of everyday life in Zabalo, and

it is my main means of communication with Cofan people. Unlessotherwise noted, all Cofan quotations are my direct translationsfrom Aingae.3. ECP personnel have no editorial control overmy research, and

they want me to be as truthfully critical as I can. Nevertheless, Iwant to state that I consider myself a conservationist and that I ad-mire the expertise, openness, motivation, and ethical approach ofthe ECP.4. In other works (Cepek 2006, 2008b), I explore the importance

of ecotourism in generating Cofan conservationism. From theirearliest days in their new community, the Cofan of Zabalo guidedWestern backpackers on canoe trips and forest hikes. According tothe testimony of Cofan individuals, working with tourists helpedthem to appreciate the forest as an object that could hold aestheticand commercial value without being materially transformed.5. In 1993 and 1994, the people of Zabalo engaged in a radical

and successfulcampaign against Ecuadors state oil company,which they forced out of their territory by kidnapping oil workers,burning down a heliport, and publicizing their actions in the na-tional and international media with the help of non-Cofan allies(Cepek 1996).6. Another main activity of the ECP is the design and execution

of rapid biological inventories, which program personnel organizewith teams of national and international scientists as well as localinhabitants, to demonstrate the biological value of unprotected ar-eas. One inventory led to the establishment of the Cofan-BermejoEcological Reserve, a 55,541-hectare park inhabited by four Cofancommunities.7. Two coordinators are responsible for directing the work and

supervising data entry. During my research, each of them received$150 a month. Each of the monitors received $100 a month.

513


8. According tomost narratives that I recorded, the turtle projectbegan when a Zabalo man collected a nest of hatchlings and keptthem in a bucket next to his house. Keeping pets is a commonCofan practice, and there was nothing extraordinary about his ac-tion. By coincidence, visiting tourists saw the turtles and gave asmall sum of money to Borman to help the community care forthem. After a few years of experimentation, which included thebuilding of small ponds, outside scientists andNGOs became inter-ested in studying Cofan experiments so as to create a project thatwould repopulate the Aguarico River with the endangered animals.Only with the entrance of the Field Museum, however, did mon-itors and coordinators begin working on the project and keepingsystematic data on its progress.9. I intentionally leave the difficult idea of alienated species be-

ing (Ollman 1976:8284) out of my discussion.10. Borman is trilingual in English, Spanish, and Aingae. He

spoke this passage in English.11. The inventories do not involve the same sort of community

census work that occurred as part of the ECPs program in Zabalo.Rather, Cofan people act as paid guides, logistical coordinators,and natural historians for Western academics, who inventory ar-eas faunal and floral diversity according to established scientificmethodologies. The results are published in glossy reports filledwith statistics, maps, and expert summaries written in English andSpanish.

References cited

Agrawal, Arun2005a Environmentality: Community, IntimateGovernment, andEnvironmental Subjects in Kumaon, India. Current Anthropol-ogy 46(2):161190.

2005b Environmentality: Technologies of Government and theMaking of Subjects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Braun, Bruce2000 Producing Vertical Territory: Geology and Governmentalityin Late Victorian Canada. Cultural Geographies 7(1):746.

2003 The Intemperate Rainforest. Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press.

Callinicos, Alex1989 Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique. London: Pal-grave Macmillan.

Cepek, Michael1996 Reorganization and Resistance: Petroleum, Conservation,and Cofan Transformations. Bachelors thesis, Department ofAnthropology, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign.

2006 The Cofan Experiment: Expanding an IndigenousAmazonian World. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of An-thropology, University of Chicago.

2008a Bold Jaguars and Unsuspecting Monkeys: The Value ofFearlessness in Cofan Politics. Journal of the Royal Anthropo-logical Institute 14:334352.

2008b Essential Commitments: Identity and the Politics of CofanConservation. Journal of Latin American and Caribbean An-thropology 13(1):196222.

2009 TheMyth of theGringo Chief: AmazonianMessiahs and thePower of Immediacy. Identities: Global Studies in Culture andPower 16:227248.

