Nature and Society

Anthropological Perspectives

Philippe Descola, Gisli Palsson, Philippe Descola, Gisli Palsson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415132169
• eBook ISBN: 9781134827152
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The contributors to this book focus on the relationship between nature and society from a variety of theoretical and ethnographic perspectives. Their work draws upon recent developments in social theory, biology, ethnobiology, epistemology, sociology of science, and a wide array of ethnographic case studies -- from Amazonia, the Solomon Islands, Malaysia, the Mollucan Islands, rural comunities from Japan and north-west Europe, urban Greece, and laboratories of molecular biology and high-energy physics. The discussion is divided into three parts, emphasising the problems posed by the nature-culture dualism, some misguided attempts to respond to these problems, and potential avenues out of the current dilemmas of ecological discourse.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Philippe Descola and Gísli Pálsson

The overall theme of this volume—the place of nature and the environment in anthropological theory and social discourse—is not a novel one. From early on, nature was one of the central concerns of anthropology, whether in the field of folk-sciences and cultural ecology or in the study of myths and rituals linked to the environment and subsistence techniques. Nevertheless, in recent years the issue of ecology, in the broadest sense of the term, has tended to be relegated to the margin of anthropological discussions, as post-modernism and culturalist perspectives have dominated the centre stage of theoretical developments in the social sciences generally. This is reflected in the declining supply of (and, presumably, reduced demand for) ecology courses in the curricula of many anthropology departments. However, the situation is changing again, as anthropologists are increasingly returning to the study of environmental issues (see, for instance, McCay and Acheson 1987, Croll and Parkin 1992). Similar developments seem to be taking place in other disciplines, including philosophy, history, and sociology (see, for example, Dickens 1992, Simmons 1993, Attfield and Belsey 1994).

The contributors to this book focus on the nature-society interface from a variety of theoretical and ethnographic perspectives, drawing upon recent developments in social theory, biology, ethnobiology, epistemology, sociology of science, and a wide array of ethnographic case studies—from Amazonia, the Solomon Islands, Malaysia, the Moluccan Islands, rural communities from Japan and north-west Europe, urban Greece, and laboratories of molecular biology and high-energy physics. Among the questions posed by the authors are the following: Are the different cultural models of nature conditioned by the same set of cognitive devices? Are we to replace the historically relative nature-culture dualist category with the more general distinction between the wild and the socialised? Do non-western cultures offer alternative models for rethinking universality and the issue of moral attitudes towards non-humans? Will the blurring of the nature-culture opposition in certain sectors of contemporary science imply a redefinition of traditional western cosmological and ontological categories? And, finally, would the theoretical rejection of the nature-culture dualism merely signify a return to the ‘ecological’ concepts of the early medieval European world or would it, perhaps, set the stage for a new kind of ecological anthropology? This introduction briefly outlines the themes of the volume, reviews the theoretical frameworks and arguments of the contributors, and defines fields of consensus and areas of disagreement. The discussion is divided into three parts, emphasising the problems posed by the nature-culture dualism, some misguided attempts to respond to these problems, and potential avenues out of the current dilemmas of ecological discourse.

The Nature-Culture Dualism

For over forty years the nature-culture dichotomy has been a central dogma in anthropology, providing a series of analytical tools for apparently antithetical research programmes as well as an identity marker for the discipline as a whole. Materialists considered nature as a basic determinant of social action and would import from the natural sciences models of causal explanation which, they hoped, would give sounder foundations and a wider scope to the social sciences. For cultural ecology, sociobiology, and some brands of Marxist anthropology, human behaviour, social institutions and specific cultural features were seen as adaptive responses to, or mere expressions of, basic environmental or genetic constraints. Internal or external nature— defined in the ethnocentric terms of modern scientific language— was the great driving force behind social life. As a result, little attention was paid to how non-western cultures conceptualised their environment and their relation to it, except to evaluate possible convergences or discrepancies between bizarre emic ideas and the etic orthodoxy embodied in the laws of nature.

Structuralist or symbolic anthropology, on the other hand, has used the nature-culture opposition as an analytical device in order to make sense of myths, rituals, systems of classification, food and body symbolism, and many other aspects of social life that imply a conceptual discrimination between sensible qualities, tangible properties and defining attributes. Although the cultural configurations submitted to this type of analysis differed widely from one another, the actual content of the concepts of nature and culture used as classificatory indexes always referred implicitly to the ontological domains covered by these notions in western culture. In other words, while each of the two approaches emphasised a particular aspect of the polar opposition—nature shaping culture versus culture imposing meaning on nature—they nevertheless took the dichotomy for granted and shared an identical, universalistic conception of nature.

