After four unsuccessful attempts, in June 2012 UNESCO approved a new World Heritage Cultural Landscape: the subaks and water temples of Bali. An innovative management plan empowers the elected heads of subaks and villages to manage the World Heritage as a Governing Assembly, with assistance from government departments.  Implementation of this management system has been delayed, but it has been endorsed by UNESCO as a promising model for democratic adaptive management.

With millions of visitors arriving in Bali each year, there is obvious potential for the Governing Assembly to capture revenue from visitors to the sites, and in this way channel benefits from Bali’s enormous tourism industry to Balinese communities. The design of visitor facilities also offers an opportunity for people in the sites to decide what they would like to communicate about their cultural landscape, to Indonesian school children as well as foreign tourists. To that end, Sang Putu Kaler Surata and his students at Mahasaraswati University in Denpasar have just published a school book about the subaks and the World Heritage.

Landscape architect Julia Watson and I have prepared a design proposal, “Gateways to Sacred Lands”, offering initial suggestions for imagining educational facilities in the World Heritage. When the Governing Assembly comes into existence, the intent is to use these ideas as catalysts for discussions in the villages. Our hopes for the World Heritage are discussed in a recent posting at Agroforestry World, and plans for these design charrettes are outlined in a short video about empowering the Governing Assembly:

Photos from fieldwork:

Farmers of Subak Kulub Atas perusing Julia Watson’s Design Proposal for Bali’s World Heritage.

Preparing the nomination dossier for UNESCO.

Preparing the nomination dossier for UNESCO.

In order to move global society towards a sustainable “ecotopia,” solutions must be engaged in specific places and communities, and the authors here argue for re-orienting environmental anthropology from a problem-oriented towards a solutions-focused endeavor. Using case studies from around the world, the contributors—scholar-activists and activist-practitioners— examine the interrelationships between three prominent environmental social movements: bioregionalism, a worldview and political ecology that grounds environmental action and experience; permaculture, a design science for putting the bioregional vision into action; and ecovillages, the ever-dynamic settings for creating sustainable local cultures.

The book is well structured, engaging and highly topical; it brings together a range of academics and practitioners—itself a potentially interesting and seldom examined dialogue—around three main areas which form the book’s structure: Bioregionalism; Permaculture; Ecovillages.
— Malcolm Miles, University of Plymouth

This is an excellent and timely collection of essays by ecological and environmental anthropologists and other scholars and activists who, together, are redefining the field of human ecology as a contribution to the cultural revolution the world needs, if we are to achieve the transition to sustainability.
— Laura M. Rival, University of Oxford

…a fascinating and significant anthology. The integration in this book of theory and practice, scholar and activist, reprinted classics and new essays, is very creative and admirable. It deals with three contemporary subjects that have been rather neglected by researchers…It is current and futuristic in many respects [and] deserves a wide readership.
— Leslie E. Sponsel, University of Hawai’i

About the Editors

Joshua Lockyer is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Arkansas Tech University where he is co-creating a bioregionally-based undergraduate anthropology program.

James R. Veteto is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Texas. He is the director of the Laboratory of Environmental Anthropology and the Southern Seed Legacy project and is currently president of the Culture and Agriculture section of the American Anthropological Association and Research Associate at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas.

More details on this title can be found here
www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=LockyerEnvironmental

MOUNTAIN OPENING

Every year in July a small group of people gather on the summit of Ontake-san, a 3,067-meter volcanic mountain in the central Japanese prefecture of Nagano, to ceremoniously open it for the summer season. They do so with prayers to the gods, or kami, who dwell on the mountain. After Shinto priests have welcomed the kami with chants and offerings, representatives of several local constituencies come forward to offer prayers; included among them are employees of Japan’s national Forestry Agency and officials from local government and business offices.

Shinto priests conduct a mountain-opening ceremony on the summit of Ontake-san. (photo by Eric J. Cunningham)

Though my knowledge of and relationship with Ontake-san began much earlier, my engagements with the spiritual ecology that encompasses the mountain began in July 2008 when I climbed to its summit and joined in that year’s mountain opening ceremony. After the formal ceremony ended, I followed other participants into a mountain hut near the summit shrine. Outside, cold winds whisked clouds over Ontake-san’s rocky slopes. Inside, the mountain hut was warm and inviting. The head priest of Ontake-jinja, a shrine dedicated to the gods of the mountain, thanked us for our participation in the ceremony and made a brief speech. In particular, he emphasized the importance of Ontake-san for the local community, suggesting that as long as the mountain was cared for those who inhabited its foothills would be fine. He then led us in a toast of ritually sanctified sake, called o-miki. And, with that, the ceremonious morning quickly gave way to merriment.

The annual mountain-opening ceremony, or kaizanshiki, which takes place in the rarified air of Ontake-san, stands in stark contrast to other images often associated with modern Japan—those of high technology, cute characters, and densely packed urban cores. It is a wonder that people go to so much trouble to climb a mountain that many in Japan have never heard of to give offerings and prayers to the deities who inhabit its rocky slopes.

In this post, I offer this ceremony as one among many other localized human-mountain interactions that constitute a local response to broader changes currently taking place in Japanese society. My focus in on Otaki, a village community located at the base of Ontake-san, where I conducted research for 24 months between 2008 and 2010. For residents of Otaki, I argue, the mountain is embedded in symbols, meanings, and practices that contribute to community perseverance within the increasing turbulence of late capitalist Japan.

OTAKI

Otaki is located at the back of a box canyon that runs along Ontake-san’s southeastern flank. With a population of fewer than one thousand (and shrinking), the village is less than a pinprick within the national geography of Japan. Otaki belongs to the larger Kiso Region, which, though famed for its lush pine forests that once brought prosperity, is today economically depressed and generally considered a social, economic, and political backwater. The vast majority of land in Otaki is also forested, but roughly 87% of this is designated as national forest, meaning that local residents have no formal role in forest governance. Government-sponsored forestry once enlivened the village economy (albeit while ravaging its environments), but post-war decreases in demands for domestic timber brought those days to an end. More recently, water resource development has played a large role in shaping the Otaki landscape, with two major dams and several minor ones located within the village.

In these terms, Otaki is representative of rural communities across Japan for which the nation’s post-war “economic miracle” has by and large been experienced as a period of  social and economic decline. There have been limited successes—development of tourism and other light industries—but overall the pattern has been one of marginalization, with rural communities struggling to survive off the scraps that fall from Japan’s mega-cities.

OYAMA

Otaki has also long been an integral part of a spiritual ecology that revolves around Ontake-san, linking together human, non-human, and supernatural beings. The village is known as Otaki-guchi, meaning “Otaki entrance,” and comprises the first of ten stages of pilgrimage that lead to the mountain’s summit. Thus, in addition to forestry, life in Otaki has for generations been economically, socially, and politically oriented around Ontake-san as a sacred mountain.

Ontake-san photographed from Otaki village. (photo by Eric J. Cunningham)

Otaki’s position within the folded slopes and ridgelines that form the broad base of Ontake-san makes it so that the summit of the mountain is often unseen. Depending on one’s own movement in the landscape, Ontake-san seems to suddenly appear, its rounded form popping out from the forested hillsides like a child playing hide and seek. Residents often expressed feelings of calm or reassurance when conveying their experiences of seeing Ontake-san suddenly emerge from the landscape. As one resident stated, “When I catch a glimpse of the mountain, I feel a kind of relief.”

The cover of a 2001 tourism booklet published by Otaki’s village office offers a similar sentiment in the following lines:

The snowmelt water of O-yama

flows cool and clear.

Again today there is O-yama.

Silently watching over us.[i]

Although the Chinese characters for Ontake-san are used in the passage, written above them in hiragana (a Japanese phonetic script) is the word “O-yama.” O-yama is a local name for Ontake-san largely unknown and unused outside of Otaki. It literally translates as “the mountain” or “honorable mountain” and conveys a sense of respect, but also familiarity. Otaki residents often referred to other landscape elements in relation to Ontake-san, using “Ontake-san” and “O-yama” interchangibly along with the particle no, meaning “of” or “belonging to.” For example, I often read or heard Ontake-san no sato (village of Ontake-san) in reference to Otaki; or O-yama no mizu (water of the mountain) in relation to the mountain waters that flow ubiquitously through the landscape.  In addition, Ontake-san was often depicted as a central (if not THE central) element of the village landscape in pictures and photographs. These various verbal and visual clues reflect the central position that Ontake-san holds in the mental geographies of Otaki’s residents, who continue to create and reinforce a strong sense of individual and community connection to the mountain.

Map of Otaki village drawn by a junior high school student. Ontake-san is the mountain prominently featured. (photo by Eric J. Cunningham)

Not only did Otaki residents often reference O-yama, but they spoke of it as a stable, benevolent, and even guiding entity. Just as the Shinto priest did in his speech in the mountain hut, they often referred to the mountain as a central part of village life and discussed it as something that must be respected and protected. They appealed to O-yama and its enduring qualities in ways that reflected multiple, and at times contradictory, anxieties concerning the future of the village. For instance, during mura-zukuri or “village-making” meetings, residents and I discussed the ties between the village community and Ontake-san. At the beginning of one meeting in the fall of 2008, the leader of a village revitalization group explained that:

Otaki is a village that has walked hand in hand with the history of the sacred mountain Ontake-san. However, in recent years, in the midst of a very severe situation never experienced before, returning to financial health and creating vitality in which citizens live in health and well being have become new topics for the village.

In this quote, “severe situation” refers to financial troubles that had recently plagued Otaki. By invoking Ontake-san in this way, the speaker was giving voice to more general feelings of anxiety among residents.

As a symbol of endurance and even permanency for Otaki’s residents, Ontake-san helps throw into sharp relief the rapid changes that have been part of Japan’s modernization and, more specifically, the processes of resource exploitation, environmental degradation, economic decline, and depopulation that have accompanied modernization in Otaki.

MOUNTAIN MOVEMENTS

One cool spring morning in 2010 I visited an exhibition of Ontake-san-related materials in the gymnasium of Otaki’s run-down community center. The exhibition mostly included old scrolls with prints of deities, various talisman, and small statues made of wood or bronze. What caught my attention, however, was a collection of guidebooks about Ontake-san covering the span of the last century.

A sweep of 20th century media depicting Ontake-san. (photo by Eric J. Cunningham)

Early guidebooks from the beginning of the 20^th century had covers portraying religious pilgrims set against the form of Ontake-san, with photographs and captions depicting ascetic activities and sacred sites. Then, in those from the middle of the century, I noticed a shift. One small pamphlet from 1953 titled shinkou to kankou no kiso ontake he (“Off to Kiso Ontake, [the mountain] of faith and tourism”) consisted almost exclusively of pictures of religious activities and sites, but also included a photo of a dam and reservoir. Later materials in the collection, dating from about 1955 to 1965, offered images of a desacralized Ontake-san, empty of pilgrims and worshipers. These later pamphlets also included hiking maps and bus schedules.

Moving through the exhibit I began to realize that the artifacts presented a stratigraphy that spoke to Ontake-san’s transitory existence as something created and shared among people—in the past primarily at a local level, but more recently at a national level. Though O-yama seems solid, unmovable, and permanent, there before my eyes on that morning was evidence of an evolution from sacred to recreational space over the span of a century. Within this evolution, which is enmeshed in broader processes of modernization, Onake-san has shifted from a centralized position within a regional spiritual ecology to a position in the oku—the “back” or “margins”—of Japan’s national geography.

UNCERTAINTY AND (MOUNTAIN) FAITH

Through their varied relationships with Ontake-san, many in Otaki recognize their position at the margins of the Japanese nation. At the same time, many (if not most) also continue to exhibit a profound sense of connection to the mountain they call “O-yama,” as well as to the spiritual ecology of spirits, gods, animals, rocks, rivers, trees, and people embodied within its broad slopes. Ontake-san remains a meaningful marker of the vitality and perseverance of both the Otaki community and landscape, albeit one that continues to evolve through the broader set of social, political, and economic processes within which it is enmeshed.

To varying extents and in diverse ways, residents of Otaki continue to work towards maintaining their connections to Ontake-san and all that it represents in their lives. The mountain remains central to life in Otaki and finding a way to protect it while sustaining livelihoods is their continuing struggle. It is a struggle that I too am now thoroughly engaged in. Unfortunately, the terms of the engagement are difficult to define as I, like my friends in Otaki, are only small parts of the larger spiritual ecology of the mountain. How are we to articulate the importance of such a humbled position within a global economy of knowledge that increasingly values expertise, facts, and certainty?

During my time in Otaki, I introduced residents to the resilience thinking approach to environmental management. Though receptive, I found that people had a hard time understanding the resilience concept and were at a loss for how to implement the approach. I too backed away from resilience thinking in my own research for a time, though I have recently returned to it as a way to think about my research in Otaki. What brought me back was the centrality this approach gives to uncertainty. As a state in which knowledge is lacking, uncertainty calls for humility, caution, and reserve. What I have learned from my friends and colleagues in Otaki is that uncertainty positions us as inhabitants who must practice humility and learn to respect the greater ecologies of which we are but small parts. Through their relationships with O-yama, people in Otaki are made to understand that there exist forces greater than them and that these must be honored. I wonder, how would the management of national forests in Otaki differ if such an understanding was present at an institutional level?

In their own humble way, the Otaki community has persevered through many uncertainties—forest overexploitation, dam building, economic decline, depopulation—and there are more to come. I suggest that their and my engagement with these uncertainties is often inspired by O-yama and a belief that, if cared for, the greater community of beings to which we belong will endure. It is often a subdued engagement, but one that I, and many I work with in Otaki, continue to have faith in.

An Otaki resident explores a statue at a sacred site on Ontake-san. (photo by Eric J. Cunningham)

Eric J. Cunningham is Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at Earlham College. His research focuses on cultural representations of nature and the political dimensions of forest governance in Japan

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[i]　御嶽山の雪どけ水が

  清冽に流れていきます。

  今日もそこにあります。

  静かに私たちを見守っています。

  Oyama no yukidoke mizu ga

  seiretsu ni nagarete ikimasu.

  Oyama ha kyou mo soko ni arimasu.

  Shizuka ni watashitachi wo mimamotte imasu.

Through my ongoing research on the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), I am engaging with broader questions about the “nature” of militarized landscapes and the production of their ecological value. In this piece, I examine how South Korean state and NGO projects configure the DMZ as a unique site of biodiversity that could provide the basis for sustainable development and also peace on the Korean peninsula. These projects, however, often depend upon a branding of the DMZ as a bounded space of pristine nature, disregarding the more complex social and political landscapes of the inter-Korean border region, of which the DMZ is just one part. This tendency to fetishize the DMZ and its “nature,” moreover, disguises the ways in which global capitalism, development, and militarization are affecting other parts of the border region, areas where the majority of what is known of the “DMZ’s biodiversity” exists.

This map shows the location and spatial extent of the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and its surrounding geographies.The dotted line is the Military Demarcation Line (MDL), the actual border between North Korea and South Korea. The area shaded in dark grey is the DMZ, the area shaded in medium grey is the Civilian Control Zone (CCZ) and the light grey area is the border area. This image was adapted from Kim, Kwi-gon and Dong-Gil Cho. 2005. “Status and Ecological Resource Value of the Republic of Korea’s De-militarized Zone.” Landscape and Ecological Engineering 1: 4.