Chapin, Mac2004 A Challenge to Conservationists. World Watch Magazine,NovemberDecember: 1731.

Darier, Eric1999 Foucault and the Environment: An Introduction. In Dis-courses of the Environment. Eric Darier, ed. Pp. 134. Oxford:Blackwell.

Escobar, Arturo1994 Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking ofthe Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Ferguson, James1994 The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticiza-tion, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho.Minneapolis: Univer-sity of Minnesota Press.

Field Museum2005 Environmental and Conservation Programs. http://www.fieldmuseum.org/researchcollections/ecp, accessedMarch 1.

Fisher, William1997Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGOPractices.Annual Review of Anthropology 1997:439464.

Flavin, Chris2005 From Readers: A Challenge to Conservationists: Phase II.World Watch, JanuaryFebruary: 520.

Foucault, Michel1978 The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction. New York:Vintage.

1991 Governmentality. In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Gov-ernmentality. GrahamBurchell, Colin Gordon, and PeterMillereds. Pp. 87104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gordon, Colin1991 Governmental Rationality: An Introduction. In TheFoucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Graham Burchell,Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller eds. Pp. 151. Chicago:University of Chicago Press.

Inda, Jonathan Xavier2005 Analytics of the Modern: An Introduction. In Anthro-pologies of Modernity: Foucault, Government, and Life Pol-itics. Jonathan Xavier Inda, ed. Pp. 122. Malden, MA:Blackwell.

Kimerling, Judith1991 Amazon Crude. New York: Natural Resources DefenseCouncil.

Kipnis, Andrew2008 Audit Cultures: Neoliberal Governmentality, SocialistLegacy, or Technologies of Governing? American Ethnologist35(2):275289.

Li, Tania Murray2007 The Will to Improve: Government, Development, and thePractice of Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Little, Paul1992 Ecologa poltica del Cuyabeno: El desarollo no sosteniblede la Amazona. Quito: ILDIS, Abya-Yala.

Luke, Steven1999 Environmentality as Green Governmentality. In Discoursesof the Environment. Eric Darier ed. Pp. 121151. Oxford:Blackwell.

Marx, Karl1964 The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. DirkStruik, ed. New York: International.

Moore, Donald2000 The Crucible of Cultural Politics: Reworking Develop-ment in Zimbabwes Eastern Highlands. American Ethnolo-gist 26(3):654689.

Ollman, Bertell1976 Alienation: Marxs Conception of Man in Capitalist Society.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

514


OMalley, Pat, Lorna Weir, and Clifford Shearing1997 Governmentality, Criticism, Politics. Economy and Society26(1):501517.

Porter, Theodore1999 Quantification and the Accounting Ideal in Science. InThe Science Studies Reader. Mario Biagioli ed. Pp. 394406.London: Routledge.

Rose, Nikolas1999 Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rutherford, Paul1999 The Entry of Life into History. In Discourses of the Envi-ronment. Eric Darier ed. Pp. 3762. Oxford: Blackwell.

Sawyer, Suzana2004 Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil,and Neoliberalism in Ecuador. Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress.

Townsend, Wendy, Randall Borman, Eduardo Yiyoguaje, and LuisMendua

2005 Cofan Indians Monitoring of Freshwater Turtles in Zabalo,Ecuador. Biodiversity and Conservation 14(11):27432755.

Turner, Terence1994 Bodies and Anti-Bodies: Flesh and Fetish in ContemporarySocial Theory. In Embodiment and Experience: The Existen-tial Ground of Culture and Self. Thomas Csordas ed. Pp. 2747.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Vickers, William2003 The Modern Political Transformation of the Secoya. InMillennial Ecuador: Critical Essays on Cultural Transforma-tions and Social Dynamics. Norman Whitten Jr., ed. Pp. 4674.Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

accepted December 23, 2010final version submitted January 10, 2011

Michael L. CepekDepartment of AnthropologyUniversity of Texas at San AntonioOne UTSA CircleSan Antonio, TX 782490649

[email protected]

515

cepek, michael l. foucault in the forest - questioning environmentality in amazonia

Documents