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In this lecture on critical political ecology, Dr. Paige West
traces the history of the theory and how it emerged from
the study of isolated communities and their connections
to external structures that impact their social lives.
She defines political ecology as a critical approach
that sees environmental change as caused by both
natural and human structures with differential
impacts for individuals within those structures.
She highlights the role that female academics have
played in advancing the theory and methods of political
ecology and then focuses on the influence and ideas
from Foucault including discourse, power, and discipline.
She then draws on examples from her own
work in Papua New Guinea to exemplify the
ongoing use of the political ecology frame
starting with characterizing contemporary
communities as connected to the outside world
and continuing to explore copy commodity
chains as one form of local global relationships.
She ends by discussing updated understandings
of Marx's ideas of accumulation and dispossession
and suggests that there are both material
and non-material forms of these tendencies
in modern global economic structures.
Today I'm going to talk to you about critical
political ecology and hopefully build on some
of the lectures that we had yesterday and the
two wonderful lectures that we had earlier today.
So I want to go back for a second and talk about
Roy Rappoport and Pigs for the Ancestors.
I scoured the web last night and found
this wonderful picture of Skip Rappaport
who is a wonderful human being.
One of the reasons that I became
an anthropologist was this book.
This is a beautiful book that got
tons of criticism as Eduardo said.
There are many, many things we could say about
it, but one of the things to think about, when you
think about this book is it was a really wrapped up
neat package, you got ritual and ecology of the
Tsembaga Maring as if they were living in a place
that had never been touched by the outside world
when indeed people in the Highlands of Papua
New Guinea had been living in a colonial world
for a very long time like people all over the world.
The Tsembaga Maring were also growing
coffee at the time that Rappaport did this
eloquent study, eloquent and elegant study
of ritual in ecology and he didn't take any of
those sort of outside influences into account.
You know, one of their reactions to this kind of
work in cultural ecology was for people to take
a look at things that were being done in other
parts of the discipline and so again to look at
the work of Eric Wolf at the time, so Pigs for
the Ancestors is published in the 1980s, I think
I have the date up there, yeah, 1968 sorry 1968,
and then you have ownership and political ecology
in 1972 and you have Eric Wolf really thinking
carefully about the way in which people that are
thought about of, thought about as outside history,
people that are thought about living in these still
bounded societies are actually tied up in a world
system, so in many ways political ecology comes
out of people dissatisfied with the type of work
that Rappaport did about small-scale societies and
the way that they were living in very close proximity
to nature in these very bounded ways and the work
of Wolf that shows us that those bounded ways are
actually touched by many, many outside influences.
Political ecology as a field emerges in the 1980s
and it really emerges in multiple disciplines, so
when we think about political ecology we should
think about anthropology, we should think about
human geography, we should think about people
in critical development studies, so there's a whole
world of people that come together to create
political ecology, people in economics, people
in political science, so from the very beginning
political ecology is this very multidisciplinary field.
Piers Blaikie said and I'm going to read a
quote here about political ecology early on
"it's the multiscaled analysis of environmental
degradation from a political economy perspective.
As such political ecology rejects the
neo-Malthusian explanations of human impacts
on the environment," so one of the things early
political ecology was reacting against were kind
of neo-Malthusian explanations for why people
were degrading the landscapes that they lived in.
It's also, in many ways, rejecting the work coming
out of development studies in the 1970s and 1980s,
that basically is seen by anthropologists and human
geographers as blaming the poorest of the poor for
the environmental disasters that they're living with
on a daily basis, so there's a kind of political activist
undertone to political ecology very early on.
So one of the things political ecology
sort of formulates very early is an
argument that environmental change
is caused by many different things.
Environmental change is certainly caused by
people living at the very local level engaging
with resources on the daily basis, but it's
also caused by changing power relations.
It's the result of global processes like colonialism,
development, and the spread of capitalism writ large.
The kinds of things that political ecology was
interested in really can be drilled down to some work
that was done or can, we think about it in terms of
work that was done by Brian, Bryant and Bailey.
