Masculinities in Forests

Front matter

IN FORESTS

Representations of Diversity

MASCULINITIES

Contents

List of figures

List of tables

List of boxes

Foreword

Susan Paulson

Multiple masculinities shed new light on forest management

This adventurous book takes readers on a journey through the author’s long career in international conservation and development, exploring findings about diverse forest communities together with personal positions and experiences. A wealth of tangible detail gathered along the way allows readers to see and hear how diverse people-forest relationships are informed by gendered identities, knowledges and opportunities.

Through decades of research and practice, Colfer has observed that fellow scientists perceive forests as masculine realms. Yet lack of attention to the variability of masculine identities, norms and behaviours has resulted in incomplete data and analysis, and has limited efforts to tailor studies and projects to fit actual forest realities.

Masculinities in Forests supports more comprehensive research and practice by demonstrating mutual influences between masculine identities and environmental management, and by applying concepts of plural masculinities and intersectionality to varying manifestations of those processes. It challenges universalizing stereotypes about men by presenting unique empirical findings, and by showing how they vary across sociocultural, ethnoracial and ecological contexts. This book will support foresters, ecologists, natural resource managers and gender scholars to strengthen their attention to men and masculine identities, thereby increasing the rigour of empirical research and enhancing the design and outcomes of policies and projects.

Colfer’s work resonates with my own journey exploring processes through which gender, class and ethnoracial systems interact with farms and forests. Like Colfer, I was raised in the US, and have worked in wide-ranging contexts which, in my case, included 15 years living full-time in South America and six years in Europe. My research in Andean and Amazonian communities has long been

Foreword xix enriched by Colfer’s writing and edited collections (Colfer 2005; Colfer, Basnett, and Elias 2016; Colfer et al. 2017), and I have enjoyed reading Colfer’s work with students pursuing graduate degrees in natural and social sciences. In a course I am teaching now on masculinities and environment, participants are especially inspired by Making Sense of ‘Intersectionality’: A Manual for Lovers of People and Forests (Colfer, Basnett, and Ihalainen 2018). I am honoured to introduce this book, and do so by drawing ideas and phrases from strands of my own intellectual trajectory that have been influenced by Colfer’s work, including two of my books, Masculinidades en movimiento. Transformación territorial (2013) and Masculinities and Femininities in Latin America’s Uneven Development (2015) and other publications (Paulson 2016; Paulson and Boose 2019).

Path-breaking contribution to complex challenges

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (1980) and others brought attention to perspectives and behaviours that are linked to masculinity in western culture, and that have impelled increasing domination and exploitation of natural environments. In light of many ensuing portrayals of masculinity as toxic, and of men as degraders of women and nature, it is no surprise that few men wanted to hear any more about gender and environment.

In a welcome shift, Colfer’s cross-cultural material and intersectional analyses take us beyond dominant stereotypes of destructive masculinity to reveal surprisingly varied practices and meanings; vital among these are different forms of knowledge, nurture and love for forests.

Current scholarship conceptualizes plural masculinities as constellations of qualities, behaviours, attitudes and accomplishments that are associated with the category “man” in particular communities of interpretation, and that shift through time and across contexts (Hultman and Pulé 2018; Connell 2017). Logging, for example, has been ranked world-wide among the most masculine, and the most dangerous, fields of work. Yet the forestry-manliness nexus is far from static or homogenous. Loomis (2017) reveals historical forces behind shifting ideas of masculinity and nature among working-class loggers in the US Pacific Northwest, while Brandth and Haugen (2000) trace shifts in media representations of Norwegian forest workers from lumberjacks to business managers.

Here, in one volume, we get to know different men engaging forests in different ways: career loggers, professional forest managers, swidden farmers, NGO practitioners, hunters, gatherers and a group that usually escapes the lens of gender analysis: research scientists and international development experts. In Chapter 4, for example, Colfer shows how a particular mosaic of primary and secondary forest with new and older swiddens provides men in Long Segar opportunities to develop and demonstrate forest-related skills including hunting, fishing, gathering forest products and finding their way through dense forest.

xx Foreword

Why should you read this book?