The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) is often described as a space of superlative and jarring juxtapositions: the most heavily militarized area in the world and one of the last remnants of the Cold War; a no-man’s land for sixty years turned into an accidental haven of biodiversity. In South Korea, despite the persistence of the Cold War division and ongoing tensions with the North, the DMZ’s “return to nature” and symbolic potential have fueled state visions of converting the forbidden zone into a peace park or ecological preserve since the 1990s.[1] North Korean opposition, however, has consistently forestalled such plans. Despite this serial disappointment, and in the midst of the latest round of military provocations and propagandistic saber-rattling on both sides of the border, Park Geun-hye, the newly elected president of South Korea, during her visit to Washington D.C. in May 2013, announced her intention to build an “international peace park” in the DMZ to send “a message of peace to all of humanity.” Although she did not make an explicit connection in her speech between the DMZ’s ecological renaissance and its function as a symbol of peace, the equation between the two has been central to official state branding of the DMZ as a zone of “peace and life.”

But what is the “nature” of the DMZ that is being preserved? The DMZ proper is 4 kilometers wide and 248 kilometers long and serves as a buffer between the two Koreas, mandated by the armistice agreement signed in July 1953. It encompasses multiple ecosystems, including mountain highlands, lowland wetlands, grasslands, five rivers, and watersheds. What is referred to as “the DMZ region,” however, is a more expansive area that includes the adjacent Civilian Control Zone (CCZ), which extends south from the DMZ between four and twelve kilometers.

Korean Water Deer in the CCZ, January 2012. Photo by Eleana Kim.

In fact, one of the major sticking points for measuring the DMZ’s ecological value is the lack of knowledge of what constitutes the biodiversity of the DMZ proper. Surveys starting in the 1990s have documented eighty-two rare and endangered species in areas within and around the DMZ and the CCZ, out of a total of 2,900 plant and animal species, which represent the majority of the all species in the peninsula. Existing surveys inside the DMZ, however, have been spotty and unsystematic, due to difficulties of accessing the highly restricted area, which requires oversight from the UN Command. Thus, ecological knowledge of the “DMZ” is more often based on research in the CCZ and other parts of the border region, where evidence of charismatic megafuna like highly endangered migratory cranes, the rare Amur Goral, and even the apocryphal Siberian Tiger has attracted international attention. In light of these data, conservationists and others have become intrigued by the DMZ’s possibilities as a conservation area and peace park, and central and regional governments have been engaged in sustainable development projects as a solution to the economically stagnant border area to capitalize on the ecotouristic value of the DMZ.

I have worked closely with a small NGO of citizen ecologists that monitors the ecology of the western side of the DMZ region in the area of the Han River estuary and related wetlands, which are habitats for numerous species, the most celebrated of which are the highly endangered Red-crowned Crane (grus japonensis) and the White-naped Crane (grus vipio). The Red-Crowned Crane in particular is culturally valued across East Asia. Both species are declining in numbers, with a global population of 2,750 for the Red-Crowned Crane and around 5,500 for the White-naped Crane. They typically mate for life and produce one or two offspring per year.

White-naped Cranes feeding on a fallow rice paddy in the CCZ, October 2012. Photo by Eleana Kim.

The cranes’ rarity and association with the DMZ render them even more symbolically potent, especially given the fact that they metaphorically and literally connect the two Koreas as they cross the border annually in their migrations from breeding areas in eastern Russia to the southern half of the DMZ area, where they feed on grains from rice paddies following the autumn harvest. Even as these birds are associated with the DMZ as an ecologically valuable space and branded as an integral part of this landscape (rice grown in the CCZ area is marketed as “Red-crowned Crane rice”), their survival is enmeshed in relationships with humans and agriculture that has evolved over centuries, if not longer.

On the western side of the border area, where wintering populations of Red-crowned cranes used to number in the hundreds, pressures on land use due to development have created inhospitable conditions and loss of habitat for the cranes and other migratory birds like the Bean Goose and the Greater White-fronted Goose. Landowners are increasingly converting fields and forests to high-profit greenhouse products like bell peppers and blueberries, or shade-grown ginseng. Both ginseng fields and greenhouses reduce the amount of feeding and roosting habitats for cranes, and the extension of the agricultural calendar from seasonal rice cultivation and harvesting to year-round production means more human activity and vehicular traffic during the cranes’ wintering months – between October and March. Moreover, electrified greenhouses require the erection of more power lines, which are a major hazard for migratory birds. Dozens of birds are injured or killed annually from collisions with power lines and fences, or poisoning from pesticides. In effect, the nature of the CCZ is far from pristine, and is becoming increasingly developed, threatening the very species whose presence is heralded.

Citizen ecologists monitoring aquatic insects in small irrigation ponds in the CCZ, April 2012. Photo by Eleana Kim.

For ecologists and crane conservationists, these developments in the CCZ are dismaying. Their monitoring work can often seem like a salvage project, as they meticulously document pockets of biodiversity while the landscape around them is transformed into plastic-covered ginseng fields created atop former forests and meadows. Urbanization and the construction of new edge cities along the western coast are destroying wetland habitats used by cranes and other birds. In response to these developments in the South, the International Crane Foundation has shifted its conservation efforts for the Red-crowned and White-naped Cranes to the North Korean side of the border in hopes that underdevelopment there will make the restoration of crane wintering habitats more viable in the long term. International designation from the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands or the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve might help to stave off the degradation of the CCZ’s landscapes, but with the expansion of ecotourism sites and facilities in the western part of the CCZ, as well as plans to create zones for inter-Korean economic cooperation within the DMZ, many committed ecologists and environmentalists are less than optimistic about the sustainability of these precious habitats.

President Park’s announcement of the peace park may have seemed merely utopian to some, especially at a moment when inter-Korean diplomacy had reached a particularly low point. The DMZ, however, invites just such projections of hope and myth-making. Many people in South Korea and internationally have become enraptured by the story of the zone and its ecological renaissance. That the most extreme example of human political strife and violence can inadvertently create a preserve for endangered species feeds romantic visions of nature’s resilience and indifference to human design. Imagining the DMZ as a site of pristine nature, however, requires one to forget its ongoing social and historical transformations, as well as the material conditions of its militarization, not the least of which includes over one million landmines within the zone and another one million in the CCZ. The space of the DMZ may be literally shaped by military conflict and political stalemate, but its ecology is also deeply enmeshed with global capitalism. It is at the nexus of militarization and neoliberalization that the DMZ’s nature now emerges as an object of fascination and instrumentalization. The idea of conserving the DMZ as a protected area may provide a glimmer of hope in a seemingly hopeless situation, yet, the romanticization of nature in the zone, whether in the name of unification politics or sustainable development, may be obscuring the ongoing endangerment of the border area’s actually existing biodiversity.

Eleana Kim is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rochester University. Her first book, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (Duke University Press) was published in 2010. Her current project, Making Peace with Nature: The Greening of the Korean Demilitarized Zone, received an ACLS/SSRC/NEH fellowship in 2011-12. Articles on adoption have appeared in Anthropological Quarterly, Social Text, and the Journal of Korean Studies. Articles on the DMZ have appeared or are forthcoming on SINO-NK.com and Perspectives: The Journal of the Rachel Carson Institute. She can be reached at: eleana.kim@rochester.edu.

[1] This “return to nature” narrative is not unique to the DMZ. In fact, the post-Cold War era has witnessed a number of decommissioned militarized spaces and borders that are being converted into conservation areas after having been “off limits” to civilians and thereby unintentional sanctuaries for other species for decades (despite or because of intense toxicity and militarized pollution). In addition, Transboundary Conservation Areas have been widely celebrated as a “global solution” to conservation and sustainable development (as Bram Büscher describes it in his excellent new book, Transforming the Frontier), in which landscapes of political antagonism could be transformed into zones of mutual cooperation and peace.

Jim: Can you talk a bit about your dissertation research in Ecuador and your more recent project in Russia, how they relate to each other, and how they both relate to your conceptualization of an eco-tourism extraction nexus?

Veronica: My dissertation was about ecotourism in the Amazonian lowlands of Ecuador. I studied how indigenous Kichwa communities in the Amazonian provinces negotiated involvement with the ecotourism industry. I examined what kind of cultural space was produced on these tours, between the tourist fantasies and expectations of wildness and primitivism and Kichwa aspirations of being “modern” and participating in the global economy.  I soon realized, however, that it was not possible to study ecotourism without also looking at oil extraction in the region.   Although the imaginaries and representations of the Amazon generally posits these industries as having mutually exclusive trajectories, my ethnographic perspective revealed that they were actually entwined in a variety of ways.  For one, it was the oil roads into the rainforest that made the ecotourism infrastructure possible at all.  Secondly, indigenous resistance to oil development, and related global lobbying, played a part in the World Bank allocating funds for what were called indigenous ethnodevelopment programs, which is how funding for many ecotourism initiatives came about.  Most clearly I could see how the two were entwined in Kichwa life histories—many of my informants engaged in ecotourism after years of working in the oil fields, and for them the two industries were connected through their bodies and their labor.  Although I was not thinking in terms of an ecotourism-extraction nexus at this point, I had become cognizant of a discrepancy: these two industries were entangled through local geographies and life experiences but decoupled from each other in virtually all knowledge production about the area.

I became more clearly aware of a nexus in my second project, which focused on the impacts of privatization of nature on indigenous Veps of Karelia. If in Ecuador both oil extraction and ecotourism were “modern” industries, Russian Karelia was a place where both ecotourism—or a prefigurative version of it—and mining have existed side by side for a very long time, dating back to the reign of Peter the Great.  The nexus there encompasses a long history of the region being simultaneously a leisure destination, famous for its nature, and a source of several rare, elite minerals. These minerals were utilized by the Russian royalty, then the Soviet state, and now by private transnational companies.  So both industries have been a source of stable, desirable livelihoods for local communities for a very long time. The mining industry was a particular source of pride, as you had multiple generations of miners and stoneworkers extracting raspberry quartzite, an extremely rare decorative mineral that was quite cosmopolitan in its circulation, and used exclusively for prestigious objects and landmarks—from Napoleon’s sarcophagus, to Lenin’s mausoleum, to the Moscow metro.  For the local Veps, there was no contradiction between these two identities of their region, and they viewed both industries as categorically similar, rather than different—and today they feel similarly vulnerable as a result of both industries simultanesouly being deregulated and privatized.  So that was a very different incarnation of the nexus, but one that also challenged the narrative that ecotourism and extraction cannot possibly co-exist.

Jim: You have described the eco-tourism extraction nexus as part of a larger conservation-extraction nexus. Could you say a bit about the conservation-extraction nexus and then why you have chosen to focus on an eco-tourism extraction nexus?

Veronica: I think the conservation-extraction nexus is a concept that comes out of the literature on neoliberal conservation, that recognizes the false dichotomy between conservation, specifically neoliberal conservation, and extraction.  This literature shows how neoliberal conservation and resource extraction are ontologically similar –they both ways of rationalizing and financializing nature.  But much of the literature that looks at this broader conservation-extraction nexus is about the macro-level—recognizing the ideological convergences, the neoliberal foundations, and even the large-scale monetary flows and institutional alignments that enable both kinds of interventions. And at the same time, I think sometimes people still often think of conservation/ecotourism projects and extraction projects as taking place in different locales and at different sites within those larger scales. So, for me, the ecotourism-extraction nexus re-scales and concretizes the larger framework of the conservation-extraction nexus by showing that the same communities can be affected by extraction and ecotourism industries, and can participate in both, at various times, or even at the same time. So it’s a way—one of many—to study the conservation-extraction nexus empirically.

Jim: You have brought together an interesting group of scholars working on eco-tourism and extraction in an called The Ecotourism-Extraction-Nexus: Political Economies and (un)Comfortable Bedfellowsco-edited with Bram Buscher. Could you talk a bit about that process, what kinds of themes emerged from it, as well as telling us a bit about the collection and what readers can expect from it?

Well, Bram Büscher has been a total kindred spirit and wonderful collaborator on this topic.  A few years ago I sent in an abstract for the Nature Inc. Conference he was co-organizing in The Hague, and the abstract was on the E-E Nexus, and he really liked the concept, it resonated with the work he was doing in South Africa, so that started a conversation. Then, when I presented on it at the Nature Inc. Conference, the same thing happened that seemed to be happening whenever I would talk about that research—I had people come up to me afterwards and say “oh, that is happening in my fieldsite!”  So through such encounters, I kept getting the sense that there are all these places around the world, where increasingly ecotourism projects arise in close proximity to oil transport, mining, and other forms of extraction—but that no one was studying it!  So Bram and I decided to reach out to scholars who were already working in these zones, and with our call for papers push them to say something on the topic.  We put a call out for a European Association for Social Anthropologists meeting workshop, and we got great responses.  For the most part, we got abstracts from people who were already working on some component of this—either the ecotourism part or the extraction part—but were inspired by the CFP to think through how these things co-existed in their fieldsites.  So many of the volume contributors were also conference participants, and then some other people joined in, like Andrew Walsh, who was already working on ecotourism and sapphire mining in Madagascar, and Rob Fletcher, and Jamon Halvaksz.  So we pitched the idea to Routledge, and they were very enthusiastic about it, and now, almost exactly a year after EASA, in August, our volume is coming out.

Veronica: The thing I am really happy about is that first of all have a broad geographical range represented in the volume, which shows that this nexus is really something global in scope—we have case studies from Madagascar and Ecuador and Russia and Papua New Guinea and Belize and Swedish Lapland and Costa Rica, to name just a few.  The other thing that is really nice is, we ended up having a mix of more senior scholars, who have been working in their fieldsites for years –and saw how the gradual dynamics of these convergences evolved over time—and contributors who were finishing or had recently finished their PhDs, and wrote their chapters from the perspective of having just completed long-term fieldwork.  So, I think the readers can expect a really diverse mix of perspectives, and they can learn about the different ways in which ecotourism and extraction co-exist—whether as compatible and flexible livelihoods for the locals, as Tim Smith writes in a chapter on Ecuador, or with ecotourism being politicized and mobilized to oppose extraction, as Elisabet Rasch describes happening in the Philippines, or with ecotourism projects even literally merging with extractive ones, with certain kinds of “artisanal” mining, becoming a part of ecotourism packages, as Luisa Rollins shows happens with larimar mining in the Dominican Republic.  I hope that through showing these very different configurations of how ecotourism and extraction coexist, the volume problematizes the pervasive idea that they are “opposites,” this fiction of incommesurability.

Jim: Your article “From a Blind Spot to a Nexus: Building On Existing Trends in Knowledge Production to Study the Co-presence of Ecotourism and Extraction” was a finalist for last year’s Junior Scholar Award. What would you do you consider the key points and/or arguments that you make in that article?

Veronica: I think in many ways the article can be thought of as the companion piece to the volume.  The volume is largely about theorizing and showing empirically the different ways in which such a nexus can arise and function, through case studies.  And the article was for the journal Environment and Society: Advances in Research, which is an annual review journal.  So, framing this topic as a literature review gave me the opportunity to think through the question of why people don’t study ecotourism and extraction together, even though there are increasingly more and more places where the two coexist.  Not only is this convergence understudied, people are resistant to it.  Early on in pursuing this topic, I wrote a grant proposal to do a comparative study of the nexus in Ecuador and Cameroon, of ecotourism initiatives along the oil pipelines in both countries, and one of the anonymous reviews I got said: I am rather dubious about this project. I find it hard to imagine that landscapes ravaged by extraction of oil or other sub-surface minerals are commonly being selected as sites for ecotourism development. This response helped convince me that even among academics, certain assumptions about what extraction or ecotourism “do” to landscapes contribute to the seeming impossibility of contemplating them as co-occurring practices.  So, in the article, through critically engaging with ecotourism literature and extraction literature, I was able to look at the trends and conventions in production of knowledge in these two bodies of scholarship.  The argument I make is that certain epistemological frameworks and study designs currently used in scholarship of ecotourism and extraction create and reproduce blind spots, where one of the industries remains obscured.  I also make recommendations for how study designs can incorporate a nexus perspective, looking at the two phenomena together.

