Documento(s) 19 de 23

Peter Harries-Jones is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University, Canada. His recent work has been on the joint themes of social movements (the environmental movement in particular) and the epistemology of ecology. His most recent book is A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson (University of Toronto Press, 1995).

Let me begin this chapter with a metaphor, ‘wild globalization’. Following the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, the United States, supported by other countries including Canada, attempted to create an international consensus on environmental issues through extension of ‘free market’ principles. The first phase of attempted consensus culminated in the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which aimed at cutting emissions of greenhouse gases through international exchange of carbon credits. From Rio to Kyoto, the global oil industry and other transnational enterprises questioned the validity of the proposition that human activity is an integral part of global climate warming. Kyoto was significant in that world leaders, for the very first time, acknowledged that human industrial activity increased the release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and is, therefore, a contributor to climate warming–a point on which scientists had become convinced even before the Rio conference. The Kyoto Protocol was only mildly ameliorative, but had the global cut in emissions standards been accepted, the cuts would not have halted global warming, though they might have affected the rate of change and validated an international framework with which to confront its inevitability. As it turned out, a meeting held at the Hague in December 2000 failed to ratify the Kyoto proposals. This failure was dramatically enhanced by the decision of George W. Bush, president of the United States, on 29 March 2001 not to send the Kyoto Protocol to the US Senate for ratification. The president stated at the time that he believed that the costs of Kyoto would cripple the US economy. The result is a political vacuum at the centre, filled only by nongovernmental agencies, each with a segmented approach to global warming, but no central agency through which overall policy can emerge–in short, ‘wild globalization’ (Gray 2000: 9).

‘Wild globalization’ brings strongly to mind an image of runaway capital-intensive production without proper assessment of cost, either social or environmental, the very opposite of sustaining better health and better economic opportunity for all. Some environmental critics claim, with good reason, that the prospect of ‘wild globalization’, whatever its dangers, is no worse than the centrally managed approach that immediately preceded ‘wild globalization’: that is to say, a ‘top-down’ neoliberal economic approach based on ‘free market’ principles led by supra-governmental agencies such as the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. In their opinion these institutions’ rigid application of ‘free market’ principles has led to repeated disasters for the economic performance of some LDCs (less developed countries), in both the former Soviet Union and the countries of the South.

In any event, both ‘wild globalization’ and the neoliberalism of its immediate predecessor are useful contexts for juxtaposing the two terms in the title of this chapter, the ‘risk society’ and ‘tradition’, discussed below. The ‘risk society’ is both a contributor to and a product of ‘top-down’ neoliberal economic globalization. The ‘risk society’ threatens the integrity of the biosphere, while at the same time loosening the political framework of the nation-state. ‘Life-politics’ is a concept that arises from an alternative project of society, that which expresses a ‘bottom-up’ approach to political control, and the emergence of a multilateralism grounded in civil society. The agenda of ‘bottom-up’ multilateralism is that of much greater protection of the biosphere, a greater diffusion of power among social groups and institutions of the state, the pursuit of social equity, and nonviolent means for dealing with conflict (Schechter 1999: 1). The first step towards bottom-up multilateralism is much greater protection of the biosphere, policies through which knowledge of ecological effects are given the same or greater importance in ‘development’ than conventional market indicators. An additional feature of multilateralism is acknowledgement of the cultural visions of Indigenous peoples as they, too, contest the ravages of the ‘risk society’ in their own lands.

The ‘Risk Society’

The ‘risk society’ is a cultural thesis about the effects of wild globalization. According to its primary author, Ulrich Beck, ‘risk society’ stands for a type of thought and action not perceived by nineteenth-century sociologists. In that era both government and industry were able to calculate risks and relate solutions to unambiguous outcomes. They were able to do so because the premisses of social order in the society of that time were relatively unambiguous. A century or so later a quite different situation has emerged. Risk is omnipresent and is no longer calculable in the same way. Risk is an automatic outcome of goods production and the set of material conditions necessary to bring them into production. The most noticeable risks emerge from nuclear or chemical mega-technology, and most recently from genetic research. Other aspects of risk include arms sales and increased carbon emissions from industrial production and use of automobiles. Today one cannot choose or reject risk. In Beck’s view, exposure to risk is an outcome of industrial and political processes that are blind and deaf to their own effects and threats. Risks accumulate because they are automatic side effects of the whole industrial process and are infinitely reproducible. Industrialism in its advanced stage, from the second half of the twentieth century, has increasingly produced effects that can no longer be encompassed or covered by the calculus of risk and insurance. Rather, these latter confront the technical and social institutions of the ‘precaution state’ with threats that nullify, devalue and undermine all calculations at their very foundations (Beck et al. 1994: 181–2).

