Methodological Challenges in Nature-Culture and Environmental History Research

Jocelyn Thorpe, Stephanie Rutherford, L. Anders Sandberg, Jocelyn Thorpe, Stephanie Rutherford, L. Anders Sandberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138956032
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317353560
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

This book examines the challenges and possibilities of conducting cultural environmental history research today. Disciplinary commitments certainly influence the questions scholars ask and the ways they seek out answers, but some methodological challenges go beyond the boundaries of any one discipline. The book examines: how to account for the fact that humans are not the only actors in history yet dominate archival records; how to attend to the non-visual senses when traditional sources offer only a two-dimensional, non-sensory version of the past; how to decolonize research in and beyond the archives; and how effectively to use sources and means of communication made available in the digital age.
This book will be a valuable resource for those interested in environmental history and politics, sustainable development and historical geography.

1
Introduction

Methodological challenges

Stephanie Rutherford, Jocelyn Thorpe and L. Anders Sandberg

This collection of essays started life as a round table on research methods at the World Congress of Environmental History in Guimarães, Portugal, in the summer of 2014. We, the editors of this volume, asked round-table participants to reflect on their research methods that take them outside of archives, as well as on how they communicate that research beyond scholarly books and articles. While archives can be valuable sources of information about the past, there is also a lot they do not tell us, particularly if we are trying to understand the past of other-than-human beings and/or of human beings whose perspectives are difficult to find in stored files. Like the archives, scholarly ways of communicating can obfuscate as well as illuminate, for example by using words such as obfuscate instead of perfectly acceptable alternatives such as confuse.

Much to our surprise, given the warm weather and stunning beauty of our mountainous surroundings, conference attendees packed the room for the round table, making possible and contributing to a rich discussion about the challenges and possibilities of conducting and communicating research on the history of relationships between humans and the rest of the world. Scholars from a diversity of disciplines and inter-disciplines attended the conference, some of them hailing from history and geography departments and conducting their research under the respective banners of environmental history and historical geography. Others work in anthropology, English, and interdisciplinary departments and programmes such as Indigenous studies, cultural studies, environmental studies, gender studies, and science and technology studies. The level of interest in the round table led us to consider the importance of making space and time at conferences to share ideas about the common elements of our work—the how of research and teaching—as well about our more individual research interests and projects. It also motivated us to continue and expand the conversation in book form.

Despite their varied intellectual traditions, researchers who seek to comprehend the histories of relationships between humans and the more-than-human world take as a starting point that key to understanding the past is paying attention to how humans shaped and were shaped by the world in which they lived. Disciplinary commitments certainly influence the questions scholars ask and the ways they seek out answers, but some methodological challenges go beyond the boundaries of any one discipline. In this collection, we grapple with such methodological challenges by bringing to bear the insights of a number of scholars working in different geographical and disciplinary areas on questions related to nature, culture and history.

The methodological challenges that authors in this collection explore are inspired by the conversations we had at the round table, and do not have easy solutions. Our aim in collecting these stories is to continue the conversation that began for us at the round table in Portugal, but that we know also takes place in supervisors’ offices, on walks, and online as we grapple to figure out how to answer the questions we pose in our research and how best to communicate what we find out. While we know that this book represents just one part of this broader conversation and that it does not fully reflect the geographical diversity of our shared world, we hope that it offers a promising continuation of the conversation about the ‘how’ of our research and communication. We would like to see this conversation continue over the variety of media available to us today, including in scholarly books such as this one.

This book is about the challenges and the possibilities of conducting nature-culture-history research today. The methodological challenges that authors in the collection examine include: how to account for the fact that humans are not the only actors in history, yet they dominate in archival records; how to decolonize research when archival sources and their embedded narratives are both colonial and colonizing; how to attend to the non-visual senses, to materiality and to affect when traditional sources offer only a two-dimensional, non-sensory version of the past; and how effectively to use sources and means of communication made available in the digital age. The book is divided into sections (or ‘parts’) according to these main challenges, and the chapters within each section consider pieces of the larger methodological challenges addressed within each section. The themes of the sections emerged both from the round table and from abstract proposals submitted by contributors, not all of whom participated in the round table. By emphasizing the research process rather than product, we aim to challenge ourselves and our readers to think creatively and to make use of research tools we might not have considered previously. While the focus on process rather than product sets this collection apart, it is exciting also to think about how different research processes might also lead to innovative research findings and communication strategies. Below, we explain the sections and chapters in further detail.

