A forest of dreams

Ontological multiplicity and the fantasies of environmental government in the Philippines

Bibliographic Data

ID5719367
AuthorsNoah Theriault (0000-0002-0727-8799, University of Oklahoma, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume58
Pages114-127
Publication date2017-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePolitical Geography (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0962-6298 • E-ISSN: 1873-5096
PublisherElsevier BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1016/j.polgeo.2015.09.004
OpenAlexW1805961760
LanguageEN
Citations received62
References cited64

How do invisible beings in the forested hinterlands complicate the work of bureaucrats in the capital? What do dreams and the beings who visit them have to do with state power? Despite a deepening commitment to posthumanism, political ecologists have rarely opened our accounts of more-than-human assemblages to what have conventionally been termed "supernatural" or "metaphysical" forms of agency. To counter this lingering ethnocentrism, I argue here for an ontologically broadened understanding of how environmental government is produced and contested in contexts of difference. My argument draws on ethnographic fieldwork on Palawan Island in the Philippines, where the expansion of conservation enclosures has coincided with the postauthoritarian recognition of Indigenous rights. Officials there have looked to a presumed Indigenous subsistence ethic as a natural fit for conservation enclosures. In practice, however, Palawan land- and resource-use decisions are based, in part, on social relations with an invisible realm of beings who make their will known through mediums or dreams. These relations involve contingencies that complicate and at times subvert the designs of bureaucratic conservation. As a result, attempts to graft these designs onto Palawan practices do as much to engender mutually transformative encounters between contrasting ontological practices as they do to create well-disciplined eco-subjects or establish state territoriality. To better understand the operation of environmental government – and to hold it accountable to promises of meaningful local participation – political ecology should, I argue, attend more carefully to the ontological multiplicity of forces that shape spatial practices and their regulation

Bureaucracy · Environmental ethics · Ethnography · Indigenous · Political ecology · Political science · Politics · Precarity · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Law · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Water Governance and Infrastructure · Ecology

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