MICHAEL L.

CEPEK
University of Texas at San Antonio

Foucault in the forest:

Questioning environmentality in Amazonia

A B S T R A C T
In this article, I analyze the encounter between the
Field Museum of Natural History and Amazonian
Ecuadors Cofan people to question the concept of
environmentality: the idea that environmentalist
programs and movements operate as forms of
governmentality in Michel Foucaults sense. I argue
that, although the Field Museums community
conservation projects constitute a regulatory
rationale and technique, they do not transform
Cofan subjectivity according to plan. By exploring
Cofan peoples critical consciousness of
environmentalist interventions, I aim to cast doubt
on the governmentality paradigms utility for
analyzing the complexities of cultural difference,
intercultural encounter, and directed change.
[governmentality, environmentality, indigenous
conservation, environmental management, Amazonia]

he inspiration for this article stems from a reaction that I believe to

be familiar to many anthropologists who struggle to combine nuanced ethnography and theoretical critique with practical aid to
their research populations. As an academic who collaborates with
indigenous peoples and Western environmentalists in Amazonia,
I am often struck by a pair of opposing perspectives. After decades of failed
projects and frustrated intentions, many conservationists who work with
indigenous communities wonder whether their interventions accomplish
anything at all. In contrast, theoretically ambitious academics suggest that
community-based management projects transform the entirety of indigenous being through the forms of discourse, practice, and knowledge that
Michel Foucault (1991) calls governmentality. In other words, the actors
who want to work toward indigenous conservationism often feel utterly impotent, whereas the analysts who critique them grant a near-magical power
to their intentions and actions.
In this article, I offer an ethnographic account of an encounter between science, conservation, and indigenous culture and practice in the
Amazonian homeland of Ecuadors Cofan people, an ethnolinguistic group
that numbers approximately two thousand and lives on both sides of the
countrys Colombian border. My main objective is to question the analytical and political utility of what Arun Agrawal (2005b) calls environmentality, or the idea that environmentalist logics, projects, and movements
are forms of governmentality in the Foucauldian sense (see also Darier
1999; Luke 1999). More broadly, I aim to provoke thought on the impact of
Foucaults work on all ethnographic attempts to understand the complexities of cultural difference, intercultural encounter, and directed change. I
suggest that many analysts who employ the governmentality paradigm underestimate the degree to which people are capable of forging a critical,
self-aware, and culturally framed perspective on collaborative projects for
socioecological transformation.

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 501515, ISSN 0094-0496, online
C 2011 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1548-1425.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01319.x

American Ethnologist

Volume 38 Number 3 August 2011

My material comes from more than ten years of work

with two sets of actors: the Cofan inhabitants of Zabalo, a
community of approximately 175 individuals in far northeastern Ecuador, and the employees of the Field Museum
of Natural Historys Office of Environmental and Conservation Programs (ECP), which has been pursuing conservation objectives in Zabalo and other Cofan communities
for more than a decade.1 When one is confronted with
the extent of the ECPs efforts in Zabalo, it is not difficult to understand the temptation to identify a form of
power that operates through the calculated and systematic conduct of conduct (Foucault 1991). The ECP divides
the forest and the rivers into a segmented landscape of
census trails, distance markers, and resource zones. Within
these sectors, Cofan monitors perform structured tasks
to track wildlife populations and harvesting trends. They
transform masses of quantified information into computerized databases and graphic representations. In the language of text, table, and diagram, individuals environmental practices become available to the surveillance of
both community members and distant officials, including government bureaucrats, Western academics, and NGO
agents.
I argue that although the ECPs program of scientific conservation is a regulatory regime par excellence,
it does not succeed in remaking the beliefs, desires, values, and identities of Cofan participants. In other words,
although the ECP program of scientific conservation entails the performance of novel institutions and actions, it
does not transform the Cofan into environmental subjects (Agrawal 2005b:xiv). Rather than merging their sense
of self with the logic of a governmental scheme, Cofan
people experience participation in ECP projects as a form
of alienated labor, to use a broad interpretation of Karl
Marxs (1964) concept. From this perspective, Cofan people
maintain a critical consciousness of the activities, sociality, equipment, and products of scientific conservation, and
they view their participation in relation to their political aspirations and cultural background rather than the aims and
rationales of the ECP.
I base my conclusions on a long history of research with
Cofan people and the Field Museum. I began to work with
the Cofan in 1994, and I spent a full year in Zabalo during 2001 and 2002, when I conducted focused and holistic ethnographic work and acquired functional fluency in
Aingae (the Cofan language, which remains unclassified).2
In total, I have completed approximately three years of immersed research with Cofan people. During my initial stay
in Zabalo, I also began to work as a volunteer on ECP
projects. Given my linguistic and cultural knowledge, the
Field Museum hired me as an anthropological advisor from
2004 to 2006, and I continue to serve as an unpaid fellow in
the museums Division of Environment, Culture, and Conservation.

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All of my work with the ECP focuses on protecting

the ecological integrity and legal status of Cofan peoples
traditional territory. I have spent hundreds of hours interacting with Cofan project workers and ECP extension
agents during dozens of sessions in Zabalo, other Cofan
communities, and Chicago, the home of the Field Museum.
Although much of my work consists of cultural and linguistic translation, the museum asked me to provide an
ethnographic perspective on the means and ends of their
Cofan-related projects.3 This article represents a step in that
direction. I intend my insights to open up a space for dialogue on new possibilities for collaboration between indigenous people, Western scientists, and global environmental
organizations. More modestly, I hope that my account reflects Cofan peoples optimistic stance on the potential for
creating a truly just and effective form of indigenous conservationism.
I begin with a review of Foucaults work on governmentality and the ways in which anthropologists and
other scholars use his thought to investigate environmental politics and community-based conservation projects.
I then provide an ethnographic account of Cofan peoples environmental relations, focusing specifically on
their participation in and interpretation of ECP-supported
work. I conclude with a brief discussion of the broader
ramifications of Foucauldian anthropology, which, I argue, risks misunderstandingand even denyingthe discourse, practice, and politics of the people with whom we
work.

Governmentality and environmentality

The person most responsible for popularizing the term environmentality is Arun Agrawal, who made it the title of a
book (2005b) and of a Current Anthropology article (2005a).
Six years earlier, however, Steven Luke (1999) used the word
in his chapter for Discourses of the Environment, which Eric
Darier compiled in hopes of bringing Foucaults thought
to bear on issues of environmental criticism (see Darier
1999:4). In his discussion of the political discourse on sustainability in the United States, Luke coined environmentality to articulate his claim that most environmentalist
movements now operate as a basic manifestation of governmentality (1999:121). Wikipedia now has an entry for
ecogovernmentality, which it uses as a synonym for environmentality and associates with the work of Agrawal, Darier,
Luke, and a number of other scholars (Braun 2000, 2003;
Rutherford 1999).
Before providing a more detailed account of Agrawals
argument on forest management in rural Indiawhich is
the most pertinent work on environmentality for ethnographers who study conservation interventions in nonWestern settingsI offer a brief summary of Foucaults
thought on governmentality. Although his 1978 lecture is his

