The dissertation illuminates the centrality of communication to the way environmental policies and practices arise and unfold, and it shows how the living materiality of ecological phenomena are entangled with the social dynamics of communication. The work innovatively bridges insights from the field of political ecology with theory and method from linguistic and sociocultural anthropology to advance scholarly debates about environmental value and governance. Drawing on 19 months of ethnographic research in Tanzania, conducted in Kiswahili from 2013-2017, it ethnographically examines how residents of a biodiversity hotspot in Tanzania creatively and strategically navigated conservation policies and political-economic marginalization. It argues that people most affected by conservation policies—smallholder farmers living on the borders of the protected forest—participated in environmental governance in ways that went beyond the limiting platforms provided by conservation institutions in the name of community-based management. ', 'The dissertation’s introduction and first chapter lay the theoretical foundation for scholarship at the intersection of linguistic anthropology and political ecology and argue for the centrality of practices of communication—that is, language use and semiosis—to the workings of environmental politics and humans’ ecological entanglements. Chapter 2 introduces a small cadre of residents from the protected area’s villages who have found ways to significantly profit from conservation initiatives through tourism and research. These men engaged in material and semiotic labor to visually manifest the abstract concepts of biodiversity and nature, both through performances as tour guides and through landscaping decisions as new land owners. Chapter 3 extends the linguistic-anthropological and semiotic concept of “uptake†to analyze a myriad of residents’ discursive and material responses to institutional efforts to commodify natural resources in the name of conservation. With uneven levels of success, village residents creatively and strategically incorporated market-based conservation messages into their broader portfolio of economic activities and communicative resources, thereby calling into question the ambiguities and inadequacies of conservation policies. ', 'Chapter 4 synthesizes theorizations of value from semiotic and Africanist anthropology to analyze discursive acts of commensuration and to argue that conservation is a semiotic and material project to privilege particular modes of interpreting and conferring value on environmental resources. Chapter 5 continues with an account of government foresters as residents to show how the foresters’ non-salaried neighbors used their conversations with them to bend regulatory categories and effectively contest the enforcement and interpretation of forest rules. Through the concepts of moral economy and what I term “neighborly surveillance,†the chapter conceptualizes governance as a process that unfolds through social interactions, which, in turn, have ecological consequences. ', 'With a keen awareness of material inequalities and deft linguistic maneuvering, residents of conservation areas mediate political-ecological tensions in ways that impact the region’s ecology. The dissertation thus complicates persistent, though not universal, narratives that analyze conservationists and locals as discrete and opposed social groupings. Moreover, it illustrates the ethnographic particularity of how inequalities emerge through conservation politics, argues for the inextricability of the semiotic and the material in the construction of value, and centers the creativity and agency of people navigating the political-economic circumstances that conservation interventions and broader neoliberal shifts engender.

Last modified

• 10/14/2019

Creator

• Jessica Pouchet

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-fp9w-jn62

Subject

• Anthropology

Keyword

• Tanzania
• Conservation
• Value
• Participation
• Political Ecology

Date created

• 2018-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright