Cuentos sobre la población agricana que relatan los pueblos de los altos de chiapas

Environmental Entitlements as Representation:
A new perspective of the relationship between
Nature and Society[1]
Reyna Moguel Viveros[2]

Translated by Laura Brown

Introduction

This article seeks to explore the way in which a social system, hence a system of communication, creates its own differentiation and, as a consequence, defines its own evolution. It draws a theoretical andmethodological path to construct a type of system whose selectional operation – understood from an adaptational and evolutional perspective – is carried out through specific collective representations called “Environmental Entitlements”.

This study is based on the elaboration of a Model that has allowed the revelation of the structure and function of Entitlements, which in this article areperceived as a kind of social representation that arbitrarily and timelessly forms (in longue durée, to refer to Fernad Braudel’s words[3]) a semiotic field, through which any system of production of this kind[4] routinizes (Giddens, in Urry, 1985) social actions within their own frameworks and reproduces its own informal structure, that is outside of the institutions, in the field of “real politique”, asdefined by Michael Foucault (quote).

This model is made up of levels of integration that incorporate multiple variables on differentiated and parallel scales. These tend to be diversified horizontally, structuring spatially their complexity on being reduced time and time again in the scope of generic negotiation. That is to say, those that differentiate from the system that surrounds them[5]and are attributive, or rather those that provide their state of appropriation to environmental elements – the concept of Environmental Entitlement precisely alludes to this state. Both kinds of negotiation occur in the arena of power games to consolidate concrete and fluid endowment of natural resources through the use of norms, codes and agreements.

Environmental Entitlement, understood as asocial representation of appropriation and reappropriation of natural surroundings and which becomes dialectic between Nature and Society, allows the segments that are meaningful in their constitution to be incorporated together and on multiple scales in its reconstruction. This document undertakes the construction of a model in order to test its heuristic value when faced with situations where thecomplexity of self-limitation (self-reference in Luhmann’s words) expresses the infinite possibilities posed by tacit knowledge (culturally determined) included in social representations of the environment.

In the first section, the model is presented in order to explain the location of the field of social action represented cartographically on the map of Nueva Colombia[6] and the map of thesettlements in the reserve along with the dynamic of Environmental Entitlement that gives meaning to the selection of significant segments which gave rise to the positioning of an ejido (around which the System was reconstructed), segments that are territorially significant. Whereas in the second, attempts are made to reflect on the spatial structure of the distribution of land lots of coffeeplantations on a Cartesian plan of the cartography of the location, which has allowed the reconstruction of attributive negotiation of the socio-spatial arrangements of the System.

These two sections facilitate the reconstruction of the group of selection and semantic orientation of Environmental Entitlement as well as explaining the way in which generic and attributive negotiations of EnvironmentalEntitlement are established within a framework of interaction of the system. In this way we can conceptualize primary indicativity[7], which underlies the creation of any matrix of cultural knowledge and thus, the genesis of information flow. The methodological scope is exceptionally useful in other semantic fields, in those far beyond what is demonstrated in this article regarding social...