Nature - autonomous learning

de-naturalisation 131open conflict by securing the acquiescence of the oppressed to theirsubordination.While hegemonic ideas serve the interests of dominant groups in society(e.g. men over women, ethnic majorities over ethnic minorities), they donot go uncontested. From time to time subordinate groups ‘see through’these ideas, while dominant groups may seek to make new ideas hegemonicthat unsettle older accepted ones. For instance, feminists have challengedthe once taken-for-granted idea that ‘a woman’s place is in the home’.Meanwhile, many Western governments and businesses have promotedideas of individualism over those of community since the 1970s in anattempt to weaken the power of trade unions whose traditional credowas ‘all for one and one for all!’.Thus hegemony is a dynamic process inwhich dominant and subordinate groups battle it out to define whichvalues, norms and beliefs will be the shared ones at any given momentin history. For Gramsci, power and resistance are not so much (or simply)physical acts as struggles over meaning. Importantly, Gramsci did not regardhegemonic ideas as false or misleading ones. Rather, they are partial orselective depictions of reality that appear to be otherwise because they areinternalised as ‘common sense’ among the mass of the population.Donald Moore’s (1996) study of struggles over land use in the Kaereziarea of eastern Zimbabwe is a good example of how ideas about nature(in this case the environment) factor into the maintenance and contestationof hegemony. Moore, like Forsyth, is a political ecologist (based at theUniversity of California, Berkeley).The element of his study I wish to focuson here is a 1990s dispute over the siting of a cattle dip in Kaerezi. Kaereziis a rural area in a high rainfall belt that abuts Zimbabwe’s Nyanga NationalPark, a major international tourist attraction. The cattle dip in questionwas established in 1988 by the national Ministry for Rural Development(MRD) for local livestock owners who were required by law to protect theirherds from tick-borne disease. However, shortly thereafter another armof national government – the Department of National Parks and WildlifeManagement (DNPWM) – discovered that the dip was sited within 500metres of the Kaerezi River.The area around the river had been designateda protected zone.To complicate matters further, a local trout-fishing clubentered the fray, supporting the DNPWM’s opposition to the siting of thedip near the river.What you had, then, was different parties clashing overthe ‘proper’ use of a particular parcel of the natural environment.