| Summary: | "AN ECOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGES-based on Micha Rahder's ethnographic field work in the Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR), a jungle in northern Guatemala that has been a site for oil extraction, tourism, violence, and war-looks at how NGOs attempt to do conservation work in this contested and precarious landscape. Rahder develops the concept of the "nooscape"--patterns of collective thought and action that emerge from and fold back into material-ecological worlds--to explore the dynamic relationship between environmental knowledge and conservationist intervention. Rahder argues that specific kinds of knowledge emerge from situated encounters and relations, and in turn are folded back into the material reality of the landscape, shaping the actions and interventions that take place in the MBR. Her exploration of the incommensurable yet co-entangled ways of knowing, acting, and living in the MBR opens up a reflection on the conflicting harms and benefits of conservation work and enables us to imagine more just and equitable directions for environmental movements. The book is divided into three sections, each emphasizing a different aspect of the nooscape. The first explores the symbiotic relation between the use of technoscience, in the form of tools such as satellite imagery and GIS mapping, and the experience of paranoia, wrought by daily violence and regular death threats. Rahder looks at how the material realities of various groups of people in the MBR-conservationists, migrants, indigenous Guatemalans-produce different forms of conservationist knowledge and different understandings of the state that are often at odds with one another and give rise to controversy. The second section examines how the uneven distribution of ways of knowing and acting in the MBR shape encounters that have unequal impacts on individual people and places. Rahder shows how the nooscape of the MBR is fragmented by human forces of structural violence, ethnic inequality, and changes in land use. The last section explores how knowing a place in order to change it is itself a form of change, and how forms of knowledge in the MBR translate into interventions that can have unexpected and unintended effects. Here Rahder looks at shifts in identity and livelihood in one reserve village, experimental interventions in wild animal populations, and how imagined futures of the reserve shape its present. An afterword considers what a knowledge ecology approach might offer in our present era of environmental upheaval. AN ECOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGES will be of interest to scholars and students in anthropology, Latin American studies, and environmental studies"--
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