♪ Music ♪
In this lecture on the foundations of environmental
anthropology, Dr. Eduardo Brondizio first highlights
the modern era in world history as one great global
acceleration in which the use of natural resources and
economic development have increased exponentially.
He traces the history of ideas used to study the
relationship between human culture and environmental
constraints starting with cultural ecology and moving
through ecological anthropology, political ecology,
ethnobiology, and historic and symbolic ecologies.
He notes that these and other related theories
and approaches all deal with complexity
and connectivity and that the temporal
and spatial scope of current change
requires new frameworks for understanding.
He ends with questions about the Anthropocene
and how anthropology and related disciplines
are dealing with the epistemological and moral
tensions inherent in current challenges facing
humans and the environment.
My original plan was to set the stages of today
and I like you to use this figure of the great
acceleration by Will Steffen to talk about the
challenge that we have in terms of understanding
human environmental issues today, right,
I mean we live in a hyper-accelerated time.
Right, so every understanding that we build
about a particular place, and that's changing as
we go, you know, and the tools that we have are
not adapted to capture this kind of change and
interconnections and so this is often my sort of
starting points to talk of how I'm trying to bring
together, you know, the historical legacy of
theories in anthropology and other fields to
confront and to collaborate with others today.
So I put this forward because, you know, of
course we are struggling to understand this
change today, but imagine to understand the
beginning of the great acceleration around the
1940s and 50s and one of the things that, what
I want to do here is give a historical overview of
what we call environmental anthropology today.
It's a genealogy, it's never perfect, you know, and
someone else will tell in a different way, but as to
offer a framework where you could see the, how the
different pieces evolved and why they evolved, right.
The other point that I want to make is that a lot
of what we do today in social-ecological systems,
if you will, has deep roots in anthropology, but
those routes are invisible and I hope they become
clear today as I work through some concepts
and ways of thinking and also, I think for me,
it's a way to reflecting why did we lost that
connection of having such a central place
in understanding human environment issues.
So when I put this, I basically provide a
summary of what Paige did so well here.
So imagine the 1950s and the starting point here
will be Julian Steward's theory of cultural change.
What Steward was trying to do at that point
and that's the origin of cultural ecology
which the term itself comes from his work in
the 30s, but this book formalize a theory and
a methodology that, well became cultural ecology.
Steward was confronting and if you
read this book with the same issues
that Paige was mentioning about.
It's still a legacy of social evolutionism, you know,
and unilinear, thinking about social change within
anthropology included, right, others were proposing
new theories of linear evolution at that time.
You have the over relativism in the sense of,
I'm putting over relativism here in this sense of,
still a highly descriptive place-based understanding
of culture without sort of, I mean I'll mention
some theories of the time, but without sort of
a frame in which to put relativism in relation
to a larger comparative agenda, right.
You have cultural determinism coming from American
anthropology and you have still environmental
determinism coming from, more broadly, many others
fields and you have the beginning of another unilineal
form of evolutionism, which is what their theories
of modernity, so you have Rostow and others in the
post-war, you're starting to think about development
and we continue to use those frameworks today.
We use them all the time when you talk about
under-development, developed, over-developed,
we are using a framework developed during that
period and Steward was, had in that context an
agenda that was both an agenda of thinking about
a method in which we could understand human
environmental relationship in a systematic way
to put it in his words, but also an alternative to how
we see social change and that is a very important
aspect of that period that we tend to disregard.
He was confronting with those same issues as
Paige had mentioned and the same issues that
we are mention today when you talk about poverty.
So what he came and why this book was so
fundamental was that he offered a systematic
methodological approach to understand human
environmental relationship and one that he tried
to move beyond the overarching theories of that
explained everything to an empirical method that
could be used, but is still within a comparative
agenda, so what I put here is a framework in
today's words that in, you're not going to find in
Steward's book, you're going to find a wonderful
narrative of this drawing that I made here, but
what he was trying to do is that to understand
cultural change you need to understand how people
adapt in their particular context to the environment.
And he developed an approach that had on the one
side what he called the cultural core, those features
of a society that are most relevant to understand
how they adapt and relate to the environment.
On the other side he had the environmental
constraints and the key element and the key
concept here was the idea of limiting factors,
right, and I'll come back to that in today's
context of discussion of limiting factors.