As risks increase, the instruments of rational control in industrial society–more technology, more government, more market opportunities–no longer seem able to cope. The side effects of industrial success have already undermined the foundations of the society out of which it has emerged.¹ Social, political and economic risks increasingly escape the institutional monitoring of risk in industrial society, and threats far exceed the social ideas of safety. The inability to calculate risk has made institutional monitors blind to this transformation of the pattern of risk in industrial society, but such blindness is no mere happenstance. The loose coalition of business firms, policymakers and experts who comment on and/or devise policies about risk in contemporary society have constructed a discourse of euphemisms as a means for disavowing their responsibilities. Nevertheless, the dangers of the present situation have led to a new form of politics, ‘life-politics’. This follows from the belief that minimizing environmental hazards is the key to ameliorating a general feeling of insecurity, ‘ontological insecurity’, that pervades current Western society. Beck states that ‘life-politics’ are an evident part of a number of new social movements, each of which strives to introduce new sources of meaning to life itself, as collective disenchantment exhausts other sources of meaning, like faith in technical progress and class consciousness.

‘Life-politics’ and the new meanings it sustains have to be rooted in localism and in the political thrust of civil society in order to reshape society from below, argues Beck. His analysis is no longer simply academic talk. As risks increase so also do the combination of NGOs, support for ‘life-politics’ and the ideas of a multilateral approach towards altering instruments of rational control in industrial society. Nevertheless, Beck’s analysis of ‘life-politics’ sticks almost entirely to a discussion of conditions in Western society. Beck’s portrayal of ‘life-politics’ in Western industrial settings is a concerted reflection upon the concept of ‘reflexive modernization’, or how the activities of life-politics result reflexively in ‘modernization undercut[ting] modernization’. Beck assumes that ‘life-politics’ is highly individual, a feature typical of Western industrial societies but not one that is repeated on a global scale. He argues that the new ‘life-politics’ will enable individuals to stage their own biographies through social networks, in their ‘compulsion to find and invent new certainties’ contra those of the ‘risk society’. Something along these lines seems to have occurred with the European protest against the acceptance of genetically modified food from 1999 to the present.

Yet Beck confines himself to situations where human rights, rights of dissidence and protest are in many ways respected–though protestors may be beaten and jailed. He does not consider typical situations of environmental protest in the non-industrial world where the pervasive epistemology of individualism is either absent or diminished, and where organized protest takes on very different characteristics. Nation-states are often ‘rights-aversive’ rather than rights-supportive, and in rights-aversive societies international conceptions of human rights are constantly buried in military or other direct action against minority populations. The issues that give rise to protest about ‘life-politics’ are matters of life and death.

Social Process and Time–Space Acceleration

The concern with ‘life-politics’ as a heightened expression of individualism against the state and industrial practices is supported by Anthony Giddens, a co-author of the concept ‘reflexive modernization’. However, Giddens imagines that with the coming of ‘reflexive modernity’ we in the West would, for the first time, be living in a ‘post-traditional society’. In a pointed reference to anthropology’s concern with tradition, Giddens argues that reflexive modernization will take us away from ‘a way of life to which we can no longer bear witness’ (Beck et al. 1994: 100). In other words, the anthropological concept of tradition is dead. Giddens interprets reflexive modernization as an argument about historical transition–away from traditional ways of thinking to a new form of cognitive reflection arising from globalization.² Associated with this is a change in the form that risk manifests itself, from natural hazards to socially created risk. In addition, ‘A phenomenology of modernity has to probe the experience of living in created environments in which pre-existing ties between trust, security, risk and danger have become substantially transmuted’ (Giddens 1989: 279)

Giddens’s statements about the supposed disappearance of tradition are welded to his well-known thesis that globalization is concerned with the organization of time and space. Likewise, he declares, tradition is about the organization of time and therefore also space. Whereas tradition controls space through its control of time, giving emphasis to the value of past practice and the continuation of past order to present time, globalization fosters the marking of time–space the other way around, through time–space acceleration. Globalization is essentially ‘action at distance’; and, unlike in colonialism, which required the physical presence of managers of capital, their physical absence in global control of capital flows predominates over their physical presence. The disembedding consequences of abstract systems of capital flows are so forceful that globalization excavates traditional contexts of action (Beck et al. 1994: 96). No longer is social thinking controlled in the sedimentation of time, as in traditional society, says Giddens; instead, financial globalization with its time–space acceleration has far-reaching ramifications (a point supported by Marcus; cf. Marcus 1995).

If Giddens’s analysis refers to global politics, then the disembedding consequences of abstract systems have led to a number of dangerous political crises in recent years in which self-ascribed parties of modernity have been challenged by traditionalists. Politically speaking, the forces of traditionalism have not disappeared but rather have become resurgent. The resurgent forces of tradition in the Middle East over the last twenty years have left the West puzzled as to how to deal with them; the same political polarities have appeared and reappeared in the post-colonial politics of many countries in Africa like Chad, Sudan and Nigeria. As I write, the latest area of conflict is Turkey, and the outcome may well affect the entrance of Turkey into the European Union. So it is evident at the political level that Giddens is mistaken. Yet I wish to disagree with Giddens not so much on political grounds as on his epistemology: that is, on how ideas of time–space affect our understanding of persistence and change. Giddens has shown, more than any other recent sociologist, how concepts of time and space are central to social theory. He also shows how time and space, though abstract concepts, are linked to repetitive day-to-day social activities. Face-to-face interaction typically takes place in a definite setting for a definite period with other persons present both in time and in space. Moreover, the routine ways this day-to-day activity occurs is bound recursively to rules and resources in macro-level dispositions in society (structuration). So far, so good. Giddens is one of the very few authors in sociology or anthropology to discuss abstract concepts like ‘structure’ in terms of the recursive characteristics of social interaction; doing so he makes a remarkable contribution to social theory.

