Kosek Jake, Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

Extract

The politics of nature are at play in forests and nations, as well as within contested memories and variably shaded skin. By tracing the connections between these realms, we can learn how difference becomes racialized in cultural politics. This is Jake Kosek's argument in Understories, an ethnography of the virulent struggles that have raged over the use and control of forests in northern New Mexico. Aligning himself primarily with a Hispano community in Truchas, New Mexico, while also reaching out to local forestry officials and environmentalists, Kosek conducted ethnographic fieldwork and archival study into the conflict that has pitted advocates of conservation, scientific management, and local subsistence use against one other. Kosek found that race was a powerful but frequently avoided factor in the dispute, and rather than shying away from race as a politically sensitive subject, he takes this as a motivation for writing. The book represents a successful example of engaged anthropology, since the analysis is both ethnographically innovative and politically useful to those he studies.