Sletto, 2002

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2002, volume 20, pages 183 ^ 208
DOI:10.1068/d325
Boundary making and regional identities in a globalized

environment: rebordering the Nariva Swamp, Trinidad
BjÖrn Sletto
Department of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University, 316 Sibley Hall, Ithaca,
NY 14850, USA; e-mail: bis3@cornell.edu
Received 30 January 2001; in revised form 26 October 2001
Abstract. The recent work in critical geopolitics problematizes the notion of boundaries and interrogates
the narratives, ideologies, and institutions that inform processes of boundary making, or `reborderings'.
From the perspective of critical geopolitics, boundary making for conservation purposes is understood
as an act of power embedded within a discourse of environmental geopolitics. Through reborderings,
environmental geopolitics thus reflects and informs everyday practices and relations of power between
local, state, and international actors. In this paper I illustrate a process of rebordering in Trinidad, the
West Indies, in which local, state, and international actors engaged in a contest to define conservation
boundaries and produce bounded identities within the Nariva Swamp. Rebordering in the Nariva Swamp
reflected and influenced state and local practices in complex ways, altered relations of power on multiple
levels, and led to the production of a bounded space that is simultaneously local and global.
Introduction
The social relations of power that inform and reflect the construction of national
boundaries have recently become the focus of a growing body of literature within
`critical' geopolitics (Oè Tuathail, 1996; 1998). In contrast to the realist perspective that
long influenced the geopolitical literature, these writers problematize the very notion
of boundaries and interrogate the discourses that inform processes of boundary
construction and maintenance, and unpack the intellectual and political ^ economic
structures that shape territorialization and make bounded territories seem meaning-
ful (Albert, 1999, page 59; see also Michaelson and Johnson, 1997; Newman, 1999;
Oè Tuathail, 1998; 1999; Paasi, 1996; 1999; Wilson and Donnan, 1998). The notion of
geopolitics as discourse draws on Michel Foucault's notion of power/knowledge,
particularly his postulate that the production of knowledge and the exercise of power
are intimately intertwined, which leads to the crucial insight that intellectuals, institu-
tions, and ideologies constitute discursive structures that shape how we think about
and act on relations between states and territories (Foucault, 1980; see also Oè Tuathail,
1998). Building on Foucault, but also borrowing broadly from postmodern and post-
structural literature bridging academic fields, this critical work has led to a renaissance
of the field of geopolitics and to new ways of understanding the changing role of the
state and ethnic and national identities in a world impacted by complex processes of
globalization (Newman, 1999, page 1).
Central to critical geopolitics are processes of identity construction and othering,
enacted and reproduced through complex interrelations of power between different
social groups, state agencies, and international institutions and the nation-state. Crit-
ical geopolitics assumes that boundaries are not given and determined (Dalby, 1999,
page 134) but must be `made' through social processes of territorialization, and that
such social processes are embedded within discursive formations of power/knowledge.
Whereas realist geopolitics views boundaries as the objects of statist policymaking
informed and restrained by such notions as `balance of power', critical geopolitics
argues that such materialist perspectives on boundary production and maintenance
overlook the ways in which states, territories, and boundaries are socially contingent
184 B Sletto
on narratives of nation, region, and identity. This reassertion of culture as a significant

variable in boundary construction within the field of critical geopolitics has important
ramifications for a broader understanding of conservation planning as a discursive
formation operating through global, environmental policymaking, or what Oè Tuathail
has termed `ènvironmental geopolitics'' (1998, page 2).
Environmental geopolitics can be partly defined by what Dalby identifies as a
``danger discourse'' (1999, page 3), through which ènvironmental degradation' in the
South is constructed by Northern policymakers and environmental scientists as issues
of global concern. This danger discourse represents the Third World ènvironment', in
particular, tropical rainforests, as an object of management and control through such
strategies as `sustainable development' and ènvironmental security', which again derive
from notions of rational environmental management embedded in Western scientific
thought (Dalby, 1998; 1999; Oè Tuathail, 1998; 1999; see also Dryzek, 1997; Jasanoff,
1996; Lele, 1991; Sunderlin, 1995). The emergence of the `global environment' as an
object for analysis and policy prescription has led to a new form of global environ-
mental geopolitics in which knowledge is not neutral, but instead can be understood as
a set of commonsense assumptions deployed at local, state, and international scales.
From a Foucaultian perspective, environmental geopolitics is embedded in a discursive
formation consisting of global environmental experts, global environmental institutions,
and a complex, global ideology of conservation that produces `local' conservation
spaces in the Third World (Dalby, 1998, page 184; see also Oè Tuathail, 1998). This
conservation discourse has tended to be premised on notions of equilibrium and
stability, which has led to the development of rigid conservation boundaries
and temporal management strategies (Zimmerer, 2000, page 357).
Because this discourse originates in the North, Southern social critics argue that it
forms the theoretical and institutional foundation of a form of `green imperialism'
where the `global' does not represent a universal human interest, but rather serves the
particular, local, and parochial agenda of Northern, industrialized countries (Shiva,
1998, page 232). I suggest, however, that this discourse can not be spatially fixed, but
rather that it emerges and is reproduced through local/global linkages, and is modified
and resisted in myriad ways through specific geographies and ethnographies of place.
Environmental geopolitics can thus be viewed as a corollary to globalization, a com-
plex process whereby increasingly powerful global institutions are challenging the
relevancy of the state as an independent international actor, and substate social move-
ments are undermining the state's legitimacy as a privileged site of power. Ultimately,
the linking of the broader processes of globalization with environmental concerns has
produced a discursive formation in which the North expands its global reach and
establishes bounded conservation units in the South, whereas the South, because of
its circumscribed options, exists only locally within itself (Shiva, 1998, page 233).
Because of the appropriation of Third World landscapes into a global environ-
mental geopolitics, the ènvironment' can be seen as a symbolic arena upon which
struggles between global, state, and local actors are enacted (Becker, 1996). As a result,
boundary making in the name of conservation has become an increasingly complex
social act, shaping and reflecting local and state practice and relations of power
between local, national, and international actors. Operating through discourses of
environmental security and sustainable development, international environmental insti-
tutions are placing increasing pressure on states to establish conservation spaces, while
substate social movements, in particular indigenous federations, are demanding rights
of self-determination to self-defined `homelands' and other bounded spatial units. These
demands are viewed as interference by states, which through their ongoing projects of
territorialization and boundary making reproduce the rationales for their existence.
Boundary making and regional identities 185
Case study
In the following case study I describe a process of boundary making in Trinidad, the
West Indies, in which local, state, and international actors engaged in a contest to
define conservation boundaries and produce legitimate, bounded identities within the
Nariva Swamp (figure 1). I use this case as an illustration of worldwide processes of
`rebordering' (Albert, 1999), through which boundaries are (re)constructed and func-
tionally differentiated through the discursive processes constitutive of environmental
geopolitics. Albert's notion of rebordering derives from a dialectical perspective
contrasting processes of deterritorialization following the declining relevance of state
power in a globalizing world community, with processes of reterritorialization, that
is, the formation of different sorts of territories, but on substate and suprastate levels
(for example, the formation of `communities' of states such as the European com-
munity, on the one hand, and the designation of indigenous territories within the
boundaries of Asian and South American states, on the other). In other words,
the deterritorialization/reterritorialization dialectic should not be understood as an
argument that boundaries are disappearing or becoming irrelevant, but rather that
we are experiencing concurrent processes of `deborderings' and `reborderings'.
``What these terms suggest is that we currently witness a continuing functional
differentiation [of boundaries] on a worldwide scale, with an ensuing incongru-
ence of functional boundaries that cease to overlap on one line [the territorial
state's boundary] ... . Such processes of debordering ... follow from structural shifts
that can be observed sociologically, primarily the continuing functional differ-
entiation of world society and the ensuing operative autonomy of the various
functional subsystems'' (Albert, 1999, page 62).
Building on Albert's perspective, I argue that rebordering is becoming an increasingly
common corollary to conservation planning in Third World environments, which itself
0 10 20 km
Figure 1. Trinidad, including major towns and the study area.

