ABSTRACT
Environmental anthropologists, on the other hand, despise an understanding of nature as purely material. In her case study in Caledonia, for example, Horowitz traces the roots of the environmental conflict she examines in the local lack of political legitimacy and trust in the democratic process, both of which are, in turn, grounded in the political-economic history of the area. Confronting what is often taken for granted by a flat definition, a genealogy is the Nietzschean and later Foucauldian technique of accounting for the history and the conditions of possibility for a certain discourse. An ideology is reproduced by a discourse, a close heuristic. Discourse—with its methodological deployment, discourse analysis—is involved in recognising both its effect in engendering subjectivity and in its depoliticising tendencies. The idea here explained could be considered the phenomenon, intended primarily as the object as it appears and is intended.
