Oct 2, 2004 - Simon Davis for scanning Figure 1. 6. I do not wish to claim ...... One such enterprise is C.V.Bening, a company run by a young American couple.
SUSTAINABLE ENVIRONMENTS, SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES POTENTIAL DIALOGUES BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGISTS, SCIENTISTS AND MANAGERS
Proceedings of a symposium hosted by The School of Anthropology, Geography and Environmental Studies The University of Melbourne October 2, 2004
Edited by
Monica Minnegal
SAGES Research Paper No. 21 School of anthropology, Geography and Environmental Studies The University of Melbourne Melbourne, Australia
Published by the School of Anthropology, Geography and Environmental Studies, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010 AUSTRALIA
Series Editor: Lisa Palmer
© Monica Minnegal Copyright of papers included in this volume remains with the authors
ISBN 0 7340 3082 7
SUSTAINABLE ENVIRONMENTS, SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES: POTENTIAL DIALOGUES BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGISTS, SCIENTISTS AND MANAGERS
CONTENTS Who is talking, who is listening? Reflections on potential dialogues between anthropologists, scientists and managers Monica Minnegal
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Building an epistemological bridge: coeval integrated practice in studies of human/environmental relationships Sandy Toussaint
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Teaching multidisciplinarity: lessons from an Honours practicum Jane Mulcock, Beverley McNamara & David Trigger
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Heritage, identity and place making: implications and applications for environmental management Jane Harrington
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Management and the model: burning Kakadu Robert Levitus
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Aspects of anthropological engagement with environmental discourse Michael O’Kane
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But I’m just an anthropologist – what can I do about farmers’ problems? Graeme MacRae
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‘Caring hands’ and ‘caring for country’: sustainable resource management encounters between Landcare and Indigenous peoples David Hyndman
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Meaningful differences: dis-integrated management in the Mitchell River catchment Veronica Strang
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Informed consent and mining projects: some problems and a few tentative solutions Martha Macintyre
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Bridges and escalators: metaphorical engagements with non-scientific knowledge in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Colin Filer
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List of contributors
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WHO IS TALKING, WHO IS LISTENING? REFLECTIONS ON POTENTIAL DIALOGUES BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGISTS, SCIENTISTS AND MANAGERS Monica Minnegal SAGES, The University of Melbourne
Managing environments ultimately entails managing the people whose environments they are, and input is now regularly sought from social scientists as well as natural scientists in the design of management plans. Anthropology, with its fundamental interest in the ways that people make sense of their worlds, and in how the meanings they negotiate shape the ways they act in relation to that world, can contribute a perspective crucial to the success of such plans. But this potential remains largely unrealised. It is time to move beyond assertions that, as anthropologists, we have important insights to offer both management and ‘science’, and address the nature of barriers to communicating those insights. The symposium at which the papers in this collection were first presented was organised with that aim in mind. In this introductory paper I outline the themes of the symposium, which sought to address perceived disjunctions in the form of questions asked, the kinds of data collected and the scale of analyses produced by anthropologists and by natural scientists and managers, and to propose ways that these disjunctions might be addressed to enhance the potential for productive dialogue. I then provide an overview of the papers and, finally, reflect on what those papers and the associated discussion reveal about anthropology and anthropologists in an interdisciplinary setting.
Introduction1 “Why do all fishermen lie?” That is how my first conversation with a fisheries biologist at Lakes Entrance began. The ‘scientist’ had just returned from several days at sea, conducting a survey of fish stocks with local fishermen, and as the boat arrived at the wharf where several people had gathered in the hope of garnering the latest gossip we were pointed out to him as ‘the anthropologists’. He came over, introduced himself, then asked the question that had obviously been bothering him: “So tell me, why do all fishermen lie?” The question, of course, was not intended literally. It was expressing, rather, the scientist’s frustration at fishermen’s apparent refusal to accept what seemed to him obvious ‘truths’. Fishermen often express their puzzlement about the actions of others in equally derogatory terms. As I’ve been told more than once, fisheries ‘managers’ may not lie, but they are clearly corrupt; how else to explain decisions that are not in the best interests of the fish stocks they are supposed to be managing and from which they do not directly profit, than by assuming that they are somehow rewarded for those decisions by under-the-table payments. Fisheries ‘scientists’, on the other hand, are not seen as corrupt but, to fishermen, do seem to be blind; while they are clearly knowledgeable about fish that knowledge comes from elsewhere, primarily from books, and they seem unable to recognise that it does not always apply to the particular places that fishermen know so well. This tendency to express frustration by metaphorically denigrating the presumed motives of others seems pervasive. Scientists may not speak of ‘managers’ as corrupt, but do see their decisions as corrupted by 1
The symposium on which this paper reflects was supported, logistically and financially, by the School of Anthropology, Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Melbourne. The efforts of Tanya King, Simone Blair and Peter Dwyer were crucial to its success. But without the contributions of the speakers, both on the day and in responding rapidly to comments by reviewers of their papers, neither the symposium nor this volume would have been possible. I thank them all.
© Monica Minnegal
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political considerations; how else to explain why they ignore the advice the scientists provide. And managers accuse ‘scientists’ of an unwillingness to commit to definitive judgements, and ‘fishermen’ of either unmitigated greed or stupidity; why else would they keep fishing when the harm they are doing to the environment is indisputable and they could make a better living in other ways. While fishermen may accuse some of their own of those same sins, they – like their counterparts among the scientists and managers – reject and resent the negative image that is projected onto them as a class. Anyone who has worked at the interface of science, management and industry will have encountered the often virulent antagonisms generated there. But what intrigued me in that opening foray on the wharf was not the implied accusation about fishermen, or even what had led the scientist to make that generalisation. It was that he thought we, as anthropologists, might have the answer to his question. He is not alone in thinking this. Increasingly, those charged with managing natural environments are realising that this ultimately entails managing the people whose environments they are, and input is now regularly sought from social scientists as well as natural scientists in the design of management plans. Anthropology, with its fundamental interest in the ways that people make sense of their worlds, and in how the meanings they negotiate shape the ways they act in relation to that world, can contribute a perspective crucial to the success of such plans (see, for example, the papers in Sepez and Lazrus 2005). Natural scientists, too, increasingly acknowledge that those whose livelihoods depend on close observation of local conditions, and who have engaged with particular environments over many years, may have something to contribute to understandings of those environments. Again, anthropologists have a crucial role to play in systematising the observations of such people through long-term ethnographic studies (e.g. Ellen et al., 2000; Hunn et al. 2003; Sillitoe 1998). But this potential remains largely unrealised. Though management agencies may pay lip service to the value of social science, and may even specify that anthropologists be included in advisory panels, their input is often seen as a distraction from the main task and thus marginalised.2 It is time, then, to move beyond assertions that anthropologists have important insights to offer both environmental management and science (e.g. Anderson and Berglund 2003; Brosius 1999; Maschia et al. 2003), and address the nature of barriers to communicating those insights. This requires that we apply our anthropological skills to reflect on ourselves as a discipline, and on how we interact with scientists and managers. The symposium at which the papers in this collection were originally presented was organised with that aim in mind. In this introductory paper I reflect, in turn, on what those papers and the associated discussion reveal about anthropology and anthropologists in an interdisciplinary setting.
The symposium Three themes emerged in preliminary discussions for the symposium, and framed the questions posed for discussion. First, anthropologists, scientists and managers frame their questions in rather different ways. Natural scientists tend to stress the need for environmental justice, while anthropologists (and other social scientists) have tended to stress social justice. And while anthropologists are interested in what people think, managers are much more concerned with what they do. But these are differences in emphasis, not 2
Paredes’ (1985) comments about this, nearly two decades ago, still resonate with the experiences of anthropologists today, as expressed in the papers in Sepez and Lazrus (2005) and in this collection.
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contradictory approaches. Can (and should) we re-frame our questions in terms of language and concepts that are more familiar to those with whom we are seeking to communicate? Secondly, the information needs of managers do not mesh well with the research methods of anthropology. The need for rapid assessment of situations often rules out ethnographic research of the kind we generally associate with ‘doing’ anthropology. And the demand of policymakers for conclusions rather than opinions leads to a preference for quantitative data over the kind of qualitative data that anthropology usually generates. Can (and should) we adjust our research practices to meet these management needs? Is it possible to still do ‘anthropology’ within those constraints? Thirdly, there are significant differences in the spatio-temporal scale at which managers of environments, scientists analysing environmental processes, and the people who actually engage with environments (the people anthropologists usually work with) tend to operate. Can we translate the results of our analyses between these scales? The symposium thus sought to address perceived disjunctions in the form of questions asked, the kinds of data collected and the scale of analyses produced by anthropologists and by natural scientists and managers, and to propose ways that these disjunctions might be addressed to enhance our potential for productive dialogue. Participants were also encouraged to draw on their own encounters with scientists and managers to elucidate these issues and possibilities. After all, it is the emphasis on active engagement with others and the associated emergence of an intersubjective understanding – participant observation – that perhaps, more than anything else, distinguishes anthropology as a mode of enquiry and gives anthropological knowledge its particular epistemic character. But anthropology is also characterised by its pursuit of holistic understandings. Intense engagement with people caught up in negotiating, and often contesting, strategies for living with their environments foregrounds the questions they are asking, the knowledge they are seeking to convey, and the scales relevant to them. These dimensions are difficult to disentangle and, arguably, doing so would weaken the holistic perspective that anthropologists seek to establish. Not surprisingly, then, the papers presented at the symposium tended to speak to all three themes in the particular encounters they described. Rather than organising papers by analytical focus, therefore, in this collection they are ordered according to the focus of engagement. Anthropologists are translators, at heart, seeking a language in which to express the experience and understandings of one group of people in ways that makes sense to those with rather different experiences. That audience has usually been our academic peers. When anthropologists are concerned not merely with understanding but with influencing action in the world, however, their audiences are outside the discipline, if not necessarily outside the academy. The question then becomes one of whose understandings we are seeking to translate, and for whom. The collection begins with two papers where the interlocutors are anthropologists and scientists or managers. They ask how the understandings of the anthropological community are to be translated for others; an initial engagement with anthropologists is central to the discussion. These are followed by four papers that focus on the role of anthropologists as translators between local communities, scientists and managers; an engagement with both communities and managers prompts the search for a common conceptual frame within which the two groups can communicate each other’s understandings. The first three see the task as one of translating local perceptions for an audience of scientists and managers so that those perceptions can inform more
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effective policy decisions, while the last sees the task more as one of translating science and management structures for local communities, so that individuals can act more effectively. Three further papers analyse institutional constraints on communication, either across scales or within particular settings. Finally, a last paper deals with the problem of translation itself, particularly between different scales of knowledge production and policy-making, challenging anthropologists to consider how we might translate for ourselves the multiple forms and scales of understanding that comprise environmental discourse in the modern world, and so participate effectively at all those levels.
The papers The papers included in this collection indicate the wide range of engagements by Australasian anthropologists with issues of environmental management. Their scope extends from the local, to the regional, national, international and transnational. They address understandings of indigenous peoples, rural communities, peri-urban communities, small-scale farmers, government and quasi-government institutions, academic anthropologists and scientists. And they deal with issues as diverse as management of water, fire, trees and soil, preservation of heritage, biodiversity and knowledge, promoting development and sustainability. While most papers focus on Australian contexts, there are papers that examine issues in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and in the rarified space of international diplomacy. And they are written by academics, by those working in government organisations, by consultants for industry, community, government and international groups. In the first paper, Sandy Toussaint argues the need to identify ‘epistemological bridges’ between different disciplines, to find a common set of premises and concepts that can frame what at first sight may seem very different foci and forms of knowledge production. Only then, she asserts, can we hope to establish a ‘co-eval integrated approach’ in which the perspectives of social science and natural science can complement each other rather than one always being subsumed in, and subordinated to the other. During her encounters with ecologists and managers in the course of research into the social and cultural use and management of water, she struggled both to explain her own approach as an anthropologist to water as socially and culturally constructed, and to understand the approach of ecologists who regarded water as just one component of the environments they were charged with managing. To find a language that encompasses these subjective and objective orientations, she suggests we step outside the bounds of both ecology and anthropology and turn to modern physics, which embodies ‘a balance between empiricism and philosophy, ... abstract and concrete thinking’. A ‘theory of relativity’ informs both ecological and anthropological enquiry, though the factors that each discipline recognises as defining different observer positions may differ. In this metaphor she finds a way to translate between disciplines, to locate those different factors within a single discursive frame so that all can be seen as relevant to a comprehensive understanding of what ‘water’ is, and how it can be effectively managed.
Jane Mulcock, Beverley McNamara and David Trigger, in the second paper, continue this emphasis on translation between anthropologists and professionals trained in other disciplines as crucial to effective interdisciplinary collaboration. Rather than seeking a meta-language for communication, however, they argue that we need to apply the skills of anthropology itself to the task of translation. By approaching other disciplines as ‘foreign cultures with different epistemologies, value systems and beliefs’ and seeking to understand ‘the different world views that accompany the different languages’, they suggest, anthropologists may better position themselves to engage effectively with those cultures. We must recognise, too, the distinct institutional constraints that shape effective action in the worlds of management
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and policy-making, and respect those constraints if we wish to operate effectively in those contexts. Doing so may be seen as threatening our own disciplinary integrity, but we do as much in all good fieldwork. The paper outlines a practicum that the authors arranged for their advanced anthropology undergraduate students, which entailed a small group of students working as ‘consultants’ for a team of environmentalengineering students charged with documenting and predicting changes in the sustainability of Western Australia. In the process, the anthropology students confronted all the disjunctions identified in the symposium program: the task they were assigned – to produce ‘a single number that indicated the state of social capital in WA’ – made little sense from an anthropological perspective; the requirement that they quantify what seemed essentially qualitative, and that the number be produced within tight time constraints, challenged their understandings of methodology; and the scale of the final analysis, characterising an abstract entity rather than the perceptions of particular people, was foreign to their previous experience. But in engaging with the task, and in negotiating expectations with their ‘employers’, the students (and their supervisors) were obliged to reflect on their assumptions about different disciplinary perspectives, including their own. This, the authors argue, is crucial if effective dialogue and interdisciplinary collaboration is to be achieved. While Toussaint argues the need for an epistemic meta-language, and Mulcock et al. the need for intersubjectivity achieved through engagement, Jane Harrington suggests that dialogue requires dissolving the ontological dichotomy that underlies the separation of natural and social science. Her paper illustrates how those charged with managing ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ heritage, respectively, are increasingly confronted by a blurring of boundaries as local communities articulate the ‘cultural’ value they accord to practical engagement with ‘natural’ places. While this has led to a rethinking of the nature/culture dichotomy by heritage managers, the theoretical shift has not been reflected in management policy and practice, which remain focussed on identifying ‘things’ to be preserved. Drawing on her own study of residents of Magnetic Island, in Queensland, Harrington shows that anthropologists have the methods and theories to explore the ‘experiential interaction’ that embeds people in places. By translating these local relationships, making their meaning accessible to managers, anthropology can contribute to management practice that engages with ‘community attachments, values and concerns in a proactive, timely and responsible way’ but also has ‘the philosophical flexibility to deal with conflicting determinations of value’. But Harrington warns, too, that an emphasis on ‘stasis and absolutism’, on identification of things rather than investigation of meanings, continues to characterise heritage assessment and management processes. It is this philosophy that constrains anthropological input and that anthropologists must seek to shift if ‘broader disciplinary applications’ and ‘mutually desirable advances and outcomes’ are to be possible. Anthropologists, as Harrington shows, are not the only people seeking better communication with, and a better hearing from, scientists and managers. Communities whose engagements with local environments are impacted by the policies that managers produce, often on the basis of advice from scientists, seek to have their knowledge included in decision processes. Scientists and managers would often welcome such input, but encounter difficulties in interpreting what they are being told. Robert Levitus demonstrates that these encounters may be framed less by a fundamental difference in ontological understandings than by the different logics that inform action. By identifying the source of apparent disagreement, and explicating this in terms that both groups can understand, new possibilities may emerge for articulating and resolving disputes. The design of burning regimes in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory of Australia is one domain in which managers have turned to models of local indigenous knowledge for guidance. But burning practices of Parks staff and local indigenous people have remained an area of management characterised by
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dispute as much as complementarity. Levitus shows that dispute arises largely because the research-based ethos of Parks staff seeks to define when one should burn, while the activities of indigenous people are framed by when they can burn. Scientists and managers, then, have analysed what local people do, and tried to formalise that pattern, but failed to pay attention to the logic and motives that informed those actions. As a consequence, they have missed the ‘adaptive’ aspects of local practice, and the ways these are changing as the context of action changes. The two groups share a common model of the way fire impacts local landscapes, but the activities based on that model differ because underlying motivations differ. By locating both positions with a single ‘historical-ecological frame’, thus clarifying the relationship between them, ethnography can enhance mutual understanding and ‘indicate points for ‘strategic intervention’. The paper by Michael O’Kane similarly presents the role of anthropology as that of translator, facilitating dialogue between people whose discourses are grounded in very different epistemological and ontological understandings and logics. Anthropological methods, O’Kane suggests, may serve as a ‘conduit’ providing a ‘window of understanding between conflicting world views’, and thus establish the basis for a conversation in which statements emerging from those different views can be given ‘equal discursive weight’. Anthropological mediation was undoubtedly important in the case that illustrates the paper, the negotiation of a strategy for re-channelling the Todd River where it runs through Alice Springs in the Northern Territory of Australia. Here two distinct models of land management – one predicated on engagement with a meaningful landscape, the other grounded in detached analysis and manipulation of physical processes – were rendered mutually intelligible by the intervention of an anthropologist. The outcome was a plan that met the specifications of both management regimes, and of which all parties to the negotiations were justifiably proud. The model that O’Kane presents, of competing environmental discourses that anthropology can analyse and help to reconcile, is clearly valuable. In the papers by Harrington, Levitus and O’Kane it seems that the anthropologist’s primary contribution was to articulate the understandings of local people, embedded in experiential connections to place, so that the Heritage managers, or Parks staff, or council engineers might appreciate that ‘their actions would impact on the cultural as well as the physical aspects of the landscape’. Graeme MacRae, in contrast, examines the role anthropologists might play in facilitating the flow of information in the other direction. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic research in Bali, Indonesia, he traces the patterns of ‘(dis)articulation’ between local farmers, agricultural scientists, government departments, foreign aid agencies, nongovernment organisations, and expatriates that frame initiatives in environmental management and development. Farming, and farmers, have become increasingly marginalised ‘economically, culturally and ecologically’ in the tourism-dominated southern part of the island. As farmers struggle to respond to this marginalisation, and find sustainable solutions, they are confronted by ‘deficits of knowledge and gaps of communication’ that constrain their ability to engage with an increasingly globalised, capitalist and technology-driven system. MacRae suggests that an anthropologist ‘with little expertise in farming but some general knowledge of Balinese society and culture’ can do much to address these deficits and gaps, by employing his or her linguistic and cultural experience and social networks to negotiate strategic connections between local people and relevant experts in agriculture, marketing and administration. The role of anthropologist, in MacRae’s view, may best be understood as that of ‘initiator or catalyst’ for exchanges of information between local people, scientists and managers, rather than as ‘translator’.
