| Most recent political-ecological and environmental anthropological scholarship is quick to critique community-based conservation programs, and their attendant ideas about locality and participatory development, for failing to account for the heterogeneity of state institutions, activists, commercial interests, and local organizations. But such programs continue to be predicated on, and are actually constructed in, everyday practices that bring into being a distinct social universe of cultural and economic interaction. Such everyday engagements in the quotidian aspects of development and conservation projects also occurs in delineated social-geographic spaces, along perceptible linkages across scales of socio-political action, and results in the shaping of citizen-subject identities in a plural democratic polity like India. The current dissertation is based an ethnographic examination of one such social universe in the Periyar Tiger Reserve in the state of Kerala in India, to describe and analyze the interplay between everyday practices of sustainable tourism and cultural production of ideas about nature, regional pride, and professional conservation.The focus on Periyar Tiger Reserve becomes particularly important in the context of it being recognized as the only 'success model' of India Eco-development Project (IEDP). Introduced jointly by the World Bank, Global Environmental Facility, Government of India and various state governments, the IEDP attempted to meet the dual goals of biodiversity conservation and addressing the question of local livelihood. The dissertation explores the various kinds of social networks, alliances and unexpected friendships that arise out of the operationalization of such a national policy. It further explores the role of crosscutting interests and motivations that engage various social actors in a complex web economic rationality, ideological inclinations and affective bonds. Further, the dissertation argues that the specific manifestation of such networks and alliances have much to do both with the unique economic and political context of Kerala, and with global ideas of nature consumption and conservation. Finally, drawing simultaneously from regional history of conservation, discourses engaged by local eco-guides and the expectations of tourists, the dissertation explores how very different notions of biodiversity can come to interact with each other in interesting ways in a place like PTR. |