Jim: What do you see as the potential contributions of the eco-tourism extraction nexus to theoretical and applied anthropology? Where do you see your research going next?

Veronica: Well, theoretically I think the ecotourism-extraction nexus contributes to what I think is an important task of anthropology—which is critically looking at how the spaces and convergences where familiar dichotomies become blurred.  Clearly demarcated oppositions usually become much less clear, and much more messy—productively so–through an ethnographic lens, and the ecotourism-extraction nexus provides a new framework for problematizing these oppositions that are still so prevalent in most discussions of both “nature” and “development.”  And in terms of applied anthropology, I think there are a number of ways this approach can have practical implications.  For example, applied anthropologists are often involved in assessing the impacts of ecotourism, whether it works in meaningful ways, whether it achieves these different things it is supposed to achieve, be it conservation of biodiversity or environmental sovereignty of local communities.  But applied anthropologists work in a political context, where ecotourism is generally treated as indicative of a paradigm shift from “wild nature” to sustainable development, or as a vehicle of rehabilitating previously “mismanaged” nature, while minimizing the scope of ecotourism projects expected to coexist with resource extraction activities. So there is this ideological framing bias, and it actually skews what kind of applied work, or policy research gets done, and the impact of ecotourism in areas concurrently affected by extraction industries, remains understudied. So the nexus concept, and the study design possibilities it entails, can reframe ecotourism as a subject of inquiry in a way that recognizes its structural dependence on global ideologies and institutions that often promote “unsustainable” development.  And that, I think, can lead to empirical research that will procure data that is often located in the “blind spots” of academic and policy debates on sustainable development and efficacy of ecotourism.

As for where my research is going next—I have a number of projects in various stages of development, but specifically building on this topic, I plan to study other nexuses, where extractive industries co-exist with either institutional initiatives or livelihood strategies that are commonly imagined to be incompatible with extraction.  Basically, I am interested in looking at situations that are not “supposed” to exist, and thus either get understudied or framed in this kind of sensationalist “isn’t it unusual?” way, and figuring out how to approach them as an anthropologist interested both in natural environments and in the production of knowledge about natural environments.

Dr. Muehlmann’s article is a wonderful and compelling account of how three distinct processes of enumeration interact to create a crisis narrative regarding the people, language, and ecology of the lower Colorado River Delta of northern Mexico. I have to admit that I was rather skeptical from the outset. I know a lot about the area and have personally interacted with many of the researchers who work in the region. I initially thought to myself, “C’mon now! How could counting residents, birds, fish and native language speakers really have negative consequences for people struggling to assert local control over natural resources?” As I read the paper, I got sucked into the story by Muehlmann’s clear prose and vivid imagery. Like all really good ethnographies, I felt like I was there. I felt like I was talking with Don Madeleno, catching birds in nets with Christian, or listening to the radio with Cruz’s family. So, my skepticism faded away and I became convinced that counting does matter.

I also work among indigenous fishing communities of a river delta and encounter many of the same issues. For five years, I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork among Yup’ik and Cup’ik First Alaskans in the Yukon-Kuskokwim River Delta (Y-K Delta) of Western Alaska. People in the Y-K also struggle with fishing regulations that undermine their subsistence way of life. They are likewise frequently surveyed by health officials, census workers, fish and game managers, or anthropologists like myself. Some community members decline to be interviewed and tell me, “We’ve been surveyed to death!”  Unlike the Colorado Delta, however, the Y-K Delta region remains a stronghold of Yup’ik language vitality. Moreover, Alaska Native groups have formally recognized political rights and actively participate in conservation decisions through management boards. The Y-K Delta region struggles but is far from a state of environmental or social crisis as the Mexican Colorado River Delta.

Nonetheless, reading “Rhizomes and other uncountables” has made me wonder the degree to which my own work among residents of the Y-K Delta may be inadvertently contributing to a similar form of countdown. I thank Shaylih Muehlmann for writing an article that compels all of us as ecological anthropologists to reflect on the myriad types of enumeration we routinely do as part of our fieldwork. We should ask ourselves if all our counting ultimately relegates the people we study and their experiences to “a realm that simply does not count” (p. 340).

Hi, Shaylih. I’m Colin and I really enjoyed reading your article. Congratulations on receiving the A&E Junior Scholar Award!

Thanks Colin! It’s nice to meet you.

I really was struck by your writing. You are able to blend anthropolo

gical theory and ethnographic material into an extremely compelling account. Could you talk a little bit about how you go about writing ethnographically?

For me the process of writing and the process of analyzing my material have always been necessarily inseparable. It’s very rare that I start out writing already knowing how to make sense of the ethnographic material I intend to address. So my descriptions of people and events are placed in the way they are in the text less for stylistic reasons and more as a result of my own process of trying to think through the issues that those people and events are raising. I find that if I begin with the ethnographic accounts as the basis of my writing it’s easier to start untangling the theoretical and political issues they speak to.  This was particularly the case in writing “Rhizomes and Other Uncountables” because the issue of enumeration wasn’t one that I had ever considered before noticing peoples’ reactions to counting practices in my field-site. So trying to understand those reactions involved really thinking through and considering the ethnographic examples carefully.

Your paper discusses the ways in which enumeration undermines local struggles for control over natural resources, language, and livelihoods. But you also point out how it can simultaneously help and become a basis for demanding greater rights. Counting is such a simple thing but you illustrate its potential power. I was wondering how you first became drawn to counting as an important and illuminating theme?

Enumeration practices are such a taken for granted feature of both qualitative and quantitative research that it actually took a while for me to realize that they were particularly significant in the Colorado delta.  I remember that after submitting the first draft of my dissertation, as a graduate student, my supervisors asked me to include the population of the village in the introduction. They wanted a number, which is of course standard.  I hadn’t included that number because I had already encountered the hostility among villagers towards counting practices and especially the question of how many people lived there. But I didn’t know how to justify the omission of that information because I still hadn’t fully understood what the hostility and discomfort was about.  So it was over the next several years, during my postdoctoral work, that I started paying more specific attention to the issue and deliberately collecting more examples of how counting practices were being experienced by local people over several different contexts.

In several passages you specifically write about your personal experiences while conducting research that really did make me feel like I was there in the Colorado Delta. Could you just briefly describe a typical day of fieldwork?

I spent most of my fieldwork in the delta following people around. In the extended field period when I was staying with local families I would wake up and spend the first few hours of the day hanging out and visiting with people. Then I would try to join in on any organized activities that were related to my research themes – fishing, meetings with local river users’ association, work projects, environmental workshops, and cultural events – those sorts of things. But most days were less eventful and I spent a lot of time just talking to friends and neighbors, eating, helping with the kids and sitting around.

Congratulations again, Shaylih. I see that you have several other articles about your work in Cucapá villages (I’m intrigued by your 2008 “Spread Your Ass Cheeks” paper . . . ), one book that is coming out soon by Duke University Press, and yet another in the works with the University of California Press. With all these publications, what’s next? Do you see yourself continuing to work in the Colorado Delta for the foreseeable future? What new directions do you see yourself going in?

Thanks again Colin. As for what’s next, that’s still an open question. I’ve already started to roam a bit farther from the delta in my more recent fieldwork projects but I’m sure I’ll always go back to the area. It’s a fascinating part of the world and I feel attached to the landscape as well as many of the people I’ve become close too over course of my research there. I also have a lot more to write about the delta and the river so you certainly haven’t heard the last from me on that intriguing region where the Colorado River used to meet the sea.

In 2012, the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians engaged research specialists working in several different fields, including anthropology, the physical sciences, and law. Our assignment was to assemble a report to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) about air quality on the tribe’s reservation in northern Wisconsin. With this report, the tribe aims to redesignate its reservation’s air quality from Class II to Class I under the “Prevention of Significant Deterioration” provisions of the federal Clean Air Act. The air on the reservation today is too clean to be classified as Class II, and redesignation as Class I will help the tribe ensure that this status is formally recognized and protected. In fact, the tribe first initiated this process in the 1990s, but suspended its work due to the anticipated legal costs that it would incur if the redesignation were challenged by the State of Wisconsin. Now that five other tribes in the United States—including the Potawatomis in Wisconsin—have set a precedent by achieving this same redesignation, Bad River decided to reinitiate the process.

The requirements of the federal law that enable redesignation of air quality include assessment of the environmental, health, social, and economic effects that upgrading air quality is likely to entail. Larry Nesper, who has extensive experience working with tribes in Wisconsin, was asked to contribute the “social effects” section of the report to the EPA. He invited me to assist him by conducting interviews with members and neighbors of Bad River during a one-week visit to the reservation in the summer of 2012.

We began our research with the premise that the sociocultural vitality of the Bad River community is rooted in culturally meaningful interactions with non-human elements of the landscape. Nesper’s previous research with the Sokaogan Band over the development of the Crandon mine has illustrated the deep significance of such relationships for Ojibwe people in Wisconsin. Thus, rather than focusing our interviews on speculations about what could happen if the high quality of air on the reservation were to deteriorate, we mainly discussed what people do on the landscape right now, how these activities underpin the health of the Bad River community, and what happens within the community when environmental degradation interferes with these activities.

From among the many activities that involve culturally meaningful interactions with the environment, one subset emerged as a particularly productive topic of conversation: the wild rice harvest that occurs in the late summer. Wild rice plays a key role in Ojibwe mythohistory and lends its Anishinaabe name to Bad River’s annual Manomin Powwow, which takes place during the harvest. “It’s just a big community thing out there, and a lot of people look forward to it,” one man said of the harvest. “It’s something else. If you come into the sloughs [the wetlands near the mouth of the Bad River] and you come around the last corner there by the line, you look and you can stand up in your boat and you can see all the guys out there ricing, all the boats, all the guys out there ricing. […] Same thing in spring time when there’s fishing: you’ll see everybody out there pulling their nets.  You know, it’s always good to [ask], ‘Hey how’d you do?’ And, you know, finding out the scoop and it’s… it’s a lot of fun.  It’s a whole community thing.” Our interviewees remembered going to the ricing camps that were set up near the slough during the rice harvests of their youth—occasions at which they learned about Ojibwe culture from their elders.

Several years ago, the committee of elders that oversees the rice harvest was forced to cancel the annual harvest entirely because low water levels in the Bad River slough disrupted the growing season for the rice, resulting in very low yields. The committee decided that any harvest would impair the rice’s ability to reseed itself for the following year. The cancelation was not prompted by poor air quality, and most interviewees did not attribute the poor yield to human-caused environmental damage. Still, the decision to cancel that harvest triggered tensions in the community that are of direct relevance to our research. One elder, who compared the normal rice harvest to a holiday that draws out-of-town relatives back to the reservation, recalled the year the harvest was canceled: “The younger people really got angry. They were looking forward to going out, bringing rice for the family. They’re all macho guys wanting to do all this stuff, and they couldn’t go. […] Some of the guys, they rice for their family and then they go and sell some. And so they got a little cash in their pockets and they can go buy something [that] they’re not able to get or whatever. And that’s not there. They have to go tell their grandparents there’s no rice. So nobody has the rice for the winter. And there’s special ceremonies, special holiday’s during the year, and on your birthday there’s rice. Whatever kind of meal you have, there’s always been rice there. And it’s…well, you’re feeling sad. It’s like a grieving when something has died. You know when someone dies there’s grieving because it’s not there no more.”

The wild rice harvest is, of course, only one of many activities that bring Bad River Ojibwe out onto the landscape. Our interviewees also talked at length about hunting, fishing, and gathering for subsistence and ceremonial purposes. Each of these activities strengthens the social fabric of the Bad River community as it draws people into closer relationships with each other and with non-human elements of the environment. Amongst humans, extensive networks of reciprocity are activated each time a resource is harvested: interviewees commented that they donate a part of their take from hunting and fishing to the elders, that they give to neighbors who have been less fortunate, that they give foods to relatives who live off the reservation, and so forth. These foods are also a necessary element of feasts celebrating life-cycle rituals. In fact, since many Ojibwe consider it taboo to replace feast foods with store-bought items, special licenses are issued by the tribal council for harvesting certain resources out of season when they are needed for feasts.

A prominent leader in the tribe explained how Ojibwe cosmology extends human sociality and reciprocity to non-humans: “essentially it’s an understanding that we’re sharing the land, that we’re sharing the water, that we’re sharing the air, and as much as we’re sitting here talking about impacts to the people of our reservation, if we really wanted to explore it through an Indian world view, we’re going to talk about the impacts—in as much depth as we do with people—as it pertains to frogs, blue herons, wild rice, forget-me-nots, things like that. Because they all have their spirit. Those rocks under that lake bed—when I talked about water clarity being as important as air clarity and the potential impacts—those rocks have a spirit, and the way we look at them and the way we pick them up and hold them and put them back and things like that, all of that stuff has a place and an importance in who we are and for what they are.”

Succumbing at one point to the temptation of “what ifs,” I asked two men of around 30 what might happen if the air and water quality were to worsen: “If there’s a haze over the watershed, or the mercury levels go up in fish, what happens?” The tone of the interview changed instantly. After losing himself for a moment in thought, one of the men replied, “I say we failed.” He explained: “You know, it’s not in our beings to just let that kind of stuff come into the land that we’re trying to protect and live off of. We are a part of the land, you know; it’s not just for us to use up the way we see fit, but to live within the means of the land. And, I don’t know, it’s just—it would be hard to imagine my rez with those kinds of things, with mercury pollution or any kind of pollution. I don’t know what to think if something like that were to happen.”

The second interviewee, an employee of the tribal natural resources department, agreed: “I think that failing, it’s huge.” He pointed out that the quality of the air, the water, and the land, which the tribe is attempting to protect, affects people well beyond the borders of the reservation. “So when we’re trying to preserve not only our rights and our waters and everything else, we’re trying to preserve [them] for the entire population—the entire world—because our area is something to be seen by, I believe, the entire world. We got one of the most pristine, beautiful wetland areas in the world, I believe. And I’ve been around a little bit in the United States and I’ve yet to see places [like those] that are seen around here. So I think if it becomes like that, [then] yeah, we failed. I think we’d lose a lot. I think our rice is so… so touchy. If an inch of water could affect how it grows I can just imagine what dirty air could do to it, and with the cycle that it’s in I think it’d just be too much for the rice to grow. But… it is something to think about, I guess. You never know until the day comes, but… it would be nice to preserve it for everybody in the future.”

Nesper completed a first draft of the “social effects” section of the report to the EPA in August 2012. He will return to Bad River in the summer of 2013 to conduct further interviews. When the physical scientists and the lawyers have weighed in, a final application will be made to the EPA with the full expectation that the agency will approve the higher air quality standards for the Bad River Community. Redesignation will reaffirm the pride with which community members speak about their stewardship of the land and will help them continue to look after the wellbeing of both human and non-human spirits that inhabit the landscape in and around the reservation. It may also become an important tool in the tribe’s efforts to oppose the construction of an iron mine that was recently approved by the State of Wisconsin.

