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The Chicken and the Quetzal
Incommensurate Ontologies and Portable Values in Guatemala's Cloud Forest
By Paul Kockelman Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7459-6
CHAPTER 1
NGOs, Ecotourists, and Endangered Avifauna
IMMATERIAL LABOR, INCOMMENSURATE VALUES, AND INTERSUBJECTIVE INTENTIONS
Early Scientific Expedition
In the spring of 1989, ten German ecologists traveled to Guatemala to evaluate the extent and condition of cloud forest — the ecological home of the resplendent quetzal. Their endeavor was sponsored by the Landesbund für Vogelschutz, an organization dedicated to protecting the endangered avifauna of Germany and the world. Using satellite photos, they located all the regions in Guatemala where cloud forest still remained, an area approximately nineteen hundred square kilometers in size. Under the assumption that cloud forest requires a minimum annual rainfall of 2,000 mm, and a minimum altitude of 1,500 m, they inferred that this area constituted a mere fraction of Guatemala's original fifty-two hundred square kilometers of cloud forest. Using old maps of Guatemala, they determined that most of this destruction happened within the last thirty-six years (a period relatively coterminous with the civil war). Destroyed, they hypothesized, were first those areas of cloud forest that were lowest in elevation and closest to roads. If conditions remained the same, they predicted that by 2020 all of Guatemala's remaining cloud forest would be gone.
The ecologists decided to limit their conservation efforts to the Sierras, or mountainous regions, of Caquipek, Yalijux, and Guaxac in the Department of Alta Verapaz, an area approximately 270 square kilometers in size, wherein lived some six thousand people in thirty-four different communities. They gave two reasons for their decision. First, its population density of quetzals was the right size for a conservation effort to be fruitful. Any lower a density, and a population of birds would not be able to reproduce itself, no matter how otherwise favorable the environment. And second, the cloud forest in this area was in immediate danger because of the clearing of forest by indigenous peoples. Indeed, the ecologists called this region "one of the most seriously endangered (amenazadas) areas in Guatemala owing to the high density of indians (indios) that live in the region." In other words, this area became the focus of the ecologists' attention owing to its high density of both endangered birds and endangering people.
As the ecologists then saw it, a simple strategy would underlie their future conservation efforts: "to incite a co-existence between the indians and the forest" (incitar una coexistencia entre los indios y el bosque). Such an incitation would require a number of interventions, such as terracing and reforesting, eliciting grants from private organizations, and petitioning the government for environment-friendly laws. Most important, they thought, indigenous people should be integrated into the interventions. For example, they suggested that "Indians be paid for their work in the region, ranging from the construction and maintenance of infrastructure to the constant patrolling of the area." Last, they issued a warning aimed at Guatemalan national pride: insofar as Guatemala was known as the "Land of Forest" (Tierra del Bosque), and insofar as the quetzal was the national bird, with the loss of its cloud forest and quetzals, Guatemala was "losing an important part of its identity."
Let me summarize the logic of these ecologists' projected interventions. The quetzal bird was the main value in need of protection, and the cloud forest was its necessary habitat. The indigenous people, with their "slash-and-burn" agriculture, were the main agents in the destruction of the cloud forest. The indigenous people should play a key role in stopping this destruction; and they could play such a role if they were offered economic incentives. Only in this way could "coexistence" of birds and people be "incited."
Under this logic, economic and political conditions underlying the indigenous destruction of the cloud forest were elided. No mention was made of Guatemala's historical, sociological, or political conditions or history. The ultimate value of the ecologists was biodiversity conservation; in other words, these interventions were not humanitarian in the strict sense. That is, while the indigenous populations played a necessary role as a means to the end of biodiversity, they were not an end in themselves. Last, it is important to note that the ecologists presupposed two distinct modes of personhood. Indigenous people could be most effectively moved to action by appealing to their instrumental values (cash payment). But funding agencies and national organizations could be most effectively moved to action by appealing to their ethical values (loss of national identity or biodiversity). That is to say, each of these groups of actors was understood to be best motivated by different evaluative standards (Kockelman 2010c). The strategies and tensions underlying the ecologists' interventions were in place from the very beginning, as clear in their initial plans.
