Anthropology and Nature

Kirsten Hastrup

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134463282
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

On the basis of empirical studies, this book explores nature as an integral part of the social worlds conventionally studied by anthropologists. The book may be read as a form of scholarly "edgework, " resisting institutional divisions and conceptual routines in the interest of exploring new modalities of anthropological knowledge making. The present interest in the natural world is partly a response to large-scale natural disasters and global climate change, and to a keen sense that nature matters matters to society at many levels, ranging from the microbiological and genetic framing of reproduction, over co-species development, to macro-ecological changes of weather and climate. Given that the human footprint is now conspicuous across the entire globe, in the oceans as well as in the atmosphere, it is difficult to claim that nature is what is given and permanent, while people and societies are ephemeral and simply derivative features. This implies that society matters to nature, and some natural scientists look towards the social sciences for an understanding of how people think and how societies work. The book thus opens up a space for new forms of reflection on how natures and societies are generated.

1 Nature

Anthropology on the Edge

Kirsten Hastrup

This introductory essay sets the scene for the chapters to follow by identifying the edge upon which their arguments run—the edge of emerging worlds. Theoretical advancement in anthropology today is precipitated by new insights into the deep-seated entanglements of natural and social, of human and non-human, and of organic and non-organic forms. Through such entanglements, worlds emerge simultaneously as empirical and analytical objects, and the volume explores new modes of thinking about this generative process.

In a seminal volume on Nature and Society, published in 1996, the dualism between the two concepts was explored and challenged from a range of ethnographic and theoretical perspectives. The general idea was to revisit “the place of nature and the environment in anthropological theory and social discourse” (Descola & Palsson 1996: 1), and to probe the possibilities for a new ecological anthropology, to put it briefly. Thanks to works like that, we are now in a position to take the next step—beyond the dualism. The chapters in this book generally take of from a unified view of world(s) as the combined product of natural and social life, albeit with different analytical emphases.

In the predecessor to the present volume, similar views were intimated, but there is still an important intellectual shift between the two sets of arguments. While in the early 1990s anthropologists still worked to dismantle the dualism, and attacked the ‘Western’ conceptual hegemony by means of ethnographies from ‘other cultures’, we now seem to have completed the move that Phillippe Descola anticipated when he wrote in conclusion to his own chapter in Nature and Society:

Once the ancient nature-culture orthogonal grid has been disposed of, a new multi-dimensional anthropological landscape may emerge, in which stone adzes and quarks, cultivated plants and the genome map, hunting rituals and oil production may become intelligible as so many variations within a single set of relations encompassing humans as well as non-humans. (Descola 1996: 99)

It is such an anthropological landscape that is canvassed in the present book. There is no us and them, no definitive boundaries between human and non-human, and no space for science outside of the world it engages with (Rossiter 2007). To probe nature as part of any anthropological analysis is to search for a new understanding of the (temporary) wholeness of whatever worlds emerge in the anthropological study.

This takes me to the subtitle of this chapter, introducing an anthropology on the edge. I argue that in the process of assembling natural and social worlds into new wholes, anthropological analysis takes us close to the notion of edgework, studied by sociologists and socio-psychologists, and pointing to risk-taking experiences (Lyng 2005). While mostly studied at the level of individual risk-taking, such as skydiving, drug use, graffiti making, and delinquency, what connects such activities is “a common attraction to exploring the limits of human cognition and capacity in search of new possibilities of being” (ibid.: 4). While the individual contributors to the present volume hardly would see their own writing as a form of skydiving or bungee jumping, collectively we do take a certain risk on behalf of anthropology. If there is no distinct entity of society, how may the social sciences fare at a time where institutional pressures and control measures such as bibliometric counts and impact factors already seem to favour the natural sciences when it comes to meter out the deserved funds within the academic audit culture (Strathern 2000)?

Society was the constitutive notion when the social sciences emerged in the 19^th century, fostered by Auguste Comte and later Émile Durkheim. For the latter, society bifurcated into modern and primitive forms. Durkheim's dualism lost both its empirical and its theoretical power in the latter half of the 20^th century, due to new postcolonial and global realities, and the distinction between sociology and anthropology no longer runs along the distinction between modern (complex) and primitive (elementary) forms of social life. If there still is a distinction between the disciplines, it is possibly in methodological emphasis, largely associated with quantitative and qualitative methods, respectively—true to the origin. I shall not elaborate on this here, but simply note that in the present volume the authors explore the limits of ‘society’ as we have so far understood it. There is a strong will to theorize the unconfigured, and not-yet-conceptualized, emergent worlds both near and afar, and on a multiplicity of scales.

