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Abstract
This paper concerns the often-assumed universal translatability of the environment as it exists in conservation discourses and policies in Amazonia. It focuses on Guyana's Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS), a government-led strategy to achieve socioeconomic development goals through foreign capital investment and trading in rights over “eco-services” provided by the country's forests. Guyana's indigenous peoples have been identified as one of the largest stakeholder groups for the LCDS and as such, are particular targets for translating it. Drawing from my research with indigenous Waiwai, I explore some cosmographic and cosmological differences between the arboreal, unilinear, and commodified environment portrayed in the LCDS and the fractal, recursive, and mediated environment portrayed in Waiwai discourse and practice. The way in which I understand the Waiwai lived environment is informed by their very ways of moving through it: along meandering and indirect interpretations shaped by social memories, nuanced impressions, physical and affective experiences. As the role of ethnographer is increasingly defined in terms of translation, there may be grounds for considering the differences between the knowledge-politics of direct, mechanical translation practices often found in consultations with indigenous communities and the more long-term, roundabout interpretive processes of ethnographic fieldwork and writing.
Acknowledgements
Much of the research for this paper was conducted while I was a PhD student at Cambridge University, where I was the William Wyse Student of Social Anthropology from 2004–2007. In addition to the Wyse Studentship, my fieldwork was funded by a grant from the Anthony Wilkins Fund. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the University of Mary Washington in January 2010, and at the “Amazonian Geographies” session at the Annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers in April 2010. I thank both audiences for their instructive questions and comments. I am grateful as always to my husband, George, for his support and encouragement throughout the many drafts of this paper. Above all, I am indebted to the people of southern Guyana, who continue to graciously open their homes and lives to us and our daughter, Kamina.
Notes
1. Unfortunately there is not space here to properly review the well-established discussions and debates in anthropology concerning translation and the notion of “culture as a text”. For key references, see Gellner (Citation1970), Geertz (Citation1973), Asad (Citation1986). The 2002 issues of Anthropology News also contain an informative series of discussions under the heading “Problems of Translation.”
2. Schuler-Zea (Citation2009) offers a similar account of Waiwai ways of knowing the environment as indirect and mediated. Though translation is one of her main theoretical concepts, she refers not to translation-proper but to “improper translation,” a concept taken from theorists who problematize conventional assumptions about translation, such as Benjamin (Citation2004), Asad (Citation1986) and Derrida (Citation1976). In her “improper” approach to translation, Schuler Zea's argument would seem to support the concept of interpretation used in this paper.
3. On symbolic associations between the longevity of trees and human social histories, see Rival (Citation1998).
4. The most comprehensive anthropological studies of the Waiwai to date are G. Mentore (2005) and Howard (2001). Earlier accounts by Fock (Citation1963) and Yde (Citation1965), though driven by a “salvage anthropology” approach, are valuable sources on Waiwai cosmology and material culture. For syntheses of the ethnography of the Guianas region, see Rivière (Citation1984) and Overing (Citation1981).
5. The term “varieties” is used instead of “species” to avoid suggesting that the Waiwai classify plants and trees based on the same criteria as the Western taxonomic classification of species.
6. For an earlier use of fractal principles in anthropology see Haraway (Citation1991).
7. Lefebvre (1991) uses the term meshwork to refer to reticular patterns or webs of lines made by the movements of animals and people in the environment. Here it is meant to provide an alternative spatial imagery to the “network” composed of fixed points or centers. On this distinction, see Ingold (2007, p. 80).
8. This is an important point given the tendency in conservation discourses to focus disproportionately on indigenous swidden or “slash and burn” agricultural techniques as forms of deforestation and carbon emissions in comparison to much larger scale and less sustainable forms of commercial agriculture and ranching.