Part I Nonhuman actors

In the past 20 years, the ‘question of the animal’ and discussions about the agency of the more-than-human world have gained currency. Environmental historians, animal geographers, scholars of posthumanism, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary theorists have produced a range of studies that consider the nonhuman not simply as fodder in the human story of change over time, but as agents that shape the course of history (see, for example, Coleman 2004; Fudge 2006; Haraway 2007; Wolfe 2003). This kind of research can offer particularly nuanced ways of apprehending the world. As geographers Stephen Hinchliffe and Nick Bingham note, ‘All kinds of things become more interesting once we stop assuming that “we” are the only place to begin and end our analysis’ (2008: 1541). Including the nonhuman in conversations about historical and landscape change offers the opportunity not only to understand the past in a more holistic way, but also to begin to encounter with fresh eyes the variety of environmental problems we now face.

This kind of research, however, remains fraught with methodological dilemmas. The most central among them is how to understand and trace the histories and contemporary realities of beings whose patterns of communication, movements, and life-worlds are often outside of human comprehension. How do we come to know animals, trees and glaciers as agents in historical change if the only record we use to understand them is that made by humans? The chapters in this section engage with these questions, and, in so doing, offer students and practitioners concerned with the roles in history played by nonhuman actors tools with which to conduct research.

The first two contributions in this section consider landscapes—often imagined as passive terrains to be written upon—as agents that shape relationships in the more-than-human world. This section opens with a chapter by Sverker Sörlin that considers glaciers as protagonists in global environmental change. Working against the grain of scientific knowledge, Sörlin suggests that we pay attention to the ways that glaciers act as local ‘truth-spots’: sites where climate change is made manifest. Drawing together cultural representations of glaciers, Sörlin contends that glaciers give us a visual and conceptual language to apprehend our changing environment. In the next chapter, Martha Weisiger takes the reader on a journey to another iconic landscape: the American West. Accessing methodological questions through the lens of art, Weisiger offers an analysis of what we can learn about environmental history by walking the land, including through landscapes shaped by Earth art. The following two chapters consider how animals might be written into environmental histories and nature-culture research, and what methodological challenges and opportunities this might pose. Stephanie Rutherford attends to how sound might be an entry point into histories of the animal, exploring how the howl of the wolf has been recognized (and misrecognized) through time in Canada. Rutherford suggests that paying attention to sound offers a way to understand the affective registers wolves have induced, especially in settler Canadians, while offering new insights into human-nonhuman relationality. Moving from Canada to China, Michael Hathaway contends that changing conceptions of agency can open up data (gained through interviews, participant observation, and oral histories) to new interpretations, and queries the uses and limits of using conventionally generated scientific information to enrich our writings about animal histories. The final chapter in this section considers neither landscapes nor animals, but weather. Roger Owen’s contribution traces the history of a dance-theatre work that illuminated a political act of Welsh nationalism set within the context of, and indeed affected by, a heavy and prolonged snowfall in the UK. In his description of the event, Owen asserts that theatre practice may effectively combine and collide human and nonhuman actors within a single assembly of action, spectatorship, and objects in space.

Part II Decolonizing research

The idea that historical documents provide a clear window into the past has long given way, at least in many circles, to the scholarly notion that objectivity is an illusion and truth is an effect of power (Brown and Vibert, 2003, p. xiv; see also Mills, 1997; Smith, 2012). Indeed, anthropologist and historian Ann Laura Stoler (2002) has encouraged students of colonialism to think of archives not simply as sources of information, but as sites of knowledge production that require their users to take seriously the implication of archives in colonial power relations (see also Burton 2005). The relationship between archives and colonialism comes as no surprise to Indigenous scholars, activists, and community members who have consistently critiqued written historical documents for their failure to include Indigenous perspectives (see, for example, Cardinal et al. 2005). The recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools in Canada makes powerfully clear the disconnect between the written historical record and the experiences lived by people in their communities and in residential schools. It is only through the persistence and courage of residential school Survivors that their stories of a system designed to eradicate their cultures by removing children from communities are becoming part of the mainstream historical record (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2012). It is impossible to go to the archives and access an unmediated and unbiased past.

Yet scholars examining historical relationships between ‘nature’ and ‘culture,’ like others interested in understanding and illuminating parts of the past, often find themselves conducting research in colonial archives. Certainly archives can help researchers reveal important (though not apolitical) insights about the past, even as work such as Julie Cruikshank’s (2005) demonstrates the need to conduct research beyond a colonial archival record. In Do Glaciers Listen?, she shows how Indigenous oral traditions can offer quite different, though no less true, readings of the past than the written colonial record, and makes clear how colonial power relationships can reappear through the telling of historical stories as though European perspectives are the only ones. Decolonizing nature-culture-history research, then, requires conducting research differently, both at the archives and beyond.

