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 Cof an 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 Cof an subjectivity according to plan. By exploring Cof an 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 Cof an 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 ISSN 1548-1425. C 2011 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01319.x

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My material comes from more than ten years of work with two sets of actors: the Cof an inhabitants of Z abalo, a community of approximately 175 individuals in far northeastern Ecuador, and the employees of the Field Museum of Natural Historys Ofce of Environmental and Conservation Programs (ECP), which has been pursuing conservation objectives in Z abalo and other Cof an communities for more than a decade.1 When one is confronted with the extent of the ECPs efforts in Z abalo, it is not difcult 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, Cof an monitors perform structured tasks to track wildlife populations and harvesting trends. They transform masses of quantied 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 ofcials, including government bureaucrats, Western academics, and NGO agents. I argue that although the ECPs program of scientic conservation is a regulatory regime par excellence, it does not succeed in remaking the beliefs, desires, values, and identities of Cof an participants. In other words, although the ECP program of scientic conservation entails the performance of novel institutions and actions, it does not transform the Cof an into environmental subjects (Agrawal 2005b:xiv). Rather than merging their sense of self with the logic of a governmental scheme, Cof an 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, Cof an people maintain a critical consciousness of the activities, sociality, equipment, and products of scientic 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 Cof an people and the Field Museum. I began to work with the Cof an in 1994, and I spent a full year in Z abalo during 2001 and 2002, when I conducted focused and holistic ethnographic work and acquired functional uency in Aingae (the Cof an language, which remains unclassied).2 In total, I have completed approximately three years of immersed research with Cof an people. During my initial stay in Z abalo, 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.

All of my work with the ECP focuses on protecting the ecological integrity and legal status of Cof an peoples traditional territory. I have spent hundreds of hours interacting with Cof an project workers and ECP extension agents during dozens of sessions in Z abalo, other Cof an 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 Cof an-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 reects Cof an 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 Cof an peoples environmental relations, focusing specically on their participation in and interpretation of ECP-supported work. I conclude with a brief discussion of the broader ramications 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

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denitive statement on the topic (see Foucault 1991), most commentators nd 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 identies 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 denes 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

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 identies 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 elds of conceptualization and justication, 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 gure 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 specic 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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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, protable, 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 specic 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 dened 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,

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 difculty 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 identication of the origin or the content of environmental subjectivities. Other scholars of governmentality are clear about the epistemological and methodological specicities 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 supercialityan 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 nd 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 reection 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

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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 inect 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, ofcial 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 sacrice 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 regure values, desires, and identities? The Cof an case supports my skepticism. Cof an 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, Cof an 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 Cof an peoples participation in and understanding of ECP projects.

Science and conservation in Z abalo

The Cof an 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.

Catholic missionaries began entering their territory in the late 1500s, and there are records of violent Cof an reprisals through the 18th century. By the time Ecuador achieved independence from Spain, however, the Cof an nation had suffered dramatic reductions due to epidemic disease. After the rst two decades of the 20th century, only a few hundred Cof an 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 Cof an territory, however, has a poor record. Few Cof an people feel adept in the language, knowledge, or ways of national Ecuadorian society. Reecting on their questionable mastery of external sociopolitical domains, many Cof an 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 Z abalo faces many of the same problems as Ecuadors other Cof an 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 Cof an 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 Z abalos history is Randy Borman, a son of North American missionary linguists who grew up with Cof an people, married a Cof an woman, and became an important Cof an leader. He was one of Z abalos rst 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 Cof an ethnic federation. By the end of the decade, he spent most of his time in Quito, where he continues to work as a Cof an activist. Currently, he serves as the director of territory for the Indigenous Federation of the Cof an Nationality of Ecuador, and he manages two Cof an-afliated NGOs. As with other contemporary and past leaders (Cepek 2009), Bormans identity is somewhat ambivalent. Nevertheless, most Cof an accept his claim to Cof anness, and I view him as an essential player in the development of Cof an political consciousness. (For detailed accounts of Bormans position, see Cepek 2006, 2008a, 2009.) In response to the forces that threaten their existence, the Cof an developed a rich tradition of environmental politics. The people of Z abalo 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 signicant attempts an environmental subjectivity. Rather than to transform Cof