186 B Sletto
can be read as a contested social process informed by the broader discourse of environ-
mental geopolitics. The discourse of environmental geopolitics influences and alters
relations of power on multiple levels (within states, between states and global environ-
mental institutions, and between states and local communities), ultimately leading to
processes of rebordering that produce new, bounded, and functionally differentiated
spaces that are simultaneously local and global.
To unpack further the actual practices of power implicit in processes of reborder-
ing, in this case the institutionalization of the Nariva Swamp as an officially bounded
conservation region, I draw on Paasi's (1996) notions of differentiation and integration.
These apparently contradictory terms should not be viewed as poles of a dialectical
continuum, but rather as tendencies that are mutually reinforcing, each vital for social
processes of rebordering operating through environmental geopolitics. Through differ-
entiation the Nariva Swamp landscape was constructed through media and scientific
representations as a naturally bounded region, essentially different than the rest of the
island and serving a specific, functional purpose as a conservation and ecotourism
region. The process of differentiation also extended to the swamp inhabitants, whose
identity was constructed through media narratives linking them to the Nariva Swamp
landscape in accordance with the region's naturalized identity. Ultimately, this process
was embedded in the broader, global discourse of environmental geopolitics, and thus
the `rebordered' Nariva Swamp was defined by boundaries that disallowed certain
land-use activities and favored others. The ability of the state to define the functionality
of the Nariva Swamp through the process of differentiation was crucial to integrate this
natural space into national conservation policy as a coherent, `manageable' unit.
Integration thus refers to the subjugation of the new, bounded territory to the interests
of the state, which are ultimately imbrigated with the hegemonic assumptions of
scientific conservation implicated in environmental geopolitics. In the case of the
Nariva Swamp, the differentiated and rebordered region was integrated into state
territory as a vital environmental and economic resource for the nation, and its
inhabitants were similarly recruited through naturalizing narratives to serve the
conservation interests of the state.
The first part of this paper builds on an analysis of 35 newspaper articles published
during the `Battle of Nariva', a conflict of representations that was fought largely in the
Trinidadian media between 1993 and 1996. The conflict aligned an informal alliance of
environmentalistsöwho were mainly wealthy, well connected, and based in the capital,
Port of Spainöagainst the Ministry of Agriculture in a campaign to change state
policy towards the Nariva Swamp. During the late 1980s a group of commercial
rice producers had moved to the Nariva Swamp from more developed and densely
populated areas on the west coast of the island and begun large-scale rice production.
The commercial producers arrived in the Nariva Swamp during a period of extensive
state support for rice production, a strategy which was embedded in an overarching
development policy that favored food security and agricultural development of
frontiers such as the Nariva Swamp, and they quickly began clearing swamp forests
and constructing extensive networks of drainage ditches. What is important in this
context is that their production methods were far different from those of the original,
peasant swamp dwellers. Local residents in the community of Kernahan, which is the
focus of this case study, practice small-scale rice farming, fishing, and hunting, and
their land-use practices are more benign or even beneficial to the wildlife in the swamp
(Sletto, 1998; 1999). Because of this contrast between the long-time inhabitants and the
newcomers, environmentalists linked the original swamp dwellers with a rhetorically
defined swamp `region' in narratives of environmental conservation, drawing on global
environmental texts exalting the necessity of preserving wetlands environments along
with the practices of local peoples. Through this process of rebordering, the Nariva
Swamp was constituted as a global locality, a space rhetorically bound to both the
global and the national.
However, since the rebordering process relied on concurrent projects of differ-
entiation and integration imposed on what was represented as a monolithic swamp
culture, it is crucial to consider the implications of the Battle of Nariva for daily
practices of place building, constructions of identities, and relations of power both
locally and within agencies of the state. The second part of this paper therefore reports
findings from an ethnographic study of land-use practices, mainly fishing and rice
farming, and local social changes linked with the rebordering process and the essenti-
alizing narratives of the environmental discourse. What became evident was that
practices and identities locally and within state agencies were far more complex and
place contingent than the representations emerging in the environmental discourse.
The rebordering process led to important changes in the way the swamp was viewed
and represented by fishers and other villagers, caused increasing tensions between
different groups of fishers regarding trapping methods, and reduced women's control
of the limited, local ecotourism industry. The process also contributed to closer state
oversight of local land-use activities and altered relations of power between different
sections of the Ministry of Agriculture, in particular leading to the ascendancy of the
Wildlife Section through its association with the Swiss-based Ramsar Convention, a
global environmental institution. Ultimately, the concurrent focus on representations
and practice illustrates the importance of ethnographic approaches for understanding
the place-contingent impact of environmental geopolitics on local livelihoods, identi-
ties, political and economic marginality, and the ``daily practice of the state'' (Wilson
and Donnan, 1998, page 4), and for unpacking how processes of rebordering impli-
cated in environmental geopolitics are situated within the broader political economy.
The representational politics of the urban-based environmental alliance also illustrates
the need to consider carefully the complex relations of interests and identities within
Southern states, and to avoid viewing environmental geopolitics as a game solely
played and controlled by Northern elites (see Shiva, 1998).
Critical geopolitics, boundaries, and the politics of conservation planning

Critical geopolitics emerges from long traditions within the fields of international
relations, strategic studies, and political geography, which have largely favored the
theoretical perspective of political realism and relegated questions of territoriality
and boundary disputes to experts on international law (Albert, 1999, page 54). This
literature saw the ordering principles of states and territories as givens, and the realist
perspective viewed states as unchanging and privileged units for the organization
of global relations. Realist geopolitics owes its origins to the establishment of the
Westphalian state system in Europe, which gave rise to the notions that states have
exclusive sovereign power over their territories, that the domestic and the foreign are
two distinct realms, and that the boundaries of a state define the boundaries of society
(Oè Tuathail, 1999, page 17; see also Harvey, 1990; Oè Tuathail, 1998). Boundaries thus
came to serve as `àgents of a state's security and sovereignty, and a physical record of a
state's past and present relations with its neighbours'' (Wilson and Donnan, 1998,
page 9). However, after the breakdown of the Cold War world order, this system
came to be widely questioned by realist and critical geopolitical theorists alike. The
new thinking within realist geopolitics now focuses on the impact of globalization,
within economic, cultural, and environmental realms, and often vacillates between
views that see such processes as not affecting the state, or as undermining the state
in a sum-zero game (Albert, 1999, page 55).
188 B Sletto
Within critical geopolitics, however, an explicitly poststructuralist perspective has

developed during the past two decades that questions the very meaning of statehood
and the principles of territoriality that underpin it, and which tries to understand the
ways in which globalization has led to qualitatively different processes of boundary
production. The poststructuralist perspective allows analysts to problematize the field
of geopolitics as a discourse defined by fundamental figures of thought at its center,
and to understand that such constraints of thought (such as the theoretical foundations
underpinning the Westphalian state system) are not givens but are socially contingent
(Albert, 1999, page 59). Critical geopolitics thus ``seeks to reveal the hidden politics of
geopolitical knowledge. Rather than defining geopolitics as an unproblematic descrip-
tion of the world political map, it treats geopolitics as a discourse, as a culturally and
politically varied way of describing, representing and writing about geography and
international politics'' (Oè Tuathail, 1998, page 3). Such a poststructuralist perspective
allows us to theorize and problematize the notion of boundaries explicitly, without
taking the boundary for granted either as an object of study or as an analytical tool
(Michaelson and Johnson, 1997, page 3). Whereas realist geopolitics has paid little
attention to the meanings of boundaries in the construction, organization, and repro-
duction of social life, instead implicitly viewing boundaries as stable empirical entities
that fix national and regional identities, critical geopolitics assesses the symbolic
nature of boundaries and the changing roles of `new boundarings' in a new global
political economy (Newman, 1999, pages 6 ^ 7; see also Oè Tuathail, 1999; Paasi, 1999).
From this perspective it is understood that territorial relationships are constructed
within social contexts through contests between different social groups, that territories
are subject to ongoing projects of territorialization (reborderings) (Albert, 1999, pages
61 ^ 62), and that such projects of territorialization inherently lead to inequalities
between different social groups (Sack, 1986, page 39).
To understand how environmental geopolitics implies a power project of exclusion
and marginalization, we must consider the continuing attempts by modern states to
secure their sovereignty through internal boundary making. Internal boundary making
such as the partitioning of the American prairies along county, township, and section
boundaries was explicitly done to serve the dominant political economy and to
marginalize social groups (in this case indigenous North Americans) (Sack, 1986, pages
11 ^ 13). Crucial to boundary construction as a means of state control is thus a process
of bureaucratic simplification of spatial entities in order to make them legible, defin-
able, and ultimately mappable. In his discussion of scientific forestry in early modern
Europe, Scott (1999) argues that the state reduced a complex forest environment to
an economic `resource' whose utilitarian value would lend itself to `scientific' manage-
ment. The abstractions that gave rise to scientific management of nature ultimately
led to the institutionalization of disciplinary objectives, including taxation, political
control and conscription (page 23). Local spatial measurements were ìllegible' to the
state since they represented local interests and local environmental realities: seasonal
cropping patterns, the local geology and climate, mixed forms of common property,
and so on. Hence, in order to implement the state's scientific management of natural
resources and centralize its control of national territory, state agencies began to stand-
ardize measurements, institute systems of national grids, and record and enforce
property and regional boundaries for purposes of taxation. Ultimately, `èvery act of
measurement was an act marked by the play of power relations'' (page 27). In
the case of the Nariva Swamp, the rebordering process led to officially legitimated
policies of exclusion of fishers from a new, officially bounded enclosure that serves the
development and conservation purposes of the Trinidadian political economy.
Standardization of measurement through hegemonic cartographic practice is

therefore crucial to external control of local lands and resources. Much has been
written on the role of cartographers in imperial expansions and wars, as well as the
complicity of the profession in the appropriation of indigenous land and the natural-
izing of the non-European òther' during the colonial era (Kobayashi and Peake, 1994;
Rundstrom, 1991; 1993; Stea, 1996, page 25; Wood, 1992; 1993). Indeed, the field of
realist geopolitics can be said to owe its existence to imperialism (Oè Tuathail, 1998,
page 4), which derived its legitimacy largely through linkages between intellectuals,
institutions, and ideology provided by such institutions as the Royal Geographical
Society (page 9). Besides the obvious political and economic motives of such cartog-
raphy in the service of empire, however, the power to draw and enforce boundaries on
the body of the land is also key to state control of its periphery. State power is always
weaker on its periphery, and the state consistently struggles to control the political
structures it establishes at its extremities (Friedmann, 1996, page 11; Wilson and
Donnan, 1998, page 10). From this perspective the discourse of food security in
Trinidad in the 1980s makes sense as a constitutive element of a hegemonic project
of nation building and frontier expansion. However, to draw on the Foucaultian
perspective of power/knowledge, wherever there is power there is also resistance
(Oè Tuathail, 1998, page 11). In other words, while drawing a boundary provides a
means of reifying power, making the potential visible for violent enforcement of
territoriality (Sack, 1986, page 37), boundaries are always contested, both from within
the bounded spatial unit and from beyond, and particularly so in peripheral frontier
regions. Such processes of resistance as the conservation campaign and local counter-
hegemonic narratives in Kernahan can ultimately illuminate the power effects on
practices and identities in specific, peripheral places (Oè Tuathail, 1998, page 11).
Today, through the globalization of the tropical environment, major frontiers
such as the Amazon basin as well as minor frontiers such as Trinidad's Nariva
Swamp have become contested, symbolic sites of sustainable development, global
environmental security, and global environmental services such as carbon sinks
and biodiversity protection. As these once marginal spaces are increasingly becoming
the focus of international attention (Dalby, 1998; Welch, 1996, page 47), developing
nations attempt to expand and exert control over their peripheral regions, often
through development and conservation schemes involving surveying, mapping, and
other means of boundary production. Frontiers have always been important for
projects of nation building, but boundary making for purposes of conservation
management within these once marginal spaces has now become a politicized
process involving not only the state and substate actors, but also international and
global institutions. The notion of environmental geopolitics thus provides a post-
structuralist prism to grapple with the `messiness' of conservation planning on the
global level and its impacts on states undergoing processes of deterritorialization and
reterritorialization (Oè Tuathail, 1999, page 18).
Through its explicitly poststructural perspective, critical geopolitics thus draws
attention to cultural factors, such as visual significations, narratives, and media repre-
sentations, as vital tools in the service of boundary making (Dalby, 1999, page 146).
From Paasi's (1996) perspective, landscapes, history, and cultural products are
exploited to produce commonsense narratives and iconographies of place, which then
serve as rhetorical foundations of regional identities. These regional identities are
then reproduced through social and material practices, such as regional `customs',
public administration, and economic arrangements. Most importantly, such narratives
of place produce notions of separateness or difference between a given territory and
other spatial units. Paasi refers to this process as the ìnstitutionalization' of a region,
190 B Sletto
a term I use as a means to link the theorization of boundary making (specifically