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David Hyndman’s paper, too, emphasises the role of anthropologists in facilitating communication. Whereas Harrington focuses on mediation of diverse ontological understandings, however, and O’Kane on translation of potentially divergent discourses, Hyndman argues that anthropologists can most usefully contribute by interpreting between management institutions that operate at different social and spatial scales. The paper reviews interactions between Australian indigenous people and the National Landcare Program, highlighting the ways that different organisational scales and understandings of responsibility may inhibit effective collaboration. The indigenous ‘caring for country’ ethos is grounded in active engagement with land, while according the right to speak for land and make decisions about future management to traditional owners. This ‘coexistence of traditional/custodial and residential/locational title interests’ itself necessitates negotiation between different scales of organisation. The NLP ‘caring hands’ ethos further complicates matters by its focus on organising programs at national and regional scales. A disjunction between regions defined by local communities in social and cultural terms, and those defined by government institutions in biophysical terms adds yet another layer of complexity. Hyndman points to the role that ‘multi-sited ethnography’ by anthropologists can play in comprehending the multiple scales that frame management of the Australian landscape, facilitating their effective articulation and integration. Institutional dynamics are also focal to the paper by Veronica Strang. Rather than examining the structural articulation of institutions operating at different scales, however, she focuses on the discourses and activities of one particular management organisation to show how these are defined and limited by the composition of the group and by its decision-making processes. Drawing on long term ethnographic research in the Mitchell River area in far north Queensland, Strang outlines an extraordinarily complex situation of multiple stakeholders, multiple perspectives, intersecting needs and wants and on-going problems associated with land (and water) management. The establishment of a Catchment Management Group for the watershed held promise of an integrated approach to achieving social and environmental sustainability in the region, but the CMG’s focus on technical concerns and valorising of ‘practical knowledge’ has pushed social issues firmly into the background. Local stakeholders, it seems, have colluded in this, choosing to ‘paste over’ underlying social and political tensions in order to maintain fragile working relationships. In teasing apart these dynamics, Strang seeks to understand how anthropology, and social science more generally, has been marginalised in supposedly integrative and interdisciplinary management structures. Rectifying this, she suggests, requires that social scientists actively seek inclusion, initiating communication with natural scientists, managers and local communities that do not shy away from thorny political issues and that highlight the benefits of locating ‘specialised ecological analyses in a larger social context’.
Martha Macintyre, too, is concerned with institutional constraints on effective communication. Rather than analysing the institutional structures that frame the decisions of managers, however, she addresses the problems that may arise for managers when insufficient attention is paid to social and political tensions within the communities with whom they are negotiating, and to the local institutions that govern participation in those negotiations. Her paper examines the complexities entailed in procuring ‘informed consent’ for large-scale mining projects in Papua New Guinea. While negotiations may overtly be about management of environmental impacts, deciding who has the authority to consent (or refuse consent) to proposed developments renders the negotiations as much about social justice as environmental justice. A failure to recognise the subtleties of local tenure systems, and consequent marginalisation of some categories of stakeholders in the process of negotiating consent, can result in significant alterations to local power relations. The impact of this marginalisation on the social and economic position of some segments of the
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community – particularly women, non-resident land-owners and long-term residents without rights to land – may be at least as great as that caused by environmental effects of the mine itself. As Macintyre notes, these marginalised stakeholders are often at the forefront of later opposition to mining agreements. Closer attention to local dynamics, and to appropriate ways of conveying information about potential impacts of the mine on, and to, all stakeholders is crucial to achieving outcomes that are both just and sustainable. But this will require development of clear ‘principles, processes and responsibilities’ as well as nuanced social and cultural research. The last paper, by Colin Filer, is perhaps the most ambitious in scope, dealing not with local, regional or even national discourses and institutions but with those emerging at the global scale. Filer reflects on attempts by ecologists at a meeting of the Sub-Global Working Group of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment to grapple with the relationship between local and indigenous knowledge and their own abstract visions of biodiversity. In doing so, he proposes that what has usually been characterised as ‘environmental’ knowledge might better be seen as ‘political’ knowledge, concerned with practical action and staking claims in society at different scales. He questions, too, whether the building of epistemological bridges, and resistance to such bridge-building, should not also be viewed as political projects. These observations are relevant to much that is discussed in the other papers in the collection, whether they concern dialogues between anthropologists and scientists or managers, or the dialogues between local communities, scientists and managers that anthropologists mediate. More generally, as I read his paper, Filer is asking anthropologists to reflect on the problem of translation itself, particularly between different scales of knowledge production and policy-making, challenging us to consider how we might translate for ourselves the multiple forms and scales of understanding that comprise environmental discourse in the modern world, and so participate effectively at all those levels.
Reflections Anthropologists, as the papers in this collection demonstrate, are increasingly working with people from other disciplinary backgrounds within and beyond the academic setting. The reported collaborations have, in some cases, been very effective. Yet a mood of frustration pervades many of the papers, a sense that we are still not being heard, our insights repressed, even excluded from consideration. If only we could find a way to clearly explain the nature and value of what we have to contribute, several papers imply, those contributions would be welcomed. And so the papers outline the kinds of things we could tell scientists and managers, and emphasise why those things matter, why they should be heard. But dialogue entails talking with others, not to them. There is much about dialogue in the papers, but the focus rapidly slips from dialogues between anthropologists, scientists and managers, to dialogue between local communities, scientists and managers – dialogues that anthropologists might mediate but in which they do not participate other than as translators. The implicit identification of anthropologists with local communities is made explicit in Strang’s paper; anthropological knowledge tends to be holistic and experiential, generated through and embedded in local engagements with place and people, and anthropologists are politically ‘tainted’ by their perceived role as advocates for local groups in negotiations with impersonal institutions. But this merely underlines the validity of Filer’s suggestion that environmental knowledge always has a political aspect, and his conclusion that anthropologists must ‘abandon the pretence that we specialize in the analysis of things which are said and done at the “local local” scale, and have nothing special to say about things which are said and done at “higher” scales’.
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The role of anthropologists in facilitating communication between heritage managers and local communities, between Parks staff, or council engineers and indigenous people, between farmers and development agencies is valuable. Scientists and managers are not unaware of the importance of the conversations we facilitate. They increasingly recognise that creating sustainable environments and communities requires that the actions of people be managed, not just those of fish, or cattle, or water, or soil – and that managing people requires an understanding of what moves them, analogous to studies of what moves those cattle or fish or water or soil. But these are not ‘our’ conversations. If we are to move beyond translation, to succeed in establishing dialogue between anthropologists, scientists and managers, we need to go beyond identifying what anthropologists could tell them. We need to problematise how we talk, and not just what we talk about. The reflexive turn in anthropology during the 1980s challenged us to consider how we represent the subjects and objects of our research, to recognise the dialogic character of knowledge production, and to deconstruct the tropes that frame our interpretations. And yet it seems we seldom bring these lessons to bear on our attempts to communicate with those from other disciplines within our own society. Some papers in this collection do explicitly encourage such reflection. This is a start. But self-reflection, alone, is not enough. Perhaps it is time to bring others into the discussion, to initiate dialogue by inviting scientists and managers to participate in the next symposium, and pull us up when we wax lyrical about the value of what we have to say. As Filer concludes, we need to stop ‘pretending that the purity of our own brand of scientific knowledge will have its own distinctive impact on the policy process if we just keep talking to each other’.
References Anderson, D.G. and E. Berglund (eds) 2003. Ethnographies of conservation: environments and the distribution of privilege. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Brosius, P.J. 1999. Analyses and interventions: anthropological engagements with environmentalism. Current Anthropology 40: 278-309. Ellen, R.F., P. Parkes and A. Bicker (eds) 2000. Indigenous environmental knowledge and its transformations: critical anthropological perspectives. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic. Maschia, M.B., J.P. Brosius, T.A. Dobson, B.C. Forbes, L. Horowitz, M.A. McKean and N.J. Turner 2003. Editorial: Conservation and the social sciences. Conservation Biology 17(3): 649-650. Hunn, E.S., D.R. Johnson, P.N. Russell and T.F. Thornton 2003. Huna Tlingit traditional environmental knowledge and the management of a ‘wilderness park’. Current Anthropology 44: 79-103. Paredes, J.A. 1985. "Any comments on the sociology section, Tony?": committee work as applied anthropology in fishery management. Human Organization 44: 177186. Sepez, J. and H. Lazrus (eds) 2005. Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Federal natural resource management agencies. Special issue, Practicing Anthropology 27 (1). Sillitoe, P. 1998. The development of Indigenous knowledge; a new applied anthropology. Current Anthropology 39: 223-252.
BUILDING AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL BRIDGE: COEVAL INTEGRATED PRACTICE IN STUDIES OF HUMAN/ENVIRONMENTAL RELATIONSHIPS Sandy Toussaint University of Western Australia
Complex lines of inquiry that disturb broad assumptions about how people interact with their cultural environments are increasingly explored in the humanities and social sciences. At the same time, contributions from these fields are less well-known than research in the physical and natural sciences. If incremental environmental renewal and sustainability are to be accomplished for future generations and landscapes, it seems likely that a coeval integrated approach might present a likely research framework for comprehensive rapprochement. By way of a focus on water, this paper contemplates how an ‘epistemological bridge’ might ensure a productive cross-disciplinary framework in studies of human/environmental relationships.
Introduction In an increasingly global and interconnected world, it is crucial to investigate the social and cultural relevance of how different groups of people actively cause and respond to environmental change, and how prepared women, men and children are to change existing behaviours.1 Anthropologists have written for many years about ways to ensure that attention to human cultures is automatically included (rather than ‘tacked on’ at a later stage) in research design in studies of the environment and related projects. But, as Kay Milton (1994: 213) argues, there is still a long way to go in persuading those outside the discipline of the intrinsic value of cultural work. While a huge body of ethnographic material on the significance of culture as a tool of analysis exists, anthropological research is not always useful, interesting or accessible for nonanthropologists, such as environmental scientists, engineers, geologists, ecologists, and so on. Yet we continue to claim that that such work matters.2 Anthropology’s potential as a discipline of the particular as well as one that has the ability to complement other disciplines, means that its raison d’etre often needs to be made explicit. I was reminded of this point recently during an interview about water issues that I conducted with an Environmental Manager of a Kimberley office of Conservation and Land Management (or CALM, a Western Australian Government agency). At the end of the interview, he made the following comment: I’ve met a few anthropologists in my time. You’re a pretty interesting group of people. But I just don’t get it. I just don’t get what you’re all on about.
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The paper on which this article is based was first presented at the ‘Sustainable Communities, Sustainable Environments’ Symposium at Melbourne University in October 2004. I would like to thank Symposium Convenor, Monica Minnegal, and an anonymous reviewer for insightful and encouraging comments on an earlier draft. 2 Examples from anthropology include Pottier (1993), Toussaint and Taylor (1999), and Anderson and Berglund (2003). See also Thompson and Warburton (1985) who, as systems analysts and environmentalists, made explicit almost twenty years ago that environmental research without attention to human agency, social action and cultural life in the Himalayas resulted in a problematic research process and unreliable results. Arguing that a comprehensive examination of the Nepalese ‘people-and-resources’ system was required to explain human/habitat interactions, they reveal that ‘part of a process that is caused by human agency [in their case, de-forestation] can only be altered by altering human behaviour’ (p.7).
© Sandy Toussaint
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I later realised that I ‘didn’t get’ his point of view either. For example, when I asked about management of the relationship between land and water in the Kimberley, he replied: CALM looks after the management of national parks and wildlife, end of story. It’s got nothing to do with water. Our job is big enough without having to be worried about water. That’s up to others.
As an anthropologist, the claim that water could be so easily distinguished from the environment generated a number of concerns. The exchange also helped to crystallise the divergent understandings we both held, and inspired a more concentrated search for the means to explain cross-disciplinary contributions in the diverse field of human/environment relationships. How anthropologists and non-anthropologists might more constructively work together is thus the focus and the aspiration of this article.
Anthropology’s potential and its complexity Cross-disciplinary research that includes anthropology and cognate disciplines has increased during the past decade, in part as a result of funding priorities but also because of broader environmental concerns and an awareness of culture. While there is great potential for constructive rapprochement between certain disciplines, in some cases misunderstandings emerge and ethical, methodological and conceptual problems arise.3 There are many differences among and between academic and practising anthropologists that reveal not only the view that anthropology sits mid-way between the humanities and the sciences, but also the range of sub-fields within the discipline. These, in turn, reflect the diversity of communities among whom anthropologists work, and the spectrum of topics with which they are engaged. Different emphases and methods are undoubtedly found in other disciplines. But anthropology’s potential as a discipline of the particular as well as one that has the potential to complement other disciplines, means that the epistemological differences – or the premises on which knowledge is based and how it is reproduced over time – within anthropology often need to be made transparent. This is especially so in studies on human/environment relations where it is evident that there are many differences among human populations and the cultural habitats within which such populations live and work.4
Bridge-building possibilities While it is undoubtedly the case that caution should be exercised to ensure that a dilution of disciplinary expertise is avoided, it is also plain that productive crossdisciplinary engagement on projects focused on the natural and built environment is more likely if research includes substantive attention to human activities, ideas, beliefs and behaviours. This is because they are not mutually exclusive fields of interest and inquiry; rather they are in a constantly changing and mutually transforming relationship with each other. In a sense, the need to identify human cultures as part of the environmental and sustainable research equation has become progressively visible and public, although it would be naïve to suggest that such a need has not existed before. So how can anthropologists make plain the epistemological importance of including people and their cultures in studies of the environment? And how can 3
For example, during a cross-disciplinary project with an archaeologist, it became clear that whereas my concern was on the human community and relationships with the environment, the archaeologist’s was focused solely on the environment. A range of practical and ethical problems emerged as a result of our contrasting experiences and research emphases. 4 Tsing (2002), in a cogent discussion on globalisation which situates environmental studies as project example, makes the point that environments, like populations, anthropologists and histories, differ.
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anthropologists convey the epistemological importance of demonstrating that environments, which clearly vary geologically, geographically, and so on, also vary culturally? How can the coeval (or equally co-present) contribution of anthropology to studies on landscapes and broader environmental sustainability be seen as adding value to a suite of projects devoted to topics of significance to all humankind and other life forms? Questions such as these have been regularly explored by anthropologists in the hope that the products of our cultural work will be used alongside research from the physical and natural sciences. This has not yet occurred in any substantive way. But, in part as a result of my exchange with the environmental manager from CALM, the possibility that it both could and should led me to examine texts and ideas outside my own discipline. The aim became to construct what might be called an ‘epistemological bridge’ or a constructive way to exchange knowledge-based premises and research ideas between/among disciplines. In other words, the concern was to find a discipline outside anthropology, one that would help to translate familiar concepts and ideas from one discipline to another. The external or bridge discipline of interest was found in modern physics, an interest fostered through some very productive and ongoing conversations with colleagues in physics and texts such as Zukav’s (1990) The Dancing Wu Li Masters: an overview of modern physics.5 One of the inviting qualities of Zukav’s work was that he writes for both scholars and non-scholars in the field of physics without diminishing the discipline’s integrity or expertise.6 Modern physics embodies a balance between empiricism and philosophy, as well as abstract and concrete thinking. It is both objective and subjective and therefore includes a range of qualities clearly helpful with regard to conceptualising coeval integrated practice, especially as a means to explore ways in which seemingly divergent disciplines might productively coexist. In order to explain my meaning here, I turn to a standard example from physics. My concern is to show how theories of relativity are relevant to both anthropological and non-anthropological ideas, methods and practices: an interest in relativity is something commonly shared. Figure 1 below shows a train with four observers watching its passage as lightning strikes one of its moving carriages. A key point is that each observer is standing at a different distance from the train and therefore sees the lightning strike at a different moment in time.7 In other words, the perceptions of each observer to the impact of lightning are entirely dependent on their position, such as their place, time and distance from the moving train and their ability to see the lightning strike. Thus, their perceptions are both relative and contextual. This form of analysis clearly illustrates the problem of absolute or singular interpretation. It also shares some resonance with anthropology’s interest in examining things from different points of view: an observer’s interpretation and representation of an actual or symbolic event depends on where that observer is positioned. Unlike a
5
I am indebted to geophysicist Lucien de Rooy for introducing me to the study of modern physics, and to Simon Davis for scanning Figure 1. 6
I do not wish to claim extensive knowledge of modern physics (just as an anthropologist would be uncomfortable about a non-anthropologist claiming knowledge of anthropology because she or he has developed an interest in human cultures). My aim is to highlight the value of investigating another discipline’s qualities in seeking an ‘epistemological bridge’. 7 Serway’s diagram does not pay attention to social, cultural and generational indicators that would be of interest to anthropologists. It is clearly the case that information on these qualitative differences would extend the analysis further.
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Figure 1 Observer responses to a moving train (from Serway 1990: 1112)
physicist, however, an anthropologist would argue that such an interpretation could only be fully understood by analysis of observer culture and environment. But the premise remains similar. Situated within paradigms and models embedded in, and familiar to, the natural, physical and environmental sciences, the moving train example is capable of crossing several disciplinary boundaries. Comparing theories of relativity from one discipline to another has also helped me to explain to persons from these disciplines the value of undertaking research on the anthropology of water.8
Water, not trains and lightning Water is a resource that is obviously central to the survival of humans and all living things. While universal at one level, there is considerable variation in the beliefs, practices, economies, policies and laws associated with water, a substance that can also cause death, for instance as a carrier of water-borne disease. Put differently, how diverse groups of women, men and children conceptualise water often varies. Disputes over water’s abundance, scarcity, pollution or non-existence, perceptions of re-cycled water, religious explanations of water’s origin, and distinctions among salt, fresh and desalinated water, all reveal a range of ways in which human populations, alongside a diversity of water sources, need to be examined (Toussaint 2004). Sources of water vary from freshwater rivers, to salt-water oceans, to rainfall and to bottled, irrigated, chlorinated, polluted and underground water. People’s identity, knowledge and life-style also vary. They are influenced by complex and often intersecting qualities dependent on age, class, religion, gender and ethnicity. Like the sources of water that give humans and other species life, they cannot be treated as homogenous categories. They are not always the same; they often differ. One of the ways this difference can be contextually explained is by reference to theories of relativity.9
Conclusions The emphasis that anthropologists place on recording and understanding the human condition, interpreting cultures of difference, examining multiple relationships to lands and waters, and integrating complex bodies of theory, are clearly disciplinary strengths. How a change in the weather or a climatic event such as a drought, cyclone or flood 8
See http://www.anthropology.arts.uwa.edu.au/home/research/under_water for an outline of an Australian Research Council funded research project grant awarded to Veronica Strang and I in 2003. Titled ‘Under Water: a comparative ethnographic analysis on water and resource management in Queensland and Western Australia’, the work concentrates on the social and cultural use and management of water in four contrasting locations. 9 A few examples might help to illuminate my meaning here. A mining engineer at a north Australian worksite, a market gardener in outer Melbourne, a dairy farmer in rural Queensland and a fisher or horticulturalist in south-west Western Australia, are likely to conceptualise and use water in very different ways.
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become incorporated into the lived experience and cultural memory of individuals and communities may help to develop water-related policies and strategies if or when, for instance, such events re-occur. At other moments in time, documenting and explaining multiple responses to water restrictions or the use of re-cycled water may help to predict how successful the introduction of water treatment systems may be. The need to explain anthropology’s disciplinary strengths to researchers from other disciplines has far from diminished. Finding a means to translate and make meaningful this message would seem to be the first grid of the epistemological bridge that has to be crossed.
