Producing space(s), representing landscapes: Maps and resource conflicts in Trinidad

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 9, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 389-420

  Sletto, Bjørn ^a  

^a Department of Obstetrics Gynecology   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84993731444     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1191/1474474002eu256oa     Document Type: Article

References (63)

1. See e.g., A. Baker, ‘Introduction: on ideology and landscape’, in A. Baker and G. Biger, eds, Ideology and landscape in historical perspective: essays on the meanings of some places in the past (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 1-14; D. Hayden, ‘Urban landscape history: the sense of place and the politics of space’, in P. Groth and T. Bressi, eds, Understanding ordinary landscapes (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 116; D. Cosgrove, ‘Place, landscape, and the dialectics of cultural geography’, Canadian geographer 22 (1978), p. 66; J. Duncan, The city as text: the politics of landscape interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1990); and A. Pred, Making histories and constructing human geographies: the local transformation of practice, power relations, and consciousness (Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1990).
2. See e.g., J.B. Harley, ‘Maps, knowledge, and power’, in D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels, eds, The iconography of landscape: essays on the symbolic representation, design, and use of past environments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 277-312; J.B. Harley, ‘Deconstructing the map’, Cartographica 26 (1989), pp. 1-20; J.B. Harley, ‘Cartography, ethics, and social theory’, Cartographica 27 (1990), pp. 1-23; J.B. Harley, ‘Deconstructing the map’, in T. Barnes and J. Duncan, eds, Writing worlds: discourse, text and metaphor in the representation of landscape (London, Routledge 1992), pp. 231-47; R. Rundstrom, ‘A cultural interpretation of Inuit map accuracy’, Geographical review 80 (1980), pp. 155-68; R. Rundstrom, ‘Mapping, postmodernism, indigenous people and the changing direction of North American cartography’, Cartographica 28 (1991), pp. 1-12; R. Rundstrom, ‘The role of ethics, mapping, and the meaning of place in relations between Indians and Whites in the United States’, Cartographica 30 (1993), pp. 21-28; D. Wood, The power of maps (New York, Guilford Press, 1992); and D. Wood, ‘Maps and mapmaking’, Cartographica 30 (1993), pp. 1-6.
3. N. Smith and C. Katz, ‘Grounding metaphor: towards a spatialized politics’, in M. Keith and S. Pile, eds, Place and the politics of identity (London, Routledge, 1993), p. 70.
4. J. Duncan and D. Ley, eds, Place/culture/representation (London, Routledge, 1993), p. 1.
5. Practitioners argue that participatory research mapping (PRM) results in more accurate, local data than those found on official government maps. P. Herlihy and A. Leake ‘Participatory research mapping of indigenous lands in the Honduran Mosquitia’, in A. Pebley and L. Rosero- Bixby, eds, Demographic diversity and change in the central American isthmus (Santa Monica, CA, Rand, 1997), p. 721, report that indigenous surveyors’ geographical knowledge of their local area in the Honduran Mosquitia is often far more detailed than that contained on the official government maps. More recently, participatory mapping was used to develop a ‘consensual zoning system’ for the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve: P. Herlihy, ‘Participatory research zoning of the Rio Platano biosphere in the Honduran Mosquitia’, in Natural resource management: between poverty alleviation and nature conservation (Hamburg, Gesellschaft fur Agrarprojekte, in press). And in a community-based mapping project in Maya villages in Belize, indigenous village researchers recorded information not found on Belize's 1:50 000 map series. This spatial information was based on an ‘intricate system of names for their local lands which allow [the local Maya] to pinpoint, with a great deal of accuracy, areas where they farm, hunt, fish [and] collect medicinal plants and firewood’: [Toledo Maya Cultural Council, Maya atlas: the struggle to preserve Maya land in southern Belize (Berkeley, CA, North Atlantic Books, 1997), p. 142.
6. P. Poole, An analysis of current activities and opportunities for applying geomatics technologies (Washington, DC, Biodiversity Support Program, 1995), p. 2.
7. N. Peluso, ‘Whose woods are these? Counter-mapping forest territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia’, Antipode 27 (1995), pp. 383-406.
8. Harley, ‘Maps, knowledge, and power’, p. 290; and Harley, ‘Cartography, ethics, and social theory’, p. 12.
9. Pred, Making histories and constructing human geographies, p. 13.
10. To gather and analyse representations of the Nariva Swamp during the mid-1990s, I relied on a mix of methodologies. Local representations were primarily recorded through interviews or informal conversations with villagers during fieldwork in autumn 1997. I also interviewed state officials and analysed 37 newspaper articles from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, most of which supported the environmental movement's construction of the swamp landscape as a sensitive remnant of island ‘nature’.
