While I was conducting my PhD research at Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda, I spent a lot of time talking to local people about ‘the forest’ (or eihamba in the local language, Rukiga). My interviews were about the benefits and costs of mountain-gorilla tracking tourism and conservation for local people, and the forest came up all the time. This was not surprising – the forest is home to the gorillas and other species of conservation concern, and also plays a major role in the livelihoods of local people. But something was wrong. As I wrote up my interviews in my room every night, I noticed that in some cases the same respondent had been very positive and very negative about the forest in the same interview. This often seemed entirely contradictory.

After a lot of thinking and discussions with my supervisors it finally dawned on me that the word ‘eihamba’ was being used to mean two very different things. On the one hand, it meant the physical forest, including the species within it and the resources it provided (or took away in the case of crop-raiding animals). On the other hand, it meant the institution of the national park, the boundary of which almost exactly matches the edge of the physical forest (which of course is no coincidence). The same respondent could talk in positive terms about benefits of gorilla tourism that they attributed to the forest as a physical entity, and then about the costs of conservation that they blamed on the forest as an institution. In both cases they used the same word – forest. Continue reading →