Ecological Nostalgias

Memory, Affect and Creativity in Times of Ecological Upheavals

Olivia Angé, David Berliner, Olivia Angé, David Berliner

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781800739086, 9781789208931
• eBook ISBN: 9781789208948
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Ecología

Introducing the study of econostalgias through a variety of rich ethnographic cases, this volume argues that a strictly human centered approach does not account for contemporary longings triggered by ecosystem upheavals. In this time of climate change, this book explores how nostalgia for fading ecologies unfolds into the interstitial spaces between the biological, the political and the social, regret and hope, the past, the present and the future.

CHAPTER 1
Thinking Through Nostalgia in Anthropologies of the Environment and Ethnographies of Landscape

Roy Ellen

Here, in the vibrant, tactile scented gloom is the landscape of nostalgia and abandonment.

—A. Gell, ‘The Language of the Forest:
Landscape and Phonological Iconism in Umeda’

Introduction

Memory is everywhere in current anthropological writing, whether as a subject of research or as a trope, such that some observers think it much overplayed, vacuous and semantically overextended (Berliner 2005; White 2006). I tend to agree. Memory is not just another word for culture, by which we usually mean everything transmitted from one generation to the next, while ‘social remembering’, in the sense of implying that societies have memories, entails a logical error in attributing an impossible capacity to an abstract second order category. In this chapter I treat memory as a cognitive property only of individual organisms, but also a property which organisms (especially human organisms) can instantiate through the ‘extended phenotype’ and re-organize through social distribution and the intelligent use of artefacts. I critically examine the treatment accorded to memory in the ways in which anthropologists have conceptualized cultural adaptation, especially in what we might conveniently call ‘anthropologies of the environment’. In the first part, I argue that from being implicit in the explanatory apparatus of ecological and environmental anthropology since at least Julian Steward, the role of memory has not always been explicit. Indeed, as we move through successive and competing paradigms, so we transition from denial and ignorance to increasing acknowledgement of a place for memory. In this context ecological nostalgia might be seen as the selective use of memory by the subjects of our research to create potent and evocative valuations of particular scenarios which impact on how people store, represent and use environmental information; and the selective evocation of a romanticized past of the protagonists by those who study them. The consequences of all this vary depending on different socio-cultural configurations, and how these draw on emotional resources (White 2006) to reinforce particular kinds of memory.

In the second part of the chapter, I focus on two case studies that show how specific ecological nostalgias are dependent on the ways in which people make their environments, both physically and conceptually. In situations where states have come to re-define environmental relations, nostalgias can in various ways become ‘false’, through a process in which science, governments, stakeholder citizens, heritage specialists and traditional peoples may all in different ways be complicit. I illustrate this with reference to research conducted in and around the Batu Apoi forest reserve in Brunei during the mid-1990s, and among Nuaulu people on Seram, during the period 2000–2015 as they put together arguments in support of negotiations with the Indonesian government to establish an independent devolved administration. I show how what some people might describe as ‘ecological nostalgia’ has reinforced notions of ancient political autonomy that have transformed Nuaulu relations with the state, while at the same time the complexities of historical process prevent any easy definition of what, in this instance, this might actually constitute.

The Concepts of Memory and Nostalgia in Anthropologies of the Environment

The earliest theoretical formulations of the human-environment relationship accorded little ostensible role for memory (Ellen 1982). Where environments were seen to mechanistically determine cultural outcomes – as for example in the anthropogeography of some of the followers of Frederic Ratzel – there was no need for local cultural populations ‘to remember’ previous accommodations. However, as soon as the notion of ‘cultural adaptation’ becomes central to the modelling of human-environment relationships, as we find in the possibilism of Daryll Forde or in Julian Steward’s cultural ecology, so memory becomes implicit, if not always explicit. People not only learn from their accumulated experience of a particular environment, but from the remembered experience of their predecessors. Cultural adaptation can be seen in the objective process through which certain practices allow one individual, group or population to survive better than another, but whether this is inadvertent or the consequence of premeditated action, the successful outcome depends on memory, either memories of past practices used to instantiate innovation into routine behaviour, or the transmission of instantiated practices and knowledge between individuals and populations over space and time. The role accorded to memory in post-Stewardian models is implicitly much expanded, but not always any more explicit, possibly because ‘memory’ as an analytical concept for a long time was assumed to be the preserve of psychologists rather than ecological anthropologists. But with the arrival of ethnoecology and the concept of ‘indigenous knowledge’, adaptation becomes an active rather than a passive process, its role reflected in the complex culturally transmitted classifications and protocols for organizing knowledge and using it to solve problems in material situations. The decision-making involved in environmental management is inevitably based on individual and collective memories. And in that other critical response to the mechanistic Stewardian theory of the separation of culture and environment systems, memory (as in the ‘cognized models’ of Rappaport 1979: 97–144) becomes a cybernetic loop supporting emic models of the world. Thus, successive re-workings of culture-environment theory have gradually recognized how initial responses to environmental problems faced by people in low energy small-scale subsistence systems, generally beginning as short-term problems for individuals, become institutionalized in the longer term through personal life-histories and sharing, such that the individual episodic response is transformed inter-generationally and collectively into a mimetic cultural memory.