Giddens goes on to argue that technology extends social interaction in time and space in such a way that ‘the other’ in face-to-face interaction is no longer immediately present. As this occurs ‘the locality’ no longer has the same significance as the boundary within which routinized activities occur, and this time–space distancing (or ‘distanciation’, as he calls it) in turn brings a change in the generation of control by nation-states. Giddens argues that his notions of time–space acceleration of global capitalism and time–space distanciation in social interaction are much better concepts than others used in sociology’s repertoire to denote the countervailing tendencies of persistence and change. These latter, he says, nearly always draw their notions from the concepts of Western physics and provide limited opportunity to match social theory to meanings and experience. Yet Giddens himself is not entirely free from the framework of physics, for behind his exposition lies a fundamental belief that the commodification of time–space relations in Western culture, integrated with its sophisticated measurement techniques, has indeed produced ‘acceleration’ in time–space that affects both monitoring and control over peoples. Also, Giddens borrows many of his ideas from the time-geography networks of Hägerstrand, who portrays a social system as a series of time–space paths flowing through a set of stations. To my mind Giddens is still far too close to a natural science or physics-based account, instead of an ecological account, of the response of human beings or any other living system to the interaction of other human beings or organisms in time and space.

Somewhere in all his analysis of time–space relations, both knowledgeability and agency of human beings become attached to the activities of the modern sector, while tradition, including tradition understood ‘as a mode of routinization by means of which practices are ordered across time and space’, becomes displaced. Although Giddens acknowledges that tradition is always open to reinterpretation, he argues that the controls of tradition, rooted as they are in ‘how things are always done’ and ensuring that the highest degree of stability is attached to ‘how things are always done’, become displaced by rationally defensible purposes, the hallmark of modernity (Giddens 1989: 277). A major problem with all this is that Giddens’s version of tradition always seems to stem from conditions which he categorizes as being ‘pre-modern’–as if tradition, like the notion of the pre-modern, is lodged in a past stage of events, and is not an important concomitant of the present conditions of modernity. This mistake has affected much anthropological analysis as well as sociological theory, as Johannes Fabian has pointed out (Fabian 1991: 113–29). In making this mistake Giddens brings his arguments within the orbit of older sociological conventions–of social process proceeding in a stage-like manner. It could be argued that such an approach is, in itself, a side effect of the blindness of industrial capitalism, namely an ‘internment’ of all alternatives, unreflectively burying them out of sight and out of mind (Escobar 1995: 204).

There is nothing in Giddens’s discourse about the relationship of time–space acceleration to ecological order, despite the fact that one would expect such a provocative notion as time–space acceleration to include reference to global climate change. That a thesis on the ‘risk society’ should ignore responses of traditional societies to this threat created by rampant globalization seems unreasonable. Another important point not addressed is the relation of tradition to the conventional political ideas of liberalism and conservatism. In North America the politics of conservatism and liberalism are wrapped in the perceived historical transition from traditional society to modernity. Conservatism in a conventional political sense expresses a strong political interest in tradition as an exemplar of stability and in maintaining ‘how things are always done’; but the very opposite of stability will occur by simply maintaining ‘how things are always done’ in the context of global climate change. At the same time, progressive use of science and technology, the hallmark of liberal thinking, is no guarantee of remediation since the progressive use of technology unlimited by the awareness of deleterious ecological effects has produced the current alarming growth in natural hazards. Nor can the command and control systems of socialism adequately deal with global change unless and until people in Western industrial states willingly give up much of their profligate lifestyle. Stripped from the conventional politics of conservatism, liberalism and socialism, but deeply embedded in the prevailing conditions of ecological change, wherein lies the ‘life-politics’ of traditional societies? At the very minimum I would argue that where ‘risk’ and culture and ecology conjoin, a new understanding of their conjunction changes discourse about Western understanding of both ‘tradition’ and ‘reflexive modernization’, from the way that both Beck and Giddens have understood it.

‘Life-Politics’ and Tradition

The response of traditional orders to global climate change has been varied, and a complete discussion would require detailed comparative evidence that I do not have available. Here I will outline three trends. The first is a matter of survival, of life and death and outright rejection of global practices of industrialism. The second may be described as a resurgence of tradition based on a notion of ‘reflexive traditionalism’. The third is an attempt to combine traditional values with the modern science of conservation in order to enhance the planned response to known environmental change stemming from global climate change. It is a politics of shared experience, in which cultural forms of understanding in traditional societies, or traditional sectors of industrial society, find common ground with the investigations of environmental planners and scientists. The common ground is not necessarily agreement about common perspectives; in fact perspectives are likely to differ. There is, nevertheless, an overriding attempt to make perspectives, experiences and actions fit each other. For various reasons, including the enormity of the risk and the fact that environmental science has to proceed within large measures of uncertainty, it has come to accept–reluctantly perhaps–that the perspectives of traditional order are not merely anecdotal, and that the prospect of fittedness between science and traditional ecological knowledge may be fruitful.

