Detailed class notes from the course Economy and Ecology, part of the Bachelor Cultural Anthropology in Leiden University. Notes from Lecture 1 to 9. The notes are form the class given by Andrew Littlejohn in the academic year .
Economy and Ecology
Class Notes
2020-2021
Lecture 1 – 9
Ecology and Economy LEC1
02/09/2020
Coronavirus
- May 22nd the Court of Pennsylvania declared that covid19 is a “natural disaster”.
- Because Covid19 is natural in origin it does not raise any questions regarding our economic,
social or political systems.
- Some people have been criticizing this idea including in their argumentation topics such as
issues of preparedness (political system is implicated), diffusion of the virus in a market
setting (economic setting), differentiated vulnerability (the virus hit people differently based
on their socio-economic statues, social structure etc.), the impact that a virus has is heavily
determined by the particular socio and economic conditions of the society it interacts with,
the virus travelled around the world in airplanes/boats etc. (the pathways that covid19
followed in spreading are the channels of our global economy/business routes/tourists
routes/international tourists economy etc., covid19 followed the established trails of our
increasingly integrated global economic system)
- We should question the dichotomy of nature and society; how are these two things related?
- The virus originated in animals; spilled over because of social and economic practices (ex.
Deforestation which is an economic practice); spread through tourism and business
networks. We should ask ourselves: does this dichotomy helps us making sense of the world
as we encounter it today?
The theme of the course is going to be INTERCONNECTIONS. Each lecture will introduce specific case
studies regarding relationships between economy and ecology that requires us to question how
useful the dichotomy is.
Economy:
- The whole spectrum: from system of production to political economy
- Political Economy: it means not only looking at the market as a system, but also placing
systems of production and circulation within the relations of power (national level,
governmental or international level), political economy thinks about systems of production
and circulation and the political system, systems of power, authority etc. together,
integrated one with the other. The structure of production and circulation of goods.
Economy + Power = Political Economy.
Ecology:
- Common features between ecology, nature, wilderness, and environment.
- Political Ecology: major movement in anthropology
- One way of theorizing Political Ecology (but not the only one):
What came before this theory? In environmental anthropology (study of relationship
between human beings and the environment) there has been many trends. For example,
,Cultural Ecology, Behavioral Ecology, Structural Ecology etc. They all focused on how people
adapted to pre-given environments, how they transformed the raw material provided by
those environments and transformed them into what we call “culture”. In these older ways
of theorizing the relationship between ourselves and the environments, culture operated
through metabolizing something external to itself. Nature provides the raw material and
culture uses it to make and transform itself. Nature/the environment, this way, is either a
substratum (below culture) or external (outside culture). Metabolizing: the environment is
external to human society but elements of it can be brought into society and transformed in
the process. Through the process of transforming what you appropriate from the
environment, you create culture and produce human history.
What came after? Political Ecology (1980s) criticizes this view in two ways:
1) We need to incorporate politics. The workings of power, of the state, of international
relations, of economic systems etc. in and how they shape phenomena we call “natural”
into our theories (theorizing the production of nature). What we call “nature” isn’t
simply something that exists independently, but it is partially an outcome of our own
political and economic activities. The production of nature: nature is no long separate
and external. Both we physically produce landscapes that we call natural but also
politics, power etc. shapes how we think about those landscapes.
2) A new understanding a what “natural phenomena and by extension, us, are”. “Nature is
not in question in ecology” said Bruno Latour, “ecology dissolves boundaries” like those
between nature and culture, environment and society, wilderness and civilization.
Ecology is not the study of nature, but it aims at dissolving the boundaries we created
ideologically between ourselves and our environment. Political Ecology challenges one
of the fundamental binary oppositions, though which some parts of the western society
have conceived the world for the last few hundred years (nature/culture,
environment/society, wilderness/civilization).
Natural dichotomy between human and animal. What it means to be human? To be
human is not to be animal (erroneous conception). The way we think of our humanity is
through opposing it from that which we are not (animal/natural/environmental). We
oppose our social, cultural and human lives to nature/animal and environment life.
The history of the divide between culture and nature can be traced back to the
Enlightenment and the emergence of modern science in its torturous dialogue with Christian
theology. The non-human world is mechanistic, only humans have been gifted rationality by
virtue of the Spirit or Soul that they possess. Descartes and non-human animals (“bete-
machine”, “beast-machine”). Animals do not have souls or spirits they are not gifted with
rationality, intentionality, will, or any independent decision-making power. The idea of the
non-human world as being mechanistic, not filled with spiritual intentionality was
fundamental in the work of early Enlightenment thinkers. Only humans were gifted with
spirit and therefore, rationality.
The moral consequences of this can be seen in the work of Immanuel Kant. “Everything in
creation which he wished and over which he has power can be used merely as a means; only
man is an end in himself” (Immanuel Kant). Human beings have an intrinsic moral worth,
moral value by virtue of the fact that human beings have spirit “because of the autonomy of
his freedom”. Men cannot be used as a means to an end (it is always an end itself), but
everything else in creation can be used as a mean to our ends because it is not “subject of
the moral law which is holy”.
This view still influence the way we think about economy and ecology, environment and
society, nature and culture, human and non-human.
, Political Ecology criticizes these old concepts.
