Sustainability, Conservation, and Creativity

Ethnographic Learning from Small-scale Practices

Pamela J. Stewart, Andrew J. Strathern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429851353
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

By examining how small communities have dealt with forces of change and have sought to maintain themselves over time, this book offers pointers and lessons for conservation practices at all levels of society.

"Sustainability" has become an increasingly popular term as a signal of concerns with long-term environmental consequences of human actions. Sustainability as a goal has started to replace "development" as a way of describing policies that go beyond the concept of increasing commercial production or making monetary profits from enterprises. By focusing on topical case histories on agricultural activity, stock-keeping, cash cropping, mining, and renewable energy, the authors highlight how ethnographic studies can and should inform policy decisions at both local and global levels.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of applied anthropology, sociology, and development studies.

1   Conceptual orientations

This book is an exploration of a topic that is of great importance in the world today: how can the use of resources by humans continue in a sustainable way when the overall emphasis appears to be on increased production and consumption and potentially therefore on the unsustainable depletion of resources? Answers to this question inevitably depend on the attitudes and values of the human actors involved. “Sustainability” as a concept can be framed differently by different people, even by individuals within a given cultural milieu. As a concept it is therefore both malleable and moot. The issues surrounding it include the following. When we say that a practice is sustainable, do we mean that it continues unchanged? If it changes, has it been sustained? What ranges of time do we need to take into account here? Since one practice may advantage some actors and disadvantage others, for whom are we reckoning sustainability? Ecology also involves the study of interaction between actors in a wider web of relationships, so what is sustainable for humans may be unsustainable for other species. Finally, does “sustainable” equate with “optimal”? In contemporary discussions, it may be that the answer to this point is yes, since “sustainable development” is often held up as a desirable goal to achieve, but this is not an absolute matter. A practice may be sustainable, but at what cost? In short, the word sustainable turns out to be complex and even awkward to pin down and make it operational. In this book, therefore, we use it as a pointer to discussions centering on a cluster of issues about the viability of practices and the social values attached to them. We can accept in broader terms that all practices need to have built into them the capacity to persist over time and space, and we can speak of this capacity as “sustainability”, always bearing in mind that an ecological approach demands that we realize that what keeps one entity going may entail the death of another. A truly balanced ecological approach would therefore be one that minimized such a zero-sum situation. However, species loss is such an established ecological situation that it is impossible to guarantee such balance, notwithstanding the fact that efforts to conserve a particular species of plants or animals can be profitably entered into and are important in their own right.

In seeking a model for studying issues of sustainability, therefore, we identify the following parts:

1. 1. First, the definition of an ecosystem, specifying this domain of interactions.
2. 2. Second, the recognition that one system may be enmeshed in a wider web of relations.
3. 3. Third, that sustainability has to be thought of in terms of time and space so that its extent is both historical and geographical.
4. 4. Fourth, that human agency is involved at all levels of scale, as well as environmental factors stemming from conditions of the planet as a whole, including climate change.
5. 5. Fifth, that when a crisis of sustainability arises, ingenuity and creativity of response to such a crisis is crucial.
6. 6. Sixth, that this creativity will indicate the powers of resilience and recovery from any crisis that is experienced.
7. 7. Seventh, that the mode of recovery, or the lack of it, becomes the marker for sustainability.
8. 8. Eighth, that we always bear in mind the degree to which recovery is encompassing or partial, both in relation to humans and in relation to other species in our biosphere.

With these modeling pointers, we will enter into case materials, relevant to the issues of sustainability outlined here. However, some further clarifications of our viewpoints are necessary.

We recognize that energy extraction is a basic requirement for all species. The human capacity for fuel extraction has been driven over time by technology, and notably by industrial development and its complex and elaborate machinery. This development builds on elementary human needs, such as for shelter, food, and mobility, and creates a massive superstructure that then requires sustainable maintenance in itself. In solving one problem, for example, the need to produce food, complex technology creates others, for example how to afford the machinery needed and how to handle issues of pollution, depletion, and overuse. Businesses are then built onto this situation, escalating both the solutions and the problems. Sustainability moves in this way from an elemental human need, for food say, into a complex set of social problems. In other words, sustainability cannot be considered only in material or biological terms but must involve a continuous cross-over between the material and the social dimensions of life.

We recognize also that increases in the scale of social units and contexts that have emerged as a result of industrial and post-industrial development make the analysis of sustainability more complex. Cities are the sites where problems and solutions to them obviously meet or fail to meet. Can we see a city or a set of cities as an ecosystem? Cities are located in space and have their official boundaries, but they are also inextricably joined with other sites in the world. For a city, the question of sustainability has to be phrased in starkly monetary terms. Where will the money come from to address social and material issues? The essence of an ecosystem approach is to see how factors are balanced or imbalanced and their effects. For cities, this question is very hard to compute, but in financial terms, it is also very much to the forefront in planning. In terms of sustainability, carbon-neutral solutions are obviously at a premium, but they are not always feasible. Cities have long-standing environmental problems, in terms of air pollution and contamination of the earth, and these need to be addressed in order to bring an ecosystems viewpoint back into plans for sustainability.

