The Nature of Spectacle: on Images, Money, and Conserving

THE NATURE OF SPECTACLE CRITICAL GREEN ENGAGEMENTS Investigating the Green Economy and Its Alternatives Jim Igoe, Molly Doane, Dan Brockington, Tracey Heatherington, Bram Büscher, and Melissa Checker series editors JIM IGOE THE NATURE OF SPECTACLE On Images, Money, and Conserving Capitalism THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA PRESS TUCSON The University of Arizona Press www.uapress.arizona.edu © 2017 by The Arizona Board of Regents Open-access edition published 2021 ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-3044-1 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-4345-8 (open-access e-book) The text of this book is licensed under the Creative Commons Atrribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivsatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Cover design by Leigh McDonald Cover photo: [ Indoor] Safari by Soe Lin Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Igoe, Jim, 1964– author. Title: The nature of spectacle : on images, money, and conserving capitalism / Jim Igoe. Other titles: Critical green engagements. Description: Tucson : The University of Arizona Press, 2017. | Series: Critical green engagements : investigating the green economy and its alternatives | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016057165 | ISBN 9780816530441 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Nature conservation—Economic aspects. | Ecotourism. | Spectacular, The. | Capitalism. Classification: LCC QH75 .I355 2017 | DDC 333.72—dc23 LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2016057165 An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. The Open Access ISBN for this book is 978-0-8165-4345-8. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www. knowledgeunlatched.org. In memory of Jim Igoe, Annie Igoe, Charles Comes Killing, Moringe Parkipuny, and Edward Lengai. Congratulations Edward Loure. Sometimes it takes some time. x CONTENTS Preface ix Introduction: The Spectacle of Nature and Circuits of Capitalism 3 1 Making, Managing, and Marketing East African Nature 19 2 A Landscape That Functions Ecologically and Economically? 35 3 Seeing the World to Save the World 54 4 Wise Exchange, Convention Space, and Transnational Tournaments of Value 73 5 Consume, Connect, Conserve 90 6 Some Last(ing) Stories and Reflections 109 Notes 119 References 143 Index 155 PREFACE HAVE BEEN WRITIng THIS BOOK FOR SOME TIME NOW, and much has changed since I began. It strikes me as odd, therefore, but also appropriate, that many I readers will begin with my last words on nature spectacle. One reason this has taken so long is that this is an ambitious book that seeks to make connec- tions between diverse times and places. The penultimate version of this preface was an elaborate account of all the research, writing, thinking, and talking I have undertaken over the past twenty years to do with the human side of transnational nature conservation. In retrospect, however, I have concluded that such an exhaustive account would have been a distraction to most readers without adding a great deal of value to the discussions and analysis presented in the chapters that follow. Let me therefore provide a more modest account of the background to this book. My first book, Conservation and Globalization (2004), describes my early research into conflicts between indigenous people and nature parks in Tanza - nia’s world-famous northern tourist circuit. I followed up this original research, which I did in the mid-1990s, with another year of field research a decade later. It was during this second stint that I noticed the prominence of discourses about capitalism and markets in conservation interventions. These had pre viously emphasized community-based conservation (Igoe and Brockington 2007; Igoe and Croucher 2007). This began a further seven years of collaborative research, writing, and event organizing on conservation and capitalism (Igoe and X PREFACE Sullivan 2008; Brockington and Duffy 2011) that has produced, among other things, the Critical Green Engagement Series (see Büscher, Dressler, and Fletcher 2014), of which the book you are reading is a part. This book, as the title suggests, is about nature spectacle, which refers most basically to a kind of nature that is heavily mediated by mass-produced and -disseminated images. My focus on this kind of nature began shortly after re- turning to the United States following my second stint of field research. By early 2007, I had noticed the appearance of digital photographs and images on the Internet that depicted the very communities and landscapes in which I had recently conducted research. What struck me about these images was that they were true without being accurate. That is, the images faithfully portrayed actual animals, people, and places, all of which exist within the broader geographies that they claim to represent; however, they zoom in on selected fragments of space and time (i.e., very specific places and very specific events) and present them in ways that make them appear to correspond to much larger and encom- passing territories. As I began to track these visual representations, I realized they were part of a wider profusion of similar visual representations produced by diverse entities from diverse times and places. This realization prompted me to reexplore Guy Debord’s (1995) book Soci- ety of the Spectacle. Debord was a French filmmaker and activist, and Society of the Spectacle is his treatise on moving-image culture and capitalist modernity. Debord wrote Society of the Spectacle in the months leading up to the Paris upris- ings of 1968. Many of the book’s theses were operationalized by activists seeking to undo ways consumer capitalism—and its attendant images—had estranged them from their everyday experiences. By the 1990s, Society of the Spectacle had become a cult classic, one of several written works that seemed to pervade the urban collectives and infoshops I frequented in the early 1990s. Twenty years later, it struck me that the book might have significant relevance to contempo- rary nature conservation, and I have found it to be most generative indeed. My article, “Spectacle of Nature in the Global Economy of Appearances” (Igoe 2010), engages Debord’s formulations of spectacle in relation to what Anna Tsing (2005) has called “spectacular accumulation.” In short, this involves using images and performance to conjure desired future realities, giving them the appearance of having already been achieved. If successful, such strategies inspire investors and supporters to bring forth the funds by which the conjured realities are actually brought into existence. As I suggested in that article, and elaborate in this book, this kind of conjuring prefigures how nature conserva- PREFACE XI tion actually gets done. It generates images and discourses of a global green capitalist policy zeitgeist, green consumer appeals, and the widespread cultural experience of a world that seems animated through capitalist exchange value: exchangeable things, experiences, and nature in general. While writing this book, I have continued engaging synergies between the ideas of Guy Debord and those of Anna Tsing. The two have written about spectacle in different times, places, and situations, but in ways that are immensely generative for understandings of commodifying nature. To generalize, it would be fair to say that Debord tended to emphasize alienating effects while Tsing has tended to emphasize emergent possibilities. However, this distinction does not always apply. Tsing (2015: 263) describes the alienating potential of images in relation to the figure of the Japanese hikikomori, young (usually male) people who refuse to leave their room and who retreat into “a world of images that leaves them free of embodied sociality.” “There is a little bit of hikikomori in all of us,” she admits. And Debord (1955: 1), from his point of view, proclaims, “Of all the af- fairs we participate in, with or without interest, the groping search for a new way of life is the only aspect still impassioning.” For me, however, the most produc- tive complementarity is between Tsing’s emphasis on emergent encounters and the necessary diversity that they make and what Debord can help us understand about arrangements that tend to thwart such encounters, but more importantly the potential for vibrant alternative relationships and realities amid of what Tsing (2015) calls “capitalist ruins.” Debord was one of the leading lights of the Situationists, an international movement concerned with how social alienation (the estrangement of people from directly lived realities) and commodity fetishism (the appearance of money’s exchange value as a force of nature) had become part of everyday life and culture. While they paid tremendous attention to capitalism as a cultural form, their aim was always to discover how it could be undone, so that it could be re- done in other ways. They wanted to reawaken what they saw as authentic de- sires and relationships. Early Situationists, in the 1950s and prior to explosions of spectacle, were especially interested in the influences of space on people’s emotions and behav- ior, a field of enquiry known as psychogeography (Debord 1955). Situationist methods for psychogeography involve

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