Andrew Mathews
I am currently a full Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. My research, both in Mexico, and more recently in Italy, has focused on the relationship between people forests, and with environmental change more broadly. Around the world, peasants and indigenous people developed very long term traditions of experimenting with plants, animals, and soils. We can learn from these traditions of experimentation, and we can bring them to bear upon contemporary climate change politics, including questions of state formation, political economy, and ecological modeling. In addition to my concern with human/environment relations, I have research and teaching interests in anthropology of bureaucracy and financial markets, anthropology of law and illegality, political ecology, environmental history, landscape history, sociology of knowledge, science and technology studies and state building. More recently I have been learning to draw and diagram plant form, and I have been exploring how drawing and diagramming are methods for attending to long term or long past events, from tree cutting, to forest fires and disease. My work spans the range from environmental humanities, to anthropology, to collaborations with ecologists and ecological modelers.
My research in Mexico focused on the culture of state and indigenous environmental institutions and on the links between Zapotec indigenous forest communities in Oaxaca, the national forest service, and internationally circulating forestry science. This project emerged in my book Instituting Nature, (MIT Press, 2011), which was both a history of conservation and forest management in Mexico, and a history of the particular landscapes where modern forestry and conservation came to be applied. I described culture of state forestry institutions and of indigenous forest communities in the state of Oaxaca, and the environmental history of the forests of the Sierra Juárez. In this book I combine theories of state making with science and technology studies to argue that the production and management of ignorance are as important as knowledge to the assertion of state power.
Since 2013, I have been working on histories of cultivation, landscape shaping and disaster in Central Italy. My most recent book, Trees Are Shape Shifters: How Cultivation, Climate Change, and Disaster Create Landscapes, Yale, 2022, used historical ecology and natural history methods to study forest histories and climate change politics. I use drawings and diagrams to explore the slow temporalities of trees and landscape forms, and I argue that humans have the capacity to care for very long term processes through our capacity to tend and care for the shapes of trees and landscapes.
My research in Mexico focused on the culture of state and indigenous environmental institutions and on the links between Zapotec indigenous forest communities in Oaxaca, the national forest service, and internationally circulating forestry science. This project emerged in my book Instituting Nature, (MIT Press, 2011), which was both a history of conservation and forest management in Mexico, and a history of the particular landscapes where modern forestry and conservation came to be applied. I described culture of state forestry institutions and of indigenous forest communities in the state of Oaxaca, and the environmental history of the forests of the Sierra Juárez. In this book I combine theories of state making with science and technology studies to argue that the production and management of ignorance are as important as knowledge to the assertion of state power.
Since 2013, I have been working on histories of cultivation, landscape shaping and disaster in Central Italy. My most recent book, Trees Are Shape Shifters: How Cultivation, Climate Change, and Disaster Create Landscapes, Yale, 2022, used historical ecology and natural history methods to study forest histories and climate change politics. I use drawings and diagrams to explore the slow temporalities of trees and landscape forms, and I argue that humans have the capacity to care for very long term processes through our capacity to tend and care for the shapes of trees and landscapes.
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Books by Andrew Mathews
In Italy and around the Mediterranean, almost every stone, every tree, and every hillside show traces of human activities. Situating climate change within the context of the Anthropocene, Andrew Mathews investigates how people in Lucca, Italy, make sense of social and environmental change by caring for the morphologies of trees and landscapes. He analyzes how people encounter climate change, not by thinking and talking about climate, but by caring for the environments around them. Maintaining landscape stability by caring for the forms of trees, rivers, and hillsides is a way that people link their experiences to the past and to larger scale political questions. The human-transformed landscapes of Italy are a harbinger of the experiences that all of us are likely to face, and addressing these disasters will call upon all of us to think about the human and natural histories of the landscapes we live in.
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Greater knowledge and transparency are often promoted as the keys to solving a wide array of governance problems. In Instituting Nature, Andrew Mathews describes Mexico's efforts over the past hundred years to manage its forests through forestry science and biodiversity conservation. He shows that transparent knowledge was produced not by official declarations or scientists' expertise but by encounters between the relatively weak forestry bureaucracy and the indigenous people who manage and own the pine forests of Mexico. Mathews charts the performances, collusions, complicities, and evasions that characterize the forestry bureaucracy. He shows that the authority of forestry officials is undermined by the tension between local realities and national policy; officials must juggle sweeping knowledge claims and mundane concealments, ambitious regulations and routine rule breaking. Moving from government offices in Mexico City to forests in the state of Oaxaca, Mathews describes how the science of forestry and bureaucratic practices came to Oaxaca in the 1930s and how local environmental and political contexts set the stage for local resistance. He tells how the indigenous Zapotec people learned the theory and practice of industrial forestry as employees and then put these skills to use when they become the owners and managers of the area's pine forests--eventually incorporating forestry into their successful claims for autonomy from the state. Despite the apparently small scale and local contexts of this balancing act between the power of forestry regulations and the resistance of indigenous communities, Mathews shows that it has large implications--for how we understand the modern state, scientific knowledge, and power and for the global carbon markets for which Mexican forests might become valuable."
Papers by Andrew Mathews