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| 說明 | 210 p |
| 附註 | Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 71-08, Section: A, page: |
| Adviser: Allan F. Burns |
| Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Florida, 2010 |
| My research asked: How and why do the Lacandon denizens utilize forest resources in the Lacandon rain forest, and does this lead to landscape change? I analyzed the driving forces behind gender roles (social-cultural practices associated with being female or male) and landscape change (visible land features). I explored whether or not these two variables affect forest resource-use within Mexico's socio-political rain forest management planning in the State of Chiapas |
| This is a longitudinal study in Lacanja Chansayab (hereafter simply Lacanja), Mexico during my fieldwork periods in 1991, 1994, 1995, 2003, and 2004. Lacanja refers to a lake in the Chiapas region. Chansayab refers to the river running through the town of Lacanj (Boremanse 1998:16). My 2004 census collected qualitative and quantitative data from 56 households out of 90 total Lacanja households. A town composed in 2003 of a 353 people |
| For both genders, Lacandon work activities involved using rain forest resources, although reasons for use and non-use differed between women and men. Physical landscape change occurred as men choose service tourism work over traditional participation in the household production economy. Agriculture was once men's main household production work activity, now declining among young Lacandon men. On the other hand, women's participation in tourism depended on their sustainable use of rain forest resources, which provided them with all their natural resources needed for their craft products |
| Women's labor activities in addition included craft tourism as well as both traditional household production and reproduction work tasks, such as agriculture, cooking, childcare, cleaning, and washing. Gender bias embedded within governmental development, a term I used to "describe deliberate attempts to alter human interaction with the natural and built environment through innovation" (Chambers 1985:81), projects segregated women to lower paying tourism work tasks, which resulted in women harvesting more valuable timber in order to make higher quality woodcrafts that were sold to tourists |
| Women also took charge of their limited work opportunites and in doing so mainted their symbolic landscapes. By landscape, I imply, the "ways in which land is materially appropriated and used" (Cosgrove 1984:1). Women sustained numerous tree ridges grown between land parcels. These tree ridges act as mnemonics for land boundaries between families and between the private and public space being shared by the Lacandones and tourists |
| I utilize genderscape, a conceptual model (Krishna 2004), for understanding how Lacandones created, modified, and sustained a neotropic landscape through paid and non-paid daily work activities and community identity resilience. Genderscape allowed me to decipher Lacandon's sense of place and space in their ecosystem. It also illustrated how utilization of rain forest resources defines all Lacandones by their own cultural terms and labor activities |
| The Lacandon have been described by governmental agencies as Guardias de la Selva (Guardians of the Rain Forest), a term specifically used to identify and authenticate an indigenous community. This identity expression used by the federal government during the last twenty years for the purpose of promoting tourism and geopolitical stability in the Chiapas region is what I termed the "commodification of Lacandon indigenous authenticity." |
| The Lacandon live purposeful lives everyday with family and community members, but also co-exist in a brilliantly staged interactive museum-like setting for the tourists (Anderson 1983) to see and for the benefit of the tourism economy. The rain forest became an ideal "tourist setting" (MacCannell 1999:100). Tourists visited the Maya architectural splendors of the Bonampak Ruins, while engaging with local indigenous residents whom they assumed were the direct ancestors of the Classic Maya |
| A second issue in my research was the federal government's role and purpose in creating rain forest policies. I employed Dr. Janaki Alvalpati's definition of forest policy as "A general agreed to purposeful course of action that has important consequences for a large number of people and for a significant number and magnitude of resources" (Alvalpati 2003: graduate course lecture at the University of Florida, December, 2003) in forest management. Mexico's federal rain forest policies secured land hegemony without taking into consideration access-ethics (Kuznets 1955) or using a distributive justice model (Rawls 1971; Nozick 1974), and instead left the Lacandones and other non-land tenured communities to struggle for survival within the market constraint of a global economy |
| In the end, the Lacandones of Lacanja have been perceived by external governmental agencies as being auto-conservationists. However, my research revealed that within the limitations of the work opportunities made available to them, both women and men will either conserve or exploit their natural rain forest resources based on the benefits they receive, and without regard to externally imposed forest management policy or governance laws. (Abstract shortened by UMI.) |
| School code: 0070 |
| 主題 | Anthropology, Cultural |
| Biology, Landscape Ecology |
| Women's Studies |
| Natural Resource Management |
| Sustainability |
| 0326 |
| 0414 |
| 0453 |
| 0528 |
| 0640 |
| ISBN/ISSN | 9781124131436 |
