P Vandergeest
Biographic Data
| ID | 2519 |
|---|---|
| NAME | P Vandergeest |
| GIVEN NAMES | P |
| FAMILY NAME | Vandergeest |
| SIGNATURE | VANDERGEEST P |
| AFFILIATIONS | York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6679-8356 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 964 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
A Visual Analysis Between the Sheng Character of Shadow Puppets from the Central Plains of China and Sri Rama of Wayang Kulit Kelantan, Malaysia
Although research on cross-cultural influences between Asian nations has been widely published in the field of fine arts, there is a near absence of studies that directly analyse the connection of visual characteristics between the People's Republic of China and Malaysian shadow puppets, or the visual design elements that are unique to China's Central Plains Sheng shadow puppet.Using the classic shadow puppets Sheng and Sri Rama, this paper inves…
Ontological Politics and Conservation in Thailand
The lens of ontological politics explains the persistence of conflicts between upland ethnic minorities such as Karen peoples and state forest conservation agencies in Thailand. As can be seen with Karen communities in areas managed as national parks, such as the Ngao River basin, the environmental management practices employed by state agencies and ethnic minority communities enact different ontologies of conservation. We argue that shifting the…
Migrant workers in Irish fisheries
Exploitative working conditions for migrant workers in industrial fisheries have recently drawn considerable attention among activists and scholars, often with a focus on Asian fisheries. Even so, fish work can offer a better livelihood option than migrant workers might have in their home countries. These contradictions are apparent in fisheries around the world, including those based in Europe and North America. In this paper we explore the inco…
Coastal transitions
Across Southeast Asia, coastal livelihoods are becoming more diverse and more commodified, as maritime zone developments intensify. We review literature from the ten maritime states in Southeast Asia to assess how older and emerging forms of maritime zone developments influence the viability of small-scale fishing livelihoods. Applying a political economy lens to small-scale fisheries and maritime zone developments at regional scale, we show how …
Coastal erosion narratives in the Gulf of Mexico
This article presents a study of coastal erosion narratives by the Mexican government, scientists, and local fishers in coastal communities in the Gulf of Mexico. It shows how plans to enroll fishing communities into programs to adapt to or to slow coastal erosion are based on simplified environmental narratives that rely on global climate change as the main cause of coastal erosion. They discount local processes and local explanations, as well a…
Beyond slavery scandals
Seafarers in fishing
This paper builds on our earlier publication that examined COVID-19, instability and migrant fish workers in Asia during the initial six months of the pandemic. Drawing on interviews with port-based support organizations and various other international organizations, we outline how pre-existing structural marginalizations of seafarers in distant water fishing has made them particularly vulnerable to the negative impacts of pandemic management pol…
Industrial seafood systems in the immobilizing Covid-19 moment
We set aside small-scale fisheries and aquaculture because of the distinctiveness of these heterogeneous value chains
Writing Political Forests
In this essay, we highlight the intellectual context that shaped our initial conceptualisation of political forests as dynamic spaces and political ecologies, and how our fieldwork and comparative approach shaped our subsequent elaboration of the concept and its empirical manifestations. Of particular significance was our emphasis on incorporated/relational comparison and our multiscale analysis. These approaches allowed us to locate subjects and…
Modern Slavery and Freedom
This paper examines the modern anti‐slavery movement through the lens of the slavery scandal in Thailand’s fisheries sector. The slavery framing provoked a response on the part of governments, corporations and NGOs that produced improvements in working conditions. Nevertheless, we argue that while the slavery framing was effective in drawing attention and resources to solidarity groups, it provided a poor guide to action because of how it resolve…
Fisheries development, labour and working conditions on Myanmar's marine resource frontier
Migrant worker experiences in Atlantic Canadian fish processing plants
Low‐skilled migrant workers provide an important labour source in Atlantic Canada's seafood industry. This research unpacks the experiences of 22 workers from Thailand and the Philippines working in one Atlantic Canadian seafood processing company. We pay particular attention to migration routes, labour conditions, and worker mobility, along with worker reflections on their experiences landing a Canadian job. We also consider the perceptions of m…
Law and lawlessness in industrial fishing
