Читать книгу Ecosystem Crises Interactions - Merrill Singer - Страница 33

All societies through time and location must contend with the opportunities and challenges presented by their environments. This requires the development of environmental knowledge and sustaining social practices. Failure to overcome challenges can lead to social collapse, leading in turn to reversion to less complex social organizations that put fewer demands on environmental resources. Failure can also lead to obliteration and complete depopulation. A case of social collapse and simplification is seen in Classic Mayan society. The indicators of this collapse are found in the archeological record, most notably in the abandonment of Maya cities like Palenque, Copán, Tikal, and Calakmulin, located in the southern Maya lowlands of Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico, which were left to be swallowed up by the re‐expansion of surrounding forests between the 8th and 9th centuries. After the collapse, there was a significant decline in large‐scale architectural construction in the area, though Mayan communities continued to persist in the southern lowlands and Mayan people still inhabit the region today. There has been considerable debate among archeologists about the causes of the collapse of Classic Mayan society. Suggested reasons include a growth of population that could not be supported by the local environment given Mayan farming technology, epidemics that decimated the population, military conflict between competing city‐states, deforestation, loss of plant and animal biodiversity, and catastrophic environmental events, such as climate change and intense drought (Hodell et al. 1995; Webster et al. 2007). Some of these factors may have been connected. War, for example, can be driven by the demand for environmental resources, while deforestation can lead to a loss of biodiversity (Durham 1976; Giam 2017). It is likely that the knowledge and practices needed to meet the environmental challenges faced by the heavily populated city‐states of Classical Mayan society were inadequate, and that this played an important role in the collapse. This example underlines the importance of investigating a society’s environmental knowledge/beliefs and their practical utility and contribution to sustainability in the encounter with environment opportunities and threats and changing conditions.

Robert Paine (2005, p. 280), coiner of the ecosystem concept “keynote species,” proposed that:

ecology with its roots in “natural history,” whether that was stalking prey, keeping special mushroom (e.g., morel or truffle) sites secret, or the best spots to fish, was initially an individualistic endeavor. Deep knowledge of parts of the natural world was a requisite for survival.

However, precisely because it is a requisite for survival, deep knowledge of the natural world has always been social, not individual, as humans have survived as a species from our origin into the present because we live in interactive and mutually supportive groups.

Eriksen & Adams (2010, p. 1) note that various “terms have been used to describe the collective environmental knowledge and the shared cultural resource practices of indigenous peoples, including indigenous environmental knowledge, traditional ecological knowledge, and ethnoecology.” Hardesty (1977, p. 291) defines ethnoecology, for example, as “the systems of knowledge developed by a given culture to classify the objects, activities, and events of its universe.” Brosius et al. (1986, p. 187) bifurcate indigenous knowledge into two categories:

On the one hand, there is knowledge that is inherited from generation to generation and is generally shared by most of the members of the society. This cultural information is often passed on as folk wisdom in the context of folktales or is preserved and transmitted in the context of rituals and various religious ceremonies. The second category includes information gained through individual experience‐empirical observations made by individual[s] … during the course of [life] activities. The two categories of indigenous knowledge are not mutually exclusive. Information collected by an individual may become knowledge that is shared by members of the group through time.

There is then in cultural environmental knowledge an ongoing flow of information between individuals in a social group, some of which over time is inscribed into the cultural repertoire of the group and is transmitted to new generations as agreed upon reality. It should be stressed that not all knowledge in a group is equally or fully shared, as there may be some that is mostly retained by subgroups (e.g., traditional healers, mothers) within the wider society (e.g., knowledge about plants used to make traditional medicines, how to prepare them, and where they can be found). Moreover, traditional knowledge about the environment may contain entities not recognized by outsiders, such as spiritual beings and sacred places.

Human knowledge of the environment is conditioned by language and the ability to have complex thoughts entwined with memories, values, and cultural norms. Consequently, environmental perceptions are filtered through cultural perceptions. This point is emphasized by Vayda & Rappaport (1968) in the distinction they draw between the “operational environment,” which they define as the sum total of all environmental features, whether or not they are locally comprehended, and the “cognized environment,” which is the environment as it is perceived and understood within a social group. Notably, some features of an operational environment may affect a group even if its members are unaware of their existence (e.g., pathogens, disease vectors, climate change). Because of cultural filtering, people of different cultural backgrounds can view the same operational environment differently.