References Anderson, D.G. and E. Berglund (eds) 2003. Ethnographies of Conservation: Environments and the Distribution of Privilege. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Milton, K. 1994. Environmentalism and Cultural Theory: Exploring the Role of Anthropology in Environmental Discourse. London: Routledge. Pottier, J. (ed.) 1993. Practising Development: Social Science Perspectives. London: Routledge. Serway, R.A. 1990. Physics for Scientists and Engineers with Modern Physics. Philadelphia: Saunders Golden Sunburst Series. Thompson, M. and M. Warburton 1985. Decision making under contradictory certainties: how to save the Himalayas when you can’t find out what’s wrong with them. Journal of Applied Systems Analysis 12: 3-34. Toussaint, S. 2004. ‘The Anthropology of Water’, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio National’s Ockham’s Razor, broadcast on 2 May, 2004 http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s1097540htm Toussaint, S. and J. Taylor (eds) 1999. Applied Anthropology in Australasia. Nedlands: The University of Western Australia Press. Tsing, A. 2002. ‘The global situation’. In The Anthropology of Globalization, edited by J. Inda and R. Rosaldo, pp. 327-60. Oxford: Blackwells. Zukav, G. 1990. The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of Modern Physics. Toronto: Bantam Books.
TEACHING MULTIDISCIPLINARITY: LESSONS FROM AN HONOURS PRACTICUM Jane Mulcock, Beverley McNamara and David Trigger Anthropology and Sociology The University of Western Australia
This paper reports on the authors’ experiences of preparing students to work in applied settings through practicums that we first introduced to anthropology honours students in 2004. It focuses on lessons learned about the value of providing students with the opportunity to apply their anthropological knowledge and skills outside of their home discipline. The major issues addressed relate to the ability to initiate and maintain dialogues across disciplines, the importance of training in quantitative research methods, and the realities of working with timelines and intellectual frameworks set by professionals in other fields. We argue that if anthropology is to increase its relevance in Australian society by having a voice in growing areas of multidisciplinary research, such as environmental policy and management, we need to equip our graduate students, intellectually and practically, to compete successfully in a marketplace that values the logics of science and economics. While anthropologists working in such settings need a strong sense of disciplinary identity as a basis for productive engagement with other disciplines, they clearly belong to one discipline amongst many. With this in mind we propose that there is a need for undergraduate students to learn what it means to be an anthropologist in a multidisciplinary world.
Introduction Communication across disciplinary divides, while it is at times vexed, is clearly crucial (Bauer 1990, Bruhn 2000, Wear 1999). Effective cross-disciplinary communication is one of the key challenges associated with conducting productive dialogues between anthropologists and potential employers and collaborators such as scientists and policy-makers. Given that this challenge is likely to be central to the workplace requirements of future graduates, we consider such preparation essential at undergraduate level (cf. Golde and Gallagher 1999). Competence and confidence in multidisciplinary settings is especially relevant for graduates seeking future employment in areas such as environmental and medical anthropology, and native title. In reporting on our experiences and challenges in introducing a practicum in the honours year, we focus on the value of providing students with exposure to the cultures and languages of scientists, policy makers and lawyers. The aim of the practicum was to apply anthropological knowledge and skills in a project which required the development of effective communication strategies in multidisciplinary settings. Effective cross-disciplinary communication clearly requires a good understanding of, and healthy respect for, other epistemologies and methodologies. It is most important to recognise the different philosophies, expectations, agendas and beliefs of the groups we work with, while simultaneously having a very clear understanding of our own disciplinary world views (Redclift 1998). However, in our student practicum this was not straightforward and we found that the students’ challenges became our challenges as teachers as they became aware of the remarkable gaps between their own anthropological world view and the world views of other disciplines. The realities of working with tight timelines, additional operative constraints, and the intellectual and methodological frameworks set by professionals in other fields proved difficult for the students as they tried, for the first time, to translate
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what they knew of anthropological methodologies into very different research settings. However, if anthropology is to increase its relevance in Australia by having a voice in growing areas of multidisciplinary research we need to overcome these barriers and equip graduate students, intellectually and practically, to compete successfully in a marketplace that values the logics of science, economics and law. We suggest that these outcomes can be best achieved by providing students with practicum experience as part of their undergraduate degree. Valuable opportunities may be lost and our own disciplinary integrity may be compromised if anthropology graduates are inadequately prepared to face the challenges of working in contemporary research settings.
Introducing the practicum Whereas anthropological insights and skills have been utilized extensively in the areas of native title and cultural heritage, the potential to apply our disciplinary strengths in areas of environmental- and health-related decision making and planning is largely unrealised. This can be explained, at least partly, by the barriers to successfully communicating anthropological insights along with a general lack of appropriate skills to work effectively in multidisciplinary settings. In Australia, the latter might be attributed to the overwhelming predominance of cultural anthropology and thus, qualitative research methods – to the almost total exclusion of other subfields that may be more methodologically compatible with the physical and biological sciences.1 Our aim in the practicum was to extend this somewhat limited focus and to provide the 23 honours students with an opportunity to refine their communication and methodological skills in one of three multidisciplinary settings. Two of these (the environmental and the medical anthropology practicums) involved team-based practical exercises, while the third (the native title practicum) involved individual placements. Although all three groups of students had to produce reports for the organisations or groups that they worked with, the emphasis, from our perspective, was very much on the process. We therefore asked the students to submit, as part of the formal assessment for the unit, a written reflection on their practicum experience including discussion of what they found difficult and what they felt they had learned about interdisciplinary collaboration. The practicum was introduced in response to consistent feedback from students and employers that Western Australian anthropology graduates were insufficiently prepared for the workforce. Although there are units in applied anthropology and social research methods in the undergraduate curriculum in anthropology and sociology at The University of Western Australia, they are offered only every second year and are neither core units nor prerequisites for honours enrolment. While these units have included practical components, such training is labour intensive for teaching staff and raises logistic as well as ethical and methodological concerns. Nevertheless, a strong case can be made that we are neglecting the needs of students by not sufficiently preparing them for future workplace challenges.2
1
This may help to explain the comparative success of multi-disciplinary collaboration in North America where a four-field approach is still taught (i.e. physical or biological anthropology, archaeology, linguistics and cultural anthropology). American anthropology students are likely to have greater familiarity with quantitative research methodologies than are Australian anthropology students. 2 While we are aware of other anthropology departments, such as those at Adelaide, Macquarie, and James Cook Universities, that offer honours and undergraduate units with fieldwork components, the only other program we know of that gives students the opportunity to apply their knowledge and skills in a workplace situation was set up in 1998 by Dr Lesley Jolly at the University of Queensland. This involved students spending time with non-government organisations, government departments, the state library and the Queensland Museum (Jolly, Personal Communication, 01/08/04).
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In developing the practicums we wished the students to think about and be able to translate and interpret between (and within) particular cultural settings. Anthropologists working in applied contexts must be prepared to communicate the value of anthropological concepts in ways that are meaningful to target audiences, just as they attempt to communicate meaningfully across settings when producing ethnographic accounts for academic or other readerships. We also anticipated that the students should tackle the notion of cultural relativism. The applied anthropologist’s role in a multidisciplinary team is not only to gather data on the topic being researched, but also to develop an understanding of the disciplinary backgrounds of the other researchers with whom he or she engages. To ‘suspend disbelief’ (Fernandez 1990) may be necessary in order to value what other disciplines bring to the problem or issue at hand. The learning, we believed, should also be an embodied experience (Kolb 1984, Warren 1997), as the challenges of interpersonal negotiation and confrontation are best played out in a real and memorable sense. In each of the three practicums, students were required to communicate with and report to people from quite different professional backgrounds. This exercise raised similar problems for all three groups of students, suggesting that this is indeed an area of development that needs greater attention in our undergraduate degree. For the purposes of this paper, we now focus on the environmental anthropology practicum, while occasionally contrasting, or comparing with, the medical anthropology and native title practicums.
The Environmental Practicum The need for multi-faceted research on a wide range of environmental issues (most of which are related in some way to human beliefs, values and practices) makes this an important area for multidisciplinary approaches (Daily and Erhlich 1999, Redclift 1998, Redman 1999). Anthropologists in North America and Europe are increasingly called upon to take a role in multidisciplinary teams working on environmental problems. With this in mind, a practicum was developed that provided Western Australian anthropology students with an environmentally-focused client group – the class of final-year environmental engineering students from UWA’s Centre for Water Research (CWR). Over a four week period the anthropology students worked to refine an aspect of the engineering students’ broader project. The engineering students were charged with the extremely ambitious task of developing an index for measuring sustainability in Western Australia with the aim of documenting and predicting changes in the sustainability of social, environmental and economic systems across the State. The project was conducted across nine months by a team of four student managers (including one in the role of CEO) who had to design a research program to be implemented by the rest of their class. The final product was to be a collection of representative numerical data that could be depicted on a single graph which would show the current level of sustainability in Western Australia. The anthropology students were invited to participate as ‘expert consultants’ and were given the task of measuring social capital3 as a component of the ‘social system’ that had already been defined by the CWR student managers. The initial brief provided by the managers required that the anthropology students produce a single number that indicated the state of social capital in WA – a request that made little sense from an 3
After considerable research and discussion the anthropology consultancy team defined social capital as ‘the resource that inheres in the structure of social relationships which can be used by actors, whether individuals or communities, in achieving their desired outcomes.’ (Blake et al. 2004: 4). The CWR team identified a high level of social capital as an important component of an environmentally, economically and socially sustainable community, an assumption that the anthropology team challenged by presenting examples of instances where high levels of social capital had negative impacts on community life.
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anthropological perspective. After some negotiation the two student groups agreed that the anthropology students should take a step back and rather than providing an index number, suggest an acceptable definition of social capital, identify some of its main components and come up with suggestions for quantitative ‘indicators’ that might be used to effectively measure social capital in WA. The anthropology students were also asked to identify potential methodologies for gathering such data and to present this information to the environmental engineering team in a five to ten page report.4
Student Feedback Producing what the CWR students referred to as ‘indicators’, representative social factors that could be quantitatively measured in order to make an assessment about the level of social capital present in Western Australia, provoked considerable angst among the anthropology students. This anxiety was compounded by the knowledge that the final index would not only be publicly available, but would actually be trialed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (CWR managers, personal communication). It could potentially have real implications for real people and each of the students would have their names associated with it. In a not dissimilar way the other two practicum groups worked on projects with real consequences and with very real responsibilities.5 The students’ level of learning and the intense emotions that accompanied it meant that they were eager to provide feedback. We were also pleased to receive their responses, particularly given that the practicum was experimental, and we wished to refine it for future years. Our analysis here is based upon three sources of feedback: (1) students provided a reflective essay where they analysed their own performance and discussed insights they gained from working across disciplines; (2) 21 of the 23 students provided feedback on the unit as a whole through short ‘SPOT’6 questionnaires; and (3) short debriefing interviews were conducted with each of the participants in the environmental practicum. Each of the students identified a consistent set of challenges in the five areas they were prompted to reflect upon. The first of these related to the tensions that arose across the qualitative/quantitative methodological divide. Several students specifically reflected on their own biases against quantitative research methodologies. For some this was a surprise given that they believed they had been trained to take a relativist stance towards other ways of knowing. Two students felt, in fact, that the engineers had been more open to qualitative approaches than the anthropologists had been to quantitative methodologies.7 Secondly, the students reflected upon cross-disciplinary communication. The CWR management team met several times with the anthropology ‘consultants’ and both met once with a larger sub-section of the environmental engineering team. This latter meeting, although tense at points, was well managed and productive, at least in terms of the process of real-life negotiation and communication that we were attempt4
True to their form of valuing text over numbers, the anthropology students finally produced an impressive 24 page report that included a considerable, but measured, critique of the CWR desire to quantify social capital across the state of WA. 5 The medical practicum was an intensive one week field placement, an evaluation of a rural medical school student placement initiative. The native title practicum saw students in individual placements, some with fieldwork components and all with specific responsibilities. 6 Student Perceptions of Teaching questionnaires are routinely administered by the university. 7 Both the environmental and the medical practicums involved working with client groups who worked predominantly within the 'hard science' paradigm. However, the medical practicum students had a surprisingly sympathetic client group who requested that they combine qualitative and quantitative methodologies in their evaluation. Some of the medical practicum students expressed discomfort with, and inability to engage with, the survey data.
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ing to simulate for our students. The major point of contention was the respective validity of qualitative and quantitative approaches to understanding the role of social capital at micro and macro levels in the community. While the anthropologists were not convinced by the meaningfulness of the measurements the engineers wanted to collect, the engineers did not appear to be wholly convinced by the suggestion that it was, in fact, impossible to produce a number that could be meaningful in terms of actual social realities. While no consensus was reached, each group felt able to express their opinions and concerns and respect the other disciplinary perspective. The anthropology students also expressed concern about their ability to produce a report which would satisfy the client group. They were unsure of what a report should look like and struggled to produce text that was jargon-free and could be easily understood by non-anthropologists.8 Three other aspects of the practicum experience provided themes for discussion: team work; time management; and the overall nature of the consultancy role itself. It was clear that team work did not come naturally or comfortably to the students required to work in teams.9 They expressed frustration at the need for frequent meetings (the CWR managers initially wanted to meet with them once or twice a week) and felt that these were a waste of time given the tight deadlines. This perhaps reflects the (almost exclusive) tendency in our undergraduate degree to require students to work independently according to their own individual timeframes and agendas. The challenges of time management were confronting – working according to tight deadlines imposed by the ‘clients’ on a job essentially designed by the clients (and perceived by the anthropologists to be unrealistic in its scope), for what seemed to be small ‘pay’,10 was stressful and not especially rewarding. This led several of the students to reflect in their debriefing interview that they now knew they did not want to work as consultants because of the degree of intellectual and methodological compromise they felt they would have to make on a regular basis. The nature of the consultancy role was the final issue the students were specifically asked to reflect on, wherein this matter of compromise due to the difficulties involved in working with a brief designed by someone else – someone who is not likely to be an anthropologist – was raised repeatedly. Additional unprompted reflections on the benefits of the practicum experience confirmed those noted above, particularly as they relate to personal biases and challenges. Students also perceived consultancy to be goal-oriented to the extent of being personally, intellectually and ethically compromising. Two representatives of the environmental practicum group took part in a post-practicum presentation to the environmental engineering students. In their overview of their report on social capital, they also commented on the process of multidisciplinary research. The students emphasised the importance of keeping an open mind when working with other disciplinary perspectives, of trying to identify common ground, of learning how to ‘compromise without collapse’ (i.e. without losing the integrity of the insights provided by one’s home discipline), and, ideally, of being ‘onboard from the beginning’ (i.e. of taking an active role in defining one’s own brief as part of the bigger project, rather than simply having to ‘jump onto a moving train’ as one of the students put it.) They 8
Meeting the needs of the client was also pertinent to each of the other two practicum groups. The medical practicum students faced challenges in phrasing their criticisms in a clear and productive manner. The native title practicum group learned also that they needed to provide appropriately presented documents and abide by the rules relating to expert evidence in court proceedings and established legally based procedures for negotiating outside of the courts. 9 The medical anthropology practicum students also struggled with this requirement. 10 In 2004 this component of the honours course was worth only 12.5% of the overall grade. It has now been upgraded to 25% of the overall mark in order to better justify the amount of time invested by students.
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indicated that they felt these were valuable lessons to learn and that the practicum experience helped them to do it in a constructive way 11
Teaching multidisciplinarity? As would be expected there are a number of problems that need to be considered in developing and maintaining student practicums, and our experience has served to bring attention to these matters. Practical matters must be attended to, not least of all the acknowledgement of the amount of staff time required to set up and supervise practicums. There are also the challenges involved in finding fair and equitable ways to assess student participation in what is acknowledged as a vital final year of study. The formal student feedback suggests, however, that this exercise is well worth pursuing. Of the 21 students who completed the SPOT questionnaire, 19 said that the practicum was a valuable learning experience and 16 out of 20 students who provided additional written comments felt that the practicum was the best aspect of the applied unit. These reflections and logistics need to be seen in light of trends indicating that it is very important, if not crucial, that anthropologists are able to work confidently across disciplines. This has potentially serious implications for anthropology in terms of funding and credibility. Based on extensive personal experience of working with engineers, Lesley Jolly (personal communication, 2004) made the observation that simply improving communication strategies is not enough to solve the myriad challenges of cross-disciplinary collaboration. Jolly suggests that we need to think of other disciplines as ‘foreign cultures with different epistemologies, value systems and beliefs’, that we need to think about trying to understand the different world views that accompany the different languages – although we should also keep the similarities firmly in mind as well. Formally preparing students to think about and grapple with the challenges of cross-disciplinary communication does appear to be a reasonable and manageable starting point. This starting point could lead us to grapple more actively with our students’ lack of knowledge about quantitative methodologies. Their associated prejudice,12 could constitute a considerable stumbling block for multidisciplinary collaboration in these research areas given the dominant scientific and economic paradigms. This is a difficult issue to resolve given that academic anthropologists often, though not always, lack quantitative expertise themselves – and the fact that students, as well as staff, are often drawn to qualitative methods because of their own strengths, values and beliefs. Nonetheless, overlooking or dismissing the value of quantitative approaches is just as arrogant as overlooking or dismissing the value of qualitative approaches. At the very least we should be encouraging anthropology students to develop literacy in quantitative methods, to learn some of the language and the culture of quantitative research in order to understand and engage with a wider sector of the professional and academic community, and to seriously engage with a very different world view. One way of doing this might be to teach students to approach the challenges of multidisciplinary work settings as they would any other ethnographic site, as an opportunity to apply their anthropological skills and knowledge, an opportunity to actively demonstrate to other professionals what it is that we trained to do.
11
The environmental engineering students also agreed that the cross-disciplinary collaboration was positive. In their report they noted the anthropological perspectives were 'useful' and the anthropology students' report was 'well written', though they suggested that the 'use of clear straightforward language that can easily be understood upon the first read by non-anthropologists' would have helped, as well as the tailoring of the report more towards what they required. It is worth noting that the report forwarded by the environmental engineers to anthropology staff relied very heavily on formulae and technical engineering jargon, a factor which also made it alienating to an untrained reader. 12 This was evidenced most clearly in the environmental and medical anthropology practicums.
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The relationship between teaching applied skills and theory is likely to be contentious in many social science/humanities departments. There is, however, a need for collegial debate which might usefully include reflection on what outcomes we want for anthropology graduates, and what kind of ‘professional’ training we need to provide in order to achieve those outcomes.13 Despite the discipline’s potential to contribute in valuable ways to a multitude of applied social issues, anthropology (outside of the context of native title and associated cultural heritage and land negotiation research) has a limited profile in the wider Australian community. This situation might lead us to ask questions of ourselves and our teaching practices. Should we be willing to change some aspects of our own professional practice to accommodate the needs of employers and funding bodies and potential cross-disciplinary collaborators rather than waiting for others to accommodate us? Should we be placing greater emphasis on the importance of teaching good communication strategies, of providing students with intellectual and practical tools that will help them to strategically represent themselves and their discipline in a variety of workplaces? We pose these questions as a way of inviting further discussion on some of the difficult matters the discipline currently faces. Our emphasis in this paper has been on the value of preparing students to think about and engage with the challenges of working with professionals and managers from other disciplinary backgrounds – a need that became increasingly clear through student responses to the exercises we set for them. We believe that anthropology graduates would benefit from familiarity with basic theoretical and methodological paradigms in the physical and biological sciences as well as procedural and evidentiary frameworks employed in law. We also believe in the value of exposing students to the administrative and management aspects of undertaking applied work in any setting. The practicum we instituted in 2004 was experimental, though we are committed to continuing it, albeit with variations, and hopefully, improvements. One such change is in the greater attention we will direct towards the challenging of assumptions we may have about different disciplinary perspectives. And with good reason, for at the most basic level, students majoring in anthropology should be made aware of the contribution anthropology can make in the Australian economic and intellectual marketplace. This awareness-raising and training in the essential skills of multidisciplinary teamwork and communication are best addressed in a real life or practical setting.