Trend 1: matters of life and death

The U’wa who live in the foothills of the Andes of Colombia gave a categorical reply to Shell and Occidental Petroleum in 1998 when they were told that these transnational oil companies would begin extensive exploration in the Samoré area of Colombia, a sizeable part of the U’wa existing territorial area and ancestral lands. They told Shell and Occidental that the U’wa will throw themselves off a high cliff called the Cliff of Death in an act of mass ritual suicide when the transnationals moved into their territory. The Cliff of Death is sacred territory to the U’wa, and ritual suicide a part of U’wa culture (Guardian Weekly, 12 October 1997, p. 8). The U’wa then secured a court injunction against further oil exploration. The oil companies contested this ruling. In April 2001 they began exploration once again in U’wa territory, estimating that there were 1.5 billion barrels of oil in the area. The U’wa then declared a National Day of Action and Prayer. In July 2001, Occidental Petroleum announced that its first exploratory well on U’wa land had turned up dry. At its annual shareholder meeting in May 2002, it announced that it would return its oil block to the Colombian government

The response of the U’wa is evidently an extreme example of the outright rejection of traditional societies to the intrusions of oil, gas, mineral and other exploitation of Indigenous peoples’ environment, but many local populations beside the U’wa have no means to resist development programmes. The vulnerability of marginal populations is nearly always structurally reinforced through government action at the national or international level (Aaragon 1997). Some populations are more vulnerable than others. Governments tend to view environmental protest as threatening the status quo and respond by denying the protestors’ rights and resources in their own land, in the name of economic growth, national security or national debt. With little alternative for peaceful protest, local groups may then move from local protest to political rupture, and finally resort to armed conflict.

In rights-abusive states there is no national arena in which a local environmental movement can advocate alternatives, hence no local arenas for the sort of ‘life-politics’ to which Beck refers. In fact, the overall evidence suggests an alternative view: despite international accords and conventions establishing inalienable human rights for all peoples, violent protest occurs most frequently in rights-abusive settings–that is, where the hopes of having peaceful advocacy of land claims and territorial governance are minimal (Johnston 1997: 15). For example, the World Commission on Dams recently acknowledged the shoddy economics and human rights violations that attend large dam construction. Up to 80 million people have been physically dispossessed of their land and millions more impoverished as a result of these dams. In addition, the destruction of species in flooded areas affects the food supply and livelihood of millions more. In the past the global dam industry largely ignored the social protests of those it would deprive of their lands and livelihoods, even though many of these protests were violent and resulted in loss of life. Now the World Commission agrees that dams should be built only if developers can gain the ‘demonstrable public acceptance’ of affected communities at each key stage of the decision-making process. It recommends that developers negotiate binding agreements, enabling communities to hold developers accountable to their promises of resettlement and compensation (McCully 1996; McCully and Williams 2000: 26).

Trend 2: reflexive traditionalism

My second example is that of the Inuit of the new Territory of Nunavut in the Canadian Arctic. They have taken it upon themselves to foster traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) as part of ongoing government practice. In this case the fostering of TEK is a direct counter to the activity of societies to their south that has created massive chemical pollution of Arctic waters, affecting fisheries, wildlife and human diet. The argument put forward within various Nunavut government departments is that TEK ought not to be cast in traditional notions of ‘the traditional’–that is, tradition as its own time-warp vis-à-vis the temporal expression of modernity. TEK is much more than it has been defined as the continuation of traditional practices (berry-picking, hunting, preparing seal skins, listening to the elders, and the like). These are only small parts of a very much larger story. Arnakak and others are reconceptualizing ‘the traditional’ in TEK as ‘healthy, sustainable communities regaining their rights to a say in the governance of their lives using principles and values they regard as integral to who and what they are’ (Arnakak 2000).

This version of TEK has undergone extensive discussion in the Nunavut Social Development Council, the Department of Sustainable Development, and in curriculum planning for schools. TEK is defined as the knowledge of country that covers weather patterns, seasonal cycles, wildlife, use of resources. It includes the interrelationships of these elements; and of practical truisms about society, human nature and experience passed on orally, from one generation to the next, that one can learn best through observing, doing and experience. Such a broad approach to TEK releases the traditional from the time warp in which it has been impressed for so long a period of time. In the context of this chapter the Nunavut version of TEK seems more akin to time–space expansion of tradition than space–time acceleration. The relationship of TEK to Avatimik Kamattiarniq (‘environmental stewardship’) is best represented by Paul Okalik, premier of Nunavut, in August 2002 when attending a conference of Canadian provincial leaders. He defended the federal government’s position in approving the Kyoto Protocol, stating: ‘our goal is to be self-reliant and to be as prosperous as Alberta [an oil-rich province] and to rely on our resources. . . . Our custom is to pass on our knowledge, our traditional knowledge, to our children and you can’t put a price tag on that.’

