Wild mushrooms, forest governance, and conflict in the northern Sierra of Oaxaca

The dissertation presented here is a study of the ways in which a Zapotec community in the Sierra Norte region of Oaxaca State in southern Mexico is formed and reshaped by political mobilizations around forest use and conservation. The process of community formation is traced across different periods through a focus on wild edible mushroom harvesting, forest governance, and intervillage conflict in the Pueblos Mancomunados community, always with a view to showing how affiliation, solidarity and government come to be enacted in and on the community as its members seek livelihoods and political rights in their lands. Ethnographic and ethnohistoric evidence was collected in Oaxaca over a period of fifteen months between 2002 and 2006 in order to: first, document the use and management of wild mushrooms; second, to examine the extent to which environmental management becomes a set of processes through which campesinos are governed by, contest, or support conservation projects in their communal forests; and lastly, to situate recent conservation efforts within a larger regional history as a way to explore the continuities and disjunctures between historic and contemporary community formation and territorialization.;The results indicate that regimes of nature management, specifically of such forest products as ectomycorrhizal fungi whose very essence is networked and largely hidden, are representative of complex processes found at the 'margins' of the state. This research also contends that the emergence of new collaborative assemblages blur the boundaries between state, civil society and communities, and reveal the unfinished and contingent process of state-making and environmental governmentality. Moreover, this research shows that far from bending to the hegemony of agrarian and environmental control of the state, campesinos exercise agency in strategic and dynamic ways that at times conform to institutional and political economic forces, and at other times openly and covertly resist them. Finally, this research contributes to a body of literature about forest politics in Mexico and Central America, particularly adding a focus on non-timber forest products and adding an understudied case to the ethnographic record of Oaxaca.