“Environmentalism, governmentality, and citizenship in northeast Argentina

FERRERO, BRIÁN GERMÁN

Vancouver

Workshop; Workshop: “Environment and citizenship in Latin America”; 2010

Simon Fraser University (Sociology and Latin American Studies) With co-sponsorship from Wilfrid Laurier University (Global Studies).

In this paper 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 (Agrawal & Gibson 1999; Brockington 2004; Brosius, 2006; MacDonald, 2003; Scott 1998). I take de case of 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. 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”.