Foucault in the forest

definitive statement on the topic (see Foucault 1991), most

commentators find the origin of the idea in the notion of
bio-power, which Foucault introduces in the last chapter
of volume 1 of The History of Sexuality (1978). Foucault opposes bio-power to sovereignty, a form of control with a
longer history that operates negatively through processes of
restriction and removal (e.g., of property, of taxes, and of life
itself ). Bio-power, in contrast, is productive in that it functions positively through knowledge, management, and formation of the totality of human life. According to Foucault
(1978:139), bio-power operates at the level of both the individual (through the anatamo-politics of the human body)
and the aggregate (through the bio-politics of the population).
Foucaults work suggests that bio-power achieved an
early theoretical articulation in the art of government, a
political discourse that he identifies in a set of European
treatises from the 16th century onward that advise rulers
on the proper manner of governing subjects. Most scholars associate the rise of govermentality with the growth
of modernity, liberal democracy, and contemporary forms
of political-economic practice (Agrawal 2005b:216216;
Gordon 1991:3; Rose 1999:6). As states respond to neoliberal calls for privatization and decentralization, the
proliferation of NGOs has become a prime topic for anthropologists interested in governmentality (Fisher 1997).
Nevertheless, even though the balance of forces has shifted,
Foucault (1991:102) is careful to state that sovereignty continues to function alongside both discipline and government as a form of power.
In the most basic terms, Foucault defines governmentality as the conduct of conduct. It can refer to the government of oneself, of souls and lives, of children, and of the
state itself (Foucault 1991:8788). In general, writes Nikolas
Rose, government . . . refers to all endeavors to shape,
guide, direct the conduct of others (1999:3). What makes
governmentality a distinctly modern form of power is that
it is a pluralized (Gordon 1991:36) control that operates
through the efforts of a multiplicity of state and nonstate actors, who work with relative autonomy. Governmental accomplices (Agrawal 2005b:217) do not act as dominators
to enforce control from above. Instead, they presuppose the
agency of their subjects, whom they guide implicitly by acting on their hopes, desires, or milieu (Inda 2005:6).
Rather than crushing the freedom of preconstituted
subjects, government works by forming subjectivities
through intimate forms of knowledge and management.
Even more insidiously, governmental power inhabits both
the facilitators and the targets of its interventions. It is because of the pervasive presence of governmentality, commentators suggest, that one should take its agents at their
word. Governmentality, after all, aims for the welfare of
individuals and populations rather than the aggrandizement of the principality, the state, or the ruling class. As

American Ethnologist

Rose writes, it attempts to promote the well-being of its subjects, their good order, their security, their tranquility, their
prosperity, health and happiness (1999:6). In Tania Murray
Lis words, governmentality mobilizes the will to improve,
and the sincerity of its spokespeople is not in question: They
do not knowingly exploit or deceive their subjects, and objective interests do not lurk behind their stated motives
(Li 2007:89). Accordingly, one can see governmentality at
work in schemes for betterment in myriad domains: insurance, health, hygiene, medicine, education, development,
crime, poverty, risk, security, and environmental conservation and management (Agrawal 2005b:217; Darier 1999:22;
Gordon 1991:36; Rose 1999:7).
In an impressively clear and comprehensive article
that uses Foucaults thought to outline an anthropology
of modernity, Jonathan Xavier Inda (2005) highlights three
dimensions of governmentality for ethnographic analysis. First, Inda identifies the reasons, or rationality, of
government, which consist of the forms of knowledge,
expertise, and calculation that make humans intelligible
and susceptible to management. Governmental rationalities comprise discursive fields of conceptualization and justification, which articulate problems that demand expert
intervention. Second, Inda discusses the technics of government, or the mechanisms, instruments, and measures
that authorities use to guide action. Governmental technics, which also include the discursive formation of projects
and programs, make objects visible, calculable, and programmable. Finally, Inda describes the subjects of government, or the selves, persons, actors, agents, or identities
(2005:10) that develop from and figure into governmental
projects and processes. With the last category, Inda aims
to pinpoint the ways in which governmentality forms the
deepest levels of subjectivity, including individual capacities, values, and desires.
In Environmentality, Agrawal adopts the last of Indas
foci as his central theme. In his words, Explaining why,
when, how, and in what measure people come to develop an
environmentally oriented subject position is the ultimate
target of this books arguments (Agrawal 2005b:23). In his
exploration of more than 150 years of humanenvironment
relations in the Indian region of Kumaon, Agrawal tracks
the processes by which rebellious hill men were transformed into individuals who participate in a decentralized
government-in-community inscribed on modern forests
(2005b:11). For Agrawal, environmental subjects are people
who relate to the environment in a specific manner: They
think and act toward it in new ways (2005b:xiiiiv),
it exists for them as a critical domain (2005b:16) and a
conceptual category (2005b:164), and it becomes an object that requires regulation and protection (2005b:226).
In general, Agrawal argues that environmental subjects are
individuals who have been environmentalized (2005b:17)
by governmental projects, programs, and processes. For

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Volume 38 Number 3 August 2011

such subjects, the environment is the axis around which

much of their thought and action revolves, including their
beliefs, desires, interests, and agency.
As do authors of other monographs on the relationship between governmentality and such topics as economic development and environmental conservation (e.g.,
Escobar 1994; Ferguson 1994; Li 2007; Sawyer 2004),
Agrawal excels in his meticulous discussion of a complex
history of policy changes, which he tracks through in-depth
textual analysis. He covers a long history of shifting relations between forests, individuals, communities, colonial
powers, and the Indian state. Part 1 of Environmentality
traces the increasing importance of numbers and statistics in making Kumaon forests visible, profitable, and governable. Part 2 examines how decentralized environmental
regulationespecially after the creation of the Forest Council Rules of 1931led to changes in three relationships:
between the state and communities, between community
forest councils and community members, and between individual subjects and the forest.
Whereas Agrawals main argument follows the logic
of other works on governmentality, he states that his specific contribution is the conclusion that practice is the
key mediator between power and imagination in subject
formation (2005b:198199). According to his data, participation in such forest council activities as monitoring resource use and enforcing community regulations endows
individuals with the desire to protect their environment.
Through such engagement, Agrawal argues, villagers acquire the sense that they are working toward sui generis
interests: They assume that their actions are defined locally, they act in pursuit of goals that they imagine as their
own, and they believe that they operate with an imagined
autonomy (2005b:197). In truth, however, Kumaon residents who speak and act in the name of forest protection
are governmental accomplices. They embody an exogenous
logic, and the deepest level of their subjectivityespecially
their desire to conserve their forestsis the product of their
active immersion in expanding networks of governmental
power.
Agrawal is very clear that governmentality is the key
factor in producing people who orient their action toward care for the environment. He directly criticizes accounts that rely on such concepts as cultural form and
symbolic system, and he refuses to accept the relevance
of such static categories as caste, gender, or location
(Agrawal 2005b:197). He argues that attention to common
anthropological objects will only obscure the processes
through which subjects are made (Agrawal 2005b:197
198). Of course, even though he is in dialogue with
anthropology, Agrawal is a political scientist, and many
ethnographers might question his methods. Apart from his
impressive archival work, most of his data come from a survey with forest council headmen and two rounds of short,

