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Touring FavelasContinued from page 19

Fernando then brings us to the rooftop of a five-story apartment building that, for a favela, is rela-tively posh. From near the favela’s highest point, we peer down on an abstract mass of dense settle-ments and out to the Atlantic Ocean beyond. Atop everything, from a vantage point external to the favela, Fernando criticizes the state’s neglect. He invokes favelas as dirty, disorganized and chaotic and blames the government for its reluctance to address such inequity and squalor.

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form the image of Rio are schizo-phrenic, for the tour’s paradoxical representations subvert its own desire to prescribe and fi x coher-ent meanings to the favela.

Following Anna Tsing, I point to how projects like the tour often cross-cut different scales—in order to present the local they play to the global. Given the transnational nature of these tours, producing the favela as a commodity thereby produces Rio, of which a favela is a part, as a commodity. Consider this: for residents of the wealthy beach communities less than a mile from Rocinha, representations of the favela remain representations of the favela. For global consumers, how-ever, the favela, as known through these tours, or films like City of God and Black Orpheus, comes to metonymically represent the city of Rio as a whole. In the global imagi-nation, favelas are as synonymous with Rio as mountains, beaches, samba and Carnival.

On the website, and repeated by Fernando during the drive back to our hotels, the favela tour asserts that, to understand Rio, you have to come to the favela. The favela is “another Rio, within Rio.” But the scale often shifts: the tour also advertises, “If you really want to understand Brazil, don’t leave Rio without having done

the Favela Tour.” As such, the favela is asked to perform a difficult task: to represent, in a microcosm, all that is Rio and all that is Brazil. The favela offers tourists a conceptual marker by which to understand geographic spaces that are objectively larger and perhaps impossible to represent, such as the city or the nation.

If the favela is made to stand for Rio and even Brazil, does it follow that such representations are symp-tomatic of desire? The symptoms I have in mind are manifested in the contradictory values ascribed to the favela that is sold to tourists. The favela is, at once, orderly and disorderly, attractive and repulsive, safe and dangerous. Meanwhile, favelados are moral and immoral, empowered and disempowered, vital and tragic. These paradoxes suggest the impossibility of fully transforming images of Rio, which the tour seeks to achieve. To be precise, this makes it schizophrenic only in the ordinary sense of the term. But can we go further to connect it to schizophrenia in the psychoanalytic sense?

Jameson uses Lacan’s account of schizophrenia, not as a clinical diag-nostic, but as a descriptive tool. I follow Jameson by agreeing with the utility of schizophrenia as a cultural, rather than clinical, descriptive. Over

a decade ago in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson related Lacan’s version of schizophrenia as a “breakdown in the signifying chain, that is, the interlocking syntagmatic series of signifiers which constitutes an utter-ance or meaning.”

What Jameson referred to as “a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers” constitutes the talk and advertising about and during the favela tour. Though Fernando’s individual utterances do make sense, taken together the tour’s paradoxical representations forfeit its ability to fix a coherent mean-ing to the favela. What remains is a schizophrenic disjunction among the chain of signifiers in the tour, preventing the favela from attain-ing a determinate symbolic value. It is precisely this tension within the cultural economy of urban space that renders the favela an object of desire, leading to what I call the schizophrenia of the slum. And this hinges on the favela tour as a global production.

Austin Zeiderman is an anthropologygraduate student at Stanford. He partici-pated on the producing the spatial order of things panel during the Stanford grad-uate student conference, “The Anthropol-ogy of Global Productions.”

A Schizophrenic CommodityNow suddenly there are two clash-ing notions of the favela—a split projection or, in ordinary terms, schizophrenia. But following Fred-ric Jameson, I would also like to give the term its psychoanalytic infl ection. These attempts to trans-

JEREMY CAMPBELL UC SANTA CRUZ

NIKHIL ANAND STANFORD U

ADAM HENNE U GEORGIA

AMELIA MOORE UC BERKELEY

SHAILA SESHIA

YALE U

A nthropologists have long pointed to the charisma of various forms of environmen-

talism. Arguing from sustained, eth-nographic experiences of the local, anthropologists have critiqued the universalizing categories of environ-mental sciences, and have likewise argued for a more locally meaningful approach to resource management,

conservation and sustainable devel-opment. Our ethnographic research, however, troubles the local/universal distinction of previous research to focus instead on how environmental issues emerge in webs of global rela-tion and concomitance.

