Chapter Outline

Chapter 2: Swampy Backwater and
Historical Political Ecology.

History

A. History of migrations & settlement

Pirates & logwood

Spanish "discovery"

sovereign power & make pirates/settlers illegal

Miskito Shoremen?

threatened economic & political dominance of elites

Garifuna

settle beyond settlement's boundaries & interact with the sea as well as with forestry

Mestizos

White Confederates

demonstrate racialised land policies that favor whites

B. History of land

Logwood Common resource & transition to land claims

Tania Li - private property? Enclosure of "the commons?"

Formal claims to land

Exclusionary Land Policies

Subjectivity: squatters, criminals (when squatting), marginal people, dependent laborers not autonomous indendents

Land Monopolies

Theorizing Land Grabs

C. History of Governance/Relations of Power

Egalitarianism

Self-Governance

Crown Colony

D. Historical Socio-natures

  1. Unwanted swamp where marginal people could make a living w/logwood

poitical disinerest in swampy waterscape led to pirate-rule & abuses of power

  1. Mahogany reorders social relations by necessitating slave labour

concentration of wealth and further consolidation of claims to land

Subjectivity: elite, free and enslaved peoples; elites & landless; "whiter" creoles with power vs. "devil-worshipping Garifuna"

  1. "productive land" is claimed so poor free people settle in margins

Garifuna settle on "unproductive" beaches, away from governance

provides access to sea where autonomous subsistence practices are available

autonomy is challenged by land policies that seek to order and manage an "unruly" population and to strip them of ability to live independently

Marginality: Rob Shields & Anna Tsing

  1. ownership of land has always meant political power, even when foreign ownership is dominant pattern

i. Imaginative geography uses contrastive relations to make the swamp a place unfit for human habitation; Said & Foucault as well as Derek Gregory

ii. Place-making: Doreen Massey Places are constructed out of the articulations of social relations, including trade, and unequal colonial links, that are internal to the locale but tie them to elsewhere and what makes a place unique is the ways in which the locality is connected outward by global forces (Massey 1995: 183)

Maya were present

Chapter 3. Tropicality and the Shift to a Touristic Paradise

Ch. 4 The Hopkins Waterscape

Garifuna

Tourism

Lifestyle Migrants

Employment

Other Belizeans

Tourists

click to edit

Place

Landscape Theory

Waterscape

Coastal Culture

Littoral places

Water Worlds (Hastrup)

Saltwater Sociality

Neo-colonaialism

Territorialization

Land/Shore

Hopkins

Land Dispossession

Village Land Boundaries

Geographic Imaginary: from unproductive land to touristic paradise

Values of Land

Social Value of Land

cultural values

family

"A piece" for future generations

We are GARIFUNA, FROM THE SEA. They are from Sittee; they're river people

knowledge systems

perceptions of the environment

Economic Value of Land

Local belief that the land will continue to be available to sell for profit

Political Value of Land

Environmental/Social Crises on the Beach: This chapter will analyze the material, socopolitical and discursive elements of an environmental "crisis." The beach will be explored as a deeply politicized place, percieved differently by situated actors, who struggle to secure the shoreline. However, the shifting sand and sea are not static objects over which power can be exerted. Instead they are examined in a dialectical relationship between nature and social power that illustrates the way the biophysical properties and agency of nature's materiality configure the social relations competing over the shoreline.

How environment and problems are framed by different social actors

  1. CENTRAL EROSION

D Locals

Natural Discourse: It's natural

The beach is a living thing, it comes, it goes

You white people worry too much.

I'm AFRAID!

"My Heart Hurts"

B. Hospitality/Tourism business community

This will ruin tourism!

It's a disaster!

Discourse of BLAME: It MUST be Hopkins Bay

This was a "social" or "political" discourse

C. Tourists

This is not paradise! I'm leaving

Failure to meet preimagined geography

E. Expats/Lifestyle Migrants

Get the government out of here

Don't impose new rules (or taxes) on me

Why don't we actually know to which governing body we should be making complaints/appeals/ reporting infractions?

Hopkins Bay paid off the governemnt

Where was the environmental assessment on the groyne?

A. Hopkins Bay (the accused)

F. Government

The cause was the groyne - take it out

Only part of the groyne has to go (speculation that Hopkins Bay paid off some officials)

  1. EARLY EROSION

Expats

She's craxy

Bad luck on the property she bought

Trish (Kismet)

YOU NEED TO HELP ME - media appeals

"the ONLY thing I can do is build a seawall"

backlash from Cheryl and concerned villagers about what will happen down the beach

shift from being community-minded, she is now out for herself, having seen little-to-no support from the villagers or village council

concerns about early erosion were spatially and territorially divided, but also socially divided:

"North Side"

social division - not as important; a different part of town; less money & development on north side; only foreign-owned businesses are Hopkins Bay and Driftwood, aside from Kisimet

local population is different from South Side population

The biophysical agency of the environment can be located in the southerly current of water. This directional flow gives those on the north side an advantage over the center and south sides of the village in terms of successfully capturing sediment through anthropomorphic changes or interventions.

Northside beach owners could manipulate the shoreline in their own interests

Village Perceptions of Trish

chaotic atmosphere at Inn with Elvis

rumours of drugs and alcohol abuse. justifying social marginalization and lack of concern for her requests for the community to help

a "northside girl"

"We northside gyals stick together"

How are discourses are employed to position favored solutions?

These affect vested interests

disagreements emerge from the differing perceptions of issue

*The key debate centers on whether irregularities observed in natural processes are attributable to randomized behavior or the limitations of scientists’ ability to observe & measure" BUdds 2012)

Ch. 6 Governing & Dwelling on the Shoreline

Land Scarcity

Mangrove deforestation & creation of land

Dispossession

Garifuna Identity

Co-constitution of people & place

Mangrove Deforestation & Creation of Land

Garbage & Pollution

Image of Paradise

Transnational connections by water: the garbage comes from elsewhere

Sargassum

global connections shape the locality

The Road

Was an environmental assessment completed?

Ch. 5: The cultural politics of beach erosion

Resort Development

Land Leases from Council

Policing the Beach

fruit as a commons

Foreign Ownership as Neocoloniallism

Local responses

Oceana Cleanup Day

Ted's Beach Cleaning Team

Illustrates North/South & Hopkins vs. Migrant divisions

Crime

Reva: Home Invasion

Denise: Robberies

overall sense of security in village

Media represntations of Belize as Paradise for retirement etc.