Albert's notion of debordering) with the social production of bounded conservation
units:
`Ìnstitutionalization refers to the process in which specific territorial units öon
various spatial scalesöemerge and become established as parts of the regional
system in question and the socio-spatial consciousness prevailing in society ... .
Regions are understood ... as being a complex synthesis or manifestations of
objects, patterns, processes, social practices and inherent power relations that
are derived from simultaneous interaction between different levels of social
processes ... . Through the institutionalization process and the struggles inherent in
it, the territorial units in question `receive' their boundaries and their symbols
which distinguish them from other regions'' (pages 32 ^ 33).
For the purposes of the present discussion, I understand ìnstitutionalization'
of regions as operating through concurrent processes of differentiation and integration:
regions are socially constructed as different and unique, at the same time as regions are
integrated from within through narratives of sameness. The language of difference
distinguishes one particular spatial unit from others, and the language of integration
aims to homogenize the content of the bounded unit. In the case of the Nariva Swamp,
the processes of integration and differentiation were made operational largely through
narratives produced by actors outside the region (in this case the environmental
alliance), who sought through media representations to construct a region that was
naturally differentiated from the rest of Trinidad. And because of its institutionalized
difference from the rest of the country, the environmental alliance could produce
narratives of integration to subjugate the Nariva Swamp within a discourse of environ-
mental geopolitics and to incorporate the institutionalized region into a state project of
frontier expansion. Ultimately, therefore, the rebordering of the Nariva Swamp relied
in part on significations drawing on the discourse of environmental geopolitics, most
important of which were environmental narratives, boundary demarcations, and car-
tography. Harley (1988; 1989; 1990; 1992), Monmonier (1991), Pickles (1995),
Rundstrom (1991; 1993), Wood (1992; 1993), and other writers in the vein of critical
cartography have pointed out the power of rhetoric inherent in cartography, and the
use of maps as social and political instruments of power in the division of space. As
this literature suggests, maps are not mimetic reflections of reality but cultural texts
engaged in the construction of social realities. Cartography can hence be understood as
a form of storytelling, disguised beneath a surface of apparent technical objectivity.
As we will see from the following case study, maps have long been implicated in the
institutionalization of the Nariva Swamp as a region.
Finally, it is important to consider the ways by which narratives and significations of
`natural' boundaries are imbrigated in the construction of regional identities, and how
boundary narratives selectively obscure or foreground different local practices. Since
frontier regions are socially constructed through processes of imaginative geography
(Stea, 1996, page 28 ^ 29), social groups within and outside such institutionalized regions
can be ordered, understood, and controlled through spatialized identity production.
Within the discourse of environmental geopolitics, the rationale for establishing and
materially defending conservation boundaries relies on imaginative constructions of
the other within two poles of a false set of dualities. They are either represented as
benign, ènvironmentally sensitive' residents whose presence can be tolerated öassuming
their land-use practices remain appropriate as defined by outside `managers'ö
or as intruders whose practices are deemed illegal, hence justifying their expulsion
(Neumann, 1997). The specification of the world in particular ways, such as through
mapping of natural spaces for conservation purposes, is therefore an intrinsically
political act (Dalby, 1999, page 147; see also Peluso, 1995, page 383). The history of
conservation planning in the Third World includes numerous examples of forced
evictions and violent appropriation of peasant and indigenous lands to make way for
national parks and other bounded conservation units (Moore, 1993; 1996; 1997;
Neumann, 1997). However, the consequences of specific projects of reborderings and
the broader implications of environmental geopolitics for local identities, daily practi-
ces, and processes of resistance and appropriation of universal symbols, are felt differ-
ently in different places (Dalby, 1999, page 147), as we will see in the following case
study.
Reborderings in the Nariva Swamp

