Culture, Place, and Nature. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. xxvi, 283 pp. (Illustrations, maps.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-295-99548-9.
At high altitudes in contemporary Vietnam, one can see posted signs in the hills. “Destroying the forest,” they declare, “is a grave sin” (phá rừng là tội ắc). This slogan targets swiddeners, shifting cultivars who have resisted state-led sendentarization campaigns, and illegal logging. It also broadcasts the importance of environmental management, controlling the natural world and those who dwell within it. Anyone who seeks a thoughtful, contextual analysis of environmental management and its link to governmentality in Vietnam, as well as its comparative connections throughout and outside Southeast Asia, should studiously read Pamela D. McElwee’s Forests Are Gold.
Based on long-term ethnographic and archival research, McElwee’s critical examination of environmental policies and their everyday realities balances empirical claims, and some fascinating stories, with compelling theoretical insights. This book will interest not only academic specialists across a wide swath of fields but also more general readers who have an interest in international development, contemporary resource conflicts, and environmental issues in Vietnam and elsewhere.
McElwee calls readers to consider the imbrication of the environment with the political. Recalling Bruno Latour and Michel Foucault, McElwee frames this book as a study in “knowledge-making” and “environmentality” (13–23). Rather than review official policies, McElwee traces the stakes of contemporary environmental management, and environmental crime, from the late nineteenth century to the present. McElwee charts the conceptual terrain of historical environmental discourse in Vietnam, drawing on fieldwork, archives, and the author’s own experience with the comically eponymous “PAM” project (134).
Across five chapters and a conclusion, readers follow the shifting paradigms of resource management in Vietnam. McElwee builds an account of environmental rule grounded in the recent Vietnamese past. The first chapter explains the emergence of environmental rule under French colonialism, tying a political understanding of the natural world to an anthropocenic frame. McElwee continues into the postcolonial twentieth century with the second chapter, “Planting New People: Socialism, Settlement, and Subjectivity in the Postcolonial Forest,” which deftly guides readers through the forest policy changes that accompanied the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (1945–1976), including an insightful account of the shifting definitions of “shifting cultivation” during the 1960s (83). However, the chapters that engage with the period since 1986, after “Renovation” or Đổi Mới, when the Vietnamese Communist Party pursued a platform of measured reform, are the most compelling. “Illegal Loggers and Heroic Rangers” (97–133), “Rule by Reforestation” (134–171), and “Calculating Carbon and Ecosystem Services” (172–206) not only provide crucial context to the contemporary environmental issues in Vietnam, but each combines solid documentary research, ethnographic fieldwork, and a capacious appreciation for comparative studies into an edifying narrative of environmental rule in contemporary Vietnam.
Throughout Forests Are Gold, McElwee connects Vietnam to the larger scholarly discourse surrounding environmental rule, avoiding the pitfalls of an overly constrained area studies approach while crafting an account that is both theoretically engaged and accessible. Readers will benefit from the comparisons between the French colonial forestry regime in Vietnam with elsewhere in the French Empire, as well as the taungya system in British Burma (53). McElwee’s work will particularly interest China specialists; the discussion of State Forest Enterprises (SFEs,lâm trường) features empirical accounts of individual hardship that resonate with the “Sending Down” or xiaxiang campaigns (76–86). The sophisticated analysis of Forest Rangers (khiểm lâm) in Bình Thuận province, and the scandal that followed, contributes to a long discussion by historians, anthrpologists, and political scientists about the ways in which people negotiate state power, including appeals to a higher bureacratic authority, media pressure, and mockery (125–126). McElwee has written a book that continues a conversation about governmentality and environmental rule begun by scholars such as Nancy Peluso, Peter Vandergeest, James Scott, and K. Sivaramakrishnan, but also one that recalls the work of David Biggs, Ken MacLean, Daniel Kelliher, and Xiaobo Lü.
Although this excellent book will leave its readers with a trenchant and critical understading of contemporary Vietnamese environmental rule, it will also leave some readers, particuarly historians, asking questions. For instance, to what extent did forest management and environmental rule “emerge” under French colonialism? (35). Did forestry managers “put in place the earliest reforestation programs” during French rule? (137). These claims invite future historical research into the relationship between land management and government before French colonial rule, hopefully inspiring much needed work on the Vietnamese imperial past.
Forests Are Gold does more than clear a fresh path for historical inquiry, it also sows the seeds of an engaged, critical envinromental sensibility. Readers will find their understanding of contemporary Vietnam enriched by McElwee’s work. For this reviewer, Forests Are Gold gives new meaning to familiar signs in the hills.
Bradley Camp Davis
Eastern Connecticut State University, Willimantic, USA
pp. 622-624