The epistemological implications entailed by the dualist paradigm are addressed by several contributors to the present volume. A recurring criticism is that the nature-society dichotomy hinders true ecological understanding. Analysing the figure of the ‘optimal forager’ in human ecology and its relation to ‘economic man’, Ingold (Chapter 2) shows that whereas economic man is credited with the design of his own strategies of maximisation, foragers are construed as the mere executors of strategies assigned to them by natural selection. The natural domain is characterised by rational choice, while society is reduced to an external normative structure that causes behaviour to deviate from the optimum. Evolutionary ecology has thus created the anti-ecological fiction of a natural being endowed with a set of capacities and dispositions prior to its relation with the environment. Following a similar line of argument, Hornborg (Chapter 3) shows that the present-day opposition between ‘dualist’ and ‘monist’ approaches in human ecology echoes the former polarity between formalists and substantivists in economic anthropology. While advocates of dualism stress objectification, conscious choices and decontextualisation, a monist espistemology would emphasise embeddedness, self-regulation and local autonomy. Drawing upon the pioneering work of Roy Rappaport, Hornborg argues that the monist approach is also the only solid premise for a ‘contextualist’ stance, i.e. one that considers traditional, pre-industrial societies as having something to tell us about how to live sustainably. The dualist paradigm thus prevents a genuine ecological approach to human-environmental relatedness. In Chapter 4, Pálsson suggests that once the ontological separation between nature and society has been posited there is no way out, no escape from the dual ‘prison houses’ of language and naturalism, whatever the dose of dialectics and interactive language injected into theoretical discourse.

As Descola points out, in Chapter 5, this ontological disjuncture also induces a strange epistemological confusion in the theoretical premises of both materialist and culturalist approaches. Leaving aside the initial comparative ambition of Julian Steward, cultural ecology tends to treat each society as a specific homeostatic device tightly adapted to a specific environment. On the other hand, culturalist perspectives see each society as an original and incommensurate system of imposing meanings on a natural order, the definition and boundaries of which are nevertheless derived from western conceptions of nature. Paradoxically, the purported universality of geographical determinism thus leads to an extreme form of ecological relativism, while self-claimed cultural relativism leaves unquestioned its assumption of a universalistic conception of nature.

The dualist paradigm also prevents an adequate understanding of local forms of ecological knowledge and technical know-how, as these tend to be objectified according to western standards. Making this point, Hviding (Chapter 9) criticises conventional ethnoecology for its incapacity to accommodate alternative ‘ethnoepistemologies’ and its correlative tendency to reify certain domains of indigenous knowledge so as to make them compatible with western science. These trends, he argues, impede any serious understanding of the role played by certain beliefs and practices—such as ‘magic’ or ritual—in people’s daily engagement with their environment. In a similar vein, Ellen (Chapter 6) questions the close correspondence implied by mainstream contemporary ethnobiology between the Linnaean taxonomic scheme and the structure of folk classifications of plants and animals, noting that the hierarchic conception of nature typified by scientific taxonomy is not one which is readily yielded from his own ethnographic data. Nature as an abstract inventory of things, distinguished by a small number of features, he notes, is more obvious in museums of natural history than in the lived culture of indigenous peoples. As Hviding and Descola also point out, the search for domain-specific universals in the recognition of ‘nature’s basic plan’ (Berlin 1992:8) impedes taking into serious consideration those entities and phenomena which do not fall within the sphere of the western notion of nature, however important they may be in local conceptions of the environment.

The persistence of the nature-culture distinction in anthropological discourse is all the more surprising as this core dichotomy appears in many respects as the philosophical touchstone of a whole series of typically western binary oppositions which anthropologists have otherwise successfully criticised: mind-body, subject-object, individual-society, etc. Moreover, the nature-culture distinction is challenged by a growing body of evidence from a variety of sources. One kind of evidence relates to studies of biological evolution, comparisons of human and non-human behaviour, and research on the process of hominisation. In the theories of Mendel and Darwin, organisms are presented as both passive and alienated from the environments in which they live, as objects dictated by genes, on the one hand, and selective pressures through a mechanical process of adaptation, on the other. Such models, the theoretical ancestors of a series of neo-Darwinian paradigms, including optimal foraging theory, seem to present substantial theoretical difficulties. For one thing, while the mechanical conception of adaptation was necessary, perhaps, to establish the modern science of biology, it closed other avenues and, thus, has prevented further developments. Indeed, the dominant evolutionary models derived from the so-called ‘New Synthesis’ of Mendelian and Darwinian theory increasingly contradict the facts of biology; they do not ‘stand up under even the most casual survey of our knowledge of development and natural history’ (Lewontin 1983:284). An alternative model emphasises that the organism is empowered to shape its own development, the subject of evolutionary forces (see Ho and Fox 1988). Drawing upon such a perspective, some scholars have argued that the relations between organisms and their environments are reciprocal, not one-way. In the process of engaging with the environment, organisms construct their own niches. In other words, the evolving organism is one of the selective pressures acting upon itself; each living being participates in its own making, engaging in cultural or ‘proto-cultural’ alterations of selective pressures (Odling-Smee 1994:168). Significantly, the interactive vocabulary of ‘co-evolution’ and ‘niche construction’ is emerging in the place of mechanical Newtonian notions of automatic responses to the ‘forces’ of the alienated environment.

