The affective labor of growing forests and the becoming of environmental subjects: Rethinking environmentality in Odisha, India

Abstract

How do humans come to care for their environment and what turns them into conservationists are central questions in environmental politics. Recent scholars have turned to Foucault’s ideas of “governmentality” to understand how technologies of power intersect with technologies of the self to create “environmental subjects,” that is, people who display a sense of commitment to the conservation of the environment. In this article, I argue that the applications of governmentality tend to privilege technologies of power and pay insufficient attention to the role of affect, emotions, and embodied practices in shaping human subjectivities. I draw on Spinoza’s framework of affects and Hardt and Negri’s idea of “affective labor” to bring attention to the processes through which human beings make themselves and the role of affect and environmental care practices in shaping subjectivity. Using the example of community-based forest conservation efforts in Odisha, India, I argue that we need to look beyond economic and political rationalities to explain human action and behavior. I suggest that villagers’ efforts to regenerate degraded forests involve affective labor in which mind and body, reason and passion, intellect and feeling are all employed together. Through the daily practices of caring for the forest and helping the forests grow, villagers not only transform natural landscapes but also transform their individual and collective subjectivities. I conclude by elaborating on the “biopower from below” of these environmental care practices.

Introduction

In view of current global environmental crises, the question of whether we can fundamentally change our ways of relating with nature is becoming increasingly urgent. These ecological crises and the arrival of the “Anthropocene” are challenging us to invent a “different mode of humanity” (Plumwood, 2002) and new ways of “caring for nature” (Milton, 2002) and of “belonging”(Gibson-Graham, 2011) in a “post-natural” world (Castree, 2004, Escobar, 1999). There is now a growing body of scholarship by human geographers and anthropologists – under the labels of posthumanism, vital materiality, and performance ontology – that provides tools to reimagine a new ontology of human beings and to rethink human subjectivity, modes of being, and drivers of human action (for a detailed review see Braun, 2004, Braun, 2008). However, academic theorizing and policymaking for environmental conservation have yet to fully embrace the radical potential of this work. At the same time, there is evidence coming from other disciplines, including evolutionary biology (Alexander, 1987, De Waal, 2008, De Waal, 2010), neuroscience (Decety and Jackson, 2006, Maturana and Varela, 1987, Preston and De Waal, 2002) and behavioral economics (Bowles and Gintis, 2011, Falk and Fishbacher, 2005, Levine, 1998), that shows that reciprocity, empathy, and affect play central roles in shaping human behavior and actions. However, environmental policy-making continues to treat human beings as rational economic actors and relies on economic incentives to transform human behavior. According to this view, subject positions and preferences are seen as fixed and pre-given and shaped by the perception of self-interest; meanwhile, the “self” that drives self-interest is largely left unquestioned. While the question of subject formation has long engaged the attention of philosophers, it has only recently begun to engage those in nature-society studies. Notably, Arun Agrawal’s work (Agrawal, 2005a, Agrawal, 2005b) has been influential in drawing attention to issues of subjectivity and subject formation within environmental politics. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of governmentality, Agrawal (2005a, p. 166) uses the term “environmentality” to denote a “framework of understanding in which technologies of self and power are involved in the creation of new subjects concerned about the environment.” Despite the richness in Foucault’s later work on how human beings make themselves, Agrawal’s analysis remains closely tied to rationalities of governance and the role of disciplinary practices in the production of subjectivity.

This paper brings Agrawal’s notion of environmentality (and similar applications of governmentality) into conversation with ideas about subjectivity that are informed by a Spinozian perspective on affect and Hardt and Negri’s concept of affective labor. Affects refer to the power to affect and be affected; and a focus on affects in our laboring (and everyday practices) draws attention to the potential of these practices to produce new ways of being, new subjectivities, and new forms of human communication and cooperation.

Using ethnographic research from community-based forest conservation initiatives in Odisha,¹ India, I illustrate the role of affect and environmental care practices in the production of new subjectivities. In Odisha, about 10,000 villages are actively protecting state-owned forests through elaborate community-based arrangements (Nayak and Berkes, 2008, Singh, 2002). They had been doing so prior to the state’s provision of “incentives” to conserve forests or the invitation to “jointly” manage forests through the Joint Forest Management (JFM) program (Kant et al., 1991, Sarin et al., 2003). This paper shows that villagers’ daily practices of caring for and regenerating degraded forests in Odisha can be seen as affective labor in which mind and body, reason and passion, intellect and feeling are employed together. Through the environmental care practices involved in “growing forests,” villagers not only transform natural landscapes they also transform their individual and collective subjectivities.

This paper is based on my long-term engagement as an activist and researcher with these community-forestry initiatives. In 1990, my first job with a Swedish consulting firm managing the Social Forestry Project took me to Odisha, where I found that villagers were actually protecting the state-owned forests that the Project sought to “protect” from them. After my initial, naïve efforts to make visible local forest-conservation efforts, I spent about a decade with Vasundhara, a Bhubaneswar-based NGO, supporting the community-forestry initiatives in their struggle to gain rights over forests, before coming to academia. This paper uses data from ethnographic research conducted from 2004 to 2007 in the form of village case-studies, oral histories, village songs, and poems and also draws upon insights from my practitioner work. During this long-term engagement with communities in Odisha, the question that I had initially set aside with easy answers has come back to engage my attention – that is, Why have villagers invested their labor (and love) in protecting forests over which they have few formal rights? Economic reasons and subsistence dependence on forests provide a partial answer, but they do not explain how subjectivity is produced through processes of “becoming” at work and through the dynamic relations between people and forests. Reading Agrawal’s Environmentality against my experience of shifts in environmental subjectivities in Odisha left me frustrated – as the analytics of environmentality did not seem to provide enough space for local agency (dispersed over forests and people) and for the processes of “becoming.” I turned to Spinozian philosophy and to the biopolitical potential of affective labor to open up ways of theorizing local agency and emergence that are creative and life affirming.

I state my positionality in order to emphasize that I did not read local conservation practices through the lens of the “in-vogue” theories of posthumanism, liveliness of matter, and affect; rather, I turned to these theories in my restless quest to better understand and explain how people’s sense of self and subjectivity are intertwined with their biophysical environment and with the forms of human cooperation that emerge in response to changes in this environment. Spinoza’s philosophy, as taken up in the works of Deleuze, Massumi, and Hardt and Negri, provided the tools to better understand the “becoming” of people who care for their environment. In stark contrast to the application of Foucauldian “governmentality” to the making of environmental subjects in Agrawal’s framework of “environmentality,” Spinozian optics of affect help us understand how people’s sense of self is shaped by their affective capacity to respond to other bodies, both human and non-human.

The article begins with a discussion about the analytical framework of environmentality and its limitations, then explores Spinoza’s perspective on affects and Hardt and Negri’s employment of Spinozian affect theory, in their notion of affective labor and biopower from below. Next, it describes villagers’ efforts in Odisha to protect local forests; illustrates the everyday practices and affective dimensions involved in the laboring practices of caring for forests; and discusses how their affective labor transforms local subjectivities. It concludes with a discussion of the biopolitical potential of such environmental care practices to produce new subjectivities and to challenge state and capitalist projects to discipline and commodify life.