Geographies of settlement and participatory methods: from the rainforest to Jordan

Women's Voices from the Rainforest. Janet Gabriel Townsend (in collaboration with Ursula Arrevillaga, Jennie Bain, Socorro Cancino, Susan F. Frenk, Silvana Pacheco and Elia Pérez). Routledge, London, UK and New York, USA, 1995, pp. viii + 212. ISBN 978-0-415-10532-3 (pbk). I write this as an early career scholar who never had the chance to meet Janet Townsend, although I am fortunate to have been supervised and taught by those who knew her well. The opportunity to read Women's Voices from the Rainforest (WVFTR) and to reflect on the contemporary significance of her work has been a pleasure and has reminded me that as academics we should do more to celebrate prior scholarship that continues to shape present day geography. I had initially thought my main contribution would be centred around the methodological contributions made by Janet, and her collaborators. However, upon reading WVFTR, I came to realize that her writing is relevant to my own work in numerous ways. In this short reflection, I will focus on two. First, her arguments surrounding settlement and secondly, her arguments surrounding methods. Early on in WVFTR, we hear about some of the land settlement schemes that came to dominate Janet's work, particularly those in Mexico and Colombia. As Janet (p. 81) notes, land settlement in Mexico was largely the result of ‘[a] succession of government policies, beginning in 1940 but became much more effective from the late 1960s, that encouraged people to settle on “new” lands to reduce the pressure in other areas for more land reform’. In my own research, I too have become increasingly interested in settlement schemes, specifically their role in settling nomadic communities across the Middle East and North Africa. Although Janet's focus is not on nomadic communities, she notes that nomadic communities experience land settlement too, which can ‘settle nomads and shifting cultivators, which may appeal to governments who prefer sedentary citizens but not so strongly to those who are forced to settle’ (p. 22). Throughout my own research I frequently see the impacts of the Eurocentric ideals of planners that significantly affected the lives of the women, which Janet sees happening too under the influence of US economists. To see these neo-colonial connections across space is vital geographical work, and as she surmises is perhaps because ‘the planners around the world have had the same training, read the same books and made the same mistakes’ (p. 9). Yet, as Janet so compellingly demonstrates, it is also crucial that we see the situated geographies of settlement and how they impact on the everyday. By attending to these voices, we can challenge dominant Eurocentric gazes. My own work has explored the ways in which settlement schemes in Jordan have denied rights to nomadic groups and embedded colonial imaginaries. For instance, the UK's National Archives in Kew hold material pertaining to expeditions in the 1960s to Jordan to establish nature reserves. In a 1967 letter from the Anglia Natural History Unit to expedition members, they offer filming suggestions in a guidance letter: ‘Today most of Jordan is inhabited by nomads, and so is the custom of nomads, they settle like locusts. When they have sucked the goodness from a piece of land [they] move on. The land, in the end does not recover’.1 It is precisely these attitudes that have led to much of the forced sedentarization of Bedouin throughout the Middle East and North Africa, whereby a failure to recognize indigenous relationships to the land instead centres around statist and settler-colonial ones so that, ‘Bedouin communities are classified as “unrecognized” and “illegal”,’ (Kedar et al., 2018: 5). Bedouin and mobile communities across the Middle East are continually subjected to state created narratives and essentialized representations of Bedouin that serve the interests of the hegemonic power and colonial or state imaginaries (Tatour, 2019). As a result, cultural heritage and conservation projects often approach these communities as a threat to be managed, forcing their settlement and thereby shifting livelihood structures towards those favouring wage labour (Chatty, 2001). Yet crucially as Nora Barakat (2023) argues, assumptions about Bedouin communities invariably see them as inherently antagonistic to agriculture, private property, and bureaucratic institution-building. They offer essentialized accounts of Bedouin communities, rather than engaging with the complexities and nuances of livelihood practices and ways of organizing and governing life. In the very different societies of Colombia and Sri Lanka, pioneer women say that in their home villages they felt safe to move around freely, but now live among strangers and there is no one with whom they can leave the children, so that their freedom of movement is severely curtailed (p. 30). I found this passage striking because of how it spoke to my own research with Bedouin communities in the south of Jordan where women also spoke to me about how their forced sedentarization to the village of Wadi Rum impacted on their freedoms. In Wadi Rum, many women told me how nomadic life enabled them the freedom to roam with their animals and to spend time in and around their tents. In life before sedentarization, families would live close to one another and women would be free to move between different family tents. Whereas inside the village, the infrastructure and planning of the village results in an environment in which it is very difficult for women to leave the house, due to fear of women being seen by members of the community outside of the family. In summary, by emphasizing the everyday politics of settlement schemes, Janet's approach demonstrates how settlement is a political act with highly gendered outcomes. Indeed, as we have seen with Israel's building of settlements across the West Bank, settlements continue to be used as an important tool of war, colonialization, and racial segregation (see Rabie, 2021). In Jordan, settlement schemes were constructed as development projects but were used largely to devalue and delegitimize indigenous knowledge. Cultural and social structures were destroyed in Jordan through these settlement schemes and there are important gendered aspects to this destruction. It is only through engaged methods such politics can be known and it is here that I turn to Janet's second contribution, methods. But what is the point in documenting more and more bad experiences which people have in common? (p. 3). We think that many Mexican women talked to us partly as a political calculation. Contact with the powerful is an opportunity to manipulate them and to enumerate the problems with local level…But we are confident that women worked hard, some or all of the time, to project an image of themselves and their communities which might, when published, possibly be of benefit to them. For several, telling the world about their troubles was an important part of telling their stories…By working on us, as people, they have reworked our views of the world. (p. 17). Participation is all too often 1990s-speak for ‘Do as you’re told – or else!’, but, at its best, participatory appraisal can be the most appropriate education for planners, managers and administrators (p. 133). Participatory research, especially in geography, has grown in recent years in important and exciting ways. Yet, reading Janet also made me wonder if at times participatory research now demands too much from both the researcher and communities we engage with. Reflecting on my own experiences of using participatory methods in Jordan, I found that participatory methods must be considered in relation to the situated cultural and social politics. Participation is not something that should be taken for granted. For instance, my own research in Jordan used participatory filmmaking as a tool to engage community relationships with nature reserves. However, this proved difficult because of a lack of community buy-in but also wider challenges in relation to what participation means within the cultural political context of Jordan. In contrast to important work engaging participatory methods in research projects in the UK, in Jordan I found participatory methods to be met with increasing resistance as communities did not have the energy to take part nor the political will. In my own work, I have therefore explored the importance of considering methods in relation to their situated cultural politics (Mason, 2021). I end therefore by thanking Janet for providing geography with work that speaks today so resonantly with my own research. Thirty years on from when it was published in 1995, the theoretical, conceptual, empirical and methodological contributions Janet Townsend has provided us with are as pertinent now as they are ever.