In this article, I narrate an ethnographic storyline that involves forest inhabitants, local politicians, development professionals, and scientific researchers in both representational and nonrepresentational worlds of knowing. I discuss how and why, in Angola, making forest knowledge through relations of distance to the forests is crucial for attaining institutional legitimacy over the forests. This way of acquiring authority and influence is championed by a broad epistemological tendency to address only the absent, which is then made present by accredited representers. Yet this technique disempowers local forest dwellers in their everyday territories and disallows the capacity that the ecological knowns have to reveal themselves. Knowing Angolan forests through absence and distance is not just a potent contemporary form of knowledge that qualifies as a way of ruling the forests, but is also integral to widespread (neo)colonial processes of distinction and separation: the knower and the known, the representer and the represented, the “cosmopolitan intellectual” and the “rustic bestial” Other. Finally, I discuss different forms of ecological knowledge in light of ethical stances toward knowing, relationality, and, ultimately, being.

中文翻译：

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生态学

在本文中，我叙述了一个民族志故事情节，其中涉及代表性和非代表性知识领域的森林居民，当地政客，发展专业人员和科学研究人员。我讨论了在安哥拉如何以及为什么通过与森林的距离关系来获取森林知识对于实现森林的机构合法性至关重要。广泛的认识论倾向支持这种获得权威和影响的方法，这种倾向只解决了缺席的情况，然后由认可的代表提出来。然而，这种技术剥夺了当地森林居民在日常领地的权力，并削弱了生态知识必须自我展示的能力。通过缺席和距离了解安哥拉森林，不仅是一种有力的当代知识，可以作为统治森林的一种方式，而且是广泛的（新）殖民主义区分和分离过程不可或缺的：知识者和已知者，代表者代表人物是“世界知识分子”和“乡村兽人” Other。最后，我根据对知识，关系以及最终存在的伦理立场讨论了不同形式的生态知识。