Recent research on the ethology of primates as well as growing evidence on the enormous time-scale entailed by the process of hominisation also tend to invalidate such notions as a clear phylogenetic boundary between nature and culture. Studies of chimpanzees in the wild not only show that non-human primates use and make some of the kinds of stone tools usually believed to be a distinctive feature of homo faber; they also indicate that neighbouring bands of chimpanzees elaborate and transmit markedly distinct styles of tools. In the terminology of prehistorians, chimpanzees thus appear to possess different ‘traditions’ in terms of material culture (Joulian 1994). The complexity of social behaviour among baboons is also well documented (Strum 1987). The fact that an individual may provoke a certain kind of response from another individual in order to influence the behaviour of a third one seems to indicate that baboons are capable of understanding and categorising behaviour in terms of underlying states, not as mere movements of the body. Such an achievement strongly suggests that they have the ability to form meta-representations, i.e. representations of representations, without the help of language. The development of language is probably nothing more than one among many stages in the process of hominisation and, in an evolutionary perspective, it may be seen as a consequence, rather than a cause, of the development of communication made possible by the ability to form meta-representations (Sperber 1994:61). Culture certainly took a long time to evolve. Did it emerge with the first hominids, some 3 million years ago, or with the first recorded tools, one million years later? Although the first modern humans, homo sapiens sapiens, are probably no older than 100,000 years, some form of burials are 150,000 years old and the first hearth is dated 450,000 BC. The very idea that the origin of culture could be dated or ascribed to a single stage in the hominisation process thus appears utterly unrealistic.

A related shift in perspective with respect to the nature-culture dualism has been taking place in ethnographic studies of enskilment and expertise. According to traditional theories of learning, the novice individual gradually becomes a competent person by internalising a cultural code or a superorganic script (Pálsson 1994). The person, in other words, is seen as an alienated container that progressively absorbs increasing amounts of information from the social environment. Recent studies indicate, however, that the radical opposition of person vs. environment and individual vs. society prohibits an adequate understanding of the contextual nature of the learning process. Assuming a constitutive model of the individual, introducing agency and dialogue into the process of learning, Lave (1993) and some others have shown how learning is situated in communities of practice. Such a perspective suggests a radical break with the Cartesian tradition. The proper focus of research is no longer the passive autonomous individual but the whole person acting within a particular context (Ingold and Rival, both in this volume). Anthropological fieldwork is one branch of learning which is currently being recast along those lines. While the experience of fieldwork does involve highly ‘personal’ moments, it is not simply a solitary enterprise, the monologic reflection of an independent observer. Ethnography is a dialogic product involving colleagues, spouses, friends, and neighbours—the collective result of a ‘long conversation’ (Gudeman and Rivera 1995).

Modernist critics may argue that the current dissatisfaction with the theoretical dualisms of the past is simply yet another post-modernist fad and that the deconstruction of the nature-society dichotomy has more to do with competition on the academic labour market and trendy rhetorics than with solid evidence and reliable observations of the real world. This kind of criticism is implied in Worster’s remark (1990:18) concerning the current popularity of chaos theory; there are ‘striking parallels’, he argues, between chaos theory in science and post-modern thought. Ethnographic discourse, however, invites a rather different argument. For many anthropologists—including some contributors to this volume—the shift from a dualist to a monist perspective appears to have been triggered by fieldwork among peoples for whom the nature-society dichotomy was utterly meaningless. This is the case, for instance, of the Achuar Jivaro of the Upper Amazon who, according to Descola (1994), consider most plants and animals as persons, living in societies of their own, entering into relations with humans according to strict rules of social behaviour: game animals are treated as affines by men, while cultivated plants are treated as k...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Editors' preface
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Contested domains and boundaries
• Part II Sociologies of nature
• Part III Nature, society and artefact
• Name index
• Subject index