poachers had two consequences. It almost halved the population of elephants in the area and pushed the survivors to stop migrating and take refuge in the center of the newly established national park. It also encouraged the emergence of a wide international mobilization for the defense of wildlife and of elephants in particular. David Western and Cynthia Moss were solid allies in this fight, the first through his work in the field of nature conservation, the second with her internationally acclaimed accounts of elephant life (originally commissioned by Western himself). In 1974, this mobilization led to the establishment of Amboseli National Park itself and in 1989 to an international ban on the ivory trade.
In the 1980s, the success of the wildlife protection policies had led to a fivefold increase in the density of the elephants in Amboseli, effecting, according to some observers, a severe loss of woodland and biodiversity. The link between elephants and deforestation had been a matter of controversy for a long time. In the 1970s, Western himself had opposed this link, blaming instead the excessive salinity of water from Mount Kilimanjaro. In the 1980s, however, the results of the electric fence experiments convinced Western that resuming the elephants’ migration was necessary to safeguard biodiversity. Accordingly, he asked the Wildlife Service to open a discussion on the overconcentration of elephants but was refused several times because of stiff opposition from the ethologists and the international sponsors of the park.
Figure 5 Stream diagram of the temporal evolution of the Amboseli controversy. Time flows from the top to the bottom of the diagram with each stream representing an actor. The size of each stream indicates the level of engagement of that particular actor at a particular moment in time according to a qualitative estimation (created by the authors based on the account provided by Thompson, 2002; released by the authors under CC BY-SA 4.0).
Only in 1995, after taking over the direction of the Wildlife Service, did Western manage to convene the workshop at Serena Lodge. Having full control over the agenda for the meeting, its participants (which featured prominent local stakeholders), and its schedule (which included a visit to the fenced plots in the park), Western used the occasion as a tipping point for his “beyond-parks” conservation approach. In the 1990s, such an approach had the wind in its sails thanks to a general decline in poaching, the rise of conservation biology and its focus on biodiversity, and the growing demands for more locally controlled land use management.
The success of Western’s approach, however, was not irreversible and in the following years it was put under pressure by the change of circumstances in Kenya. In the late 1990s, political turbulence, droughts, floods, and disease outbreaks tested the local model of natural management to breaking point. The devolution of national institutions exposed the Kenyan Wildlife Service to political unrest and in 1998, Western was fired and replaced with one of his most prominent critics. This change in the balance of forces illustrates how fragile the arrangement favored by Western really was and how its success was only possible in a brief period between the end of the poaching crisis and the beginning of Kenyan political unrest. Yet, that brief period did empower a series of local stakeholders (Maasai groups, regional authorities, local wildlife associations) who, thanks to the connections created in the 1990s, remained influential in the promotion of local and beyond-park natural management.
Charis Thompson’s analysis of the Amboseli elephant controversy offers a brilliant example of how a well-chosen field site can allow you to study issues that span far beyond the two days of the workshop and the walls of the Serena Lodge. However, not all controversies are conveniently observable from a pivotal situation where opposing sides encounter each other and attempt to settle their scores. More often, sociotechnical debates are distributed over networks of actions extending to distant times and places. This is why conventional ethnographic methods alone are not always sufficient for controversy mapping and why, as argued in this book, digital methods can be of invaluable help.
What controversy mapping is not
Combining Actor-Network Theory and Digital Methods, controversy mapping inherits some of their strengths, but also some of their blind spots. As a research method, it is well-suited for situations where the actors explicitly challenge each other, but it can be blind to situations where power is presumed rather than questioned. Compared to other types of conflict, controversies over scientific discoveries or technological innovations have the advantage of being relatively explicit. The high level of formalization that characterizes modern technoscience (Koyré, 1948) also means that its disagreements are, in general, extensively documented (Venturini, 2007a). While these disputes can have their share of secrecy and silence, few controversies in science and technology can be closed without some exposure to the validation of the scientific community. Furthermore, the fact that current controversies are heavily mediatized and thereby exposed to public scrutiny also ensures that power is explicitly questioned and arguments made public.
As we shall see in the next chapter, controversies are convenient objects of investigation precisely because they constitute the moments in which what is usually tacit and taken for granted becomes the explicit object of discussion. But such a focus may indeed risk drawing attention away from the situations where dissent is successfully silenced by dominant actors. The habit of working with public knowledge controversies may have made our approach unsuited to study situations where domination is exerted not by pushing one’s position explicitly, but by suppressing the alternatives. Controversy mapping is well-equipped to describe the tactics that the actors use to push their agenda, less so to reveal the implicit forms of power (and resistance to power) that are deeply embedded in collective institutions (Foucault, 1975), individual habits (Goffman, 1961), and bodily postures (Bourdieu, 1990).
Similarly, while digital methods can help illuminate public debates, they are incapable of documenting collective life in its entirety. Even if social media platforms and search engines are constantly expanding their reach (Bogost & Montfort, 2009; Helmond, 2015), they do not cover the entire World Wide Web, and luckily so. Every day hundreds of thousands of new webpages are created and only a fraction is reached by “likes” and search crawlers. Likewise, even if more and more information is exchanged through the Web, a large slice of electronic traffic travels through other routes. Emails, teleconferences, chats, peer-to-peer exchanges, mobile apps, document transfers, and many other types of digital information do not circulate via Web protocols. Besides, many digital records do not circulate at all. Not every digital inscription is shared on a computer network and not all networks are connected to the Internet. Finally, even if digital devices are more and more ubiquitous, not all social interactions are digitally mediated.
Mind that this is not just a question of coverage. Digital records come with all sorts of biases connected to the conditions of their production. Sometime these biases can be taken into account (Venturini et al., 2018) and even exploited for research (Marres & Moats, 2015), but sometimes they distort observations to the point of making them useless as a proxy for the phenomena they are supposed to capture (Venturini and Rogers, 2019). Imagine that the Amboseli elephant situation had been discussed through social media rather than in an onsite workshop. Leveraging her greater media exposure, Moss might have mobilized hordes of elephant lovers to throw their weight behind her position – elephants are, after all, more instagramable than fence experiments – and by that concealed, but not necessarily outplayed, the subtle strategies employed by Western to bring the Maasai on his side by collaborating and living with them over several years.
A