The paper examines the extension of state regulation of industrial fisheries to include labour relations in the wake of scandals concerning unfree and abusive working conditions in the fishing industry. The focus is on fisheries operated out of Thailand, supplemented by information about working conditions in fisheries based in Myanmar and Taiwan. A concept of frontier that pays attention to patterns in labour relations prior to intensification o…
What happened when the land grab came to Southeast Asia
This introduction to the collection seeks to determine to what extent the specialist regional literature on agrarian and environmental transformations in Southeast Asia has responded to land grab studies, and how scholarship on Southeast Asia contributed to the broader field. We argue that at the centre of land grab studies is what Mara Goldman calls a 'standardized package' that we use to explore the ways that the field of land grab studies has …
Slavery scandals
Over the past year, scandals around what has been labelled slave labour in the industrial fisheries sector in Thailand have revealed not only the connections between northern buyers and southern labour practices, but also the relative lack of research on fisheries labour in Asia and the global South. The slavery and trafficking framings pervading these depictions have been very useful for drawing attention to and acting on criminal activities in …
Assembling sustainable territories
The authors show how certification assembles 'sustainable' territories through a complex layering of regulatory authority in which both government and nongovernment entities claim rule-making authority, sometimes working together, sometimes in parallel, sometimes competitively. It is argued that territorialisation is accomplished not just through (re)defining bounded space, but more broadly through the assembling of four elements: space, subjects…
Introduction
This essay makes a case for centering the questions of ecological knowledge in order to understand how environmental governance and resource access are being remade in the frontier ecologies of Asia. These frontiers, consisting of the so-called uplands and coastal zones, are increasingly subject to new waves of extractive and conservation activities, prompted in part by rising values attached to these ecologies by new actors and actor coalitions.…
A new extraterritoriality? Aquaculture certification, sovereignty, and empire
Political Ecologies of War and Forests
We examine the significance of a specific type of political violence—counterinsurgency—in the making of political forests, providing a link between literatures on the political ecology of forests and the geographies of war. During the Cold War, particularly between the 1950s and the end of the 1970s, natures were remade in relation to nation-states in part through engagements with “insurgencies” and “emergencies” staged from forested territories.…
Certification and Communities
CBNRM communities in action
Empires of Forestry
This paper examines the origins, spread and practices of professional forestry in Southeast Asia, focusing on key sites in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Part 1, in an earlier issue of this journal, challenged popular and scholarly accounts of colonial forestry as a set of simplifying practices exported from Europe and applied in the European colonies. We showed that professional forestry empires were constituted und…
Empires of Forestry
This paper examines the origins, spread, and practices of professional forestry in Southeast Asia, focusing on key sites in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Part 1 challenges popular and scholarly accounts of colonial forestry as a set of simplifying practices exported from Europe and applied in the European colonies. We show that professional forestry empires were constituted under colonialism through local politics t…
Racialization and Citizenship in Thai Forest Politics
The first part of this article argues for the usefulness of the concept of racialization in understanding the intersection between identity and resource politics in Southeast Asia. The production of space through cadastral mapping, forest reservation, and community forests has all been racialized to the degree that these spaces are also associated with naturalized and essentialized ethnic identities. The second part explores the tension between r…
Mien Relations
Territorialization and state power in Thailand
Genealogies of the Political Forest and Customary Rights in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand
How have national and state governments the world over come to "own" huge expanses of territory under the rubric of "national forest," "national parks," or "wastelands"? The two contradictory statements in the above epigraph illustrate that not all colonial administrators agreed that forests should be taken away from local people and "protected" by the state. The assumption of state authority over forests is based on a relatively recent convergen…
Political Ecologies of War and Forests
We examine the significance of a specific type of political violence—counterinsurgency—in the making of political forests, providing a link between literatures on the political ecology of forests and the geographies of war. During the Cold War, particularly between the 1950s and the end of the 1970s, natures were remade in relation to nation-states in part through engagements with “insurgencies” and “emergencies” staged from forested territories.…