504

structured interviews, which included such questions as

Do you agree with the statement, Forests should be protected (indicate level of agreement from 1 to 5) (Agrawal
2005b:173, 183184). Many of his anecdotes are interesting
and relevant, but participant-observation was not his main
method. At the end of Environmentality, one is left wondering whether the people of Kumaon even have a term with
the same semantic span as environment.
Agrawals book forces readers to acknowledge the difficulty of answering the question of why, when, how, and
in what measure people come to value the environment
(2005b:23). It asks us to consider the power of regulatory regimes that originate outside of the communities that
practice them. Agrawal suggests that governmental logics
and techniques are responsible for producing people who
want to conserve their environment, regardless of the cultural background from which they emerge. In making his
argument, however, he appears to give short shrift to nuances of sociocultural form, which do not play a role in his
identification of the origin or the content of environmental
subjectivities.
Other scholars of governmentality are clear about the
epistemological and methodological specificities of their
approach. Rose argues that the analytics of governmentality should not focus on the real of governmental
rule or on what happened and why (1999:20). Instead
of interpreting such a reality, Rose calls for embracing
superficialityan empiricism of the surface, of identifying the differences in what is said, how it is said, and what
allows it to be said and to have an effectivity (1999:5657).
From a similar perspective, Inda states that an anthropology of governmentality should not plumb thick descriptions
of places and peoples to find meaning; rather, it should focus on uncovering the concrete manifestations of modern
government (2005:1112).
In slicing off a certain section of reality for observation
and critique, these scholars appear to be interested in only
one storythat of governmental power as the substance
and cause of what researchers see (or, at the very least,
what we attend to in our work). Even Li, who argues explicitly against Roses methodology in favor of an ethnographic
focus on situated practices (2007:2728), locates the origin of perspectives on schemes for improvement within the
messy conjunctures of governmental powers themselves
(2007:282283). And, similarly to Agrawal, she suggests that
much of the way in which people think and act in relation
to environmental management is the subtle inducement of
trustees rather than a reflection of their own sociocultural or sociopolitical positions (Li 2007:45).
A number of scholars question the governmentality
paradigm, and I share their concerns. Pat OMalley, Lorna
Weir, and Clifford Shearing (1997) argue that many who
work within the tradition embrace an overly mental sense
of rule, thereby ignoring the social relations through which

Foucault in the forest

technologies of control are formed, exercised, contested,

and critiqued. From the perspective of ethnography, Donald Moore (2000) and Andrew Kipnis (2008) voice similar
criticisms. In Moores words, analysts of governmentality
downplay the historical trajectories, cultural complexities,
and micropolitical struggles that inflect intervention. He
terms the failure ethnographic anemia and historical amnesia (Moore 2000:659). Kipnis holds that if researchers
conceive governmentality as merely a work of thought, a
regime of truth speaking, or a mentality of rule, we will
never be able to assess the effects of attempts to implement
governmental rationalities. He suggests that only concrete
studies of interrelations among written plans, official pronouncements, off-the-record comments, and observed social practice (Kipnis 2008:285) can determine the degree to
which governmental programs alter local subjectivities.
Reviewing the literature on governmentality and environmentality, I am left with a set of misgivings. I worry
that researchers will be unable to understand a populations perspective on such issues as conservation if we sacrifice open-minded attention to the sociocultural form of
its members discourse and practice. And I fear that we will
suffer from a political and methodological bias if we begin
our research with the assumption that their environmental positions are manifestations of governmental logics and
techniques. Pace Rose (1999:20), if we do not investigate
what happen[s] and why, how can we know whether governmentality has any power to refigure values, desires, and
identities?
The Cofan case supports my skepticism. Cofan peoples
long-term involvement with collaborative conservation initiatives does not make their environmental perspectives the
simplistic subject effects of environmentality. Even though
they perform a set of governmental technics with precision,
they continue to maintain a critical consciousness of their
practice. Indeed, Cofan participants in ECP projects view
their action in terms of their political agendas and their cultural perspectives rather than the rationales of ECP agents.
In summary, if ethnography reveals that a populations
engagement with a regulatory practice exhibits an origin, a
form, a commentary, and a utility that can only be understood in terms of a local backgroundwhether historical,
cultural, or political in naturethen researchers have reason to doubt the analytical possibilities of the environmentality approach. In the next section, I substantiate this claim
with an account of Cofan peoples participation in and understanding of ECP projects.

Science and conservation in Zabalo

The Cofan are no strangers to attempts at political control. Before the Spanish arrived, they resisted the incursions of the Inca Empire. Later, they rebelled against the
colonial forces that invaded their land in search of gold.

American Ethnologist

Catholic missionaries began entering their territory in the

late 1500s, and there are records of violent Cofan reprisals
through the 18th century. By the time Ecuador achieved independence from Spain, however, the Cofan nation had suffered dramatic reductions due to epidemic disease. After
the first two decades of the 20th century, only a few hundred Cofan survived. They attracted little attention from
the Ecuadorian state, whose control of the region was relatively weak. Sporadic missionary campaigns too bore little fruit. By the 1960s, the Summer Institute of Linguistics
had set up Aingae-language schools, which the state took
over in 1980. Schooling in Cofan territory, however, has a
poor record. Few Cofan people feel adept in the language,
knowledge, or ways of national Ecuadorian society. Reflecting on their questionable mastery of external sociopolitical domains, many Cofan feel great anxiety when contemplating todays threats: a rapacious oil industry, waves of
Andean and coastal migrants, and the spillover of violence
from Colombias civil war and drug trade.
The community of Zabalo faces many of the same
problems as Ecuadors other Cofan villages. Its relative isolation, however, gives its residents a partial reprieve. Its boundaries encircle 140,000 hectares of lowland
Amazonian forest near the countrys borders with Peru
and Colombia. Its formation dates to the late 1970s, when
a group of Cofan began to look for an area free from
the colonization and oil contamination that characterized
the land surrounding their home community of Doreno
(Kimerling 1991; Little 1992; Vickers 2003). Perhaps the
most important individual in Zabalos history is Randy
Borman, a son of North American missionary linguists
who grew up with Cofan people, married a Cofan woman,
and became an important Cofan leader. He was one of
Zabalos first residents, and he acted as its president for
much of its early history. From 1991 to 1994, Borman
served as the elected president of the Cofan ethnic federation. By the end of the decade, he spent most of his
time in Quito, where he continues to work as a Cofan
activist. Currently, he serves as the director of territory
for the Indigenous Federation of the Cofan Nationality
of Ecuador, and he manages two Cofan-affiliated NGOs. As
with other contemporary and past leaders (Cepek 2009),
Bormans identity is somewhat ambivalent. Nevertheless,
most Cofan accept his claim to Cofanness, and I view him
as an essential player in the development of Cofan political
consciousness. (For detailed accounts of Bormans position,
see Cepek 2006, 2008a, 2009.)
In response to the forces that threaten their existence,
the Cofan developed a rich tradition of environmental politics. The people of Zabalo committed themselves to conservation, or tsampima coiraye (caring for the forest), independently of NGO or state interventions. Before the arrival
of the ECP, no outside agents made significant attempts
to transform Cofan environmental subjectivity. Rather than