Thus the arguments presented in this volume can be seen as edgework practice, resisting institutional calculation and conceptual routinization in the interest of exploring new possibilities of being. It is a practice that carries with it a sense of the generative power of anthropology—and other scholarly pursuits—engaged in discovering, defining, and creating significant objects, relations, and scales. Such generative power always rests on the edge between reasonable certainty about the workings of the world, and the manifest uncertainties just beyond the horizon. Arguably, this edge is immanent in any scientific pursuit, destined to destabilize old certainties along with the creation of new ones; one never reaches a definitive peace of mind. For anthropologists today, the practical work implies directing all their skills of attention towards the complex meshwork of human life as lived, and towards the worlds emerging from that life, striving to understand people's actions in the same way as they do (Strathern 1999: 10); this challenges conceptual dualisms which may potentially destabilize anthropology, but also open up for unprecedented insight. In this introduction, I shall attempt at qualifying some of the domains that have emerged as anthropological hotbeds of edgework in recent years, and present a series of pertinent questions relating to the fluid field.

DISCIPLINARY COMMITMENTS: THE QUESTION OF FLEXIBILITY

There is an implicit irony in hedging in anthropological edgework by the bounds of a book. One might see this as succumbing to a general feature of the present era, which is actually the other side of the edgework approach, where individual risk-taking converges with, rather than deviates from, societal and institutional demands for adventurous business and financial risk-taking (Lyng 2005: 11–12). Truly, times may be seen as favouring edgework also in scholarship; yet within academia itself, freedom remains circumscribed by organizational frameworks that only allow for so much license, lest departments be deprived of funding and positions cancelled. Gideon Sjoberg (2005), writing of political and institutional censorship at the University of Texas in the Cold War (and beyond), reminds us forcefully of the intellectual risks that some academics have run (and still run) in the interest of knowledge and academic freedom. Times have changed, but when creativity is universally praised and even expected from all corners, this in itself becomes an institutional straightjacket, pushing scholars to simply declare the new, rather than giving it time to emerge through a keen attention to detail and pattern. Truly new knowledge cannot simply be asked for, but it may emerge in the course of work—edgework—provided a degree of institutional flexibility is in place.

In a groundbreaking essay, Gregory Bateson defined flexibility as “uncommitted potentiality for change” (1972: 497). This serves as a poignant reminder to academic institutions not to commit too much scholarly energy to other matters—notably in the form of accounting—that will cut back the potentiality for scientific revolutions of sorts. When we think of edgework as an exploration of the limits of human capacity, Bateson's parable of the acrobat on high wire, illustrating the salient point, is more than appropriate. To maintain the position on the wire, the acrobat must be free to move from one position of instability to another, and his arms must have maximum flexibility to secure the stability of more central parts—for that purpose, the span of the arms is often extended by a long stick. If the arms are locked, the acrobat will fall. During the period when the acrobat is learning to walk on the wire, and thus learning to move the arms in an appropriate way, a safety net is necessary; this gives him the freedom to fall of the wire. “Freedom and flexibility in regard to the most basic variables may be necessary during the process of learning and creating a new system of social change” (ibid.: 498). In academic work, the institution must provide the safety net and give scholars time and space to learn to walk the tightrope towards emerging worlds, and thus enable them to push the horizon further forward (and closing others behind).

In a sense, anthropology has operated on the edge since its inception. As Vincent Crapanzano has suggested, anthropology is in essence “an interstitial discipline” (2004: 5). “The beauty of the field lies in its fluidity– its resistance to tight compartmentalization and territorialisation” (ibid.). Whatever moves forward anthropology has made, they have not made up a straight line, of course, and have owed as much to extrinsic changes in the world as to intrinsic qualities. Again, there is a larger point in this, namely that revolutions in science are not necessarily earth shattering, but simply reflect new knowledge interests and value judgements. I shall briefly refer back to Thomas Kuhn, whose notion of scientific revolution has generally been seen as shifts in understanding that immediately rendered old knowledge obsolete. In an afterword to the second edition of his book, Kuhn himself tempers this:

A revolution is for me a special sort of change involving a certain sort of reconstruction of group commitments. But it need not be a large change, nor need it seem revolutionary to those outside a single community, consisting perhaps of fewer than twenty-five people. It is just because this type of change, little recognized or discussed in the literature of the philosophy of science, occurs so regularly on this smaller scale that revolutionary, as against cumulative, change so badly needs to be understood. (Kuhn 1970: 180–81)

In Kuhn's comprehensive work on the Copernican revolution (1957), which led to the more general work on scientific revolutions, he shows how it primarily depended upon factors outside of the world of astronomers, belonging to a larger historical and intellectual development. The Copernican revolution was not precipitated by new astronomic discoveries, but by a new way of understanding old ones, due to renaissance learning and scholastic critique of received wisdom (Kuhn 1957: 132). In anthropology of the past two decades, it may likewise be difficult to make claim to new discoveries, but the commitments have been reconstructed in response to historical and scientific developments in the world—to which anthropology has also contributed by seeking to grasp them in new terms. We know very well, of course, that anthropologists never speak in one voice, and that many currents of thought co-exist at any point in time, yet emerging clusters of generative studies testify to particularly creative spaces of intellectual work at certain points in time. I would contend that we find ourselves at such a point.

