Reenchanting the Tropical Rainforest: Landscaping and Aesthetic Interpretations of Nature in the Lacandon Maya Villages (Chiapas, Mexico)
Résumé
The Lacandon Forest of Chiapas, traditional habitat of the Lacandon Mayas, is going through an « esthetization » process whereby the territory turns into a global landscape. NGOs, ecotourism enterprises, as well as Mexican Government and Biosphere Reserves administrative agencies are remodeling space, setting the scenery for tourism development in order to reconcile visitors with common representations of tropical wilderness. Throughout decades of direct interaction with tourists, Lacandon Mayas have established themselves as actors of the local landscaping process, therefore ruled by two different patterns : - a naturalist model, deeply influenced by the biocultural conservation paradigm. In this framework, the uses of romantic exoticism as an aesthetic category are part of a conservation strategy for building durable landscapes within a fragile environment ; - an indigenous model aimed to enhance the anthropogenic influence on nature, through metadiscourses as a cross between environmental injunctions and group’s territorial claims. This « landscape syncretism » is particularly visible in the « interpretative trails », designed to produce a genuine aesthetic experience for the visitors accompanied by Lacandon guides, who provide an immediate familiarization with the uncanny nature of the forest. Far from a simplistic indigenous/exogenous opposition, this collective process of estranging the domestic space and making the exotic seem familiar in shared landscapes reveals pragmatic and symbolic links between two opposed, though strangely similar conceptions of nature. In this paper/poster, I will develop an analysis of tourist trails in the Lacandon Maya villages, based on the results of ethnographic surveys since 2007.