This section opens with a chapter co-written by Bawaka Country, which includes Indigenous and non-Indigenous women from Bawaka, an Indigenous homeland in the north of Australia. Together, the chapter’s authors examine how their research team has grappled with the concept of time in their research, and show how understanding time within Yolŋu ontologies of co-becoming presents unique challenges and possibilities for decolonizing nature-culture-history research. Next, Lianne C. Leddy examines the possibilities of dibaajimowinan (stories) as a method for conducting environmental history research on Anishinaabe territory, demonstrating that while oral history research might be ‘new’ within environmental history, it is anything but new within Indigenous communities. Its centrality to Indigenous ways of knowing, however, does not mean that there exist no challenges to balancing oral histories and archival material as sources of knowledge about the past, and Leddy addresses these challenges as well. In her chapter, Aimée Craft reflects upon the process of coming to learn about Anishinaabe water law, describing the research as a practice of learning and growing together. She shows that ceremony and research depend on each other, much as humans depend on and indeed are made of water. In an interview with co-editor Jocelyn Thorpe, Fred Metallic reflects upon decolonizing academic work through language, describing how he conducted his PhD work in Mi’gmaw, including the defence of his dissertation. He also argues that how one does research is at least as important as the outcome of the research. Jocelyn Thorpe’s chapter concludes this section with an analysis of what she has learned so far, often from Indigenous scholars and knowledge holders, on her journey toward decolonizing research.

Part III Senses and affect

In recent years, an exploration of ‘sensory histories,’ through attention to sound, smell, taste, touch, vision and movement, has enlarged the possibility of using different sources to piece together an understanding of the past (see, for example, Harvey 2003; Fitzgerald and Petrick 2008; Jay 2011; Parr 2006; Picker 2003). Simultaneous to this embrace of the senses has been what’s named ‘the affective turn’ (Ticiento, Clough and Halley 2007). Studies rooted in affect recognize that precognitive, unstructured intensities shape how humans encounter the world on a physiological level. To return to the senses, one might suggest that a foot that unconsciously taps to the beat of a song offers one expression of affective attunement to sound. Scholars of affect suggest that these intensities give feelings strength and resonance. As such, the emphasis on materiality and sensory understandings of the past offer new research horizons in the social sciences and humanities. This attention to senses is a particularly important endeavour when one’s study focuses on historical engagements with nature, where so much of what we know is felt rather than seen.

The chapters in this section employ eclectic strategies to access the senses and to consider affect, demonstrating the myriad approaches scholars in nature-culture and environmental history can use to understand human/nonhuman relations through time. Owain Jones and Katherine Jones start off this section emphasizing the affective dimensions of narrative. Drawing on their relationship with tidal landscapes as places, spectacles, experiences, and as manifestations of a living, mobile planet and biosphere, they offer vignettes that attempt to mirror the ebb and flow of the tides themselves to tell the story of environmental change. Ian Mosby offers an examination of the palate, thinking with taste as a novel access point into environmental history. Mosby explores eating practices through time, using the changing experiences of food’s smell, taste and presentation to offer an innovative set of tools for examining the past. From the delight of a tasty meal, we move on to the smell of garbage in Marco Armiero and Salvatore Paolo Da Rosa’s exploration of environmental injustice in Naples, Italy. Armiero and Da Rosa use waste, and the smells it produces, as a source of environmental history, exploring the way that perception can lead to new kinds of alliances between activists and scientists in the matter of what gets thrown away. Sonja Boon’s chapter turns to movement and embodiment as ways of knowing. Using the minuet, an eighteenth-century dance form, Boon argues that our understanding of the nonhuman environment is shaped by the way that we physically and physiologically move through space, and that such movement is fundamentally gendered and classed. Moving from the scale of the body to the cosmic, Lisa Sideris’s chapter takes on Big History, investigating stories such as the ‘Epic of Evolution’ as the basis for a new metanarrative that inspires wonder and affective connection to Earth. She contends that these stories reveal a phenomenology of human-as-species, offering an intriguing, if problematic, means to craft an environmental cosmopolitanism. This section is rounded out with a chapter by Stephen Bocking on cycling as a novel method in environmental history scholarship. Bocking asserts that the unique vantage point of a bike provides access to sensory histories, enabling one, at least in part, to recapture how people sensed and experienced past environments.

Part IV Digital research

The Internet has certainly changed the way people do research, and indeed many forms of work. Digital history has emerged as a sub-discipline (‘Interchange’ 2008), and the journal Environmental History (2014) recently appointed a digital content editor who edits a web-only ‘field notes’ section that provides insights into the practice of environmental h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Methodological challenges
• PART I Nonhuman actors
• PART II Decolonizing research
• PART III Senses and affect
• PART IV Digital research
• Index