And so they developed kind of three fundamental
assumptions about practicing political ecology.
The first is that costs and benefits associated with
environmental change are distributed unequally.
Changes in the environment do not
affect society in the homogeneous way.
Political, social, and economic differences account
for uneven distribution of costs and benefits and
political power plays an important role in such
inequalities, so from the very beginning political
ecology is interested in explaining inequality
at multiple scales, but thinking about who's
accumulating while others are being dispossessed,
something I'll come back to in a minute.
Again their second point this unequal environmental
distribution invariably reinforces or reduces existing
social and economic, reinforces and/or reduces existing
or exacerbates, sorry, existing social and economic
inequalities, so the uneven distribution actually affects
people's social lives on the ground in terms of inequality.
And third, that the unequal distribution
of cost and benefits and the reinforcing,
reducing of the pre-existing inequalities
hold political implications in terms of the
altered power relationships that are reduced.
So inequality is changed by these larger
forces and then power relationships on the
ground are also changed by these larger forces.
One of the first books to come out that really
took this new paradigm early on is 1987 Land
Degradation and Society by Piers Blaikie and
Harold Brookfield, it's actually an edited volume
and they have chapters on all of these different
places and what they start to do is really develop
from a multi-sited analysis, a robust theory for
thinking about the relationship between land
degradation and social change at multiple scales
and so they really bring in the question of how
different scales and the actors at different scales
intersect in these systems that we all study here
today and that we all take for granted today and that
Eduardo just gave us a beautiful presentation on.
So they focus on land degradation and all of these
different sites and they really go through what are
the current explanations for land degradation, what
are the reasons, what are the kind of causal chains
that are being traced out and work prior to their work.
They look at the question of individual behavior and
they say yes, absolutely there are some elements of
individual behavior at the very local level that are causing
land degradation and we can see changes as connected
to individual behavior, but then they also say there are
these other scales, there are these much, there's my
pointer, there are these much larger processes that are
affecting the local scale and also they say there're actors
at ever scale, so kind of drilling down and only focusing
on people living under the conditions of land degradation
or environmental change and not thinking about actors
at the regional scale, at the national scale, or at the
global scale is a problem, so scale, scale, scale.
So I'm going to talk a little bit about some
of the classic works in political ecology
and you will notice here that I'm highlighting
work by women because it struck me yesterday
that there was quite a lot of discussion of
environmental anthropology, very little discussion
of women's role in pushing theory forward.
The first person I want to talk about is Nancy
Peluso, so Nancy Peluso, again early on in
the piece, this is 1992, it's based on her PhD
dissertation from Cornell which was in 1988.
Nancy worked in Java and Java's a place where
for about three centuries people have been doing
agriculture and there's good evidence, archaeological
evidence, but also historical data from the state
about the agriculture that people have been doing
there and so what she did was really look at all of
this data on agriculture and then ask some questions
about what's going on today, why is it that peasant
farmers are actually living in highly degraded
environments today when we've had agriculture in
this place for three centuries and she says well, so
maybe it's not about the farmers, maybe it's about
the state and then she says well maybe the state is
connected to a larger system and so taking something
that she can show has changed over time with this
huge dataset about agriculture and saying how are
these new conditions of a changing Javanese state
and then a changing Indonesian state and then
changing international relations in which the state is
kind of mired, how's that affecting peasant farmers.
She also brings in a critique of development and
begins to think for the first time really I think,
about the way in which development projects
focused on agriculture are actually not doing the
work they're supposed to be doing, but increasing
the dispossession of people living on the margins.
Bonnie McCay is one of the foremost thinkers
in political ecology and from very on again
1987 she co-edits The Question of the Commons.