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being a product of immersion in expanding networks of

governmental power, Cofan conservationism is the result of
a gradual and organic process of community-internal discussion in a specific historical, political, and ecological conjuncture.
As I describe in another article (Cepek 2008b), the
Cofan began to appreciate the relationship between residence in an ecologically intact environment and a valued
socioexistential state when petroleum-based development
destroyed the forest surrounding Doreno. Their traditional
forms of hunting, fishing, and gathering transformed their
shrinking patches of forest in new and destructive ways. In
addition, a steady stream of colonists created a socionatural landscape that Cofan people learned to associate with
sickness, hunger, conflict, and anxiety. Together, these dynamics convinced the people of Zabalo to form their new
community in a more pristine area,4 to resist the entrance
of oil companies onto their land,5 and to create a system
of community sepicho (prohibitions) that would serve to
maintain the favorable condition of their rivers and forests.
In the mid-1980s, the people of Zabalo decided to restrict the hunting of large game animals that were susceptible to overharvesting. By the beginning of the next decade,
they had created a comprehensive system of sepicho. They
used natural landmarks to construct a spatial system that
divided their territory into sections with permitted and prohibited activities; they limited their use of certain species on
the basis of season, location, and reproductive state; they
ceased hunting other animals altogether; and they decided
to prohibit the marketing of nearly all forest products.
In annual meetings, the people of Zabalo discuss and
modify their regulations through majority voting, and they
punish rule breakers with fines. They base their decisions
on a collective knowledge of environmental conditions,
which they gain through direct experience and secondhand reporting. Although I have not conducted a biological inventory of Zabalos forests, I do know that community
sepicho play an important role in structuring everyday action. Zabalo residents do not doubt that their knowledge
and rules ensure the desirable ecological state of their territory.
In 1991, the Cofan of Zabalo achieved legal control over
their land, which overlaps with the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve. To comply with Ecuadorian law, they had to formulate a management plan for the Ministry of Agriculture
and Ranching, which later became the Ministry of the Environment. According to Borman and other Cofan leaders,
the short document was simply an abbreviated description
of what the people of Zabalo were already doing. No government bureaucrats or NGO practitioners came to the community to teach residents to act in new ways or to check on
their compliance with the plan.
The sepicho system is mainly oral in nature. It exists in
the set of intimate, face-to-face relations that compose so-

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cial life in Zabalo. All households know its basic elements.

The rules derive much of their force from their articulation with long-standing elements of Cofan culture and social structure, including a complex system of activity and dietary prohibitions that follows the logic of shamanic power
and local concepts of maturation and illness; a relatively
flexible division of labor that produces a more or less generalized state of ecological knowledge; a strong emphasis
on egalitarian social and economic relations, which facilitates shared norms of conduct among different household
groups; and the overall importance of the tsampi (forest)
in supplying the color and content of a valued lifeworld.
Cofan people call themselves tsampini canjensundeccu
(forest dwellers), and most find it difficult to imagine how
one could be Cofan without living in a relatively intact
Amazonian environment. Although Zabalos conservation
system is by no means an ancient Cofan tradition, it does
represent the encounter of substantive sociocultural features with a present characterized by ecological crisis and
political mobilization. Over the last two decades, other
Cofan communities have taken Zabalos lead in constructing their own sepicho systems. Cofan people move frequently between villages, and ideas and institutions travel
with them.
The people of Zabalo developed their capacity for
tsampima coiraye by themselves and for themselves. Nevertheless, two groups of outsiders have shown a key interest in their environmental practices: Western scientists and
conservationist NGOs. Although individuals in Zabalo have
acted as guides and hosts for scientific researchers for more
than two decades, the ECP has been the most consistent
outside presence in Zabalo since the late 1990s. The ECP is
the wing of the Field Museum that works explicitly on conservation action, as summarized in its introductory webpage statement:
Environmental and Conservation Programs (ECP) was
established in 1994 to direct The Field Museums collections, scientific research, and educational resources
to the immediate needs of conservation at local, national, and international levels. ECP is the branch of
the Museum fully dedicated to translating science into
action that creates and supports lasting conservation.
Through partnerships with research institutions, conservation organizations, local communities, and government agencies, ECP catalyzes science-based action
for conservation. [Field Museum 2005]
For various biographical and strategic reasons, the ECP
focuses most of its work on the Amazonian regions of
Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, although it also has done work
in Cuba, China, and central Africa. Debby Moskovitz, the
founder and head of the ECP, learned of Randy Borman and
the Cofan of Zabalo through publicity of their opposition to
oil development and their experience in community-based

Foucault in the forest

conservation. She subsequently worked to help Borman receive the Field Museums prestigious Parker/Gentry Award
for Conservation Biology in 1998. Since that time, the ECP
has become deeply involved with projects in Zabalo and
other Cofan communities. ECP staff members hope that the
experience of Zabalo will lead to the creation of global models for community-based conservation. Although the ECP
wants to use science to improve Zabalos sepicho system,
it also wants to document what the Cofan were doing prior
to its entrance so as to publicize the possibility of indigenous conservationism to a world that has grown skeptical
of indigenousenvironmentalist alliances (see Chapin 2004;
Flavin 2005).
ECP personnel think of themselves as enabling technicians rather than convincing proselytizers. Their work presupposes a common endenvironmental conservation
but seeks to introduce new meansscientific methods and
technological instrumentstoward the pursuit of that end.
Even though the knowledge produced by these means is,
like all science, capable of traveling across social lines in
the universalizing language of number, table, and diagram,
the ECP views much of its work in a local light. In its
community-based conservation projects, the main gap it
is interested in traversing is between Cofan environmental
practice and Cofan knowledge of that practice.6 With true
self-knowledge, ECP personnel believe that the people of
Zabalo will be able to manage their resources in a rational
and successful way.
Beginning in 1999, ECP personnel traveled to Zabalo
multiple times each year to teach the use of technological instruments (e.g., notebooks, computers, and measuring devices), to create a basic infrastructure (e.g., a central
project meetinghouse and a system of census trails), and to
communicate the utility of scientific understanding. They
worked to develop five project activities: terrestrial censuses
of Zabalos forest animals, household tabulations of hunting takes, visual censuses of river turtles (Podocnemis expansa and Podocnemis unifilis), beach monitoring of river
turtle nests, and headstarting of river turtle hatchlings in
artificial ponds and nests. During my main fieldwork years
of 2001 and 2002, eight men, who represented the communitys main household groups, worked regularly on ECPsupported projects, and they received a monthly salary for
their efforts.7 The ECP initiated three of the activities (the
turtle visual census, the terrestrial census, and the hunting
tabulations), and it modified the others (beach monitoring
and headstarting).8
All of the ECP-supported activities depend on processes of spatiotemporal unitization, practical regularization, and linguistic standardization and entextualization.
Spatially, rivers are marked off in 250-meter sections for
visual census work and in five broad areas for beachmonitoring work. Census and hunting trails are divided
into 50-meter segments. Temporally, project work is coordi-

American Ethnologist

Figure 1. Project worker with P. unifilis hatchlings (photo by Michael

Cepek).