11. H. Lefebvre, The production of space (Cambridge, MA, Blackwell, 1991).
12. T. Unwin, ‘A waste of space? Towards a critique of the social production of space’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 25 (2000), pp. 11-29.
13. E. Soja, Postmodern geographies: the reassertion of space in critical social theory (London, Verso, 1989), p. 81.
14. Lefebvre, The production of space, pp. 410-11.
15. Soja, Postmodern geographies; and D. Gregory, ‘Lefebvre, Lacan and the production of space’, in G. Benko and U. Strohmayer, eds, Geography, history and social sciences (London, Kluwer Academic, 1995), pp. 15-44.
16. Unwin, ‘A waste of space?’, p. 12.
17. Soja, Postmodern geographies, p. 51.
18. Hayden, ‘Urban landscape history’, p. 114.
19. Unwin, ‘A waste of space?’, p. 14.
20. Lefebvre, The production of space, p. 413.
21. A. Merrifield, ‘Place and space: a Lefebvrian reconciliation’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 18 (1993), p. 525.
22. Lefebvre, The production of space, pp. 38-9.
23. Gregory, ‘Lefebvre, Lacan’, p. 33.
24. Lefebvre, The production of space, p. 286.
25. Gregory, ‘Lefebvre, Lacan’, p. 34.
26. Lefebvre, The production of space, p. 52.
27. D. Cosgrove, ‘Power and place in the Venetian territories’, in J. Agnew and J. Duncan, eds, The power of place: bringing together geographical and sociological imaginations (London, Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 104 (emphasis original).
28. Lefebvre, The production of space, p. 41.
29. Unwin, ‘A waste of space?’ p. 26.
30. A. Baker, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1-14; J. Duncan and D. Ley, eds, Place/culture/representation; Cosgrove, ‘Place, landscape’, pp. 66-72; D. Cosgrove, Social formation and symbolic landscape (Sidney, Croom Helm, 1984); D. Cosgrove, ‘Geography is everywhere: culture and symbolism in human landscapes’, in D. Gregory and R. Walford, eds, Horizons in human geography (London, Macmillan, 1989), pp. 118-135; and Cosgrove, ‘Power and place’, pp. 104-23.
31. Cosgrove, Social formation.
32. D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels, ‘Introduction: iconography and landscape’, in D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels, The iconography of landscape: p. 1.
33. E. Relph, Rational landscapes and humanistic geography (Totowa, NJ, Croom Helm, 1981).
34. P. Groth, ‘Frameworks for cultural landscape study’, in Groth and Bressi, Understanding ordinary landscapes, p. 7.
35. Pred, Making histories and constructing human geographies, p. 13.
36. M. Keith and S. Pile, ‘Introduction part 1: the politics of place’, in Keith and Pile, Place and the politics of identity, p. 6.
37. Lefebvre, The production of space, p. 23.
38. R. Bryant, ‘Political ecology: an emerging research agenda in Third-World studies’, Political geography 11 (1992), pp. 12-36; R. Bryant, ‘Beyond the impasse: the power of political ecology in Third World environmental research’, Area 29 (1997), pp. 5-19; T. Mitchell, ‘The object of development: America's Egypt’, in J. Crush, ed., Power of development (London, Routledge, 1995), pp. 129-57; D.S. Moore, ‘Contesting terrain in Zimbabwe's eastern highlands: political ecology, ethnography, and peasant resource struggles’, Economic Geography 69 (1993), pp. 380-401; D.S. Moore, ‘Marxism, culture and political ecology: environmental struggles in Zimbabwe's eastern highlands’, in R. Peet and M. Watts, eds, Liberation ecologies: environment, developments, social movements (London, Routledge, 1996), pp. 125-47; D.S. Moore, ‘Remapping resistance: “Ground for struggle” and the politics of place’, in S. Pile and M. Keith, eds, Geographies of resistance (London, Routledge, 1997), pp. 87-106; D.S. Moore, ‘Clear waters and muddied histories: environmental history and the politics of community in Zimbabwe's eastern highlands’, Journal of Southern African studies 24 (1998), pp. 377-404; R. Neumann, ‘Local challenges to global agendas: conservation, economic liberalization and the pastoralists’ rights movement in Tanzania’, Antipode 27 (1995), pp. 363-82; P. Routledge, Terrains of resistance: nonviolent social movements and the contestation of place in India (Westport, CT, Praeger, 1993); and P. Routledge, ‘A spatiality of resistance: theory and practice in Nepal's revolution of 1990’, in Pile and Keith, Geographies of resistance, pp. 68-86.
39. Bryant, ‘Beyond the impasse’, p. 10.
40. P. Blaikie, ‘Changing environments or changing views? A political ecology for developing countries’, Geography 80 (1995), pp. 203-14.
41. J. Scott, Weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1985).
42. See e.g. D. Denniston, ‘Defending the land with maps’, World watch (Jan./Feb. 1994), pp. 27-31; K. Kassam and S. Maher, Indigenous, Cartesian, and cartographic: visual metaphors of knowledge in Arctic (tundra) and sub-Arctic (taiga) communities (Presentation to the Cultures and Biodiversity Congress in Kunming, China, 2000); Herlihy, ‘Participatory research mapping’; Toledo Maya Cultural Council, Maya atlas; Poole, Indigenous peoples, mapping and biodiversity conservation; and J. Fox, Siam mapped and mapping in Cambodia: boundaries, sovereignty, and indigenous conceptions of space (Presentation at Cornell University, spring 2000).