Eric Worby has provided a useful shorthand for what we are aim-ing to study here: “science friction.” Pushing forward Anna Tsing’s figure of friction as a way to think about global connections, Worby high-lights the ways in which the sciences lend themselves to environmentalist practices through selective and situ-ated engagements between a wide array of actors and landscapes.

Worby’s pun on “science fiction” should not be overlooked: conserva-tion science, NGO networks, partici-patory management schemes, and the marketing of sustainability each instantiate utopian dreams not unlike those of the literary genre. Indeed, the self-conscious progressivism of

New Work on Environmental Science Frictionscientists, activists and policymakers involved in environmental politics has been widely noted: how such universalizing perspectives emerge in the “grips and gaps” of global circula-tion is a matter for further inquiry. Science friction opens up the pos-sibilities of studying how environ-mental knowledge practices become entangled with state policies, trans-national markets and the localization of conservation experiences.

Let’s turn to stories of science friction.

Organic Agriculture in UttaranchalThe promotion of organic agriculture by the recently formed state of Ut-taranchal expresses an agrarian uto-pianism set deliberately against the modernist projects of the Green and gene revolutions in India. At once a project of place-making and market creation, images and discourses of pure and pristine nature help to cul-

tivate and commoditize a distinctive regional identity, while emergent modes of agrarian governance—cer-tifi cation, extension and contract farming defi ne what it means to be organic (Shaila Seshia’s research).

Though the organic niche in domestic and global markets is estab-lished by marking distinctiveness, market participation itself introduces certain standardizing, modernist log-ics of its own. Thus, Uttaranchal’s farmers, who the state claims are “organic by default,” receive exten-sion advice on methods of organic farming. Exploring these multi-faceted productions of ”Organic Uttaranchal” may therefore highlight the tensions and paradoxes forged through locally situated yet globally ambitious processes of identity for-mation and institutional practice.

Forest Certification in ChileJust as the organic proliferates as a novel and productive form of envi-

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ronmental governance, forest cer-tifi cation programs offer another compelling location for the study of environmental knowledge pro-duction (Adam Henne’s research). Defi nitions of sustainable forestry are negotiated and contested by conservation biologists, forestry engineers and activists of every stripe. The resulting assemblage is put into motion by the chain of custody, a managerial technol-ogy for documenting the fl ow of wood products that connects (sus-tainable) growing trees with the consumer of branded sustainable products.

With its tracking and bar-coding, the chain of custody both docu-

Science friction environments: (L to R) Ghaindikatha agricultural settlement in Utttaranchal. Satellite photos of the Bimini habitat of the Bahamas, created by the Bahamas Biocompoletxity Project. Forest glade in North India. The BR-163 highway in the state of Para, Brazil, which cuts directly through the National Forest. Photo courtesy of greenpeace.org

ments and defines a network of global connection. The moral imagi-nary of certification, with its mul-tiple audits to prevent contamina-tion and enable segregation, calls particular social collectivities—tim-ber companies, environmentalists, indigenous advocates—into being. How those collectivities interact, and how their representations of the world’s forests resonate or collide, define the site where the production of the neoliberal forest takes place.

view of the NSF, the participation of anthropologists in determining the degree of local human interac-tion with the marine environment. This inclusion stems from the logic embedded in the notion of biodi-versity-as-value which implies the necessity to micro-manage the dis-tribution of resources while paying overly narrow attention to produced forms of the local, the community and the “interested” individual as figures of the requisite “social.” This has lead to the creation and implementation of certain idiom-atic notions of personhood and identity as linked to occupation, all of which then become elided with extractive activities.