References Bauer, H. 1990. Barriers against interdisciplinarity: implications for studies of science, technology and society. Science, Technology and Human Values 15(1):105-119. Blake, S.M. Giles, L. Kwan, L. Lange, C. Shearer, T. Tun, M. Van Zuilen and P. Walsh 2004. ‘Getting the Anthropological Measure on Social capital’: a consultancy report on social capital. Unpublished report. Anthropology and Sociology, University of Western Australia. Bruhn, J. 2000. Interdisciplinary research: a philosophy, art form, artifact or antidote? Integrative Physiological and Behavioural Science 35(1): 58-66. Daily, G. and P. Erhlich 1999. Managing Earth’s ecosystems: an interdisciplinary challenge. Ecosystems 2(4): 277-280.
13
Our own discipline group at UWA, partially stimulated by the honours applied practicum described here, is currently reflecting upon these very issues. This conversation has not been without disagreement, because of the diversity of the group, replicated at a broader scale among the range of anthropologists currently practicing in Australian universities.
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Fernandez, J. 1990. Tolerance in a repugnant world and other dilemmas in the cultural relativism of Melville J. Herskovits. Ethnos 18(2):140-164. Golde, C. and H. Gallagher 1999. The challenges of conducting interdisciplinary research in traditional doctoral programs, Ecosystems, 2(4): 281-285. Kolb, D. 1984. Experiential Learning. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Redclift, M. 1998. Dances with wolves? Interdisciplinary research on the global environment. Global Environmental Change 8(3): 177-182. Redman, C. 1999. Human dimensions of ecosystem studies. Ecosystems 2(4): 296298. Warren, R. 1997. Engaging students in active learning. About Campus. 2(1):16-20. Wear, D. 1999. Challenges to interdisciplinary discourse. Ecosystems 2(4): 299-301.
HERITAGE, IDENTITY AND PLACE MAKING: IMPLICATIONS AND APPLICATIONS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT Jane Harrington School of Anthropology, Archaeology and Sociology James Cook University
Managers in both cultural and natural heritage are facing ongoing challenges from the increasing acceptance and understanding of the need to consider contemporary community attachments to ‘place’ and the broader environment. This paper will briefly consider the implications arising from the imperative to break down a reliance on management approaches that separate ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ heritage and to work towards an integrated approach that recognises the interaction between the environment, place-making, and expressions of personal and collective belonging. This can act in a mutually reinforcing process to bind people and the environment so that nature is implicated in lived experience and the creation of place. This is discussed in the context of recent research with the community at Magnetic Island, Queensland, which is part of a broader project to investigate how the use of comparative anthropology-based approaches can be valuably incorporated into heritage practices that seek to engage with community values and attachments.
Introduction1 My focus in this paper is ‘cultural heritage’ and derives from an academic and professional background that encompasses both natural and social sciences. I consider that anthropology has important contributions to make to investigations that seek to understand what communities identify as part of the ‘heritage asset’ that should be protected for current and future generations. And yet approaches to cultural heritage – particularly those dealing with ‘social’ value – do not commonly engage with anthropological theory or practice. Borrowing from recent doctoral research (Harrington 2004) I ask how anthropological methods can be constructively used in a heritage management context. At the outset I note that, for communities, this context may be best served by removing the distinction between natural and cultural heritage.
The divergence of nature and culture Following the emergence of distinctive modes of modern thought, ‘nature’ and culture came to be increasingly opposed, culminating in the intellectual division of human and natural sciences (Thomas 1999: 13–14). Together with the opposition of human/ animal, this nature/culture dichotomy has emerged from the Enlightenment to become central in contemporary human sciences and their existence as autonomous disciplines. The effect is a reification of nature and culture as scientific concepts, and the emergence in biology (and later anthropology) of an approach to understanding in which our knowledge of nature was considered to be independent of our relationships with it (Ellen 1996: 13). Although this conceptualisation has been subject to more recent argument, debate and revision, I suggest that it continues to influence contemporary approaches to heritage, reinforcing a separation of knowledge and experience that has left little room for understanding how people experience and value nature.
1
My research with the Magnetic Island communities described in this paper has been valuably aided by funding provided by the CRC Reef Research Centre. I would also like to thank Peter Dwyer and Monica Minnegal for their comments on the original draft of this paper.
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I am certainly not suggesting that nature and culture are categorically meaningless.2 Following Ellen (1996: 11), I suggest that the difference between nature and culture is not a universal opposition but, rather, varies between cultures. Thus, the object of interest lies in understanding the interaction between, on the one hand, human individuals and communities and, on the other, the ‘natural’ environment (Ellen 1996: 17; see also Descola and Pálsson 1996). Recognition of the strong influence of the cultural on the natural has meant that it has become difficult to maintain a distinction between nature and culture when considering ‘heritage’. This is particularly so when it is understood that, in the most basic ways, cultural elements can regulate not only use of the environment but also relationships held with it. The challenge, therefore, is to overcome entrenched systems of heritage management that not only separate ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ heritage but which, in both realms, can fail to engage with the experiential interaction between people and their environment. There have been positive outcomes, often drawing on anthropological insights, particularly in the understanding of relationships between indigenous people and their environments. However, less attention has been paid to the relationship between nonindigenous (or non-‘traditional’) communities and the natural environment. Where this has been undertaken, it has been argued that concepts such as ‘traditional’ use can also extend to non-indigenous stakeholders. Fishing, camping, swimming and other land and resource-use activities are part of a wider and long-term community understanding and association with natural areas. Such associations are extremely important to a community’s sense of identity and to its continuing social and economic function. When management agencies institute controls with a view to achieving goals of nature conservation, and while cultural heritage approaches emphasise tangible features of environments, the outcomes can inadvertently compromise a wide range of important cultural practices. One of my research aims has been to address theoretical and methodological approaches that can promote enhanced management outcomes through understanding ways in which people and communities create attachments to the environment. The relationship between non-traditional communities and the natural environment has been most formalised in the recruitment and participation of the community in attempts to preserve ‘threatened’ natural values. Where this has been activated by environmental organisations the primary goal is to protect biological values. Little attention is given to deeper understandings that could identify and protect the attachments and meanings that communities may have for their natural surroundings. It is necessary, I suggest, to challenge the entrenched concept of ‘environment’ as a Western construct that serves as a focus for the rhetoric of nature conservation. One of the more significant developments in ‘the heritage debate’ in the last decade has been to rethink the nature/culture dichotomy. But the theoretical debates that have ensued have, arguably, not been reflected in significant changes in domestic heritage management policies and practices. This is surprising, given the growing understanding of nature as culturally constructed and defined and of nature gaining meaning through practical engagement and cognition. This applies equally to scientific apprehensions of nature. Ironically the definitions of nature and the ‘natural’ criteria applied in most natural heritage significance assessments, including the UNESCO World Heritage Operational Guidelines, are themselves culturally derived, placing great
2
Ellen (1996: 30) reinforces that nature-culture, as with other dichotomies, can be useful or misleading – it is not necessarily true or false. Although remaining a simplifying model for organising thought, it is not a ‘way of the world’. Moore (1994: 12) asserts that – as with other binary categorisations in anthropology, dominated as it is by ‘a Western folk model’ – the nature/culture opposition does not withstand crosscultural examination.
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emphasis on nature as determined from the scientific, conservation or aesthetic point of view.
Methodological approaches My recent research and fieldwork in Australia, Thailand and England has involved a critical investigation of a series of concepts related to communities and ‘being in place’. Of these, perhaps the most important concern has been identity formation and the relationship between people, practice and locality. For many communities, engagement with the broader environment is an important component of this relationship. How people interact with the natural environment has been of particular relevance in my work with communities of Magnetic Island (North Queensland). Excessive urban development of the island, with the potential to impose multiple impacts, is threatening the place and landscape values of island residents. Many islanders clearly and emotionally assert a sense of place and identify special places within the island. These places are commonly representative of the ‘natural’ environment, such as the bush and the bays and the beaches. Although heritage issues are interwoven with concerns for nature, they are grounded in notions of attachment, identity and the social construction of the natural environment. It is this relationship with the environment – through which the natural environment is made culturally meaningful, and redolent with stories, memories and experiences – that continues to be problematic in contemporary approaches to heritage management. I have been pursuing a people-oriented approach to heritage through theory and methods that are more commonly found in social science disciplines, such as anthropology, that investigate the experiences of living communities. I anticipated that an investigation of place, community attachment and meaning could be usefully pursued through ethnographically oriented fieldwork, complemented by a review of literature across a broad academic spectrum. Anticipating that a more defined aspect of community life can be constructively pursued through a comparative approach, I have been working with three separate communities and have placed emphasis on building on a tradition of knowledge through the investigation of a particular phenomenon, in this case attachment to place and how this can be construed within the context of heritage. I relied on three fieldwork methods. The first involved direct contact with individuals through a series of semi-structured interviews. The people targeted were primarily local residents. The interviews were undertaken with individuals or small groups in informal settings (often their homes), and with a focus on a particular aspect of their lives and experiences. The second involved limited interaction with the daily lives of the broader community that resulted from my own experiences of being ‘in place’. Although my participatory engagement was relatively minor it did complement the information obtained through more direct interviewing. The third method involved collection and collation of additional sources of information that could assist in a contextualisation of the study. Most of these sources were texts, in the form of relevant legislation and policy documents, management plans, discussion papers, government heritage publications, local histories and accounts and newspapers (both local and national). Others took the form of television interviews and documentaries, and internet discussions and references.3 I also found that personal, unpublished commentary can be valuably obtained through reviewing visitor and feedback books, which provided additional ‘images’ relevant to attachment.
3
See, for example, Hastrup and Olwig’s (1997: 10) discussion of the use of such material, both visual and written, as a valuable supplement to field-generated material; also see Gosden (1999: 61) and Low (2002).
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Magnetic Island, Queensland Magnetic Island is a small island in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area, lying some 8 kilometres north of Townsville. In contrast with many of the inhabited Reef islands, the Magnetic Island community is not primarily composed of tourists or of those supporting tourism and its related activities. Rather, it is a place where people choose to live, while in pursuit of the professional and recreational activities associated with Queensland coastal life. The Island has a resident population of around 2500 people concentrated in four settlement areas that are interspersed with a number of small, secluded, attractive and uninhabited bays that are visited regularly by both locals and tourists. More than half the island area is included in the Magnetic Island National Park, which has a considerable influence on land use and development. The uninhabited bays, the national park, and the surrounding sea form the focus of expressions of attachment by both islanders and Townsville residents who regularly visit the island. It is these expressions of place and attachment to the environment that I shall now discuss. Many islanders to whom I spoke assert that the island grants a sense of isolation and of freedom to explore a way of life that has been lost in the modern urban experience. It has been interesting to engage with these expressions through an understanding of being ‘an islander’ and how this gives symbolic significance to places and landscapes on the island. However, it is important to reinforce that the islander experience of nature is not separate from the domestic environment, the integration of the two in an enmeshed landscape enhancing the sense of wellbeing and harmony that saturates the island sense of place. Although being ‘in nature’ is an important aspect of the experience of the bays and the national park, the natural environment is integrated in the more extensive socio-cultural landscape. Assertions that experiential relationships with the environment more closely link place, nature and community in a network of collective meanings and categories than do biological (scientific) values are supported by this work with the Magnetic Island community. The narratives of the islanders suggest a spiritualisation of the natural environment that values (re-values) the surrounding land and sea in non-economic and non-material terms. The bays stand out as places that island people consider special. The expressions of attachment appropriate the aesthetics and natural attributes of various bays and capture them as integral parts of the experience of nature, of being absorbed within the ambience of the bush, beach and sea. These experiences include travelling and arriving and, once there, participating in activities that are inseparable from the experience of the environment: snorkelling, fishing, swimming, boating, walking or simply listening to the leaves moving in the wind. Being in place is a reinforcement of not being somewhere else. For the islanders it is also a strong expression of the indivisibility of the experience of the land and the sea Attachment to the land and a sense of being in the environment provide a focus for both individual and social identity, where that identity comes from an intimate relationship with the unchanged, natural landscape, not necessarily from efforts to impose external order. The attachments to place, and expressions of personal and collective belonging, community and identity expressed by the Magnetic Island community create a vibrant and multi-layered landscape, imbued with sensual and emotional affinities. These act in a mutually reinforcing process to bind people and the environment so that nature is implicated in lived experience and the creation of place. That the islanders consequently find prospects of major development of the island threatening is of little surprise. However, the threat is as much to their sense of being and sense of community as it is to the physical environment. This, of course, is an issue of great importance from a management point of view.
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Conclusion In any management context, approaches that can engage with community attachments, values and concerns in a pro-active, timely and responsible way and which have the philosophical flexibility to deal with conflicting determinations of value are important tools in conflict resolution and co-operative outcomes. There are ways of ‘doing anthropology’ that can facilitate these outcomes; in fact, I suggest that certain outcomes will continue to be constrained without recourse to anthropological theory and methods. The dilemma of course remains that no amount of qualitative research will satisfy demands that seek quantitatively derived answers. The solution I believe lies more pressingly in a shift in management philosophies to allow for broader disciplinary applications. For example, the meanings that different communities give to places cannot often be readily superimposed on formal heritage significance assessment and management processes. The meanings so inscribed are inseparable from the people who attribute them and gain significance within that context. However the concern must ultimately be with the contextual framework of each knowledge system, and not with the validity of one claim over another. In addition, we must recognise that communities and various aspects of anthropological interest, such as the way in which people attach significance to experiences, emotions, practices, objects and places, are neither static nor absolute. Hence it is unlikely that outcomes that seek to apply stasis and absolutism will resolve many of the dilemmas faced by managers. Heritage practice continues to be constrained in attempts to comprehensively engage with the way in which people attribute meaning and value to the natural environment. In addition, there is the ongoing challenge of the perennial separation of assessment and management regimes, processes and legislation that maintain the disconnection of nature and culture as distinct realms in heritage practice. It is in attempts to resolve both these issues, I think, that we see the potential relevance and value of incorporating anthropological insights and approaches into issues of heritage management. It also highlights the need for anthropologists to engage with managers such that each comes to appreciate the other’s points of view and to take advantage of opportunities to achieve mutually desirable advances and outcomes.
References Descola, P. and G. Pálsson (eds) 1996. Nature and Society: Anthropological Constructions. London: Routledge. Ellen, R. 1996. ‘Introduction’. In Redefining Nature: Ecology, Culture and Domestication, edited by R. Ellen and K. Fukui, pp. 1-36. Oxford: Berg. Gosden, C. 1999. Anthropology & Archaeology: a Changing Relationship. London: Routledge. Harrington, J. 2004. ‘Being Here: Heritage, Belonging and Place Making – A Study of Community and Identity Formation at Avebury (England), Magnetic Island (Australia) and Ayutthaya (Thailand)’. Unpublished PhD Thesis, School of Anthropology, Archaeology and Sociology, James Cook University, Townsville. Hastrup, K. and K.F. Olwig 1997. ‘Introduction’. In Siting Culture: the Shifting Anthropological Object, edited by K.F. Olwig and K. Hastrup, pp. 1-14. London: Routledge. Low, S. 2002. ‘Anthropological-ethnographic methods for the sssessment of cultural values in heritage conservation’. In Assessing the Values of Cultural Heritage: Research Report, edited by M. de la Torre. pp. 31-49. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute.
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Moore, H. 1994. A Passion for Difference: Essays in Anthropology and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press. Thomas, J. 1999. Time, Culture and Identity. New York: Routledge.
MANAGEMENT AND THE MODEL: BURNING KAKADU Robert Levitus The Australian National University
The strategic use of fire is now recognised as perhaps the most widespread and important tool of environmental management employed by Australia's Indigenous peoples prior to colonisation. Across large areas of the northern Australia savannah lands, the system of pre-contact Aboriginal burning is now taken as one which modern landscape managers need to approximate in the interest of restoring and preserving the original biodiversity of pre-European environments. In Kakadu National Park, research with local traditional owners and other Aboriginal residents, supplemented more recently by further work in Arnhem Land, has established a model in which burning is a function of an intersection between the succession of seasonal conditions and access to the varied resources of landscape zones in the Park. Still, annual burning practices by Park staff and local Indigenous people have remained an area of management characterised by points of complementarity and dispute. In this paper I discuss these sets of practices in terms of both their relationship to the model and the modern conditions that constrain the practitioners.
Introduction1 From the moment that the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service began implementing a management regime for Kakadu National Park in 1980, the controlled use of fire was officially recognised as an important management tool. If the ultimate goal of Park conservation lay somewhere between the ideal of restoring the Park to a pre-European environment and, more immediately, retaining the existing level of native biodiversity, then the burning practices of Aboriginal people had to be considered relevant. That fundamental idea, that fire might be a tool for, rather than a threat to, sound environmental management, was a spin-off from research into Australian prehistory, encapsulated in Rhys Jones’ paradigmatic term ‘fire-stick farming’ (1969), in which the eucalypt-dominated vegetation of the Australian continent was suddenly revisioned as the outcome of systematic long-term human intervention (Singh et al. 1981: 45–49). In this paper, I shall first trace the development and sources of the Park’s fire management strategy, especially the significance that the Parks Service attributed to contemporary local Aboriginal knowledge. I shall then look at one aspect of divergence between the Parks Service’s preferred burning regime and current Aboriginal practice, and argue that both are comprehensible in terms of the same ideal model, but express contrasting understandings of the grounds for intervening in the environment in the first place. I shall conclude with some cautious reflections on what anthropologists might have to say about this in relation to Park management.
The Parks Service and Aboriginal knowledge Both politically and environmentally, Kakadu National Park was something new in Australia, established on Aboriginal-owned land, and open to Aboriginal re-occupation and residence. The Parks Service routinely consulted senior local people on initial management proposals, began an Aboriginal Ranger training program, and hired white Rangers partly on the basis of their willingness to work with Aborigines and respect Aboriginal interests in the Park. However, while Parks staff were uniformly positive about the idea of working in an Aboriginal-owned park, respectful of Aboriginal interests 1
I wish to thank Chris Haynes for helpful comments on this paper.
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and sympathetic to their concerns, and in some cases prepared to nurture individual friendships, they maintained attitudes ranging from uncertainty to deep skepticism regarding the value of contemporary local Aboriginal knowledge for Park management. As Lewis (1989) has documented, those attitudes were clearest in the cautious beginnings of debate over the management of fire in the early 1980s. This caution arose from a number of considerations. At that time most Australian conservationists held strongly to the view that fire was a destroyer of natural environments, so a national conservation agency like the Parks Service had to consider carefully before deploying fire as a management tool. Park Rangers were conscious also of what appearances suggested was a major discontinuity between the life experiences of local Aborigines in cattle and buffalo camps, and traditional practice. They were further worried by the complicating evidence of significant changes in the Park landscape away from the pre-contact pristine, especially changes that had been brought about by the presence of large numbers of introduced water buffalo. So Park Rangers did not seek guidance from local Aborigines, I think, partly because of doubts as to the provenance and reliability of the information they might elicit, partly from uncertainty as to the relevance of whatever information they did uncover for the use of fire amidst the changed contemporary Kakadu flora, and partly because there was no shortage of other tasks to be done in establishing an important new Park that was attracting a rapidly growing number of tourists. As the Park began employing specialist natural resource management staff with biological training and research experience, caution was gradually replaced by commitment to a more active use of fire as an agent of landscape management (Press 1987: 245). By the mid-1980s, moreover, the largescale eradication of water buffalo from the Park was allowing a spectacular resurgence of some kinds of vegetation, and investing the question of proper burning practice with greater urgency.