This book will motivate and empower you to recognize gender realities unique to the places where you live and work. Attention to masculine actors and phenomena that are most certainly relevant for forest management has been constrained by the practice of lumping 3.8 billion humans into one category labelled with the veterinary term “male,” and by the assumption that all members of said category enjoy privilege and power, and do not need or want gender-based attention. This book demonstrates how to use empirical evidence and intersectional analysis to see beyond those stereotyped categories.

One powerful way to transcend gross generalizations is by paying attention to descriptions of observed practices, characteristics and voices of differently positioned actors, including loggers, farmers, professionals and entrepreneurs. The evidence-based case studies presented here help us to see how masculinities interact with communities and ecosystems in half a dozen contexts:

e The author’s own family history and upbringing in various US communities

e Loggers and public employees in the forests of the American Pacific Northwest in the mid-1970s

e Uma’ Jalan Kenyah Dayaks in the wilds of Borneo in the early 1980s

e Javanese, Sundanese and Minangkabau farmers in the more domesticated forests of West Sumatra in the mid-1980s

e Global professionals in international conservation and development from the 1980s to the 2010s e 21st century return visits to earlier sites

Another useful way to see beyond stereotyped categories is by paying attention to race, class and other social systems that shape different groups of men and women. This book describes how men’s relationships with forests are influenced by Christian and Muslim traditions, by matrilineal and bilateral kinship and by class and vocational positioning. In doing so, it masterfully demonstrates the approach called intersectionality, which has been applied widely to make visible conditions of women whose identities are influenced by multiple kinds of difference. Colfer widens the scope of intersectional analysis to encompass diversely positioned men residents, and also to consider professionals who study, make and implement policies and programmes. Moving beyond assumptions that all men are dominant oppressors who control resources and monopolize power over women, this approach encourages readers to recognize that masculine positions of some forest-dwellers are co-constituted by racial, occupational or other identities that disadvantage them vis-a-vis some other men and women. It also entails recognition that, in each context, certain women (like scientist Dr. Carol J. Pierce Colfer in Indonesia) enjoy class, professional and/or ethnoracial positionality tied to greater privilege and power than that accessed by some men.

Foreword xxi

Reading this book will help you to understand gender systems by looking at mutually-influencing interactions among diverse masculinities, femininities and other identities, just as you understand ecological systems by looking at mutually-influencing interactions among diverse plants, animals and other elements.

For half a century, feminist science and gender studies have challenged dominant interpretations of environmental issues and motivated new kinds of action. Early work focusing on women and women’s issues forged vital advances—notably revealing that not only men, but also diverse women, engage actively in forest management around the world. But some women-focused programmes have provoked negative reactions and backlash. Some men have perceived women’s empowerment as a zero-sum game that entails dis-empowering men. Changes in women’s conditions have—in some contexts—been blamed for a range of social and ecological problems. Rather than lose faith in the benefits of paying attention to gender, Colfer advances the struggle to develop more comprehensive approaches.

Over time, feminist research and action have contributed to emerging considerations of men and masculinities. Increased awareness of ways in which hierarchical gender institutions constrain and harm men (as well as women and others) began motivating some men to question, resist and adapt gender norms and practices that they experience as degrading or dangerous to themselves and others, including their natural environments. New work on masculinities and forests began to emerge as a fruit of, and a vital complement to, decades of womencentred research and projects on gendered knowledge and participation in forest management (e.g., Agarwal 2009, 2010; Colfer, Basnett, and Elias 2016; Colfer et al. 2017; Nightingale 2003).

Even readers committed to sustaining a focus on women will benefit from a more comprehensive framework to understand and address the sociocultural systems that produce and reproduce gender arrangements that variously constrain and oppress women, or support their healthy development. More inclusive and systemic approaches to gender often lead to greater interest and participation by diverse members of communities and professional teams.