The Inuit concept of self-reliance through environmental stewardship is one of the fundamental sets of ideas embedded in the notion of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, IQ for short. IQ is interpreted as ‘healthy, sustainable communities’ and affirms Inuit intentions to regain their rights to a say in the governance of their lives using principles and values they regard as integral to who they are. Certainly there is a strong lobby in Nunavut to develop IQ as an epistemology that can be taught in the primary school system through the concomitant expansion of Inuit language learning there (Martin 2000). This reinterpreted concept of ‘traditional’ strips away the more ineffable aspects of culture and presents IQ with its concomitant principles of TEK as a means of organizing tasks and resources which has ramifications for organizing family and society into coherent wholes (Arnakak 2000).³

This whole process could be described as ‘inverse anthropology’. Instead of outside anthropologists providing analysis of how family-kinship relations underpin the structure of Inuit life, and in so doing provide the fundamentals of an Inuit tradition, the Inuit take it upon themselves to teach other societies how their family-kinship model is an appropriate management model whose roles and relationships provide profound insights into stewardship of the environment. Another way of looking at this process is as ‘reflexive traditionalism’. If modernity is, as Giddens and Beck argue, characterized by reflexivity, so too the Inuit example introduces ‘reflexive traditionalism’ in the sense of appraising Inuit traditions in light of the failing of industrial modernity to take into account appropriate stewardship of the Arctic environment.

In short, far from heralding the passing of traditional thought, the traditional order with its intense localism can appeal to a radical contemporaneity among its subjects. The key difference between this revamped version of tradition and the more usual versions of ‘traditional’ is the way in which modern scientific discourse, including social science, places ‘tradition’ in opposition to ‘modernity’ as a process of continuous change, but conveniently forgets to include the risks generated by modernity including wild globalization when it comes to pass judgement on this process of change. Thus it turns ‘tradition’, something that is profound, enriching and alive, ‘into something that is meaningless, sterile, and awkwardly exclusionary’, as Arnakak notes (Arnakak 2000).

Trend 3: a question of fit

The third example is the growing trend, since 1994, of constructing a Vulnerability Index for less developed countries. As their title suggests, the various Vulnerability Indices are an important recognition of the vulnerability of small nations to ecological impacts of global warming and have been put together by NGOs, United Nations agencies and small island governments. They are particularly evident in the planning documents of forty-two countries that are all members of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), but today other nations that are not small islands and are not necessarily designated as ‘Third World’ countries are compiling this approach to global ecological change. AOSIS members feel their Vulnerability Index will soon replace such standard economic indices as gross national product (GNP) and gross domestic product (GDP).

AOSIS members state that not only does calculation of per capita income through standard procedures of GNP or GDP make the world’s smallest nations look more prosperous than they are, but, more significantly, these statistics fail to deal with the phenomenon of the increasing rate of natural disasters visited upon them. The statistical relationship between increased per capita income and quality of life has become severely warped through recurrent disasters in the small island states. Disasters include more frequent tropical cyclones, damage to fishing stocks, and loss of land as a result of rising sea levels–events that one way or another are attributed to global warming. Some of the small island states in Micronesia and the Maldives already know they will lose a significant proportion of their land through rising global ocean levels within this coming century.

The compilation of Vulnerability Indices is a major move away from Western nations’ valuation of wealth and prosperity. By identifying increased vulnerability to disaster as a primary handicap to increasing quality of life, the various indices are altering perspectives about the linkage of risk to ecological events, which, in turn, has altered perspectives about the benefits of development in the less-developed countries as a whole.⁴ As Herman Daly has pointed out, conventional economics does not usually admit to the importance of ‘exogenous factors’, such as ecological fluctuation or natural disaster, as a limitation on economic activity. Development is predicated on quantifiable technical variables of growth and expansion–that is, the continuing expansion of goods and services as a means to procuring a better quality of life for the population as a whole (Daly 1996). This conventional attitude affected the first batch of indices. The Commonwealth Vulnerability Index completed in 1999, for example, concluded that the impact of ‘external shocks’ was only one of a number of determinants affecting the volatility of income in small island economies. However, researchers soon began to appreciate that ecological fragilities themselves were a primary threat to the implementation of any developmental strategy, and furthermore that ecological frailties covered a very broad base of activity. Research emphasis began to shift more specifically towards constructing an EVI, an Environmental Vulnerability Index, assessing both the relative susceptibility to natural disasters and the relative susceptibility of the ecology of countries to damage by anthropogenic activity (Howarth 1999; Pacific Islands Development Program/East-West Center 2000).

Meanwhile, putting together EVIs had revealed how top-down development, bad economic planning, and sheer ignorance on the part of development planners can accelerate risk and vulnerability in fragile economies. If development planning could heighten risk of vulnerability, then the usual responses–even more development to counter such risk–might not apply. Thus, the compilers of EVI began to consider all appropriate responses to mitigation of repeated disaster by examining all possible avenues of anthropogenic (human-caused) hazards associated with an increased rate of natural disasters and plan alternatives (Vermeiren 1993). At this point they began to incorporate traditional ecological knowledge in their planning documents as one avenue through which anthropogenic (human-caused) hazards might be lessened.