Fire research The research that has guided the Parks Service in the development and refinement of its burning program has included ethnography, field observation and experimentation. By the time the Park was established, research by Rhys Jones (1975: 25) and Chris Haynes (1985) had detailed the fire regime applied by Aboriginal people in similar savannah woodland environments to the east, inside Arnhem Land. Very briefly, Haynes’ research paid close attention to timing and spatiality: when and where burning was done. He distinguished four classes of country – floodplain, open woodland, open forest and closed monsoon forest – and noted and mapped the different regimes of burning applied to each. Most of the Aboriginal burning he witnessed took place in open woodland between June and August. That concentration of effort in the first half of the dry season produced a mosaic of small-scale areas burnt by fires that were extinguished by the remaining moisture in the ground and the cool of the nights. By the mid-1980s ecologists recognised that this was the primary way in which human manipulation of fire in these savannah environments differed from the natural fire regime caused by early monsoonal lightning strikes around November. In the early 1990s, an extended research project around the middle reaches of the South Alligator River inside Kakadu produced an integrated model of seasonal movement, resource availability and burning that drew upon local Aboriginal memory and experience. It showed that the reconstructed traditional human ecology of the Kakadu region was consistent with that documented by Haynes and others for other areas of the Australian wet-dry tropical savannah (Russell-Smith et al. 1997: 176–77). Most recently, an assessment of the ecological integrity of another clan estate, on the upper Cadell River inside Arnhem Land, that had been subject to almost unbroken Aboriginal management, showed a pattern of extensive but controlled annual burning, abundant plant and animal food resources, well represented fire-sensitive vegetation,
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diverse vertebrate fauna, and a very low incidence of exotic species. The authors concluded: ‘We attribute the ecological integrity of the site to continued human occupation and maintenance of traditional fire management practice ...’ (Yibarbuk et al. 2001: 325). By this time the Parks Service was more confident in its formal commitment to traditional Aboriginal burning as a model for Park management. In 1987, a natural resource management officer had written that ‘[t]he aims of the fire management program are to re-establish as far as possible the presumed pattern of traditional Aboriginal burning ...’ (Press 1987: 245). In the 1991 Plan of Management, the word ‘presumed’ was dropped from that statement. However, documentation of Aboriginal practice and testimony was not enough. Scientists required both verification of ecological outcomes and more detailed understanding of constituent biological processes by whatever observational or experimental means were available. This was true even if their findings could often only substantiate the circular proposition that burning that replicates the traditional Aboriginal model is a necessary means for maintaining a level of ecological integrity characteristic of areas that were formerly subject to traditional Aboriginal burning. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation conducted long-term fire experiments at research locations in the Park, subjecting different stands of vegetation to different fire regimes (Williams et al. 2003). Parks officers studied Landsat images over several years and showed a negative correlation between the extent of early dry season burning and that of late dry season fires (Press 1987: 244-45). Other researchers compared the intensities of fires put through different kinds of ground fuel biomass at different times of year (Yibarbuk et al. 2001: 333). There are good reasons, apart from the search for knowledge, as to why it is pertinent for fire managers in Kakadu to accumulate ‘evidence that customary fire management practice can contribute to ongoing maintenance of the savanna biodiversity that it contributed to shaping’ (Whitehead et al. 2003: 6). Firstly, some biologists have disputed that the positive outcomes achieved are clearly and predictably a result of the management actions recommended. Secondly, there must always be the possibility that circumstances of environmental change may require a fire regime, perhaps only for temporary restorative impact, that is different to the traditional maintenance regime. But thirdly, there remains a clear concern in the Parks Service that some burning carried out by local Aboriginal residents and traditional owners is contrary to the traditional model, and that contemporary Aboriginal burning in the Park is not so much a guide to proper management as a challenge to it. The most common instance of this is the lighting of late dry season fires in open woodland environments. Ambient temperatures and soil dryness allow these fires to burn for days or even weeks, across very large areas, at an intensity that is destructive of mid-storey openforest flora and monsoon jungle boundaries. Park fire policy requires all prescribed management burning in this zone to cease in July, and attempts to prevent and if possible suppress burning after that time2. I want to show how these contrasting practices relate to the same model.
The traditional model and current management A distinctive feature of research into pre-contact human ecology in the Kakadu region is its multi-disciplinary focus on seasonal migration (Russell-Smith et al. 1997: 173–76, Brockwell et al. 2001). In brief, human movement across the annual cycle oscillated between two extremes: concentration of large groups around shrunken lowland 2
This is now changing. In response to views expressed by the majority-Aboriginal Kakadu Board of Management, the Park burning season is being extended (Haynes pers. comm.).
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wetlands to share in the protein harvest of massed populations of water fowl at the end of the dry season in September and October, and dispersed, band-level movement, camping and resource use across all zones from the floodplain fringes to the sandstone plateau (see map) during the monsoonal wet season of December to March. When, in April, wet season storms ended, the wind changed to drying south-easterlies, and creeks began to fall and lowland inundation recede, people began to burn as they moved. The reasons are well documented: clearing areas in which macropods would be attracted to the new green pick, establishing fire breaks to control later hot-weather fires, ease of movement, protection against snakes, and the generalised aesthetic and custodial value of cleaning up the country. The traditional practice of fire management produced effects across a broad landscape through the actions of many individuals and small groups. The time of year when the population was most dispersed was also when the country was least flammable, so firings were at their most widespread in total but least extensive individually. As the months passed, the plateau dried first and became less hospitable to human habitation, and food resources began to concentrate around gradually shrinking bodies of water on the lowlands. People, burning still, adjusted their camping and movement patterns to ensure access to water and to exploit various resources as they became available, as animals and plants passed through their annual cycles and new areas dried. The net trend of human movement during the dry season was towards the lowest areas, with people clustering on springs and billabongs, and finally concentrating around wetlands that offered both perennial water and large populations of food species. This model of human movement and aggregation also describes the conditions that determined the incidence of fire. As the seasons progressed and woodland environments dried, limited and low-intensity burns gave way to fires that were probably less numerous and dispersed in total, but more extensive individually. Ultimately, well into the dry season, hunting fires could be planned to muster large numbers of kangaroos into the range of men waiting with spears. In the Aboriginal accounts we have of the particularities of burning strategy, including those that emphasise improper uses of fire, the default position is to burn. One burns as one travels, returning the surrounding country to a liveable state for the coming year. One burns what one can, where and when one is able, subject only to the constraints of specific and known particularities in the landscape that require special husbanding. One burns unless there is a particular reason not to burn. So when the dry season advances and fire can travel through the night, one can still burn for hunting, because the fire will be limited by what has been burnt before. And to understand the thoroughness of that protection, we need only revert to the familiar circularity: it must have been sufficient to have produced the level of native biodiversity that Park management is now trying to conserve. But the research-based ethos of Park burning is not the same. Beginning from the starting point of skeptical science, the management attitude has come only so far as to say one burns when one knows one has a proper reason to burn. Multiple smallscale early dry season woodland and open forest fires are authorised fires, but in those zones authorisation stops in July each year (see Note 1). Because management has sought guidance from the model with its conservation relevance in mind, Parks do not pursue burning of woodland later into the dry season because those later fires do not have a conserving effect. But if both the Aboriginal practice of late burning and the Parks policy of a limited burning season are both referable to the same model, the first as an expression of the everyday motivation that produced a traditional fire regime, and the second prescribed by the management lessons abstracted from that same regime, why is late dry season Aboriginal burning a conservation problem for the Parks Service? The answer is that
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the human ecology of seasonal migration no longer operates, the mobility of Aboriginal people across the wooded areas of the Park is much more limited in space and time, and the Parks Service, despite the use of quad-bikes, 4WD Toyotas, and aerial incendiaries, cannot always compensate for the absence of that dispersed human agency on the ground. In particular, over large areas inaccessible by ground transport, there is difficulty in finessing the choice of ignition points and times according to highly localised conditions of wind, vegetation and ground moisture, and Rangers rarely get the chance to revisit burned areas to assess results. Meanwhile Aboriginal people maintain their attitude of responding to the condition of country as and when it is encountered, even to the extent of lighting intensely hot and destructive late dry season ‘corrective’ fires (Lewis 1994) to clean up country that has, due to lack of visitation, remained unburned for several years.
Anthropology and management What contribution might anthropology make here? The Aboriginal attitude to burning as a component activity of everyday life can become a problem for conservation either where the environment has changed or where the material logic of Aboriginal life has changed. Both have happened in Kakadu, but I have focused here on the problem raised by the latter for a fire management strategy based on an earlier logic of Aboriginal resource articulation. Parks officers have responded with talk, trying to suggest to individuals responsible for late wildfires that what they are doing is bad for country. But of course, the response is traditional: ‘the country needs to be burned, and we have always lit fires on areas where fire has not yet been through’. The analysis offered in this paper might be seen as one kind of contribution, aimed at placing these contending positions into an historical–ecological frame that allows them to be seen in relationship to a common model, and thus in a different relation to each other. This might serve as a starting point from which to soften the management perception of Aboriginal delinquency in fire use on the one hand, and the Aboriginal perception of uninformed official imposition on the other. Beyond this, further ethnography can offer further understanding and might indicate points for strategic intervention. Of course, as in many other applied fields, anthropologists have no monopoly on direct communication with Indigenous people whose actions are a matter of policy concern. Indeed, the ethnographic component of the research projects referred to above was mostly carried out by non-anthropologists, and mention has been made of Park Rangers liaising with local residents over particular fire events. Conversely, the Aboriginal owners of Kakadu are able not only to express their views of management practice, but to direct changes in that practice, through their majority membership of the Board of Management. But despite repeated communications on the issue, it remains an issue. I have in mind ethnography that takes up the focus of this paper on adaptation, and investigates it in the contemporary setting. Some of the interlocking elements and sources might be: how local residents use, and would like to use, country; the past and present role of bush resources within mixed livelihoods that depend also on provisioning from welfare, wages and royalties; control of vehicles; the intra-Aboriginal politics of access to country; outstation demography; the Park’s records of where late fires have been lit; the problem of increased fuel loads caused by invasive species or changed distribution of native species; Aboriginal employment by the Parks Service, and District management priorities; accommodating diverse public interests in the National Park. Anthropology does not claim to be a predictive social science. The suggestion here is only that understanding the contemporary material logic of Aboriginal life in the Park may reveal new possibilities for articulation, or even merely new measures of pre-
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caution, between the interests of that substantial resident population and the concerns of both the Board of Management and the Parks staff. The presently identifiable possibilities for improving fire management depend on the possibilities for changing the ways in which people, not just Rangers, move around country. It may be possible to improve the thoroughness of early dry season burning by increasing the amount of time allocated by Parks staff to accessing country on the ground as soon as conditions allow, or by improving or better applying the technology of delivering ignition agents from a distance. It may be possible to emulate the kind of strategy pursued by the Caring for Country program in Arnhem Land, by materially supporting new outstations and servicing long-term residents, and by fostering the resumption of old patterns of footwalking around and between those points, so that people burn and do other management work as they travel. The Community Development Employment Projects scheme seems an obvious instrument of such support. One cannot presume a high level of local Aboriginal interest in such an effort. One local couple, who have been supported by Parks to gain experience in and then encourage the practice of proper floodplain burning, have been unsuccessful in recruiting other members of their extended family into the work. But whatever might be done by management to sustain such programs through conscious and reliable resource prioritisation, they will not be self-sustaining, precisely because they are now management programs, and no longer an integral and necessary part of a cultural ecology of living on and moving across country.
References Brockwell S., A. Clarke and R. Levitus 2001. Seasonal movement in the prehistoric human ecology of the Alligator Rivers region, north Australia. In Histories of Old Ages: Essays in Honour of Rhys Jones, edited by A. Anderson, I. Lilley and S. O’Connor. Canberra: Pandanus Books. Haynes, C.D. 1985. The pattern and ecology of munwag: traditional Aboriginal fire regimes in north-central Arnhemland, Proceedings of the Ecological Society of Australia 13: 203-14. Jones, R. 1969. Fire-stick farming. Australian Natural History 16: 224-28. —— 1975. The Neolithic, Palaeolithic and the hunting gardeners: man and land in the Antipodes. In Quaternary Studies, edited by R.P. Suggate and M.M. Creswell. Wellington: The Royal Society of New Zealand, Bulletin 13: 21-34. Lewis, H.T. 1989. Ecological and technological knowledge of fire: Aborigines versus park rangers in northern Australia, American Anthropologist 91: 940-61. —— 1994. Management fires vs. corrective fires in northern Australia: an analogue for environmental change, Chemosphere 29(5): 949-63. Press, A.J. 1987. Fire management in Kakadu National Park: the ecological basis for the active use of fire. Search 18(5): 244-48. Russell-Smith, J., D. Lucas, M. Gapindi, B. Gunbunuka, N. Kapirigi, G. Namingum, K. Lucas, P. Giuliani and G. Chaloupka 1997. Aboriginal resource utilization and fire management practice in western Arnhem Land, monsoonal northern Australia: notes for prehistory, lessons for the future. Human Ecology 25: 159-95. Singh G., A.P. Kershaw and R. Clark 1981. Quaternary vegetation and fire history in Australia. In Fire and the Australian Biota, edited by A.M. Gill, R.H. Groves and I.R. Noble. Canberra: Australian Academy of Science. Whitehead, P.J., D.M.J.S. Bowman, N. Preece, F. Fraser and P. Cooke 2003. Customary use of fire by indigenous peoples in northern Australia: its
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contemporary role in savanna management. International Journal of Wildland Fire 12: 1-11. Williams, R.J., J.C.Z. Woinarski and A.N. Andersen 2003. Fire experiments in northern Australia: contributions to ecological understanding and biodiversity conservation in tropical savannas. International Journal of Wildland Fire 12: 391-402. Yibarbuk, D., P.J. Whitehead, J. Russell-Smith, D. Jackson, C. Godjuwa, A. Fisher, P. Cooke, D. Choquenot and D.M.J.S. Bowman 2001. Fire ecology and Aboriginal land management in central Arnhem Land, northern Australia: a tradition of ecosystem management. Journal of Biogeography 28: 325-43.
ASPECTS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL ENGAGEMENT WITH ENVIRONMENTAL DISCOURSE Michael O’Kane Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority Alice Springs
This paper discusses some aspects of anthropological engagements with environmental discourse that may represent a way forward for the discipline as it strives for a greater relevance in the field of environmental management. Following on from an introductory statement at the recent AAS symposium on this subject, ‘managing the environment often means managing people’, this paper takes as its starting point the assertion that managing people often means managing discourse. The following discussion aims to bring into focus the role of the anthropologist in analysing and making sense of different cultural currents as they emerge in discourse concerning the environment and environmental management.
Introduction This paper presents a discussion of the ways in which the insights gained by anthropologists through the use of participant observation may be presented in a form accessible to those scientists and technicians whose job it is to ‘manage’ environments. More specifically, my main focus here is to emphasise the importance of environmental discourse in this endeavour, for it is through discourse that we create, evolve and disseminate the ideas that reflect our concerns and questions about the environment. This is a key aspect in understanding how the discipline of anthropology and the insights gained by its engagement with environmental issues can greatly benefit those given the difficult task of managing the physical environment while navigating the cultural one simultaneously. What follows is an extrapolation of the directions taken by a number of anthropologists who are concerned to engage with the discourse of environmentalism. Although, at first glance, this seems to stray from the stated aims of the paper, the discussion will show that the method of cultural analysis employed by these anthropologists holds great promise for a deeper and more holistic understanding of the importance of cultural perceptions when dealing with environmental issues. Initially, let us consider Brosius’ (1999: 278) assertion that environmentalism refers broadly to the field of ‘discursive constructions of nature and human agency’. He makes the point that the study of environmentalism should encompass much more than an analysis of the different social movements involved and their various trajectories over time and space. As stated above, he feels that at the crux of environmentalism is the ongoing discourse about human beings and their place within nature. As a postmodernist thinker and an anthropologist, Brosius declares that the relevance of anthropology in this field of investigation is due to its unique concentration upon the phenomenon of culture. He urges anthropologists to see environmentalism as a ‘rich site of cultural production’ (ibid: 277) and stresses that ‘a whole new discursive regime is emerging and giving shape to the relationships between and among natures, nations, movements, individuals, and institutions’ (ibid). Similarly, Milton declares that A discourse is an area of communication defined purely by its subject matter. In this sense, environmental discourse is communication about the environment, and environmentalist discourse is communication about the protection of the environ-
© Michael O’Kane
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ment. There is no indication here that a particular mode of communication is being used, or that a particular way of understanding is being generated. (1993: 167).
Milton describes environmentalism as a trans-cultural discourse that, not being rooted in any specific culture, spans the local through to the global and now has become a specific cultural discourse existing within, although not bounded by, other cultural systems. Thus, environmentalism is perceived by her to transcend many traditional geographical and conceptual boundaries such as east/west, north/south, first world/third world and left/right. As Milton describes it, environmentalism incorporates ‘all culturally defined environmental responsibilities, whether they are innovative or conventional, radical or conservative’ (ibid: 11). Furthermore, in her view environmental discourse does not merely articulate perceptions of the environment, it contributes to their formulation. In this way, the whole spectrum of thought is included in Milton’s analysis because a pro-environmentalist stance is not required for discourse to be considered environmental (ibid: 8). If we also take into account Brosius’ description of environmentalism provided earlier, we see that anthropologists have begun to discern environmentalism as being expressed through a myriad of social and cultural relationships and situations. Milton explains this well when she writes: In this framework, social movements and political ideologies become specific cultural forms through which environmental responsibilities might be expressed and communicated. Instead of environmentalism being seen as a category of social movement or ideology, these forms of cultural expression become types of environmentalism. (ibid: 8)
In light of this, if we again focus on the topic of the symposium, the point to be made here is that environmental managers work firmly within the broad rubric of environmental discourse described above and contend with the very same cultural undercurrents that Brosius and Milton are attempting to describe through the agency of discourse theory. Indeed, one does not have to make a large leap of imagination to perceive that those involved in the science, politics and practicalities of environmental management must be as aware of the cultural manifestation of the environments they work with as they are of their physical terrain.
