An Ecology of Knowledges

Fear, Love, and Technoscience in Guatemalan Forest Conservation

Micha Rahder

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781478006916, 9781478006107
• eBook ISBN: 9781478007524
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: Social Sciences

Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR), the largest protected area in Central America, is characterized by rampant violence, social and ethnic inequality, and rapid deforestation. Faced with these threats, local residents, conservationists, scientists, and NGOs in the region work within what Micha Rahder calls "an ecology of knowledges," in which interventions on the MBR landscape are tied to differing and sometimes competing forms of knowing. In this book, Rahder examines how technoscience, endemic violence, and an embodied love of wild species and places shape conservation practices in Guatemala. Rahder highlights how different forms of environmental knowledge emerge from encounters and relations between humans and nonhumans, institutions and local actors, and how situated ways of knowing impact conservation practices and natural places, often in unexpected and unintended ways. In so doing, she opens up new ways of thinking about the complexities of environmental knowledge and conservation in the context of instability, inequality, and violence around the world.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION ​/ ​What on Earth Is a Nooscape?
• LEARNING HOW TO SEE
• ONE ​/ ​The Many Worlds of the Maya Biosphere Reserve
• SILENCES OF MEMORY
• I. Double Visions: Technoscience and Paranoia
• II. Patchiness and Fragmentation
• III. Composing and Composting Knowledges
• AFTERWORD
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Color Plates