Читать книгу Political Ecology - Paul Robbins - Страница 43

Robert McC. Netting's Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture is a wonderful contradiction, typical of one of cultural ecology's most enigmatic observers. Amassing a huge body of evidence and summarizing a lifetime of work, Netting’s opus is concentrated on making only a single (but nevertheless important) point: intensive, small, peasant landholdings are inevitable, persistent, and sustainable.

The book is a blizzard of impressive detail from Nigeria and Japan to the Swiss Alps (long Netting's stomping ground). These particulars of farm strategy are harnessed to answer some big questions: Can the world's peasantry compete on regional and global markets? How much land is required for a farm family to survive? What systems of tenure allow small producers to thrive?

Like the bulk of Netting's work, the book debunks the high priests of intensification who tout that large farms with more machinery, operated by full‐time agribusinesses, produce more and cheaper food. Where Netting discusses the question of a farm's size versus its productivity, for example, a hotly debated question with implications for the decollectivization of post‐socialist farms and the agglomeration of corporate farmlands, he notes that “as is so often the case, cultural values are said to be responsible for economic inefficiency,” keeping “traditional” and “spiritual” people close to the land despite the hopelessness of production arrangements. Nothing could be further from the truth, he demonstrates. The economies of scale enjoyed by some plantation industries and the marginal conditions of some dry areas notwithstanding, small farms show extremely high yields with relatively few capital inputs.

Netting's politics are also fairly clear. He finds leftist accounts of emergent inequality and the disappearance of “the little guy” just as unsupportable as the celebration of consolidation by big‐farm optimists. Intensive small farms, Netting insists, thrive in feudalism, capitalism, and late capitalism. And while “within‐group” stratification of smallholders is a timeless reality, Netting insists that social mobility and opportunity in such groups are persistent – these high‐population, high‐intensity landscapes show remarkable social equality. These claims are contextual and debatable, of course, and do distract from troubling problems that smallholders will continue to face: unequal terms of trade, protectionism, and politically networked agribusiness. Even so, a material reading of the daily lives of smallholders shows a complex picture, one that defies grand theories about “the poor.”

In this way, Smallholders, Householders does what many postcolonial critics have long urged: it abandons the creation of ethnographic accounts of the “other.” Explicitly eschewing ethnology, Netting lays out his project from the start: “what follows is not an attempt to interpret ‘culture,’ a project of eliciting and perhaps creating meaning so grand that only the artist or the literary critic would confidently attempt it. Rather it examines a limited set of social and economic factors that are regularly associated with a definable type of productive activity” (p. 2).

Netting died in 1995. I regret that I never met or spoke with him. But this self‐effacing passage seems to admirably capture his eminently practical voice.

Cultural ecology, in this way, opens the door to a range of productive questions, allowing a continuing exploration of the sophisticated adaptations of people who had historically been characterized as backward. Related work continues to show the immense adaptive capacity of people, from the indigenous people of pre‐Columbian North and South America to the producers of agro‐food systems in the present day (Turner and Brush 1987; Turner 1990; Butzer 1992; Barham and Coomes 1996; Berkes 1999; Doolittle 2000; Denevan 2001). By uniting highly specialized skills in agronomy, pedology, and hydrology with social and cultural exploration, cultural ecology has, moreover, created a model for integrative multidisciplinary research in anthropology and geography (Butzer 1989; Turner 1989).

The incipient critical politics of cultural ecology are also readily apparent. Farming, herding, and hunting groups around the world, who have been characterized as primitive, conservative, and inefficient, become the focus of sustained and focused study, revealing the veracity and sustainability of their ways of life. It is the modern development state, by implication, with its high‐input agricultural systems, its market orientation, and its urge to separate producers from resources, that appears primitive and inefficient. In the evolution of their work, cultural ecologists almost invariably, though perhaps not intentionally, have come to champion the most marginal and powerless groups, revealing the problems and limits of state and commercial power.

Even so, cultural ecology has been the subject of many criticisms over the years, in terms of both its concepts and its practices. Firstly, the excesses of the logic of adaptation, so central to cultural ecology, often lead to problematic reductionist conclusions, suffering from a fundamental teleological flaw: if people do it, it must be adaptive (Trimbur and Watts 1976; Bassett and Fogelman 2013). Indeed, the adaptation approach is focused specifically on assuming and demonstrating the ecological functionality of the most unusual cultural practices. The crude theories that developed from this approach propelled some truly bizarre and excessive claims. Aztec human sacrifice traditions, for example, the immensely complex socio‐religious institutions of Mexico in the pre‐Colombian period, were spuriously explained to be an adaptation to protein deficiencies for which human flesh was a crucial supplement (Winkelman 1998).

This “neofunctionalism” was further criticized for its crude use of the concept of “carrying capacity,” which uncritically assumed that there are given limits to human population density, despite extensive and growing evidence to the contrary (Sayre 2008, 2017). So too, neofunctional cultural materialism, as championed by anthropologists like Marvin Harris, has been overturned, often simply through rigorous research. Arguments that the cow became sacred in India because of the value of its protein and agricultural traction power (Harris 1966), notably, have been undermined by historic observation and reconstruction (Simoons 1979; Freed and Freed 1981). Adaptation researcher Alexander Alland (1975) once insisted the worst cultural ecology in this way represents little more than “just so stories” (p. 69).

Most problematic, the thrust of some cultural ecological argument explicitly naturalizes and, by implication, legitimizes what can be seen as contingent social behaviors and practices, recalling the socially and politically disturbing features of determinism. If the Native Americans of Bennett's Northern Plainsmen fill an “adaptive niche” by living at the edge of subsistence, scavenging at the periphery of the larger economic and ecological system, the implication is that such a status is natural, and not the result of land seizure, political marginalization, discrimination, and decades of exploitation (Bennett 1969).

The politics that both make up and constrain the daily life of such people, who are perpetually engaged in social and ecological conflicts over subsistence, are little in evidence in this work. This disinterest in resource politics, in the end, often makes it difficult for cultural ecologists to explain the outcomes they observe in the world.