Environmental discourse in conflict: Loggers and conservationists In order to further illuminate the utility of insights gained by anthropological methodology, let us consider Peace’s (1996) article ‘Loggers are environmentalists too: towards an ethnography of environmental discourse’. This paper is based on events that occurred during 1994-1995 when the contentious issue of wood chipping was brought forcibly to the public’s attention by both environmental activists and the greater timber industry. Although rallies and actions by environmentalists and conservationists were commonplace, similar protests by those working in, or associated with, the timber industry were a much rarer occurrence. Nevertheless, the largest mass gathering of those opposed to the further regulation of timber harvesting and wood chipping took place in Canberra on the grounds of Parliament House and involved some six to seven thousand protesters. Among this number, many different groups from major corporations, trade unions and logging contractors were represented under the banner of the ‘Timber Industry’. As Peace explains, his interest was not in the proceedings of the protest itself but rather in the social forces that led to a protest of this kind being possible especially given the antipathy shown by many involved towards mass protests in the past. His focus was on protestors from one particular area in New South Wales whose participation in the protest seemingly ran counter to the staunch individualism which was usually characteristic of their conduct. Peace points out that his ‘concern is to detail the presence among the mass of protesters of a small number of contractors, sawmillers, loggers and hauliers, from the southern NSW coastal town of Ulladulla and
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the nearby inland town of Milton’ (1996: 44). Peace contends that the reason for this ‘self-avowedly apolitical, rural population’ (ibid: 45) becoming involved in a protest of such large and organised dimensions lay in their recent initial confrontation with elements of the environmental movement in their own locale. The event so unsettled their community that, consequentially, ‘their occupational culture no longer held unchallenged sway over the forest which provided their livelihoods, and, second, the institutional power relations on which they had long depended were now subject to major realignment’ (ibid). Indeed, it is Peace’s emphasis on the phenomenon of ‘occupational culture’ that is of interest here. It may be that developing an understanding of similar cultural phenomena, where they pertain to issues of resource use and management, will provide a better understanding of the cultural significance of management decisions made concerning the environment. The conflict that is the subject of Peace’s article arose in mid November 1994 after the NSW branch of The Wilderness Society declared its intention to halt logging in the Croobyar State Forest, some ten kilometres west of the towns of Ulladulla and Milton. One of the key claims made by The Wilderness Society was that the area to be logged was ‘relatively undisturbed’, had a ‘high conservation value’ and contained ‘large old growth trees’ (ibid). Another was that, as no environmental impact statement (EIS) had been produced by the state government, there was a dearth of information concerning exactly what flora and fauna occupied the area let alone what impact timber harvesting would have upon this particular environment and its life forms. Although the ensuing protest was brief, lasting roughly three weeks, and relatively small, consisting of thirty to forty protesters on the logging site at any one time, the ramifications for local social relations were quite significant. In many cases protests such as this one have immediate and drastic economic consequences for the area in question but, in this instance, the effects were more social than financial. The implied threat to the cultural significance of the timber industry in the area and the social position held by those working in it was, in this case, of greater consequence than the immediate effects caused by the loss of any single potential contract. Peace notes that the residents of the Milton-Ulladulla locale became polarised into those for and those against the continuation of logging (ibid: 46). Where once the populace would have been mostly local born and bred, the demographic of the area had changed in recent years to include retirees from urban areas and a burgeoning tourist industry had seen the region frequented by a growing number of tourists, some with an interest in settling. Conversely, the timber industry in the region had experienced a steady contraction since the 1970s and its influence, although still strong, was declining. Peace addresses the differences in perception throughout the district by emphasising the differences in the way the conservationists and the timber workers saw the forest itself. Whereas the conservationists regarded timber harvesting as something wholly detrimental to the well-being of the forest and sought to have as little human interference in its ecosystem as possible, the timber workers had been operating throughout the region for a number of generations and viewed claims by conservationists that the forest was ‘relatively undisturbed’ as highly misleading. Additionally, in stark contrast to the view of the conservationists that the forest was a resource for all, Peace notes that the timber workers viewed the forest as ‘exclusively and unambiguously their terrain’ (ibid: 49). Thus the interpretive gulf between the conservationists and the loggers was so wide that each party objected to the presence of the other within the forest at all. At the end of the third week of the dispute, a moratorium was put in place by the National Parks and Wildlife Service and the dispute came to a successful conclusion for the environmental lobby. This left the timber workers, and a large part of the local community, defeated and dejected. What rankled the timber workers most about their defeat, and deeply concerned them, was that their intricate local knowledge of the area
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and its capacities had been thoroughly overlooked by what they saw as a government eager to gain the Green vote. They felt that it had pandered to the whims of urban conservationists who displayed virtually none of the well honed skills and experience that they, as workers in the timber industry, had gained through generations of working in and living with the forest. However, what was more disturbing for the timber workers was that they felt that their relationship with the NSW Forestry Commission had changed from a respectful partnership to an uneasy association. It seemed to them that the main aim of the Forestry Commission throughout the dispute had been to appease the conservationists in the quickest possible manner and to direct the attention of the public away from the workings of the Commission with all possible haste (ibid: 54). Here Peace draws attention to the ways in which different discourses can wax and wane in relation to the amount of authority vested in them at any particular time by noting the anxiety caused among those working in the timber industry by the Forestry Commission’s apparent lack of regard for their narratives and circumstances. For generations their discourse and their work had been accorded an eminent position concerning decisions made about the forest among the relevant government institutions, but now their hegemony had come to an end. As alluded to in the subheading, ‘Towards an ethnography of environmental discourse’, Peace’s article is not a report on a comprehensive ethnography but rather an exploration of a terrain he felt promising for anthropological investigation. Regarding his aims, he informs us that: From an anthropological perspective, of course, the analytic concern is to establish how particular bodies of knowledge are socially constituted as authoritative and definitive, to examine, in other words how they are accorded a particular ‘truthvalue’ by virtue of the social relations in which they are embedded. (ibid: 56)
With this in mind, the conservationist activism in the Croobyar State Forest and their subsequent success in bringing a halt to timber harvesting in that area had major consequences for the timber workers. For Peace, the most significant of these is that it ‘subverted some of the most important presumptions of their culture, and it did so in full view of the population at large’ (ibid: 57). Thus, we may posit that Peace’s article describes an incident where occupational discourse comes into conflict with conservationist discourse under the rubric of environmental discourse. Importantly, it is along these lines of conflict that anthropology may prove most useful in helping environmental managers and other stakeholders to negotiate the cultural terrain of the physical landscape. In providing a window of understanding between conflicting worldviews (or worldviews temporarily in conflict), the anthropologist may have an opportunity to initiate a dialogue between conflicting parties that leads, if not to resolution, at least to an acknowledgement of the underpinnings of the respective positions involved. The following is a brief example of the way in which the results of anthropological investigation has been used to reduce conflict between environmental managers and significant stakeholders in central Australia. In this case, the two parties concerned were the Alice Springs Town Council and the traditional custodians of the Mparntwe estate.
Environmental discourse in dialogue: Town planners and indigenous people Historically, environmental management and land development have been responsible for much conflict between the indigenous people of central Australia and the various governmental departments that make, and police, laws pertaining to the environment. One only has to recall the now infamous decision made by the Country-Liberal Party of the Northern Territory (CLP NT) government to disregard the wishes of both local custodians and the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority and dynamite part of a sacred rock formation on Christmas Eve 1982, for the purposes of building a road, to understand how these conflicts have arisen. Indeed, the fact that these same local
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custodians and their descendants are still grieving over the desecration of this site speaks to the enduring resentment created by such hasty decisions. However, the following is an example of what can happen when an anthrop-ological perspective is heeded and used to facilitate a dialogue of understanding between significant stakeholders in environmental management. In 2003 the Alice Springs Council determined to re-channel its portion of the Todd River by removing the obstructing sand banks, and the debris these banks had collected over time, in order to concentrate the flow of flood water and make use of the old channelling patterns that predated the build-up. Over the years, as the city of Alice Springs has grown, the water run off that traditionally flowed into the Todd River from the town area has been dramatically reduced by modern guttering, drainage systems and development. Water flows, always sporadic in the Todd River, have been reduced to such an extent that large sand banks have formed in many parts of the river as it winds its way through Alice Springs. Furthermore, these sand banks have been stabilised by vegetation, both native and exotic. This has had the effect of altering water flows in times of flooding and it is now not unusual for large sections of the town to be inundated with flood water during the brief periods of heavy rain that regularly, if not frequently, are visited upon the central Australian region. When compared with other local rivers within the area, such as the Finke, Charles and Trephina Rivers, still in much the same state as they had been before contact with Europeans, the full extent of the impact of non-indigenous practices becomes readily apparent. These rivers are broad and flat with mature river red gums dotting their river beds and banks but sand banks are few and the river beds themselves are mostly free of the vegetation now clogging the Todd River. This, in itself, may seem a simple task but was complicated by the existence of many trees within the riverbed considered sacred by the local Arrernte people. Additionally, these trees are part of perhaps the most important dreaming in the area and have significance for the whole Arrernte community. Cognisant of this, and aware of the tensions caused by irresponsible and ill-informed development in the past, the Alice Springs Council decided to consult with local custodians via the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority and the local Native Title group Lhere Artepe. As a direct result of these consultations, work was planned to avoid culturally and spiritually significant features within the landscape and Council engineers were able to carry out the necessary alterations to the river with the approval of the local indigenous people. This is a project that both the Alice Springs Council and the local Arrernte people are rightly proud of and constitutes a way forward for land management in built up areas which incorporates the needs and wants of both indigenous and non-indigenous communities. What is significant here, in relation to our topic, is that it was through the anthropologist, in this case myself, that a dialogue of understanding was created in which the Council engineers were able to grasp why the sacred trees in the vicinity needed to be safeguarded while the indigenous custodians, their fears allayed, were able to perceive the need for the restorative works to be carried out. To look at it in another way, the anthropological method was able to act as a conduit through which one group of people using a discourse concerned with western scientific and mechanistic principles were able to interact intelligibly and positively with another group whose discourse employed the traditional spiritual worldview of the local indigenous people. In essence, a middle ground was found between the local, spiritually expressed, indigenous system of land management and that built on the westernscientific model. This created a space in which statements such as ‘These trees are part of a big dreaming that runs through the river here’ and ‘We need to redirect the waterflow back into the main channels to increase the river’s water capacity’ were of equal discursive weight. By introducing the anthropological data concerning the local
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custodians and their connection to the area, the anthropologist was able to impress upon those acting as environmental managers on behalf of the Alice Springs Town Council that their actions would impact on the cultural as well as the physical aspects of the landscape. If we recall the inclusive nature of both Brosius (1999) and Milton’s (1993) notion of environmental discourse, it becomes readily apparent that both groups in the above example were engaged in a discourse concerning the environment even though their perceptions were informed by vastly different epistemologies. Similarly, Peace’s notion of occupational culture comes into focus when we consider the historical dominance of western scientific thought in land management and environmental issues and the challenge that indigenous knowledge presents to its continued hegemony. As my aim here is simply to offer for discussion some aspects of anthropological investigation that would expand and complement current environmental practices, I will forgo a more detailed discussion of the theoretical aspects and notions raised in this paper. To reiterate, my aim is to bring to the fore some of the ways in which anthropology, through its engagement with environmental discourse, might assume a more visible profile in environmental issues. As the above discussion suggests, whether dealing with ‘Loggers’ and ‘Greenies’ in New South Wales or town planners and local indigenous custodians, there is a legitimate and necessary role for the discipline of anthropology to play in the decisions being made concerning the management of the environment.
References Brosius, P.J. 1999. Analyses and interventions: anthropological engagements with environmentalism. Current Anthropology 40(3): 278-309. Milton, K. (ed.) 1993. Environmentalism: The View from Anthropology. London: Routledge. Peace, A. 1996. Loggers are environmentalists too: towards an ethnography of environmental discourse. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 7(1): 43-66.
BUT I’M JUST AN ANTHROPOLOGIST – WHAT CAN I DO ABOUT FARMERS’ PROBLEMS? Graeme MacRae School of Social and Cultural Studies Massey University Auckland
Environments, resource management and agricultural economies are in crisis throughout Southeast Asia. Bali, as a small island with dense population, a relatively high level of economic development, but limited natural resources and carrying capacity, provides an unusually focused “laboratory” for the study of interactions between environment, resource management and development. This paper reports on my attempts to trace the various patterns of (dis)articulation between local farmers, (mostly local) agricultural scientists, government departments, foreign aid agencies, expatriate residents and NGOs, which both facilitate and hinder more appropriate forms of development. It also argues that anthropologists are especially well-equipped to play a key role in identifying problems and facilitating communication between local communities, scientists and managers.
Introduction Since 1993, when I first started doing ethnographic research in Bali, I have watched the lives of farmers getting harder while everyone else’s lives gets easier. Ten years later, in mid 2003, I decided it was time to apply whatever I had learnt in those years to the practical problems of farming in an increasingly prosperous and commercially based economy1. I am by no means the only one concerned about this problem, but despite much useful knowledge and good intentions all round, the critical connections between those who know something about agriculture, those who have the power to make things happen and those in the ricefields are not being made. As an anthrop-ologist I have neither specialised knowledge nor power but what I do have is a general knowledge of Balinese culture and society, a disciplinary commitment to the plight of the farmers as well as a degree of privileged access to those with knowledge and power. I began by simply asking farmers about their problems and soon found myself firstly mapping social patterns of knowledge and power, then trying to facilitate strategic linkages between those who seemed to need what each other had. What follows is firstly an overview of the problem, then a simple map of the main interested parties and their varied knowledge and power, followed a report on some preliminary ethnographic-based work. My argument is essentially that there can be a useful role for an anthropologist working independently of agencies, institutions and research teams, based not on any specialised expertise, but on exactly the resource scientists and managers do not have: a deep ethnographic knowledge of the society in question. Such knowledge does not necessarily lead to startling insights and dramatic action: it can be simply seeing the obvious and acting as a catalyst and facilitator.
1
I would like to thank my various friends and informants who taught me the little I know about farming in Bali. Many of them are anonymous farmers, but others with an interest in farming include Wayan Tirja, Made Cakra Widia, Dr. Gede Suyatnya, Christine Foster, Ngurah Karyadi, Carol Warren, Ed Dunk. Thanks also to Monica Minnegal who organized the symposium at which the first version of this paper was presented, as well as the other participants in it and especially Peter Dwyer for editorial comments and suggestions. If there is anything of value to be found in this paper, I would like to dedicate it to the memory of my first teacher of the magic and mystery of rice-growing, the late Gusti Putu Widia of Taman Klod, Ubud.
© Graeme MacRae
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What’s the problem? Agriculture, especially the cultivation of rice in irrigated fields, has been the basis of Balinese human ecology, economy and culture for over 1000 years. During the past thirty years, this ecology/economy/culture has been drastically transformed firstly (chronologically) by the technological and ecological changes of the Green Revolution, secondly by a process of general modernisation driven by tourism, thirdly by the globalisation of the agricultural economy and finally by the effects of a series of economic and political misfortunes in Indonesia since 1998. Most households in the southern part of Bali where tourism is centred, are dependent, more or less directly, on tourism and most people work in tourism or industries supplying goods and services to tourism. In this new economy farming has been marginalised, economically, culturally and ecologically. Holdings are small, the price of rice is low, input costs are rising constantly and the cost of living in an increasingly affluent and modernising society is also rising. It is hard to feed a family from farming, let alone provide all the necessities of modern life which require cash – the motorbike, the power bill, health and education expenses. The farmer is no longer the epitome of Balinese adulthood. For young people, the prospect of long days of hard work in the sun and mud, for small and uncertain return holds little appeal compared to the multifarious attractions of tourism. Most farmers in the tourist areas are men of middle age or older. Farming is seen as an option only for those too old or too uneducated to find a place in the new economy. Water supplies are pushed to the limit by double or triple-cropping of rice as well as increasing demands for domestic use and for hotels, swimming pools and golfcourses. Thirty years of petrochemical fertiliser and pesticide use are starting to manifest themselves in soil degradation, water pollution, and suspicions of links to new health problems. The demand for land for development and the consequent inflation of land prices leads to steady conversion of land from agricultural to residential, tourism or commercial uses. This is a familiar picture throughout southeast Asia (see for example Rigg 2003), but here it takes a distinctive and extreme form because of the tourism-driven modernity of Balinese society – and this is especially so in the tourism-dominated southern part of the island.2
The social distribution of agricultural knowledge: Who knows what about farming? Farmers Farmers feel they are caught in an ever-tightening squeeze between rising production costs and returns for their produce which never seem to increase – exacerbated by a wider context of generally rising incomes, standard of living and expectations. The main production costs are fertiliser, pesticides, tractor ploughing and contract labour – all of which are rising while the price of rice is held artificially low by a combination of government regulation and cheap rice imported from Vietnam and Thailand. Although farmers receive some financial support from the government and are grateful for the efforts of local farm advisors, they feel the government has abandoned them and they have little confidence that it will provide solutions. They sense instead that the solutions lie in the mystery of the marketplace but they are ill2
Other areas are poorer, but agriculture is less marginalised. Some kinds of agriculture, such as marketgardening in the mountains are more economically viable. So while I am speaking generally about agriculture, my comments are apply most directly to the cultivation of irrigated rice in southern quarter of the island where tourism, modernity and affluence are concentrated.
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equipped to understand it and very hesitant to approach it. Consequently they remain at the mercy of the rice-merchants who buy their grain at low prices, sometimes with part-payment in advance to help with production costs.3 They have also heard of new and potentially lucrative approaches with names such as sustainable and organic but these are, like the market through which they are mediated, mysterious and unattainable.4 Government The Indonesian government is involved in agriculture at several levels. General policy on agriculture has shifted over the past 10 years, partly as a result of International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Trade Organisation (WTO) encouragement, from a focus on local production of staple goods for local food security to an emphasis on cash-crops for the market, and especially for export. Policy documents contain phrases such as ‘agribisnis which is competitive, community-based, sustainable (berkelanjutan), and decentralised’ (Dinas Pertanian Tanaman Pangan, 2004). There are obvious tensions between some of these terms – but the key words are agribisnis and ‘competitive’. There is recognition of and lip-service to terms such as community-based and sustainable, but the bottom line is a large-scale, industrialbusiness model of cash-cropping for export.5 Local branches of the Department of Agriculture are busy trying to translate these new concepts into practical programmes for farmers whose only experience, like that of the departments themselves, has been over thirty years of responding to a regime of top-down directives. Although they are aware of alternative approaches which might utilise resources more effectively and cater to new markets, and have in some cases initiated trial projects, they tend be sceptical of the productivity of such approaches and their capacity to be applied on the scale necessary to maintain production levels (Dinas Pertanian Kabupaten Gianyar 2004). A further obstacle to such innovation is that for some years the departments dealing with food crops and livestock farming have been separated, hindering the continuation of old integrated systems or the development of new ones. One of the innovations of recent years has been a series of interdepartmental pilot projects for re-introducing indigenous cattle into ricefield and horticultural ecologies. The primary motivation is ironically official concern over the decline of population of Bali cattle, but the benefits in terms of soil fertility, reduced input costs, proceeds from sale of cattle and ploughing power are becoming apparent. But such projects are few and far between and their full potential has not yet been realised. A hopeful sign however is a new plan for recombining the two departments. The real coal-face between government policy and farmers is the farm-advisors, the extension officers who often live in rural areas and spend much of their time in the field. In the past they served largely as downward conduits for instructions from above – but now they play a more active role in helping farmers face the challenges of the future. Those I know are dedicated, hard-working and intelligent, but their visions are limited by their training and experience in the top-down system. They too have heard of new methods and in some cases believe in them in principle, but they tend not to have sufficient knowledge, direct experience or autonomy to play a key initiating role. While 3
Although farmers have, as Peter Dwyer pointed out to me, “centuries of market experience”, these markets were historically controlled, as in much of Southeast Asia, by merchants rather than farmers. During the three decades of Suharto’s New Order, they were significantly mediated by government pricefixing and subsidies. Since then the nature of these markets has changed dramatically in response to the IMF and WTO pressures and few farmers have the skills or resources to deal effectively with these. 4 There is obviously a degree of generalisation in the picture painted here, but it consists of a refrain I have heard, with minor variations, many times and I have yet to hear a rice-farmer with a radically different view. 5 For a further discussion of current government policy on agriculture, and the alternatives to it, see my article in press (MacRae 2005).
