Redefining nature: Karen ecological knowledge and the challenge to the modern conservation paradigm

This dissertation is an ethnography that offers a critical analysis of issues in contemporary conservation politics in Thailand. By examining the development of the dominant nature conservation ideology and the response by the Karen, a group of ethnic hill people, to changing patterns of environmental control, the dissertation focuses on two main themes. The first part covers the Thai forest history and the role of development of scientific forestry in shaping discourses and practices of Thai nature conservation. The latter part explores Karen ecological knowledge and its challenge to the modern conservation paradigm.;Central to the dissertation is the argument that "hill tribes," "nature" and "conservation" in Thailand are not only constructions but are also constantly "under construction." The questions of how the dominant nature conservation ideology has been constructed and how this ideology has been contested are the key issues of this dissertation. By tracing the historical development of forestry in Thailand, this study shows how Thai nature conservation is a product of a social and political economic transformation in which shifting conceptions of the forest represents an essential part of the modernization of the Thai nation. The colonial legacy of commercial forestry, the desire for modernization, and the use of natural resources for developmental purposes are fundamental to the establishment of nature conservation in urban Thai society. The making of nature conservation represents a significant form of technology of government that involves the creation of certain institutions, knowledge, and bureaucratic rationality. As the state is not an undifferentiated entity, internal bureaucratic politics have also significantly shaped the ways resources have been differently viewed and utilized by different state agencies. In analyzing the mentality shared among foresters and some nature conservationists, this study suggests that the efficacy of conservation ideology lies not only in the power of scientific forestry to transform perceptions of landscape and the relationships linking landscape with certain groups of people, but also in the capability to blend such perceptions into the existing structure of class and ethnic inequality. As a result, class differentiation and ethnic discrimination have become an integral part of the structure of nature conservation ideology in Thai society.;The second part of this dissertation examines the ways in which Karen knowledge has problematized the construction and centralization of the state's modern conservation paradigm. In encounters with contemporary conservation politics, Karen ecological knowledge represents a dynamic and responsive mode of conceptualizing nature developed out of interactions among competing discourses and knowledge of various social groups. Local challenge to dominant forestry ideologies has therefore been constituted through the appropriation of foreign knowledge such as mapping and the invention of local tradition in resource management. This study shows that the Karen adoption of certain terminologies, such as community forest and rotational swidden agriculture, manifested in local maps has provided them with a communicative device for use in dialogues with forestry officials as well as with non-government organizations. These counter-discourses have been employed by the Karen as a strategic tool to defend their resources and to re-situate the marginal space and identity of the Karen within the dominant Thai society. In this respect, reinvented forms of local knowledge are generated through ongoing encounters between the dominating and dominated ideas and practices with regard to nature conservation in the Karen struggle for recognition within the dominant Thai society.