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====== Ontological politics ======

===== Ontological politics =====

Ryan Schram\\
ANTH 2700: Key debates in anthropology\\
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au\\
Social Sciences Building 410 (A02)\\
Week of May 16, 2022 (Week 12)

Slides available at http://anthro.rschram.org/2700/2022/12

**Main reading:** Blaser (2016)

**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 =====

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.


———. 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.



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