Joint Forest Management in IndiaThe different, yet overlapping valu-ations of biodiversity in India’s for-ests by residents, social movements, NGOs, state offi cials and interna-tional development foundations have produced a range of Joint Forest Management (JFM) projects in hundreds of sites throughout India. These projects are the over-determined result of neoliberal discourses of auto-governance, a revitalization of colonial regimes of fl exible management and also effected by postcolonial social movements for justice and equality (Nikhil Anand’s research).

As World Bank support helps to develop JFM through state agen-cies, its expansion has drawn some critique by social movements who see their political objectives being neutralized via administrative ac-tions. Through the languages of subject responsibility and care, the forest department now seeks to manage both human and non-human communities. As such, JFMcompels us to question the neolib-eral teleology of state withdrawal, and points to the new mechanicsof state form and operation through which governance is achieved by structuring local management plans.

Sustainable Development in AmazoniaNew mechanics of state, NGOs, and supranational funders are likewise being worked out in the Brazilian Amazon, as mega-de-velopment in the form of road pavement and dam construction returns to the region. “Participa-tion” has become the watchword in development and conservation management: certain NGOs have been invited to take part in col-laborative research to represent the perspectives of key natural and cultural “constituents” who live along the as-yet unpaved BR-163 highway corridor (Jeremy Campbell’s research).

Ironically, this form of “enlight-ened” participatory development greatly resembles the widely-dis-credited road and dam projects of the 1970s and 1980s; activists left outside the planning meetings point out that the state’s claims to having democratized develop-ment ring hollow for roadside resi-dents. Calling on other histories of participating in public debates in Amazonia, the activity of non-sanctioned NGOs point to how the environmental and indigenous NGOs who have been given special status in planning meetings are open to manipulation by multina-tional soy companies hungry for Amazonian territories, the menac-ing logic of neoliberal multicultur-alism, and the assertion that the “science of sustainability” is fair and democratic.

Figuring the FutureCutting across all these reports is an attention to universalizing projects that have turned toward fi guring the future. In each case, a wide range of actors collaborates on projects they believe to be good: good for nature, good for the mar-ket, good for the people.

The moral tone of these uto-pian projects is striking; we’ve tried

to undertake critique by focusing on how such future-projects get politi-cized when plans begin to circulate. We have approached the temporal and moral dimen-sions of science friction by tracking how knowledge and practice have concrete effects, and how materials, objects, plants, board meetings and moments of translation have each been differentially crucial in the construction of global projects.

Again, science friction allows us to focus on the entanglement of diverse processes. The prom-ise, and supposed purity, of “the organic” in Uttaranchal depends upon a global niche market just

as much as it depends on farm-ers’ willingness to learn how to be “green,” a virtue they’re supposed to already have. Similarly, in both India and Brazil, the fate of “par-ticipation” in forest management hangs on the faith that NGOs, the state and international agencies are talking about the same thing; local practices that inform such talk are often quite different. And, as we mark the emergence of for-est certification and biocomplexity research, it becomes clear that both are specific assemblages contingent upon encounters between science, the market and local populations.

As we continue with our research, we remain attentive to the emergent forms of knowledge and practice that mark the environment and the ways in which these complex assemblages implicate our own involvement as anthropologists in this process. How do we want to participate in the drafting of science friction?

This essay emerges from the panel “Packaging Nature, Marketing the En-vironment” at the Stanford graduate student conference. At the time of writ-ing, the authors were pre-fi eld doctoral students in anthropology eager to con-tinue and expand upon the conversation initiated at the panel.

Bahamas Biocomplexity ProjectThe production of new environmen-tal imaginaries and social forms is also a primary activity of contem-porary conservation science. The Bahamas Biocomplexity Project, funded by the NSF, is a nascent sci-entifi c assemblage created in order to rearticuate the ways in which the life sciences and the public conceive of ecological systems and the place of human interaction within them (Amelia Moore’s research).

The project is characterized by its attention to the “dynamics of coupled natural and human sys-tems,” which necessitates, in the