1998 she writes Oyster Wars and the Public Trust:
Property, Law, and Ecology in New Jersey History
and what Bonnie does is say basically, alright
fisheries management, here's another system that's
been looked at by many, many people over time
or kind of system that's been looked at by many
people over time and the focus has been on what
fishers are doing and really not thinking about
how do we scale up our focus, how do we scale
up our analysis and think about the way that
fishers and their decision-making is connected to
regional, state, and then national influences and
again in this, especially in Oysters Wars she brings in
something new, she brings in questions about property
and law in a way that nobody has brought into
political ecology before because the legal structures
at multiple scales interact just as actors at multiple
scales interact and so Bonnie helps us think about
the way that people negotiate the law at every scale.
So then, as happens in anthropology, you have
this sort of flourishing of all different kinds of
political ecology and this is not because people
are not building on each other's work, but this is
because people are actually thinking very carefully
about the kinds of questions that they're not seeing
driving political ecology work, so post-structuralist
political ecology Arturo Escobar and Anna Tsing.
Post-structuralist political ecology is really driven
by a set of questions around how does ideology as
manifest and discourse affect practice, so how does
the stuff that gets said at the local level, at the
medium level, and at the highest scale said both
through oral language, but also said in reports
and documents how does that actually affect
people living at every scale and I'll come back to
talking about discourse and power knowledge
in a second, so Arturo Escobar and Anna Tsing
and then you have feminist political ecology.
Feminist political ecology is taking questions of
gender inequality, so remember political ecology
at its very base is thinking about inequality and the
way that inequality is changed or exacerbated or
somehow altered by these structural engagements.
Feminist political ecology puts questions of
gender inequality at the very center of political
ecology, but he, but it does it by sort of starting
out from questions about gender inequality.
Dianne Rocheleau in some of her work asks
about women's access to resources at the very
small scale to do conservation and then she
thinks about the way in which that disparity
between men and women's access to resources,
how that is affected by multiple scales of influence.
Then you have placed based
political ecology Aletta Biersack.
Aletta reads all of this stuff in political ecology
and says this is really interesting, but there's
this new work on the importance of place in
anthropology coming out in the 1990s and
she says people's attachment to place is one
of the most important things in people's lives;
how is people's socio-cultural attachment and
an understanding of place being altered by
these kinds of multi-scale-ular interactions,
so very specifically how does someone
thinking about a particular place as sacred
or not sacred, how is that affected by these
multiple scales of influence and then last,
but not least ethnographic political ecology.
So one of the things that many of us who have
been reading political ecology for a long time,
many of us from anthropology who have been
reading political ecology for a long time started
to think in the mid-1990s was that there was
a kind of transformation of the scholarship going
on where the kind of fine-grained ethnographic
description that anthropology was famous for
and I actually think is one of the things that we do
very well, that was sort of slipping out of political
ecology analysis, it was becoming much more about
analyzing and geographers are very good at this and
geographers were driving this much more about
analyzing the sort of higher scales of influence
and much less about explaining in a rich and
nuanced way the effects on the ground and so it
wasn't or isn't really a critique of other political
ecology, but it's just saying, look we have this
wonderful methodology and this wonderful way
of writing about our data in anthropology that
actually brings something to political ecology.
I want to stop for a second and talk about ethnography.
Ethnography is both a method and a product.
Ethnographic research is basically research when
you go and you live with a population of people
somewhere; that population of people can be rural
people living in a village in Tanzania, it can be people
working at the United Nations on gender equity, any
population, but you go and you live with them, you
hang out with them, you do participant observation,
you do interviews, you do other kinds of multiple
methodologies, that's ethnographic research, but
anthropologists also often produce ethnography
and an ethnography is a form of writing about
people that focuses in on specific examples.
Ethnographic vignettes we might think that are
a very small part of a larger sample, so when you
read an ethnography and someone tells you a story
and a very powerful story, that is, think about
them having a huge in and that is one example
and I think that's important to put, to point out
to people that don't read a lot of ethnography
because when people talk about ethnography as
case studies or when people talk about ethnography
as not being David Rubin it's actually hugely data
driven, so for instance my first field work, I have
three thousand pages of field notes, so take that in
for a second, three thousand pages of field notes.