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they, especially the younger ones, often have some academic agricultural-science knowledge, they usually occupy a different social, economic and cultural world from both conventional farmers and the people who are actually working with alternatives to the top-down agribisnis model. Alternative Practitioners While the emphasis of government policy is on agribisnis and agroindustri and the main local market is for affordable rice and the other necessities of Indonesia diet, there is a growing local market for both ‘traditional’ and ‘organic’ produce in restaurants, hotels and for the large and relatively affluent expatriate population – a niche market but an affluent and growing one in which demand outstrips supply. There are a number of mostly small enterprises producing for this market – ranging from expatriates with vegetable gardens to feed their children or hobby-farming to Chinese market gardeners in the mountains for whom it is good business to produce organically because input costs are lower and produce prices are higher. Almost without exception, if for different reasons, these producers hope their neighbours will take up their example and start producing in the same way. But, also almost without exception, they are puzzled by the reluctance of conventional farmers to take what to them was an obvious step with proven advantages. Clearly there is a mismatch of perceptions or a problem of communication. What is needed is some means of interpreting and facilitating communication – someone with expertise in making the vital connections between producers and markets. One such enterprise is C.V.Bening, a company run by a young American couple with training and experience in organic agriculture. They have established a marketing network among hotels and restaurants and are currently seeking export markets. They producing organic vegetables and chickens themselves but are unable to keep up with the demand (in terms of either quantity or variety) so they are also locating and supporting farmers interested in converting to organic production for their markets. But they find it hard to locate willing farmers and at the same time many potentially interested farmers either do not know about them or how to approach them. The gap between markets and farmers is not easily bridged. Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) NGOs are specialists in working at this interface between local communities and larger systems of knowledge and resources – managers of information and projects. There are a number of NGOs in Bali, working on a range of environmental, social and especially health issues. Some profess to interest and experience in agriculture, but those I have know seem to be working at a level somewhat removed from the field – producing training manuals and running courses and seminars. None have a track record in on-the-ground facilitation of agricultural development.6 However on the neighbouring island of Java, where essentially similar ecological and economic conditions prevail but with a longer tradition of commercial agriculture and without the prosperity and cultural effects of tourism, there are other examples. On the outskirts of Jogjakarta is a shop called Sahani. It operates on Fair Trade principles, wholesaling and retailing traditional and organic rice produced by several farmers groups in the surrounding area. It began in 1977 out of a truly grass-roots network of local farmers. Over the years other local NGOs became involved and since 2003 Oxfam has provided funding for a manager and one other employee. Volunteer Service Abroad (VSO [UK]) also provides a worker with expertise in foodstuffs marketing. Ownership and control is firmly in the hands of farmers but it is still dependent on 6
There are minor exceptions, such as the East Bali Poverty Project which operates in a very specific and localised social, economic and physical environment.
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Oxfam and VSO for staff and expertise. In mid 2004 marketing was the main issue, as (unlike in Bali) production from its network of farmers greatly exceeded the shop’s retail demand. Farmers who grow organically and sell through the shop report reduced yields but better prices and lower input costs – the balance is much the same economically – but they see the advantages in environmental and health terms. They were however disappointed at not being able to sell all their produce at premium organic prices and most are still dependent on other crops (in some cases tobacco, ironically grown organically) to supplement their incomes. Despite these and other problems, Sahani is a model for successful intervention by NGO’s in making the critical links between producers and consumers. Local Scientists/Academics Most Indonesian universities have substantial agricultural science faculties, but Indonesian academia is plagued by a number of problems. One of them is the reluctance of middle-class academics to go to the field, get their hands dirty and listen to the views of village people. Agricultural scientists share in this but are more fieldoriented than most. Some I know are actively engaged in government-sponsored field projects and some grow various crops on their own land for experimental and/or commercial purposes. But as part of the modernising middle-class they tend to subscribe to a modernist-scientific view of what modern agriculture should look like. They are also heavily influenced by Government policies directing them to an agroindustry/agribusiness model. One exception is Ibu Kartini, a soil scientist at Universitas Udayana (UNUD) in Denpasar. For twenty years she has researched, practised and advocated the regeneration of depleted soils with organic composting accelerated and enhanced by earthworms. Although she has a successful worm farm in central Denpasar processing abattoir wastes and several organic vegetable growers in the mountains use her products and methods, she remains marginal to the agricultural science and government establishments, at best ignored and at worst ridiculed. So there are social and cultural barriers hindering direct relationships of co-operation between farmers and academics. Foreign Academics Bali has no shortage of foreign researchers, but most of their research tends to be on the endless intricacies of traditional arts and culture or on tourism and its discontents. There is little of the solid economic, environmental or developmentoriented anthropology that is common in the rest of Southeast Asia, let alone models for successful anthropological intervention in development processes. There are two striking exceptions. Stephen Lansing’s extraordinary work on the relationships between irrigation systems, planting regimes and traditional ritual cycles was aimed at providing farmers, ritual specialists and bureaucrats with practical tools for regaining control over the balance between pest control and water management (Lansing 1991). Although his work is known by people at all levels of the agricultural system in Bali, it has not been taken up systematically and seems ironically to have had little effect at scientific or management levels. Despite serious engagement with both scientists and managers, and obvious practical relevance, Lansing’s work has had surprisingly little effect on the ground. The second exception is Carol Warren’s work with local communities and NGOs on sustainable development projects. Her work is not especially oriented to agriculture but it provides a model of how an anthropologist can work – with her feet firmly based in the grass-roots, but making connections with other levels of the political and economic order (Warren, in press).
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Ethnographic conclusions While many of the problems faced by farmers in Bali are substantially caused by political and economic factors beyond local control, the obstacles to addressing them at a local level are mostly deficits of knowledge and gaps of communication – people problems rather than technical ones. While farmers understand that their fundamental problems lie in the relationship between their production and the market process, they lack confidence in new crops and they are generally ignorant and afraid of marketing. Alternative producers are unable to inspire their neighbours to follow their example. There are institutional gaps between government, NGOs and the local agricultural scientists – the parties who may have the necessary resources for facilitating new ways. Farmers have neither confidence in the government nor a social connection to the NGOs or alternative producers. This raises the question of what an anthropologist, with little expertise in farming but some general knowledge of Balinese society and culture, can usefully contribute.
What can an anthropologist do?7 Virtually everyone I spoke to was responsive and even grateful for my interest – farmers especially feel like the forgotten people of modern Bali. They often asked me to help in finding markets and other ways into the new economy. It also became apparent fairly quickly that, surprisingly I knew lots of people who did not know each other but who obviously had common or complementary interests and in many cases felt isolated and in need of support. So after my preliminary research in 2003 (and again in 2004) I wrote a brief, simple report of what I’d learnt and a list of people and projects which I distributed to as many as possible by email – essentially establishing a network of people with common interests. Most of these people were expatriates or foreign researchers, but the report has since been translated into Indonesian and distributed further. The people it is least likely to have reached, however, are the ordinary farmers struggling away in their fields. My plan for my brief visit in 2004 was to move beyond information-gathering to trying to apply this knowledge in a more practical way. The most pressing task seemed to be to initiate social contact and facilitate exchange of information between (especially local) scientists, (government) managers, farmers and markets. Here are two brief stories from the ricefields: preliminary and yet to bear fruit. They may appear ludicrously simple and perhaps even naive, but the simple and obvious are easily, and often have been, overlooked. Nyoman Candra On the fringe of the tourism-dominated economy of Ubud, Nyoman Candra owns over half a hectare of ricefields which are worked by a sharecropper. Nyoman has lived overseas, speaks good English and works as an immigration consultant. He can see the situation from various points of view and he wants to return, for a combination of health, environmental and economic reasons, to traditional rice varieties and methods, which are essentially organic. He has tried several times already with small plots but his sharecropper is reluctant and his neighbours are sceptical. When I met him he said that he felt isolated and despondent and that what he most needed was some moral support.
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I should at this point declare and clarify my interest in organic and sustainable forms of agriculture. This is based on a combination of environmental and health factors, but also ones of economic sustainability which are particularly relevant in the unusual economic environment of Bali. While Balinese farmers are aware of the health and environmental factors, they see their problems primarily in economic terms and this is the basis on which I initiated the tentative interventions described here.
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I told him as much as I knew about the other people working in the same direction, and gave him some material to read. A few weeks later I received a text (SMS) message from him saying he was planning to plant the whole area in traditional rice and did I know where he could get good seed. I connected him (also by SMS) with an American expatriate who was also experimenting with old rice about half an hour away – and he got seed and advice from him. I also told him about the Sahani network in Java and gave him copies of their booklets and VCD from which he made copies. I also connected him by SMS to the group discussed below. When I last heard from him he was about to plant. Subak Lumbung Made Tirta is an urban-based political activist, but his home village, Lumbung is in West Bali, far from tourism profits and urban concerns. Many of the younger generation have migrated to the city or tourism centres in search of employment but virtually everyone remaining in the village lives from farming. This has long been Bali’s premier rice-growing area, but over the years Made has watched his relatives and neighbours reduced from proud and prosperous farmers to not being able to make ends meet and becoming increasingly bewildered and demoralised. The majority of them grow standard hybrid rice and sell it to merchants (tengkulak) who come to their village each year with offers to buy the standing crop, and offering advance payments to help with up-front costs. Needless to say the prices they offer are not high. A minority of farmers are still growing traditional varieties, simply because they like them better. These are the true artists of the ricefields; traditional rice requires more work, the crop is smaller and the prices the merchants offer are the same as for hybrid rice, but it is beautiful to watch and it tastes better. Others, because of water shortages and the low prices for rice, have begun planting other crops – mostly corn, which is reliable and cocoa which had a brief period of fetching high prices. Made has been exhorting them for some years to return collectively to traditional rice but with little success. He asked me to come and talk to them on the grounds not of my (non-existent) expertise, but because they are more likely to listen to an outsider, especially a foreign professor, than to him. I went there with him and spent an afternoon listening to their stories, looking at their fields and telling them about the other projects I had seen and the good market for traditional and organic produce. They understood the idea but were worried about the practicalities of marketing. I offered to bring back people who knew more than me and they were keen to hear more. I looked for local NGOs who might be interested in helping – but found they either had little experience in hands-on farming issues or were pre-occupied with funding and partnership issues. I also approached a senior local economist who is currently setting up a new postgraduate programme in rural development and poverty reduction – and who was actually looking for a farming group on which to run a pilot project on more commercially oriented farming. He was interested in foreign collaboration but is also pre-occupied with funding issues, and this project did not look attractive to him unless I could attract some funding for it. Scientists and managers are not necessarily easy to find, especially outside of formal project structures. The person I eventually brought to the village was a senior agricultural scientist from the local university, with a track record of hands-on involvement in local projects – especially government schemes for bringing cattle back into cropping ecologies. He listened to their stories and made some suggestions: first, to contact the local Department of Agriculture and work with them; and, secondly, to start taking small steps themselves, such as dedicating a small portion of their fields to traditional and/or organic crops and involving their young people by asking them to attempt to market the crop to hotels, restaurants and expatriate shops.
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I also gave copies of information from the NGO initiatives in Java, especially about the Sahani network, to my primary contact with this village, who will get it to others in the village in a way which suggests it has come directly from some outside source rather than through him so they will take it more seriously. I also arranged for Made Tirta to meet Nyoman Candra.
Practical conclusions While much current anthropological work on development and environmental issues operates (quite rightly) at the level of analysis of institutions and structures of power which condition the actions of all interested parties, there remain problems of implementation, endlessly intractable but often fundamentally simple, at the grass-roots level. Anthropologists, with their unique training and commitment to ethnographic methods, are uniquely positioned to make a significant contribution both in terms of understanding and effective action at this level. What they have is precisely that which is most difficult for scientists and managers to achieve – the background of linguistic and cultural experience and the social networks necessary to communicate effectively with local people. I am tempted to glorify this with the label “ethnographic capital”, but that would perhaps reify and obscure the simplicity of it. Over fifty years of the development endeavour, the essential problems of (mis)understanding between the developers and those they seek to develop, have changed little. Anthropologists have tended largely to be critical spectators from the sidelines, but there is a growing consensus that we need to be prepared to work in interdisciplinary teams with scientists and managers. This may indeed be an appropriate strategy, but given the track record of scientist- and manager-driven development to date, what I would like to argue here is not against such involvement, but that there may be room also for alternative approaches, available even to solo academic anthropologists with ethnographic capital but limited time for contract/team projects. Such approaches would be based on the ability to identify problems and act as an initiator or catalyst for exchanges of information between local people, scientists and managers. What has been achieved to date with both these (very preliminary) projects is at once very little and hopefully something more. Nothing tangible has, to my knowledge, yet changed for either of the groups described above. On the other hand both groups, in a short time and at little cost, have begun to see possibilities and made some simple connections to other groups and individuals with whom they have common or complementary interests and knowledge and may have the potential to work productively together. More work is needed, and time will tell whether they bear fruit, but let us not dismiss too quickly the simple and obvious solutions which lie in the ethnographic darkness between local people, scientists and managers.
References Bachelier B. 2001. ‘Preface’. In Agriculture in Crisis: People, Commodities and Natural Resources in Indonesia, 1996-2000, edited by F. Gerard and F. Ruf. Curson Press: Richmond, UK; Cirad: Montpellier, France. Dinas Pertanian Kabupaten Gianyar 2004. Laporan Kegiatan Demfarm Perintasan Teknologi Pupuk Organik Pada Budidaya Tanaman Padi Organik di Kabupaten Gianyar. Dinas Pertanian Tanaman Pangan Provinsi Bali 2004. Rencana Strategis Dinas Pertanian Tanaman Pangan Provinsi Bali, Tahun 2004-2008. Jha N. 2002. ‘Barriers to the diffusion of agricultural knowledge: a Balinese case study’. In Economic Development: an Anthropological Approach, edited by J. Cohen and
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N. Dannhaeuser. Altamira Press: Walnut Creek, USA; Rowman & Littlefield Lanham: Oxford, UK. Lansing J.S. 1991. Priests and Programmers. Princeton: Princeton University Press. MacRae G. in press. Growing rice after the bomb: where is Balinese agriculture going? Critical Asian Studies. Rigg J. 2003. Southeast Asia: the Human Landscape of Modernization and Development, (2nd Edn). London & New York: Routledge. Suparmoko M. 2002. The impact of the WTO Agreement on agriculture in the rice sector. Paper presented to the Workshop on Integrated Assessment of the WTO Agreement on Agriculture in the Rice Sector. Geneva. April 5. Warren C. in press. Mapping common futures: Balinese customary communities, NGOs and the State in Indonesia’s reform era. Development and Change.
‘CARING HANDS’ AND ‘CARING FOR COUNTRY’: SUSTAINABLE RESOURCE MANAGEMENT ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN LANDCARE AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES David Hyndman Anthropologist, Social Science Program Bureau of Rural Sciences, Canberra
Indigenous people now constitute two percent of the population in Australia and have some form of title to 20% of the continent, mostly in the rangelands of the arid centre and the savanna north. Therefore, the sustainable management of the remote rangelands with indigenous natural resource managers has become a significant challenge for landcare. The objective of the landcare caring hands stewardship ethic is sustainable production, whereas the cornerstone of the indigenous caring for country stewardship ethic is culture and the role for NRM is in protection and enhancement of culture. This engagement process requires indigenous peoples and NRM anthropological specialists working together in contemporary management of country. Anthropologists are another class of knowledge holder, and cannot presume to speak for indigenous people. There is a plurality of traditional/custodial and residential/locational title interests among indigenous peoples, but only those with traditional/ custodial rights can speak for the management of country. Anthropologist NRM specialists can contribute usefully to understanding and interpreting the multiple scales of government, market and civil society that frame and intrude upon the systems of sustainable natural resource management, and inform communication for outcomes that are more acceptable and useful for all natural resource managers.
Introduction Indigenous peoples represent two percent of the Australian population, and have some form of title to 20% of the continent, mostly in the rangelands of the arid centre and the savanna north. Managing these remote lands with indigenous peoples is a significant challenge for the National Landcare Program (NLP). The objective of the Landcare caring hands stewardship ethic is sustainable production, whereas the cornerstone of the indigenous caring for country stewardship ethic is culture and the role for NRM is in protection and enhancement of culture. The indigenous caring for country stewardship ethic provides economic (subsistence and commercial), social, and cultural benefits, and the diversification has decreased economic vulnerability. Anthropologists can contribute usefully to understanding and interpreting the multiple scales of government, market and civil society that frame and intrude upon these systems of sustainable natural resource management.
‘Caring Hands’: the Landcare stewardship ethic The NLP was established in 1992 as the major Australian Government program to support the community landcare movement and improve natural resource management at the farm, regional and national level. Investment is directed to: maintaining and building the momentum and motivation of the landcare movement; raising awareness and improving information on better sustainable land management practice; encouraging the wider community and industry to participate in regional and national natural resource management activities, including strengthening links with science; helping landcare groups implement projects; encouraging innovative primary production practice and rewarding success; and improving communication, particularly between the landcare community and the Australian Government.
© David Hyndman
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Landcare as a voluntary movement provides a vehicle for local cooperative responses to sustainable use of land and water resources. Since its inception, landcare was unique in its use of a community-based approach to project assessment (Lane 2002). Landcare aims to encourage a community-wide stewardship ethic for the Australian landscape (Baker 1997). It has become a vital social movement and has achieved major cultural change across rural Australia. Landcare groups typically raise local awareness of issues relating to the use of land, vegetation and water resources. Landcare provides the basis for local cooperative responses to pressing degradation problems as diverse as weeds, feral animals, water quality, soil erosion, soil structure decline, salinity, and rising water tables. Tree planting aimed at controlling erosion and lowering water tables has been a major activity. Field days typically consist of group ‘reading the landscape’ walks around each other’s farms to develop ‘land literacy skills’ for monitoring the state of local environments. It is already understood that the different ways graziers and crop growers view their landscapes inform the outlook of the landcare groups that each establish (Baker 1997).
‘Caring for Country’: the indigenous land stewardship ethic Indigenous peoples commonly refer to their lands as ‘country’. Country is the literal, cultural and spiritual place of origin and refers to the values, places, resources, stories and cultural obligations associated with the geographical area (Turner 1994). ‘Caring for Country’ involves indigenous peoples mixing customary and modern practices in community-based natural resource management (NRM) (Altman and Whitehead 2003). The activity of caring for country is predicated on indigenous people living on country and caring for country through harvesting wildlife and reducing feral animals, weeds and wildfires. Practical approaches to ‘caring for country’ are different from what they were formerly. While indigenous people assert that traditional ecological knowledge still significantly informs their management of Australia’s lands and coastal regions, it is for the most part in country that is environmentally degraded from decades of non-indigenous resource exploitation (Baker et al. 2001). Caring for country today involves indigenous peoples asserting that by right they have a role in managing Australia’s land and coastal regions. The landcare communitybased approach is consistent with indigenous aspirations for self-determination and enabling communities to respond to their own problems and agenda (Lane 2002). Traditional ecological knowledge will be significant but is inadequate to addressing non-indigenous degradation problems and restoring degraded resources. It requires indigenous people and scientists working together in contemporary management of country (Baker et al. 2001). Indigenous people and landcare NRM professionals are beginning to explore how their knowledge systems can be applied together in contemporary management of country. The ‘Caring for Country’ network of 30 communities and hundreds of remote outstations in the tropical savanna supported by the Northern Land Council has received Landcare funding (Altman and Whitehead 2003). Indigenous multiple land use Landcare sustainable production objectives do not fully reflect indigenous approaches to caring for country. Country is seen as the cornerstone of culture and the role for NRM is in protection and enhancement of culture. Improving productivity and profitability of resource-based industries may not be prioritised. Indigenous enterprises based on NRM can be differently based on native foods and medicines, cultural tourism and eco-tourism (Hassall & Associates 2003).
