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Cultural
Ecology Newsletter (CEN #33 -- Spring '99) Editor: Simon Batterbury Last Updated: · 1999 Netting Award · William M. Denevan - a testimonial · 1999 Award Winners · Honolulu AAG meetings · Announcements · Meeting Report · Members News · Book Reviews · The 1999 Robert
McC. Netting Award The 1999Robert McC. Netting
Award for a lifetime of achievement in cultural ecology goes to KARL BUTZER,
Raymond C. Dickson Centennial Professor of Liberal Arts at the William M. Denevan A testimonal on Bill Denevan,
winner of the 1998 Robert McC.Netting Award, is available. By Gregory Knapp, 1999 Student Paper and Field
Award Winners Student Paper Award The 1999 Student Paper Award was
made to Thomas Perreault (Dept. of Geography, University of Field Study Award The CESG committee awarded the
1999 Field Study Award to William Moseley (Dept. of Geography, The University
of Georgia, Well done to the winners and
thankyou to all those who took part. These are annual awards, described here.
The Honolulu AAG meetings, 1999
The Honolulu meetings of the AAG took place from 23rd March Announcements Email Discussion Group for
Ecological Anthropology The American Anthropological
Association has set up an E-mail discussion Group for Ecological
Anthropology. At last count it had over 350 members, mainly anthropologists
and a few practitioners and other interested members. In the absence of our
own email group, please join this one. It is simple! Details available at
http://dizzy.library.arizona.edu/ej/jpe/anthenv/mailinglist.html Earthworks Is an on-line database of career
opportunities (including post-docs and temporary appointments) for
geographers, geoscientists, environmental scientists, space/planetary
scientists, remote sensing/GIS staff, climate/atmospheric scientists,
archaeologists, soil scientists, oceanographers, ecologists, geotechnical
engineers, petroleum scientists/engineers and hydrologists/hydrogeologists
with particular focus on the UK, Europe, the Pacific Rim, North America and
Africa. http://www.earthworks-jobs.com Society for Human Ecology The Society for Human Ecology,
based in Conference of the Society for
Ethnobiology The 22nd Annual conference was
held from Conference: "Society,
Nature and History. Long Term Dynamics of Social Metabolism". This conference will be held
from Sept. 30th Conference: Patterns and
Processes of Land Use and The 48th Annual Conference
Sponsored by the Center for AAG contact list Richard Marston is secretary of
the AAG. He is compiling a "Contact List" of geographers for use by
teachers, students, community colleges, government officials, consulting
companies and private industry, and the media. The eventual goal of the
project is to have a contact list of geographers, cross-indexed by state and
by specialty, available on the AAG's web site. For each member willing to
participate, their specialty and a means of contacting them would be listed.
This project is designed to help implement the ties between geographers and
society as promoted by AAG Past Presidents Pat Gober and Will Graf.
Participation is entirely voluntary. Members of CESG should to respond by 20
February to the following questions: 1. Are you willing to participate in the
AAG Contact List Project? 2. Please state your name and specialty (using AAG
specialty group names only). 3. If you are willing to participate, which of
the following would you like to have listed as a means by which you could be
contacted: mailing address? phone number? fax number? e-mail address? Please
send responses to Oliver Coomes (coomes@felix.geog.mcgill.ca) who will
compile them and forward them to Richard Marston. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Meeting Report 'Constructivism and Realism in
Environment and Development' Tim Forsyth, IDS, This seminar was held at the LSE
in The seminar reflected on some of
the philosophical positions underlying research on environment-development
linkages. Four key sessions dealt with (a) developments in political ecology
(b) the so-called 'New' Ecologies, offering a more complex understanding of
biophysical reality than linear, equilibrium-based explanations; (c)
understanding 'dominant' discourses; and (d) realist and critical realist
attempts at explanation. In session 1, John Harriss
introduced the day by discussing key trends in political ecology since Piers
Blaikie's 'Political Economy of Soil Erosion' was published in 1985. It was
suggested that trends since then have established poststructural ways of
identifying environmental change, and that others (notably Peet and In session 2, Ian Scoones
outlined the essentials of the so-called 'new' ecologies, or non-equilibrium
ecology. He argued that, over time, historic 'laws' of ecology had been
fabricated to reflect scientific agendas in particular localities. 'New
ecology' challenges these, in five areas: units of measurement; implications
for understanding temporal change (i.e. which baselines do we use?); the use
of statistics the average, or indices of variation?); understanding based on
hierarchies and non-linear questions of scale; and new visions of the