Generally, then, what can an ethnographic approach contribute to approaching these problems? An ethnographic approach is admirably, if not uniquely, suited to understanding the viewpoints of the social actors themselves, because it starts from observations of behavior and from conversational dialogue with the people. This method has been followed in time-honored traditions for small-scale societies, but it is equally applicable everywhere. Every large-scale context contains within it numerous small-scale levels. People operate at the smaller-scale levels, they think locally, even in global contexts. Large-scale problems begin to be solved by ingenious co-operative action at smaller scales. Cities encompass numerous interlinked localities, whose concerns have to be recognized and harnessed. In other words, a city may comprise a number of “villages” or village-like units. They are not monolithic. Local initiatives are important, such as in establishing urban gardens or local food markets. In our essay “What Is Sustainable?” (Strathern and Stewart 2017) we explore some of the questions and issues of sustainability.

Another issue is the degree of comparison that can be entered into. Given what we have just outlined, there is no reason to reject comparisons that cross over between scales of geographical regions of the world. Renewable energy schemes in Scotland, for example, exist at small-scale levels as well as more broadly. Cultural attitudes and values are always in play. We take two examples from parts of the world where we have conducted research for several decades: Papua New Guinea and Scotland (see, for example, Stewart and Strathern, 2002a, 2010). The effects of a new cash crop in parts of Papua New Guinea can from this viewpoint be compared with the effects of a wind turbine program in Scotland that also introduces wind turbines as a “new crop”, enhancing the sustainability of one set of practices and perhaps reducing the sustainability of others. Scientists may not be accustomed to this mode of reasoning, but if we are to broaden our outlook, we need to become versed in cross-cultural analogies of this kind.

Finally, here, we repeat what we indicated in our opening sentence, that this book is an initial exploration, done from a certain perspective. Its aim is not encyclopedic. Its purpose is not to review all the literature on the topic. It is rather to bring to bear our field experiences and those of others on a topic of obvious importance today, and to offer some specific insights stemming from an ethnographic and anthropological approach, highlighting the creativity of people in coping with environmental or ecological problems. (See, for example, Feinberg, 2010, for an excellent study along these lines, based on his long-term fieldwork in the island of Anuta.)

2 Perceptions and practices in Papua New Guinea: the Duna case

One part of creativity relates to the basic cultural perceptions of reality that inform peoples’ views of the world. Do people have an intrinsically conservationist attitude to their use of resources? When do they become aware that there is or may be an ecological problem with their access to resources? The Duna people of Hela Province in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, with whom we have worked for many years, provide some striking answers to such a question. We have carried out firsthand fieldwork among these people and published two books on them (Stewart and Strathern 2002a, Strathern and Stewart 2004). Male leaders of kin groups among the Duna keep elaborate knowledge of genealogies running for up to fourteen generations as a record of the group’s identity, and its historical presence in the landscape. Each large group is thought to have originated from a powerful ancestor, part human part spirit, who is often also said to have migrated into the area from a distant place, such as Oksapmin, across the great Strickland River that marks the northern boundary of Duna settlements. These powerful founding characters can be seen as injecting strength into the land. After a full set of generations this initial strength is held to be waning and with it the fertility of the soil. Duna therefore perceived a horizon of potential unsustainability in their lifeworld, and they had developed an elaborate ritual complex to deal with their perceived situation. When they felt that fertility and life force was decreasing, they set in motion a series of ritualized actions to restore vitality. This ritual series was called rindi kiniya: setting the ground to rights, repairing the ground, restoring it. At intervals of time after the founding of a group, people expected to find sacred stones in their ground, indicating that an ancestor wanted to manifest himself and appeared in this shape to induce his descendants to set up a shrine where they could sacrifice pigs to honor him. People said that an ancestor might want to “come up” to the surface of the ground in this way five generations after his death and burial. In particular the stones that “came up” in this way were seen as the petrified hearts of the ancestors in question, thus incontrovertible manifestations of their identity and agency, calling on their descendants to recognize them and emplace them in a shrine so that they could continue to invigorate the ground. The local agencies of such “kindred spirits” were followed into the larger-scale contexts of the response to signs of decreasing fertility and increasing sickness in the linked people/ground domain. The basis of these rituals lay in the idea that the ancestors were those who held the key to the restimulation of fertility. In one part of a major ritual, the Liru, male participants fed banana juice to the skulls of prominent leaders of the past, in order to gain the ancestors’ favor and help to renew the fertility of the land/kin group.

The perceived importance of the ancestors for the renewal of the world is marked by the narrations of descent that form the ideological framework for each parish (rindi). These narratives signify an unbroken chain of ties with the past, offering legitimization of occupation for the current generations and also a connection of power channeled through the genealogical ties that can be tapped into by means of ritual. Although the form of descent applied to parish membership in general is cognatic, that is, can be traced through either male or female links, ideological precedence is accorded certain agnatic lines encompassing prominent males who were leaders in the parish. The “line of power” entailed thus runs through agnatic kin, producing a symbolic hierarchy among parish members and giving a responsibility to agnatic leaders to act as preservers of the parish’s viability by making appropriate sacrifices to the ancestors and to the spiritual powers of the landscape at large. The leaders could then draw on the other group-members, including the wider cognatic category of kin, to raise the material resources needed for the sacrifices. T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the authors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Conceptual orientations
• 2 Perceptions and practices in Papua New Guinea: the Duna case
• 3 Arguments about the commons
• 4 Traditional conservation and cash-cropping in Papua New Guinea
• 5 Mining and its effects in Papua New Guinea
• 6 Energy
• 7 Farming, sustainability, and kinship
• 8 The ends of sustainability
• References
• Index