And in between, he was concerned with the
elements of behavior and creativity which is a word
that he used all the time of how people organize
themselves and deal with environmental limitations
through technology, and through different forms
of social organization, so he created a frame in
which people could sort of overcome those, the,
what came before any of the legacy of overarching
theories and theories that, you know, we're not
going to, I mean, Paige did a great job covering them,
to a methodology and an empirical methodology.
Well I mention about multi-linear evolution, but
so what he, in his words, what he was interested
on was to move away from that, you know, sort
of highly deterministic pathway and look at, you
know, how different aspects of different societies
and cultures may evolve and may have similarities
and may follow some patterns, but not necessarily
in any particular sequence and when you look back
into, you know, if you look into the testing of
all the social evolutionist types of theories, they
could not explain diversity over time or diversity
over space, so there was already a pretty strong
need for other ways of thinking about how do
we explain, how do we understand diversity.
So coming back in a very simple way what he was
trying to do was, you know, a general methodology
and I tried to put here in very simple terms, right,
describe and analyze the relationships between
productive technology and particular environments,
pay attention to that he was telling you, you know,
as you go to a place pay attention to that.
Describe behavioral patterns or elements of social
organization that are key to understand how people link
to the environment and understand their relationships
of how one particular pattern of social organization
influence or response to environmental constraints
influence other parts of society, so he said that
kind of framework apply to a very localized context.
He was interested in understanding the reality
on the ground, how people deal with those
things and what can we learn from comparative
perspective if we sort of follow the systemic ways
of thinking, so I put more text here, but just to
illustrate how in that book he outlines what is
not very different today when we think about,
you know, sort of training his students, so pick
your specific question, don't try to explain
everything and try to generalize for everything.
Think about your problem, what problem you're
interested on, you're going to pay attention to
particular issues if you pay attention to those
problems, define what are the relevant issues for
us to understand in relation to that problem, both
from the environmental side and from the social
side try to outline what kinds of relationships
you see between those elements and so forth,
you know, possible causalities, historical context,
and then he had an element which is I think
that one of the most interesting components
of that and the most disregarded, I say, which
was what he called levels of social integration.
What he was trying to do at that time was a
sketches of a theory complexity in which he
could put, he works a lot with very small units
in the Great Plains with families in very small
band groups and his idea of levels of social
integration was an idea of understanding
how individual units, social units are,
become part of large complex societies.
It was a project that I'll come back tomorrow
when I talk about my own research that was
largely abandoned for many reasons, the project
of understanding complex and he's not the only
one, there are many fronts in anthropology that
were between the 50s and the 70s trying to grasp
and define a, sort of a theory of complexity which
has been sort of put in the background because
of many, many debates within anthropology and
other issues and I may come back to that tomorrow.
But here's where you see when he tried
to apply his method both at a local level
and explain complex society and this is
another one of the most fascinating, I think,
chapters in anthropology that is forgot.
The Peoples of Puerto Rico Project that project
was an idea in which, very much we do it
today, right, work as a team, the team has a
common goal, we each go to a different site, we
collect our work, and we come back together
to integrate those sites into an understanding
of a complex society, in this case Puerto Rico.
So here's the cover of the book and that book had
perhaps one of the most influential generations
of anthropologists up to very recently, right, and
I sort of put the photo of Sid Mintz there, who
was one of the ethnographers of that period.
One of these students and one of the links
between the boys in anthropology and
today; he passed away in November.
And Sidney Mintz was part of that team.
What that team and here's the first turn that I
want you, to start to get you to understand of
the first two turns that develop on what we call
environmental anthropology today, which are,
actually I should have mentioned about the
terminology, but I'll get to that at the end.
His group on the one side were studying societies
that were basically colonial societies, right,
these were a colonial enterprise of monoculture
and control of labor and everything else, right.
What Mintz and Eric Wolf and others, you
start to look at was that explanation of culture
ecology, the framing of an environment, social
organization, technology, was you could explain
some things with it, you could explain localized
patterns, but you wouldn't, couldn't capture
the role of those external forces that actually
shaped the relationship of a particular place.
