Campbell, Jeremy M.

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Review of Instituting Nature: Authority, Expertise, and Power in Mexican Forests by Andrew S. Mathews

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Roger Williams UniversityDOCS@RWUFeinstein College of Arts & Sciences Faculty Papers Feinstein College of Arts and Sciences2013Review of Instituting Nature: Authority, Expertise,and Power in Mexican Forests by Andrew S.MathewsJeremy M. CampbellRoger Williams University, jeremy.m.campbell@gmail.comFollow this and additional works at: http://docs.rwu.edu/fcas_fpPart of the Anthropology Commons, and the Arts and Humanities CommonsThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Feinstein College of Arts and Sciences at DOCS@RWU. It has been accepted for inclusionin Feinstein College of Arts & Sciences Faculty Papers by an authorized administrator of DOCS@RWU. For more information, please contactmwu@rwu.edu.Recommended CitationCampbell, Jeremy M. 2013. "Review of Instituting Nature: Authority, Expertise, and Power in Mexican Forests by Andrew S.Mathews." Political and Legal Anthropology Review 36 (2).Page 370 PoLAR: Vol. 36, No. 2This brings me to my final comments on this excellent and intriguing book. The afterwordbrings into play a range of more inclined ethnographic, anthropological and sociologicalstudies and perspectives on the commission. Cole discusses authors who have analyzedthe everyday work of the staff of the commission in contrast to the genre’s usual focus oncelebrities like Tutu, and the detailed theoretical and methodological implications of thevarious truth and reconciliation techniques and traditions at work in the commission, as wellas the human rights discursive work of the commission. Cole may not have wanted to overdothe referencing in order to make the book unnecessarily heavy to read, while simultaneouslywanting to add more perspectives. Yet I wonder if the ethnographic and anthropologicalauthorships included as an afterthought would have changed her perspective and celebrationof contested concepts like Ubuntu (reified notion of people’s allegiances and relations witheach other) and encouraged her to show a greater attentiveness to the a priori structuring ofthe performance or performativity of the Commission.Jeremy M. CampbellRoger Williams UniversityInstituting Nature: Authority, Expertise, and Power in Mexican ForestsAndrew S. Mathews (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011)Much ethnography since the mid-1980s has been dedicated to the careful study of howknowledge-making necessarily entails power struggles in everyday encounters: the powerto name, to enunciate official discourses, and to privilege or occlude phenomena as thesites of knowledge. This important work has relied on the assumption that knowinginstitutions—organizations such as states or regimes of scientific authority—go about theirwork with a determined confidence, and that the power of these institutions corresponds totheir ability to construct the grids of intelligibility through which the subjects of knowledgewill come to know themselves. While Andrew Mathews’ Instituting Nature: Authority,Expertise, and Power in Mexican Forests contributes to this rich line of research, he turns thebaseline assumptions of ethnographies of power and knowledge on their heads. At the heartof this compelling account of the arrival of forestry science in Mexico and its subsequenttransformation into community forestry, Mathews is exploring the conceit that perhaps it isignorance, rather than knowledge, that is the most important feature in how bureaucracieswork and how authoritative discourses come to travel.Based on careful oral histories, archival research, and accompanying officials andlocals as they move through Oaxaca’s forests, Mathews shows how various commu-nities are induced to “institute nature” for their own motives. The text proceeds innine chapters, though it can be more usefully thought of as having three sections.In the first section, Mathews outlines his principal argument—that collusion and complicitybetween experts and their publics is crucial to how state authority becomes effective. Mathewscontends that moments of confusion, dissimulation, and official reversals have markedthe construction of nature/culture binaries within official Mexican forestry discourse andpractice, and that would-be subjects of rule have actively undermined, remade, or evadedthese binaries. Mathews lays out the theoretical foundations of his work, which includes nodsto science studies scholars Sheila Jasanoff, Donna Haraway, and Bruno Latour, and chartsa fresh approach to James Scott’s (and by extension Foucault’s) framing of state power asvision. Mathews insists that state’s ability to see is itself the result of socially-situated dramas,November 2013 Page 371encounters between officials, communities, and ecosystems that are messy and indeterminate.These encounters have to be produced as seemingly transparent ligatures of power/knowledgeafter the fact. Between forest communities and the official reports that pin them as “known” isa rich terrain of trial-and-error, miscommunication, and willful ignorance that Mathews arguesis the halting and fallible site for the construction of state power and popular accession to rule.Mathews next explores the environmental and political history of the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca,where he tracks the arrival of forestry practice and knowledge in the early twentieth century.Writing from interviews and archives, Mathews convincingly portrays Oaxacan oak and pineforests as complex environments that had been shaped by indigenous economies, war, and thepolitics of patronage through the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, forestry sciencearrived in the region with an explicitly modernist orientation toward rationally managingMexico’s natural resources and alleviating “rural ignorance” (p. 41). On the heels of the revo-lution, forestry science and bureaucracy took aim at the ejido system and swidden agriculture.Arbor Day celebrations were spectacles which wedded environmental values with citizenshipideals. As readers learn in Mathews’ thorough history, however, the institution of forestry didnot unfurl evenly over the Oaxacan landscape: “the state was very good at communicatingwhat it wanted people to do even as it was very rarely able to make them actually obeyregulations” (p. 102). From 1920 through the late 1950s, indigenous Oaxaquen˜os learned thescript of forestry regulations and began to adjust their practices to fit with the emerging regimeof power/knowledge. While firewood harvesters and charcoal producers learned approvedtechniques to continue exploiting the forest, they also learned how to evade surveillance and toinfluence the exercise of rule. In the latter half of the 20th century, the focus of forestry in SierraJuarez shifted toward large-scale industrial logging. Though state- and corporate-sponsoredideologies of environmental management circulated widely in the region, Mathews contendsthat these were never imposed on indigenous communities. To the contrary, Mathews explainsthat the rise of community forestry in Oaxaca—where it is a model of rationality, profitability,and local sovereignty—is due to “creative reworking(s) of official discourse and history . . . intoan environmental history that justifies community ownership of the forest” (p. 140).So how did this work? In the third section—by far the most ethnographically rich and usefulto scholars interested in the methodological challenges of studying bureaucracies—Mathewsdetails how documents and official encounters provide the theatre for effective power. In thefinal chapters, we learn how local forestry officials are under pressure to report only certainkinds of knowledge to Mexico City; how indigenous participation in forestry bureaucracygets enmeshed in the community cargo system; and how paperworkers and loggers “skillfullytranslate foresters’ theories into local practice” (p. 229). The community’s success in layingclaim to forestry resources emerges as a result of local foresters’ skillful participation in thedramas of public knowledge and authority. To a certain extent, the comuneros of Sierra Juarezlearn to become petty bureaucrats by shuffling papers and mastering the art of dissimulation,but as Mathews reminds us “public assent to forestry was not produced by the imposition of astate project . . . but by the ability of a well-organized and powerful community to collaboratein making knowledge that would inhabit national timber production statistics and officialreports” (p. 232).Instituting Nature may prove challenging to undergraduates, but the weaving of detailedethnographic description into sophisticated arguments can serve as a model for advancedseminars in science studies and the anthropology of the state. By taking a novel approach tostate power, Mathews is clearly hoping to reach an audience beyond scholars of Mexico andLatin America, though the book is also replete with careful research and thoughtful passagesthat will delight regional specialists as well.

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Review of Instituting Nature: Authority, Expertise, and Power in Mexican Forests by Andrew S. Mathews

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