Environmental Citizenship and new social conflicts in Northeast Argentina

FERRERO, BRIÁN GERMÁN

Toronto

Congreso; Latin American Studies Association (LASA) XXIX International Congress; 2010

Latin American Studies Association

Here I analyze the changing relationship between state and local peoples in the province of Misiones, exploring the way that settler and indigenous communities reshape their political agency through participation in what I call an “environmental arena”, a discursive and territorial space in which environmental management systems and identities are collectively negotiated and substantively transformed. Here I propose that participation in this arena involves a key tension for local communities, which in part create new social identities for themselves and in part have new identities imposed upon them by conservation agencies. This tension involves a fraught relationship between acts of submission to state authority, for instance by accepting the imposition of certain forms of group organization, and acts of defiance against the state in order to claim rights to a particular territorial space (Agrawal 2005). For colonos and indigenous peoples alike, negotiating this tension involves the uptake of new subjectivities and identities, particularly around the notion of being “conservationists”.