So Steward was coming, of course in a place
already influenced by a lot of that on the Great
Plains, but, you know, much less visible I guess
political economic context, which was not possible
to ignore in Puerto Rico; that provides the
foundation for the emergence of political ecology
and for that turn that starts to happen through
the 1960s and takes place during the 1970s.
So, you know, there's a major shift here,
if you're sort of following my logic here.
Now the first big reaction was not political
ecology, was what became known as ecological
anthropology and I'll step back here to talk
about terminology cause we use environmental
anthropology today as a term that is no older
than 1994, '93 or so and it has to do in part
with their response of anthropologists work on
environmental issues, maybe in the U.S., to
the fragmentation of the feud in trying to find an
umbrella that was not ecological anthropology
and I will tell why that would be inclusive of the
full range of anthropology of the environment
taking place, so it was a very strategic move and
it led to the Anthropology and Environment section
of the American Anthropological Association;
there are particular individuals that were very
important in bringing that conciliatory approach
to what I call an umbrella instead of lines that
had particular theoretical orientations, so the
term became popular after the 1990s in a way that,
in it's becoming inclusive, right, now ecological
anthropology is still largely used in many places
and sometimes with the same idea of being inclusive
of what we do in terms of human environmental
anthropology, right, human ecology is often
used as another label for the inclusiveness of
the field and to respect the diversity of the field.
In cultural ecology, it's still used in many ways,
sort of in a inclusive way more than what it
refers to Steward's cultural ecology, right.
In geography, for instance, geography has a
very strong field of cultural ecology and it has
sort of different debates or sort of, you know,
different perspective than when we think
about cultural ecology in anthropology.
But ecological anthropology was a different turn and
the turn here was not as much a turn and actually
the opposite of a turn to the attention to the political
economy, but an actual attention to the ecology.
So, and I'll show text right after this, so what
you have is that the term ecosystem and the
use of the framework of ecosystem is start to
become a frame to understand in both to bring
anthropology to a conversation with biology,
and we see evolutionary theory, and a way
of looking into the environment in a more
detailed way to put it simply, right, so you have
of course the ecosystem ecology itself from
Odum and others being, serving as the frame,
you have important readings of, like Clifford
Geertz's book which is a wonderful book, it's
sort of an ecosystem reading of the history of
Indonesia, it's a beautiful book, but using the
consistence as a frame to explain the different
types of productions and types of interactions
with the environment in that particular region.
And you have a paper which I believe is a
chapter in fact, in which Andrew Vayda and
Roy Rappaport present an alternative to cultural
ecology and they call it Ecology, Cultural and
Non-cultural, you know, I'll get to this in a second.
Now one of the seminal works of that time is
Roy Rappaport's Pigs for the Ancestors; it's a
beautiful book; it's one of the most, perhaps
the most criticized work in anthropology
and he spent the last, his last 20 years, but
the next 20 years responding to criticism
about anthropology and I'll get to that
in a second on the implications for that.
But it's such a beautiful work in which it brings a
cultural ecology perspective on the one way and
ecosystem perspective this sort of systemic thinking
about flows of resources and energy and material
in nature with, in connection with the social and
ritual institutions in which societies sort of, in which
that particular assembly, group frame and mediate
and orient their relationship with, in this case,
with the particular, you know, the use of the
ecosystem, the vegetation, and the population
of pigs and how that enters into their culture
repertoire; I'm not going to get into that, but
it's a seminal work which actually did, with all
its flaws and defenses, what a lot of us try to
do today to bring the symbolic and the religious
to the core of understanding relationships
with the environment, but that's to another
discussion and as I said he spent the last,
the next 20 years just responding to that.
Now here are elements of ecological anthropology;
I just put this a little bit in more detail and then I'll pass,
faster to other phases because of the nature of this
group because I don't want to see, you know, sort
of the relationship between the language you use in
social-ecological systems analysis today to that period
and to the way those things were framed in that
period, so in that paper they mention ecology rather
than cultural ecology, right, anthropology needs to
connect to general ecology, develop a single science
of ecology that applies to humans, so they're really
trying to really get into the evolutionary thinking
in a way that it was inclusive of social system.