nated according to basic divisions of the calendar year (e.g.,

six months each for turtle work and forest census work).
Work cycles are structured both by year (e.g., measuring and
releasing turtle hatchlings in specific seasons [see Figure 1])
and by month (e.g., conducting censuses a certain number
of days each month). Practically, the ECP has labored intensively to make sure that project workers move, collect, construct, and perceive in uniform ways on the river and in the
forest. (Without one standard mode of action, it would be
impossible to compare the results of different monitors and
to ensure that turtle hatchlings receive equal treatment.)
Semiotically, all of the activities depend on the creation of text artifacts in written Aingae and the standard
Western number system, which enables their incorporation into computerized databases. The ECP has worked for
years to make sure that all project participants use the same
species names, spelled in the same ways. Turtle sightings
are recorded according to a size systemsmall (less than
20 cm), medium (2030 cm), and large (greater than
30 cm)that has no correlate in Aingae. For the hunting tabulations, a true effort has been made to create a
system of numbered and standardized place-names that

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monitors can use to pinpoint hunting locations on an accurate map. In addition, participants must maintain a set
of written records: weights and measurements of turtle
hatchlings, dates and locations of monitored turtle nests,
and temperatures and feeding details for the turtle ponds.
For the ECP, rigorous data collection and exact computation and representation present a decisive advantage over
preexisting modes of environmental knowledge. All of the
information compiled by monitors can be put into textual
forms, which display how absolute numbers (e.g., of turtle
nests protected, peccaries killed, or toucans seen) vary according to calendar year as well as to spatial location (e.g.,
of marked-off river section, numbered hunting site, or segmented census trail). And when absolute quantities or computed averages do not suffice to communicate a trend, totals of varying kinds can be placed chronologically next to
each other in a chart, which allows the ups and downs of
a single line to tell the years-old story of an entire territory. Quantified, uniform, and synoptic, scientific representations allow for the discernment of patterns with a level of
exactness that is shared by neither everyday subsistence
nor collective community debate.
Zabalos sepicho system depends on culture- and
context-bound discussions about shifting environmental
conditions. Scientific conservation involves an entirely different kind of object: stable, portable documents with numbers, tables, names, and maps that anyone, anywhere, can
hold in his or her hand and that speak in the same way
about the same things to a Western scientist, a government official, an oil company executive, or a Cofan leader.
With scientific representations in hand, any individual is as
knowledgeable as any other. There is no confusion about
what the forest contains, what Cofan people are taking from
it, and what the community should do if it wants to conserve its resources. For the ECP, the benefits of scientific
representations are self-evident. They depend neither on
the memory and objectivity of particular, isolated individuals nor on the localized trust and sociodiscursive confusion of community discussions. For Cofan people, however,
the yields of scientific knowledge are not convincing in the
same way.
On a few occasions, project participants have engaged
ECP personnel in direct conversations about the logic behind their activities. In one interaction, a Cofan worker
questioned an ECP staff member about the meaning of the
term evidencia. The scientist explained the word by posing
an opposition between census-produced datos (Spanish for

data) and informacionwhich are numeros

and therefore
precisoand opiniones, vague senses about which there is
not always consenso. The opposition between fact and opinion is highlighted in a Spanish and Aingae pamphlet that
the ECP developed to document and communicate Zabalos
experience with the terrestrial census. A question is posed
at the beginning: Why do we do a census program of the

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animals in our community? Then, an answer is suggested:

A terrestrial census program can help us to obtain information for making decisions. One page is dedicated entirely
to communicating the fallibility of opinion, with different Cofan individuals pictured as wondering to themselves,
I want to know how things truly are. What should I believe? The booklet portrays the techniques used in Zabalo,
with a running commentary on the utility of science: There
are ways of finding answersdoing regular censuses. Doing
regular censuses can help us to discover tendencies. Scientists use methods like this in order to test their ideas and to
know whats happeningand we can do it, too. The booklet portrays the desired end point with an image of a Cofan
man and woman pointing to diagrams, numbers, maps, and
papers with ten years of census results in their hands. In
conclusion, it suggests, Now we base our decisions on real
information, not on opinions.
The ECPs efforts in Zabalo meet the accepted criteria
of a governmental program. Using Indas (2005) terminology, the governmental reason is to remedy a perceived
shortcoming of local practicethe lack of precision and
certainty in Cofan modes of knowing their environment and
their resource use. The technics of ECP interventions are
all of the practices and instruments I describe above. Indeed, Indas conceptualization of the tool kit of governmentality bears a striking resemblance to the multiple elements
of the ECP approach:
These instruments encompass such things as: methods of examination and evaluation; techniques of
notation, numeration, and calculation; accounting
procedures; routines for the timing and spacing of activities in specific locations; presentation forms such
as tables and graphs; formulas for the organization
of work; standardized tactics for the training and implantation of habits; pedagogic, therapeutic, and punitive techniques of reformation and cure; architectural
forms in which interventions take place (i.e., classrooms and prisons); and professional vocabularies.
[Inda 2005:9]
Finally, ECP projects aim to create a specific kind of
subject: people who value the ecological integrity of their
forests and the importance of science in effective community conservation. After nearly a decade of collaborating
with the ECP, however, Cofan people remain critical of the
work required to produce scientific knowledge as well as of
its overall utility. Instead of instilling in Cofan actors exogenous logics, desires, and values, participating in ECP work
creates a sense of the strange, burdensome, and indirectly
beneficial quality of collaborative projects with scientists
and Western conservationists.
After witnessing, implementing, and analyzing scientific conservation for the past ten years, I view Cofan
participation in ECP-supported activities as a form of

Foucault in the forest

alienated labor, to use a concept that Marx elaborates in

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1964).
Marx argues that labor in capitalist society is alienated
because workers do not view their actions, instruments,
products, and fellow laborers as organic extensions of their
practical being.9 Instead, they experience their work as the
expression of an alien power. As a theoretical concept,
alienated consciousness is the polar opposite of governmental subjectivity. Rather than merging their sense of self
with the logic of a regulatory practice, alienated laborers
understand their work as the means and end of an external and potentially antagonistic force. In short, they do not
view their action as an expression of their own capacities, desires, and needs. Although Cofan project workers are
far from fully proletarianized laborers, I believe that Marxs
concept has a broader analytic relevance and that it can
help elucidate Cofan perspectives on their relationship with
the ECP and other Western institutions.
Participation in ECP-supported projects fits the first
form of alienationthat of workers from their activity
rather well. Projects take monitors through the same spaces
that they pass through while hunting and collecting, but the
moment-to-moment flow of their activity differs substantially from that of daily subsistence. For example, an individual might hunt in a territory traversed by a census trail.
The forms of sensing and moving through that territory
while conducting censuses, however, differ from the starts,
stops, zigzags, and varying durations of hunting trips, which
direct attention toward traces and bodies rather than pen,
paper, and mental distance calculations. Monitors must reproduce the same structure of action on each outing. They
stay on the trail at all times, and 50-meter distance markers
function as cues to stop, to listen, and to watch. When they
detect an animal, they must pause to take out their note pad
and record the encounter (see Figure 2), which they enter
into a workbook when they return to their home. Learning and performing censuses requires substantial effort. It
is neither intuitive nor easy, and workers understand it as
the command of ECP personnel rather than an inherently
useful or rational type of action.
Participation in ECP projects also exhibits the second
form of alienation: that of workers from the sociality of
the labor process. Problematic relations occur on three levels: between workers, between workers and the community,
and between workers and the ECP. The main difficulty of
negotiating project relations is their dependence on social
dynamics suppressed in Cofan culture, namely, power differentials, evident inequality, and open criticism.
Relations between workers demand constant comparison and critique. Monitors inhabit equivalent positions,
and, ideally, they perform standardized actions. The outcomes of their actionswritten words and numbersallow
individual capacities to be measured against one another
in a public framework. In collective data-entry sessions, for

