Power/Knowledge, Power/Ignorance: Forest Fires and the State in Mexico

Abstract

For over a century the Mexican state has justified its control of forests by claiming that rural people are ignorant and destructive fire setters, in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary. Academic and popular stereotypes of the state have tended to assume that official power and knowledge go hand in hand. In an institutional ethnography of the Mexican environment agency, SEMARNAP, I show how official ignorance is deployed both within and outside state forestry institutions, and how ignorance and complicity may be as important as knowledge in asserting state power. Rather than internalizing official fire discourse, rural people in Mexico learn to mouth polite fictions in their encounters with officials. I argue that the scholarship on governmentality derived from Foucault has uncritically internalized the link between power and knowledge. A closer attention to the production and translation of knowledge within state institutions leads to a more nuanced understanding of various forms of obscurity and ignorance which accompany official knowledge claims.

Foucault in the forests—A review of the use of ‘Foucauldian’ concepts in forest policy analysis

“…For instance, as Van Herzele (2006, p. 675, quoting Healey, 1999 points out in her genealogy of the Flemish forest policy discourse, "apparently successful efforts in the transformation of policy rhetoric may fail to transform policy practices because either the rhetoric does not reach the routines of practice or the changes leave contradictory deeper cultural assumptions in place." Sletto (2008Sletto ( , p. 1945, in a similar vein as Mathews (2005) and also in a case study on fire suppression policy, but without explicitly criticizing Foucault, points out the frictions between discourse and practices, laconically noting that despite the long presence of the fire suppression discourse and programs in Venezuela, the indigenous Permon "burn as before". Comparable limitations on the effects of hegemonic discourses are also described by other scholars (Sowerwine, 2004;Pulhin and Dressler, 2009).…”

“…When looking at this aspect, it is astonishing that only one of the 39 analyzed studies critically reflects on a Foucauldian concept it used. In his case study on forest fire policy in Mexico, Mathews (2005) criticizes the Foucauldian governmentality concept for not considering the effects of 'strategic ignorance'. While the official discourse on fire suppression is shared in this case at both the national and local policy levels, it turned out to be a "public secret" that the official fire suppression policy seldom manifests itself in local practices.…”

A propósito del fuego: diálogo de saberes y justicia cognitiva en territorios indígenas culturalmente frágiles

“…Sin embargo, esta narrativa pasa por alto las causas estructurales del uso incorrecto del fuego y resta méritos a importantes contribuciones ecológicas de las prácticas indígenas tradicionales para el manejo de este (véase Fairhead y Leach, 1996;Kull, 2002 [a, b], Mathews, 2005). Dicho esto, la percepción del fuego entre los principales actores del conflicto dista de ser homogénea (Sánchez, R. y Vessuri, 2008): entre los gestores de recursos del Estado y los académicos están en un extremo aquellos que visualizan el fuego como un factor negativo para la naturaleza; sin embargo, existen otros que lo ven como un componente natural del paisaje.…”

The complex reality of biodiversity conservation through Natural Protected Area policy: Three cases from the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico

“…This virtualism is the attempt by policy-makers to make biodiversity and its conservation look like and conform to an abstract model for land planning and resource management. The model is assumed to be rational in the sense of having predictable outcomes, and goals that are supposedly shared nationally (Mathews, 2005). The planning process becomes virtual when high level officials, based in Mexico City with little understanding of rural conditions (Smardon and Faust, 2006), expect to transform local communities' productive activities and management of natural resources in accordance with the model (West and Brockington, 2006:609).…”

“…First, the process assumes that Mexican state institutions at all levels (federal, regional and local) are a monolithic entity working towards the same goal (Mathews, 2005). This interpretation disregards the fact that the forces operating at the level of the federal state are quite different from those at the levels of region and community (Berkes, 2004), and that a separation usually exists between those officials who have to design policies and regulations and those who have to implement and enforce them.…”