43. P. Bacon, ‘Ecology and management of swamp forests in the Guianas and Caribbean region’, in Ecosystems of the world, 15: Forested wetlands (Amsterdam, Elsevier Science, 1990); W.G. Downs et al., ‘Arbovirus studies in Bush Bush Forest, Trinidad, W.I., September 1959-December 1964’, American journal of tropical medicine and hygiene 17 (1968), p. 224-75; E. Ramcharan, ‘Flora history of the Nariva Swamp, Trinidad’ (PhD, University of the West Indies, St Augustine, 1980); and University of the West Indies, Zoology Department, St Augustine, Studies on the biological resources of Nariva Swamp, Trinidad, Occasional Papers 4 (1979), p. 17.
44. P. Bacon, ‘Ecology and management of swamp forests’, p. 241.
45. Downs et al., ‘Arbovirus studies’, p. 234.
46. K.D. Thelen and S. Faizool, Policy for the establishment and management of a National Park system in Trinidad and Tobago (Port of Spain, Ministry of Agriculture, Lands and Fisheries, 1980), p. 16.
47. K.D. Thelen and S. Faizool, Plan for a System of National Parks and Other Protected Areas in Trinidad and Tobago (Port of Spain, Ministry of Agriculture, Lands and Fisheries, 1980).
48. Personal interviews with P. Bacon (director and professor, Department of Zoology, University of the West Indies, Oct.-Nov. 1997), and Robyn Cross (director, National Parks Division, Ministry of Agriculture, Oct. 1997). See also Ramsar, Ramsar Convention Monitoring Procedure Final Report: Nariva Swamp, Trinidad and Tobago (Gland, Switzerland, Convention on Wetlands of International Importance especially as Waterfowl Habitat, 1996), p. 13.
49. FAO, Report no. 636 to the government of Trinidad and Tobago on the reclamation of the Caroni, Oropouche and Nariva areas (Rome, Food and Agriculture Organization, 1957); Agricultural Engineering and Development Division, Request for financing the rehabilitation of the Plum Mitan Rice Scheme (Port of Spain, Ministry of Agriculture, Lands and Food Production, 1985), p. 1; and University of the West Indies, Studies on the biological resources of Nariva Swamp.
50. Agricultural Engineering and Development Division, Request, p. 1.
51. B. Sletto, ‘Fish, rice and the meaning of place: the political ecology of the Nariva Swamp, Trinidad’, Caribbean geography (1998), pp. 14-29; and B. Sletto, ‘Landscape of resistance: reading, producing and representing the Nariva Swamp, Trinidad’ (Master's, University of Kansas, Lawrence, 1999).
52. Sunday Express (23 May 1993); Trinidad Guardian (28 Apr. 1994); Express (15 July 1996); Trinidad Guardian (22 Sept. 1996); Trinidad Guardian (17 Oct. 1996).
53. Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, ‘Legal notice no. 78, the Forests Act, chap. 66:01, Order made by the Minister under section 2 of the Forests Act: the forests (prohibited areas) order, 1993’, Legal Supplement Part B 32 (21 May 1993), pp. 343-4.
54. No action was taken against the small-scale squatters in Kernahan. However, the conflict focused new attention on their activities and the Ministry of Agriculture has increased its pressure for normalization of land tenure. While in the past land was designated to different families on an informal basis within the community, the Ministry of Agriculture now requires villagers to prepare formal management plans and sign long-term leases for their land.
55. Trinidad Guardian (31 Oct. 1996), p. 8.
56. Participatory household surveys were conducted in 42 of 62 households in Kernahan. The surveys were designed by the author and participatory researcher Pamela Bridgelal and tested informally on different female heads of households. As it was intended to reach female heads of households in this very gender-divided community, Bridgelal conducted the survey alone. Surveys of fishermen were developed in a similar participatory fashion and were conducted by author and participatory researcher Anthony Moti. The survey of fishermen is based on a sample of 15 full-time fishermen. The sample is not random, but constitutes a core group of full-time fishermen who have fished consistently for a living for up to 10 years.
57. Carter and Beadle, 1932, cited in I. Ramnarie, ‘Larval culture, development and growth of the cascadu, Hoplosternum littorale’, Aquaculture 126 (1994), p. 291.
58. The community-based maps were produced by a dozen fishermen during a series of 4 workshops, conducted during a period of a little more than a month. During the initial workshops, the fishermen drew a base map of place names, natural features and fishing grounds. I reduced this map to a smaller scale by hand and brought it back to the group for corrections. The final sketch maps were presented to the community and to representatives of the Ministry of Agriculture and the University of the West Indies at a community meeting in Kernahan. The maps were then scanned and heads-up digitized in FreeHand 8 for publication.
59. Merrifield, ‘Place and space’, p. 525.
60. Personal interview with Bissoon Samaroo, Oct. 1997.
61. Sletto, Landscape of resistance; and Sletto, ‘Fish, rice and the meaning of place’. See also Ramsar, Ramsar Convention monitoring procedure.
62. Personal interview with Zaffaroon Chandra Jonas, Nov. 1997.
63. Lefebvre, The production of space, p. 39.