American Ethnologist

Figure 2. Project worker conducting a terrestrial census (photo by Michael

Cepek).

example, less educated individuals are confronted with

their relative ignorance, on which project coordinators
sometimes remark. Often, participants become frustrated
and embarrassed. Some of them find it easy to laugh off the
difficulties, but others show intense discomfort when their
failures are recognized.
Relations between workers and the community can
also be difficult. The river turtle repopulation effort is a
case in point. In return for finding nests and communicating their existence to project personnel, community members receive a small payment that varies with the number
of surviving hatchlings. For people with few sources of income, the revenue is highly appreciated, and it generates
substantial community support for the project. Nevertheless, worker control over community income places participants in a difficult position. If a flooding river destroys
a marked nest because of monitor negligence, the identifier loses the compensation. Such incidents lead to angry
calls for worker dismissal and project termination. When
confronted with community ega afacho (bad talk), workers
express their desire to quit the project altogether. Neither
resource conservation nor steady salaries are worth the tension that inevitably results from resentment, jealousy, and
inequality.

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Volume 38 Number 3 August 2011

Relations between workers and the ECP can also be

stressful. Participants understand ECP coordinators as their
nasu (bosses). Some ECP personnel are gentler than others in dealing with Cofan participants. Nevertheless, Cofan
people are prone to see antagonism and hostility when
Westerners see only helpful instruction. When ECP officials train and evaluate participants, Cofan people experience the interactions as painful exercises in public embarrassment. The critical questioning can be intense: Why
hasnt all of the data been entered into the computer?
Why doesnt a monitor know how long a census trail is?
Where are the receipts for the gasoline that was bought
to fuel the project generator and water pump? Workers
fear ECP recriminations, and the power structure makes
them keenly aware of the emotional reactions of ECP personnel. The most sensitive workers drink an extra bowl of
fermented manioc mash before meetings with the ECP, as
they are not accustomed to the hierarchy and anxiety of the
interactions.
In addition to alienated activities and relations, participants identify a third form of alienation in ECP-supported
projects: that of themselves from the means of scientific
knowledge production. All of their work depends on expensive and exotic instruments, including binoculars, computers, and GPS devices. Even as participants learn how to use
the instruments, the equipment arouses anxiety because
of its high cost and fragile nature. Even more importantly,
the assumed necessity of high-tech instruments convinces
Cofan people that they could never sustain the projects on
their own. They realize that they can neither produce nor
purchase such objects in their rain-forest homes, especially
with their meager incomes. As with many scientists, ECP
personnel are entranced by the precise and efficient operations that technology enables. Nevertheless, a simpler tool
kit would better serve their goal of convincing the Cofan to
accept scientific practice as a helpful addition to community conservation.
Perhaps the most important form of alienation involved in Cofan performance of scientific conservation is
that of workers from the forms of knowledge they produce.
Paradoxically, what most interests the ECP in Zabalo is what
most complicates its efforts, namely, Cofan peoples preexisting practices of community conservation. Long before
ECP representatives arrived in Zabalo, the Cofan structured
their subsistence toward the end of caring for the forest.
Even though their sepicho system depends on practical
knowledge, oral communication, and trusting familiarity,
Cofan people do not doubt their ability to know and to manage their forests. Their confidence raises the question: Why
did they collaborate with the ECP in the first place?
In general, Cofan people see little communityinternal use for the numbers, words, and charts that the
ECP projects produce. Similar to historian of accounting
Theodore Porter (1999), Zabalo residents understand

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formalization and quantification to be most useful in transporting knowledge across, rather than within, established
lines of culture and power. Accordingly, they deny sciences
ability to improve community-internal practices. Instead,
they believe that science transforms their knowledge into
a good that can be understood and used by non-Cofan
outsiders.
Although the Cofan have a long history of peaceful interethnic cooperation, they are sick to death of 500 years of
unequal relations with Westerners. In the 21st century, they
do not believe that any Westernerenvironmentalist, humanitarian, or otherwould come to their communities if
not motivated by self-interest and profit. The Cofan maintain a strong set of expectations for such encounters: that
outsiders will attempt to make money off of them, that the
most altruistic foreigners see them as objects of missionarylike charity, and that their only sensible option is to try to
get a fair share of the economic resources that Westerners
possess and produce. With regard to the ECP, Cofan expectations of exploitation are exacerbated by participation
in projects that depend on alien activities, relations, and
equipment to produce a form of knowledge that is of more
use to the outside world than to the Cofan themselves.
No matter how much idealistic practitioners protest
to the contrary, the people of Zabalo believe that Western
conservationists derive value from Cofan lives and Cofan
forests. Obviously, they are right. ECP personnel earn a paycheck for their efforts. They treasure the biodiversity of
Cofan territory. And they hope to transform Zabalo experiences into a general model for community-based conservation. From the Cofan perspective, all of these benefits represent the extraction of a surplus from Cofan activity.
When pressed, most people in Zabalo admit ignorance
about why outsiders come from so far away to work on
conservation. Currently, most Cofan explain their understanding of the word cientista or cientfico (Spanish for scientist) by extension (i.e., by naming ECP personnel). The
most experienced project workers suggest that a scientist
is one who oshachoma atesusu (learns everything) about
macaen jinchocho (how things are) and mingae dajecho
(how things become). Although many ECP personnel are
far too routinized in their work to evince touristlike fascination with wildlife, somesuch as Debby Moskovitz, whom
all project workers recognize as the true ECP nasuexhibit
enthusiastic attachment to the tsampi. They watch birds;
they wander through the forest alone; and they express sincere concern for environmental destruction. In the words
of one worker who has known Moskovitz for years, She
really hates the idea of hurting animals. She really hates
everything like that. She really loves the tsampi. Her true desire is for the tsampi. The house of her heart is the tsampi.
She really loves it. The tsampi as well as animals, everything, turtle, woolly monkey, everything. All that is of the
tsampi.

Foucault in the forest

Even when they recognize outsiders earnest attachment to their environment, the people of Zabalo cannot
imagine any scientist coming to their territory without
earning a living by doing so. The Cofan know that scientific conservation is the semamba (work) of ECP personnel.
Moreover, they are perpetually aware that Westerners are
far wealthier than they, who are but pori ai (poor Cofan).
The Cofan find it most convincing to use cash as the surest
means of calibrating values across deep social divides. No
matter how much Cofan people believe that the ECP and
others appreciate the tsampi, and no matter how much they
understand outsiders as idealistic individuals who want to
help them, they cannot imagine non-Cofan conservationists doing anything without making money. In the words of
one project worker,
Why would you just do this work if I were the only
one being paid? Lets say you look for a project. And
then $10,000 comes to you. You receive it, and you give
me $500, $500, $500, everything to me. With nothing,
would you work? No, you wouldnt. My thought is like
this. The museum people dont have other work. Because of that, they want to work with the Cofan, to help
the Cofan, and to help other people and other lands.
With that, I, too, will take some [of the money]. So
that they can live. Thinking like that, the museum people want to work here.
This interpretation, more than anything else, explains
why Zabalo residents understand ECP-supported projects
as work that they perform for the outside worldand for
which they deserve a paycheck. Some Cofan are beginning

to understand that only numeros

can communicate their
intact environment and sustainable modes of resource use
to an encroaching oil company or a vigilant state environmental ministry. Nevertheless, they have never had to offer such justifications for their land claims. Moreover, their
knowledge of the raw power relations and basic unfairness
of state machinations leaves them uncertain that they will
ever have toor that it would do any good. And if the
portable forms of knowledge produced through scientific
conservation are of little direct use to them, they are even
more certain that their project participation obeys a logic
that is very different from that of their preexisting system of
forest care.
In contrast to Zabalo residents, ECP personnel believe
that the activities they support are to be done by the Cofan
and for the Cofan. They find it difficult to understand why
the people of Zabalo have not embraced scientific knowledge production as a helpful addition to community conservation activities. Not surprisingly, the ECP has suffered
mounting frustration at what it interprets as the Cofans
failure to conceptualize the project activities as theirs.
By the end of 2005, in fact, the ECP began to shift its
Cofan-centered work from community-based management