What happened when the land grab came to Southeast Asia
This introduction to the collection seeks to determine to what extent the specialist regional literature on agrarian and environmental transformations in Southeast Asia has responded to land grab studies, and how scholarship on Southeast Asia contributed to the broader field. We argue that at the centre of land grab studies is what Mara Goldman calls a 'standardized package' that we use to explore the ways that the field of land grab studies has …
A Political Ecology of Shrimp Aquaculture in Thailand1
This paper uses themes from political ecology to develop insights into the billion dollar shrimp aquaculture sector in Thailand. We find that corporations can exercise only limited control over shrimp production and that there is no clear trend toward larger operations. We explain the continued viability of small owner-operated farms by looking at how shrimp farming is located in physical and social space, and at the ability of owner-operators to…
Certification and Communities
Empires of Forestry
This paper examines the origins, spread, and practices of professional forestry in Southeast Asia, focusing on key sites in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Part 1 challenges popular and scholarly accounts of colonial forestry as a set of simplifying practices exported from Europe and applied in the European colonies. We show that professional forestry empires were constituted under colonialism through local politics t…
Racialization and Citizenship in Thai Forest Politics
The first part of this article argues for the usefulness of the concept of racialization in understanding the intersection between identity and resource politics in Southeast Asia. The production of space through cadastral mapping, forest reservation, and community forests has all been racialized to the degree that these spaces are also associated with naturalized and essentialized ethnic identities. The second part explores the tension between r…
Mapping nature
In Thailand, as elsewhere, the administrative definition of forest has changed from one based on classification by species to one based on territory. This process was an important facet of the more general process by which the central government claimed a monopoly on the administration of property rights to natural resources. The process took place in three stages: First, the government declared that all territory not claimed by permanent cultiva…
Land to some tillers
For a new economics of resettlement
Many development projects intended to alleviate poverty end up increasing poverty by displacing large numbers of people without reestablishing them viably, despite the use of compensation payments for assets lost. This paper appreciates the contribution of economic science to matters of compensation. However, it also subjects the theory of compensation to critical scrutiny and deconstructs the current practices of compensation to highlight their …
Empires of Forestry
This paper examines the origins, spread and practices of professional forestry in Southeast Asia, focusing on key sites in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Part 1, in an earlier issue of this journal, challenged popular and scholarly accounts of colonial forestry as a set of simplifying practices exported from Europe and applied in the European colonies. We showed that professional forestry empires were constituted und…
Marx, Weber, and development sociology
Rice Paddy or Shrimp Pond
Writing Political Forests
In this essay, we highlight the intellectual context that shaped our initial conceptualisation of political forests as dynamic spaces and political ecologies, and how our fieldwork and comparative approach shaped our subsequent elaboration of the concept and its empirical manifestations. Of particular significance was our emphasis on incorporated/relational comparison and our multiscale analysis. These approaches allowed us to locate subjects and…
Constructing Thailand
Studies of what we call modern societies frequently take one of two major perspectives. The first emphasizes an ever-increasing constraining or regulatory power (Weber's iron cage [1976], or Foucault's discipline and regulation [1979, 1980]). The second tradition seems to contradict the first by emphasizing trends, such as a 'democratic revolution' (de Tocqueville 1969:702-5; Laclau and Mouffe 1985:152) or the extension of citizenship rights (Mar…
Fisheries development, labour and working conditions on Myanmar's marine resource frontier
Assembling sustainable territories
The authors show how certification assembles 'sustainable' territories through a complex layering of regulatory authority in which both government and nongovernment entities claim rule-making authority, sometimes working together, sometimes in parallel, sometimes competitively. It is argued that territorialisation is accomplished not just through (re)defining bounded space, but more broadly through the assembling of four elements: space, subjects…
A new extraterritoriality? Aquaculture certification, sovereignty, and empire
Law and lawlessness in industrial fishing
