Andrew S Mathews
Biographic Data
| ID | 431381 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andrew S Mathews |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andrew S |
| FAMILY NAME | Mathews |
| SIGNATURE | MATHEWS A S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Santa Cruz |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6350-7533 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 481 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Wildfires as legacies of agropastoral abandonment
Agropastoral practices that historically reduced the flammability of Mediterranean landscapes are poorly understood due to state prohibitions and lack of scientific interest. Oral histories, analysis of agronomical writings, transect walks, and ethnographic study of fire managers and community members in the Monte Pisano of Italy, find legacies of traditional agropastoral practices in present-day landscapes. Forest leaf litter raking, largely car…
History as grounds for interdisciplinarity
International audience
Anthropology and the Anthropocene
The Anthropocene, a proposed name for a geological epoch marked by human impacts on global ecosystems, has inspired anthropologists to critique, to engage in theoretical and methodological experimentation, and to develop new forms of collaboration. Critics are concerned that the term Anthropocene overemphasizes human mastery or erases differential human responsibilities, including imperialism, capitalism, and racism, and new forms of technocratic…
Patchy Anthropocene
The Anthropocene deserves spatial as well as temporal analysis. "Patchy Anthropocene" is a conceptual tool for noticing landscape structure, with special attention to what we call "modular simplifications" and "feral proliferations." This introduction suggests guidelines for thinking structurally about more-than-human social relations; "structure" here emerges from phenomenological attunements to specific multispecies histories, rather than being…
Landscapes and Throughscapes in Italian Forest Worlds
Phenomenological descriptions of landscapes, trees, and terraces, combined with oral history and historical ecology, find traces of industrialization, plant disease, and forest fires in central Italian forests. Plant form, landscape form, and forest structure can be described through drawings that give resolutely partial descriptions of more-than-human encounters. This kind of knowledge of the landscape is potentially unstable and remade by the d…
Prognosis
While prognoses about the future are as old as human society, this special issue argues that the proliferation of new ways of modelling, planning, and interpolating the future of resources and environments is an increasing feature of contemporary environmental politics. In our introduction, we draw out two dimensions to this prognostic politics: first, the processes of making predictions about the future; and second, the movement of these predict…
Scandals, audits, and fictions
Over the past 10 years, Mexican officials and scientists have promoted the project of protecting Mexican forests in order to mitigate climate change, forests acting to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This article compares existing policies around mass reforestation and markets for environmental services, and their relationships to a policy in construction - Reduced Emissions through Degradation and Deforestation. Mass reforestation pol…
Instituting Nature
A study of how encounters between forestry bureaucrats and indigenous forest managers in Mexico produced official knowledge about forests and the state. Greater knowledge and transparency are often promoted as the keys to solving a wide array of governance problems. In Instituting Nature, Andrew Mathews describes Mexico's efforts over the past hundred years to manage its forests through forestry science and biodiversity conservation. He shows tha…
Unlikely Alliances
Indigenous community leaders and conservationists in Oaxaca, Mexico, believe that deforestation causes streams to dry up and threatens rainfall, authorizing popular mobilizations against industrial logging. This belief was produced by a combination of indigenous beliefs in nature spirits and early-twentieth-century state-sponsored desiccation theory, which was brought to the Valley of Mexico in the 1920s. Desiccation theory acquires political sig…
State Making, Knowledge, and Ignorance
Officials in the Mexican environmental protection agency, the Secretaria de Medio Ambiente, Recursos Naturales y de Pesca (SEMARNAP), deploy representations of agropastoral fires set by rural people to find urban allies, whereas officials and rural people in Oaxaca avoid mentioning fire and firewood cutting. Rigorous fire and firewood regulations are largely unenforced, producing official ignorance of burning and firewood cutting, partially becau…
Local Science vs Global Science
Building the town in the country
Her own thoughts and reflections were habitually her best companions; and, in observing the appearance of the country, the bearings of the roads, the difference of soil, the state of the harvest, the cottages, the cattle, the children, she found entertainment ... Miss Crawford was very unlike her. She had none of Fanny's delicacy of taste, of mind, of feeling; she saw Nature, inanimate Nature, with little observation; her attention was all for me…
Power/Knowledge, Power/Ignorance
Suppressing Fire and Memory
Patchy Anthropocene
The Anthropocene deserves spatial as well as temporal analysis. "Patchy Anthropocene" is a conceptual tool for noticing landscape structure, with special attention to what we call "modular simplifications" and "feral proliferations." This introduction suggests guidelines for thinking structurally about more-than-human social relations; "structure" here emerges from phenomenological attunements to specific multispecies histories, rather than being…
Prognosis
While prognoses about the future are as old as human society, this special issue argues that the proliferation of new ways of modelling, planning, and interpolating the future of resources and environments is an increasing feature of contemporary environmental politics. In our introduction, we draw out two dimensions to this prognostic politics: first, the processes of making predictions about the future; and second, the movement of these predict…
Instituting Nature
A study of how encounters between forestry bureaucrats and indigenous forest managers in Mexico produced official knowledge about forests and the state. Greater knowledge and transparency are often promoted as the keys to solving a wide array of governance problems. In Instituting Nature, Andrew Mathews describes Mexico's efforts over the past hundred years to manage its forests through forestry science and biodiversity conservation. He shows tha…
State Making, Knowledge, and Ignorance
Officials in the Mexican environmental protection agency, the Secretaria de Medio Ambiente, Recursos Naturales y de Pesca (SEMARNAP), deploy representations of agropastoral fires set by rural people to find urban allies, whereas officials and rural people in Oaxaca avoid mentioning fire and firewood cutting. Rigorous fire and firewood regulations are largely unenforced, producing official ignorance of burning and firewood cutting, partially becau…
