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2700:2022:12 [2022/02/03 23:44] – external edit 127.0.0.12700:2022:12 [2022/05/16 18:42] (current) – [Revisiting the world-picture] Ryan Schram (admin)
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 **Other reading:** Blaser (2013) **Other reading:** Blaser (2013)
 +
 +===== Anthropology confidential =====
 +
 +A recent encounter with “culture.”
 +
 +===== Human ecology and political ecology =====
 +
 +An influential definition of political ecology is
 +
 +//"...the constantly shifting dialectic between society and land-based resources, and also within classes and groups within society itself" (Blaikie 1987, 17; see also Watts 1983).//
 +
 +==== Political ecology derives inspiration from Wolf in multiple ways ====
 +
 +//"[T]he __world of humankind__ constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes…" (Wolf 1984, 3).// 
 +===== Revisiting the world-picture =====
 +
 +Political ecology has its own “world-picture” in which nature and culture are separate. Imagine a map with many layers
 +
 +  * National boundaries
 +  * Human communities
 +  * Various, culturally specific adaptations and utilizations of material resources
 +  * Blue lakes and oceans, green and brown landscapes
 +
 +Wolf calls on us to abandon the assumption of isolate social systems, but political ecology isolates human communities in another sense---on a separate map layer.
 +
 +===== Nature and culture are characters in a modernist metanarrative =====
 +
 +The central character of any historical narrative of modern progress is a specific version of the rational individual.
 +
 +The story goes:
 +
 +  * Before, the individual was trapped in ignorance and accepted it.
 +  * As time goes on, they increasingly become free of this constraint.
 +  * As traditional patterns fade away, there is more room for the individual’s conscious, rational mind to influence the world.
 +  * The individual was once mastered by external forces, but now is its own master.
 +
 +Similarly, stories of social progress depict a society moving from tradition, stasis, and dependence to mastery of itself 
 +
 +* Animals depend on nature
 +* Humans use nature
 +* Modern societies control nature.
 +
 +===== “We have never been modern” =====
 +
 +  * There is no such thing as modernity.
 +    * There are no societies in which individuals have absolute freedom to create themselves.
 +  * “We have never been modern” (Latour 1993)
 +    * Western societies believe that they have refounded themselves on science, that is, that they exist independently of the natural world and can intervene in it.
 +    * A society’s scientific knowledge arises from the intervention of the nonhuman in the human, from the material into the symbolic.
 +    * Yam biology is the same as respect for shy yams: The proof of the yam pudding is in the eating.
 +
 +===== Links in a chain =====
 +
 +  * An essentialist theory of being
 +    * A yam is a yam.
 +    * A caribou is a caribou
 +    * Yam personhood and atiku are ideas about yams and caribou
 +  * A relationalist theory of being
 +    * A yam is a person when a gardener is weeding
 +      * The yam has a biological existence as a species because seed yams are stored, the genome is decoded
 +      * The yam is nutritious food because it has been domesticated
 +    * Atiku is present in caribou when Innu are hunting
 +      * Caribou are a population when they are mapped, tagged, observed, regulated (even when these are done in consultation with and out of respect for the Innu value of caribou and hunting)
 +
 +===== Different networks, different worlds =====
 +
 +Do we live in a universe of many natures?
 +
 +Should ethnography describe more than cultural difference?
 +
 +Should anthropology posit multiple humanities?
  
 ===== References and further reading ===== ===== References and further reading =====
 +
 +Blaikie, Piers M. 1987. //Land degradation and society//. London ; New York : Methuen. http://archive.org/details/landdegradations0000blai.
 +
  
 Blaser, Mario. 2013. “Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe: Toward a Conversation on Political Ontology.” //Current Anthropology// 54 (5): 547–68. https://doi.org/10.1086/672270. Blaser, Mario. 2013. “Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe: Toward a Conversation on Political Ontology.” //Current Anthropology// 54 (5): 547–68. https://doi.org/10.1086/672270.
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 ———. 2016. “Is Another Cosmopolitics Possible?” //Cultural Anthropology// 31 (4): 545–70. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.4.05. ———. 2016. “Is Another Cosmopolitics Possible?” //Cultural Anthropology// 31 (4): 545–70. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.4.05.
 +
 +
 +Latour, Bruno. 1993. //We Have Never Been Modern//. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
 +
 +
 +Watts, Michael J. 1983. //Silent Violence: Food, Famine, and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria//. Berkeley: University of California Press.
 +
 +
 +Wolf, Eric R. 1982. //Europe and the People Without History.// Berkeley: University of California Press.
  
  
2700/2022/12.1643960657.txt.gz · Last modified: 2022/02/03 23:44 by 127.0.0.1