The paper examines the extension of state regulation of industrial fisheries to include labour relations in the wake of scandals concerning unfree and abusive working conditions in the fishing industry. The focus is on fisheries operated out of Thailand, supplemented by information about working conditions in fisheries based in Myanmar and Taiwan. A concept of frontier that pays attention to patterns in labour relations prior to intensification o…
Coastal transitions
Across Southeast Asia, coastal livelihoods are becoming more diverse and more commodified, as maritime zone developments intensify. We review literature from the ten maritime states in Southeast Asia to assess how older and emerging forms of maritime zone developments influence the viability of small-scale fishing livelihoods. Applying a political economy lens to small-scale fisheries and maritime zone developments at regional scale, we show how …
Modern Slavery and Freedom
This paper examines the modern anti‐slavery movement through the lens of the slavery scandal in Thailand’s fisheries sector. The slavery framing provoked a response on the part of governments, corporations and NGOs that produced improvements in working conditions. Nevertheless, we argue that while the slavery framing was effective in drawing attention and resources to solidarity groups, it provided a poor guide to action because of how it resolve…
Gifts and Rights
A pervasive assumption in the critical literature and practice of development has been that capitalism and state‐building has undermined relatively autonomous village communities in which there were equalizing institutions of mutual help or gift‐giving. These assumptions tend to retain the dualisms of modernization theories by reversing them. The author argues that we should instead challenge these dualisms, and look for complexity and contradict…
Commercialization and Commoditiza-tion
Hierarchy and Power in Pre-National Buddhist States
Since the Second World War, an important school of social science scholarship in Southeast Asia has explained pre-national social hierarchy in terms of religious cosmology, or religious beliefs in the ordering principles of merit and karma (Heine-Geldern, 1956; Geertz, 1980; Errington, 1989). With respect to Siam/Thailand, Tambiah (1970, 1976, 1984) exemplifies this approach in its strong form-he has attempted to explain all religious practices o…
Marx, Weber, and development sociology
Commercialization and Commoditiza-tion
Peasant Strategies in a World Context
In this paper I draw on research in two rice and palm sugar producing areas in Thailand to make several points regarding approaches for understanding the process of market integration in peasant societies. In contrast to the usual assumption in the political economy literature that commoditization is always imposed on peasants, and that the process always implies a progressive loss of control by peasants, the interpretation here suggests that pea…
Gifts and Rights
A pervasive assumption in the critical literature and practice of development has been that capitalism and state‐building has undermined relatively autonomous village communities in which there were equalizing institutions of mutual help or gift‐giving. These assumptions tend to retain the dualisms of modernization theories by reversing them. The author argues that we should instead challenge these dualisms, and look for complexity and contradict…
The Southern Thai Shadowplay Tradition in Historical Context
The shadowplay of Southeast Asia has often been understood as a reflection of local cultural patterns, and it has therefore been the object of much scholarly interest. That interest has been directed especially at the Javanese play, although much has also been written about Balinese and Malaysian shadowplay performances. The shadowplay performance is not usually associated with Thailand, and the shadowplay there has not been subjected to the same…
Hierarchy and Power in Pre-National Buddhist States
Since the Second World War, an important school of social science scholarship in Southeast Asia has explained pre-national social hierarchy in terms of religious cosmology, or religious beliefs in the ordering principles of merit and karma (Heine-Geldern, 1956; Geertz, 1980; Errington, 1989). With respect to Siam/Thailand, Tambiah (1970, 1976, 1984) exemplifies this approach in its strong form-he has attempted to explain all religious practices o…
Constructing Thailand
Studies of what we call modern societies frequently take one of two major perspectives. The first emphasizes an ever-increasing constraining or regulatory power (Weber's iron cage [1976], or Foucault's discipline and regulation [1979, 1980]). The second tradition seems to contradict the first by emphasizing trends, such as a 'democratic revolution' (de Tocqueville 1969:702-5; Laclau and Mouffe 1985:152) or the extension of citizenship rights (Mar…
Social Aspects of Forestry in Southeast Asia
This paper examines the major trends since the 1950s in social science writing on forest management in Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia is simultaneously rich in and dependent on natural resources, both for local and national use or sale. Among renewable resources, forest products have played critical roles in the region's national, provincial, and local economies before, during, and after colonialism — for as long as two millennia. Their importanc…
Territorialization and state power in Thailand
Mapping nature