In some areas the compilers found, to their surprise, that the evidence of the efficacy of traditional ecological knowledge had been undervalued even by ethnographers. For example, one survey of TEK in New Caledonia, a small island state, concluded that while the religious aspects of societies were well reported, it was evident that ‘context and importance [of the practical activities of villagers] have not even been understood’. References to TEK are dispersed and anecdotal in these anthropologists’ writing, the survey stated, because ethnographic research had concentrated on agriculture.⁵ The growing of crops of yams and taro was well documented, as was the use of terracing, spill ways and other water management devices. On the other hand, documentation on traditional medicine was ‘almost non-existent’, as was evidence of traditional controls of pests and disease. Above all, detailed evidence about the agricultural calendar was missing, as were questions of decisions about timing, although ‘such timing was one of the most important aspects of Melanesian life’. The research survey concluded that while New Caledonians’ (Kanak) knowledge of nature and the environment was very large indeed, little of that rich heritage had been recorded. Only a hint of the former existence of practice or knowledge that might have been useful as a guide to solving current resource management problems was available, and what was evident in New Caledonia is repeated and has much wider implications for the whole of the Pacific Islands.

Researchers compiling EVIs soon found they had to transform the standard terminology of GDP in order to accommodate their focus on risk, vulnerability and its alternatives. A key idea that emerged was the necessity to build up ‘intrinsic resilience’ in these small island states, a non-economic concept which approximates the health and integrity of the environment. The concept of resilience will be dealt with in more detail below, but it can be noted that the concept is non-economic and refers to the health and integrity of ecosystems, rather than the quantitative physical and material utilities of ecosystems as a type of natural resource. While ‘resilience’ does not necessarily translate Indigenous peoples’ conceptions of risk and misfortune–since these are often expressed through sacramental or religious belief systems–‘resilience’ has provided a means by which TEK can be brought into the planning documents not only among AOSIS members but elsewhere.

For example, evidence from Greenland suggests that while ecologists and Inuit have their own rationales that are differently thought out and phrased, they may and often do agree on common conservation policy and issues. Ethnographic material from Nunavut and Greenland Inuit demonstrates that people regard animals as ‘non-human persons’ who are able to build up knowledge about their environment. This enables skilled hunters and fishers to rely not only on their own interpretation of the environment but also upon the understanding and interpretations of animals about animal interaction with the environment. The behaviour of fish and seals not only gives signs about the location of fish and seals to Inuit hunters in Greenland but indicates the behaviour of whales, glaciers, winds, water temperature and other physical aspects of the environment. Animals may be disturbed by what people are doing in ways rarely mentioned in the conventional ecological literature. Greenland Inuit are able to observe and account for animal movements and other aspects of behaviour in a systematic way because they believe that animals have their own semiotic interpretation of the environment. This evident information, at least evident to Inuit, enters directly into Inuit discourse about environmental change (Roepstorff 2001). Berkes (1999) and Ingold (2000), following Feit (1994 and Chapter 6 in this volume), discuss similar issues in the environmental thinking of the Crees of Northern Quebec.

Resilience, then, is a concept that permits fittedness, a concordance between the science of ecology and the ‘life-politics’ of embodied tradition, the one perspective different from, but not unrelated to, the other. Those ecologists accepting resilience as a valid scientific approach to an understanding of ecological order are impelled by their own knowledge of ecosystem change and impermanence to listen to the evidence of how traditional peoples have helped maintain flexibility and resilience in their own habitat over so many years.

Time–Space Events and Temporal Recursion

Initially, the response to EVI research was sceptical, even United Nations economists doubting whether it would be possible to gather sufficient information about how human activity relates to ecological fragility. Yet once ecological ideas like ‘resilience’ became accepted into research discourse, the collection of EVI data proved to be much easier than originally expected. The notion of resilience owes a great debt to the work of the Canadian ecologist C.S. Holling. In the early 1970s Holling began to use this idea, or similar ideas, to explain the formal dynamics of spruce budworm outbreaks in New Brunswick, Canada, treating the budworms as predator and the trees as prey. Holling’s stated intention in developing the concept of resilience was to transform classical notions of equilibrium in ecosystems, based on physical determinants of time and space, to account for uncertainty and surprise in ecological events (Holling 1998: 1–5). That is to say, ecosystems tend to ‘flip-flop’ from one set of conditions to another in a manner not represented in linear continua. His idea was to elaborate the methodology of ‘flip-flop’ and build a bridge between analytical science and policy that takes these conditions into account. Unlike prior analytical perspectives of biotic interactions drawn from the physical representation of space and time, resilience embodies inherent unpredictability and unknown outcomes of the interaction between ecosystems and the human societies with which they are linked. Note resiliency is not the same as stability–stability refers to how resistant a system is to change, whereas resilience refers to the conservation of opportunities for ecosystem renewal, the absorptive ability to respond to change.

