Since the signing of the 1996 peace accords, a procession of ethnographers has engaged in mapping the convoluted and often contradictory bodies of knowledge that shape contemporary Guatemala. In a country marked by decades of intra-community violence, systemic oppression and political corruption, accounts have understandably emphasised the experiences of local communities and inequitable power relations therein. With An Ecology of Knowledges, Micha Rahder contributes a thought-provoking, interdisciplinary volume on epistemological inconsistencies that define conservation practice in the Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR). In nine chapters, Rahder produces a comprehensive case study on the production of knowledge in Central America's largest protected area, shining a spotlight on the evolution of ecological consciousness and the increasingly complicated project of protecting our wild spaces.
This, Rahder's first book, draws upon a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in the northern department of Petén, embedded within several of the region's most influential conservation institutions including the Center for Monitoring and Evaluation (CEMEC) at Guatemala's National Council of Protected Areas (CONAP) and non-profit partners like the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). The book is explicitly written from within such organisations, a viewpoint which might raise alarm for some given the historical omission of local and/or indigenous voices in conservation narratives. But An Ecology of Knowledges does not lack local perspectives. The author's struggles with chronic illness precluded long stays in the field or campo, but observations from her brief forays are descriptive and astute. She manages to write about institutions without glossing over the humanity of individuals, and the account is replete with useful maps, satellite images, PowerPoint presentations, and other technical artifacts that would be otherwise inaccessible to most. Her methodological self-awareness is refreshing and honest in acknowledging the challenges faced by a researcher with hidden disabilities.
Early chapters draw unfamiliar readers into an alluring landscape, establishing a diverse cast of characters acting on what Rahder terms the ‘nooscape’, a neologism derived from mid-century philosophical and geological musings on the ever-evolving ‘mind of the earth’ (p. 4). As the book's subtitle would suggest, Rahder identifies fear, love and technoscience as three epistemic frames at play in the nooscape. Beginning with technoscience, the author calls into question and in some cases directly undermines the air of neutrality that surrounds ‘official’ knowledges. Processes of map drawing, population estimation, and other reporting mechanisms promise truth and objectivity but seldom present a complete or accurate picture of life in the MBR. The impulse to collect copious amounts of technoscientific data is instead a reflection of conservationists’ desire to ‘know a place in order to change it’ (p. 3). To estimate population growth in remote forest concessions, CEMEC deploys a digital camera shakily affixed to an aircraft, using blurry aerial images to triangulate new builds and simply multiplying each new structure by average family size (p. 121). These dubious estimates are then used to justify and inform intervention in the reserve's predominantly indigenous communities (Rahder explicitly discredits Malthusian concepts of population growth as an ecological threat). Even when equipped with more advanced technology, data and its interpretation are repeatedly skewed by internal and external circumstances beyond the purview of field staff and organisational leaders, like limited funding and high political turnover. The generation of technoscientific knowledge is a method of ‘epistemic taming’: a way to translate messy first-hand experiences into intelligible and impactful data (p. 233). Rahder argues that conservationists in the MBR are resigned to such unpredictability, but that oversimplification for the sake of expediency may engender grave social, political and environmental consequences.
Despite the demand for technoscientific data to support conservation intervention across conservation narratives, the thrilling unpredictability of life in the campo is seen as more ‘real’ than the cold, clinical corporate offices where policy and interventions take shape. The author refers to this sentimentality as love, the silent engine powering conservation efforts and the most intriguing yet least developed of the book's epistemic frames. Joining love and technoscience means assembling subjective memories and fragmented realities into generalised and abstracted knowledges, an imperfect or even ‘parasitic’ translation, since technoscience depends upon conservationists’ love for wild spaces, but the subjective power of love is absent from official knowledges in favour of objectivity and neutrality (p. 244). It is here that Rahder notably breaks from dualistic and teleological conservation narratives, depedestalising a human-free nature imported by US environmentalists. She envisions an environmental consciousness which accommodates the messiness of lived reality wherein humanity is an inevitable and even necessary part of the forest ecosystem. Love's role in sustaining conservationists and conservation organisations is an important contribution that merits further exploration.
Throughout the book, readers sense an underlying fear that permeates conservation practice and society at large. Such paranoia stems from the ever-looming spectre of violence, reinforcing a kind of ambient distrust and a ‘double vision in which knowledge is always haunted by terror of the unknown’ (p. 27). To illustrate fear's corrosive capacity, Chapter 4 breaks down the Mirador Basin controversy, an ongoing disagreement across political and environmental circles about the existence of a geological basin surrounding a significant archaeological site. Politicisation leads to factionalism and high-stake mudslinging on either side, both camps entrenched by suspected ulterior motives and varying interpretations of murky technoscientific data. Through the epistemological lens of fear, controversy becomes conspiracy. Paranoia is a justifiable mechanism for coping with chronic uncertainty in a country subjected to decades of violence and instability, but one that demonstrably encumbers intervention.
The MBR comes alive under Rahder's pen in an insightful volume that will appeal to anthropologists and environmentalists alike. Certain sections may require the acquisition of some foundational vocabulary, but even non-academics may find this a useful case study, particularly those interested in the region or conservation more broadly. Readers will appreciate the author's willingness to address head-on the unnamed fears that perpetuate inconsistencies in conservation efforts, from illicit airstrips laid by narcotraffickers with suspicious political connections, to racially charged accusations aimed at indigenous migrants displaced by the civil war. In another notable feat, Rahder deploys creative structural elements which evoke the simultaneous synergy, friction and collision of competing bodies of knowledge. Chapter 6 simulates the ‘edge effects’ created by fire through a series of disjointed vignettes, all revolving around the use or study of fire but chafing against one another so as to constantly shift and blur lines, quite intentionally leaving the reader disoriented and slightly scorched. Those familiar with the historical and geographical context may recognise certain issues raised throughout the book, like the NGO-ification of Guatemalan civil society or the underlying fear that thwarts development interventions across the country. Rahder expands our understanding of these phenomena, which are well documented elsewhere, with a detailed account of their manifestation in conservation practice.
An Ecology of Knowledges weaves an intricate web of human and more-than-human life across the MBR, haunted by disparate ways of knowing and being. Rahder argues that the accommodation of difference is required to exorcise the ghostly epistemologies that hinder conservation efforts in Guatemala, illuminating a path for the next generation of social and environmental scientists to contemplate. Ending with a surprisingly optimistic reflection on the decomposition and renewal of knowledges and interventions across the nooscape, this book miraculously avoids trite and oversimplified representations of power and leaves readers with at least a shred of hope for the future of our wild spaces.