The Nariva Swamp, a 24 000 ha, mixed wetland on the east coast of Trinidad, is
hemmed in by low, rolling hills in the south and by the Central Range in the west
and north, and forms the lowest spot in a 450 km2 catchment area. This is not just a
vast and undifferentiated swamp, as the name implies, but a diverse wetland consisting
of true swamps (permanently inundated, forested areas), marshes, mangroves, savannas,
and sandy hills supporting a wide variety of vegetation communities (figure 2, see over).
Trinidad was first colonized by the Spanish and then by the French and the English,
who initially settled in the west and northwest around the capital, Port of Spain. The
west coast still supports the largest population concentration, while the east coast is
considered remote and less developed (Anthony, 1975). The Nariva Swamp, in partic-
ular, has been the object of narratives of differentiation since 18th and 19th-century
Spanish and British colonial rule. Victorian travel writers such as E L Joseph and
Charles Kingsley constructed the Nariva Swamp as a remote, alien, and dangerous
landscape, a space of òtherness' on the margins of the otherwise civilized island nation
of Trinidad. One particularly potent symbol of the Nariva Swamp was the anaconda,
which struck Joseph with morbid fascination:
`Òn the eastern side of the island there is said to exist an amphibious kind of snake,
which has been described to me as one of the boa species. This is said to grow to
more than 30 feet in lengthöit is said to be an inhabitant of the marshes and rivers
of the Band de l'Est, and it is reported to have attacked men, or at least a man.
I have never seen this monster, but give the report, which is generally believed, as I
have heard it'' (1970 [1838]).
Still today, the anaconda figures prominently in the local identities of the Indo-
Trinidadian communities that fringe the Nariva Swamp. Fishers who traverse the
swamp in the rainy season in unsteady, flat-bottomed prams recount exaggerated
stories of encounters with anacondas, and if one is caught it is displayed to the
community with great fanfare. The relationship with the anaconda, which in fact has
not been known to hurt anyone in the community, illuminates the ambivalence of
fishers' place-contingent identity, which simultaneously constructs the Nariva Swamp
as a source of material needs, a landscape of beauty and mystery, and as a place of risk
and danger.
Thus, the anaconda became an integral element of an early, historical anthropology
of the Nariva Swamp (Wilson and Donnan, 1998, page 5) and was incorporated into
early narratives of differentiation of the wetland from the rest of the island. Since this
era predated the notions of biodiversity and carbon sinks, the anaconda and other
shadowy swamp denizens were seen as sensible reasons why the wetlands were ùnfit'
for human habitation, and the swamp was left alone, awaiting modern development.
As Kingsley wrote after a journey along the eastern coast of the island, `Ìnside the
Cocal [the coastal strip], two hundred yards to the westward, stretches a labyrinth of
lagoons and mangrove swamps, impassable to most creatures save alligators and boa
192
0 1 2 3 4 km
B Sletto
Figure 2. Administrative boundaries in the Nariva Swamp (sources: Ministry of Agriculture, 1992; Ministry of Planning and
Development, 1989; Ramsav, 1996; the proposed National Park was drawn on a 1 : 25 000 topographic map of Trinidad by Forestry
Division, Ministry of Agriculture in 1997).
N:/psfiles/epd2002w/
constrictors'' (1892, page 273). The cartography of the day was also complicit in
this construction of the Nariva Swamp as an inhospitable wilderness: a 1797 map
drawn by a British cartographer identifies this area as a region of `ùnpenetrable [sic]
woods'' transected by meandering `Ìndian footpaths'' (figure 3, see over). The demarca-
tion of Indian footpaths, in particular, served as a visual signification of the `primitive'
nature and undesirability of the Nariva Swamp, and as a form of negative representa-
tion of the lack of development that characterized this Trinidadian frontier. The
mystification of the Nariva Swamp through such textual strategies was again related
to the colonial political economy, whose reliance on the sugar industry meant that the
wetlands were of limited economic interest. Nor did the east coast support major urban
centers that might rely on wetland reclamation for their expansion, such as the belt of
settlements between Port of Spain and San Fernando along the west coast.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, central state agencies, successive
ministries of agriculture in particular, began attempts to integrate the Nariva Swamp
frontier into the nation's development. These narratives of integration were related to
a new, state-driven push for agricultural production associated with a discourse of
food security, which led to increasingly generous policies of state support for rice
production that reached their apogee in the 1980s. Because of the availability of
technology to clear-cut and drain the wetland, the Nariva Swamp was by the mid-
20th century represented by state agricultural and development ministries as a
potential source of rice to meet the needs of the growing island nation. Thus began
a geopolitical process of rebordering to institutionalize the Nariva Swamp as an
agricultural region, a process intimately associated with a political economy that
was turning from a reliance on the sugar industry for export, to the political necessity
of providing a steady supply of staples for a growing, urban population. Already in
the 1930s the government began developing the Plum Mitan rice scheme, or `Rice
Project A' (figure 2), a state-funded and state-managed rice-growing area, which was
mapped onto the swamp and thus became an exclusionary zone with a state-defined
purpose for its existence. After Word War 2, the Trinidadian government continued
pursuing a lukewarm but persistent dream of developing the remainder of the
swamp. In 1952, a team of experts from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO) drew up a proposed irrigation system, and five years later another FAO study
suggested developing two large polders (agricultural fields surrounded by raised
canals) following the Dutch model of wetland reclamation (FAO, 1957). The final,
and most audacious scheme, was developed in 1970 by the Japanese Overseas Tech-
nical Cooperation Agency (OCTA), and involved clear-cutting the windward side of
the Central Range and converting the entire Nariva Swamp into a network of canals,
polders, and embankments (University of the West Indies, 1979; see also Sletto, 1999).
These projects were never officially implemented, and in the early 1980s the
discursive influence of such international institutions, ideologies, and expertise as
the FAO and the OCTA appeared to have led to little large-scale change in spatial
practice in the Nariva Swamp. Apart from the development of Rice Project A the
swamp appeared uninhabited within the confining gaze of the discourse of food
security. Large areas of the swamp were already incorporated into a local subsistence
economy centered on the ùnmapped' squatter community of Kernahan, whose fish-
ers had slowly expanded their activities throughout the swamp and produced their
own, counterhegemonic narratives of place and regionality, but these practices were
invisible to a state economy dominated by narratives of frontier development.
However, in the late 1980s spatial practice finally began to change on a large
scale when about a dozen commercial rice producers moved to the Nariva Swamp
from more densely populated and developed agricultural regions on the west coast.
194
B Sletto
Figure 3. Map of Trinidad from 1797 (Anthony, 1975, page 55, the text has been retyped for ease of reading).
These producers were attracted by the economic opportunities afforded within the
current political ^ economic context and by the narratives of development and food
security implicated in the ongoing rebordering process. [Largely because of the state
support programs, domestic rice production increased from 2300 tonnes to 14 000
tonnes between 1986 and 1990. By 1992, rice production reached an all-time high of
21 000 tonnes, which represented an increase of about 800% from 1985 (Lee and
Jacque, 1993, page 7).] Like the peasant farmers in Kernahan, the newcomers to the
Nariva Swamp were also Indo-Trinidadians, not surprisingly in a society where
the majority of agriculturalists are of Indian descent and large urban centers are
dominated by Trinidadians of African descent. But an important distinction sepa-
rated the commercial rice producers from the peasants in Kernahan. The newcomers
were connected with important figures in the Ministry of Agriculture and had much
greater access to capital and credit than the subsistence farmers in Kernahan.
Encouraged by their supporters in the Ministry and aided by their access to capital,
they began large-scale conversion of swamp forests into wet-rice paddies and con-
structed extensive drainage ditches in an area known as `Rice Project B' (figure 2),
which roughly corresponded with one of the `polders' proposed in the early FAO study.
These agricultural projects met with growing resistance from a fledgling environ-
mental movement, which even in its early beginnings had benefited from contacts with
international institutions. Like the early Victorian writers, environmentalists and sym-
pathetic scientists of the 1960s and 1970s employed narratives of differentiation to contest
the integration policy, but they represented the Nariva Swamp environment in an entirely
different light than the Victorian travel writers. These early counternarratives of differ-
entiation employed the language of science and empiricism, representing the swamp as a
haven to endemic species invaluable for the biodiversity of the island. The environ-
mentalists relied on such established, scientific works as that of Bacon (1990), who
reported 600 mammal, reptile, and bird species in the swamp, and Downs et al (1968),
who had found 27 reptiles and 59 mammals in the relatively small 1500-acre Bush Bush
Wildlife Sanctuary, including 2 endemic subspecies of red howler and capuchin monkeys.
The Nariva Swamp is also important as a filtering area for floodwater and the forested
sections are crucial as a windbreak against hurricanes, factors that figured prominently
in the environmental narratives.
The environmentalists' narratives of differentiation also drew on a recent history of
`realist' policymaking, which had already established a precedence for exclusionary
boundary making for conservation purposes in the Nariva Swamp. The Bush Bush
Wildlife Sanctuary, the first protected area in the Nariva Swamp (figure 2), traces its
history to 1962, when the Forestry Division of the Ministry of Agriculture announced
plans to clear-cut the swamp, and the International Council for Bird Preservation
launched the first recorded conservation campaign in the island in protest. This early
environmental campaign proved successful, and the logging was postponed indefinitely
(University of the West Indies, 1979, page 186). Later in the 1960s the American biologist
C Brooke Worth conducted research in the wetland and produced loquacious repre-
sentations of the Nariva Swamp as a natural area worthy of conservation. In a
rhetorical twist, Worth compared the swamp to a Hollywood movie to construct the
wetland as a form of hyper-reality, unique and undisturbed save for his outboard motor.
`Às one enters [the Nariva Swamp], the sun is quickly blotted out and one winds
among buttressed trunks of tall hardwood trees, many of them clad in climbing
vines. It is a typical Hollywood movie set, except that it is real ... . The only thing
that mars the atmosphereöand this has been true for the whole journeyöis the
damned outboard motor. What this scene needs is silence, except for the screaming
parrots and droning cicadas'' (1967, page 36).
196 B Sletto
Much as a result of Worth's research and literary efforts and of his network in the
United States, the New York Zoological Society eventually offered US $5000 over three
years to the Forestry Division `òn the condition that Bush Bush Island would receive
adequate protection as a reserve area'' (University of the West Indies, 1979, page 191).
On 16 July, 1968, Bush Bush Island was formally incorporated into the new Bush Bush
Wildlife Sanctuary. This event marked the early beginnings of the institutionalization
of the Nariva Swamp as a conservation region and, even at this early stage, the
counterhegemonic narratives of environmentalism were associated with the discourse
of environmental geopolitics, exemplified by the links between intellectuals (in this case
Worth) and global institutions (the New York Zoological Society).
The rebordering process reached its climax during the environmentalists' campaign
against the Ministry of Agriculture to evict the commercial rice producers, fought
through representations in the Trinidadian media from 1993 to 1996. This environmental
campaign, dubbed by the Trinidadian media as the `Battle of Nariva', was prompted by
the arguably destructive practices of the commercial rice producers, who were razing
large swaths of swamp habitats found nowhere else in Trinidad, and who may have
damaged the swamp's drainage system and the aquatic life in the Nariva Swamp
(however, no conclusive studies have been conducted to confirm any such damages).
The environmental movement was based in the capital, Port of Spain, and was led by
mainly wealthy Trinidadians connected with the Port of Spain based national media,
the University of the West Indies, national environmental organizations, and the state
apparatus (including dissident officials of the Ministry of Agriculture who opposed the
Ministry's development policies). As in the early campaign to establish the Bush Bush
Wildlife Sanctuary, the environmentalists relied on the hegemonic narratives of envi-
ronmental geopolitics and replayed the arguments of the environmental significance of
the Nariva Swamp. In November 1996, after three years of media battles and court
cases, the commercial rice producers vacated their illegal rice paddies after the Ministry
of Agriculture promised them land elsewhere to make up for their lost investment. This
eviction was made possible by the official designation by the Trinidadian parliament of a
National Park that encompassed most of the Nariva Swamp. The protected area
legislation thus formally and legally institutionalized a new, bounded, and mapped
conservation unit, complete with a set of rules, expectations, and exclusionary principles.
Constructing a regional identity