Those are all coded and I can go through
and if I was the kind of person who wanted
to do it, I can do some statistical work to
tell you how many times people talked to
me about dispossession or how many times
people talked to me about bride price, but
I could also take the ethnographic examples
that I have in my published work and tell
you how many times that exact scenario
happened and so ethnographic data, even
if you have just an end of one and a paper,
it's a representative of a much larger sample.
When we think about Michel Foucault who
is a French historian and philosopher, born
in 1926, died very young in 1984; we can
think about a couple of different things that he
brought to anthropology and the social sciences.
The first one is an interest in discourse and for
Foucault discourse was a group of statements
which provide a language for talking about or
representing a topic and this group of statements
again can be spoken statements, it can be written
statements, it can be historical documents, it can
be anything that provides the sort of architecture
of language for talking about a particular topic.
For Foucault, discourse is about the production
of knowledge, so every time we say something
for Foucault, every time we write something, it's
a proposition about the world through discourse.
We're saying this is the way that the world
is and his argument or one of his many
arguments is that in this production of
knowledge through discourse, we also began to
produce the conditions of possibility for practice.
People start to think about things in a particular
way because of their discursive formation.
They then start to act in the world based on
this discursive formation and one of his most
important points is that this is all wrapped
up in a power dynamic, so to go back to
the critique of anthropology a little bit
and discursive formations in anthropology.
Let's think for a second about Rappaport's work
and the Tsembaga Maring, so Rappaport and many
other anthropologists write about Highlands groups
in the 1950s and 60s as if they are living in this
kind of state of nature, no Australian colonialism,
no British colonialism, no German colonialism, no
Dutch colonialism, no global capitalist system, no
coffee industry that's been there since the 1930s
and in writing about them in that way, they begin
to create a discursive formation that cast these
people as living representatives of our historical
past and to some extent our prehistorical past.
People build on their work, development organizations
start to read their work, and this discursive formation
around people in the Highlands being apart from
the modern, comes to be in the world that then comes
to be the way that people engage with them when
they go to them, so people who go for development,
people who go for conservation, missionaries, and
others come to think about people through this
architecture that's created by discourse, so that
is what Foucault means by discourse and that's
one of the things that he brings to anthropology.
So he also brings a really sophisticated
analysis of power and the way that power
operates at multiple scales and this is why
he's incredibly important for political ecology.
So power works at multiple scales, power works, it's,
he talks about it being exercised from innumerable
points and he argues that power relations exist in
every form of social relationship and that power is
productive, so in thinking about why inequality exists.
Foucault's influence on political ecology asks
us to think about where points of power are,
where there's a dynamic where someone has more
power than another person, or when an institution
has a kind of power that a group doesn't have,
or when there is institutional struggles and
power and so he helps us think about power too.
So for Foucault, that nexus between discourse and
power and knowledge, he argues work to discipline
us and he argues that they work to discipline us in
many ways; they discipline the way that we, that our
bodies are, they discipline the way that we carry
ourselves in the world, I mean, so think about the
way that I am dressed right now, right, so I am
dressed in a feminine manner, I have a dress on,
my hair is long, I wear earrings, I put makeup on,
that's a disciplining practice that kind of global
capitalism has inserted me into because it wants to
sell me stuff and it wants to make me hate myself
and feel less feminine, so I buy more crap, right,
that's what Foucault's talking about; it's pretty, it's
pretty simple, right, so there's disciplining at level of
the body, but there's also disciplining at all the other
scales, and so what Foucault allows us to do is
think carefully about the intersection of discourse,
power, knowledge, and the disciplining of subjects,
both human subjects and other kinds of subjects.
So I'm going to skip through a bunch of stuff.
I'm going to talk about my work a little bit.
So I've been doing political ecology for
a long time and so I've had multiple
projects and I'll talk briefly about them.
