ABSTRACT
This paper concerns the often-assumed universal translatability of the environment as it exists in conservation discourses and policies in Amazonia. It focuses on Guyana’s Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS), a government-led strategy to achieve socioeconomic development goals through foreign capital investment and trading in rights over “eco-services” provided by the country’s forests. Guyana’s indigenous peoples have been identified as one of the largest stakeholder groups for the LCDS and as such, are particular targets for translating it. Drawing from my research with indigenous Waiwai, I explore some cosmographic and cosmological differences between the arboreal, unilinear, and commodified environment portrayed in the LCDS and the fractal, recursive, and mediated environment portrayed in Waiwai discourse and practice. The way in which I understand the Waiwai lived environment is informed by their very ways of moving through it: along meandering and indirect interpretations shaped by social memories, nuanced impressions, physical and affective experiences. As the role of ethnographer is increasingly defined in terms of translation, there may be grounds for considering the differences between the knowledge-politics of direct, mechanical translation practices often found in consultations with indigenous communities and the more long-term, roundabout interpretive processes of ethnographic fieldwork and writing.