American Ethnologist

projects toward large-scale biological inventories of potential conservation areas in threatened Cofan territories.
Despite their questioning of conservationist intentions
and actions, Cofan people see great potential for their relationship with the ECP and other outside institutions. Even
though most environmentalist NGOs understand payment
to play a minor role in community conservation, the savviest Cofan leaders hope to construct a much larger system of
cooperation on the basis of political-economic reciprocity.
They realize that their forests matter to Westerners. Furthermore, they know that Cofan people are becoming increasingly adept at producing scientific knowledge, which they
want to make available to outside researchers as long as the
exchange is balanced.
In short, Cofan activists want to convince the world
that Cofan people are the best custodians and investigators of the Amazonian environment. Instead of negotiating short-term interventions aimed at the unrealistic goal of
project self-sufficiency, Cofan leaders seek to create permanent partnerships that recognize the reciprocal costs and
benefits of scientific research and conservationist practice.
In return for protecting and analyzing their forests, they expect steady but modest compensation as well as the political aid that will help them to solidify control over their traditional territory.
Cofan leaders hope to take over many of the roles
that are currently inhabited by better-paid and more securely employed outsiders, whether NGO workers, academic scientists, or state enforcement agents. To date, they
have made significant strides toward realizing their vision.
With a force of approximately fifty state-accredited park
guards, the Cofan nation is directing the management and
protection of approximately 430 thousand hectares of forest. In communities such as Zabalo, Cofan individuals receive coauthorship recognition on peer-reviewed research
articles written by ECP scientists (e.g., Townsend et al.
2005). According to Randy Borman, Cofan peoples intimate
knowledge of and dependence on the forest make them the
perfect agents of effective research and conservation. In his
words, the Cofan are ready to work with and for the world on
rain-forest protection. All they request are the right kinds of
compensation, recognition, and resources:

The whole point of our trying to get control over these

large national park areas, to manage these conservation areasthe whole point of doing that is because
were the best possible people to do it. Its not because
we have any special racial characteristics that make it
that way, or something like that. Its that a whole culture has developed to do exactly this particular job, and
all we need to do is modify that slightly and we have an
incredible force to do exactly what the world claims it
wants to do in those areas . . . Weve got these unique
abilities. Come on, lets use them!10

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Conclusion
Alex Callinicos once described Foucault as the most eloquent advocate of the intellectual movement that seeks to
demote the subject from constitutive to constituted status (1989:87). For much of its history, anthropology has
explored the sociocultural mediation of subjectivity, which
overlaps with more familiar notions of value, desire, belief, and identity. Ethnographers investigate the ways in
which individuals acquire embodied perspectives through
primary and secondary processes of enculturation, which
intersect with larger movements of history and politics.
For most of us, the concept of a constituted subject is an
essential element of our theoretical foundation. We have
never accepted the idea that people are born with a universal, timeless, and fully formed stance toward the world.
Foucaults intervention was to make a demiurge-like
power (Turner 1994:35) the central player in subject formation. In Arturo Escobars words, Foucault envisions a world
in which power-saturated articulations of discourse and
knowledge produce permissible modes of being and thinking while disqualifying and even making others impossible
(1994:5).
In this article, I have questioned the Foucauldian approach to subject formation as articulated in the literature
on governmentality and environmentality. In my ethnographic analysis of scientific conservation in Zabalo, I have
demonstrated that a governmental project did not engender an environmental subjectivity in Cofan participants.
Nor did it preclude a specifically Cofan understanding
of science, conservation, and environmental politics. The
technics of ECP programs affect Cofan stances toward their
forests and their environmental practices but not along the
lines of ECP rationalities. Rather than adopting an external
logic as their own, Cofan project workers maintain a critical consciousness of the activities, relations, instruments,
and products of scientific conservation. They view their collaboration with Western institutions as part of a larger exchange with a world that values the environments that they
know and inhabit. As long as they receive some portion of
the political-economic resources that they seek, Cofan people are more than willing to devote themselves to a form of
labor that they continue to experience as burdensome and
oriented to community-external rather than communityinternal logics and needs.
Although Cofan approaches to science and conservation can reveal a great deal about the particularity of
Western values and assumptions, they are highly specific
in terms of their origin and content. The Cofan understanding of scientific conservation as an indirectly beneficial form of alienated labor has a set of social, cultural, historical, and political conditions of possibility. It is easy to
imagine how another Amazonian peoplenot to mention
populations at other ends of the geographic and political-

512

economic spectrumwould have a completely different reaction to ECP interventions. The Cofan of Zabalo have practiced community conservation for decades. They do it in
a way that depends intimately on their culture and social
structure as well as their experience of petroleum-based development. Cofan difficulties with ECP-supported activities
are generated by a clash between accepted forms of social
and environmental relations and the necessities of regularization, formalization, and intercultural knowledge exchange. The benefits that Cofan people do hope to attain
by cooperating with Western scientists and environmentalists only make sense in relation to the strategizing of Cofan
leaders, who creatively rework Cofan resources into a proposal for a new form of NorthSouth collaboration.
Without engaging the sociocultural subtleties of Cofan
peoples discourse, practice, and politics, I never would
have understood as much as I do about the ways in which
scientific conservation does and does not transform their
environmental understandings. From my perspective, immersed and open-minded ethnography is essential to any
adequate investigation of governmental projects, especially
in contexts of cultural difference and intercultural encounter. By devoting the bulk of our analytic attention to
the rationalities that governmental agents bring to bear on
their work, as researchers, we grant them a power that they
do not possess. In our implicit acceptance of the slippage
from rationale and technique to subjective effect, we do a
disservice to the critical capacities of the people with whom
we work, and we commit an error that is both intellectual
and ethical in nature.
I mention one more potential problem of the governmentality paradigm. In addition to its naive stance on interveners ability to transform subjectivities, it risks overestimating the grip that governmental rationalities have on
governmental agents themselves. After years of experience
with Zabalo workers and residents, ECP personnel began
to understand Cofan perspectives on their programs. Although many of the projects that I have described continue
to function, other NGOs have stepped in to finance them.
After 2005, ECP officials decided that the Cofan vision of scientific conservation did not match their own. Rather than
abandoning their partnership with Cofan people, however,
the ECP returned to its traditional strengthorganizing biological inventories that can influence states to create protected areas with the cooperation of local populations.11
After a Field Museum inventory helped to convince the
Ecuadorian government to declare the Cofan-Bermejo Ecological Reserve (RECB) in 2002, the ECP decided to conduct more inventories in Cofan territory, the most recent
of which occurred in 2008. Both the ECP and Cofan leaders know that the authoritative reports of a prestigious
North American institution can help Cofan people to consolidate control over their threatened lands. Even if they
do not see to eye to eye with the Cofan on questions of