dynamics of change (including consideration of multiple stable states,
uncertainty and surprise). The topic of 'surprise' -- or the transition from
one stable state to another, or the advent of an extreme event -- seems
particularly useful in accounting for shifting human-environment
relationships. The debate focused on some of the problems human scientists
have in identifying with the lengthier biophysical timescales that are
appropriate for environmental explanation. The session concluded that -
despite the obvious need for physical scientists to become more aware of
social and political analysis - there were also new developments in
biophysical sciences, and ecology, that made many debates in sociology and
politics somewhat out of touch with the latest physical understandings of how
ecosystems operate. The third session focused on the
construction of so-called 'environmental orthodoxies' or dominant discourses,
based on a paper by James Fairhead and Melissa Leach. Their work looks at how
'citizen science' can counter established 'scientific' pronouncements on
biophysical reality, and particularly the erronous belief that forest areas
have been decreasing in parts of West Africa during the last 100 years. Their
evidence indicates that, in fact, some forest areas have been increasing in
their extent because of human actions. How can this information be used to
correct national and international policies that assume forests have been
declining, and that local people are to blame? Debate focused on the factors
that lead to the 'reification' of science in this way, and the historic
identification of the agendas of science that then become translated into
'facts' in institutions that carry out policy. The concept of 'falsification'
was discussed. It was suggested that researchers need to acknowledge
discussions in the philosophy of science that distinguish between
'propositional' (or 'brute') claims (such as 'is deforestation increasing?' )
and 'institutional' truth claims (such as 'can people prevent
deforestation'?). It was proposed that it might be possible to 'falsify' some
overtly incorrect propositional truth claims, but not the 'institutional'
truths. The latter are like 'storylines', and hence cannot be falsified. We
need to ask whether some apparent storylines are actually based on correctly
identified 'propositional' truths coming from science and other sources. Some
common statements, such as 'fires destroy biodiversity' (often heard when
Indonesia was ablaze, recently) actually contradict what many respected
ecologists know about the nature and evolution of biodiversity, and --
importantly -- lead to repressive land-use policies forbidding the use of
fire by small farmers. The last session focused on
attempts to adopt realist or critical realist interpretations of
environmental change, and possible methodologies. Tim Forsyth introduced this
session by discussing work in Thailand that compared the biophysical evidence
for two overt 'storylines' concerning the impact of upland shifting
cultivation on lowland sedimentation and water shortages. Evidence --
collected among the uplanders, and at a small village-scale -- suggested that
they did not cultivate steep slopes as assumed, and that many deep gullies
found in the area were actually features of the granite terrain and predated
the origin of agriculture in the region. He suggested this represented a case
of 'hybrid science' because it used different knowledge sources to assess
complex institutional truth claims in order to gain a deeper level of
understanding. This was not, however, to suggest that this information was in
any way separate from the political project to support the claims of the
uplanders, or that the explanation created was a clear indication of
'external reality'. This approach , it was felt, retained a veneer of
positivistic 'truth claim' by its use of scientific methods in a sensible
way. Gaining better scientific information to refute accusations made against
shifting cultivators needs to be combined with increasing their political
power more generally, so as to diminish the force of these accusations. Some key themes : · Debate swung between those who saw
different versions of environmental explanation as a) reflecting the different
power bases of different discourses (storylines, or the Cultural Theory
'myths' of nature); and b) those who believed that more information, and more
science, could be deployed to influence and move forward the 'facts' behind
these storylines. · Dominating discourses about the environment
may be 'falsified'. Falsifying one truth claim (for example, that
deforestation has increased uniformly across West · There are still many points of
disagreement. Cultural Theorists argue that the creation and
institutionalisation of environmental knowledge can be explained by the
interface of the four solidarities of society. Poststructuralist theorists,
in general, point to the different actor networks and powers behind
'discourse coalitions'. Thirdly, post-empiricist scientists (and, probably,
cultural ecologists) optimistically hope that a better form of debate may be
achieved through including and demonstrating the extent of new knowledge