Finally, you should read this book to strengthen responses to ongoing changes and socio-ecological crises. As this book is prepared for publication, in April 2020, life around the world is undergoing dramatic changes amid COVID-19, a pandemic that has much to do with masculinities and with forests. To date, many more men have died from the coronavirus than women, in some countries nearly twice as many. This must be studied in relation to factors already causing men to suffer disproportionate rates of premature death, leading to gender gaps by which women, on average, outlive men in nearly every country, gaps that have been increasing rapidly in most countries. Just as forest management has been a factor in wildfires, floods and other intensifying disasters, so too has it influenced recent epidemics (HIV/AIDS, MERS, SARS and Ebola). The growing ease with which viruses jump between animal species, and from other animal hosts to humans, is conditioned by expansion of corporate agricultural systems, including tree plantations; by encroachment of humans on forest habitats; and by the commodification xxii Foreword of forest wildlife. There is no doubt that this pandemic, together with other socionatural disasters, will impact future human-forest relations.

Gender-specific documentation of past processes of change in environmental management will be helpful in anticipating future changes, and in developing more effective and resilient strategies for managing forests and collaborating with those who live in and near them. The temporal span of Colfer’s research shows that gender-forest relations change in response to historical forces and factors, and also to human visions and motivations. The generational trajectories of Colfer’s grandparents, parents, herself and her children provide compelling evidence of our ability to visualize, negotiate and change gender identities and relations.

In each of the realms studied, Colfer identifies some masculine-identified behaviours and attitudes that are intertwined with processes that are risky and destructive to human and environmental well-being, and others that support, and can further support, the well-being of humans and non-human nature. She makes clear that, in order to see and support positive features associated with masculinity in each context, forest management programmes will have to move away from unidirectional extension service. Methods built on mutual respect and two-way communication will allow employees of national park and forest services, the Forest Research Institute and other organizations to learn about local forest-related knowledge, goals and problems, and to recognize and work with strengths of diverse men and women in the face of changes and challenges.

This book on forest management also sheds light on other ventures that threaten forests and exacerbate climate change: mining, petroleum exploitation, ranching and agroindustry. Like logging, these sectors are characterized by exceptionally high ratios of men to women workers, and by extraordinarily high rates of occupational accidents, illness and death. However, simply characterizing these industries as masculine is insufficient to understand their gender dynamics, and inadequate to respond to troubles. By inspiring research on masculinities in each of these parallel realms, the present book can make a wider impact on efforts to address ecosystem and earth system challenges.

Conservation and development processes better suited to diverse empirical realities

Colfer’s boldest move is to turn a gender lens on her own positionality as researcher and conservation professional, and on the colleagues and organizations with which she has collaborated. This self-analysis complements Colfer’s research on forest communities to help address tendencies that continue to undermine sustainable development efforts: the exclusion of men from gender-related analysis and support, and the categorization of all “men” as a homogenous group.

At the turn of the century, the possibility of incorporating men into gender and development policies and projects was raised and debated heatedly (e.g., Cornwall and White 2000). Chant and Gutmann (2002, p. 269) observed that

Foreword xxiii

Gender and Development (GAD) policies encompass a broad range of approaches and interventions, but to date have largely been associated with programmes established by women for women. This is despite the fact that, in theoretical terms, GAD is concerned with gender relations, and therefore with men as well as women.

During two decades following these calls, a number of programmes have addressed specific groups of men and conditions of masculinity, and even supported third gender identities. Most policy-makers and programme-planners, however, have resisted doing so (Lind 2010).