Joe Quick is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. He studies indigenous peoples and material culture in the global economy. His dissertation research explores tourist-oriented handicraft production in highland Ecuador.

Larry Nesper is Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. He studies American Indian law and politics in the Great Lakes area and is currently working on a book about tribal courts in Wisconsin. His edited volume with Brian Hosmer, Tribal Worlds: Critical Studies in American Indian Nation Building (SUNY Press), was published this year.

I guess one of my concerns is what the future of environmental anthropology should look like. I too often worry that people haven’t taken Vayda and Walters’ critique of the lack of ecology in political ecology/environmental anthropology seriously enough. How do you feel about this critique and how do you think your work fits into it?

My experiences as a student and field practitioner have been fortunate in that many of my mentors and colleagues strive to put the ecology into ecological and environmental anthropology (or humans into the socio-ecological system for my non-anthropologist mentors and colleagues).  However, from time to time, I’ve been frustrated reading the literature and didn’t know if it was just me or a wider issue.  I reread the Vayda and Walters’ (1999) critique you mentioned, and then followed it up to see if anything similar had been written since that time.  Walker (2005)[1], a human geographer, made a similar critique.

There is value in, and a need for, exploring and critiquing the effects of environmental policies on human communities and the socio-ecological system.  However, policies and politics are only one aspect of the socio-ecological system.  People make decisions about resource use based on many factors, some of which exist outside cultural, political, and economic institutions.  There are biophysical elements and ongoing processes – which humans influence to varying degrees – shaping the socio-ecological systems we find ourselves in and the decisions we make about resource use.  This complexity and interconnectedness demands holistic study – traditionally, a hallmark of anthropology.  Interdisciplinary team research, long-term, situated study of a place or a phenomenon, and participatory research involving local residents as partners are some ways to tackle this demand.  None of this is easy or quick, and unfortunately we’re frequently called upon to deliver fast results on big issues like conservation, climate change, food & water security, etc.

I see a strong interest among both undergraduate and graduate students to learn more about socio-ecological systems in order to find/create sustainable solutions to some of society’s biggest problems.  That gives me hope.  Many of these students have a decent grasp on the socio-political, economic, and cultural aspects of the problems, but lack a good understanding of how these aspects interact with the biophysical components of the system – often because they have not taken the time or had the opportunity to learn about the ecology or other environmental science.  This is something that can be addressed.  I’ve also had a couple of anthropology students tell me they’ve avoided learning about the biophysical because they think they can’t do math, that the science will be too difficult, or that it doesn’t matter.  The last reason, that it doesn’t matter, makes me very uneasy.  Those students are rare in my experience.  In general though, my conversations with students suggest to me that we ecological and environmental anthropologists need to do a better job of encouraging/supporting our students to think and work outside the comfort-zone of the disciplinary silo (perhaps even pushing the truculent ones).

The paper I submitted on fire and landscape management for the A&E Jr. Scholar competition is just one small piece of a much larger puzzle.  I am interested in the complexity of human-environment interactions within a socio-ecological system.  This complexity of interactions varies through space and time.  My research in southern Mozambique (the Maputaland forest-savanna mosaic) with contemporary communities is about understanding how Ronga peoples (and their non-Ronga neighbors) currently use and manage their resources and are shaped by this landscape.  The work also explores local history to understand people’s interactions with this landscape in the past.  This can inform our understandings of how people may act in the future, and assist with building adaptive capacity, sustainability, and otherwise preparing for future uncertainty.  While I was working on the fire research for my dissertation, I was also gathering data on tree species distributions, traditional knowledge about flora and fauna, climate, fire and drought adaptation strategies, and community environmental history.  My hope is to build on this foundation as I continue my research into human-environment interactions in this region with local residents, landscape managers, policy folks, and other academic researchers.

There was also some discussion when the judges met about how applicable people’s various approaches were outside of the context of their own sites. How would you respond to this?

This is definitely something I thought about as I wrote up my results for this paper.  At one level, I wanted to show how humans, their activities, and the Maputaland landscape are intertwined through history.  The landscape needs fire, and humans have been a major source of this fire – mostly burning small patches for various livelihood activities historically and currently.  Burning for livelihoods was banned in this region to protect the biodiversity, but now scientists and policy makers are talking about developing fire regimes to protect the biodiversity because a lack of fire and large-scale wildfires create even more damage.  I see this as a familiar story for fire dependent ecosystems around the world, and, along this line, received a number of emails from fire ecologists in the US, southern Africa, and Australia that were quite positive and encouraging.

At another level, fire ecologists use archaeological evidence, archival materials, and data from controlled burns and wildfires to model fire regimes for parks and reserves.  This has definitely been the case in Kruger National Park.  But why not ask the people that live in these ecosystems how, why, and where they use fire?  And what changes to the fire regimes, and the effects of those changes, have local residents seen?  I recognize that this isn’t always possible.  The legality of burning makes answering these sorts of questions too risky for many people, in other cases, burn practices may have changed significantly from the way things were done 50, 100, 200 years ago (and if it has, why?).  However, people’s fire knowledge is another legitimate source of information for the modeling and a way to bridge different fire management perspectives.  I wanted to show the usefulness of ethnographic fieldwork in learning about local fire knowledge and use of fire to manage the landscape in which people live.  I see this approach as helpful in bridging perspectives that use similar techniques to conserve biodiversity for different reasons.  I think an ethnographic approach, similar to what I used, could be very applicable in other places in Africa and elsewhere.

Finally, what future plans do you have for your research/writing?

This past summer I went back to Mozambique to return my research results to the communities, Maputo Special Reserve (MSR) staff, and my colleagues at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane (UEM).  As part of my trip, I asked community members and reserve staff about possible research questions we could work on together that were of importance to them.  With colleagues at UEM we began to put together a framework that will inform future research on conservation, sustainable livelihoods, and environmental change, including future climate uncertainties, in communities adjacent/within MSR and three other conservation areas in Mozambique.  I’m now working on a couple of research proposals with colleagues to fund our interdisciplinary team in developing ways to model human-environment interactions for the purpose of identifying crucial locations for wildlife conservation, ecosystem service protection, and sustainable livelihood support under projected climate changes.

[1] Walker, P. 2005. Political ecology: where is the ecology? Progress in Human Geography 29(1): 73-82.

The Junior Scholar Award of the Anthropology and Environment Section of the American Anthropological Association for 2012 had seven nominations. The award is for scholars beginning their careers, and is based on a nominated article that was published or in press in the award year. This year the judges for that award are highlighting the work of the nominated scholars.

One of 2012’s nominees was Alex Nading, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Franklin and Marshall College, for his article “Dengue Mosquitos Are Single Mothers: Biopolitics Meets Ecological Aesthetics in Nicaraguan Community Health Work” (Cultural Anthropology 27(4): 572-596). Alex’s article analyzes participatory dengue eradication programs in Nicaragua as a form of exploratory learning about the natural world. Drawing on theorists such as Ingold, Bateson and Foucault, Nading argues that participants in the dengue programs experience transformation, which he labels as “ecological aesthetic,” in the assemblages created between people, places and insects. Such entanglements include pleasure and care, as experienced by the mostly female brigadistas whose job it is to search out breeding habitats for dengue-carrying mosquitos. Nading’s article also addresses the interlinkages between biopolitics and neoliberalization in the formation of dengue “technopolitics,” and the judges for this year’s competition found his article provides a unique bridge between work in environmental and medical anthropology.

Alex was recently interviewed by Stefanie Graeter, a graduate student at UC Davis, as part of a Cultural Anthropology feature on his article, and interested readers should look for more information. The featured discussion also includes video and additional readings, making it extremely useful for classroom work.

Congratulations to Alex again for an engaging and distinctive article.

Leslie Sponsel has defined a new field of inquiry: spiritual ecology. He traces spiritual views on the environment from early roots to modern advocates for religious, spiritual, or mystical approaches to environment. The first three chapters concern traditional societies. The first examines animism, a concept being rehabilitated after some years of relative eclipse. Sponsel then surveys the better-known studies of traditional societies and their views of their environments. The third chapter covers the “ecologically noble vs. ignoble savage” controversy. Sponsel dissects the popular culture views of the former and the various protests, ranging from politically conservative to academically searching. He compares these with the actual record, which reveals a tremendous variety and a lack of any “savages” or other stereotypic beings.

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When I began researching honey collecting in the Philippines, I never anticipated that making visual collections of objects and images associated with marketing honey was going to become a powerful way of stimulating discussion about my study.  But the clues were there all along. Collections are things brought together, in so many senses of the term. Such assemblages have a capacity for telling stories about how different products make their ways through the world, and into our homes, bodies and lives. Honey collecting, like other forms of forest harvesting or hunting, tends to evoke ideas about a bound type of thing moving in one direction – out of the forest and into a market (wherever that might be).  But what happens when a ‘natural forest’ honey supposedly harvested on an island in the Philippines is manufactured and sold in Manila?  And when this honey’s association with nature and forest environments is hardly natural, but needs to be made apparent by literally rendering the final product green?  How do such commodities relate to the forest honeys actually being harvested by Indigenous experts as part of their livelihoods and lifeways, and being marketed by non-government organizations?  In attempting to discuss the issues that arose from my research, I found that bringing together a range of honey products that had different, yet related, trajectories could be a wonderful prompt for talking about the social and spatial disjunctures that often occur within efforts to add value to certain types of natural resources.

Sarah Webb talking with a honey street vendor in Metro Manila

In the Philippines, Palawan[1] honey is one such ‘value-added’ forest product.  Indigenous experts[2] seasonally harvest honey mainly from Apis dorsata beehives in forested areas on Palawan Island.  For the Indigenous Tagbanua families I worked with, honey is not only a part of their livelihood but also an important source of nutrition, sweetness, medicine and cultural identity.  Within the Philippines, many people are interested in buying Palawan honey because it is a highly valued product with a reputation for purity and quality[3], particularly because of its association with Palawan’s iconic forests and ‘natural wonders’, such as the Puerto Princesa Underground River.  Local Indigenous representatives who market honey promote non-timber forest products (NTFPs) such as honey because these products support their current goals for sustainable forest livelihoods.

The notion that NTFPs, like honey, can contribute to sustainable forest livelihoods has influenced international development projects, policies and research initiatives – especially since studies began to suggest that the economic value of NTFPs might exceed that of timber.  ‘Value adding’ NTFPs often means building up markets of more highly valued forest products as an alternative to logging and mining.  The idea is to provide income for forest harvesters, while maintaining the resource base.  However, ongoing research makes apparent the need to approach the potential of NTFP commercialization for sustainability agendas with caution.  Scholars have demonstrated that merely providing more valuable resources will not necessarily address the socio-economic marginalization of forest harvesters, or the concerns of sustainable livelihoods (however these might be conceptualized).  Important research in environmental anthropology has documented how value-adding incentives can pay insufficient attention to the reasons forest harvesters do not have access to valuable forest resources – or why they no longer have such access[4].

Drawing upon this line of research, I examined how the politics of capturing value is a part of the social processes of making products valuable in the Philippines. When I began searching for Palawan honeys sold in Manila, I found that it was not only those interested in sustainable forest livelihoods who were ‘adding’ to honey in order to make it a valuable product.

Adding to Palawan Honey

The reputation of Palawan honey as ‘natural’ and ‘pure’ gives it certain market appeal, but has also inspired a burgeoning range of imitation products.  Different ‘fake’ Palawan honeys are made by adding water and sugar, the name of Palawan, and even green food coloring to honey of dubious origin.  On Palawan, campaigns have targeted adulterated honey, which is made by adding water to increase volume, and sugar or kalamansi (native lime) juice to disguise the diluted taste.  In Manila, experts on the honey trade assert that the volume of honey claimed to originate from Palawan exceeds both Palawan estimates for local production and state records of honey transported from the island. Green honey is an expensive[5] product (supposedly rare and medicinal) identified as coming from Palawan when sold across boutiques and farmers’ markets in Manila.  However, according to testing conducted by Dr. Cervancia of the University of the Philippines Los Banos, ‘green’ honey is made green by mixing yellow and blue pigments into the honey – additions which she contends change its composition in such a way that it should no longer, technically, be called honey.

A manlalbet (honey harvester) indicates the location of a hive

So what does a black market for green Palawan honey in Manila mean for Indigenous Tagbanua harvesters? Firstly, Indigenous peoples are often blamed for adulterating local honey.  Although this practice is more likely conducted by transitory middle traders[6], these rumors cause some to shy away from purchasing honey directly from Indigenous harvesters on Palawan.  Some local buyers use such rumors to negotiate a lower price for the honey they buy from Tagbanua families, claiming the honey is of a lower or ‘reject’ quality.  Secondly, my use of the term black market is somewhat facetious. While practices of ‘fake’ honeys are widely considered undesirable, and have been banned by Palawan local government, branding or labeling honey as coming from Palawan (even when it does not) is not regulated at a national level.  At the same time, honey from Palawan does not easily make its way from Indigenous harvesters to Manila.  State permits are required to transport honey, and seasonally driven, local production means that a relatively low volume of honey from Palawan enters the Manila marketplace.

As these forest products are made valuable, particularly through their association with iconic forest environments, a space has emerged for creating even more expensive ‘fake’ honey products.  Such cultural politics are part of, rather than external to, the processes of making products valuable.  Those manufacturing and purchasing such products are actively involved in creating social and economic values of not only honey, but also the ideals of nature through which consumers position their tastes and health in relation to the environments of Palawan and the livelihoods of Indigenous peoples.

Taking Away from Added Honeys: Understanding Commodity Flows and Values through Material Culture

As I investigated these politics of valuing honey, I initially collected products[7] because I was interested in the actual objects of honey marketing.  That is, not only was I interested in what people had to say about honey, or how they behaved during sales encounters, but I also wanted to know what these material objects themselves said about honey production. I was fascinated by the material transfer of honey from the large plastic gallon jugs used during harvest to smaller containers for resale, the colors or textures of the honey itself – indicative of different qualities and tastes – and, of course, the product labels that communicated both explicit and implicit messages to potential customers.  All of this material culture supplemented, furthered, or contradicted what different people told me, and it was in making sense of those relationships and tensions that I was able to understand how Palawan honey is made valuable. But during ethnographic fieldwork, I also noticed collections everywhere I looked – from displays of product samples at non-government organization (NGO) workshops, to samples of ‘fake’ honeys being tested in university laboratories, to the ways people arranged important objects in their homes.  And this made me realize that what I had collected might be of interest to others too, and so the collection became the basis of workshops conducted at the end of my fieldwork.

Sarah Webb and research assistant Mr. Rogelio Rodrigo at a honey collection workshop

For workshops with Tagbanua families, I prepared descriptive labels for honey and beeswax products that included information about the price and provenance, as well as photographs of different contexts of sale.  My research assistants and I arranged these into displays, and talked about the different products, answering any questions participants had.  After doing so, we passed the different objects around, and sampled each – trying on beeswax cosmetics, and smelling and tasting honeys.  At their request, a group of harvesters ran their own tests on the honeys we presented to determine for themselves whether they considered any ‘fake’, and to ascertain differing levels of quality.

