In The Nature of Spectacle, Jim Igoe provocatively argues that nature conservation and tourism are produced through circuits of spectacular capitalism. Igoe carefully illustrates how nature is both mediated and produced by images. “This vision is derived from spaces that are inflected by tourism and designed to deliver standardized experiences and encounters. These largely depend on alienation because, to be standardized, they must eschew the diversity and uncertainty of local lifeworlds” (41). Igoe links representational repertoires with how we come to know and manage nature, and with whose expertise counts. Drawing on Guy Debord and Anna Tsing, Igoe shows how images conjure particular forms of nature that become visible and “exchangeable” through capitalism. The book makes significant contributions to debates about the commodification of nature and what if anything is unique about nature-society relations in the contemporary “neoliberal” moment. Igoe carefully explores how particular kinds of nature, in this case the rangelands and savannahs of northern Tanzania, are grafted onto ideas about universal nature. Building on scholarship that connects the discursive and material production of nature (see Adams & McShane 1992; Neumann 1995, 1998; Carrier & West 2009; Büscher 2014), this well-written and relatively short book brings new arguments about the centrality of spectacle and capitalism through a compelling archive and narrative.

For Igoe, spectacle is no metaphor but rather a set of practices, techniques, and imaginaries that have co-produced nature alongside modern nature conservation (6). Some of the techniques explored in the book include spectacularization and gigantification. Igoe draws on Lefebvre’s (1991:286) definition of spectacularization as a practice through which “a part of the object and what it offers comes to be taken for the whole” (11). And following Slater (2002:220), he explains gigantification as a process “whereby a selected fragment comes not just to represent, but to erase the larger whole to which it belongs” (11). Igoe wields these theoretical tools to explain how contemporary nature becomes detached from the lifeworlds of people who share those very landscapes. This is a nuanced and important argument that leads Igoe to explore alternative political strategies that have more to do with imagination and collective action than with employing the tools of capital for so-called mutual benefit.

The first three chapters carefully explore how tourism and conservation have historically shaped the landscapes of northern Tanzania. Igoe tells the story of Austrian zoologist and conservation icon Bernhard Grzimek, who marketed “affordable” package tours to the Serengeti before there were companies to provide such services. Grzimek believed the demand would spur a tourism industry and vitalize an economic argument for conservation. The book questions the conventional wisdom about tourism by illustrating how the sublime and contemplative associations with nature are internally related to nature’s value as a commodity and a landscape. The book links post-WWII German guilt for the Holocaust with the idea of “escaping” to Africa, where tourists could connect with nature and their true selves. Escape from the mundane existence of the bourgeois experience and finding oneself become an essential part of the nature experience in Africa, part of its universal and exchangeable quality. Igoe introduces readers to the manner in which the popular tourist circuit in East Africa works to conjure a standardized landscape, as a space of translation “through which elements of diverse lifeworlds are turned into circulating and exchangeable forms of representation” (41).

In chapter two, Igoe describes a landscape carved from a colonial district into an ecological unit described by its conservation benefactors as the Maasai Steppe Heartland. The prevalent win-win discourse of community conservation is a technique that helps to conjure landscapes that appear whole, obscuring the ongoing practices of enforced separation. The heartland designates an area with both wildlife and people, connecting two relatively small national parks. It is the “relative smallness” of this space that makes it a “serviceable space of translation. Not only can tourists survey the landscape and have up-close encounters with wildlife, but conservation is also visibly linked with economic development “through an image of happy and prosperous communities” (49). The tourist plays a vital role in connecting the circuits of exchangeable nature by bearing witness to these flourishing projects. Such observations make their way back into abstract formulations of economic and ecological function as linked phenomena. One of the many significant arguments in the book is that tourists’ experiences are often bound up with a belief in “seeing the world to change the world” (59). High-profile tourists and distinguished visitors define a way of being and acting in the world, shaping all tourist expectations and discourses. Through the circulation of images and messages, the act of seeing becomes a form of engagement percolating with a type of global morality. More often than not, these encounters reinforce a belief in the responsibility of tourists and conservationists to teach local people to value wildlife.

The final three chapters of the book build on close observations from northern Tanzania to explore how local landscapes get conjured and reproduced in global forums and spaces. In these chapters, Igoe discusses the Teddy Roosevelt approach to conservation: to “improve upon nature … to serve increasingly beneficial uses” (77). He argues that Roosevelt’s vision was no simple wise-use utilitarian stance. Rather, he believed that the value of nature lay in the mixture of its utility and mystery.

This book draws on Igoe’s long-term engagement with conservation actors and spaces and is a fantastic resource for anyone interested in the relations among conservation, representation, and capitalism. The Nature of Spectacle is theoretically insightful and presents an inventive framework for understanding present entanglements, but also for imagining different futures. It is a significant contribution and essential reading for scholars studying neoliberal conservation, political ecology, and the anthropology of nature.