claims. · Three interpretations of the word
'democratisation', and its desirability, seemed to be apparent: (i)
democratisation of political representation, ie broadening those included in
the political process of science and policy debate (a view held by the
discourse theorists); (ii) democratisation of science and knowledge, ie what
information, and from whom, is used to create expert knowledge? (the
post-empiricist's position); and (iii) a democratisation of 'perspectives',
ie. the ability to acknowledge the generating mechanisms behind attempts to
create knowledge and to manage the environment (a Cultural Theory position). The debate continues! Members' News William Woods, Southern Illinois University has presented the 1999 Paul
Simon Outstanding Scholar Award to William Woods. Woods is a professor of
Geography at SIU, Edwardswille and his work concerns prehistoric
settlement-subsistence systems, soils, and palaeolandscapes. He is best known
for his work on the pre-Columbian (ca. AD800-1350) Cahokia Mounds located
east of B.L.Turner II of Carolyn Cartier (assistant professor, David Demeritt (lecturer, Bristol University, UK) has been appointed
lecturer, Department of Geography, King's College London, UK where he joins
Prof. Michael Redclift(Professor, Keele), Raymond Bryant, Noel Castree
(lecturer, Liverpool) and Anna Davies (Cambridge) in an expanded
human-environment research group. Leslie C. Gray (post-doc, Hong Jiang, (assistant professor, University of Rheyna Laney, (student, Juanita Sundberg (student, Antoinette Winklerprins (student, Wisconsin-Madison) has been appointed
post-doc at ITC, the Lastly Simon Batterbury (lecturer, Book Reviews All CESG members, and others, are invited to submit
reviews of books that would be of interest to our Specialty Group. Publishers
are invited to send books to the Editor, and willing reviewers are sought. Balée, William L. (ed). 1998. Advances in Historical
Ecology. ISBN: 0-231-10632-7 $65.00. Reviewed by Thomas Dietz,
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Historical ecology is the label
for the latest approach to human ecology in anthropology and kindred
disciplines. This volume of twenty contributions grew from a conference in
1994 at What is historical ecology? While
a number of the papers engage this question, the clearest explication may be
found in a chapter by Bettinger who places historical ecology in its
historical context. For Bettinger historical ecology is an effort to preserve
some of the best insights of the cultural ecology of Julian Steward while
moving beyond some of the unrealistic equilibrium assumptions of what has
come to called "evolutionary ecology." Steward emphasized the idea
of a culture core and thus the importance of technology in understanding
human ecology. The evolutionary ecology school takes from Steward the
importance of subsistence activities, but adds assumptions from sociobiology
that observed human behavior is an optimal foraging strategy for finding the
most nutritional reward for the least effort. The problem with the
evolutionary ecology approach is that it assumes a sort of "ethnographic
present." The human adaptations observed in the field are assumed to
have been in place long enough that natural selection has yielded an optimal
strategy, and thus we can understand variation in adaptive strategies across
human groups by understanding how differing environments will favor different
strategies. In this regard, evolutionary ecology is quite coherent
conventional micro- economics that assumes rational choice based on perfect
information and markets in equilibrium. Such an ahistorical approach
cannot be justified. Things change. A central theme in most of the papers is
that current modes of living are contingent on the history of the group being
studied. It may be unusual for a human group to live in the same place using
the same mode of adaptation for centuries let alone millennia. Of course, the
spread of trade and colonialism may have accelerated these changes over the
last 5 centuries, so it is hard to know if earlier history, for which data
are quite limited, was more stable and more likely to approach an equilibria. Historical ecology focuses on
the complex history of the interactions between human groups and their
environment. In his introduction, Balée notes that the historical ecology
approach emphasizes that humans have routinely reshaped their biophysical
environment--sometimes intentionally and sometimes not. Sometimes this
interaction leads to stable, sustainable systems, sometimes it leads to
environmental changes that are not sustainable. Non-industrial societies
cannot be assumed to be either, as Balée puts it, Homo destructivist or
Ecologically Noble Savages. The task of historical ecology is to understand
the human environmental dynamic in a particular landscape over time,
influenced as it will be by local environmental conditions, large scale
environmental change (especially climate changes), local human actions and
the larger human systems that impinge on the local group and its activities. Thirteen of the chapters treat a
local or regional case in some detail, drawing as appropriate on