Looking into, you know, other components that
have been ignored - genetics and behavior - or at
least framing those questions and a number of other
elements that are there, I'm not going to repeat,
where they try to frame the study of societies and
cultures from the perspective of an evolutionary, an
ecosystem-based ecology, right, including changing
the units of analysis which is a very interesting
part of the work of shifting in terms of how you
define social units in a way that it aligns with the
definitions that are ecological definitions of units.
So I'm not going to go into that, what I want to
mention is that it brought, it create and brought
all those terms from ecosystem ecology and
then developed new terms that are central
for how we think today about social-ecological
systems analysis and how we frame, in fact,
today's social-ecological systems and that.
You know, so, of course systems, ecosystem
structures in a whole variety of languages that
relate to adaptation, so that's what I, you know,
sort of didn't highlight enough both in cultural
ecology and here adaptation from the perspective
of looking at feedbacks, it's sort of the central core
that people try to understand systems and feedbacks
and develop the language and a structure to do
that, so what you see, I just picked few examples
is the rise in abuse and misuse, and everything else,
but also really interesting frames of system thinking
and the way in which you could understand those
relationships by thinking about it as a system of
exchange of energy, material, and information.
What that led to, it of course the beginning,
of, you know, computer systems, system
thinking, so it's sort of a create the frame in
which you can understand things as a system
and, you know, allowed many kinds of productive
engagement productive interpretations of systems
of agriculture of all kinds of, you know, households,
you know, sort of framings in which you could
understand pieces and feedbacks and so forth.
Now that led to a number of other problems
because of the overuse or the isolation of that
kind of system thinking from the political context
and the social context in which things happen,
right, so Ben Orlove has this wonderful paper;
it's still today with very useful to understand all
this history where he highlights the drawbacks of
that period, right, the functional fallacy, I mean
the interrelationships of everything as it, as in a
closed, you know, system; the reductionism of the,
ecological reductionism of social processes, right,
into exchanges of energy and material and so forth.
The over emphasis on, in energetics; everything
was accounted in terms of calories, right.
The local population or the closedness of the
system as if independent of everything else
that happens or shape that system and the
timescale those, you know, usually getting a
very synchronic, very limited timescale of
how something is functioning in a closed way.
There's a lot of that, from that period that still
informs how we think about those things today.
Now the other element, of course, and I'll
have, probably move faster here is that political
economic turn and Paige will pick up on that
and, you know, talk about other turns within
the political ecology itself, but the basic idea
here is that the questions that were framing in
the way it was sort of framing the understanding
of local populations and adaptation was one that
paid attention to the dynamics of external political
and economic, the dynamics of control of resources,
the dynamics of control of access and a number of
other processes in which ownership is transmitted
and negotiated, right, and that in institutions
arise and that defines, you know, how populations
are organized and respond to environmental issues.
So the term political ecology comes from
much earlier in fact, but it's used in the
way we use today, a lot of it, you know,
refers to the paper that if you remember
in all the genealogy, Eric Wolf's frame in a
workshop, it's a really interesting paper because
it has political ecology in the title and doesn't
talk about political ecology at all in the paper.
What it talks about is inheritance, ownership,
external control of resources, mainly in the Alps,
which is a workshop related to that particular
period, so a fascinating little, little piece, but
the whole idea here was that, you know, you
had world system theory, sort of, you know, is
strong in the 60s, you had dependence theory
emerging, you had a, basically an attention to
put it very quickly, the political economy that
shape people's relationships to the environment.
There's another underlying current here that
is very important then and today; it has at the
same time a parallel development and at the
same time an intrinsic development that starts
with cultural ecology and that is ethnobiology,
broadly speaking, if you take ethnobotany
you're going to start to see ethnobotany from
the end of the 19th century; ethnobiology
started to be framed as such in the 1950s
and the tension here is on how people think
about the environment, you know, in which
ways language in the frame, the invisible
cognitive frame that we have, shape the way
we understand nature and there are many
turns, many turns on this that we do not have
time to cover here and also, you know, how we
brought the scientific methodology to interpret
how people think and the drawbacks of that, but
the basic idea here was, you know, rethinking
local knowledge and how what people know
about the environment in their own terms and
actually unpacking that as a more sophisticated
knowledge than we bring to the picture and here's
I bring Herald Conklin passed away not even
three weeks ago, right, he was the other linker
that shaped the way we think about those things
today, so Herald Conklin's seminal work, I mean
you can talk a lot about how this, you know,
how you bring linguistics to this and, you know,
the other historical turns there, but what
I'm going to highlight is the, you know, that
important work on shifting cultivation because
I think it brings both that dimension of cognition,
it also brings the political dimension of how
we understand people in productive systems.
