A forest of dreams: Ontological multiplicity and the fantasies of environmental government in the Philippines

How do invisible beings in the forested hinterlands complicate the work of bureaucrats in the capital? What do dreams and the beings who visit them have to do with state power? Despite a deepening commitment to posthumanism, political ecologists have rarely opened our accounts of more-than-human assemblages to what have conventionally been termed “supernatural” or “metaphysical” forms of agency. To counter this lingering ethnocentrism, I argue here for an ontologically broadened understanding of how environmental government is produced and contested in contexts of difference. My argument draws on ethnographic fieldwork on Palawan Island in the Philippines, where the expansion of conservation enclosures has coincided with the postauthoritarian recognition of Indigenous rights. Officials there have looked to a presumed Indigenous subsistence ethic as a natural fit for conservation enclosures. In practice, however, Palawan land- and resource-use decisions are based, in part, on social relations with an invisible realm of beings who make their will known through mediums or dreams. These relations involve contingencies that complicate and at times subvert the designs of bureaucratic conservation. As a result, attempts to graft these designs onto Palawan practices do as much to engender mutually transformative encounters between contrasting ontological practices as they do to create well-disciplined eco-subjects or establish state territoriality. To better understand the operation of environmental government – and to hold it accountable to promises of meaningful local participation – political ecology should, I argue, attend more carefully to the ontological multiplicity of forces that shape spatial practices and their regulation.     

Whitescapes: A posthumanist political ecology of Alpine migrant (im)mobility

This article explores the many more-than-human actors involved in crafting migrant (im)mobility across the Alps and the racialised (re)production of the borderscape as what I call a whitescape. Using cycling and hiking as embodied and mobile methodologies of encounter it examines the entanglement of landscapes, terrains, gradients, weather, water, and forests, alongside transport and tourist infrastructures: roads, railways, tunnels, bus routes, ski slopes, golf courses, hiking trails and cycling tracks in shaping how illegalised migrants encounter the Alpine Susa Valley/Hautes-Alpes border routes and how these ecologies are made political. Drawing on the work of Juanita Sundberg the article makes the case for posthumanism and political ecology in the study of borderscapes and illegalised migrant (im)mobility, while being sensitive to the racist dynamics of the nature/culture divide present in much posthumanist and political ecology scholarship. Therefore, while the article makes space for the role of more-than-human actors in borderscapes it also highlights the racialising work of these more-than-human entanglements in the following ways: through perpetuating dualist ontologies of nature/culture or nature/human from which illegalised migrants are linked to the natural, read pre-modern, world; and through producing illegalised migrants as ‘bodies-out-of-place’ in a political ecology that is concomitantly (re)produced as a whitescape.