At this time, however, the ecologists still emphasized the importance of securing state-level support. Over the next ten years, as their efforts ultimately became institutionalized as the NGO Proyecto Eco-Quetzal, their appeals to the Guatemalan state would diminish, and their dependence on international funding would increase. For example, ten years later, in a grant sent to the Global Environmental Fund (GEF 2000), Proyecto Eco-Quetzal had a more developed understanding of the cause of deforestation. While they still blamed unsustainable agricultural practices (and the frequent resettlement that soil loss required), they also blamed the state and the market. They argued that deforestation was caused in part by a lack of awareness and coordination on an institutional level (in particular, the forest lacked a protected status). And they argued that villagers lacked both knowledge (and thus needed technical assistance in the sustainable use of biodiversity) and incentive (and thus needed marketable products — such as candles and ecotourism — as alternative resources).
Nonetheless, their main strategy of "inciting coexistence" by means of instrumental interventions, or incentivizing, remained in place throughout. They wanted to "manage the selected sites with the participation of local people and institutions in accordance with local biophysical, cultural, and social realities." And, to do this, they would have to "provide incentives to land owners to encourage them to conserve or sustainably use their forests." Finally, noting that the quetzal was a unique species, they argued for the "global significance of local biodiversity." While still appealing to the instrumental incentives required to get the indigenous population to change their behavior, they had moved from a national idiom of identity to a global idiom of biodiversity as an existential value that would appeal to transnational funding agencies.
This chapter examines the history of this NGO's interventions in the village of Chicacnab, paying particular attention to its fostering of an ecotourism program as a means to promote conservation of the cloud forest. Broadly speaking, and in conjunction with chapter 4, I focus on a particular intervention: the project's capacitation of villagers to engage in novel social relations and semiotic practices, such as the hosting and guiding of ecotourists, as a means to make commensurate disparate ontological domains: not just instrumental and ethical values, or "money" and "morality," but also villagers and tourists, and people and birds — and so various life forms and forms of life. In particular, the impulse, if not achievement, of the project's intervention was to coordinate villagers' and tourists' actions (and thereby turn them into "interactions"), calibrate these modes of coordination with cash (by articulating, instilling, measuring, standardizing, and pricing them), and thereby conduct villagers' local economic actions toward seemingly global ethical ends.
The next three sections describe the range of the NGO's interventions, focusing on the history of its ecotourism program, and the logic underlying its strategies. And the last five sections turn from the strategic and practical impulse of the NGO's interventions to the limits of its achievement. By way of a detailed description of how ecotourists were primed for their experience in the village, and an ethnographic description of a group of ecotourists, it shows the discrepancy and overlap between the NGO's portrayal of a standardized ecotour and ecotourists' actual experiences. In some sense, then, this chapter takes what is ostensibly the most portable of institutions (the NGO) and shows its radical rootedness (and fruitedness) in a particular context. I conclude by theorizing some of the key features of so-called immaterial labor, loosely understood as commoditized interactions linking villagers and tourists in novel social relations and semiotic practices. It will constitute our first analytic foray into seemingly incommensurable values.
This chapter is constructed in terms of the categories and values of the NGO and ecotourists. In some sense, it is a view of the village, and the villagers, from where Proyecto Eco-Quetzal stood. Indeed, even the category of immaterial labor itself, and the way evaluation and commensuration are initially to be understood, sticks close to the NGO's categories, commitments, and conduct (and hence its "worldview" or "cosmology" so to speak, as fluid and messy as it often was). Later chapters will offer other perspectives on, and describe other agencies in, these same entanglings of the village and NGO, focusing on the categories, commitments, and conduct of the Q'eqchi' speakers themselves, both as they unfolded ethnographically and as they transformed historically.
Other Interventions as an NGO
In 1990, following the initial scientific expedition, David Unger, one of the original ten ecologists, founded Proyecto Quetzal with the help of GEO Tropical Rainforest of Hamburg, Germany. In 1994, this organization was renamed Proyecto Eco-Quetzal (PEQ) and came under the executive direction of the Biosphere and Sustainable Agricultural Development Association (BIDAS), in Cobán, Guatemala. The association was established as an environmental nonprofit organization under Guatemalan law in November 1993 (PC 1997b). The association never had another project. Its only reason for existence was to give Guatemalan institutional legitimacy to what was originally a German organization, and what came to coordinate a variety of complex and changing transnational funding sources and affiliations. Under the national umbrella of BIDAS, and under the personal direction of David Unger, PEQ engaged in a wide range of interventions throughout the 1990s — ranging from sustainable agriculture and medicinal plants, to women's development centers and environmental education.