Tagbanua families are only too familiar with what they describe as the dangers of ‘fake’ honey – particularly, they fear being blamed for the production of such ‘fakes’, and the resultant punishment by the state or low prices from buyers.  Most Tagbanua people are aware that a fraudulent ‘green honey’ is sold.  But the complex connections and distances between the existence of such commodities and their own experiences can be difficult for any of us to talk about.  When these differently sourced, made, packaged, and promoted honey products were brought together, they provided us with the means of discussing the bigger social stories surrounding the journeys of Palawan honey to the marketplace.

The fate of my collection of honey products was important to me; I hoped that it would remain together, and be able to support ongoing research engagements. To this end, I was thrilled to hand the collection over to NATRIPAL, the Indigenous peoples’ federation of Palawan, as an addition to their own display of sample products collected during their research and marketing activities. In the offices of the organization, we installed the display of honey products and conducted an additional workshop to discuss the collection’s relationship to my research and the federation’s ongoing work. Apart from their nationally and regionally awarded efforts to provide more favorable market relations for Indigenous people and to develop the brand of Palawan honey, NATRIPAL has lobbied intensively for the land and livelihood rights of Indigenous peoples across Palawan.

There are many challenges for environmental anthropologists to work through in considering how collections can be used as forms of engagement.  But there is great potential for harnessing approaches to objects, which have traditionally resided within the fields of material culture studies or museology, for research in environmental anthropology. Visual collections are not just symbolic of what we do throughout our research activities, or simply representative of the issues we are exploring.  They can also act as a means for thinking and talking through pressing social and environmental issues in ways that draw from the experiences researchers and those they work with already have.  And perhaps most thrilling, there is a possibility that such collections might have a vibrant life beyond the intentions of researchers. This is, of course, only one of many innovative pathways for collections to act as powerful tools of engagement.

“… In other words, the way that bureaucracies work is by bleaching out local context and coming up with big simplifications.”   – Andrew Mathews, as quoted in his January 2013 interview with ENGAGEMENT

I would counter by positing that good bureaucracies do not bleach out local context. Instead, they create big, simplified umbrellas that cloak the complex, dynamic range of local circumstances and thereby give the staff of government bureaucracies the space to address local circumstances despite changes in political direction.   I base this assertion on twenty-five years’ experience working with USAID, and on the literature on good governance.

Dr. Alcorn at work in Kyrgyzstan

I came to Washington DC in 1988 to serve as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Diplomacy Fellow at the USAID (the U.S. Agency for International Development).  AAAS Fellowships offer scientists an opportunity to apply their knowledge to policy development.  And, in my case, the Fellowship served as a passport to get inside the State Department building, where USAID was then housed.  Once I had my ID pass and was inside the agency, I was often asked by USAID staff why the AAA had Fellows working in USAID.  (They were confusing AAAS with the American Automobile Association, not the American Anthropological Association.)   The AAA is an all-American organization, trusted by everyone, so AAA unknowingly gave me legitimacy to listen in on the internal workings of part of this federal bureaucracy.  And thus I became a “participant observer” inside USAID for two years, learning the language (acronyms) and customs during the first six months, and then becoming an active member of this society.

At the outset, AAAS sent us new Fellows to an intensive three weeks of in-depth orientations and briefings on the institutions that comprise Washington—from Congress to NASA, from the White House to the State Department, from the Pentagon to the Smithsonian.  One briefing stands out in my mind.   The presenter showed us a graph. On one axis was the level of knowledge about a topic, and on the other axis was the level of political attention given to the topic.   These variables were inversely related. The more that is known about a topic, the less political attention it gets.

I was given a position as Advisor to the Bureau for Asia and the Near East, in the office of Energy and Natural Resources.   My first assignment was managing an infamous reforestation project in Nepal—created by a Congressional earmark to ship poplar saplings from a constituent’s nursery in Oregon. Nepal has high levels of poverty, not to mention its own native poplars, so saplings weren’t high on the Nepali list for foreign aid.    My immediate supervisor, a social forester, advised me not to talk too much about this project.  Nepal simply was not a priority country.  He also pointed out that 80% of US foreign aid was in the form of “economic support funds”—checks written to Egypt and Israel—so Nepal was actually near the bottom of the remaining 20% of the budget described as “development assistance.”

Nevertheless, as an actor within this bureaucracy, my supervisor did his best to leverage the reforestation project into something that did more than airlift poplars from Oregon. He worked around the edges to provide assistance that was appreciated in Nepal—and then he threw away all the records of the project when he was transferred to another assignment.  When I saw him dumping out the files, I asked him whether we didn’t need to keep records of what had been done.  He said no, that it was better for the agency not to keep such records.   And thus I learned how dedicated people inside a bureaucracy can use those big, simplified umbrellas to fulfill a professional mission and address local concerns, even when the paperwork and politics push in a different direction.

I entered USAID during the transition from President Reagan to President George H.W. Bush.  There was a flurry of activity creating documents for “transition teams.” In effect, those documents served as ideologically-aligned, simplified umbrellas that shielded the professional, non-ideological work of the agency.   Again, these big simplifications did not bleach out local complexities, but rather covered for them.  During the transition, I discovered that agencies like USAID are run by political appointees, and I watched as President Bush inserted his people from the top down to the level of office director.   Our new office director met individually with each of his sixty-two person staff.  When he met me, the “AAA representative,” he said he was pleased that American business had a representative interested in “environment” inside USAID. Then he said that I needed to understand one thing: USAID was to do nothing to stop pollution. In fact, he continued, we should encourage it because US companies have the “predominant capability” in technologies for cleaning up pollution.

Over the first year, this appointee made it his personal agenda to remove biodiversity conservation from USAID’s mission by adding a “screen” that would stop all biodiversity-related activities and projects.  He believed that biodiversity was a fad whose time had passed, and he wanted to test the political power behind it.  Instead, he ended up being removed from his post because a memo promoting his anti-biodiversity plan was leaked. His memo shamed the administration and strengthened the political power of biodiversity conservation.  At his going-away party, we gave him a piece of window screen with paper cutouts of birds and rabbits taped to it along with a card that read, “We wanted you to have this screen, through which birds and bunnies cannot get.”  He laughed.

Dr. Alcorn at work in Bolivia

After my Fellowship ended in 1990, I had learned the language and culture well enough to be recommended for a new position in a USAID project.   During the 11 years I worked on that project, I again came to appreciate how those big simplified umbrellas can provide cover for dedicated agency staff and local context.   One case stands out.  Our project was able to work with black-listed NGOs in Indonesia because Jakarta had signed an agreement with Washington exempting USAID-funded projects from review against the Suharto government’s black list.  Nonetheless, the project needed its $12 million budget authorized by Congress, and USAID staff knew there were powers who would not want our project authorized.  In the mid-1990s, the paperwork for our project was placed in a stack under a simple cover sheet, which listed a different project instead of the Indonesia project.  No one in Congress looked under the cover sheet to see the details, and Congressional authorization was given on the basis of the umbrella cover memo.  After authorization, Congressional anger was impotent.

Several years later, that multi-million dollar project gave a $15,000 grant to a small NGO. This small NGO was inviting organizations from across Indonesia to a workshop in a village whose river was being heavily polluted by an American mining operation. Women in the village claimed that the pollution was damaging their vaginas because they had to stand in the polluted river to wash clothes and bathe.   Just before the workshop was to occur, the US Ambassador made a phone call directly to the NGO’s staff and instructed them to cancel it. It was inappropriate for an Ambassador to intervene in this way, and we took action to prevent it from becoming a precedent that could limit all future work.  Armed with staff knowledge of Congressional schedules, our allies were able to meet with concerned Members of Congress in both parties and build support for the workshop. But even this was not enough.  Higher levels of power were mobilized by the mining interests.  Only after an ally convinced Vice President Al Gore to step in did the mining interests back down and the workshop proceed.

None of this would have been possible without the big, simplified umbrellas of bureaucracy.  Without the opportunities I have had to be a participant observer within bureaucracies that use these umbrellas, I would not have understood how to play on the insiders’ team.  When our Indonesia project ended, a senior USAID official said to me, “this was the best project USAID ever did in my entire career … and it will never do another one like it.”  The project’s legacy continues more than a decade after it ended in 2001, in the good relations and capacity built among over 150 NGOs and the birth of the indigenous peoples’ federation of Indonesia. The project illustrates, with apologies to James Scott, how career staff in this bureaucracy made judicious and effective use of the “umbrellas of the weak” to achieve positive outcomes despite political obstacles.

March at the founding of the indigenous federation in Indonesia.

Please see the related references below, including Judith Tendler’s classic book on how giving bureaucrats the freedom to make decisions contributes to good governance and good government.

Janis Bristol Alcorn holds a doctorate in botany and anthropology from the University of Texas and has served as President of the Anthropology & Environment Society.  She currently works as the Deputy Director for Social and Environmental Soundness in a USAID-funded project based in Washington, DC.  From 1988-1990, she was an AAAS Fellow in USAID.  From 1991-2001, she was the Asia Director for the Biodiversity Support Program at WWF.  Since 2002, Dr. Alcorn has worked as a consultant for private foundations, NGOs, and USAID projects.  Her current engagements also include serving as Chair of the Theme on Governance, Equity, and Rights with the IUCN Commission on Environmental, Economic, and Social Policy and as Adjunct Professor in the University of Manitoba’s Natural Resources Institute. 

Related references:

Alcorn, J.B., John Bamba, Stefanus Masiun, Ita Natalia, and Antoinette Royo (2003)  Keeping ecological resilience afloat in cross-scale turbulence:  An Indigenous social movement navigates change in Indonesia. Pages 299-327 in C.Folkes, F.Berkes & J.Colding, eds, Navigating Nature’s Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,UK.

Tendler, Judith (1997) Good Government in the Tropics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Tendler identifies five central themes connecting the successes she identifies:

(1) Government workers demonstrated an unusual dedication to their jobs. (2) The government made efforts to instill a sense of mission in the workers. (3) Workers were more flexible and responded to the perceived demands of the clients. (4) Both workmanship pride and increased community pressures limited corruption and malfeasance. (5) A three way dynamic between the state government (central government), local government and civil society did not fit the stereotypical roles in terms of building civil society.

RG: First, for readers who might not be familiar with it, what is the theme of your new book? 

GMS: My book examines obstacles to the forest conservation effort in Madagascar through the lens of labor. It centers on the role and perspective of low-wage workers in conservation projects, and on the significance of manual labor in producing protected areas and biodiversity hot spots.

The book historicizes the conservation-and-development model, and it does so from a “subaltern” vantage point. By this, I mean that I try to tell a history of land degradation and conservation through the eyes of Malagasy worker-peasants, who have consistently been targeted by conservation officials because they practice “slash-and-burn” agriculture in the rain forest. My book begins by taking the reader back in time about 100 years, when France conquered Madagascar. The first half of my book is weighted in the past – an ethnography of the colonial archive – tracing how Malagasy “underlings” confronted (and carried) French colonialists as they organized space and life in such a way as to make Malagasy wildlife and Malagasy people’s “nature” valuable according to specific criteria.  Although I compare the moral economies of capitalism and subsistence agriculture, my focus is really on the middle ground, on the people who straddle both worlds and who are caught between them. The second half of my book is weighted in the contemporary period and focuses on low-wage workers of an integrated conservation and development project (ICDP). I believe that looking at the ways Malagasy workers have negotiated the structure, and shifts in the ideological content, of conservation institutions over time reveals a lot about why peasants still burn forest and why quick fixes through the usual institutional models are elusive.

RG: How does your book address broader questions in environmental anthropology?

GMS: Environmental anthropologists have been taking stock of conservation and development interventions into poor countries since the late 1980s, when the sustainable development model took hold.  Following the lead of a number of ethnographers, I explore the social life of an ICDP, a kind of “key symbol” of neoliberal foreign aid. Those of us adopting a political ecological approach investigate: 1) how people in postcolonial contexts receive and interpret interventions such as ecotourism development, the creation of national parks, environmental education, community conservation efforts, agroforestry training, “green” commodification, and so on, and 2) what have been the social, economic, and ecological effects of conservation interventions on postcolonial peoples and landscapes.

RG: When you were doing research for your book, how did you engage with different communities—for example, with local people, with scientists, with other scholars?

GMS: When I went to Madagascar to do fieldwork for my dissertation, I relied on my close friendship with a Merina family who I had gotten to know through prior fieldwork. Merina is the politically dominant ethnic population of Madagascar; however, the island’s coastal populations, including the Betsimisaraka (the group I focus on in my ethnography) generally do not trust Merina.  Despite these social tensions, I ended up living with members of the Merina family I knew. They had a home in the town of Mananara-Nord, also the location of the headquarters for the UNESCO biosphere reserve and its ICDP that I studied. I stayed in Mananara-Nord with my Merina friends between my forays into Betsimisaraka villages in the biosphere reserve.  My alternating residence in villages and in town was illuminating in many ways. What I feared might be a liability (living with a Merina family) in getting to know the Betsimisaraka workers of the ICDP became, after a while, an asset, offering me a deeper glimpse into the politics of ethnicity there.

While in the field, I was in contact with Malagasy academics, villagers, expatriate conservation representatives and Peace Corps volunteers, as well as tourists and scientists passing through the biosphere reserve.  At the time, my field site did not have telecommunications. However, times have quickly changed–cell phones, internet, and social media networks are now more widely available, at least in larger Malagasy towns.  I am gearing up to go to Madagascar briefly this summer after a long hiatus, and I very much look forward to my fieldwork, and to connecting with people virtually too.

I stay in touch with Malagasy contacts, read posts on the Madagascar Environmental Justice Network – a listserv run by Barry Ferguson – and communicate with conservation scientists and practitioners affiliated with the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo, which manages a protected area in Madagascar. I also treasure any opportunity to talk with doctoral students and recent PhDs who have worked in Madagascar.

RG: What is the key message or key point you hope people take away from reading your book? 

GMS: I hope to convey two key messages. First, that history matters deeply. And, second, given the acceleration of species extinctions, climate change, and habitat loss, it is high time for a redistribution of aid to further the global conservation effort.

Money needs to reach the people most affected by the degradation of biodiversity hotspots, such as subsistence farmers. I think the “direct payment” approach to conservation (payment for well-defined and measurable inputs or outcomes) is probably the most persuasive way to get a lot of people to support conservation very quickly. Direct payment for conservation services has been done to some extent by organizations who deliver community development projects in exchange for conservation practices—even the mining company, Rio Tinto, has endorsed this approach, ironically. When I discuss a “direct payment” approach, I mean making direct cash payment to individuals in regions where biodiversity is rich and vulnerable, and where erosion is severely depleting people’s livelihoods.

In my book, I have a chapter that discusses how rural Betsimisaraka people in the early 20^th century preferred doing “piecework” to regular wage work. One colonial French entrepreneur had great success in finding Malagasy workers, compared to his competitors because he would pay per log felled, rather than the normal fixed, miserly wage to men working in the timber concessions. As a result, this entrepreneur was never short of labor, while the others complained incessantly of the labor shortage. I think the piecework payment approach for reforestation, though administratively complicated, would be popular and would achieve positive ecological and ideological outcomes very quickly.

RG: What are the broader contributions of your book to public and policy discussions about environmental conservation projects?

GMS: Despite the complaints one often hears by conservation practitioners that academics criticize their projects but do not offer concrete recommendations for changing their practices, I see critical scholarship as a driving force behind policy changes in conservation programs. In particular, critical scholarship has prompted the conservation community’s re-orientation toward poverty alleviation, as compared to the colonial era. I am hopeful that my attempt to resurrect the concept of “labor” in conservation policy discourse will someday lead to positive change. Interestingly, by the 1990s, the term “labor” had been entirely suppressed in political discourse, including, not surprisingly, discussions about environmental conservation.