In Oè Tuathail's terms the environmental campaign could be seen as a counterhege-
monic discourse of resistance, which had revealed the power effects of the prevailing
policies of food security and rice subsidies in the Nariva Swamp (1998, page 11). But
this perspective obscures the ways in which the local residents had been rendered
invisible in early environmental and developmental representations of the Nariva
Swamp, and how their practices and identities had been appropriated and transformed
through the institutionalization of the Nariva Swamp as a conservation region. The
narratives of environmentalism had naturalized the swamp as a remote, pristine, and
essentially uninhabited wilderness, but in reality the Nariva Swamp is a cultural land-
scape, modified for centuries by Arawak and Carib people and generations of mostly
Indo-Trinidadian subsistence gardeners and rice farmers, fishermen and hunters, and
shadowy groups of marijuana growers who still frequent the area. Although the fishing
and rice-growing community of Kernahan, for instance, was not settled until the 1960s,
elders recall generations of fishing and seasonal farming in the swamp. Through what
Sack (1986, pages 20 ^ 21) refers to as nonterritorial actionöpractices developed to
maintain control of and access to territory öfishers, hunters, and rice farmers had in
the 1980s and 1990s expanded their land-use practices throughout large areas of the
swamp, including within Bush Bush Wildlife Sanctuary and the Nariva Swamp
National Park. During fieldwork in 1997, I initiated a participatory mapping project
to collect local spatial representations of their readings of the swamp landscape and
the practices surrounding their nonterritorial action. The maps were drawn by a
volunteer group of between six and twelve fishers and rice farmers in a series of four
workshops led by the village chairman, and revealed a complex land-use pattern, with
fishing spots scattered throughout most of the swamp (including within the Bush Bush
Wildlife Sanctuary) and frequented on a seasonal basis. Fishermen catch cascadu, a
small catfish that is adapted to the seasonal rainfall conditions, and `conch', a large
freshwater snail, in fishing spots located up to five or six hours away from the village
by foot and wobbly prams. Fishing spots must be maintained through a number of
seasonal activities, including the backbreaking task of `cleaning' the rivers, that is,
cutting away marsh grass to create open areas where cast nets can be used. Trails
must also be cut through the upland forests and kept open. Through such nonterrito-
rial action, different groups of fishers maintain rights to fishing grounds in competition
with other fishers in Kernahan, as well as with fishers from nearby communities. Such
fishing grounds, along with other local landmarks, were named and ultimately mapped
onto the landscape (both rhetorically in local histories and symbolically on the partic-
ipatory maps), and served as significations constitutive of a counterhegemonic project
of rebordering. Thus the fishers' project of place making and their participation in the
mapping project may be seen as a `local subversion' of state boundaries, specifically
those of the Bush Bush Wildlife Sanctuary, and later the Nariva Swamp National Park
(Wilson and Donnan, 1998, page 11). [See Sletto (1998; 1999) for a more extensive
description and analysis of local identities and subsistence practices.]
These land-use practices and local identities were largely invisible to the state, as
well as to the environmentalists in Port of Spain. But enough was known about the
presence and practices of the fishers and rice farmers of Kernahan to serve as a
foundation for essentializing representations, or what Wilson and Donnan refer to as
projects of objectification of border peoples (1998, page 8). During the Battle of Nariva
from 1993 to 1996, environmentalists objectified and linked the local population
with the region's institutionalized identity (Paasi, 1996), posited in the environmental
discourse as a unique, separate, and bounded wetland. As in the case of the construc-
tion of the Nariva Swamp as a natural region, the production of a regional cultural
identity proceeded in terms of differentiation and integration: differentiation of the
local population from outsiders, and integration into the nation's conservation policy
as local `stewards' of the wetlands environment. Through a process of differentiation,
the identity of swamp dwellers was `politicized' and constructed as different than other
Trinidadians, and certainly different than the commercial rice producers (see Wilson
and Donnan, 1998, page 13). Such a process of differentiation coupled with exoticiza-
tion is a common element of the power/knowledge of environmental geopolitics, as
Neumann (1997) has reported from East Africa, and served a similar purpose here: to
rhetorically couple the inhabitants of Kernahan and other swamp communities
with a naturalized region, and thus construct common-sense, scientifically founded
restrictions on land-use practices in the Nariva Swamp.
The processes of differentiation and integration were most visible in media repre-
sentations from the early to mid-1990s, when the `frontier culture' of the Nariva Swamp
was politicized by actors outside the region (see Stea, 1996, page 29). My view of the
impact of the media on the politicization of identities is informed by Mannel Castells's
(1997) notion of political marginality. Media representations, as Castells argues, do
not impose viewpoints on the population as is often simplistically argued. Instead,
the media capture political communication and information within their own space,
198 B Sletto
which means that `òutside the media sphere there is only political marginality''
(page 312). What actually happens in the media-dominated modern (globalized) polit-
ical space is not determined by the media, but the logic of the media frames and
structures politics. Although political actors use the media as vehicles of communica-
tion and persuasion, political actors have to abide by the rules and interests of the
media. The media thus frame politics through their internal selection of ``what is fit to
print'', both through their choice of language and through politicians' perceptions of
the media's impact on public opinion. Castells's notion of political marginality outside
media space thus illustrates an important insight developed in critical geopolitics: the
power to control the ways environmental problems are described and to designate
the source of the problem is a key feature of environmental geopolitics (Dalby, 1998,
page 180). Ultimately, the success of media campaigns such as that developed by
environmentalists in Trinidad derives from the simplicity of the message and the
subjectivities these engender among political actors, as exemplified by the following
headlines of newspaper articles published during the Battle of Nariva:
``Squatters destroying Nariva Swamp'' Trinidad Guardian 7 May 1993,
``Living in fear in the Nariva Swamp: `Machines are what killing we out in the land,'
laments a sad farmer'' Sunday Guardian 9 May 1993,
``Nariva must not die'' Trinidad Guardian 28 April 1994,
``The price of rice: conservationists, small farmers fight to save the Nariva Swamp''
Express 15 July 1996,
``Living in a dying lagoon'' Trinidad Guardian 22 September 1996.
It is also crucial to recall that these articles were penned or influenced by the
affluent, who Castells argues are better positioned than marginalized peoples to con-
duct `horizontal communication': in this case, to shift rhetorically between the villagers
of the Nariva Swamp and policymakers on state and global levels (1997, page 351).
Castells's contention, again, problematizes the North ^ South dichotomies postulated
by Shiva (1998). In fact, `green imperialism' is often narrated and practiced by Third
World intellectuals and institutions, who draw on the links between science and insti-
tutional capacity to rationalize their practices. Before the environmentalists `discovered'
the commercial rice producers in the Nariva Swamp, they saw the subsistence fishers
as having little relevance for conservation planning. As a result, Nariva Swamp sub-
sistence culture was absent from the media prior to 1993. The following three years,
however, saw a series of articles emerging from Port of Spain that linked the threats to
the wetlands with their presumed consequence for the local people, who were presented
as helpless victims of the commercial rice producers. The `humble' swamp dwellers
(Trinidad Guardian 28 April 1994, page 29) were represented not only as victims of the
land-grabbing activities of the commercial rice producers, but also as people who live
in harmony with the land, and who therefore would be potential partners in conserva-
tion, united with the environmental movement to do what was best for the nation.
Narratives of differentiation and integration thus were employed concurrently: narra-
tives of differentiation to produce an objectified, ùnique' swamp culture, whose ìnnate'
characteristics were then constructed as a rationale to integrate this bounded region
into a national conservation project. Here are a few examples of the representations of
the `noble' swamp dwellers from this period:
`Ìt is not the small farmer who is causing [the destruction of the Nariva Swamp], not
the people who have lived and worked in the area for generations, it is a handful of
big, illegal land grabbers ... . Poor people's livelihood is being lost ... . The Nariva is a
rich natural resource, and has supported the people living there over the years and
they know the value of the swamp, they did not destroy what fed them but managed
it and used it, wisely'' (Trinidad Guardian 8 April 1993).
``Before the arrival of the `big farmers' who are responsible for the devastation not
only of the Bush Bush [Wildlife] Sanctuary, but also of hundreds if not thousands
of acres of forest, people like Sharma [Deonarine] lived largely in accord with the
eco-system ... .`The machinery is what's killing we out', laments one of Sharma's
neighbours'' (Sunday Guardian 9 May 1993, page 11).
`Ònce, a few years ago, Savi [Deonarine] had considered the lagoon her own
personal sanctuary, but with all the changes taking place there she now feels like
a stranger in her backyard'' (Trinidad Guardian 22 September 1996, page 7).
By late 1996 a vast number of Trinidadians had also been treated to the documen-
tary ``Nariva Must Not Die'', a video sponsored and produced by the Trinidadian film
company Pearl and Dean. According to many involved in the fight to evict the
commercial rice producers, this video and the newspaper articles that accompanied it
were instrumental in swaying public opinion in favor of the environmentalists. The
video aired on all television stations in the country and ``showed how destruction of
the wetlands would affect the Nariva Swamp'', explained Peter Bacon, professor
of biology at the University of the West Indies ^ St Augustine. `Ìt certainly influenced
people's opinion in favor of conservation'' (interview, Bacon, University of the West
Indies, September 1997). The effectiveness of the video might have been a result of
its emotional nature and relatively simple, straightforward message (see Castells, 1997).
In one review of the video, the writer developed a romantic representation of the
Nariva Swamp as undisturbed `nature' and habitat for the `small farmers' and `humble
catchers', while painting the commercial rice farmers as `greedy':
``The video begins by showing life in the swamp as it has been for the past 100 years
or more. We see the birds, monkeys and man existing in harmony with each
other ... . Next we see man, the destroyer. Trees bulldozed and burned and huge
agricultural machines invading the sanctuary, ploughing and reaping vast acreages
of rice. Where once there was an astounding variety of animal life, now there is only
one crop. The small gardeners who lived and worked in harmony with the land are
threatened and chased away to make room [and money] for those who have helped
themselves to Nariva ... . In the course of this video the rice farmer stoutly defends
what he has done, claiming that he provides jobs for others. Yet the small farmer has
been dispossessed of both land and livelihood. The humble catchers of conch, crab
and cascadoo are also dispossessed (Trinidad Guardian 28 April 1994, page 29).
Rebordering, everyday practice, and relations of power

Through the Battle of Nariva, a process of rebordering thus had institutionalized a new
conservation region in Trinidad. Environmentalists had used what Dalby (1998,
page 183) calls the `danger discourse' of environmental geopolitics to construct a new
sense of environmental destiny for the Nariva Swamp region, and had been successful
in forcing the ouster of the commercial rice growers. The local population had been
stereotyped as victims of land grabbing, and their identity had been collapsed and
shaped into an objectified otherness. A closer analysis of local practices and identities,
however, contradicts these objectifying narratives. During this campaign, driven by the
affluent and well connected, nothing was said about the real development needs of
the residents of Kernahan, such as the lack of regular public transportation, electricity,
and a sewer system. The rebordering process set in motion by environmental campaign
served the parochial interest of urban-based intellectuals, and the establishment of a
bounded, exclusionary conservation unit might well lead to increased economic and
social marginality for the residents of Kernahan. Also ignored was the fact that
villagers do not self-identify as residents of the `Nariva Swamp' as a region, but rather
200 B Sletto
as inhabitants of the Indo-Trinidadian community of `Kernahan'. Another point