Anthropology and the Anthropocene
The Anthropocene, a proposed name for a geological epoch marked by human impacts on global ecosystems, has inspired anthropologists to critique, to engage in theoretical and methodological experimentation, and to develop new forms of collaboration. Critics are concerned that the term Anthropocene overemphasizes human mastery or erases differential human responsibilities, including imperialism, capitalism, and racism, and new forms of technocratic…
Landscapes and Throughscapes in Italian Forest Worlds
Phenomenological descriptions of landscapes, trees, and terraces, combined with oral history and historical ecology, find traces of industrialization, plant disease, and forest fires in central Italian forests. Plant form, landscape form, and forest structure can be described through drawings that give resolutely partial descriptions of more-than-human encounters. This kind of knowledge of the landscape is potentially unstable and remade by the d…
Power/Knowledge, Power/Ignorance
Scandals, audits, and fictions
Over the past 10 years, Mexican officials and scientists have promoted the project of protecting Mexican forests in order to mitigate climate change, forests acting to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This article compares existing policies around mass reforestation and markets for environmental services, and their relationships to a policy in construction - Reduced Emissions through Degradation and Deforestation. Mass reforestation pol…
Unlikely Alliances
Indigenous community leaders and conservationists in Oaxaca, Mexico, believe that deforestation causes streams to dry up and threatens rainfall, authorizing popular mobilizations against industrial logging. This belief was produced by a combination of indigenous beliefs in nature spirits and early-twentieth-century state-sponsored desiccation theory, which was brought to the Valley of Mexico in the 1920s. Desiccation theory acquires political sig…
Suppressing Fire and Memory
Suppressing Fire and Memory
Power/Knowledge, Power/Ignorance
Local Science vs Global Science
Building the town in the country
Her own thoughts and reflections were habitually her best companions; and, in observing the appearance of the country, the bearings of the roads, the difference of soil, the state of the harvest, the cottages, the cattle, the children, she found entertainment ... Miss Crawford was very unlike her. She had none of Fanny's delicacy of taste, of mind, of feeling; she saw Nature, inanimate Nature, with little observation; her attention was all for me…
State Making, Knowledge, and Ignorance
Officials in the Mexican environmental protection agency, the Secretaria de Medio Ambiente, Recursos Naturales y de Pesca (SEMARNAP), deploy representations of agropastoral fires set by rural people to find urban allies, whereas officials and rural people in Oaxaca avoid mentioning fire and firewood cutting. Rigorous fire and firewood regulations are largely unenforced, producing official ignorance of burning and firewood cutting, partially becau…
Unlikely Alliances
Indigenous community leaders and conservationists in Oaxaca, Mexico, believe that deforestation causes streams to dry up and threatens rainfall, authorizing popular mobilizations against industrial logging. This belief was produced by a combination of indigenous beliefs in nature spirits and early-twentieth-century state-sponsored desiccation theory, which was brought to the Valley of Mexico in the 1920s. Desiccation theory acquires political sig…
Instituting Nature
A study of how encounters between forestry bureaucrats and indigenous forest managers in Mexico produced official knowledge about forests and the state. Greater knowledge and transparency are often promoted as the keys to solving a wide array of governance problems. In Instituting Nature, Andrew Mathews describes Mexico's efforts over the past hundred years to manage its forests through forestry science and biodiversity conservation. He shows tha…
Scandals, audits, and fictions
Over the past 10 years, Mexican officials and scientists have promoted the project of protecting Mexican forests in order to mitigate climate change, forests acting to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This article compares existing policies around mass reforestation and markets for environmental services, and their relationships to a policy in construction - Reduced Emissions through Degradation and Deforestation. Mass reforestation pol…
Prognosis
While prognoses about the future are as old as human society, this special issue argues that the proliferation of new ways of modelling, planning, and interpolating the future of resources and environments is an increasing feature of contemporary environmental politics. In our introduction, we draw out two dimensions to this prognostic politics: first, the processes of making predictions about the future; and second, the movement of these predict…
Landscapes and Throughscapes in Italian Forest Worlds
Phenomenological descriptions of landscapes, trees, and terraces, combined with oral history and historical ecology, find traces of industrialization, plant disease, and forest fires in central Italian forests. Plant form, landscape form, and forest structure can be described through drawings that give resolutely partial descriptions of more-than-human encounters. This kind of knowledge of the landscape is potentially unstable and remade by the d…
Patchy Anthropocene
The Anthropocene deserves spatial as well as temporal analysis. "Patchy Anthropocene" is a conceptual tool for noticing landscape structure, with special attention to what we call "modular simplifications" and "feral proliferations." This introduction suggests guidelines for thinking structurally about more-than-human social relations; "structure" here emerges from phenomenological attunements to specific multispecies histories, rather than being…
Anthropology and the Anthropocene
The Anthropocene, a proposed name for a geological epoch marked by human impacts on global ecosystems, has inspired anthropologists to critique, to engage in theoretical and methodological experimentation, and to develop new forms of collaboration. Critics are concerned that the term Anthropocene overemphasizes human mastery or erases differential human responsibilities, including imperialism, capitalism, and racism, and new forms of technocratic…
History as grounds for interdisciplinarity
International audience
Wildfires as legacies of agropastoral abandonment
Agropastoral practices that historically reduced the flammability of Mediterranean landscapes are poorly understood due to state prohibitions and lack of scientific interest. Oral histories, analysis of agronomical writings, transect walks, and ethnographic study of fire managers and community members in the Monte Pisano of Italy, find legacies of traditional agropastoral practices in present-day landscapes. Forest leaf litter raking, largely car…
Political science (10 works) · Geography (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management (7 works) · Ecology (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Environmental ethics (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Philosophy (5 works)