RG: What are the broader contributions of your book to public and policy discussions about social and environmental justice?

GMS: My book aims to expose the deep contradictions of implementing “participatory” and community conservation via entrenched hierarchies that operate nationally and globally.  The contradictions are not just moral problems but also practical ones: they exacerbate species endangerment, human poverty, and conflict.  I focus on low-wage, locally-hired workers of an ICDP because to me their position epitomizes the contradictions of the bureaucratic hierarchy of conservation and development. These men felt that their ICDP salaries, given the difficulty of their tasks and all the moral and social tensions inherent in the work of cracking down on their friends and neighbors for breaking rules of the national park, were not adequate compensation.  To make ends meet, and to maintain their social bonds, they either practiced or relied on the fruits of slash and burn agriculture and hunting in the reserve, the very things they were supposed to police and transform.  They constantly had to make compromises (if they did one thing, they jeopardized their ICDP jobs; if they did another, they were scorned by their fellow villagers).

A biologist named Joe Peters suggested a while back that a voluntary civilian conservation corps like that of the Roosevelt administration be tried in Madagascar.  Instead of organizations hiring a small contingent of under-paid guards to police reserves and villagers, a conservation corps, perhaps paid according to measurable units of reforestation or agroforestry work, would open up opportunity for a much larger population of able-bodied individuals seeking additional income.  This would offset the precariousness of subsistence agriculture in the current environment.  In my view, this approach is a much better way to spread the conservation message. I would love to see it tried in Madagascar and elsewhere.

RG: How is your book being used beyond the academy?

GMS: In December 2012, I was invited to talk at a conference sponsored by the Kenan Institute for Ethics and the Duke Lemur Center at Duke University. The conference was invigorating because it brought together a mix of conservation experts, activists, and social scientists to discuss the illegal plunder of rosewood and other precious timber out of Madagascar’s national parks (including my former field site) since the 2009 coup, as well as more enduring obstacles to forest conservation. The looting of endangered hardwoods by what the press has called a “rosewood mafia” has shifted global attention from slash-and-burn agriculture to illegal timbering in Madagascar. In addition, the recent expansion of mining by transnational corporations along the Malagasy rain forest belt has ushered in what I see as a post-conservation era. It’s not that conservation has been abandoned, but increasingly it is mediated and managed by the mining corporations. Meanwhile the de facto state has been collaborating with the mining corporations and the timber merchants.  The expansion of mining deepens the problems of soil erosion, pollution, species loss, and social disruption.  The consequences of the mining boom remain to be seen given the time lag of extinction debt and the eventual depletion of profitable minerals.  A number of Madagascar scholars have been investigating the ways in which mining is transforming the management of nature and Malagasy societies. It seems as though the new scramble for African resources, at deeper geological strata and in smaller fragments of forest, has brought together scholars and conservation practitioners in common purpose like never before. Yet, I believe that the insights of my study for long-term conservation, and how they might be applied, will stay on the backburner until a new presidential election happens (the coup regime is still in power). We’ll see.

RG: That concludes our interview.  On behalf of ENGAGEMENT and its readers, thank you so much, Genese Marie Sodikoff, for your time and insight.

Genese Marie Sodikoff is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Professionally and academically, Dr. Sodikoff has focused on rain forest conservation and international development in Africa, specifically the Comoros (1989-1991) and Madagascar (1994-2002). In addition to her current book, Dr. Sodikoff has edited a volume entitled The Anthropology of Extinction:  Essays on Culture and Species Death (Indiana University Press, 2011). Her teaching and research interests include political ecology, conservation and international development, extinction (both biological and cultural), human-animal relations, historical anthropology, Africa, and the Indian Ocean islands. She is beginning a project on mining and future perception in Madagascar.

This paper did a wonderful job of synthesizing a large literature and linking theoretical and policy issues to ethnography, referencing not just the author’s own work but also studies conducted by others. The article places efforts to privatize fishing access in the historical contexts from which they emerged, examining early profit-maximization rationales and more recent environmental rationales, with the assertion that the emergence of conservation-based arguments in favor of privatization have enlisted broader support for such programs in recent decades. I appreciated the carefulness of the literature review: the authors combined identification of broad trends related to the implementation of projects to privatize resource access with attention to variations in the ways these trends have played out in different places and contexts, especially in terms of the relative degree to which access rights have themselves become commodities. The paper also attends to the ways that privatization programs have opened new possibilities for resisting privatization, discussing some of the divergent forms resistance has taken. 

Since this was the only co-authored paper submitted to the competition this year, it seems especially important to inquire into the origins and process of this collaboration. How did this co-authored paper come about, and towards what intellectual and career objectives has it propelled you? Given that the article is primarily a review article, how does it articulate with each of your research programs?

Catherine: I am currently a PhD Candidate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and Courtney is my advisor. This co-authored paper came about as the result of many conversations between Courtney and myself as I was developing a dissertation research proposal. Courtney’s expertise in the theoretical literature and her work in Alaska offered a solid ground for my similar research interests in Iceland. Being able to work on a paper with my advisor while still engaged in my dissertation research has given me a great learning experience. As reflected in the article, fisheries literature spans a wide range of disciplines, so it is important for early career researchers like myself to learn how to make our work meaningful to the different disciplines we draw on. For me, this collaboration on a review article is an example of how social scientists can work in teams to cover theoretical and empirical work both broadly and deeply. This article forms a basis for much of my ongoing research in Iceland, and I will be able to draw on the points made in further publications resulting from my research.

Courtney: Since I began researching the social impacts of fisheries privatization in Alaska in 2002, I have become increasingly frustrated with the simplistic and inaccurate stories often told by scientists and policy advocates about fishery systems. Students come into my classes having learned for many years that inevitable tragedies of resource overuse and degradation are bound to occur without resource privatization. Students play games in their introductory classes where they (are taught to) race to outcompete each other for beans or m&ms. These games become the common-sense models upon which students start to understand fishery and other resource systems. What they often do not learn is the social and cultural diversity and complexity that typifies fisheries systems across the globe. Many of these fisheries systems are under threat from large-scale privatization. Now that environmental groups are heavily promoting privatization, more and more people are advocating for privatization without understand the social transitions and dispossessions that often accompany it.

What Cat and I try to do in this paper is to present a broad look at these social transitions in diverse regions across the globe. We hope the paper will serve as an important teaching tool exposing students to the complexity of the privatization issue. After years of seeing headlines about how privatization saves fisheries, we were encouraged to see a recent piece in the Seattle Weekly politicizing this issue of fisheries privatization (http://www.seattleweekly.com/2013-01-09/news/sharecroppers-of-the-sea/). Researching and writing the paper was also very helpful to direct us to future objectives in our research programs. We can better understand commonalities and differences across systems and identify future research questions and advocacy priorities.

This is the second in a series of interviews with the runner-ups to the junior scholar prize. It is done by the judges with the finalists. The article referenced is:

Carothers, C. and C. Chambers. 2012. Fisheries privatization and the remaking of fishery systems. Environment and Society: Advances in Research 3: 39-59. 

Americans live in a settler colonial society, and this shapes how we understand and engage nature.

In the vast expanse of slow-flowing water and drained agricultural lands known as the Florida Everglades, thinking about settler colonialism helps make sense of Burmese python hunts and Seminole water rights, of scientific restoration models and National Park policies. Doing so informs my own ethnographic research on the relationship between peoples’ sense of belonging and the ways that they value water in the Everglades.

Let me pause to explain what I mean by settler colonialism. Life in the contemporary United States is shaped by seemingly long-ago events that dispossessed indigenous peoples. Less well understood, however, are the ways that ongoing settler colonial structures—of thought, economy, law, environment, and more—influence relations not only between but also among indigenous and non-indigenous Americans. These are distinctive to settler societies such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand (the only other states that joined the U.S. to vote against the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples). Insofar as settler colonialism pervades American life, it affects social phenomena that do not directly involve indigenous people.

What does this have to do with the Everglades and the diverse people who live and work there? A great deal, but a few examples must suffice for now.

Working cattle at the J7 Ranch in South Florida (photo by Jessica Cattelino)

Reclamation and Refusal

White Floridians in the rural interior of South Florida often refer to the region as “the last frontier,” and indigenous Seminoles sometimes do the same.

During the 1800s and much of the 1900s, the Everglades mantra was “reclamation.” Real estate speculators, industrialists, and settler families and laborers joined politicians to battle the swamp’s alleged unproductivity, miasma, and political unrest. Reclamation projects drained the Everglades in the name of “reclaiming” the land from a state of waste and for manifestly destined productive use by (white) settlers.

But of course Seminoles had lived and fought in the Everglades before and during the era of reclamation. Whether feared as military threats or discarded as quasi-human exemplars of a wilderness that called for taming, Seminoles too became targets of settler colonial reclamation. Refusing removal, Seminoles hid out in the Everglades swamps that they credit to this day for saving them, and they sustained ways of life that defied reclamation’s goals.

My point is not only to recall that indigenous dispossession goes hand-in-hand with landscape transformation but also to assert that “reclamation” in the United States is inseparable from the history and ongoing presence of indigenous peoples. The reclamation process was one of compartmentalization, marking some parts of the Everglades for drainage and others for preservation.  When creating the Everglades National Park (est. 1947) as preserved wilderness, boosters advocated Seminole removal (this was not new: Indians were removed to create U.S. national parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone). A land swap removed most Seminoles from park land and created the Big Cypress Reservation. There, Seminoles have become key players in agriculture (especially cattle ranching) and ecosystem restoration. Meanwhile, despite the ongoing presence of Native people within the park, visitors to its website read about Native Americans only in the past tense.  Reclamation is a process not only of acquisition and dispossession, but also of cultural production and forgetting.

At the University of Florida Everglades Research and Education Center, Clewiston resident Jeff Barwick stands beside a pole showing that subsidence has removed over six feet of soil since 1924. (photo by Jessica Cattelino)

Restoration

“Saving the Everglades,” now guided by federal law, is the largest ecosystem restoration project in the world. In law and public culture, restoration is understood to be a technical issue or an interest-driven political battle. Perhaps. But, as Laura Ogden and others have shown, it’s also a social and cultural project.

The city seal of Clewiston (pop. 6,000), known as “America’s Sweetest Town” and perched on the south shore of bass-rich Lake Okeechobee, features an image of the United States Sugar Corporation (U.S. Sugar) mill that dominates the city landscape. As residents often told me, many had agreed for decades that what was good for “Sugar”—including efforts to fend of environmental taxes and lawsuits aimed at curtailing nutrient pollution from agricultural runoff—was good for the town. It was a shock, then, when in 2008 U.S. Sugar and Florida’s governor announced a planned buyout of the entire corporation and its 187,000 acres for the purpose of Everglades restoration. While environmentalists cheered the prospect of restoring water’s sheetflow through presently-drained lands, many Clewiston residents feared a future of economic decline and depopulation. Economic recession and political upheaval scaled back the buy-out to 26,800 acres and maintained U.S. Sugar’s operations, but the nationally publicized affair drove home the question of what restoration might really look like for the people and businesses of the Everglades.

United States Sugar Corporation milling tandem. The Clewiston mill can grind up to 42,000 tons of sugarcane per day. (photo by Jessica Cattelino)

While conducting ethnographic fieldwork on water’s value, I asked water managers, environmental advocates, farmers, and others: restore to when?

The universal response: to the way things were when white people settled. Even restoration skeptics shared the view, albeit by criticizing restoration for erasing people from the landscape. Ecologists with several government agencies and nonprofits confirmed that scientific models take the time of white settlement as their restoration baseline. Lest this seem intuitive, it is worth noting that indigenous people had long altered the landscape through agriculture, wildlife management, and water management, while early non-Native settlers were largely unsuccessful in their efforts to drain the swamp.

That white settlement is the taken-for-granted horizon for restoration is but one of many examples of how settler colonialism structures American nature. Another is the ongoing expectation that indigenous peoples will embody environmental values, and that those values go hand-in-hand with exclusion from economic gain. Over the last thirty years, the Seminole Tribe of Florida has disrupted a legacy of environmental incursion—exemplified by drainage of the Big Cypress Reservation and resultant economic and social upheavals—by directing casino gaming revenues toward water management and ecosystem restoration. The Big Cypress Water Conservation Plan, birthed by a $25 million funding match, represents the largest-ever tribal-federal restoration partnership. Meanwhile, the Seminole Tribal Historic Preservation Office keeps regional water managers on their toes by claiming jurisdiction over cultural artifacts that are unearthed during ecosystem-wide Everglades restoration projects. By tracing these processes ethnographically—alongside Seminole and non-Seminole farming and ranching, water management, environmental advocacy, and recreation—I aim to show policy-makers that cultural analysis is necessary for ecological restoration, regional economic development, and the promotion of a more just coexistence among the Everglades’ diverse human and non-human residents.

Wovoka Tommie, Compliance Officer for the Seminole Tribe of Florida, shows land use changes at the Seminole Big Cypress Reservation. (photo by Jessica Cattelino)

Contradictions

Settlers often claim a kind of native relationship to the land while displacing Native peoples, directly and conceptually.  This is a basic contradiction of settler colonial societies.

A speech by Florida Senator Bill Nelson at the 2012 Everglades Coalition conference—where the theme was “Everglades Restoration: Worth Every Penny”—resounded with precisely this contradiction. To great applause, Nelson touted his efforts to ban importation of Burmese pythons. Pythons have reduced the population of other Everglades wildlife and captured the national imagination. Nelson tapped into a dominant environmental discourse that promotes native species and works toward the control of invasive ones.

The 2012 Hendry County Farm-City Tour visits C&B Farms (photo by Jessica Cattelino)

Such appeals to the “native”—whether out of concern with giant snakes, striking lionfish, hearty melaleuca and Brazilian pepper trees, or other species—support a contradictory settler logic that blends attachment to the landscape with erasure of settler non-nativeness. Nelson went on, in a voice thick with longing, to imagine Florida as it was almost 500 years ago, when the “explorer” Ponce de León first encountered this land of beauty. Picturing that moment, Nelson delivered his rallying cry: “and that’s what we’re all here today for.”

Senator Nelson would have his presumptively non-Native audience simultaneously battle invasive species, identify with (invasive) Spanish colonizers, and restore the Everglades to a moment of naturalness just prior to European conquest. As his speech illustrates, settler logic requires that the metaphors and practices of native and non-native remain in play. One aspect of my ethnographic research with diverse Everglades residents is to identify and unravel such contradictions. Resolving them will require the hard work of unsettling nature as it is imagined and engaged in settler societies. Only then can we “save” the Everglades and do justice to the people—from cattle ranchers to sugar mill workers to environmental advocates—who live and work there.

Rancher John Ward and Jessica Cattelino, hosting birders during the 2012 “Big ‘O’ Birding Festival.” (photo by Rhonda Roff)

Jessica R. Cattelino is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she studies questions of citizenship and sovereignty, settler colonialism, and money and economy. Her research with the Seminole Tribe of Florida has been the basis for numerous published articles and a book, High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty (Duke University Press, 2008).  Dr. Cattelino’s current project concerns the relationship between water’s valuation and political belonging in the Everglades.