In present day anthropology, it seems that a major reconstruction of group commitments is owed to a rethinking of the alleged boundary between nature and society, whether explicitly or implicitly. The current vigour of anthropology is (also) related to factors that are extrinsic to the discipline, viz. the major changes to planet Earth. In early 21^st century, half the human population on the planet lives in urban spaces, and the surface of the planet is globally marked by human presence. Additionally, humans have left massive fingerprints on the atmosphere, accumulating since the 19^th century industrial revolution. In consequence, a new geological era has been announced, the Anthropocene, replacing the Holocene, which have seen human society develop from small hunting bands, through the agricultural revolution in the Neolithic, and until the present age of global land-use, including forestry, mining, farming, and so forth, accompanied by such massive pollution of the ocean and overexploitation of marine resources that depletion is if not exactly imminent, then at least a realistic outcome.

In response to this, environmental anthropology has been reinvigorated and it has been suggested that an “anthropology of the environment affords valuable insight into our relationship with the environment, which may assist policy makers, project designers, and peoples impacted by today's environmental problems” (Shoreman-Ouimet & Kopnina 2011: 6). While the intent is well taken, the environment is still seen as external to social communities; this is of course a function of the very definition of the natural environment. Within the present volume, it is precisely this externality that is probed from various angles. We are, admittedly, walking on a razor's edge here, captured in words that no longer fit the deep anthropological insight into the complexity of actual worlds at this age and day. Another response to this complexity has been to suggest that we have come to ‘nature's end’, not necessarily implying the end of the world, but a beginning of ‘the age of environment’, according to Sörlin and Warde, who further qualify their view: “Nature needs no humans, but there is an environment only where humans live and where humans have entered into a self-conscious relationship with their surroundings” (Sörlin & Warde 2009: 2–3). In the Anthropocene, all nature has in some way become environment in this sense, defined by and defining human life on the planet. This development, which is at the same time natural, social, and scientific, in our view has internalised the environment into both social and anthropological trajectories. This again has led to the present concern about nature in anthropology—nature as implicit in social and intellectual life, which again is complicit in the makings of nature.

It is a concern with a long and winding pedigree in anthropology, reflecting different times and horizons. When in late 19^th century anthropology became professionalized as the comparative study of culture, and the first chair was established at Oxford University (in 1896), with E.B. Tylor as its first incumbent, the horizon was defined by evolutionism. Tylor made a case for all humans possessing equal capabilities for advancement and understanding, if education were available. The human mind could be cultured in different ways, but its nature was one. Tylor also wrote extensively on animism, featuring a non-separability between the physical and spiritual world. This just goes to say that since its professional inception, anthropology has found itself caught up within a discussion of the relationship between things natural and things cultural. This was further nurtured when fieldwork became the sine qua of anthropological practice in early 20^th century, inserting anthropologists in other environments, and affecting their senses in multiple ways.

Fieldwork was not invented by anthropologists; it was well known in geography, archaeology, botany, and geomorphology, to name a few companion disciplines, and it had been practiced inadvertently by comparative philologists and folklorists. The hallmark of fieldwork is the direct bodily and sensory engagement with the object of study, which is a foundational experience (K. Hastrup 1994). In the field, one soon realizes that not everything could happen anywhere; the actual spaces facilitate particular formations of life, while not determining them. Even as anthropologists configure their object of interest, they realize that w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Naturee: Anthropology on the Edge
• 2 More-than-Human Sociality: A Call for Critical Description
• 3 Qualifying Coastal Nature: Bio-conservation Projects in South East India
• 4 Engaged World-Making: Movements of Sand, Sea, and People at Two Pacific Islands
• 5 Political Ecology in a More-than-Human World: Rethinking ‘Natural’ Hazards
• 6 Islands of Nature: Insular Objects and Frozen Spirits in Northern Mongolia
• 7 Establishing a ‘Third Space’? Anthropology and the Potentials of Transcending a Great Divide
• 8 The Inevitability of Nature as a Rhetorical Resource
• 9 Divide and Rule: Nature and Society in a Global Forest Programme
• 10 Life at the Border: Nim Chimpsky et al.
• 11 Human Activity between Nature and Society: The Negotiation of Infertility in China
• 12 Broken Cosmologies: Climate, Water, and State in the Peruvian Andes
• 13 Of Maps and Men: Making Places and People in the Arctic
• 14 Designing Environments for Life
• Contributors
• Index