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being a product of immersion in expanding networks of governmental power, Cof an conservationism is the result of a gradual and organic process of community-internal discussion in a specic historical, political, and ecological conjuncture. As I describe in another article (Cepek 2008b), the Cof an 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, shing, 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 Cof an people learned to associate with sickness, hunger, conict, and anxiety. Together, these dynamics convinced the people of Z abalo 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 Z abalo 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 Z abalo discuss and modify their regulations through majority voting, and they punish rule breakers with nes. 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 Z abalos forests, I do know that community sepicho play an important role in structuring everyday action. Z abalo residents do not doubt that their knowledge and rules ensure the desirable ecological state of their territory. In 1991, the Cof an of Z abalo 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 Cof an leaders, the short document was simply an abbreviated description of what the people of Z abalo 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-

cial life in Z abalo. All households know its basic elements. The rules derive much of their force from their articulation with long-standing elements of Cof an 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 exible 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. Cof an people call themselves tsampini canjensundeccu (forest dwellers), and most nd it difcult to imagine how one could be Cof an without living in a relatively intact Amazonian environment. Although Z abalos conservation system is by no means an ancient Cof an 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 Cof an communities have taken Z abalos lead in constructing their own sepicho systems. Cof an people move frequently between villages, and ideas and institutions travel with them. The people of Z abalo 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 Z abalo have acted as guides and hosts for scientic researchers for more than two decades, the ECP has been the most consistent abalo since the late 1990s. The ECP is outside presence in Z 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, scientic 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 Cof an of Z abalo through publicity of their opposition to oil development and their experience in community-based

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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 Z abalo and other Cof an communities. ECP staff members hope that the experience of Z abalo will lead to the creation of global models for community-based conservation. Although the ECP wants to use science to improve Z abalos sepicho system, it also wants to document what the Cof an 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 meansscientic 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 Cof an environmental practice and Cof an knowledge of that practice.6 With true self-knowledge, ECP personnel believe that the people of Z abalo will be able to manage their resources in a rational and successful way. Beginning in 1999, ECP personnel traveled to Z abalo 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 scientic understanding. They worked to develop ve project activities: terrestrial censuses of Z abalos forest animals, household tabulations of hunting takes, visual censuses of river turtles (Podocnemis expansa and Podocnemis unilis), beach monitoring of river turtle nests, and headstarting of river turtle hatchlings in articial ponds and nests. During my main eldwork 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 modied 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 ve broad areas for beachmonitoring work. Census and hunting trails are divided into 50-meter segments. Temporally, project work is coordi-

Figure 1. Project worker with P. unilis 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 specic 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 sufce 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. Quantied, uniform, and synoptic, scientic representations allow for the discernment of patterns with a level of exactness that is shared by neither everyday subsistence nor collective community debate. Z abalos sepicho system depends on culture- and context-bound discussions about shifting environmental conditions. Scientic 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 ofcial, an oil company executive, or a Cof an leader. With scientic representations in hand, any individual is as knowledgeable as any other. There is no confusion about what the forest contains, what Cof an people are taking from it, and what the community should do if it wants to conserve its resources. For the ECP, the benets of scientic 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 Cof an people, however, the yields of scientic 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 Cof an 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 informaci onwhich 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 Z abalos experience with the terrestrial census. A question is posed at the beginning: Why do we do a census program of the

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 Cof an 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 Z abalo, with a running commentary on the utility of science: There are ways of nding 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 Cof an 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 Z abalo 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 an modes of knowing their environment and certainty in Cof 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 specic 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 specic 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, Cof an people remain critical of the work required to produce scientic knowledge as well as of its overall utility. Instead of instilling in Cof an actors exogenous logics, desires, and values, participating in ECP work creates a sense of the strange, burdensome, and indirectly benecial quality of collaborative projects with scientists and Western conservationists. After witnessing, implementing, and analyzing scientic conservation for the past ten years, I view Cof an participation in ECP-supported activities as a form of