The study of indigenous environmental knowledge has a long history. One of the earliest efforts was conducted by Carl Linnaeus, the renowned 18th‐century Swedish botanist, zoologist, and physician, and the creator of the binomial system we still use to give species their Latin names (e.g., Homo sapiens). While in his mid‐20s, Linnaeus undertook a field study of the indigenous Sami of northern Sweden. The primary motivations for his six‐month foray by foot, boat, and horseback to the northernmost Swedish province of Lapland were to discover new plants and animals and, if possible, find valuable minerals like silver, copper, and iron. At the same time, he was curious about the lifestyle and customs of the native Sami people, a reindeer‐herding society of semi‐nomads who traditionally followed their livestock across the tundra‐covered areas of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia in search of available grazing foods like mosses and lichen. Based on his journey, Linnaeus described about 100 formerly unidentified plants and wrote about them in his book, Flora Lapponica (Frängsmyr et al. 1983). In his grant application to the Royal Scientific Society, he described his interest in studying the plants of Lapland but additionally, if vaguely, noted that he also hoped to learn about the plant‐based home remedies used by the Sami and what kinds of food they resorted to in times of scarcity. In fact, Linnaeus had numerous questions he hoped to answer about the Sami, including ones concerning their common foods and means of food acquisition, material culture (including housing, clothing, and handicraft), and belief system.

In the early days of his expedition, Linnaeus met a schoolteacher, Per Fjellström, who had learned the Sami language and gave him a long list of Sami names for plants, mammals, birds, and fish, a clear indicator that the Sami were quite acquainted with the other species with which they shared their environment, garnered from their past and ongoing empirical observations. Based on his time among them, Linnaeus was able to describe elements of the technologies the Sami constructed from their environment and used to survive in it. His writings provided systematic information about their sewn boats (used in fishing by forest‐dwelling communities), their clothing, some of the traps they used to catch squirrels and forest birds, the harnesses they used with their reindeer when traveling with sledges, and their huts, tents, and storage structures. Moreover,

he had ample opportunity to study the reindeer. He saw whole herds; saw how scared the animals were of the gadfly and what these insects did to their skins. He saw the milking of reindeer cows and the castration of bulls and watched one or two slaughterings … He also noted down different Sami words to denote the reindeer according to their age. He [also] got information about the tanning of leather [using tree bark].

(Zorgdrager 2008, p. 62)

While not a rigorous ethnography by today’s standards, Linnaeus’ account of the ecology of the Sami suggests both Sami ken awareness of their surroundings and their diverse interactions with the biotic and abiotic components therein. Lacking, however, is a textured holistic picture of Sami understanding of their world and its biotic and abiotic makeup; that is, their indigenous, norm‐ and value‐laden map of reality.

The earliest (and most of the subsequent) systematic research on indigenous environmental knowledge was conducted by anthropologists. This occurred because of the turn toward a field‐based orientation in the disciple. Anthropologists began adopting an extended fieldwork approach in the early 20th century. This development is generally credited to the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who advocated that to understand another society it was necessary to live among its people in their traditional setting, learn their language, engage them in constant dialogue and increasingly informed interviewing, and participate to the degree possible in their everyday activities. While other anthropologists had spent time in the field before him, as Wax (1972, p. 3) asserts, Malinowski’s research among the Trobriand Islanders of the western Pacific during the years 1916–1918 “yielded a series of epochal volumes which revolutionized the content and practice of anthropology.”

As part of this transition, anthropologists came to distinguish inside and outsider viewpoints, labeling them the emic and etic points of view, respectively. These terms were introduced by the linguist Pike (1967), who derived them from the suffixes of the linguistic concepts “phonemic” and “phonetic,” the former referring to any sound unit of significance in a particular language and the latter to the system of notations scholars use to represent these vocal sounds (McCutcheon 1999). An earlier but related advance by anthropology was the embrace of cultural relativism as a foundational axiom. This is the idea that the beliefs, values, norms, and behaviors of the people anthropologists study in the field should be understood in terms of their own culture, rather than be judged against criteria developed by another, different culture—a position often attributed to the writings of Franz Boaz (1887).

Concerned with understanding the emic perspective, and aware of the critical role of language in this endeavor, some anthropologists began to inquire about indigenous labeling and classification of plants and animals in the local environment, and discovered extensive assemblages of environment knowledge among indigenous people. Exemplary is the work of the British/Australian social anthropologist Ralph Bulmer. Based on his ethnographic research among the Karam, a horticultural tribe living in Kaironk Valley in highland New Guinea, Bulmer (1974, p. 12) found “a vast knowledge concerning the integration of the plant and animal communities—of the topographic, soil and climatic conditions required by wild as well as cultivated plants, of the kinds of plants and their parts which provide food or refuge for different kinds of animals, of which animals prey upon which other animals, of the role of birds and mammals in the propagation and dispersal of certain plants.” Similarly, the American anthropologist Douglas Oliver (1989, pp. 275–276), writing in detail about the food and food‐getting activities of indigenous island‐dwellers in the Pacific, concluded that:

behind their various practices of gardening, gathering, fishing, and hunting were rich accumulations of factual knowledge about the plants and animals they produced or otherwise obtained—knowledge not just about the individual items they produced or obtained, [but] necessarily, about the ways those items were interrelated with other aspects of the physical environment … [Moreover] it would be a mistake to conclude that Islanders’ knowledge of their plant and animal universe was limited to it relevance to eating, or to apparel, or shelter, or ornamentation, or medicine, or to other practical uses alone … [They] did not close their eyes and ears to the living things around them simply if the latter served no practical value.