Beginning in 1992, for example, with the help of UNICEF (the international children's rights and emergency relief organization) and CO-NALFA (Guatemala's national literacy committee), PEQ provided teachers for fourteen schools in the Sierras. More than four hundred students between the ages of six and twelve were taught to read and write in both Spanish and Q'eqchi', and received basic mathematics training and environmental education. Despite the scope and success of this intervention, the schools had to close down in 1998 because no politician would approve their renewal, and because many other NGOs became involved with schools at the end of the civil war. Owing to this, members of PEQ thought it would be better to focus their efforts on conservation (PC 1997b).
By the mid-1990s, PEQ had established four women's development centers in the Sierras. These centers were designed to provide skills training to Q'eqchi' and Pocomchi women in the production of internationally marketable crafts of local origin. Among these crafts were tejidos, or woven fabrics, made using either the traditional backstrap loom or a larger foot-pedaled loom. The fabrics were then embroidered to make huipiles (blouses), curtains, placemats, and other decorative household items. Other marketable products included baskets, rope bags, baked goods, and hammocks (PC 1997a). As will be discussed in chapter 4, these activities often generated intrahousehold tensions; for example, older women went out for daylong training sessions, while their daughters and daughters-in-law had to take over these women's usual household chores in addition to their own.
In 1998, in the realm of sustainable agriculture, PEQ began a long-term, intervillage intervention called the "corn revolution." This intervention was designed to involve farmers in the conservation of soil by making better use of land already under cultivation. It entailed a commitment not to burn the land before planting (i.e., using fallow land rather than recently burned forest), growing on contours, using natural soil enhancers (compost), and planting live barriers to minimize soil erosion. During the first year of this intervention, PEQ reported that such methods yielded 12 percent more corn than fields planted in the traditional way. Despite this initial success, however, PEQ noted that this was a difficult intervention for a number of reasons. For example, maize agriculture was a "holy tradition"; the soil of the Sierras was very poor; and local technology was rudimentary. To minimize these problems, PEQ offered various incentives to farmers to make them try the new methods. For example, participants could purchase seed potatoes, fruit trees, and potentially a cow on a loan basis. And PEQ promised to make up any difference in yields. After the first season, however, the project noted that such incentives were barbed; in particular, having to collect loaned money and having the promised cows not arrive strained relations, causing many participants to drop out. Such drop-outs were referred to by PEQ as "defectors" (NFWF 1999).
In 1999, PEQ instituted a finquita, or "small plantation," program. In this intervention, farmers were trained to make their own tree nurseries, whose fruit could then be harvested and sold. Unlike the corn revolution program, which was designed to minimize the impact of subsistence agriculture on cloud forest, the finquita program was designed to offer a cash-based mode of production in place of subsistence agriculture. In comparison to the corn revolution, the finquita project was a huge success. Three times as much fruit as corn was harvestable in the same size plot. Unfortunately, as a consequence of good harvests, local markets became clogged with fruit. By 2000, PEQ was investigating better ways to market the fruit — such as turning it into jam to be sold internationally (NFWF 2000).
Perhaps the most economically successful intervention of the NGO was candle making, which was set up by two Australian volunteers in 1998 (PC 1999). Q'eqchi' farmers neighboring the cloud forest collected seeds of the arrayán tree (Mirica cerifera) and sold an extracted wax to PEQ's business (NFWF 2000). The language of this intervention echoed PEQ's original philosophy that the Q'eqchi' were instrumentally motivated and tourists were ethically motivated. For example, signs on the candles read, "This income is also good for the cloud forests. With an outside income Q'eqchi' people are less inclined to slash and burn the forest to grow crops. Thus destruction of forest habitat is prevented." And, in advertising these candles to buyers, signs said that the candles were natural rather than synthetic, and made by women rather than men. For example, "This arrayán candle was handmade by Q'eqchi' women of the Guatemala cloud forests." While the Q'eqchi' were portrayed as motivated by income, the consumers of the Q'eqchi's handicrafts were presumed to be motivated not only by cloud forest conservation, but also by natural products and women's rights.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Chicken and the Quetzal by Paul Kockelman. Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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