Back in 2005, as Emory University embraced sustainability as part of a new strategic plan, it was the physicians on the visioning committee who insisted on including food as a priority.  Recognizing that environmental, economic, health, and social justice concerns intertwined with food, the committee encouraged local sourcing of vegetables, fruits, dairy, and poultry from farms with sustainable certifications.  Imported items (bananas, coffee, tea) could contribute to campus goals by embracing products with Fair Trade or organic certification.

As an anthropologist with long-standing interests in social and environmental justice, I have been an active participant in Emory’s move toward sustainability. From 2007 to 2011, I chaired an active Sustainable Food Committee that brings together campus stakeholders to pursue increased sustainable food purchasing, nine Educational Food Gardens, a weekly campus Farmers Market, regular speakers and panels, an annual Sustainable Food Fair, a student summit on sustainable food, a guide to healthier event catering, and sustainable food information sheets written for general use: (http://sustainability.emory.edu/page/1008/sustainable-food).

Peggy Barlett meets with Burning Kumquat farm leaders at Washington University in St. Louis.

To inform the work with the Sustainable Food Committee, I also conducted a study of campus sustainable food projects at thirty colleges and universities around the US—small, medium, and large in size, both private and public in funding. It turned out that about half of these pioneering schools had some sustainable food purchasing commitment in their dining program.  Social scientists have debated whether institutional purchasing commitments are capable of having an impact on the global food system, but with an annual budget of $4 billion in food purchases, U.S. colleges and universities would seem to have the capacity to redirect significant purchasing power to an alternative food chain.  In addition, by explaining the rationale for such purchases, higher education can support a more public debate about the costs and benefits of our current food system.

Nevertheless, one of the important findings of my research is that few schools have transparent accounting systems in place to document their claims with regard to new directions in food purchasing.  Such transparency can be seen as a critical next step as more and more institutions embrace the goal of supporting an alternative food chain.

Beyond campus dining, campus food projects include direct marketing and experiential education for students.  About two-thirds of the schools in the sample had some academic program or courses around food issues. Many included dynamic co-curricular activities such as a movie series or Slow Food Club. Three-fourths of schools had a newly-established local farmers market or CSA, thereby making new purchasing patterns more easily accessible to employees as well as students.  Together with the rationales of sustainable food initiatives, these efforts spread an implicit critique of conventional food along with an embrace of emerging alternatives.

Perhaps most surprising is that 25 out of the 30 schools have an active farm or garden.  Farms have long been a feature of schools with a college of agriculture—or of schools with a particular mission, such as Berea and Warren Wilson Colleges—but the addition of farms to liberal arts institutions such as Dartmouth, Hamilton, and Luther and non-agricultural schools such as Stanford, Washington University, and Humboldt State demonstrates a new level of interest among students in agricultural skills, especially in organic production.  Most of these programs have begun since 1995 and offer volunteer opportunities, course credit, or paid internships.  No longer dominated by male students, women farmers are in the majority at some schools.  This embrace of both manual labor and the riskiness of organic production represents a new skill set demanded by students.  At Washington University, students obtained campus land and funds and learned to produce food organically on the Burning Kumquat Farm.  Produce was sold in a low-income neighborhood over the summer.   Such hands-on learning and the popularity of international volunteer experience on farms is evidence of emerging aspects of a new food paradigm that connects ethical action and considerations of place to the daily act of eating.

Anthropologists can contribute in many ways to these campus food efforts.  Courses that draw on anthropological expertise offer insights into the promises and challenges of developing sustainable food systems.   Many campus farms or community gardens require the support of a faculty or staff advocate in order to thrive.  In some schools, faculty can also play a critical role in making sustainable purchasing goals a reality in campus dining halls. Though dining services staff can be strong advocates for new policy directions, alliances between the “operations side” and the “academic side” build the strongest programs and also offer rich educational experiences.  Many campus sustainable food initiatives are led by students as well, so for anthropologists who are not prepared to work personally towards campus change, the adage “support your local hero” may be relevant.  Finally, anthropologists at every level who attend to how food can become a locus for consideration of alternative practices—in production, in distribution, and in consumption—can help lead the way toward a more sustainable food system for us all.

Peggy F. Barlett is Goodrich C. White Professor of Anthropology at Emory University.  Her research has long concerned the social and ecological dimensions of agrarian change in Latin America and the United States.  More recently, she has focused on sustainability in higher education as a tangible arena in which to understand and enact sustainable development more generally. 

Once a booming agricultural and factory town, Muncie, Indiana, is today a post-industrial rustbelt city grappling with questions about its economic and environmental futures. As heavy industries left town, Muncie’s economy has flagged, leaving some 24% of its residents at or below the poverty line.  To make matters worse, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) determined in 2007 that one-third of the city’s former industrial sites were brownfields that posed risks to human health and safety.[i]

In spite of these challenges, Muncie residents are transforming and revitalizing their city. In particular, they have shown renewed and growing interest in sustainably produced foods as a boon to overall health, safety and environmental restoration. Innovative partnerships have enabled Ball State University (BSU) professors and students to directly contribute to these community efforts. Inspired by Robert and Helen Merrell Lynd’s pioneering community study, Middletown, BSU professors and students are expanding this tradition of conducting engaged, local research to benefit the region. The result has been the transformation of former brownfields into public wetlands.[ii]  Also through direct civic engagement, student volunteers have helped remove 70,000 pounds of trash from the White River watershed over the last six years. As significant as these restoration efforts are for the community, local residents are also finding ways to combine sustainable economic development with environmental restoration.

As an environmental ethnohistorian and a resident of Muncie, I became interested in these grassroots efforts. I signed up for a plot in a local community garden, an experience that enabled me to better understand how organic and sustainable efforts to produce local food are also contributing to large-scale efforts to clean up and breathe new life into east-central Indiana. Gardening on everything from parking strips to abandoned and foreclosed properties is one step residents are taking towards restoring the landscape and increasing green space in the city. Such efforts improve the quality of life and encourage people to invest more in Muncie, overall.

In spring 2012, I launched a pilot study with student researchers from the Department of Anthropology in order to explore different dimensions of local food production in Muncie and Delaware County. Students compared organic and conventional farming, explored urban community gardening and studied the history of agriculture in east central Indiana. Student teams conducted archival research, participant observation and interviews, identifying three areas for community-based research. Several new and exciting student-led projects have emerged from this pilot project, which my students and I describe below.

Ball Brothers Glass Factory – Muncie, IN

HOOSIER ROOTS

Dr. Cailín E. Murray on the History of Home Production in Muncie         

Muncie’s answers to its own questions about 21^st century sustainability and environmental restoration can be located in family traditions and local histories. The Hoosier heartland is rooted in much older traditions of self-sufficiency and local sustainability. When new settlers arrived to the region in the early 1840s, they brought with them an ethic of self-sufficiency. Families took pride in the home production of seasonal fruits and vegetables, fresh meats, dairy products and eggs through family-centered activities on urban homesteads. BSU Geography graduate student, Bryan Preston, in his recent MA thesis, demonstrated that gardening is an old activity in this region and is once again on the rise in Muncie.[iii]

My own work with my colleague Mark Groover—an historical archaeologist who specializes in the study of homesteads and the American transition to consumerism—involves collaborating with members of the Delaware County Historical Society and homeowners to uncover clues about past household production in Muncie. Using both ethnohistoric and archaeological methods, we plan to reconstruct this local culture of self-sufficiency by demonstrating how Victorian-era residents in Muncie met the food needs of their families and communities. For example, early settlers Thomas and Matilda Neely worked tirelessly to grow and process a wide variety of foods on their large house lot for over 40 years. People like the Neely family also relied on the production efforts of neighbors. We’ve discovered that one neighbor in the area kept bees on his property and sold the honey locally. These are small glimpses into a complex early food web that will hopefully provide knowledge for contemporary urban growers seeking to promote self-sufficiency and sustainability in 21^st century Muncie.

Muncie became a world-renowned symbol for the possibilities of home food production and preservation with the arrival of the Ball Brothers from New York in the 1880s. They selected Muncie as the location for their new glass factory and began producing the iconic Ball canning jars.

Yet, as Muncie prospered and more residents came to rely on commercially purchased foods, home food production waxed and waned. When the need arose, citizens responded to community gardening initiatives with enthusiasm. Portions of the Ball State campus were reserved for Victory Garden plots during both World Wars. To make ends meet during times of global economic and political strife, residents did their part by planting vegetable crops at home and in local community gardens and by canning their own foods.

In 2013, Muncie’s post-industrial ‘rustbelt’ image is changing as residents once again become involved in sustainability initiatives and local food production. The community supports eleven different public garden sites, where residents from all walks of life raise food. While the gardens represent different initiatives, they have organized into a formal network: the Muncie and Delaware County Urban Gardening Initiative. This structure enables them to share resources more effectively, offer educational opportunities and encourage more public engagement.[iv]

At the same time, within the city and beyond its borders, small-scale farmers are also using sustainable methods to produce food for local outlets, including Muncie’s farmer’s market. While student researchers found few farmers can afford the formal organic certification process, many farmers still endeavor to produce food using more sustainable methods. In fact, Muncie’s Farmer’s Market has grown in size and scope in less than ten years and has become an important community gathering place. In addition to replacing rust belt and toxic waste with gardens and green belt, public gardeners and small-scale food growers are addressing the need for greater local food security—the ability of individuals, families and communities to meet their own nutritional needs. Food insecurity, a widespread social problem especially among poorer people, is the result of inadequate resources to secure and prepare food on a regular basis and can lead to hunger and even starvation.

GARDENING IS A GAMBLE

One of my students, Whitney Lingle—a Master’s student in the Department of Anthropology—is conducting ethnographic research with gardeners from Muncie’s African American community. Whitney’s work looks at the complexities of gardening, including how it might not be a “one size fits all” solution for local food insecurity.

Model for a WWII school Victory Garden – Frankfort, IN (image courtesy of IN.gov)

Whitney Lingle on Poverty, Food Insecurity and the Hidden Costs of DIY

My thesis research explores the attitudes and practices of gardeners affiliated with the Roy C. Buley Community Center, a local non-profit with deep roots in Muncie’s Whitely neighborhood. Their mission is to engage families in Muncie through community-building activities, including an after-school program, and a children’s garden, built near the site’s playground. The plots are used by Buley community members, as part of summer education programs and comprise a link in Muncie’s growing network of community gardens. As a volunteer with the Buley Center, I spent time with children and parents and engaged them in conversations about cultivating food. Community center members expressed a range of attitudes toward food production, ranging from enthusiastic descriptions of gardening as a fun family activity to anecdotes of disappointing yields or guilt over not gardening more.

While gardening is considered to be a positive facet of local foodways and urban landscapes, my thesis research looks at the socioeconomic complexities of gardening. I examine two key questions: 1) How does gardening contribute to food security for Buley Community Center families? And 2) What makes gardening practical for, or prevents it from being a viable, and worthwhile, contribution to reducing household food insecurity?.

High-profile urban gardening efforts, and a renewed interest in systems of local food production, have contributed to a resurgence in the home food production movement in the United States. This do-it-yourself trend signals a shift in how Americans valorize local food production. This is not a negative phenomenon, but there is a risk in assigning virtue to poor families and communities who grow their own food over those who do not. Gardening should not be a prescription for distinguishing the “good” poor people from those less deserving of time, attention and resources, especially given the complexities of food insecurity.

For individual gardeners, especially those without reliable access to food, gardening is a gamble. Some non-gardeners within the low-income Whitely community told me that they are hesitant to invest their resources into gardening activities, given the recent record-breaking droughts and because there is no guaranteed return. One woman I interviewed cited “not having enough time to garden and cook” after work. Even successful gardening could result in an overabundance of one particular food, or an insufficient amount that does not justify the expenditure of time, energy and resources.

Other people simply do not have the tools, space or knowledge and experience required to successfully cultivate food. For example, some people living in apartments garden in community plots or containers, but that option is not practical for everyone. During an informal interview, one parent commented that without a yard, you have to pay “extra” to garden. Growing one’s own food is not always a viable option, but remains one piece of an evolving web of urban foodways in Muncie.

GOD IS GREEN

Another feature of local sustainability is the role of Christianity in promoting land stewardship. Combining faith and agriculture is not a new trend. Hoosier farmers relied on religion in good times and bad. Victory Acres farm sells organic produce to fund their urban ministry. Another one of my students, Britny Burton, who is an undergraduate majoring in Journalism, is examining how Evangelical beliefs are influencing local ideas about sustainability. Britny’s research explores the varied ways faith-driven food producers interpret significant environmental challenges, like global climate change, and how their attitudes are key to developing sustainable local initiatives.

Britny Burton on Restoring Body, Land and Spirit in the Indiana Heartland

Through Dr. Murray’s course and pilot study, I was introduced to the Victory Acres farm as a field site, and I decided to take my class research project one step further by making the farm the basis for a semester long multimedia project: www.victoryacres.weebly.com. Through my ethnographic research at Victory Acres I was able to understand how the products of the organic farm nourish bodies and spirits while the farm itself acts as a sanctuary for those working the land.

Pigs at Victory Acres eat leftover food that is donated by Taylor University. (photo by Britny Burton)

Victory Acres of Upland, Indiana, has been in the Himelick family since the 1830s, but the farm didn’t become an organic Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) until 2000, when Victory Inner-City Ministries (VICM) purchased the property. Terry Himelick still manages the farm while his son, Eric, is a pastor at VICM.

Victory Acres believes Christ is visible in every aspect of the farm. They open their doors to people from all walks of life who are struggling with personal and substance-abuse issues. Victory Acres invites troubled souls to work on the farm as a way to re-energize and restore their faith in God. Just as the organic food they produce is free of chemicals, the farm is a place for all to come and free themselves of evils they may be carrying with them and to strengthen their relationship with God.

Leslie Gottschalk, an agricultural coach, plants garlic. Garlic is a very important crop on the farm. Victory Acres uses garlic in the natural spray they put around trees to ward off unwanted pests. (photo by Britny Burton)

William Buck, a farmhand whom I had the pleasure of interviewing, has a rough background and came to Victory Acres after living on the streets of downtown Indianapolis. Buck told me: “Victory Acres showed me something different. The whole essence of being here is to deepen my religion with Him because that’s what is going to ultimately root and ground me.”

Buck takes one day at a time and isn’t sure where he would be if he hadn’t come to the farm. He feels that God led him to the farm and that God will let him know when it’s time to go somewhere else. Most other farmhands I met were like Buck—they were at Victory Acres to overcome hardships or to escape unhealthy environments. Farmhands stay as long as they need to, and most end up becoming part of the Himelick family.

Charlie Akers (left) and Zach Hughes (middle) interview William Buck (right) about his path leading up to Victory Acres. (photo by Britny Burton)

Britny Burton discusses William Buck’s daily routine on the farm. (photo courtesy of Charlie Akers)

FUTURE RESEARCH

There remains a need for greater awareness of the cultural dimensions of landscape restoration in the lower Great Lakes. While organic farmers are restoring the Hoosier Heartland through sustainable agricultural practices, there is work to be done with Tribal stakeholders as well. Native peoples have gardened in these lands for centuries, and more collaborative research with indigenous stakeholders concerning traditional environmental knowledge would be beneficial to those interested in creating a diverse and sustainable regional future.[v],[vi]

Cailín E. Murray is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.  Her work on environmental and indigenous issues has been published in Ethnohistory, The Journal of Northwest Anthropology, and in edited volumes such as Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence.  Dr. Murray and her students are working to expand BSU’s tradition of engaged research that promotes social and environmental justice in Muncie and beyond.