In Thailand, as elsewhere, the administrative definition of forest has changed from one based on classification by species to one based on territory. This process was an important facet of the more general process by which the central government claimed a monopoly on the administration of property rights to natural resources. The process took place in three stages: First, the government declared that all territory not claimed by permanent cultiva…
On the Shoulders of Merchants
Protecting Nature and Displacing People
We usually think that national parks, wildlife sanctuaries, and other areas reserved for the protection of nature are good things but the displacement effects of protected areas have made them highly controversial in many parts of the world. However, many environmental groups see an expanded protected areas system as central to the preservation of both biodiversity and the "charismatic megafauna" which are the basis of their funding drives. Based…
Creating the Countryside
Introduction Peter Vandergeest and E. Melanie DuPuis Part I: Modernization and Marginalization 2. Stone Age New England: A Geology of Morals Michael M. Bell 3. The Farm as Firm: Rhetoric and the Remanufacturing of Basque Agrarian Production Peter Leigh Taylor Part II: People In and Out of Nature 4. In the Name of Nature: Ecology, Marginality, and Rural Land Use Planning during the New Deal E. Melanie DuPuis 5. Reserving Value: Conservation Ideolo…
Rice Paddy or Shrimp Pond
A Political Ecology of Shrimp Aquaculture in Thailand1
This paper uses themes from political ecology to develop insights into the billion dollar shrimp aquaculture sector in Thailand. We find that corporations can exercise only limited control over shrimp production and that there is no clear trend toward larger operations. We explain the continued viability of small owner-operated farms by looking at how shrimp farming is located in physical and social space, and at the ability of owner-operators to…
Response to Jasper Goss, Mike Skladany, and Gerad Middendorf
Genealogies of the Political Forest and Customary Rights in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand
How have national and state governments the world over come to "own" huge expanses of territory under the rubric of "national forest," "national parks," or "wastelands"? The two contradictory statements in the above epigraph illustrate that not all colonial administrators agreed that forests should be taken away from local people and "protected" by the state. The assumption of state authority over forests is based on a relatively recent convergen…
Racialization and Citizenship in Thai Forest Politics
The first part of this article argues for the usefulness of the concept of racialization in understanding the intersection between identity and resource politics in Southeast Asia. The production of space through cadastral mapping, forest reservation, and community forests has all been racialized to the degree that these spaces are also associated with naturalized and essentialized ethnic identities. The second part explores the tension between r…
Flexible Networking in Research Capacity Building at the National University of Laos
This paper describes a research-training project for building social science research capacity at the National University of Laos (NUOL),supported by IDRC. At the international level, the project was structured as a flexible network of resource persons from six countries. The main successes of the project turned out to be unanticipated: the project offered significant insights to NUOL's ongoing assessment of its administrative capacity to manage …
For a new economics of resettlement
Many development projects intended to alleviate poverty end up increasing poverty by displacing large numbers of people without reestablishing them viably, despite the use of compensation payments for assets lost. This paper appreciates the contribution of economic science to matters of compensation. However, it also subjects the theory of compensation to critical scrutiny and deconstructs the current practices of compensation to highlight their …
Land to some tillers
CBNRM communities in action
Empires of Forestry
This paper examines the origins, spread and practices of professional forestry in Southeast Asia, focusing on key sites in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Part 1, in an earlier issue of this journal, challenged popular and scholarly accounts of colonial forestry as a set of simplifying practices exported from Europe and applied in the European colonies. We showed that professional forestry empires were constituted und…
Empires of Forestry
This paper examines the origins, spread, and practices of professional forestry in Southeast Asia, focusing on key sites in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Part 1 challenges popular and scholarly accounts of colonial forestry as a set of simplifying practices exported from Europe and applied in the European colonies. We show that professional forestry empires were constituted under colonialism through local politics t…
Certification and Communities
Political science (36 works) · Law (25 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Geography (21 works) · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies (20 works) · Politics (18 works) · Economics (17 works) · Law (13 works) · Business (12 works) · Fishery (11 works)