Nature - autonomous learning

de-naturalisation 133[A] local herdsman was quick to pick up on the white fishing club’sclaim, using a racial idiom to demand state action in defense of localresidents’ rights. Sitting on the tall grass amidst a circle of farmers, hepointed a bony finger at the [government] resettlement officer: ‘Thenyou are the one who must go and fight these people. Why are invaders. . . coming into an area bought for people to settle on? . . .’ Whenthe resettlement officer countered that it was not the white club thatcontrolled the land, but the government, the herdsman tacticallyconcluded: ‘So you want to kill the cattle? . . .’ The state official thenproduced a letter voicing concern over pollutants from the cattledip seeping into the river: ‘This shows that the National Park wastrying to take over the river, since the dip was already been approvedby Veterinary Services’, a department within yet another ministry.(Moore 1996: 134)In sum, Moore argues that hegemonic ideas instilled during the periodof British occupation became the means through which local herderspursued their interests vis-à-vis the cattle dip. These ideas were bothembraced and questioned, as white owners were bought out by MRDon herders’ behalf and yet the DNPWM and angling club’s argumentswere resisted with reference to ancestral rights violated by the British.Tactically, herdsmen used their position of relative powerlessness to maximumadvantage by manipulating representations of the Kaerezi.A critiqueof the imposition of British norms and values (like the separation of natureparks and people) was combined with a deliberate and pragmatic embraceof the British concept of landownership.Discourse, nature and reality effectsThe notion of hegemony directs our attention to how ideas of nature arebattlegrounds where dominant and subordinate groups in any societyconfront one another. As Moore’s research shows, geographical analystsof hegemony are interested in how reality is represented and with whatconsequences. Though they don’t deny that hegemonic ideas refer toreally existing things, these analysts are interested in the way these thingsare depicted rather than in their ‘real nature’.This relative lack of interestin the biophysical realities of nature has been taken a step further by othersin human geography. The third body of research into representations