Foucault in the forest

community-based conservation, ECP officials would much

rather see western Amazonias natural landscapes in the
hands of the Cofan nation than under the control of oil
companies and cattle ranchers.
Importantly, ECP efforts to create indigenouscontrolled reserves entail substantial shifts in political
power. The RECB is Ecuadors first indigenous ecological
reserve. As in other reserves, indigenous residents collaborate with state agents on comanagement activities. What
is special about the RECB, however, is that Cofan people
have actual rights of coadministration. They are legally
empowered to create the reserves governing structure, to
coordinate its operations according to their own cultural
and political perspectives, and to disburse the funding
that makes the work possible. More than ineffective paper
parks or externally imposed sociospatial structures, coadministered reserves are essential elements of the Cofan
nations campaign for increased political-economic power
and effective conservation strategies (Cepek 2008b).
On a smaller scale, other interesting collaborations
have developed out of the CofanECP partnership. After
a long series of conversations with Cofan students and
leaders, I began to work with Field Museum fellows Dan
Brinkmeier and Clark Erickson on the Cofan Historical
Mapping Project. Building on many of the same instruments employed by the ECPGPS technology, satellite imagery, and mapmaking programsa joint Field Museum
and Cofan team traveled throughout Cofan territory in 2007
to collect data on culturally significant features of the landscape. At the same time, we trained a group of young Cofan
men in video, audio, and interview techniques. In 2008, two
of them traveled to Chicago to transform the compiled material into a five-hour Aingae-language DVD, which puts
the territory-related knowledge of Cofan elders into a form
that can be used to teach Cofan schoolchildren. With the information, our team also produced a large-scale and highquality map, which offers a portrayal of Cofan territorial
claims that can counter official representations of northeastern Ecuadors social history. With this image, Cofan activists have a new weapon in contentious meetings with
colonists, corporations, and hostile government ministries.
The Cofan Historical Mapping Project might just be, in
Lis words, one more recipe for how improvement can be
improved (2007:2). Rather than view it as another manifestation of governmentality, however, I prefer to understand it as the hard-won result of years of difficult but ultimately successful attempts at intercultural communication
across a deep geopolitical divide. Western conservationists
are slowly realizing what does and does not work in their
involvements with indigenous people. Indigenous people
are conceptualizing novel ways in which Western technologies and collaborators can help them to pursue their objectives. And many anthropologists are moving past the political paranoia of a popular theoretical perspective to listen

American Ethnologist

to the people with whom they work as they contribute to

projects that actually might do some good.

Notes
Acknowledgments. Drafts of this article profited from exchanges
with a number of colleagues: Debby Moskovitz, Dan Brinkmeier,
Alaka Wali, Clark Erickson, Terence Turner, Andrew Gilbert, Chris
Krupa, Jill Fleuriet, Jamon Halvaksz, Jerry Jacka, John Kelly,
Donald Donham, and three anonymous reviewers. In addition, I received helpful feedback from participants in my graduate seminar
on Culture, Environment, and Conservation as well as attendees
of the Workshop on Culture, Society, and Environment at the University of Texas at San Antonio. For their financial support of my
research, I thank the University of Chicago, Macalester College, the
Field Museum of Natural History, the National Science Foundation,
the Tinker Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the
Mellon Foundation. Finally, I want to express my deep gratitude to
all of the Cofan people with whom I continue to work in Quito and
eastern Ecuador.
1. Shortly after I defended my dissertation in 2006, the ECP
joined the Field Museums Center for Cultural Understanding and
Change (CCUC) under the newly created Division of Environment,
Culture, and Conservation (ECCo). A few years later, the CCUC
merged with the ECP. ECCo is now the official designation for the
museum branch that continues the work of the ECP. I retain the former label in this article because it was the only term used by both
Cofan people and museum personnel during my fieldwork. In addition, many museum employees continue to use the label to identify
themselves and their work in unofficial contexts.
2. Aingae is the primary language of everyday life in Zabalo, and
it is my main means of communication with Cofan people. Unless
otherwise noted, all Cofan quotations are my direct translations
from Aingae.
3. ECP personnel have no editorial control over my research, and
they want me to be as truthfully critical as I can. Nevertheless, I
want to state that I consider myself a conservationist and that I admire the expertise, openness, motivation, and ethical approach of
the ECP.
4. In other works (Cepek 2006, 2008b), I explore the importance
of ecotourism in generating Cofan conservationism. From their
earliest days in their new community, the Cofan of Zabalo guided
Western backpackers on canoe trips and forest hikes. According to
the testimony of Cofan individuals, working with tourists helped
them to appreciate the forest as an object that could hold aesthetic
and commercial value without being materially transformed.
5. In 1993 and 1994, the people of Zabalo engaged in a radical
and successfulcampaign against Ecuadors state oil company,
which they forced out of their territory by kidnapping oil workers,
burning down a heliport, and publicizing their actions in the national and international media with the help of non-Cofan allies
(Cepek 1996).
6. Another main activity of the ECP is the design and execution
of rapid biological inventories, which program personnel organize
with teams of national and international scientists as well as local
inhabitants, to demonstrate the biological value of unprotected areas. One inventory led to the establishment of the Cofan-Bermejo
Ecological Reserve, a 55,541-hectare park inhabited by four Cofan
communities.
7. Two coordinators are responsible for directing the work and
supervising data entry. During my research, each of them received
$150 a month. Each of the monitors received $100 a month.

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Volume 38 Number 3 August 2011

8. According to most narratives that I recorded, the turtle project

began when a Zabalo man collected a nest of hatchlings and kept
them in a bucket next to his house. Keeping pets is a common
Cofan practice, and there was nothing extraordinary about his action. By coincidence, visiting tourists saw the turtles and gave a
small sum of money to Borman to help the community care for
them. After a few years of experimentation, which included the
building of small ponds, outside scientists and NGOs became interested in studying Cofan experiments so as to create a project that
would repopulate the Aguarico River with the endangered animals.
Only with the entrance of the Field Museum, however, did monitors and coordinators begin working on the project and keeping
systematic data on its progress.
9. I intentionally leave the difficult idea of alienated species being (Ollman 1976:8284) out of my discussion.
10. Borman is trilingual in English, Spanish, and Aingae. He
spoke this passage in English.
11. The inventories do not involve the same sort of community
census work that occurred as part of the ECPs program in Zabalo.
Rather, Cofan people act as paid guides, logistical coordinators,
and natural historians for Western academics, who inventory areas faunal and floral diversity according to established scientific
methodologies. The results are published in glossy reports filled
with statistics, maps, and expert summaries written in English and
Spanish.

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accepted December 23, 2010
final version submitted January 10, 2011
Michael L. Cepek
Department of Anthropology
University of Texas at San Antonio
One UTSA Circle
San Antonio, TX 782490649
michael.cepek@utsa.edu

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