archaeological, historical and contemporary ethnographic data. These case
studies provide a nice balance with the chapters that are largely theoretical
or literature reviews and show how the historical ecology approach can yield
important insights. Seven of these chapters deal with I would recommend this book most
highly to any human ecologist who draws on the anthropological literature. It
is a strong corrective to ahistorical over-generalization. I found only two
major points of disagreement with the volume. One--too much attention to
post-modern rhetoric-- results from the current state of anthropology. The
other-- a neglect of the new evolutionary theory-- makes me hopeful for
further synthesis. Many of the authors in the
volume feel it necessary to deal with the "post- modern" turn that
is popular in most social science disciplines. I found these discussions to
be distractions from their main arguments. Some theorists labeled post-modern
have important ideas to offer. For example Foucault's notions of power
embedded in language has helped shape my view of cultural selection processes
(Dietz and Burns 1992). But too often, what is called post-modern is at best
an assertion that things are complex and culturally and historically
embedded. Of course, this is a useful point. But at its worst, what passes
for post-modern theory is a naïve critique of a sort of positivism that is
seldom practiced in the social sciences or human ecology. And, as Posey notes
in his chapter, there is an unfortunate tendency for textual exegesis to
substitute for field work. The contributors to this volume offer something
far richer than the typical deconstructionist critique and need not, I think,
justify their work vis a vis the excesses of post-modern theory. A more serious shortcoming, but
one that makes me hopeful for more synthetic work, is the weak handling of
evolutionary ideas in the volume. Some contributors view evolution as a
developmental or stage model, and strongly reject it noting the contingent
character of history. They are rejecting a pre-Darwinian view of evolution
and miss a real opportunity to move toward a more synthetic, historically
grounded theory. For example, Whitehead (p. 36) suggests that "Systems, distributions and
phenomena show processual or evolutionary change; humans show historical
change. To try and mix these metaphors is to confuse types of analysis. In
any case, it seems doubtful that the scientific representation of 'natural
systems' requires in any sense an appreciation of their particular historical
characteristics, for this would completely contradict the nomothetic
ambitions of a generalizing endeavor." This is a reasonable statement
if one assumes that physics, chemistry and the other experimental disciplines
are the only models for science. Balée seems to share this assumption in his
epilogue. But with the Darwinian revolution, we have a way of thinking that
is both historical and scientific. Certainly disciplines such as evolutionary
biology are as essentially historical as the work presented in this volume.
As Graham notes in her chapter (p. 123) "Our mistake as anthropologists
now would be to emphasize history at the expense of evolution." The authors of this volume seem
unaware of new evolutionary theory. For example, only Bettinger cites the key
work of Boyd and Richerson on the dynamics of cultural evolution. His use of
what he terms "evolutionary cultural ecology (cultural-transmission
version)" provides one of the richest chapters in the volume. Rival (p.
245) suggests that "we need a concept of culture that emphasizes the
practical engagement of people in the world." I believe the new
evolutionary theory provides such a concept. It views culture as a system of
information that is subject to selective pressures in historical time**. This
emerging work explicitly distances itself from stage theories and developmental
approaches of which the historical ecologists are properly critical. The new
evolutionary theory emphasizes micro-level processes, is comfortable with
non-equilibrium dynamics and draws attention to the interplay between the
material and the symbolic. It could provide a useful theoretical framework
for historical ecology. In turn, historical ecology provides the rich and
detailed narratives that are lacking in most of the new evolutionary work--a
body of literature that can be criticized as too abstract in its concerns
with conceptual frameworks and analytical models. Just as modern evolutionary
theory grows from the linking of Fisherian population genetics and Darwinian
natural history, so a better human ecology might emerge from the new evolutionary
theory and historical ecology. But I don't mean to criticize a volume as well
crafted as this for what it does not do. Advances in Historical Ecology is
strong in its theoretical analyses, its synthetic reviews of the literature
and its careful cases studies. I highly recommend it to all human ecologists
who draw on theory and evidence from anthropology and archaeology. *This review appears in the
Human Ecology Review, 1999. **Boyd and Richerson (1985),
Burns and Dietz (1992), References Boyd, R., and Richerson, P. J.