The latter point is also emphasized by Van Der Ploeg & Van Weerd (2010, p. 127) in noting that in their research among the Agta of the Northern Sierra Madre Natural Park area of the Philippines, they found that “[i]ndigenous knowledge of birds is not limited to economically important species, as is often assumed. Agta hunters are familiar with most discernible species.”

While anthropologists like these recognized that the cultures of different societies label and group the elements of nature differently, as exemplified by the many more words for types of snow among the Inuit people of Canada than are to found in standard English, as asserted by Boaz (1911), they took it for granted that material components of the environment existed independent of culture. In short, “‘[c]ultures’ may differ, but nature does not … People see the world in different ways, but the world is still the world” (Heywood 2017). At the turn of the 21st century, however, some anthropologists began to question this bedrock assumption—a shift in perspective that has been labeled the “ontological turn” (Viveiros de Castro 2004; Pedersen 2011; Holbraad 2012). This approach, while critiquing the etic perspective (which subordinates the insider perspective to the conceptions of the outside observer), and asserting that anthropology has not been sufficiently culturally relativist in its accounts of other peoples, “proposes that worlds, as well as worldviews, may vary” (Heywood 2017). Heywood (2017) provides a clarifying example. If, during fieldwork, a member of the group an anthropologist is studying says that that the tree they are pointing to is really a spirit, should the anthropologist record this as a cultural belief? To do so, Heywood maintains, violates the individual’s view that the object in question is a spirit, not that they believe it to be a spirit: “Calling it a belief, as a number of anthropologists writing before the ontological turn have pointed out, is both to mislabel it and to call it mistaken without actually saying so” (Heywood 2017). I encountered this problem during research in Haiti when a man I was talking to, a houngan sur pwen (lower‐level male priest) in the Vodun tradition, told me that at night he turns into a bicycle and spies on his enemies. To interpret this statement as a belief, from the vantage of the ontological turn, when to my interlocker it was a statement of fact, could only be achieved by imposing my understanding of reality on to his understanding of reality.

The ontological turn, if it gained wide adherence within the discipline, would constitute a radical paradigm shift on the scale of a scientific revolution, including with regard to how we think about nature, interspecies interaction, and the human place in the world. But, as a fair number of anthropologists have pointed out, there are grave problems with it. Bessire & Bond (2014, p. 446) argue that:

ontological anthropology is incapable of accounting for those disruptive beings [e.g., mining, petroleum, and logging company executives and other polluting elites] and things [e.g., industrial toxins, rising sea levels and planetary temperatures, disease vectors] that travel between ontologies. Today, it is not only pollution but also logging, mining, agriculture, and oil extraction that routinely impinge on the premier sites of ontology. Ontological anthropology avoids recognizing such confrontations, in part, by pressing all analysis of materiality ever further into sacred materials

An indigenous interlocutor may know a tree is a spirit, but that will not stop a logging company from cutting it down, slicing it into boards, and shipping it overseas to build structures in a wealthy country. Nor will it change the fact that the loss of such spirits/trees fuels climate change, which is now causing droughts and killing large stretches of rainforest. Moreover, are we to accept as a credible reality the statement by Donald Trump—one echoed by many like‐minded politicians and conservative think tank writers and spokespersons who are members of the tribe of climate change deniers—that “Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!” (quoted in Schulman 2017)? While advocates of the ontological turn are correct in demanding that we be mindful in writing about the realities of other peoples as well as the limits of all truth claims, there are severe costs to not striving for an objective understanding of the environment.

Another example that supports this conclusion involves the Eskimo people of Alaska. There is a body of ethnographic and other studies suggesting that the Eskimo have acquired traditional knowledge that they use to avoid diseases, such as botulism and trichinosis, that could be transmitted by unsafe handling of foraged meat, and otherwise to cope with the challenges of the Arctic environment. All of this knowledge, however, was inadequate to handle the discovery of a radioactive nuclear waste dump that had been buried beneath the ground in northwest Alaska by the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s. People expressed uncertainty, confusion, and worry (Cassady 2007) knowing that the dump site was crossed by caribou harvested by Eskimo hunters. In fact, Cassady (2007, p. 91) notes that it was impossible for her to express “the magnitude of the vulnerability, resentment and confusion” that circulated in local communities. But despite this concern, the people Caasady interviewed expressed problematic ideas such as the belief that you can cook radiation out of contaminated meat or remove it by aging the meat. In short, there are dangers in treating indigenous understandings of the world as if they are unobjective and do not matter, but there are also dangers in assuming that there are not wider forces at work beyond local or self‐interested understandings. Moreover, the involvement of communities and the utilization of local environmental knowledge have been shown to expand scientific understanding in a number of studies, including one on fish contamination in Brazil (Silvano & Begossi 2016) and one on changes in marine environments in the Canadian Arctic (Berkes et al. 2007). But, as Caron‐Beaudoin & Armstrong (2019, p. 59) state, “there is a remarkable lack of meaningful consultation” regarding industrial development with affected indigenous communities.