Power/Knowledge, Power/Ignorance: Forest Fires and the State in Mexico

For over a century the Mexican state has justified its control of forests by claiming that rural people are ignorant and destructive fire setters, in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary. Academic and popular stereotypes of the state have tended to assume that official power and knowledge go hand in hand. In an institutional ethnography of the Mexican environment agency, SEMARNAP, I show how official ignorance is deployed both within and outside state forestry institutions, and how ignorance and complicity may be as important as knowledge in asserting state power. Rather than internalizing official fire discourse, rural people in Mexico learn to mouth polite fictions in their encounters with officials. I argue that the scholarship on governmentality derived from Foucault has uncritically internalized the link between power and knowledge. A closer attention to the production and translation of knowledge within state institutions leads to a more nuanced understanding of various forms of obscurity and ignorance which accompany official knowledge claims.