excluded from the essentializing narratives was the diversity of the local economy.
Although slightly more than half of all families in Kernahan depend to some degree
on subsistence fishing, the economic system of the community is exceedingly complex,
with a number of families involved in large-scale watermelon production and others
engaged in trade, services, and laboring (Sletto, 1998; 1999). The fishers' own counter-
hegemonic project of rebordering and their `mappings' of the swamp landscape into
local subsistence culture were also made invisible by the environmental narratives.
Finally, the impacts on local practices from the early rebordering project associated
with the discourse of food security were also absent from the hegemonic narratives
originating in Port of Spain, partly because these practices were largely invisible, but
also because they would not `fit' within the objectifying narratives of `humble' swamp
dwellers. Because of the extensive rice-production subsidies, rice production had
expanded significantly in Kernahan during the late 1980s and early 1990s. However,
when the Trinidadian state revamped the rice support program in the early 1990s and
instituted a grading system that largely benefited large, commercial producers, most of
the rice paddies in Kernahan were abandoned. To make up for this loss of a source
of income, residents of Kernahan increasingly turned to fishing. This, again, led to a
rapid increase in the spatial extent of the fishing grounds, and thus an intensification in
the fishers' resistance to the hegemonic projects of rebordering (Sletto, 1998; 1999).
Implicated in the rebordering of the Nariva Swamp were also important realign-
ments of power, both within swamp communities, within state institutions, among
institutions and social groups in Trinidad, and between Trinidad and the institutions
of environmental geopolitics. On the level of the nation-state, the rebordering process
resulted in intensified state oversight of the swamp, and through the normative aspects
of boundary making (Sack, 1986, page 26) certain practices were deemed acceptable,
and others not. As in early modern Europe these state interventions include enforced
standardization of tenancy and property demarcations in what has long been an illegal,
`squatter' community established on state lands. Although peasant rice farmers in
Kernahan for the most part appear to welcome regularized tenancy as a means to
protect their holdings and qualify for bank loans, they also resent the implication that
this regularization is necessary to cajole them into paying property taxes. At the time
of this study, Kernahan still lacked all basic services and farmers received little formal
state support, which made community members unwilling to pay property taxes. Since
they had developed their land largely unaided by the state, tax evasion made sense as a
form of symbolic resistance to the state (Scott, 1985). Partly because of this perceived
``lack of contribution'' by the Kernahan settlers to the ``national community'' (inter-
view, Farrel, Ministry of Agriculture, October 1997), in 1992 the government instituted
a new tenure process involving more complex project proposals, applications, and
development programs that require the farmer to estimate yearly income, types
and costs of machinery, and the like (Ministry of Planning and Development, 1992).
After the Battle of Nariva and the intensified scrutiny of rice production in the swamp,
the State Lands Unit of the Ministry of Agriculture began conducting òccupational
surveys' and measuring and mapping plots in preparation for regularized tenancy
(State Lands Unit, 1997).
The agency most closely aligned with the environmental campaign, the Wildlife
Section of the Ministry of Agriculture, has also stepped up its surveillance activities in
the swamp. As discussed by Moore (1993), the establishment of national parks provides
an added means of extending state control into local areas, and this is also the case in
the Nariva Swamp. Before the Battle of Nariva, the Wildlife Section focused mainly on
occasional enforcement of hunting and fishing regulations within Bush Bush Wildlife
Sanctuary, with rangers appearing on rare occasions from Port of Spain to make game
counts or just cruise through the village in their jeeps. Now, encouraged by its victory
in the Battle of Nariva and by the prevailing language of `participation' in conserva-
tion, the section has become much more active in the community. ``We are reaching
out to the people [of Kernahan]'', explained Nadra Gyan, head of section, in 1997.
``We have arranged community meetings to get their input on conservation of the
swamp'' (interview, Gyan, Wildlife Section, September 1997). This new outreach took
its most visible and permanent form in the hiring of a local man as a `bird monitor',
who became a manifestation of changing state practice associated with environmental
geopolitics. The bird monitor had an ill-defined mission to monitor parrot populations
but also to keep an eye on fishers' activities, and on one occasion he was incited by
lower level section staff to destroy fish traps that ministry officials argue catch too
large quantities of cascadu.
The trapping issue has festered in Kernahan for many years and involves two
loosely defined groups of fishers: an extended family of recent (post-1990) immigrants
to the community who largely fish with traps, and fishers belonging to an original
(1960s) settler family and their supporters, all of whom fish with cast net. Fishers who
favor the cast net or line and hook argue that trappers catch far too many cascadu too
quickly, and allow other fish caught in their traps to go to waste. The dismantling of
the fish traps by the `bird monitor' caused much heated debate in the community, and
revealed how the different fishing practices and contested perspectives on trapping are
intimately linked with local identities. Trappers construct the Nariva Swamp environ-
ment as essentially limitless and themselves as individualists who struggle to make ends
meet. In particular, they invoke the new grading system on rice and the declining state
supports for rice production to justify their practices. As one trapper, who chose to
remain anonymous, argued, ``People here say, `you are blocking the fish in the river.
You catch too much.' But they don't know how hard I work. I don't interfere with no
fish from no river. They just jealous ... . I need to catch cascadu because I am not
making nothing on rice now. I [would be] working hard for nothing because prices
are so hard [such low prices on rice].'' The fishers who oppose trapping, meanwhile,
often invoke the essentializing narratives developed by environmentalists during the
Battle of Nariva, arguing that their stand against trapping demonstrates their commit-
ment to conservation, and that they therefore should be given a role (and benefits) in
protecting the swamp in partnership with the state: `Ìf these traps continue this way,
my children will wonder what a cascadu is. I could make a trap, I could set a trap, but
I don't want to. Because I want the cascadu to be here tomorrow and the next day and
the next year ... . If I was a game warden, I would check every day, and make sure there
were no traps'' (interview, Cecil, Kernahan, October 1997). The local narratives
surrounding the trapping issue ultimately suggest that local practices, conflicts, and
identities modify and inform the institutionalization of environmental geopolitics
differently in different places. Although an enclosure (the Nariva Swamp National
Park) has been created, potentially threatening local livelihoods (Dalby, 1998,
page 183), such a manifestation of power/knowledge does not simply lead to a single
``discourse of resistance'' (Oè Tuathail, 1998, page 11), but rather to a complex blend of
resistance and accommodation.
While the rebordering process appeared to shift the balance of power away from
trappers and towards cast-net fishers, the same process appears disadvantageous to
local women. Before the Battle of Nariva, a small women's group had provided meals
to the rare tourists and bird-watchers who drifted into the village on their own, an
activity that provided a small measure of financial independence to female heads of
households and extra cash earnings during periods of scarcity. During the 1990s,
202 B Sletto
however, the Nariva Swamp was incorporated into state policy as an ecotourism site
and TIDCO's(1) advertising campaigns aimed at tourists began to draw on the narratives
of environmental geopolitics, presenting the Nariva Swamp as a unique environmental
region. Local Nariva Swamp culture, however, rarely figures in these narratives, which
are largely aimed at a local and international audience of bird-watchers and
environmentalists. Although local culture was appropriated and objectified in the
rebordering process, it has again been made invisible in the tourism narratives. Tour
companies based in Port of Spain have now begun offering tours to the Nariva
Swamp, but these companies rarely make a point of stopping in the village for meals
or to purchase crafts. Instead, Kernahan is used as a gateway for walking tours and
bird-watching in the Bush Bush Wildlife Sanctuary.
Because of this transformation of the local travel industry, what was once a
women's domain has been appropriated by a socially more powerful group of men,
both as a result of their differential access to knowledge, as well as their official
legitimation. Since the rebordering process naturalized fishers as iconographies of the
swamp environment through the discourse of environmental geopolitics, fishermen
gained higher status both within the community and in the narratives of conservation
agencies (see, for example, Ramsar, 1996). In a twist on the traditional Enlightenment
dualism that linked women to unreasoned nature and men to rational culture
(Kobayashi and Peake, 1994; Rose, 1993), the fishers in Kernahan now present them-
selves both as the local residents with the closest connection to nature, as well as the
most rational participants in a `scientific', managerial program of conservation. As a
result of the production of the Nariva Swamp as a conservation space, therefore,
knowledge of the swamp ènvironment' (meaning those areas bounded within the
domain of `nature') has been privileged. In a classic example of power/knowledge,
fishers' knowledge of the swamp environment has increased through their intensifying
dialogue with Wildlife Section officials and visiting scientists. As a result, fishers are
generally better informed than women about the National Park and are better posi-
tioned to benefit from future ecotourism development, and to increase their local status
in contrast with women and other community members (Sletto, 1998; 1999). Indeed,
some ecotourism providers have already begun recruiting local fishers as guides. At the
same time, the sale of women's crafts and meals has plummeted, which frequently
caused the head of the women's group to deplore the decline in the women's position.
However, realignments of relations of power as a result of the debordering process
were not limited to the local community, but also occurred on higher, institutional
levels within the Trinidadian state. As Moore (1993) has shown from his research in
Zimbabwe, the competing agendas of different state functionaries `layer over' contested
terrains such as the Nariva Swamp, and contradict any simple structural opposition
between a presumably monolithic state and an undifferentiated peasantry. The state is
instead a constellation of practices and institutions embedded within a field of cultural
politics, and contested processes such as reborderings bring internal conflicts to the
fore. In the case of the Nariva Swamp, the dismantling by the local `bird monitor' of
illegal fish traps mirrors the changing relations of power within the state bureaucracy
that accompanied the rebordering process. After the traps were destroyed the bird
monitor was reprimanded by senior Wildlife Section officials for overstepping
his authority, even though he had been incited by low-level Section staff. His fragile
authority and ill-defined position reflect, in many ways, the fissures between the Wild-
life Section and other sections of the Ministry of Agriculture, which were illuminated
during the Battle of Nariva. Prior to this contest to define the spatial identity of the
(1) TIDCOö Trinidad Industrial Development Corporation.