My first project was the book that I talked about
yesterday Conservation is Our Government
Now and what I do in that is ask a simple set of
questions about the way in which knowledge power
systems work in conservation, so what's the
relationship between the way that very local
people, the books about people living in a place
called Maimafu village which is a rural and
roadless village in the Highlands of Papua
New Guinea that happens to be one of the
most biologically diverse places on our planet.
These folks are hunter-gatherers, they're
also small-scale subsistence agriculturalists,
so they have a mixed sort of subsistent
strategy, they also grow a ton of coffee.
The book asks what happens when you have
people like that that are seemingly relatively
powerless in the global economy interact with
people from European conservation projects.
What are the power dynamics there and what are
the multiple scales that are influencing the lives of
these people living in very, very rural places and
much like Monique's work, how are decisions that
they're making on a daily basis that may or may not
have a conservation effect, may or may not have all
kinds of effects, how are those decision-making processes
being affected by these multiple scales of influence.
My second book From Modern Production to
Imagined Primitive grows out of the first work
because I was sitting on a mountain one day after
the first book was out and I was hanging out with
these two guys that I'm very good friends with,
and Jonah one of them said so how come you
anthropologists never write about coffee, and
I thought well how come we never write about
coffee and it's about the time that Eduardo
is starting to work on acai and so there's this
kind of growing interest in anthropology and
global commodity chains and the way that global
commodity chains help us think about political ecology.
And so in it, I use global commodity, the global
commodity chain for coffee to think about how
people in rural places and lots of parts of the
world are connected to these much larger systems
of capital and how those systems are very, very
old even if some of the older anthropologists
like Rappaport didn't pay attention to them.
Another couple of things, James Carrier and I
edited a book where we think about the political
ecology of institutions and much more recently,
Tropical Forests of Oceania is another edited
volume where I, Colin Filer, and Josh Bell
think about the way in which forest transitions
are happening across Oceania and what the
multi-scale drivers for those transitions are.
But, so what I want to talk about now is
a kind of return for me to thinking about
the very foundations of political ecology.
So remember, when we think back to Wolfe,
we think about thinking about local populations,
global political economy, and so in everyday
terms dispossession is often defined as putting
people out of possession or occupancy or
taking away something they don't own.
It's also commonly used to refer specifically
to taking away people's land or homes.
Embedded in this notion is a secondary
aspect of the idea of dispossession.
For something to be taken away,
somebody has to do the taking.
Dispossession and accumulative strategies are
always paired and they can really be understood
if we go back to Marx's Capital and Rosa
Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital.
So basically, very end of volume one of Capital,
Marx does among the other many brilliant things
that he does, he talks about what he calls original
accumulation; he talks about what he thinks of
as the very beginnings of capitalism and he says,
so you have these people, they're peasants, they're
living in kind of a feudal world, and slowly, but
surely they're getting pushed to the edges of their
subsistent strategies and that's me interpreting
Marx, Marx doesn't face subsistent strategy,
but they're getting pushed to the edge of their
ability to reproduce self and society through
the strategies that they've always had and they're
getting pushed by this new system that is capitalism.
He argues that people have to either be
incorporated into that new system or that they're
made to seem aberrant by the laws and processes
that grow up along with the economic system.
If people are incorporated into the system,
they're dispossessed of their land,
their labor, and their natural resources.
If they're not incorporated into the system,
a legal apparatus emerges to make them
seem like they somehow are doing something
wrong, they somehow are lawless, they're
aberrant and their behavior or their ideas.
So Marx thinks that some sort of seed for capitalism
and he writes about the Scottish Highlands.
What Rosa Luxemburg does is say well yeah,
that's kind of right, you made some mistakes,
one of the mistakes that you made and that's
why people don't like Rosa Luxemburg because
she dared to critique Karl Marx, but Rosa
Luxemburg, and she wrote that in 1915, so what
she says is Marx is right about a lot of things,
but one of the things he's not right about is that
original accumulation only happened once.
