Introduction 2019
Cultural Politics of the Environment
Environmental Imaginaries
Swampy Backwater
Traditional Garifuna Fishing Beach
Tropical Paradise Beach
Definition
Boykoff, Max, Mike Goodman and Ian Curtis 2009
Cultural Politics of Climate Change: Interactions in Everyday Spaces
Definition
representations and messages at work in discourses, as well as those that are absent or silent
include material and discursive elements shaped by ongoing environmental processes and formal knowledge
Cosgrove 1983
inseperable dialectic of nature and culture
nature not a backdrop for heterogeneous human actors to struggle over epitsemological & material success
scientific meaning constructed, maintained and contested through socio-political and biophysical processes (Blaikie 1985: Whatmore 2002)
meaning constructed and manifested through
ontological conditions of nature
contingent social and political prcesses involved in interpritations of this nature in processed and politics of science (Robbins 2004)
"oft-contested and politicized processes by which meaning is constructed and negotiated across space, place and at various scales" (2009: 1)
Importance
David Harvey: "Struggles over representation are as fundamental to the activities of place construction as bricks and mortar" (1990: 422)
representations are manifiestations of ongoing, contested processes
Questions:
how does power construct knowledge, norms, conventions, truths, untruths?
how does power flow through shared social, cultural, political institutions?
what interactions form nexuses of power knowledge?
How do those interactions shape our understandings of "truth" and "reality" and how do these affect conditions and tactics of social iives?
Are there differences between formal impositions of law or direct discipline and subtle power-knowlege regimes?
these permeate and determine what is permissible, normal, desired in everyday discourses, practices and institutional processes
Boelens, Ruthgerd and Paul H. Gelles. 2005.
Cultural Politics, Communal Resistance and Identity in Andean Irrigation Development
cultural politics
changing political forms
power - struggles over resources
local community rules
ideological forces
local and state norms for managing resources
what are the ideological claims used to take control of local resources
who do they benefit?
how are they resisted
covert and overt forms of domination by outsiders
local resistance strategies
local forms and rules of control over resources are appropriated and affected by colonial and post colonial
classic exclusion-oriented policies of the past
contemporary inclusion-oriented policies
both extract surpluses from communities and legitimize state authority
Andean communities
respresentations of exoticized and romanticized Andean culture
critiques of those respresetnations relegate livelihood and worldviews to the margins, trivializing cultural identity