Nariva Swamp, development-oriented sections such as the Agricultural Planning

Division and the Agricultural Engineering and Development Division dominated the
Ministry. Officials in these divisions were instrumental in developing the early narratives
of frontier development and tacitly supported the commercial rice producers. The
Wildlife Section and the National Parks Division were relatively marginal and poorly
funded agencies. After the Battle of Nariva and the rebordering process, however, these
agencies emerged with a new sense of purpose. The National Parks Division became
officially charged with managing the Nariva Swamp National Park and hence institu-
tionalizing the exclusionary principles of environmental geopolitics (National Wetlands
Committee, 1996), while the Wildlife Section increased its budget more than sevenfold
during a period of ten years, from TT$ 366 000 in 1988 to TT$ 2.3 million in 1997 (Wildlife
Section, 1997).
The increased power and legitimacy for the Wildlife Section derived to a large
degree from its `geopolitical links' (Dalby, 1998, page 180) with a global environmental
institution, the Swiss-based Ramsar Convention on the Protection of Wetlands. In 1992
Trinidad designated the Nariva Swamp for the List of Wetlands of International
Importance maintained under the Ramsar Convention. The following year the Wildlife
Section arranged for the Nariva Swamp to be included in the Montreux Record, a
subset of Ramsar sites deemed in need of priority conservation attention. The
Montreux Record listing allowed the Wildlife Section to request a so-called monitoring
procedure, essentially a fact-finding and advisory field mission organized, funded, and
staffed by Ramsar personnel and conservation scientists affiliated with Ramsar. The
Monitoring Procedure was completed in May 1995 and culminated in an advisory
report (Ramsar, 1996) presented to the Wildlife Section. Although the report proposed
a less top-down approach to conservation in the Nariva Swamp, including a stronger
focus on comanagement, Ramsar's involvement also served to strengthen state
presence in the Nariva Swamp. According to Wildlife Section officials, the Ramsar
mission represented a stamp of approval for the environmental alliance and boosted
the political power of this section at the expense of others. Thus the Ramsar mission
was a manifestation of the links between Northern knowledge and power operating
through environmental geopolitics, and provided a scientific rationale for exclusionary
boundary making in the Nariva Swamp.
Discussion
This paper has drawn on critical geopolitics, specifically the notions of rebordering,
differentiation, and integration, as well as the Foucaultian critiques of environmental
geopolitics as discourse, to analyze a process of boundary making for conservation
purposes in the Nariva Swamp, Trinidad. The poststructural theorization in the field of
geopolitics has permitted an explicit focus on boundary making as a manifestation of
state practice òn the ground', and provided a theoretical framework to unpack the
ways in which such practice ultimately is linked to the constellation of experts,
ideologies, and institutions that constitutes the discourse of environmental geopol-
itics. As we have seen, the goal of such poststructuralist interrogations is to go
beyond facile arguments to demonstrate the `constructed' nature of boundaries and
instead attempt to question and unearth the social and cultural processes that
permit, and undermine, state projects of boundary production and territoriality.
From a poststructural perspective, boundaries can be understood as symbolic
weapons in contests between states, global institutions, and substate actors to define
and institutionalize local, regional, and state territories, both spatially through
significations such as maps and boundary markings, and socially through narratives
or `geopolitical texts' of places, regions, and identities (Newman, 1999, page 4).
204 B Sletto
The application of critical geopolitics to the rebordering of the Nariva Swamp thus
illustrates how narratives of exclusion and scientific management in environmental
geopolitics become operationalized through processes of boundary making, and how
environmental geopolitics becomes a justification for increasing the state's control of its
own territory, particularly of its ùnderdeveloped' and `conservation-worthy' margins.
This case has implications for a more nuanced understanding of the power effects of
environmental geopolitics on state and local levels, the consequences of environmental
geopolitics for local identities and resistance, and for the work in poststructural political
ecology and globalization more generally. To begin, this case contradicts the notion that
environmental geopolitics causes state power to decline in relevance and the `local' to
disappear, and shows the importance of considering political ^ economic structures and
processes in poststructural geopolitical investigations, both on state and global levels.
Indeed, the indirect influence of Ramsar in the institutionalization of the Nariva
Swamp as a bounded conservation region reflects the increasing power of global
institutions, and the declining independence of state institutions. However, the state
of Trinidad did not simply `lose' in the face of international pressure, but maneuvered
through its various agencies to benefit from the institutionalization of the Nariva
Swamp as a conservation region. A political ^ economic analysis of the rice industry
has shown that state policies favoring rice production, such as the costly production
subsidies, were already in the process of being dismantled at the time of the Battle of
Nariva. This development could be traced to GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade) and other international trade agreements that prevent protectionist agriculture
policies and import restrictions, but also to a political ^ economic environment in which
costly state policies made little sense (Sletto, 1998; 1999). Rice production in the Nariva
Swamp has been deemed as too costly, both economically and politically, as a result of
the environmental campaign, and, as a consequence, the area could more productively
be earmarked as a conservation `region' with high ecotourism potential (1998; 1999).
Furthermore, this case illustrates the need to pay attention to the impact of
environmental geopolitics on local and state practice, but perhaps more importantly,
to consider the ways in which local practices and identities inform the hegemonic
narratives of environmental geopolitics. This, again, points to the need to apply ethno-
graphic approaches (Wilson and Donnan, 1998) to specific case studies to understand
better how local practice informs or is shaped by the discourse of environmental
geopolitics. As Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift argue (1994), globalization does not
represent an end to territorial distinctions and distinctiveness, but rather adds new
influences on local identities and developing capacities; that is, new territorial forma-
tions such as the Nariva Swamp as conservation regions are functionally constituted
through the discourse of environmental geopolitics and owe their existence to social
processes traversing global, state, and local fields of power. Rather than simply weak-
ening or strengthening the state, the process of boundary making in the Nariva Swamp
altered relations of power in complex ways between the state and the international
conservation community, among state agencies, between the state and the local com-
munity, and among local actors. As we have seen, certain land-use practices were
appropriated and privileged through the environmental narratives of the Battle of
Nariva, and thus helped shape the form and content of the rebordering process. The
existence of a subsistence fishing culture informed the environmental representations
and provided a key, textual element of the narratives of differentiation and integration.
Locally in the community of Kernahan the privileging of certain practices led to
important realignments of power and processes of identity construction: cast-net
fishers sharpened their conflict with trappers and represented their subsistence
practices as evidence of their importance for swamp conservation, and they also
assumed greater power within the local tourism industry through their association
with the scientific narratives of global environmentalism. And within the Ministry of
Agriculture, the Wildlife Section gained power and greater policymaking relevance
through its tacit support of the environmental campaign and the rebordering process,
but also through its association with a global environmental institution.
This consideration of local practices and processes of identity construction further-
more points to the need for a more complex understanding of resistance in critical
geopolitics. Local resistance to environmental geopolitics does not take the form
of unified, counterhegemonic narratives, but must be understood as a complex
blend of strategies of resistance and accommodation that are ultimately informed by
place-specific practices, economies, and identities. The cast-net fishers had conducted
their own counterhegemonic process of `rebordering' through their fishing prac-
tices, their nonterritorial practices, and through their `mapping' of the Nariva Swamp
landscape. Through their everyday practice they had thus constructed a cultural land-
scape that initially could be seen as a form of symbolic and material resistance to
the hegemonic state project of agricultural development, and later as resistance to the
rebordering project for conservation purposes. But the same group of fishers now
selectively appropriate ùseful' aspects of the objectifying conservation narratives in
order to represent themselves as potential partners in conservation, and to construct
an identity as wise managers of the swamp landscape. Indeed, it is important to
remember that stereotypes and ideas about the `local', ìndigenous', or `primitive' still
guide conservation initiatives in Third World environments, providing rhetorical justi-
fications for coercive conservation management practices and the imposition of state
control of local lands through processes of boundary making. But such exclusionary
practices may have exceedingly complex ramifications for local practices and identities,
contributing to a place-contingent cultural politics that blends symbolic and material
strategies of resistance, leads to strategies of accommodation, and brings about a
reconfiguration of local identities and relations of power.
Ultimately, the case of the Nariva Swamp illustrates the production of new `locals'
within a globalizing environmental discourse. It suggests that conservation planning in
the context of environmental geopolitics results in processes of debordering and rebor-
dering, which (re)inscribe old and new functional boundaries (Albert, 1999, page 62),
construct new `local' places and spatial identities, restructure local practices, and create
new social relations of power. Ultimately, the regional identity of the Nariva Swamp is
not a `local' in the sense of its isolation or its marginality, as it was so often represented
during the Battle of Nariva. Instead, it is a global locality, a bounded space with an
identity linked to a global discourse of environmental security, but yet a space that
depends on its constructed difference for its essential `locality'. When it is thus under-
stood as a global locality institutionalized through a process of debordering, the Nariva
Swamp environment and other Third World landscapes can be read as discursive
arenas for broadly defined contests of power. Through languages of differentiation
and integration, Third World landscapes are institutionalized as global localities,
bounded spaces imbued with the rhetoric and interests of powerful actors on a
national, as well as on a global, level.
Acknowledgements. The author wishes to thank Dr Peter Herlihy, University of Kansas, and
Dr Paul Gellert, Cornell University, and four anonymous reviewers for their comments and sug-
gestions. All omissions and errors are solely the responsibility of the author. This research was
funded by a Robert Oppenheimer Fellowship administered by the Center for Latin American
Studies, University of Kansas, and a Pierre J D Stouse research grant from the Department of
Geography, University of Kansas. Logistical assistance was provided by the Wildlife Section of the
Ministry of Agriculture, Trinidad and Tobago.
206 B Sletto
References
Albert M, 1999, `Òn boundaries, territory and postmodernity: an international relations
perspective'', in Boundaries, Territory and Postmodernity Ed. D Newman (Frank Cass,
Portland, OR) pp 53 ^ 68
Amin A, Thrift N (Eds), 1994 Globalization, Institutions, and Regional Development in Europe
(Oxford University Press, Oxford)
Anthony M, 1975 Profile Trinidad: A Historical Survey from the Discovery to 1900 (Macmillan
Education, London)
Bacon P, 1990, `Ècology and management of swamp forests in the Guianas and Caribbean Region'',
in Ecosystems of the World, 15: Forested Wetlands (Elsevier, Amsterdam) pp 213 ^ 250
Becker B, 1996, ``Brazil's frontier experience and sustainable development: a geopolitical approach'',
in Frontiers in Regional Development Eds Y Gradus, H Lithwick (Rowman and Littlefield,
London) pp 73 ^ 98
Castells M, 1997 The Power of Identity (Blackwell, Malden, MA)
Dalby S, 1998, `Ìntroduction: environmental geopolitics'', in The Geopolitics Reader
Eds G Oè Tuathail, S Dalby, P Routledge (Routledge, London) pp 179 ^ 189
Dalby S, 1999, ``Globalization or global apartheid? Boundaries and knowledge in postmodern
times'', in Boundaries, Territory and Postmodernity Ed. D Newman (Frank Cass, Portland,
OR) pp 132 ^ 150
Downs W G, Aitken T H G, Worth C B, Spence L, Jonkers A H, 1968, `Àrbovirus studies in
Bush Bush Forest, Trinidad, WI, September 1959 ^ December 1964'' American Journal of
Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 17 224 ^ 275
Dryzek J, 1997 The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses (Oxford University Press,
Oxford)
FAO, 1957 ``Report no 636 to the Government of Trinidad and Tobago on the reclamation of the
Caroni, Oropouche and Nariva areas'', Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome
Foucault M, 1980, Power/Knowledge (Pantheon, New York)
Friedmann J, 1996, `Ìntroduction: borders, margins and frontiersö myth and metaphor'', in
Frontiers in Regional Development Eds Y Gradus, H Lithwick (Rowman and Littlefield,
London) pp 1 ^ 21
Harley J B, 1988, ``Maps, knowledge, and power'', in The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on
the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environments Eds D Cosgrove, S Daniels
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge) pp 277 ^ 312
Harley J B, 1989, ``Deconstructing the map'' Cartographica 26 1 ^ 20
Harley J B, 1990, ``Cartography, ethics, and social theory'' Cartographica 27 1 ^ 23
Harley J B, 1992, ``Deconstructing the map'', in Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in
the Representation of Landscape Eds T Barnes, J Duncan (Routledge, London) pp 231 ^ 247
Harvey D, 1990, ``Between space and time: reflections on the geographical imagination'' Annals
of the Association of American Geographers 80 418 ^ 434
Jasanoff S, 1996, ``Science and norms in global environmental regimes'', in Earthly Goods:
Environmental Change and Social Justice Eds F Hampson, J Reppe (Cornell University
Press, Ithaca, NY) pp 173 ^ 197
Joseph E L, 1970 History of Trinidad (Frank Cass, London) first published in 1838 (A K Newman,
London)
Kingsley C, 1892 At Last, A Christmas in the West Indies (Macmillan, London)
Kobayashi A, Peake L, 1994, `Ùnnatural discourse: race and gender in geography'' Gender,
Place and Culture 1 225 ^ 243
Lee M, Jacque A, 1993, ``The rice sub-sector'', in Agricultural Planning Division WP 3, August,
Agricultural Planning Division, Port of Spain, Trinidad, pp 1 ^ 19
Lele S, 1991, ``Sustainable development: a critical review'' World Development 19 607 ^ 621
Michaelson S, Johnson D, 1997, ``Border secrets: an introduction'', in Border Theory: The Limits of
Cultural Politics Eds S Michaelson, D Johnson (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,
MN) pp 1 ^ 39
Ministry of Agriculture, 1992, `Ìnventory of the indigenous forest of Trinidad'', Forest Resource
Inventory and Management Section, Ministry of Agriculture, Port of Spain, Trinidad
Ministry of Planning and Development, 1992 A New Administration and Distribution Policy for
Land 19 November, Ministry of Planning and Development, Port of Spain, Trinidad
Ministry of Planning and Development, 1989, ``Trinidad'', Land and Survey Division, Ministry
of Planning and Development, Port of Spain, Trinidad
Monmonier M, 1991 How To Lie With Maps (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL)
Moore D, 1993, ``Contesting terrain in Zimbabwe's Eastern Highlands: political ecology,

