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Despite changing views about what forests are and what values they hold to society, the
narrow vision of scientific forestry emphasizing demarcation, mensuration, calculation,
and modelling remains hegemonic across most of the World, including in Tanzania. The
reproduction of forestry across time and space is the topic of this thesis. The thesis
considers the reproduction by conceptualizing forestry practices as a product of
dispositions (habitus) and encountered situations within the forest management social
field. The thesis links the production, circulation, and application of scientific forestry
knowledge. Employing a qualitative methodology based on interviews, observations, and
document analysis, the thesis thus examines the reproduction of forestry in educative
practices at the Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA), activities of forestry academics,
and practices of government foresters. The pedagogy and curriculum of forestry education
creates scientific forestry habitus for the forest management field. Forestry academics,
who doubles as scientists and experts and occasionally as bureaucrats, conduct research
and engage in consultancies in ways that preserve and perpetuate, rather than disrupt, the
primacy of scientific forestry knowledge, consciously or unconsciously. Professional
foresters’ habitus, acquired through forestry training, imply that technical practices are
taken for granted. This is not to deny that foresters undertake strategic actions to maximize
their personal benefits. But even so, the scientific forestry habitus predisposes foresters to
reproduce technical forestry practices. Violence (injustices and failures) in forest
management is thus a by-product of what appears to foresters as appropriate forest
management approaches and practices. Violence is symbolic and often misrecognized
because foresters have acquired a frame of seeing and thinking about landscapes with trees
that naturalizes scientific forestry practices. This misrecognition of violence and failures reproduces existing practices by foreclosing the possibilities of seeing beyond and
disrupting them. A radical rethinking of forest policy, and thus of the established scientific
and social order, therefore presupposes a rethinking of the forestry curriculum and pedagogy. |
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