Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
7
Though the term has several shades of meaning, at root, 'false consciousness' refers
to dominated people who are unable to recognise their 'real' interests because pow-
erful groups actively occlude these interests. The idea has been criticised because it
conflates the positive and the normative: how can an analyst presume to ascribe 'real'
interests to people when their current ('false') interests are very obviously also 'real'?
The false consciousness idea rests on the contentious conviction that people would be
better off if they discovered, and acted in accordance with, the 'truth' belied by their
false beliefs. However, if 'better off ' is based less on the presumption of a revealed
truth and more performatively as a possible alternative future state that can be argued
to be 'better', then the false consciousness idea can be as a
political intervention
rather
than an analytical concept. To my mind, this is more plausible and defensible: the
critic of 'falsity' is seen to be trying to
persuade
people that a different way of living is
possible, which the critic regards as preferable. The idea of 'real interests' can then be
seen as part of the rhetoric of persuasion.
8
This much is obvious in the recent
Handbook of power
, edited by Stewart Clegg and
Mark Haugaard (2009). This collection of commissioned essays showcases sometimes
conflicting, sometimes complementary conceptions of social power current in the
Western social sciences and humanities (including Foucault's). But it doesn't aim to
achieve a synthesis of perspectives; nor does it stage a discursive battle in which pre-
tenders to the analytical throne are eventually vanquished by a single victor. Though
some, such as the historical sociologist Michael Mann (1986, 1993), have sought to
bring different ideas about social power together in a single overarching account, such
grand analyses have not significantly reduced disagreement in the wider community
of interlocutors.
9
These publications
[all
accessed 15 October
2012]
can be
viewed at:
has subsequently been removed]
10
Details of this can be found at
http://www.fao.org/forestry/fra/fra2010/en/ [
accessed
16 October 2012]
11
All the historical sources listed in this paragraph are cited in Fairhead and Leach
(1996).
12
After the Second World War, Clements's thinking gave way to a more holistic and
inclusive understanding called 'systems ecology', with roots in the work of Clements's
British contemporary Arthur Tansley but developed later by Eugene Odum and oth-
ers in the United States. Despite the important differences of emphasis, ecosystems
ecology tended, like Clements, to emphasise ecological stability.
13
It's highly likely that Aubréville was influenced both by the 'dust bowl' phenomenon
of the United States in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and by the Goma conference
on soil erosion in 1948 (held in the Belgian Congo). Both probably disposed him and
many others to believe that unregulated human use of natural landscapes can produce
dramatic and undesirable results.
14
I take most of the arguments below from pages 43-8 of Leach and Fairhead (2000).
Many are repeated in a more general discussion of deforestation discourse across the
wholeofWestAfricain
Chapter8
of
Reframing deforestation
(Fairhead and Leach,
1998a).
15
And Fairhead and Leach reported local farmers' complaints that local forest officers
set fires in order to then blame them and impose fines, which they pocketed.
