Daou V. Joiris and Cédric Vermeulen present two sides of the debate over the place of indigenous relationships to the land in forest conservation. Joiris argues that local peoples' perceptions and use of land must be considered in the forest management decision-making process. Vermeulen attempts to quantify the land used by local peoples, and determine a figure representative of the land necessary for their subsistence, that can be used when making land conservation decisions. The issues that Joiris and Vermeulen raise deal with "terroir," a multifaceted French word that remains difficult to translate into English. In The State in Africa: The politics of the belly, Jean-François Bayart defines terroir broadly as a "time-space, whose adjustment is problematic and always precarious." Bayart's translator notes that terroir is a historical term dating from 1960.1 Joiris and Vermeulen view terroir as a more concrete concept, yet one that is still difficult to define. In Joiris's article, terroirs coutumiers is translated as "customary lands," and terroirs villageois as "village lands." Vermeulen's terroirs villageois is translated as "villager lands," while his use of terroir is often rendered as "cultivated land." In his article, Vermeulen adheres to the definition of terroir given by Karsenty and Marie in 1997.2 Regardless of the intricacies of terroir, both Joiris and Vermeulen emphasize that further study needs to be done in the respective areas: villager opinion and lifestyle, and actual land usage.

Vermuelen attempts to take a more scientific approach to villager land use with the formation of a "spatial occupation index" that measures the amount of land necessary for village subsistence. He ascertains the plasticity of spatial occupation, under the influence of internal dynamics (such as demography and social structure) and external factors (such as new cultures and colonial administration). In the past century, he argues, villagers' forest use has increased to a point of over-exploitation, a trend that affirms conservationist limitations on villager forest use. He wonders about the legitimacy of possible village "territorial" claims corresponding to the space where hunting activities on sometimes important distances take place, all the more so as he judges that the cynegetic exploitation run by villagers does not correspond to "sustainable" management in the conservation sense of the word.

Joiris remarks that certain conservation projects impose on the villager a sort of "complete nature" in banning hunting in the zones where it usually occurred with consequences (such as pillaging of animals, insecurity of persons, over-exploitation of certain zones) that directly affect the local village economy. Joiris argues for greater consideration of human concerns in forest conservation. Her discussion focuses on the issue of land access and tenure, which are fundamental to "communities whose economies depend primarily on forest resources."

Joiris explores customary lands, subsistence production, and political power within central African forest economy villages. She contends that the forest needs of villages have been ignored because of both lack of research and direct political oversight, in favor of non-village hunting and logging concerns. Because land management systems directly impact villagers' use of the forests, and affect their relationship to conservationists, "it is necessary that these land management strategies be conceived and demarcated in a manner that allows local people to use the environment according to their perceptions of nature and their subsistence needs." Joiris affirms that "the village lands correspond to the vital space of the village" and that the "vast areas permit the local economies to exploit rationally the environment, alternating the exploitation zones along rotation systems" including hunting zones. She introduces-beyond the question of equity-the argument of "rational" management of the environment to plead the extension of the zone where the villagers may hunt and lead different agricultural activities.

The difference in outlook of the two authors comes from a divergent appreciationof the impacts of village hunting: for Joiris, "rational" (therefore sustainable)management of the environment bound to the spatial and temporal movement of the activities; for Vermeulen, sampling as required in the societies that havehardly confronted the situations requiring managing the scarcity of fauna or testingthe limits of their ecosystem. The two authors come together to envisage the extension-in the measure possible-as a means of "continued expansion" regulation (Vermeulen), or a more stable rotation system (Joiris).

Conservation, like the classification of production forests, poses the problems of the introduction of an exclusive "territorial" dimension and of the appearance of limits where this question was not asked before. At stake is the distribution of the rights to the space between different actors: the State, businesses (limits of concessions), conservation projects, and peasant farmers. In Cameroon, this territorial question is coupled with a financial stake through the sharing of a part of the forest taxation: the more the villages can "claim" a vast customary space "belonging to them," the more they increase their share of taxes collected. Ideally, the regulation could apply to the definition and details of the exercise of rights (cf. the notion of controls) rather than to a simple distri-bution of territory. Vermeulen evokes this indirectly when he talks about the possibilities of "contractualising" the activities beyond the limited space of cultivated village land. But this question interests neither the Governments nor the conservation programs, which are more preoccu-pied by the definition of their own exclusive zones. And the affirmation of the exclusivity of one side mechanically leads to a symmetrical affirmation of the other: naming the "forest of the State" clarifies "our forest." Will resource management benefit from this division? The early stages of the process of classification of the forest planning units (UFA-unités forestières d'aménagement) in Cameroon should give us some elements of response. It would be desirable for researchers to follow and analyze this process to examine the consequences of this "institutional innovation" upon social connections and modes of management and appropriation of the territory of forest zone populations.

1 J.F. Bayart, The State in Africa: The politics of the belly, New York: Longman Publishing, 1993 (260-1).

2 Cultivated land [terroir]: Group of lands subjected to cycles of cultivation (including fallows and new-growth forest), divided into assigned geometric lots; the portion of a circumscribed land where the logic of land occupation prevails (Karsenty and Marie, 1997).