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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 Cof an project workers are far from fully proletarianized laborers, I believe that Marxs concept has a broader analytic relevance and that it can help elucidate Cof an perspectives on their relationship with the ECP and other Western institutions. Participation in ECP-supported projects ts the rst 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 ow 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 difculty of negotiating project relations is their dependence on social dynamics suppressed in Cof an 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

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 nd it easy to laugh off the difculties, but others show intense discomfort when their failures are recognized. Relations between workers and the community can also be difcult. The river turtle repopulation effort is a case in point. In return for nding 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 difcult position. If a ooding river destroys a marked nest because of monitor negligence, the identier 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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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 Cof an participants. Nevertheless, Cof an people are prone to see antagonism and hostility when Westerners see only helpful instruction. When ECP ofcials train and evaluate participants, Cof an 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 scientic 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 Cof an 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 efcient operations that technology enables. Nevertheless, a simpler tool kit would better serve their goal of convincing the Cof an to accept scientic practice as a helpful addition to community conservation. Perhaps the most important form of alienation involved in Cof an performance of scientic conservation is that of workers from the forms of knowledge they produce. Paradoxically, what most interests the ECP in Z abalo is what most complicates its efforts, namely, Cof an peoples preexisting practices of community conservation. Long before ECP representatives arrived in Z abalo, the Cof an 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, Cof an people do not doubt their ability to know and to manage their forests. Their condence raises the question: Why did they collaborate with the ECP in the rst place? In general, Cof an people see little communityinternal use for the numbers, words, and charts that the ECP projects produce. Similar to historian of accounting Theodore Porter (1999), Z abalo residents understand

formalization and quantication 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-Cof an outsiders. Although the Cof an 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 prot. The Cof an 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, Cof an 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 Cof an themselves. No matter how much idealistic practitioners protest to the contrary, the people of Z abalo believe that Western conservationists derive value from Cof an lives and Cof an forests. Obviously, they are right. ECP personnel earn a paycheck for their efforts. They treasure the biodiversity of Cof an territory. And they hope to transform Z abalo experiences into a general model for community-based conservation. From the Cof an perspective, all of these benets represent the extraction of a surplus from Cof an activity. When pressed, most people in Z abalo admit ignorance about why outsiders come from so far away to work on conservation. Currently, most Cof an explain their understanding of the word cientista or cient co (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.

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Even when they recognize outsiders earnest attachment to their environment, the people of Z abalo cannot imagine any scientist coming to their territory without earning a living by doing so. The Cof an know that scientic 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 Cof an). The Cof an nd it most convincing to use cash as the surest means of calibrating values across deep social divides. No matter how much Cof an 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-Cof an 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 Cof an, to help the Cof an, 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 Z abalo residents understand ECP-supported projects as work that they perform for the outside worldand for which they deserve a paycheck. Some Cof an 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 justications 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 scientic 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 Z abalo residents, ECP personnel believe that the activities they support are to be done by the Cof an and for the Cof an. They nd it difcult to understand why the people of Z abalo have not embraced scientic knowledge production as a helpful addition to community conservation activities. Not surprisingly, the ECP has suffered mounting frustration at what it interprets as the Cof ans failure to conceptualize the project activities as theirs. By the end of 2005, in fact, the ECP began to shift its Cof an-centered work from community-based management

projects toward large-scale biological inventories of potential conservation areas in threatened Cof an territories. Despite their questioning of conservationist intentions and actions, Cof an 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 Cof an 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 Cof an people are becoming increasingly adept at producing scientic knowledge, which they want to make available to outside researchers as long as the exchange is balanced. In short, Cof an activists want to convince the world that Cof an 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-sufciency, Cof an leaders seek to create permanent partnerships that recognize the reciprocal costs and benets of scientic 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. Cof an 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 signicant strides toward realizing their vision. With a force of approximately fty state-accredited park guards, the Cof an nation is directing the management and protection of approximately 430 thousand hectares of forest. In communities such as Z abalo, Cof an individuals receive coauthorship recognition on peer-reviewed research articles written by ECP scientists (e.g., Townsend et al. 2005). According to Randy Borman, Cof an peoples intimate knowledge of and dependence on the forest make them the perfect agents of effective research and conservation. In his words, the Cof an 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 scientic conservation in Z abalo, I have demonstrated that a governmental project did not engender an environmental subjectivity in Cof an participants. Nor did it preclude a specically Cof an understanding of science, conservation, and environmental politics. The technics of ECP programs affect Cof an 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, Cof an project workers maintain a critical consciousness of the activities, relations, instruments, and products of scientic 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, Cof an 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 Cof an approaches to science and conservation can reveal a great deal about the particularity of Western values and assumptions, they are highly specic in terms of their origin and content. The Cof an understanding of scientic conservation as an indirectly benecial 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-