We must, of course, distinguish the memories and nostalgias attributed to the subjects of anthropological research from the (oftentimes covert) nostalgia reflected in the assumptions and methodologies of anthropologists themselves. There can be little doubt that historically, anthropologists looking at traditional pre-capitalist and pre-industrial modes of subsistence, that were in decline and under threat at the moment when they were being studied, have often been tempted to see them as the remnants of systems that once functioned in ways that were fully adaptive and had been, until the present, perfectly evolved for their environmental circumstances. In such views we find a convenient convergence between in-harmony-with-nature and pristine ecology arguments (Ellen 1986). Thus, Lee (1966) argued for a model of ‘affluent’ and autonomous hunter-gatherer subsistence among !Kung San bushmen that required down-playing their precarity of existence, intermittent arduous work schedules and the role of exchange with outside agricultural societies. This interpretation has since been extensively critiqued, and later partially retracted (e.g. Konner and Shostak 1986). Similarly, Rappaport, who argued persuasively in the first edition (1968) of Pigs for the Ancestors for self-sustaining cybernetic loops involving ritual regulation amongst Tsembaga of New Guinea just as these systems were ‘breaking down’, had by the second edition in 1984 to back-track somewhat. Certainly, it is very clear to me that both Lee and Rappaport were influenced by covert nostalgia in their assumptions and reconstructions regarding the ‘pristine’ systems they were describing. Friedman (1974) disparagingly described the models on which such reconstructions were based as ‘ecological functionalism’, thus linking the new ecology to a more general anthropological functionalism which had by then been discredited. Although for Friedman the linkage was ‘ideological’, it was also in almost equal measure encouraged by the fairly standard liberal and romantic anthropological imagination of primitive arcadias linked to the emergent environmentalist concerns of the late twentieth-century West, including (agro-)biodiversity loss, landscape despoiliation and ecological transformation. Such analyses were hardly uncommon in anthropology during the second half of the twentieth century, and arguably continue in much work motivated by ethnoecology, indigenous knowledge studies, concerns for environmental justice and post-humanist (more-than-human) perspectives.

Yet, what is missing in all this is any understanding of the role of nostalgia in shaping the memories of the people we study. We might reasonably assume that the neglect of nostalgia as an explanatory force in anthropologies of the environment simply reflects a generic distaste for resorting to psychological mechanisms during a particular period in the shaping of modern socio-cultural anthropology (Angé and Berliner 2015: 6), but as we have just seen, the neo-functionalist ecology of Rappaport had no problem in drawing upon cognitive psychology. What it ignored, or seemingly resisted, was a role for emotion in underpinning cognition. It is not until the appearance of the initially controversial ideas of Kellert and Wilson’s (1993) ‘biophilia hypothesis’, and its echoes in the work of anthropologists such as Milton (2002), that it becomes acceptable to assume that emoting about whatever ‘nature’ might be for particular cultural populations is a basic human propensity. We can see now how nostalgia might be conceptually embedded, if we define it as an emotionally charged valorization of the past based on selective memories. Indeed, we now understand how emotion plays a key role in cultural cognition by fixing knowledge in the long-term memory through the limbic system of the brain. In the same way as personal experience can shape long-term memory, be transmitted to others and morph from individual episodic experiences to shared cultural mimesis, so individual nostalgia, precisely because of its emotional charge, can fuel and shape collective cultural memory. However, in terms of histories of anthropologies of the environment it is not until the appearance of approaches that we now describe as historical ecology, political ecology and the humanistic ecologies (Biersack 1999; Kottack 1999) that we find an appropriate theoretical framing for understanding the role of nostalgia. But these theoretical contexts are less conducive to claims for its possible cognitive role in reinforcing adaptive memories.

The paradigm of historical ecology is of particular interest because of its foundational tenet that people make their environment, which they do both conceptually and physically. The Vietnamese Mnong Gar are famously described by George Condominas (1957) as having ‘eaten the forest’, and in his analysis the swidden cycle provides a framework which simultaneously measures time, structures activity and valorizes space as people pass through a landscape. Mnong Gar emotionally invest in landscape as they pass through it, changing it along the way, and using the physical markers so created to recall events and stories. Thus, our ecological nostalgias are to a considerable extent the consequence of how we have altered the environment and left our individual and shared marks upon it.

By comparison, the paradigms of political and humanistic ecology confound the line of explanation so far developed by reminding us that environments are not simply made and emoted in the process but contested, and that the value placed on one place, resource or landscape may be very different depending on the relationship between social groups who relate to it in alternative ways, often in ways that entrench hierarchical relationships and inequalities. Thus, because different groups with an interest in the same environment invest different memories in it, their comparative nostalgias will be different as well. Moreover, following the ‘deconstruction of nature’ debates and the subsequent ‘ontological turn’, these representations have become associated with Latourian ‘naturecultures’ (Haraway 2003, Tsing 2015), that is variable cultural constructions of what nature constitutes in particular places. One of the most discussed, contested and iconic landscapes in this context is tropical rainforest. The West has created rainforest in the imagination, based on its ur-naturalness as wilderness, paradoxically on the one hand as a feared, impenetrable, externalized nature associated with all manner of dangers summed up in the term ‘jungle’, and on the other as a basically benign landscape associated with many positive virtues (non-timber forest products, biodiversity, carbon sinks and indigenous peoples with their associated folk wisdom), the threats to all of which are rehearsed through narratives of destruction.

