Geoscience Reference
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Discourse as a maker of the world
Understandings of environmental processes and practices are, today, incomplete
without a consideration of not only natural but economic, social, cultural, political
and other events. This interdisciplinary approach, now clearly the trajectory of
environmental geography, is aligned with the now commonplace understanding of
'nature' as socially produced (Braun and Castree, 1998; Demeritt, 2002; Castree,
2003). Understandings of nature as a social construction and as, in part, an outcome
of environmental discourse have yielded compelling research on how scientifi c
knowledge, environmental policy, colonial representations and theories of sustain-
ability and/or economic development have come to produce particular environ-
ments and landscapes. In addition, this work has linked those productions of, for
example, forests (Braun, 2002; Robbins, 2003; Agrawal, 2005), climate (Demeritt,
2001), fi sheries (St. Martin, 2001), soils (Engle-Di Mauro, 2006) or bedrock
(Braun, 2000) to particular manifestations of power in economic, social or cultural
realms.
The production of nature - via the practices that environmental discourses engen-
der and the positionalities and subjectivities it creates - is, however, enacted and
performed by people in particular places. How nature is 'made' is, then, accessible
not only through an analysis of discourse but through, and perhaps necessarily so,
fi eld-based research. Ethnography, in this case, provides a means by which to under-
stand how discourse is effectively performed and it, unlike analyses of discourse in
print, opens the door to the micropolitics of environmental knowledge production,
management and resource use (e.g., Sletto, 2005). Ethnography is central to a move-
ment beyond the analyses of environmental discourse per se to an understanding of
environmental governmentality, an understanding of the people, mechanisms,
dynamics and power relations produced through and within particular environmen-
tal regimes.
The power of ethnographic research combined with analyses of environmental
knowledge/discourse is nowhere more powerfully demonstrated than in the work
of Agrawal (2005) on 'environmentality'. Through a mixture of archival, interview
and participant observation techniques, Agrawal demonstrates how knowledge of
forests and forest practices in the Kumaon region of India (from colonial times to
the present) produces both environments and environmental subjects. The use of a
broadly defi ned ethnographic approach provides a rich understanding of the pro-
duction of Indian forests via discourse (e.g., via colonial accounting methods), both
historical and contemporary struggles over the forest resources, and how local
people come to see themselves in relation to the environment.
Subjectivities and actors
Ethnography gives meaning to those positions afforded by particular discourses
(e.g., citizen, worker, capitalist, patriarch, housewife, fi sherman, farmer, rancher,
etc.) and helps to answer how they are experienced relative to economic, political,
gender and environmental systems of power and oppression. In this way, ethnog-
raphy is widely used by Marxist and feminist researchers to examine how people
not only experience but resist neoliberal capitalism, globalisation, gender inequality
and environmental injustice (e.g., Rocheleau, 1995; Little, 1999; St. Martin, 2007).
Resistance is possible, particularly from a post-structural perspective, because an
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