Nature as resource and nature as giver

Nature as resource and nature as giver

Week 10: Humans, the environment, and ecology

Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
Wednesday, October 09, 2024

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2024/10.2

Main reading: Palmer (2020); Kimmerer (2011)

A story of yams

People of Auhelawa grow most of their own food, the most important of which is wateya (Dioscorea alata), a species of yam.

OK, a lot of food. But, for Auhelawa, it’s not “real food,” because ʻwateya is real food.

During tagwala, people are “hungry” because they are only eating “bad food.”

Natural causes?

Over history, a number of thinkers have tried to explain people’s differences by saying they are caused by climate.

• In the Politics, Aristotle states that people living in colder climates are incapable of governing themselves (Aristotle [350BC] 1885, 218)
• Ibn Khaldun, Arab historian, argued that the most advanced civilizations lay in temperate climates and not in tropical ones (Siddiqi and Oliver 2005).
• Montesquieu ([1748] 1777, 296–98) says that people of “southern” climates are indolent physically and mentally, and thus live by traditional rules that they never think about changing.
• In Boas’s time, Ellen Churchill Semple and Ellsworth Huntington argued that all cultures were products of their environmental geography (see Wallis 1926).

Many of these arguments are sophisticated and appear to be bolstered by evidence, but they all sound the same.

Boasian cultural determinism and the environment

• Culture determines how people adapt
• Two cultures adapt to the same environment in different ways
  • Hopi and Navajo peoples live in the same arid landscape, but have completely different ways of obtaining food to sustain themselves (Lowie 1917, 50–51)
• Nature limits what people can do, but less than you might think
  • Tubetube island in Papua New Guinea is a low-lying atoll and has little topsoil for making extensive food gardens.
  • Yet it supports a larger population than its gardens can sustain.
  • The island is rich in clay that can used to produce pots; people on Tubetube trade their pots with partners on larger islands for all the food they need (Macintyre 1980).

There are many different types of adaptation

Foraging or “hunting and gathering”

Based on the collection of wild foods and game (fish and meat).

Pastoralism

Based on the tending of herds of domesticated animals, e.g. cows, reindeer, sheep, camels, yaks.

Horticulture

The cultivation of several different food crops in small plots and usually using simple hand tools.

And one more…

Agriculture

Agriculture is often distinguished from horticulture by the size and scale of production, thanks to the use of specialized steel tools and draught animals, if not machines.

• Peasant agriculture is a mixed type in which families produce their own food, and sell surpluses of commodity crops.
• Industrialized agriculture is the intensive production of commodity crops like rice, corn, wheat specifically for sale and usually for use in the industrial manufacture of food.
• Peasants are partly integrated into a market economy and specialized division of labor. Industrial farms feed people in societies with a complex division of labor, and today, capitalist, market economies

See Eriksen (2015, 255–56) for more information.

Are these types of adaptation absolute?

No, most societies are a mix of all of them. We can say that one type dominates, but it does not mean it excludes other possibilities

All of these types have fuzzy boundaries anyway, so we can never be absolutely sure whether a society is primarily based on one type or not.

The difference between horticulture and agriculture is supposedly technological, but it really is marked by a change in the social system.

Hunter-gatherers: The West’s noble/savage

Contradictory stereotypes of foragers

• They’re starving; and they have a naturally healthy diet
• They forage and hunt because they don’t know how to do anything else; and they are in harmony with nature

The West’s favorite prop for any debate about life

• Hunter-gatherers are “our contemporary ancestors” (Some anthropologists say this about every indigenous society; viz. Chagnon 1983, 214).

References and further reading

Aristotle. (350BC) 1885. The Politics. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Oxford: Claredon Press. https://archive.org/details/politicsofaristo01arisuoft/page/218/mode/2up.

Chagnon, Napolean. 1983. Ya̦nomamö: The Fierce People. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. https://books.google.com.au/books?id=MPArAAAAYAAJ.

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2015. Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology. 4th ed. London: Pluto Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt183p184.2.

Kimmerer, Robin. 2011. “Restoration and Reciprocity: The Contributions of Traditional Ecological Knowledge.” In Human Dimensions of Ecological Restoration: Integrating Science, Nature, and Culture, edited by Dave Egan, Evan E. Hjerpe, and Jesse Abrams, 257–76. Washington, DC: Island Press/Center for Resource Economics. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-039-2_18.

Lowie, Robert Harry. 1917. “Culture and the environment.” In Culture and ethnology, 47–65. New York: Douglas C. McMurtrie. http://archive.org/details/cultureethnology00lowiiala.

Macintyre, Martha. 1980. “Changing Paths : An Historical Ethnography of the Traders of Tubetube.” Ph.D. thesis, Canberra, A.C.T.: Australian National University. https://digitalcollections.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/7534.

Montesquieu, Baron de. (1748) 1777. Complete Works, Vol. 1 (The Spirit of Laws). London: T. Evans & W. Davis. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/montesquieu-complete-works-vol-1-the-spirit-of-laws#lf0171-01_label_1040.

Palmer, Christian T. 2020. “Culture and Sustainability: Environmental Anthropology in the Anthropocene.” In Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology, edited by Thomas McIlwraith, Nina Brown, and Laura T. de González, 357–81. Arlington, Va.: The American Anthropological Association. https://pressbooks.pub/perspectives/chapter/culture-and-sustainability-environmental-anthropology-in-the-anthropocene/.

Siddiqi, Akhtar H., and John E. Oliver. 2005. “Determinism, Climatic.” In Encyclopedia of World Climatology, edited by John E. Oliver, 333–36. Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3266-8_67.

Wallis, W. D. 1926. “Geographical Environment and Culture.” Social Forces 4 (4): 702. https://doi.org/10.2307/3004448.