The Batu Apoi Nature Reserve: Brunei 1991–1995

In 1991 I was invited by the Earl of Cranbrook (otherwise known as Lord Medway, or Gathorne Gathorne-Hardy) to participate in the joint Universiti Brunei Darussalam/Royal Geographical Society Brunei Rainforest Project (BRP), which had been launched in 1990. The aim was to set up a Field Studies Centre at Kuala Belalong in ‘undisturbed lowland tropical rainforest’ (Cranbrook 1990: 2) on the edge of the Batu Apoi Forest Reserve, Temburong district (Map 1.1). The invitation was motivated by the observation that the proposed study of an extensive tract of rainforest would be incomplete without an anthropologist or ethnobotanist to monitor traditional extraction practices within the reserve used by local Dusun-speaking peoples and other linguistic minorities living on its periphery. The BRP as a whole had the highest level patronage possible in the persons of the Sultan of Brunei and HRH the Prince of Wales, and therefore a significant international profile as a scientific endeavour, while the Kuala Belalong centre was set up with funds provided by the Brunei government, Brunei-Shell Petroleum and many other corporate sponsors. My part in the project was funded by the British Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), as part of its Global Environmental Change initiative.

Until we were well into the planning phase, including appointing staff, all seemed to be going well. Unfortunately, those agencies of the government of Brunei who were closely involved in supervising the project decided, rather late in the day, to take the view that since Batu Apoi was a protected area in which hunting and gathering by local peoples was prohibited then there would be nothing to study. In other words, ‘what should be’ was determining the interpretation of ‘what was’, or put differently, empirical reality became subservient to a legal reality. This was despite the existence of very good evidence that (a) the reserve area had been shaped by patterns of human settlement and extraction over some hundreds if not thousands of years; and (b) that local Dusunic-speaking people were continuing to traverse the reserve area. In addition, at a conference hosted by the Universiti Brunei Darusalam in Bandar Seri Begawan on ‘Tropical rainforest research’, held in April 1993 in connection with the Batu Apoi project (Edwards, Booth and Choy 1996), there was an attempt by overseas scientists present to vote on a motion opposing the Batu Apoi dam that was being proposed for the watershed by the Brunei government. Here then was a three-way clash between several visions of the Batu Apoi reserve: one by the scientific community which saw it as a classic case of virgin jungle in need of protection; a second by the BRP leadership who wished to pursue science but recognized that humans were part of a dynamic ecosystem; and a third by the government which for political reasons was happy to be seen establishing a nature reserve to protect the patrimony and heritage of the state. At the same time as denying the historicity of forest, the government wanted the freedom to dramatically alter the watershed in the interests of development. Both the scientists and the government, publicly at least, either contested or were ignorant of the historicity of the forest. On the part of the scientists this view was possibly informed by generic ‘functionalist’ modelling assumptions then still current concerning rainforest ecology, which were formed without the benefit of local memories and experience of the indigenous Temburong communities, let alone the insights of the emerging discipline of historical ecology. On the other hand, the government view was formed by an institutional and political memory of forest as the natural ‘other’ of the historical Sultanate, the periphery over which it traditionally exerted authority and nowadays had controlling power. If the government claimed by fiat that the forest now had no inhabitants then that was the reality that had to be dealt with. In this model with all its contradictions, memory was suitably selective but informed by a nostalgia born out of recollections of the relations between centre and periphery under the Sultanate, in which ethnic affinity conveniently coincided with environmental zone and degree of subjugation (Brunei Malay on the coast, Dusun in upriver areas, and Penan and other groups in deep forest): a nostalgia more for a particular political dispensation than for a distinctive ecology (Brown 1970).

Map 1.1. The river systems and state boundaries of Brunei, s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures and Maps
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Thinking Through Nostalgia in Anthropologies of the Environment and Ethnographies of Landscape
• Chapter 2 High Arctic Nostalgia Thule and the Ecology of Mind
• Chapter 3 Nostalgic Confessions in the French Cévennes Politics of Longings in the Neo-Peasants Initiatives
• Chapter 4 The Nature of Loss Ecological Nostalgia and Cultural Politics in Amazonia
• Chapter 5 Ecological Nostalgias and Interspecies Affect in the Highland Potato Fields of Cuzco (Peru)
• Chapter 6 The Village and the Hamlet in the Mixe Highlands of Oaxaca, Mexico Nostalgic Commitments to Working and Living Together
• Chapter 7 Peaceful Countryside Ecologies of Longing and the Temporality of Flux in Contemporary Mongolia
• Chapter 8 Melt in the Future Subjunctive
• Afterword
• Index