1985. Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Burns, T. R., and Dietz, T.
1992. Socio-cultural evolution: Social rule systems, selection and agency.
International Sociology, 7, 259-283. Dietz, T., and Burns, T. R.
1992. Human agency and the evolutionary dynamics of culture. Acta
Sociologica, 35, 187-200. Epstein, J. M., and Axtell, R.
L. 1995. Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up. Richerson, P. J., and Boyd, R.
1997. Homage to Malthus, Ricardo and Boserup: Toward a general theory of
population, economic growth, environmental deterioration, wealth and poverty.
Human Ecology Review 5, 85-90. Harlan I. Smith (1997).
Ethnobotany of the Gitksan Indians of Nancy J. Turner (1995). Food Plants of Coastal First
Peoples. ( Reviewed by Douglas Deur,
Department of Geography and Anthropology, Of those literatures frequently
consulted by cultural ecologists, few are as deceptively straightforward as
the conventional ethnobotanies. Following a brief introduction, there is
typically a list of plants, each plant accompanied by its name among the
people in question and some description of its known uses. There may be
variations in the plant taxonomy employed, or in the sophistication and
clarity of the introduction; some may subdivide material on the basis of
plant use, with sections on plants used for medicines, foods, material
culture, and so forth. But regardless of the specifics, the formula is
familiar and straightforward - 'this plant is used for this or that purpose'.
This is is a formula that appeals to publishers - it is tidy and data-rich,
and marketable to scholarly and popular audiences. Yet, as those who collect
ethnobotanical data know all too well, there is nothing particularly straightforward
about the facts that we insert into this stock format. This is particularly
true for those attempting to reconstruct the practices of a people who have
experienced rapid cultural change and assimilation. All of the practices we
study may be in flux. Our informants may have only been exposed to small
pieces of their peoples' cumulative plant lore, those fragments appropriate
to someone of their gender, age, rank, occupation, or generation. Some
peoples with proprietary traditions of plant use (religious or medicinal
uses, for example) may not give us the whole story, or they may alter or
embellish the specifics. More often, their memories simply fail. There are issues of time. A few
weeks of harried research are scarcely sufficient to tease out ethnobotanical
facts from a society that uses a diversity of plants.* But also, lurking
beneath the veneer of each work describing a single, cohesive pattern of
plant use, we often find data with ambiguous points of temporal reference.
All too often we see informants' comments on "what I remember from my
childhood," "what we do now," "what my grandparents told
me about their childhood," or "what everyone says we did before
white people arrived," all conflated into a single, undifferentiated
account. Like a character from a Vonnegut novel, ethnobotanical narratives
too often seem oddly, awkwardly "unstuck in time." In these works,
each professing to give a view of "traditional" plant use, such
problems hint at the precariousness of the theoretical foundations that lie
at the root of the entire "salvage ethnography" project. Though
these contradictions have been pragmatically addressed elsewhere in the
ethnographic literature, these problems seem remarkably persistent, latent
features of the ethnobotanical work. These two books from the In sharp contrast to Smith's
inchoate work, we have the recent, polished ethnobotanical overview, Food
Plants of Coastal First Peoples, by Nancy Turner. Here, we see the results of
some seventy years of ethnobotanical research subsequent to Smith's travels.
In this book, Turner has sought to distill the full corpus of ethnobotanical
research regarding the food plants of all of Both of these books deserve the
attention of cultural ecologists attempting to unravel the subtle
complexities of the ethnobotanical literature. Taken together, we might learn
as much from what has been omitted from these two volumes - one from the
beginnings of ethnobotanical research on the * As many cultural ecologists
will complain, high-speed field research on plant use, without work on
husbandry, production, and storage can lead to oversights, often contributing
to a general underestimation of the complexity and intensity of indigenous
resource management. As I attempt to reconstruct traditions of endemic plant
cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America, I am perpetually
confronted with this vast gap in the ethnobotanical corpus. New Books: Zimmerer, K. & Young, K.R.
(eds). 1998. Nature's Geography: New lessons for conservation and
development. Goodman, A.H. & Leatherman,
T.L. 1998. Building a New Biocultural Synthesis: Political-economic
perspectives on human biology. 'Linking Levels of Analysis' series. |
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