REFERENCES

ENGAGEMENT editor Rebecca Garvoille recently caught up with 

Andrew S. Mathews

RG: First, for readers who might not be familiar with it, what’s the theme of your new book?

AM: Well, it looks at how forestry—as an internationally circulating science of how to manage forests, extract resources from them, and bring them into the future—arrived in Mexico in the early twentieth century, and how it encountered landscapes and indigenous people in Mexico.  I focus particularly on a certain part of Mexico, the southeastern state of Oaxaca, with the idea that this could give some insight into how the science of forestry got incorporated into how people understand forests and then how indigenous people learned about forestry and reworked it and ultimately came to turn it back in some measure against the authority of the state.  So it’s about the domestication of a globally traveling science and how that science modified landscapes, and how the science of forestry turns out very surprisingly not to be a very helpful ally for state intervention.  Forestry turned out to be a much less hegemonic or friendly tool for powerful people than we might assume it to be.

RG:  How does your book address broader questions in environmental anthropology?

AM: There were a number of different things that I wanted to do in this book.  One of them was that I had been reading the classic political ecology when I went to the field, and I was interested in questions of control over landscapes and resources.  Nevertheless, I felt that the ecological aspect of a bunch of political ecology hadn’t been developed as much as I would have liked it to be.  And of particular concern to me was this idea that different kinds of politics come into being in relation to ecologies.  So the ecology of pine forests and pine-oak forests in Oaxaca actually engendered particular forms of politics.  This inspired me to pay attention to non-humans as actors who actually produce different kinds of politics.  So that was one part.  The second part came when I was writing the book, when I really became aware of work in science studies on political culture and epistemic culture and how these two relate.  And I found this wonderfully fruitful set of connections between classic work on state-making and politics and Mexican anthropology, and much more recent work in science-and-technology studies which engages with the ways in which knowledge is constituted in different societies.  And that combination worked really well for me because I could focus very closely on how the Mexican forestry bureaucracy worked and how it had to respond to multiple audiences and how, rather than being this solid structure or authoritative agency, it was really much more timid and hesitant and episodic and fragmentary than I thought it was going to be. I thought that bureaucracy was this big thing that did things in the world, and the longer I work on it the more I’ve come to realize it’s much more of a rather theatrical performance where many of the people involved are only partly convinced of the whole business.

RG: Your work draws on political ecology. How do you see political ecology intersecting with the concerns of environmental anthropologists?

AM: I actually don’t think of myself as being a political ecologist.  To me political ecology is one part of the vast range of work by geographers and historians and anthropologists and science-and-technology studies people who are interested in the ways humans and non-humans collaborate to make worlds.  I actually draw upon many domains of scholarship for my work. For instance, I read environmental history quite seriously, partly because I love telling stories about landscape change, partly because history is a wonderful method for sliding through or past apparently authoritative states.  And what I mean by that is that government institutions claim to be a certain thing that exists in time and to be very enduring, very solid.  But when you look at them over a long period of time they turn out not to be anything like that.  And somehow following the history of, say, pine forests or a landscape and how it slips past and only partly connects with human efforts to control it really helps you understand what kinds of affordances landscapes have for political projects, what kinds of weaknesses states have for controlling landscapes, how they engage or don’t engage, how they slip past each other on many occasions.

RG: When you were doing research for your book, how did you engage with different communities—for example, with local people, with scientists, with other scholars?

AM: That’s a great question.  Well, in some measure, I had different personas.  First of all, I’ll start with the indigenous communities in the Sierra Juárez.  I ended up working mainly in the Ixtlán de Juárez, although I did go to some other places also.  And I was really working with the forestry technicians and foresters—I actually went into the field with them a lot.  So clearly my identity was tied in with them.  Therefore, I know that people who were wary of them were probably also wary of me.  And that just goes with the terrain of doing fieldwork in a small town.  But I had of course to get permission from the indigenous community leaders to be there.  So I did quite a lot of work around communicating what I was doing, including a poster that I gave to people, and I gave a presentation toward the end of my time there.  So I engaged in quite a lot of communication with local people. I told them I’m writing the history of the forest here, and people really understood that as being a sensible project and something they could make sense of.  I thought that was helpful.

Working with forestry officials was kind of different, partly because I was then at the Yale School of Forestry, and I’m actually trained as a forester.  I was situated between forestry and anthropology.  So my identity as a forester was extremely helpful in making initial contacts within government agencies.  After that it really has a lot to do with personal chemistry and who finds your work interesting.  A number of forestry officials were themselves extremely troubled about their own institution, so they actually were excited to talk to somebody whom they could tell their stories of discomfort and to share that with me as a fellow forester who actually understood the technical terms. So indeed my identity as a forester was very helpful in allowing me to have certain kinds of conversations with forestry officials.

And finally there was sort of a middle ground of environmental NGOs and environmental activists, who were intermediaries between the state and indigenous communities.  With them it was a pretty comfortable fit because most of them were around my age, it seemed like, though some were a little older.  And they were all also trying to do some of the same kind of work that I was doing, which was traveling between indigenous communities in forests and bureaucracies in town.  So there were some similar kinds of pilgrimages that we were making in a way.

RG: How did your fieldwork spark lasting collaborations or engagements in your study site?

AM: One of the things I tried do was to go back in 2008-2009.  For various reasons, it’s been a bit hard for me to travel back. And the most surprising part of it for me actually is that… well, I have very personal connections with people I worked with in Sierra Juárez, which I haven’t chosen to write about in many ways but which matter a great deal to me.  With forestry officials, when I returned in 2008-2009, they were just happy to see that I was carrying on, doing my work, and they were happy that the book was coming out.  I have one Spanish language article, where I say some critical things about the Mexican Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT), and I thought they would be upset about it.  But actually they were really happy about it.  So their attitude has been much more of, “we’re glad that someone is writing about our world” rather than worrying that I’m saying something impolite.  That was a very pleasant surprise. My more recent work has actually been looking at how climate change and forests are getting packaged together, and quite a few of the people involved in that world were working in forests when I was working there for my long-term fieldwork. So it turns out that personal connections are tremendously important for ongoing research relationships.

RG: You mentioned that some of the forestry officials were receptive to your critique.   Have you had any further engagements with them?  For example, have they invited you to speak?

AM: Yes, actually.  There was a conference on pulling together all the research on Oaxaca’s forests last spring (put together by David Bray at FIU), and there were a lot of people from indigenous communities there.  I talked about a classic environmental anthropology point, which I made in a forthright way by defining forests in Oaxaca as a product of histories of fire and of agricultural abandonment.  Therefore, I argued, these were deeply anthropogenic forests.  And the thing that really struck me was how this point resonated with the indigenous activists and community leaders in the audience.  I was really happy about this is turning out to be helpful.  In fact, that’s coming out in a conference proceedings…  So there are these ongoing relationships with what I call the environmental practitioner-activist community in Oaxaca.

RG: What is the key message or key point that you hope people take away from reading your book?

AM: One key point would be that ethnographically we find that knowledge bureaucracies like the Mexican Forest Service (but there are many, many others around the world) are usually very fragmented, they’re often uncertain, they have to build alliances with a whole set of different actors: officials above, critics, publics, all kinds of clients; and that this has really huge effects for what kinds of things they know and don’t know.  The kinds of things that become official knowledge about forests in the Mexico case depend very greatly upon the nitty-gritty details of encounters between officials and non-officials.  So, the argument I make is really that it turns out that if you’re going to know something about what happens in distant forests you have to have very good alliances with the indigenous communities who live there.  Which is kind of the opposite of much of the argument that you might hear about how official knowledge gets made.  It’s not this sort of dominating gaze of the state.  It’s rather this state that has to find allies and get them to sign on for a certain way of seeing the world.  And I think it’s rather contrary to much of what we think about states.  And I hope that my argument based on my fieldwork in Mexico will be a kind of invitation for other people who work on conservation or climate change or many other environmental fields to think about how their institutions also might have these similar kinds of processes taking place.

RG: What are the broader contributions of your book to public and policy discussions about environmental conservation projects?

AM: I think that there is some literature in environmental anthropology which paints conservation institutions as authoritative bad guys. I think that this is partially true, but I also think it greatly overstates how powerful these institutions are.  Instead of looking at discourses of conservation, we need to pay attention to the nitty-gritty detail of who is doing conservation management—how many people, where they are, what they’re doing, how often they’re there.  Because it seems to me that much conservation is so fragile and episodic that it just can’t possibly be this authoritative actor that some versions claim it to be.  And that’s just a question of empirical method.  If you actually trace institutions and careers and where people are, you come up with a very different account of conservation, for example, than if you trace conservation discourse in official documents, which is absolutely valuable, but needs to be supplemented with this who-what-where-when part of conservation.

RG: What would you say are the broader contributions of your book to public and policy discussion about social and environmental justice?

AM: Anthropologists have long been saying, “look, there’s all of this important local detail that matters: local ecological knowledge, indigenous knowledge about forests, indigenous ways of understanding the world.”  And they say, “what happens when outside actors like conservation institutions or government policies come in is that they don’t pay attention to these details.”  And it’s absolutely true that this is the case.  However, this is exactly what any government official would tell you, or any conservation official.  In other words, the way that bureaucracies work is by bleaching out local context and coming up with big simplifications.  So we tend to get stuck in a situation of saying, “we see for the local against the power of the global or the outside.”  And I’ve kind of tried to invert that and say, “look, there are moments when details matter a great deal because how conservation gets done affects the careers and the stability of forest institutions or government officials.”  So I’ve tried to look for the back path, the ways in which humans and non-humans but especially publics affect the stability of these institutions because government officials will say, “well, we’re so sorry we can’t pay attention to details of what happens in your village, but that’s how it is.”  But if we tell them stories about how people like them lost their jobs because they didn’t pay attention to the details, then they’re interested.  So my long-term hope is really to say, “look, the details matter to people like you,” meaning officials, and maybe they’ll be receptive to that kind of argument.  Certainly in conversation, I think, they are receptive because most of them feel under enormous pressure.  They’re really stressed out. They have an agenda of twenty things they’re supposed to do, and they’re struggling with how to make sense of a very confusing landscape.  So we can cultivate our understanding of their predicament; maybe cultivate a little bit their fears of why their predicament is unstable; maybe make them a little more receptive to other ways of understanding the world.  This is actually what Sheila Jasanoff calls “technologies of humility,” which, I think, is not a bad metaphor.  Technology has to be created, but it has to be more humble and more willing to consider alternatives.

RG: You were talking before about how your work is being read by forestry officials in a particular area of Mexico, in Oaxaca, where you work.  So it does sound like, in that sense, your work may be actively shaping the management of nature in your study site.

AM: I would say very modestly.  People are very busy.  They don’t necessarily have time to read the kinds of things that we write. I think it’s actually our job to write very simple, bold, one-page summaries of what we have to say.  We have to become more comfortable with the simplification of our work.  Because we have to tell stories that people can take away with them to explain the world to themselves.  For instance, towards the beginning of my book is this image of a person walking off a cliff as they’re blinded by a newspaper in their face.  I think that an image like that with a brief accompanying text about how it links to the lifeworlds of officials is worth a great deal.  The agenda of a bureaucrat is infinitely long, and they have to pick up which things from the agenda they can actually respond to.  So thinking of a really good story or image to anchor a really simple point we have to make is actually quite valuable. My hope is that the thing that will attract their attention is the sense that people like them have in the past suffered when they did not pay attention, that the kind of stuff we love—ethnographic detail—matters in certain ways to people like them.  Maybe that’s the hook.  I can’t say that I’ve managed to do this in huge ways, but that’s certainly my approach to trying to make anthropology meaningful and relevant to these kinds of actors.

RG: That concludes our interview.  On behalf of ENGAGEMENT and its readers, thank you so much, Andrew S. Mathews, for your time and insight.

The 2012 winner of the Rappaport Student Paper Prize from the Anthropology and the Environment section is Sarah R. Osterhoudt who is a student in the combined doctoral program in Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Yale University.  Her winning paper is entitled  “Clear Souls | Clean Fields: Environmental Imaginations and Christian Conversions in Northeastern Madagascar.” In this lucidly written essay Osterhoudt analyzes the experiences of rural Malagasy farmers who are in the process of converting to Christian religions from prior systems of ancestor belief.  She argues, compellingly, that in this process, shifts in religious ideologies are profoundly connected to shifts in environmental imaginations and practice.  Drawing on long-term fieldwork in the village of Imorona in Northeastern Madagascar Osterhoudt argues that ideas of what it means to be a good farmer and what it means to be a good Christian have become intertwined in local experiences of religious conversion which reconfigure understandings of the role of central environmental elements such as stones, rice fields, and forests. By considering local experiences of religious conversions jointly with changing understanding of environmental meanings, the paper offers a unique perspective on the interconnections between environmental and religious ideologies.

Interview with Sarah Osterhoudt

In your essay you mentioned that you first lived in Imorona, Madagascar as a Peace Corps volunteer from 2005-2007.  What inspired you to return to the village as a doctoral student in 2010?

When I was planning my doctoral research, I knew I wanted to return to Madagascar, but I wasn’t sure if I would go back to the same village where I lived as a volunteer. In some ways it was tempting to go somewhere where I could see things with a completely new perspective. But then I decided that the history I had with Imorona was a great foundation for my research. Plus I really liked the region, and was excited at the chance to go back.

In what ways was your experience being there as a graduate student different from your experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer?

I was a little worried about how it would be going from being a volunteer to being a student. But the role of student is respected in Imorona, as it is throughout Madagascar. So, once I explained to people I was back to do research, people overall accepted me in this new role. I also involved people in the community as research assistants, so I think that also helped people understand better what I was doing and to feel a part of my research.

You mention in your essay that when you first began your doctoral research you were not interested in the issue of religious conversion but soon realized that it was too important to ignore. Was it difficult for you to recalibrate your research focus to include such very different themes from those you set out to study?

In some ways it was difficult, but it other ways it was a pretty smooth transition. As I mention in the paper, people were often inviting me to church events, so having opportunities to conduct good ethnographic research on Christianity wasn’t difficult. It was harder to intellectually transition to this new subject, as I thought of myself primarily as doing environmental work. But I soon realized that the two areas actually had a lot of overlaps – once I saw this, I began to enjoy my research on religion.

I was interested in your description of what the shift from ancestor beliefs to Christian beliefs implied for the prospects of watching over ones fields in the afterlife.  You describe that people who had converted to Christianity believed that when they die their souls would leave the village and go to heaven where they could not keep watch over their fields. But Christian imaginaries often include the idea of “looking down from heaven” as well. Did you find that anyone had incorporated this Christian trope of looking from above to accommodate ancestor beliefs about watching over ones fields in the afterlife?

That’s a great question, and I did find people thinking of heaven and the afterlife this way. Many new converts to Christianity described the afterlife as a blend of ancestral and Christian ideas, where people could move back and forth between a Christian heaven and ancestral realms. I think one difference may be the degree to which they intervene with the living – as ancestors they are actively involved in on-going village life, but as Christians this usually isn’t as much the case.

Could you tell us more about how this essay fits into the your larger doctoral project?

My dissertation examines how agricultural landscapes are places where people cultivate both materials and meanings. I look at ways local agricultural environments help people approach different forms of cultural change – Christianity is one such change. I also look at the ideologies of conservation and development. I found that these viewpoints all present certain ideas and moralities, and farmers in the region select and combine certain parts of each framework as they re-imagine their place in the world.