economic spectrumwould have a completely different reaction to ECP interventions. The Cof an of Z abalo 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. Cof an difculties 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 benets that Cof an people do hope to attain by cooperating with Western scientists and environmentalists only make sense in relation to the strategizing of Cof an leaders, who creatively rework Cof an resources into a proposal for a new form of NorthSouth collaboration. Without engaging the sociocultural subtleties of Cof an peoples discourse, practice, and politics, I never would have understood as much as I do about the ways in which scientic 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 Z abalo workers and residents, ECP personnel began an perspectives on their programs. Alto understand Cof though many of the projects that I have described continue to function, other NGOs have stepped in to nance them. After 2005, ECP ofcials decided that the Cof an vision of scientic conservation did not match their own. Rather than abandoning their partnership with Cof an people, however, the ECP returned to its traditional strengthorganizing biological inventories that can inuence 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 Cof an-Bermejo Ecological Reserve (RECB) in 2002, the ECP decided to conduct more inventories in Cof an territory, the most recent of which occurred in 2008. Both the ECP and Cof an leaders know that the authoritative reports of a prestigious North American institution can help Cof an people to consolidate control over their threatened lands. Even if they do not see to eye to eye with the Cof an on questions of

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community-based conservation, ECP ofcials would much rather see western Amazonias natural landscapes in the hands of the Cof an 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 rst 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 Cof an 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 Cof an 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 Cof anECP partnership. After a long series of conversations with Cof an students and leaders, I began to work with Field Museum fellows Dan Brinkmeier and Clark Erickson on the Cof an Historical Mapping Project. Building on many of the same instruments employed by the ECPGPS technology, satellite imagery, and mapmaking programsa joint Field Museum and Cof an team traveled throughout Cof an territory in 2007 to collect data on culturally signicant features of the landscape. At the same time, we trained a group of young Cof an men in video, audio, and interview techniques. In 2008, two of them traveled to Chicago to transform the compiled material into a ve-hour Aingae-language DVD, which puts the territory-related knowledge of Cof an elders into a form that can be used to teach Cof an schoolchildren. With the information, our team also produced a large-scale and highquality map, which offers a portrayal of Cof an territorial claims that can counter ofcial representations of northeastern Ecuadors social history. With this image, Cof an activists have a new weapon in contentious meetings with colonists, corporations, and hostile government ministries. The Cof an 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 difcult 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

to the people with whom they work as they contribute to projects that actually might do some good.

Notes
Acknowledgments. Drafts of this article proted 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 nancial 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 Cof an 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 ofcial 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 Cof an people and museum personnel during my eldwork. In addition, many museum employees continue to use the label to identify themselves and their work in unofcial contexts. 2. Aingae is the primary language of everyday life in Z abalo, and it is my main means of communication with Cof an people. Unless otherwise noted, all Cof an 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 Cof an conservationism. From their earliest days in their new community, the Cof an of Z abalo guided Western backpackers on canoe trips and forest hikes. According to the testimony of Cof an 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 Z abalo 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-Cof an 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 Cof an-Bermejo Ecological Reserve, a 55,541-hectare park inhabited by four Cof an 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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8. According to most narratives that I recorded, the turtle project began when a Z abalo man collected a nest of hatchlings and kept them in a bucket next to his house. Keeping pets is a common Cof an 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 Cof an 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 difcult 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 Z abalo. Rather, Cof an people act as paid guides, logistical coordinators, and natural historians for Western academics, who inventory areas faunal and oral diversity according to established scientic methodologies. The results are published in glossy reports lled with statistics, maps, and expert summaries written in English and Spanish.

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