The politics of nature are at play in forests and nations, as well as within contested memories and variably shaded skin. By tracing the connections between these realms, we can learn how difference becomes racialized in cultural politics. This is Jake Kosek's argument in Understories, an ethnography of the virulent struggles that have raged over the use and control of forests in northern New Mexico. Aligning himself primarily with a Hispano community in Truchas, New Mexico, while also reaching out to local forestry officials and environmentalists, Kosek conducted ethnographic fieldwork and archival study into the conflict that has pitted advocates of conservation, scientific management, and local subsistence use against one other. Kosek found that race was a powerful but frequently avoided factor in the dispute, and rather than shying away from race as a politically sensitive subject, he takes this as a motivation for writing. The book represents a successful example of engaged anthropology, since the analysis is both ethnographically innovative and politically useful to those he studies.

Each chapter tackles the controversy from a different angle, ranging over historical periods and across scales from community to nation-state. The common analytical threads of nature and difference hold them all together. First, by discussing the contested memories of dispossession and longing held by Hispano and Ácoma Native American communities, Kosek examines memory as a “material imaginary” that carries emotional and political ramifications for the present. Next, he turns governmentality into an object of investigation as he presents a historical account of how the United States Forest Service gained authority over both lands and community members. In what is perhaps the most innovative chapter, Kosek analyzes metaphors, practices, and materialities to examine the several ways in which Hispano residents have been understood as belonging to the land of northern New Mexico. In the political present, some of these modes of belonging are more valued than others, and this holds consequences for environmental justice advocates that use them to stake claims. The chapters that follow, grounded in archival work, explore how anxieties about race and natural resources have commingled in the United States, taking as a case study the figure of Smokey Bear. A final chapter maps the shared geography of Truchas and the Los Alamos National Laboratory by following the daily commute of one Truchas resident and tracing links of labor, radiation, and conceptions of nature between the two sites. Throughout the monograph, we see the forceful presence in history of both human agency and the active materiality of nature.

Despite occasional repetitiveness, Kosek's writing is engaging and draws skillfully on conversations, ethnographic observations, and archival research. His approach bridges disciplinary boundaries between anthropology, history, American culture studies, and political ecology. His work on cultural politics and memory will be of interest to the interdisciplinary field of memory studies. Practicing environmentalists and social justice advocates will benefit from the book's critical and even-handed consideration of these forestry disputes in the American Southwest.