The concept of resilience can be traced back to the qualitative mathematics of René Thom and his ‘catastrophe theory’ of the late 1960s, a qualitative account, in mathematical terms, of how a set of continuous events can undergo a sudden transition, or threshold jump, into a different dynamics. Resilience also draws, in more recent work, on sophisticated models of the ‘layering’ of ecological order according to ecological temporal rhythms. In this respect, the work of Allen and Hoekstra (1992) is a landmark study.

Unlike most ecologists, who concentrate their attention on the physical and energy components of biomass, Allen and Hoekstra are distinctive in the way they define ecological order. They argue that living systems escape the constraints of the physical world through the way in which they are able to recycle their resources over time.

Like Holling’s notion of ‘resilience’, Allen and Hoekstra’s notion of ‘recursion’ in temporal cycles enables a shift of focus from material dimensions of ecosystems conceived as biomass–with all its quantitative thermodynamic properties–and pays attention instead to the ways in which constraints in ecosystems derive from their temporal layering. Obviously their work does not deny that a movement of an organism and its interactions with other organisms are material events. Yet any organism can be a part of many cycles; an organism has its own life cycle–further, in its life cycle the organism passes through the life cycles of many other organisms with very different temporal cycles, all of these organisms together constituting a field of living systems. If material structures are only some of the components of ecological order, then material components ought not to be the sole focus of connecting social and ecological order; nor should the physics of temporal transformations–that is, transformation in time–space continua–be the sole model of social transformation borrowed by the social sciences from natural science–a point evidently missed by Giddens.

Most important in Allen and Hoekstra’s model is the way they incorporate the analysis of time sequences in temporal cycles to build up an understanding of the ‘logic’ of recursive constraints. In any ecological system there are different levels of cycling whose order is strongly correlated with the frequency of the return time of its recycling processes. This recursive characteristic of recycling engenders critical behaviour of the ‘level’ in question. Higher ‘levels’ of an ecological order have a longer return time–that is, their critical behaviour occurs at a lower frequency; while lower ‘levels’ of an ecological order have a relatively quick return time–that is, their critical behaviour occurs at a higher frequency. All recursions at any ‘level’ can be related to relative frequency in this way.⁶

Recursions among levels are of utmost importance because some recursions are more important to observers than others. Critical pathways of recursive recycling create a ‘context’ for observers to monitor. Knowing critical constraints leads, in turn, to a better understanding of the buffering capacity of an ecosystem; that is, whether it can withstand perturbation and continue to oscillate around existing recursive cycles, or whether the perturbation is sufficient to result in those cycles changing their pattern of oscillation. Overall, the buffering capacity of an ecosystem determines if it will withstand change or if it will cross a threshold of oscillation and become a different form of ecosystem, as with the cutting and burning of trees in the wet tropical forests of the Amazon. The buffering capacity helps define ecosystem ‘resilience’, the same notion of intrinsic resilience incorporated into the Vulnerability Indices discussed above.

Allen and Hoekstra also argue that since ecological order is multi-levelled, it is always necessary for observers to examine several scales or levels at the same time. Consider the cycling of nitrogen. Nitrogen occurs at many levels, from those inside the organism up to the level of nitrogen formed by electrical discharges in the atmosphere. Each particular cycle relates to a particular level of observation. In fact Allen and Hoekstra suggest that because all ecological phenomena are multi-levelled, it is always necessary to consider at least three levels at once if one wishes to obtain robust prediction–that is, three ‘contexts’ in which the cycle appears most cohesive, explicable and predictable. The three levels of ecological hierarchy are: (1) the level in question; (2) the level below that in order to reveal physical mechanisms; and (3) the level above that, which gives context or significance to the level in question. The requirement for a three-level check, as they point out in their analysis, results in maps compiled by using different criteria at each level, each representing different perspectives among observers, and each observer generating different focal analyses in his or her depiction of ecological order.⁷

Here comes the beauty of their model, for Allen and Hoekstra’s multi-perspective, contextual model of temporal cycles breaks the deterministic criterion that has pervaded the disciplines of social sciences⁸ and biology and ecology. This enables not only a more unified approach to fittedness in eco-social links, but also enables a procedure of cross-scaling. Cross-scaling places data dealing with social effects on ecological resources–a relatively quick time recursion–in conjunction with biophysical data in ecosystems, and with relatively longer time recursive loops of the biosphere as a whole. The idea of cross-level, or cross-scale, interactions in which differing recursive temporal loops interact with each other at different levels of observation brings new insights to the pervasive problem of persistence and change in ecological order. For social scientists, better understanding of cross-scaling of the social and the ecological (Little 1999) avoids the sort of mistake that Giddens made in presupposing that time–space acceleration in the social order would have a single level and thus a totally dramatic effect on the framework of tradition and traditional culture. Though cultures are in many respects a material manifestation of social order, they, like the ecosystems of which they are a part, are also strongly associated with temporal repetition and oscillation in the manner of ecosystems. And, as with transitions in the whole biophysical realm, cultures are highly non-lineal yet resilient through their capacity to reorganize their responses to perturbation, more so than the concepts of physical stability would suggest.