In that particular work what he does is to show
the sophistication of shifting cultivation systems,
the productiveness of shifting cultivation systems,
and the complexity of knowledge that goes into that.
It still today provides fuel for us to fight the
criminalization of shifting cultivation; it still
today provides us the elements to say, you know,
the bias that we bring to interpret production
systems that do not fit into the modernization
terms of what we think is productive systems.
But the point here is that you start having,
you know, sort of these areas of specialization
that start to emerge usually and that's a
problem that we can discuss in coming days as
a reaction to what has not been covered before
rather than a complementarity of oh we need
to look at this too, right, that's another issue.
The other reaction, it starts during the 1980s,
there's a lot more in between here; I didn't talk
about cultural materialism and other, you know,
sort of frames just because we don't have
time, I want to offer a general framework
for it to think how all those fields evolved.
The other important reaction was what we call
today historical ecology which starts in the 1980s
and the basic tenets here was, I mean there are
many tenets here, but one of the basic tenets
here is that the idea that the environment
has limiting factors, is not valid per se.
Human creativity can shape those limiting
factors in our favor and there's not a single
place on earth that we are subjected to that
kind of limitation, so it changed the cultural
ecology idea of limiting factors as a non-issue
which is another stretch that we can discuss.
It put a long-term perspective in understanding
human-environment and understanding
environment itself and it takes a very much a
landscape perspective to look into relationships,
not a localized bounded social group perspective,
so to put it very simple it, you know, it has been
very influential in many ways in part because it
allows us to rethink the ideas of pristinity and the
ideas of conservation in which you see the kind of
separation of environments that have not been
affected by humans, so it really paved the way for
the way we can, we discuss conservation today
and the way we discuss the role of indigenous
and local communities in conservation today, and
many other - there're interesting debates behind
all those things that we can elaborate later.
Then the other turn and I'm just sort
of putting a piece of it, was, actually to
rethink the whole thing in a way in which,
you know, relook and thinking reflexively
about our frame of reference as one
frame of reference and even the way we
understand what we call the environment,
what we call different compartments
of the environment, and the separation
between humans and non-humans as
one particular frame of reference, so
he brought along with other works, I'm
just putting some examples that I think
speak very, recent and they speak very,
very directly to this group, but it brought
a different way in which we think about
the so-called culture-nature divide, right.
Trying to break those ideas as a construct
in itself, it can be productive, it can or not,
but to put, you know, a perspective in which
we need to pay attention to the way others
think and look about the environment and
that will help us to understand how and why
people behave in a particular way, right.
Here's one of the papers that I think
Paige mentioned before, which is seminal,
I mean this work, it's heavy reading, but
Mary Strathern's work with the, with this,
I forgot the name of the group, the Hagen.
It's a fascinating reading about their blurry of
divisions between what is the domestic, what's
nature, what's cultural, what's nature and of
course the relationship with the way they think
about gender and other issues, but the point here
is that you have this other reaction of bringing
the symbolic into the picture in its own turn, right,
again mostly as a reaction of previous perspective,
so what we have is and I think that's, you know,
the way I look into environmental anthropologists
both as trying to be very inclusive about all those
perspectives including the ways people write, the
way people think about that, but also being very
critical about the avoidance or the, you know,
sort of the lack of a synthesis, the lack of looking
into the interrelations of those pieces, and what is
interesting is that we, in one way or another, we've
we're dealing with every piece of the equation, but
we haven't managed to put them together, yet.
And that's interesting because if you look at the
efforts of what social ecological systems mean,
it's a way of putting things together, right,
and that has been happening and I have a slide
about it I guess, has been happening in a very
broad and large field in which anthropologists
contribute to, but are not central to, and that's
the puzzle that gets many of us sort of, you know,
and many times irritated or many times sort
of frustrated with the, you know, the ability to
look at all those different parts, but the inability
to come together to think about the theoretical
synthesis or re-engage in that conversation again.
