Negotiating expendability in crisis

Abstract

What do people rendered expendable through biopolitical categories do to survive them? When governments classify types of work according to ideologies of essentiality and excess, such as in response to crisis, they construct biopolitical categories that render some livelihoods untenable. Such a politics interacts with existing terrains of inequitable citizenship, pushing some to what feels like the precipice of expendability—a place from which they must skillfully negotiate permission to continue to make ends meet. On the borders of a protected forest in Tanzania, many sources of income have been outlawed in the name of biodiversity conservation. To cope, village residents navigate environmental regulations through their conversations with the enforcers of forest laws. In these conversations they co‐construct narratives in ways that manipulate the boundaries of regulatory categories. In doing so, village residents are creative legal and moral actors who can locate their prohibited activities—and themselves—in the realm of permissibility. [biopolitics, conservation, forests, rural, subsistence, enforcement, Tanzania]