Mapping History: Cartography and the Construction of the San Pedro Valley

The San Pedro Valley of North America’s desert Southwest has been depicted in maps for over four centuries. These images composed by Euro‐American colonialists do not merely portray a topographical reality; they also construct singular notions of place. While place‐making often inspires a rich awareness of self and belonging, it is also a device of power that shapes people’s desires, perceptions and experiences. Employing Geographic Information System (GIS) technology, we explore the hidden messages embedded in maps from the 1500s to 1800s to reveal the social and political ideologies that buttressed the Spanish, Mexican and American empires. These analyses illustrate that Euro‐American maps do not advance in a linear evolution from simple (unknown) to complex (known) in the production of place. Rather they act to legitimize colonial rule through strategies of representation that privilege Euro‐American standpoints and disregard competing claims of entitlement.     

Inventing the “Pygmy”: Representing the “Other”, Presenting the “Self”

In this article, I investigate historical representations of Central African Forest People that have been constructed by explorers, scientists, colonial officers, journalists and the European public in order to provide a historical analysis of the concept of the “Pygmy”. Following Said’s argument regarding Orientalism, that “without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormous systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively” (1995 Said, E. W. 1995. Orientalism, Harmondsworth, , UK: Penguin.  [Google Scholar]: 3), I will draw on representations of Forest People from written accounts of the last 200 years. None of these accounts should be regarded as representative of Forest Peoples’ own representations of themselves, so what I hope to provide is a clear picture of how Forest People have been represented by others through the discourses of race, evolution and colonialism.     

Shajaó—Histories of an Invented Savage

Through multiple stories about Shajaó, an untold history of the Peruvian Amazon unfolds. This article, based on extensive archival research and fieldwork, brings together multivocal accounts about an Ese Eja man who allegedly killed a Catholic priest in 1932 and who, despite the large-scale expeditions sent out to capture him, was not apprehended until 1942. Through ongoing tales of Shajaó, the intersubjective ways in which memory is shaped and employed to influence and make sense of sociopoltical contexts is revealed in the exchanges between a notable “savage” and various economies in different historical settings—the rubber boom, extractivism upheld by debt-peonage, Catholic missionization and today's environmental service economy. This exploration questions the construction, reproduction and transformation of the multiple, though not always shared, experiential and interpretive frameworks that shape the historical consciousness of individual and collective memories over time. It also suggests that “disremembering”, in archival and oral accounts, reflects a critical political awareness of history's valid flexibility. Here, narratives are rewoven so that history continues to be told in ways that ensure that “Shajaó stories” never truly end.     

Creating environmental subjects: Conservation as counter-insurgency in Aceh,Indonesia, 1925–1940

This article examines the creation of Gunung Leuser Wildlife Reserve in the highlands of Aceh, Indonesia within the context of the Dutch-Aceh War in the early twentieth century, arguing that conservation was used as a form of counter-insurgency. While the agendas of the colonial military and conservationists diverged at times, they overlapped in their goals to secure Leuser from resident communities, whom they viewed as a threat to colonial order and the ecologies of the region. This article draws together the discourses of militarized conservation with their material implications. It does so by examining the nexus of military and conservation discourses, the historical context of park creation, and the processes by which colonial actors stole rights to land and created new laws and regulations dictating the people's relationships with and access to land. Scholars have shown that conservation discourses continue to normalize human rights abuses, Indigenous dispossession and displacement, and deadly violence against local peoples. These discursive tactics frame expertise and responsibility as residing in the hands of white elites who are tasked with saving imperiled environments from the people who depend on them for subsistence. I suggest that the military and conservation agendas were both operating within overlapping, constructed frameworks of crisis and emergency that constituted the resident communities as anti-environmental subjects. Discourses of environmental crisis in Leuser held a power that justified militarization while concealing the violence from international constituencies at a historical moment when an ideology of Western responsibility for threatened species around the world was growing. Moreover, the history of Leuser as viewed through the analytical framework of militarized conservation helps us rethink the history of Aceh. Through this framework, it becomes evident that the Dutch-Aceh War did not end in 1913, as many historians suggest, but instead continued throughout the colonial period.