ethnography and peasant resource struggles'' Economic Geography 69 380 ^ 410
Moore D, 1996, ``Marxism, culture and political ecology: environmental struggles in Zimbabwe's
Eastern Highlands'', in Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Developments, Social Movements
Eds R Peet, M Watts (Routledge, New York) pp 125 ^ 147
Moore D, 1997, ``Ground for struggle and the politics of place'', in Geographies of Resistance
Eds S Pile, M Keith (Routledge, London) pp 87 ^ 106
National Wetlands Committee, 1996, ``National Policy on Wetland Conservation: Trinidad and
Tobago'', final draft, 17 October, Ministry of Agriculture, Land and Marine Resources, Port
of Spain, Trinidad
Neumann R, 1997, ``Primitive ideas: protected area buffer zones and the politics of land in Africa''
Development and Change 28 559 ^ 582
Newman D (Ed.), 1999, ``Geopolitics renaissant: territory, sovereignty and the world political
map'', in Boundaries, Territory and Postmodernity (Frank Cass, Portland, OR) pp 1 ^ 16
Oè Tuathail G, 1996, Critical Geopolitics (Routledge, London)
Oè Tuathail G, 1998, ``Thinking critically about geopolitics'', in The Geopolitics Reader
Eds G Oè Tuathail, S Dalby, P Routledge (Routledge, London) pp 1 ^ 12
Oè Tuathail G, 1999, ``De-territorialized threats and global dangers: geopolitics and risk society'',
in Frontiers in Regional Development Eds Y Gradus, H Lithwick (Rowman and Littlefield,
London) pp 17 ^ 31
Paasi A, 1996 Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness: The Changing Geographies of the
Finnish ^ Russian Border (John Wiley, New York)
Paasi A, 1999, ``Boundaries as social processes: territoriality in the world of flows'', in Boundaries,
Territory and Postmodernity Ed. D Newman (Frank Cass, Portland, OR) pp 69 ^ 88
Peluso N, 1995, ``Whose woods are these? Counter-mapping forest territories in Kalimantan,
Indonesia'' Antipode 274 383 ^ 406
Pickles J (Ed.), 1995 Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems
(Guilford Press, London)
Ramsar, 1996 Ramsar Convention Monitoring Procedure. Final Report: Nariva Swamp, Trinidad
and Tobago Convention on Wetlands of International Importance Especially as Waterfowl
Habitat, Gland, Switzerland
Rose G, 1993 Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN)
Rundstrom R, 1991, ``Mapping, postmodernism, indigenous people and the changing direction
of North American cartography'' Cartographica 28 1 ^ 12
Rundstrom R, 1993, ``The role of ethics, mapping, and the meaning of place in relations between
Indians and Whites in the United States'' Cartographica 30 21 ^ 28
Sack R, 1986 Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History (Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge)
Scott J, 1985 Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale University Press,
New Haven, CT)
Scott J, 1999 Seeing Like a State (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT)
ShivaV, 1998,``The greening of global reach'', in The Geopolitics Reader Eds G Oè Tuathail, S Dalby,
P Routledge (Routledge, London) pp 231 ^ 235
Sletto B, 1998, ``Fish, rice and the meaning of place: the political ecology of the Nariva Swamp,
Trinidad'' Caribbean Geography 9 14 ^ 29
Sletto B, 1999, ``Landscape of resistance: reading, producing and representing the Nariva Swamp
Trinidad'', MA thesis, Department of Geography, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS
State Lands Unit, 1997 Occupational Survey: Kernahan Food Gardens, Block E, Period 08/05/
97 ^ 16/05/97 Ministry of Agriculture, Land and Marine Resources, Port of Spain, Trinidad
Stea D, 1996, ``Romancing the line: edges and seams in Western and indigenous mindscapes with
special reference to Beduin'', in Frontiers in Regional Development Eds Y Gradus, H Lithwick
(Rowman and Littlefield, London) pp 23 ^ 41
Sunderlin W, 1995, ``Managerialism and the conceptual limits of sustainable development'' Society
and Natural Resources 8 481 ^ 492
University of the West Indies, 1979, ``Studies on the biological resources of Nariva Swamp,
Trinidad'', Occasional Papers, Zoology Department, University of the West Indies,
St Augustine 4 1 ^ 455
208 B Sletto
Welch R, 1996, ``Redefining the frontier: regional development in the post-welfare era'', in Frontiers
in Regional Development Eds Y Gradus, H Lithwick (Rowman and Littlefield, London)
pp 43 ^ 53
Wildlife Section, 1997, ``Section allocations, 1970 ^ 1997'', Director's memo, Wildlife Section,
Ministry of Agriculture, Port of Spain, Trinidad
Wilson T, Donnan H (Eds), 1998, ``Nation, state and identity at international borders'', in Border
Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge)
pp 1 ^ 30
Wood D, 1992 The Power of Maps (Guilford Press, New York)
Wood D, 1993, ``Maps and mapmaking,'' Cartographica 30 1 ^ 6
Worth C, 1967 A Naturalist in Trinidad (Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, PA)
Zimmerer, K, 2000, ``The reworking of conservation geographies: nonequilibrium landscapes
and nature ^ society hybrids'' Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90 356 ^ 369
ß 2002 a Pion publication printed in Great Britain

Sletto, 2002

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Sletto, 2002

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2002, volume 20, pages 183 ^ 208

Boundary making and regional identities in a globalized

on narratives of nation, region, and identity. This reassertion of culture as a significant

Figure 1. Trinidad, including major towns and the study area.

Critical geopolitics, boundaries, and the politics of conservation planning

Within critical geopolitics, however, an explicitly poststructuralist perspective has

Standardization of measurement through hegemonic cartographic practice is

a term I use as a means to link the theorization of boundary making (specifically

Reborderings in the Nariva Swamp

Constructing a regional identity

Rebordering, everyday practice, and relations of power

as inhabitants of the Indo-Trinidadian community of `Kernahan'. Another point

(1) TIDCOö Trinidad Industrial Development Corporation.

Nariva Swamp, development-oriented sections such as the Agricultural Planning

Moore D, 1993, ``Contesting terrain in Zimbabwe's Eastern Highlands: political ecology,

ß 2002 a Pion publication printed in Great Britain

You might also like