In the meantime, scholarship on masculinities began to move beyond static man-woman binaries, to pay attention to intersectionality and context and to reveal how specific practices and representations of masculinity gird power structures that drive economic and environmental degradation or sustainability (Bannon and Correia 2006; Cornwall, Edström, and Greig 2011; Parpart 2015). Research on case studies has identified masculine norms that interfere with projects encouraging reforestation (Gonda 2017), as well as masculine commitments to nurture biodiversity and healthy ecosystems that can support conservation programmes (Bolt Gonzales 2003; Devore, Hirsch, and Paulson 2020). Will Boose and I were happy to document these emerging trends in research and scholarship in a review of 160 recent publications on masculinities and environment (Paulson and Boose 2019).

Colfer’s book has unique potential to bridge this troubling divide between practice and theory by communicating scholarly understandings to scientists and professionals who implement projects around the world. Among the deepest conceptual challenges faced by these professionals is that of binary thinking, manifest in the habit of perceiving and dividing the world’s diverse residents into two presumably innate categories.

Scholars have long agreed that gender identities are not constrained by biological dimorphism. Ethnographic, historic and archaeological evidence reveals widely diverse arrangements in which community members live as more than two gender identities. Across South Asia, multiple identity formations, frequently grouped together under the term “hijra” have existed for centuries, and still today, in numbers surpassing a million (Goel 2019). After repressing these gender expressions during colonial and national periods, countries including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Thailand, now recognize a third gender category on national identification cards, driver’s licenses and other official forms. Closer to some of Colfer’s field sites, Graham-Davies (2004) describes five gender categories in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, while Keeler (2017) investigates complementary masculine paths in Burma: that of Buddhist monk and head-of-household.

In recent centuries, colonization, modern development and globalization have disseminated polarized man-woman categories in many parts of the world, creating the false appearance that these categories express an innate and universal structure of human life. At the time of European contact, however, over a hundred xxiv Foreword instances of diverse gender expression were documented among Native American tribes (National Park Service 2018). Although violent efforts were made to annihilate forms perceived to vary from the European binary, some centuries-old traditions continue today in identities referred to as Muxes, two-spirit people and numerous native terms (Werft and Sanchez 2016). Similarly, Colfer’s studies show that, in spite of the institutionalization of hierarchical man-woman distinctions by churches, mosques, government and industries, community members in Long Segar have maintained remarkably muted expressions of man-woman binary.

While engaging established conversations governed by prevailing categories (man vs. woman), Colfer’s book also presents perspectives and materials that critically challenge aspects of those conversations. Qualitative findings brought together here support more culturally aware ways of interpreting gender patterns observed in the field, which can contribute to the ongoing development of more appropriate—and more robust—quantitative methods and instruments. In short, the rigour, empirical specificity and practical usefulness of all types of research and professional practice are strengthened by recognizing gender identities that exist—even when there are more than two of them.

There is no doubt that the use of common categories (man vs. woman) facilitates understanding and dialogue with a wide range of interlocutors, and enables the incorporation of gender language into national and international policy and legislation. At the same time, this book shows that the universal category “man” comes up short in efforts to represent empirical realities constituted by different norms and expressions of masculinity, linked with different positions of power, knowledge and decision. It is vital to recognize differences among the masculinity of entrepreneurs investing in forest concessions, that of loggers hired to clear trees and that of indigenous dwellers in the forest in question. Binary gender language also limits efforts on the political and strategic front: first, by reinforcing ideological messages that gender roles are determined by sex difference; and second, by making it difficult for many to think beyond a framework of competition or antagonism between two teams—men versus women.

Colfer’s careful empirical documentation of diverse masculinities will motivate and empower efforts to change gender-environment arrangements for the better by demonstrating that gender roles and expectations are not shaped by sex biology, but by historical processes, which change and can be changed. As Connell (2017, p. 5) writes, “It is true that many men and influential forms of masculinity are involved in environmental destruction. But not because XY chromosomes mechanically generate bad behavior.” What needs to be redirected is not human nature, but the historical production of masculinities, femininities and gendered divisions of labour and power that have driven and enabled degradation of forests and earth systems.