Cronon (“The Trouble with Wilderness”), emerged in 19th century. Instead of seeing the non-
human/nature/environment as lacking moral value, we began to argue that you would find
the sublime/holy in what people would call the wilderness. This idea backlashed the
relocation of moral and ethical and spiritual values into wilderness (beginning of Western
environmentalist movements). This way of thinking continues to underpin much of
environmentalist thinking including the trend known as “the ecology”.
The idea of preserving non-human life, for our own sake is particularly important and Cronon
confirms it but he also argues that the idea of the celebration of wilderness is in itself
problematic. It is problematic because it reproduces the dynamic already proposed by the
Enlightenment that nature and culture are separate. The environmentalist movement in its
origins may have fought against the way people valued the non-human world but still
reproduce the fundamental divide that was placed between them.
Development of Western modernity, post Enlightenment thinking/practice.
- It is very simple to cut down a forest or drain a wet land because we don’t see it as having
any intrinsic value.
- The development of Western modernity involves the spread of the idea that there are
separate spheres of nature and culture, environment and society, wilderness and civilization
with nature as being mechanistic and culture as spiritual and rational. Even the backlashes
against these ideas (western environmentalist movement) have maintained this
fundamental distinction.
- Parallel between the split between nature and culture and the bifurcation that happened
between the different spheres of research (natural sciences, social sciences and humanities),
which used to come together (for example at the time of Descartes, “Cartesio”). Nature and
culture are separate, so we need different disciplines for each one. The split has marked the
emergence of what William Connolly had called “Sociocentrism” of social sciences.
- Sociocentrism
Explain things only in terms of the social.
Connolly defines it as: “the propensity to interpret or explain social processes by reference to
other social processes alone.”
It may neglect the way in which non-humans, or environmental or natural processes are also
implicated and impacting our societies.
“It is often connected to perspectives that treat nature as a set of resources to extract”. As
something external to societies (for example, Clifford Geertz had a sociocentric approach to
culture).
We think that our system is “closed” but it is in fact constantly permeated and shaped by
non-human processes and actors (like for example, the corona virus).
Which problems can sociocentrism lead to?
- If human experiences incorporate the relationship with the environment and you ignore it,
then you miss a huge part of the overall human experience. We get an incomplete and
wrong concept of what the human is.
- Does not allow us to think in the framework in which we could live in symbiosis. Cronon says
that by seeing the wilderness as something separate from the human, as something that we
must protect, we don’t then have to think about what a meaningful place for ourselves
within nature would be. (?)
, - We get ecology wrong. We consider landscapes as untouched while they have a long history
of interactions between and with humans.
- We place the human outside of the environment. Kath Weston: “all bets as to where
“nature” begins, and “culture” ends are off”. We become our environment so we cannot be
separated by it.
- We place nature outside of culture. We get wrong the history of our environments, leading
to damaging policies. For example, to expel the native Americans in the US from
“wildernesses” that have emerged historically through relations between the native
Americans living there and other natural factors. Therefore, if we call those places
“wildernesses” (places where there shouldn’t be people) then we might endorse a
conservation policy that involves expelling from the landscape those who have partially co-
created it (from Conon’s article “The Trouble with Wilderness”). It becomes hard to care
about environmental justice when we think about the divide in this way. “Issues directly
affecting only humans pale in comparison. Presumably so do any environmental problems
whose victims are mainly people, for such problems usually surface in landscapes that have
already fallen and are no longer wild”. (Cronon in his article “The Trouble with Wilderness”).
- We assume a sociocentric causality (we might miss how some of the social phenomena we
study have non-social causes related to the non-human world). This way, we miss how non-
human factors (a virus), affects social and cultural life (we get anthropology wrong!).
Therefore, we focus on connections rather than divisions. Connections that trouble the
divides and boundaries that we have erected.
Modernity has been conceived through the binary oppositions (human/non-human).
“To modernize or ecologize? That is the question” (Latour).
Modernize: developing a way of thinking and acting that assumes we are divide.
Ecologize: look for the connections between entities and processes that are not separate in
the beginning. (To the extent that things are different, we only know that difference through
the relationships that they have with each other).
We are all “quasi-objects”: things that “cannot be understood or talked about independently
of the relations (we) have with other things (ndr, including the not-human)” (David Harvey).
We, in the view of political ecology, are all “quasi-objects”.
The core purpose of this course and of political ecology is to trace the network of
associations through which we become what we are and things become what they are.
Cronon: “We must abandon the dualism (…) and embrace the full continuum of a natural
landscape that is also cultural”.
Since it is political ecology, we cannot just abandon the dualism but we need to follow the
relations of power that shape environment and bodies. Focus on the relations between the
systems of power and the form of connection they produce.
The idea of something being “purely human” or “purely natural” are not ideational but ideological.
Ideational: the description of something.
Ideological: relates to systems of power and interests. The description has an underlying current of
political interests. Power is attached to it.
Ideologies: “beliefs that justify particular social arrangements, including patterns of inequality” (John
Macionis).
By calling things “purely human” or “purely natural” we mean that they are made in the services of
particular interests and particular forms of power. So we are not just describing something (“that is
nature”, “that is culture”), but we are describing it in a way that suits our interests or what we want
to gain from it. (If we say: “that’s a natural disaster”, we prove that we don’t want to take
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