She argues using data from imperialism that
dispossession happens over and over and over again
and that the only way that capitalism can grow is
through the constant dispossession of people in
new places by the system, so resources flow back
to the Metropol, so again people are dispossessed
of land, labor, and natural resources, and in this
process, colonialism and imperialism can happen.
The key thing to think about for Rosa Luxemburg
though is that she really focuses in on how
accumulation and dispossession are ongoing.
So what political ecology does at its best is think
about the way in which dispossession happens,
who is accumulating through that dispossession,
and what are the environmental effects of that
accumulation and dispossession process.
So lately I have been kind of coming
back to thinking about dispossession.
Much of the work in political ecology which is
wonderful, wonderful, wonderful focuses on
material objects and material dispossession,
it focuses on land and degradation, it focuses
on forests and deforestation, it focuses
on water rights and things like that.
In my work I've been thinking lately, I've been
thinking lately about non-material forms of
dispossession that we might see along with material
forms of dispossession and I have a new book
Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric
and Ideology in Papua New Guinea comes out
on September the 2nd and one of the things that
I've been thinking about in that work is the way
in which people are dispossessed of sovereignty.
And so, I kind of, take a second to read this long
quote "sovereignty refers to the ability to control,
and have the autonomy over, one's life in whatever
manifestation the society of which a person is part
articulates what the fundamental parts of 'life' are.
While sovereignty is often taken to mean
jurisdiction, rule, power, and domination as
these forces are tied to the state, nation, or
governing body, following contemporary scholars
of indigenous worlds, I take an expanded view of
sovereignty when it comes to Papua New Guinea."
So one of the things I've been trying to do is
think about the way our indigenous colleagues
in anthropology, sociology, geography, and law
are actually rethinking sovereignty, so moving
away from just thinking about sovereignty in
terms of the state or sovereignty in terms of land
and thinking about other things that people have
sovereignty over, so for instance, intellectual
sovereignty, sovereignty over the materials that we
produce intellectually, representational sovereignty,
sovereignty over the images of people that are
produced by others and rhetorical sovereignty,
the sovereignty over thinking and saying and
doing things that produce a power knowledge
complex of representation about you and yourself
and your place and not having outsiders do it.
And so these ideas of sovereignty I've been playing
with to think about the way in which the material
forms of dispossession that we're getting really
good at understanding and political ecology are not
allowing us to understand other kinds of non-material
dispossessions and I use sovereignty as my object.
The last thing I'll say is, in terms of sovereignty, is
that for a long time now I've been working with
this NGO that I co-founded with some colleagues
from Papua New Guinea and a couple of American
colleagues The Papua New Guinea Institute of
Biological Research and really our mandate is to
repatriate scientific sovereignty to Papua New Guineans.
One of the things that is very different about Papua
New Guinea than lots of other places in the world is
there's not been a lot of training of national scientists
in Papua New Guinea, there's not been a lot of science
done by Papua New Guineans, and that's changing;
I was speaking to someone earlier about medical
research in Papua New Guinea that's very, very,
very much done by Papua New Guineans, but the
kind of work that we all do in this room, that has not
been done by Papua New Guineans historically and
one of my arguments in my book and one of the sort
of things behind the founding of PNGIBR is that one
of the reasons that conservation efforts have not been
successful in Papua New Guinea is because all of the
work has been done by outsiders and there's been
very little local work done and that local work gives
a different lens to solutions and framing problems.
And so PNGIBR, what we've done is create a training
program where young Papua New Guineans, the kind
of best and brightest people that are at University in
Papua New Guinea can apply to come to our campus
in Goroka, which is in the Highlands and when they
come with us they write a senior thesis, or a, sorry,
they write a honors thesis at the University of Papua
New Guinea and that gets them ready to compete
internationally for Masters and PhD programs and our,
the ideology behind our organization is that this is a
form of repatriation of sovereignty and it's also for me
a crucial part of political ecology because it really does
kind of think about what are the institutional changes
that need to be made in Papua New Guinea to make
conservation work and we think this is one of them.
Thank you.
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