So, you know, a lot of that story has been one of and
I use just few terms that I think are very telling of this.
Rappaport he wrote, you know, appendices through
the, his book that are this big just responding to
specific criticism, but the ideas that he talks about,
you know, the rise and demise of knowledge that
happens in anthropology and Eric Wolf when, in
actually writing out eulogy of Roy Rappaport.
He used what I think is a fantastic way of
summarizing the project of intellectual deforestation
that marks a lot of this development which is too, in
each one of those responses, you sort of try to ignore
or erase or actually really undermine the perspectives
that are coming before, in favor of getting a new
face, or getting a new way of looking into that.
James Acheson has a wonderful review about
anthropology of fishing, very early 1980s and
he talks about these clubs and, you know, the
debate about the lack of a theoretical umbrella
that, you know, I think Monique really brought
that up earlier and I would say I think what we
have is an arrested project, right, a project
in which, you know, if you, I read a lot about
the history of complexity today and I'm
engaged in a project and a book about this.
You look at the terms that, well Steward, Marvin
Harris, a number of other people at that time,
they were using terminology and concepts that
today you see rewritten in complex systems
thinking or rewritten in Giddens' structuration
theory, so it's a really interesting genealogy that
has been lost over the long-term because of many,
many positive and negative, and negative ways.
One other aspect of it and we could, you know, have
a whole other thing just about the methodologies
of this whole period is that the 1980s you start to
confront a situation that none of those approaches
are sufficient to deal with and as it is today, right,
I mean the complex of connectivity, the pace
of change, the idea, you know, the force of the
global over local just creates a different kind of
problems in which are, we are very handicapped
in terms of methodologies, so we've engaged in
a variety of responses to that and that's beyond
anthropology, but many of that, usually what you
have are narrative frames to capture a particular
process, right, so we have, you know, if you look
at, mainly related to globalization, so you look at
the end of the 1980s, you know, have Appadurai's
frame which are number of narrative concepts to
try to grasp with the complex of things, and I could
give examples like a lot of narrative frame examples,
that they are, they offer a way of understanding
and then they hit the ceiling because they don't offer
actual frame for a study and then you hit a ceiling
and then you go to the next term or to the next
concept that will help to capture that complexity.
Now in parallel, everyone else is trying to do it,
in many different ways, right, and what happened
is that what you have is the rise of frameworks
and frameworks here become meta-theoretical
tools of theoretical perspectives as some people
write, so they are both a media of collaboration,
a way of bringing pieces together, a place for a
conversation and a way in which you conceptualize
those complexes; every single one of them have
advantages and disadvantages, depends to the
problem that you bring, but I'm putting this here
in part to say, you know, what we have to offer
as anthropology could be very central to this
debate, but ourselves we have been limited in
engaging in a conversation of synthesis that would
provide that interface with all this interactions.
The Anthropocene debate comes and I have a
paper on the, on this issue coming this week;
if it arrives, I'll share with you which is a revision
of the debates of the Anthropocene and mainly
touching on what I think is the most important
contribution of this debate, which are the
epistemological and moral tensions of it.
What happened is that and the way you can frame
it is these tensions can serve as a way of stimulating
conversation and actually deal with the really
difficult issues that we haven't been able to deal
with or can be another way of segmentation, it
depends how people, how we are responding to it.
This paper deals exactly with that issue,
it's coming in global environmental change.
The value of this is that it has really touched
on, you know, the core issues and it's an
opportunity for us to engage on the difference
of the core issues to be able to unpack and
move forward in I think in a productive way.
So to close, remember the idea, this is a keynote,
that I gave last year called A Cultural Ecology of
the Anthropocene and there was a play with the
history in the Anthropocene, but if you think about
the Anthropocene debate today, it's a cultural ecology
frame at a global scale, right, so if you think about,
you know, the sustainable development goals as
the cultural core, right, the planetary boundaries,
which is another can of worms to discuss and
really interesting concept to discuss becomes
the limiting factors that we're discussing ago.
Now a much more complicated story in between that
we didn't have at that time, but the point that I want
to make here is that we are at a turning point where
the conversation can go in many ways, it can go into
specialization and fragmentation or whatever you
want to put it, it can go into a different challenge of
synthesis that I think is an opportunity that we have.
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