Eric Perramond. Political Ecologies of Cattle Ranching in Northern Mexico: Private Revolutions. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010. xvi + 259 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8165-2721-2.

Reviewed by Keith Lindner (Geography-Syracuse University)
Published on H-HistGeog (July, 2011)
Commissioned by Robert M. Wilson (Syracuse University)

Tactics and Strategies in Sonoran Landscapes

Eric Perramond’s Political Ecologies of Cattle Ranching in Northern Mexico: Private Revolutions is a careful and thorough examination of a relatively understudied group among critical human-environment researchers, private cattle ranchers. Based on both qualitative and quantitative data generated from extensive fieldwork dating to 1995, Perramond examines seventeen private ranches in depth, mostly located in northern Mexico’s arid Río Sonora Valley. The book focuses on “the human dimensions of range management” (p. xii) and the array of tactics and strategies deployed by private ranchers to negotiate change and achieve their varied goals. While the book closely examines Sonora, it will be of interest to those studying ranching and agricultural landscapes elsewhere, especially the Americas. Implicit and sometimes explicit comparisons to the U.S. Southwest, in particular, are frequent.

The overarching theme and most consistent message of the book is that private ranches are not monolithic, and the “bad guy” caricature of private ranchers plus the simplistic private/communal binary typically mobilized to understand ranching and land tenure in Mexico obscure more than they reveal. Perramond carefully details the complex tenure arrangements found in Sonora--including how individual ranchers move between “public” and “private” ranching, or even engage in both simultaneously--as well as the complex and contingent dimensions of daily life, landscape ecologies, and gender relations in contemporary Sonoran ranching. The book adds to the growing human-environment work that tries to “look up” towards powerful groups and institutions, and reveals complexities masked by common-sense constructions of Mexican ranching and land tenure.

The heart of Political Ecologies of Cattle Ranching is a detailed examination of the tactics and strategies deployed by ranch owners, managers, and workers in response to broader political, economic, cultural, and environmental contexts. After an introductory overview and contextual survey of past historical and geographical work to help situate private ranches within the diversity of land tenure arrangements in Mexico, the book features four empirical chapters. These address, respectively, the challenges faced by ranchers and the land, labor, and management regimes deployed to address them; environmental changes of Sonora’s landscapes; complex gender relations of ranching and ranches; and contemporary challenges and changes centered around privatization and neoliberal policies. The most sustained set of findings in the book deals with the impacts ranch size has on labor regimes, herding strategies, ecological changes, gender relations, and more. Larger ranches, for example, are found to have greater land cover and less soil compaction than smaller ranches, in part because these ranches feature lower cattle stocking rates. Large ranch owners are less likely to be involved in day-to-day ranch operations--often because they can afford to be away from the ranch and pay others to manage daily activities--while women are more likely to be directly involved in ranch operations on medium and especially small ranches, which tend to be constrained both economically and ecologically. The conclusion succinctly summarizes key arguments and provides eight brief recommendations for policymakers.

The book situates itself between range science--which it critiques as reductionist, overly simplistic in its assumption of rational choice and neglect of culture, and not sufficiently qualitative (pp. 8-9, 15, 26, 62-63)--and political ecology. A main argument is that the role of nature as an active shaper of landscapes and livelihoods is missing from both fields, in political ecology’s case because of the influence of Marxism and poststructuralism (pp. 5-6), a puzzling claim. There is no mention of a growing body of work within political ecology that examines the materiality of nature, and I found myself wondering what the text would look like, and what new insights it might have gained, had it engaged this now extensive literature.[1]

Power for Perramond is located predominantly (though not exclusively) in relationships between and among individuals as they work to achieve their goals, and the book suggests a theoretical toolkit based on the “tactics and strategies” of resource managers (p. 120). Broader political economies and discourses are present in the text, but less as forces in their own right than sets of challenges and opportunities to be negotiated by individuals. The book harkens back to Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield’s “land manager” in the context of a “chain of explanation,” where local-level resource management decisions occur in broader political, economic, and ecological contexts.[2] I had hoped for greater theoretical development, and more attention to both the changing political economies and governmental regimes that construct landscapes as well as the micropolitical, productive power relations that shape contingent formations of identity. In fairness, however, that is not the book’s aim. For this reason, readers interested in such an approach could productively read Political Ecologies of Cattle Ranching alongside Aaron Bobrow-Strain’s Intimate Enemies. Both examine landowner responses to change, with Bobrow-Strain focused on “broad historical shifts in regional hegemony and conjunctural formations of landowner identities and interests,” and Perramond detailing the tactics and strategies that constitute the daily practices of ranches.[3]

One final tension deserves to be mentioned, between specificity and generalization. Perramond’s main argument about the complexity and diversity of private ranches in Sonora at times sits in uneasy relation with the book’s emphasis on “clarity of expression and explanation” for students, ranchers, and policymakers (p. xii). Providing clear-cut conclusions inevitably involves generalizing, which at times can be problematic in the text. The chapter on gender relations, for example, presents empirical material that demonstrates the diversity of women’s roles and complexity of gender relations, yet the text itself shies away from such diversity in emphasizing a separate domain of women’s knowledge. The desire for conclusions to questions like “what do women mean to ranching?” (p. 142) invites generalization and less attention to how gendered norms are produced and reproduced in the daily practices of ranching, and also by the text itself. Nevertheless, this tension should not be seen as a weakness of the book. The challenge of underscoring complexity and contingency while providing a set of “clear messages” (p. xii) for broader dissemination is one that many political ecologists and critical scholars must work with and against but rarely transcend. Perramond succeeds in opening up the category of private landowning ranchers, convincingly demonstrating the diversity contained within that grouping, and his attempt to reach a broader audience with his work is one that should be commended.

Notes

[1]. See, for example, Karen Bakker, An Uncooperative Commodity: Privatising Water in England and Wales (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Karen Bakker and Gavin Bridge, “Material Worlds? Resource Geographies and the ‘Matter of Nature,’” Progress in Human Geography 30, no. 1 (2006): 5-27; Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Paul Robbins, Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007); and W. Scott Prudham, Knock On Wood: Nature as Commodity in Douglas-Fir County (New York: Routledge, 2005).

[2]. Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield, Land Degredation and Society (London and New York: Methuen, 1987).[3]. Aaron Bobrow-Strain, Intimate Enemies: Landowners, Power, and Violence in Chiapas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 8.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-histgeog.

Citation: Keith Lindner. Review of Perramond, Eric, Political Ecologies of Cattle Ranching in Northern Mexico: Private Revolutions. H-HistGeog, H-Net Reviews. July, 2011.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=33621

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.