Browsing by Subject "territorio"

This thesis is an ethnographic study examining how widely claimed and officially recognized indigenous autonomy is construed and practiced in a state-promoted nature conservation program taking place in four indigenous Chinantec communities in the state of Oaxaca, south of Mexico. This study is based on a four-month stay in two of the communities, San Antonio Analco and San Pedro Tlatepusco, during the spring of 2016. Fieldwork consisted of participant observation and semi-structured interviews. In this study, questions of autonomy and dependence are examined in a frame of political ecology focusing on the motives and actions of territorial control by varied actors including, besides the communities, state and its institutions, environmental actors and beings of nature. Understanding of these motives and forms of control is sought through anthropological theories of state control towards minorities, indigenous analysis on environmental change and theories of autonomy in relations and dependence. Mexico has a long history of homogenizing institutional politics of indigenismo, which have been argued to continue in today’s wide offering of social and development aid programs for rural populations. This view is expanded to cover programs of environmental protection. In this thesis, personified territorial control and territorial sanctification are argued to determine Chinantec motives towards environmental care and explain the good condition in which these tropical forests can be found today. These forms of control and sanctification have undergone historic syncretic transformations making environmental and social changes locally understandable and leading to the current environmental aspirations towards nature conservation. Syncretic, evangelic transformations are argued to explain differences in the attitudes of the two communities towards nature conservation. Personified territorial control has incorporated environmental actors into local cosmovisions and forms of territorial control. In this study, it is analyzed how green politics have been able to promote and decline new kinds of autonomy in relations and in dependence. These processes have allowed the communities some material benefits, “development”, and ways to defend their territories. Still, as this study suggests, these politics and the benefits they provide have not been able to obviate inequalities and the discrimination prevalent in Mexico as well as globally. Instead, these programs have sometimes even increased and reconstrued the pre-existing national and global inequalities, as could be found out living in the communities of Analco and San Pedro, “the zone of high marginalization”.