Theoretical Underpinnings

The conceptual framework adopted here derives in part from "regional political ecology," a recent movement formed through the marriage of the environmental concerns of cultural ecology and the developmental focus of political economy. In this emerging literature, social conflict and land degradation tend to be emphasized over the communal harmony and environmental adaptation highlighted by earlier scholars. (See, in geography, Grossman 1984; Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Bassett 1988; Zimmerer 1988; Hecht and Cockburn 1989; and Turner 1989. In anthropology, see Schmink and Wood 1987; and Sheridan 1988). Inspiration is also found in traditional cultural geography, which approaches the human modification of local environments as deeply rooted historical processes, molded in part through the cultural perceptions of human agents. Culture is viewed here not as an autonomous, "super-organic" entity (see Duncan 1980), but rather as inextricably bound

up with politics and economics, continually reconstituted and reshaped through subtle interplay between individuals and social groups.

The underpinnings of the "political" side of political ecology derive largely from radical development studies. This tradition has been fruitful in illuminating specific economic processes behind local environmental change in the modern era, which must in most instances be analyzed within the context of global capitalism. But it has also biased the field against recognizing that "precapitalist" societies, and certainly "socialist" ones, often evince similar processes of land degradation. Blaikie and Brookfield (1987) offer one corrective in the novel tactic of collegial disputation, one writer arguing from a Marxist background and the other countering from a behavioralist stance throughout a coauthored text. Although writing in a dialogic mode is not an option for the solo author, I have allowed a degree of theoretical agnosticism into this text by (loosely) employing both Weberian and Marxian notions, tending toward the latter when analyzing the economy, and veering toward the former when considering religious issues. Both traditions offer powerful lenses that can profitably be trained on social and ecological change in Buguias; to take either one alone is to risk limiting inquiry and obscuring those processes that defy expectations.

One of the fundamental premises of this study is that social, cultural, economic, and ecological change must be analyzed in dense empirical detail. Here I am especially inspired by Stephen Toulmin, whose richly eloquent Cosmopolis (1990) thoroughly undermines the modernist agenda of "universal, general, and timeless" theorization and instead leads the way into a more humane appreciation of "the oral, the particular, the local, and the timely" (1990:186)—all conceived within a fluid ecological perspective. Thus, while employing a variety of theoretical constructs, I have avoided couching the findings within any "grand theory." My ethnographic sensibility leads me to seek "explanation[s] of exceptions and indeterminants rather than regularities" (Marcus and Fischer 1986:8); by the same token, as a geographer I am wary of "spatial over-aggregation" (Corbridge 1986). Broadly similar patterns often emerge where modern economic processes transform ritual and ecological practices, but a useful heuristic for directing the questions must not become a limiting template for interpreting

findings. Commercialization has often dissolved communal bonds, but its failure to do so in Buguias does not necessarily mean that we have found an aberrant exception. In practice, this means being willing to revise radically one's preconceptions. I argue from experience here; having arrived in Buguias with a deep Polanyian (see Polanyi 1957) skepticism regarding "precapitalist" markets, I was only gradually, and painfully, disabused of this romantic notion as I delved into the commercial history of Buguias.