Conclusion

I would argue that Allen and Hoekstra’s field theory can be extended to many situations where human activity is considered from a more loosely defined ‘ecological’ perspective. Though their intention, like that of all good scientists, was to improve both predictability and control of ecological systems, what they have released is a very flexible methodology for examining ‘risk’. The topological mapping of ecosystems based on concepts of recursion, together with Holling’s notion of resilience, provides a more useful methodology for an alternative expression of global market expansion and its promiscuous utilitarianism than that of Giddens. Other authors, both ethnographers and ecologists, have also found these ideas useful in making the link between social and ecological systems, though with less emphasis on ‘vulnerability’ and the ‘risk society’ (Berkes and Folke 1998).

Finally, taking into account the recursive form of ecological events evokes the broadest issues of human attempts at mega-intervention in nature. As Gregory Bateson has pointed out, in all biological phenomena the field of immanent order consists of events and relations between events which recursively draw on the other. Human beings and their cultures are no different in this respect from the rest of nature. All are in temporal fields, and patterns of change are always complex because they never fall into a single temporal dimension. A primary requirement is to understand how humanity is itself within or outside the recursive events that it tries to control. Only then does evidence that change in pattern is coming too fast for a culture or an ecosystem’s capacity to meet change give rise to a viable response, one in which flexible adaptation to recursive transformation has much chance of success (Harries-Jones 1995). ‘Life-politics’ in traditional order is associated with this understanding.

Notes

1. The major institutions of modern society are addicted to treadmill expansion because they feel they have a common interest in sharing the fruits of the treadmill, which in turn induces them to collaborate in accelerating the treadmill of economic growth. Schnaiberg and Gould (1994: 160ff.) make the case that grassroots environmental organizations have not been able to confront their opponents successfully because even they have a close attachment to elite aspirations and lifestyles. Meanwhile, Munich Re, the world’s largest re-insurer, noted that in 1998 total losses from storms, floods, droughts and fires for the first eleven months of the year were far ahead of the C$85 billion in losses for the entire decade of the 1980s, even when adjusted for inflation. Commenting on Munich Re’s report, the World Watch Institute said: ‘More and more, there’s a human fingerprint in natural disasters, in that we’re making them more frequent and more intense and we’re also making them more destructive’ (Saturday Star (Toronto), 28 November 1998, p. A2).

2. The actual context of Giddens’s statement is provocative, at least to an anthropologist: ‘The anthropological monograph preserves, in much the same way as a protected relic does, a testament to a way of life to which we can no longer bear witness’ (Beck et al. 1994: 98). Today, ‘anthropology is directly embroiled in the institutional reflexivity of modernity, and anthropology thus becomes indistinguishable from sociology’ (1994: 100). The point here is not to justify anthropology but to contest the notion that there is a global historical two-step: the first step involving ‘from traditional to industrial’, and the second step ‘from industrial to reflexive modernization’.

3. I am indebted to Ian Martin for bringing this discussion to my attention based on his experience as consultant to the Nunavut government.

4. They derived from an increasing realization during the 1990s that the usual mechanism for reducing economic risk from natural disaster, property insurance, was no longer as available and affordable in small island states of the Mediterranean, Caribbean and South Pacific.

5. The report refers to anthropologists such as Maurice Leenhardt, Jean Guiart and André Haudricourt. It notes that while these and others had recorded reasonably well some areas of traditional knowledge, other aspects entirely escaped their interest. But a practical approach to risk reduction required that every opportunity for natural hazard mitigation should be assessed (Dahl 1989).

6. Such knowledge is the hallmark of TEK. The Dene (North Athapascan people who occupy the subarctic land from Manitoba to Alaska) have become great experts on the caribou through sophisticated understanding of temporal recycling processes that enter into caribou migration. Their very social organization can be explained in terms of their knowledge of the cycling of caribou movements over a long period of time (Berkes 1999: 99). What Allen and Hoekstra add to TEK is understanding of the complex feedback relations that recycling engenders together with an understanding of critical constraints to ecological resilence.

7. Recall that in this version of ecological hierarchy, a hierarchy has nothing to do with the concept as used in models of political control. In an ecological hierarchy upper levels constrain lower levels, but they may constrain by doing nothing. A constraint is always related to the time-frames of that which is constrained, so that a time frame for lower levels indicates a higher frequency of recursion. The critical aspect of an upper level context is that the upper level is observed to be spatially larger or more constant over time than the lower level for which it is a context.

8. Anthropologists, for example, have often taken ‘landscape’ as the central ecological criterion. Focal criteria in the ‘landscape level’ may seem obvious and predictable, because they are so tangible and because they have been so well depicted by geographers and naturalists since the nineteenth century. On the other hand, criteria for ecosystem mapping are far less tangible. An ecosystem represents a conceptual map of sequences of temporal events. Those events can be described as transformations of matter and energy travelling along recursive pathways in time, but these criteria are by no means as visual as those of landscape. Hence scaling landscape to ecosystem involves a match of the tangible material features of landscape to the conceptual temporal features of ecosystems, and of the differences in recursive patterning at each level.

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