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Turner (1994) classifies indigenous land use into three sectors – economic, social and cultural. Economic land use includes subsistence production for internal circulation of native foods within the community and for commercial production of sheep and cattle, horticulture and the commoditisation of wild flora and fauna. Social land use refers to living areas ranging from small towns to outstations. Cultural land use refers to spiritual management areas requiring ceremonies, maintenance and protection. Indigenous people place extremely high value on the social and cultural significance of land and sea that may override any commercial considerations (Young 1994). Subsistence is an extremely important form of land use that contributes to economic, social and cultural well being. Recognition of the social and cultural importance of indigenous land and sea use is significant when encouraging good land management practices. There has been a surprising lack of recognition of subsistence use of natural resources by government as it is arguably the most ecologically sustainable form of land management (Young 1994). It is typical for indigenous people to practice multiple land uses within any one area of their land. (Young 1994). These uses may include: • Harvesting resources for subsistence purposes • Subsistence non-cash utilisation of cattle ‘killer herds’ for harvesting by the communities on outstations • Cattle grazing partly combined with collecting native foods • Different station management practices to reduce the size of cattle herds or to exclude cattle from areas valued for native foods • Native foods and game harvesting which can be partly commercial • Conservation supporting a commercial tourism component with the opportunity to preserve cultural heritage Landcare has funded research indicating that indigenous use of wildlife has remained consistent over the past 20 years and continues to be important to regional ‘hybrid’ economies. Indigenous peoples, however, have encountered barriers to commercially hunting native and feral animals on their country. The sustainable indigenous commercial harvest of native animals has an anti-use barrier that protects terrestrial native animals from use rather then effective management of use and an over-allocated use barrier on aquatic species. The sustainable indigenous commercial harvest of feral animals is constrained by health standards for sale of field-slaughtered meat and barriers to indigenous firearm ownership for hunting. The sustainable indigenous commercial harvest of plants includes materials for art and craft works and botanical medicines requiring regular activity on country while attending to other land management obligations (Altman and Whitehead 2003)
Indigenous peoples and lands There were 410,003 indigenous peoples identified in the 2001 census, which represents two percent of the Australian population. Queensland and New South Wales account for 55 percent of the indigenous population, Western Australia 15 percent and Northern Territory 13 percent (Baker et al. 2001). Since the Wadjina Wunggurr Native Title claim to 61,150 square kilometres of the Kimberley in northern Western Australia succeeded in December 2003 (Jopson 2003), indigenous peoples are now land managers of nearly 20 percent of the land in Australia. About 66 percent of all indigenous Australian land is under inalienable communal freehold title and the balance is reserve and leasehold (Taylor 1998). A little over 27 percent of indigenous people live in rural localities, but for three quarters of the indigenous population the opportunity to look after their country is very limited (Baker et al. 2001). There is a significant spatial imbalance in the distribution of economically
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valuable resources. In southern and eastern Australia, the little amount of indigenous land that has been returned is more culturally than economically significant. Most indigenous land is held in the arid/semi-arid centre and the monsoonal savanna north of Australia (Baker et al. 2001). Aboriginal people own 44% of the Northern Territory terrestrial landmass, and 72% of the Northern Territory’s indigenous population reside on Aboriginal land. Indigenous rangelands Rangelands located in the arid/semi-arid centre and the monsoonal savanna north of Australia account for 70 percent of the continent (Young 1998). Indigenous people are in the majority on many parts of the rangelands in terms of land ownership and population numbers, but they remain marginal in political and economic terms. Indigenous rangelands, which are held under freehold, leasehold or reserve title, consist of former vacant crown lands or Aboriginal reserves, and pastoral leases (Young 1998). Use of indigenous rangelands on former vacant crown lands was characterised by sparse population and limited commercial activities until recent changes through resettlement of Aboriginal ‘outstations’ of small extended-family communities located on the residents’ customary lands. By the mid-1980s eight percent of the Aboriginal population, at least 17,000 people, dwelled in over 600 outstations. Some 14,000 indigenous people in Northern Territory reside in 570 outstations with populations of less than 200 (Altman and Whitehead 2003). East Kimberly and Cape York have been transformed by Aboriginal land ownership and systems of management (Baker et al. 2001). Reoccupation of the indigenous rangelands reverses the dominant rural-urban migration trend and has increased interest in ‘caring for country’ and knowledge of its unique resources (Young 1998). Managing these remote lands with indigenous peoples is a significant land management challenge for the landcare.
Engagement between caring hands and caring for country Indigenous engagement in landcare for the management of Australia’s lands and coastal regions is now a major issue. However, until recently the beneficiaries of landcare funding have tended to be young, affluent, relatively well educated, and nonindigenous (Lane 2002). Indigenous communities and non-government organisations such as Aboriginal Land Councils are able to apply for landcare funding. From the very limited membership of indigenous peoples in landcare a decade ago, there has been a modest but steadily increasing involvement. The review of Aboriginal involvement in landcare in 1993 revealed that only one percent of the projects went to indigenous communities (Turner 1994). By 1997 indigenous peoples received 2.4 percent of Landcare projects and 4.1 percent of landcare funding (Taylor 1998). Northern Territory had the highest share of indigenous projects (32 percent) and program funding (37 percent). Since 1997 an Indigenous Land Management Facilitator Network has operated through National Heritage Trust (NHT) funding administered by Environment Australia through a MoU with the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF). With landcare coordinators and facilitators there can be tensions between ‘bottom up’ landcare approaches and ‘top down’ government programs and policies, and the role of coordinators and facilitators has grown from biophysical NRM advice and responsibilities to also include social capital development. The network assists indigenous organisations to participate in landcare projects and to support sustainable land management practices on the land they manage. In 2003 there were 13 Indigenous Land Management Facilitator positions with an approximate cost of 1.3 million (Hassall & Associates 2003).
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In the decade to 2004, the number of landcare projects to indigenous peoples has increased from 1 percent to 6 percent and the proportion of landcare funding has increased from 4.1 percent to 5 percent. However, the short-term nature of landcare grants is not conducive to indigenous long-term planning. Landcare has supported indigenous projects for dust suppression tree planting, remnant vegetation preservation, plant propagation and seed management, revegetation and habitat restoration and maintenance, fire management workshops, sustainable development planning, restoration of heritage sites and improved visitor management, biological and wildlife monitoring and sustainable utilisation, development of community structures for more efficient land management, employment of resource managers and coordinators, cultural site training, and landcare education curriculum development (Sutherland and Muir 2001). Lessons from Landcare projects in the northern savanna and central arid Indigenous rangelands In 1994 the Aboriginal Landcare Education Program (ALEP) was established under the auspices of the Northern Land Council and Greening Australia. ALEP facilitated the Tanami Desert Pinja ‘one campfire’ project in the northern savanna indigenous rangelands for tree planting around houses in family living spaces and development of a landcare ethic (ALEP 2001). The Yolngu started Yirrkala Landcare (Robinson and Munungguritj 2001) in the northern savanna indigenous rangelands with the Mawalan #1 Gamarra Nunul Landcare Program in 1990. Yirrkala Landcare has a steering committee composed of traditional Yolngu owners who educate the younger generation about traditional caring for country obligations, and empower them to effectively manage country in the everchanging contemporary context. Caring for country initiatives supported by landcare includes revegetation, establishing a ranger program and mapping cultural heritage sites (Marika 2000). Banduk Marika, as a landowner, insists she has the responsibility to decide what should be done (Marika 1996): If governments are talking about self-determination what’s the point of guidelines, why can’t the system support that instead of trying to make it another controlled institutional thing?
The Central Land Council and the Warlmanpa and Waramungu traditional landowners of Love’s Creek Station Landcare Project won a Landcare Australia award in 1997 (CLC 1997). The award recognised the most comprehensive mapping project ever undertaken by an Aboriginal organisation in Australia. The mapping project adapted conventional scientific and participatory methods to develop plans for sustainable land use and management in the central arid indigenous rangelands (CLC 1997). Objectives of the project were to revegetate cleared and degraded lands and establish a non-commercial cattle ‘killer herd’ on Love’s Creek Station. The project supports subsistence use of NRM and encourages young people towards living and working on their country. Impacts on native species are reduced because stock is fenced and hunting pressures on wildlife are reduced (Gambold 2001). Landcare funded the Anangu from the central arid indigenous rangelands to establish the Tangentyere Landcare Unit (Wohling 2001). Landcare on Anangu lands has a different conceptual basis from the agrarian origins in southern Australia. The Tangentyere Landcare Unit provides for land management education with school country visits lasting 3-4 days. Western science concepts of sustainable land use and Anangu traditional ecological information are presented. The Tangentyere Landcare Unit project highlights cross-cultural work and the reciprocation of knowledge (Wohling 2001).
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Tensions and constraints impacting on Indigenous NRM stewardship Indigenous Title and Coexistence of Tenure There is widespread misunderstanding of indigenous social organisation. Under indigenous law, no indigenous person can talk for anyone else’s country. There are over 300 separate indigenous nations in Australia. Groups, not individuals, have ownership and responsibility for country. Therefore, indigenous representatives are only spokespersons for their own group (Hassall & Associates 2003). In any given NRM activity traditional indigenous owners, whose rights and interests are custodial, may need to be involved with nearby indigenous residents, whose interests are locational (Lane 2002). Coexistence requires accommodating the interests of traditional/custodial title holders and other indigenous people who hold residential/ locational title through government grants of freehold or leasehold tenure, which occurs particularly in New South Wales and Queensland (Baker et al. 2001). The plurality of indigenous interests needs to be recognised. According to indigenous customary law, only traditional/custodial titleholders can speak for land and make decisions about its future management. Coexistence between traditional/custodial and residential/locational indigenous rights to land involves new approaches, trade-offs and compromise. Nearly 20 percent of the Australian continent is under some form of indigenous ownership, and the indigenous role in NRM will increase as a result of the recognition of native title. Recognition of native title controversially requires coexistence of indigenous and non-indigenous tenure rights, especially on pastoral leases, national parks and foreshore reserves. The 1996 Wik case in the High Court established that native title could co-exist with government grants of pastoral leases. There are few coexistence agreements on pastoral leases because of deep-seated interethnic tensions prevalent in rural localities (Baker et al. 2001), which have resulted in pastoral rangelands becoming the main focus of conflicts over recognition of native title. Only a small proportion of native title claims have been resolved. Most will become recognised in the arid and savanna rangelands, which will heighten the spatial unevenness of indigenous rights to land and resources (Baker et al. 2001). Regional Delivery of NRM The Australian rural landscape should be comprehended as a mosaic, not a monoculture, with diverse communities pursuing diverse practices (Lane 2004). Landcare regions tend to be defined culturally, in contrast to regions that are defined biophysically. Therefore, the regional catchment as bioregion does not neatly correspond with the way in which landcare groups identify and organise (Lane 2004). Across most of Australia the attempts to get landcare and regions to work together, especially in relation to indigenous people, could be hampered by this difference (Baker 1997). The Australian National Audit Office (2004) review of the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality found that preference for regional delivery of NRM has been constrained by the uneven implementation of regional structures and plans across Australia. Moreover, regional delivery of NRM has the potential to entrench dominance of local elites and intolerance towards indigenous peoples (Lane 2004). The regional assessment of Landcare grant applications can render applications from diverse groups susceptible to power relations at the local level that can work to exclude indigenous participation in rural Australia (Lane 2003).
Informing communication between indigenous peoples and Landcare for sustainable NRM With indigenous people now constituting two percent of the population in Australia and having some form of title to 20% of the continent, mostly in the rangelands of the arid
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centre and the savanna north, the sustainable management of the remote rangelands with indigenous natural resource managers is a significant challenge for landcare. This engagement takes place in an institutional and geographic context that includes the volunteer landcare movement, regional, state and federal government agencies and the community expectations of indigenous and non-indigenous natural resource managers. This engagement process requires indigenous peoples and anthropologist NRM specialists working together in contemporary management of country. Anthropologists themselves are merely another class of knowledge holder, and they cannot presume to speak for indigenous people. There is a plurality of traditional/custodial and residential/locational title interests among indigenous peoples, but only those with traditional/custodial rights can speak for the management of country. The role for anthropologists is to contribute to more informed communication for outcomes that are more acceptable and useful for all natural resource management practitioners. Anthropologists have played an integral and continuing role in supporting indigenous land rights and native title. Although native title has created coexistence of indigenous and non-indigenous tenure rights, so far there have been few coexistence agreements in the pastoral rangelands. Anthropologists have supported equitable public support for sustainable NRM in the indigenous rangelands through using indigenous resources in preference to replacing these resources with something else. The partnership between landcare and indigenous people has gone beyond agricultural and pastoral production to accord equal status to indigenous country that embraces a mix of indigenous and western scientific knowledge for sustainable communal and commercial harvesting practice. Anthropologists have facilitated cross-cultural work and the reciprocation of knowledge for indigenous caring for country stewardship that mixes customary and modern practices for community-based NRM in projects like Yirrkala Landcare, Love’s Creek Station Landcare and Tangentyere Landcare. The landcare stewardship ethic for sustainable production has not been wholly appropriate to the type of land use and control most indigenous people request, but traditional ecological knowledge alone has been inadequate to address environmental degradation and restoration of degraded resources. Indigenous caring for country has meant economic (subsistence and commercial), social and cultural benefits for those concerned, and the diversification has decreased economic vulnerability. Ethnographic research has provided cross-cultural understanding of indigenous communities and has demonstrated that the Australian rural landscape is a mosaic, not a monoculture, with diverse communities pursuing diverse practices. Indigenous communities, as well as landcare groups and networks, are defined culturally, in contrast to regions that are defined biophysically. Therefore, the regional catchment as bioregion does not neatly correspond with the way in which landcare groups and indigenous communities identify and organise. With regional delivery of NRM involving difference and possible conflict; anthropologists have the opportunity to play a role as a mediating force. Anthropological application of multi-site ethnography would be a useful tool to comprehend multiple scales, including the three levels of government, the market and civil society, which articulate and integrate the management of the Australian landscape. Landcare continues to facilitate indigenous caring for country options for ecological benefits through favourable fire regimes, control over weed infestations and feral animal harvesting and for economic benefits through harvesting wildlife for consumption and through harvesting plants for arts and crafts production. The anthropology of food chain analysis which traces global systems of commerce that link local and regional areas of commodity production could contribute to developing a
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sustainability and authenticity reporting system for the whole of the food chain involving indigenous commercial products. Such a study could allow indigenous producers, processors and wholesalers to report to consumers on how they are implementing improved NRM practices. A whole-of-food-chain sustainability reporting system would investigate if recognition for indigenous sustainable NRM achievements could also be linked to domestic or international market advantage.
References Aboriginal Landcare Education Program, 2000. Looking after Country. Chain Reaction 84 (summer 2000): 30. Altman, J. and P. Whitehead 2003. Caring for Country and Sustainable Indigenous Development: Opportunities, Constraints and Innovation. Working paper No. 20. CAEPR: Australian National University. Australian National Audit Office, 2004. The Administration of the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality, Audit Report No. 17 2004-05. ANAO: Canberra. Baker, R. 1997. Landcare: policy, practice and partnerships. Australian Geographical Studies 35(1): 61-73. Baker, R., J. Davies and E. Young (eds) 2001. ‘Managing country: an overview of the prime issues’. In Working on Country: Contemporary Indigenous Management of Australia’s Land Regions, edited by R. Baker, J. Davies and E. Young, pp. 1-23. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Central Land Council, 1997. CLC Landcare Winner. Land Rights News 2(43): 3. Gambold, N. 2001. ‘Participatory land assessment: integrating perceptions of country through mapping’. In Working on Country: Contemporary Indigenous Management of Australia’s Land, edited by R. Baker, J. Davies and E. Young, pp. 17186. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Hassall & Associates. 2003. Chapter 6: Achievements and Outcomes of the Indigenous Land Management Facilitators, pp. 56-66; Chapter 8: Delivery of the Indigenous land management facilitator network, pp. 100-114. In Evaluation of the NHT Phase 1 – Facilitator, Coordinator and Community Support Networks. Canberra: Dept of Environment and Heritage. Jopson, D. 2003. Wandjina triumphs in Native Title claim. Sydney Morning Herald December 9, 2003. Lane, M. 2002. Buying back and caring for country: institutional arrangement and possibilities for indigenous lands management in Australia. Society and Natural Resources 15: 827-846. —— 2003. Participation, decentralisation, and civil society: indigenous rights and democracy in environmental planning. Journal of Planning Education and Research 22: 360-373. —— 2004. Decentralisation and environmental management in Australia: a comment on the prescriptions of the Wentworth Group. Australian Geographical Studies 42(1): 103-115. Marika, B. 1996. Art is land, land is art/ Banduk Marika talks to Stephanie Britton. Artlink 16(4): 16-17. —— 2000. ‘Culture, environment and landscape in the Yirrkala region of north-east Arnhem Land’. In Vision of Future Landscapes, edited by A. Hamblin, pp. 234237. Proceedings of Australian Academy of Science 1999 Fenner Conference on the Environment. Canberra: Bureau of Rural Sciences.
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Robinson, C. and N. Munungguritj 2001. ‘Sustainable balance: a Yolngu framework for cross-cultural collaborative management’. In Working on Country: Contemporary Indigenous Management of Australia’s Land, edited by R. Baker, J. Davies and E. Young, pp. 92-107. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Sutherland, J. and K. Muir 2001. ‘Managing country: a legal overview’. In Working on Country: Contemporary Indigenous Management of Australia’s Land, edited by R. Baker, J. Davies and E. Young, pp. 24-46. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Taylor, J. 1998. ‘Indigenous Participation in Conservation and Land Management Programs’. In Improving the Capacity of Indigenous People to Contribute to the Conservation of Biodiversity in Australia, edited by D. Gillespie, P. Cooke and J. Taylor, Appendix 4. Environment Australia, Biological Diversity Advisory Council. Turner, R. 1994. ‘Aboriginal land management – a view of indigenous people’s involvement in land’. In Proceedings of the 1994 Australian Landcare Conference, Volume II, edited by D. Defenderfer, pp. 269-276. Hobart, Dept of Primary Industry and Fisheries Tasmania. Young, E. 1994. ‘Issues in land management and Aboriginal development’. In Surviving Columbus: Indigenous Peoples, Political Reform and Environmental Management in North Australia, edited by P. Jull, pp. 97-106. Darwin: North Australia Research Unit, Australian National University. —— 1998. ‘Sustainability and development: indigenous approaches in Australia’s rangelands. In Looking at Maps in the Dark: Directions for Geographical Research in Land Management in Sustainable Development in Rural and Urban Environments of the Third World, edited by L. DeHaan and P. Blaikie, pp. 124126. Utrecht: Royal Dutch Geographical Society. Wohling, M. 2001. ‘Ngaparrtji ngaparrtji nintilpayi: reciprocal thinking in indigenous land management. In Working on Country: Contemporary Indigenous Management of Australia’s Land, edited by R. Baker, J. Davies and E. Young, pp. 156-170. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
MEANINGFUL DIFFERENCES: DIS-INTEGRATED MANAGEMENT IN THE MITCHELL RIVER CATCHMENT Veronica Strang Anthropology, University of Auckland
Like other catchment management groups around Australia, the Mitchell River Watershed Catchment Management Group in Cape York makes considerable use of research focused on ecological issues, for example studies concerned with soil degradation, low environmental flows, aquatic species and water quality. The MRWMG works regularly with various natural scientists and environmental scientists, some of whom are members of the Executive, or advise it directly. However, the group rarely considers social science research, or makes use of the ethnographic studies that have explored the socio-cultural issues in the catchment area in depth. It occasionally funds and conducts its own ‘social’ surveys, but these are not generally designed or conducted by qualified social scientists. Thus, although the group is purportedly committed to ‘integrated catchment management’, its discourses focus almost entirely on specific ecological problems, and exclude discussion about the complex social, economic and political issues in the area. Based on long-term ethnographic research in the Mitchell catchment area, this paper points to some key factors that appear to impede the development of more genuinely ‘integrated’ catchment management. It considers the diversity of groups in the catchment area, and their major social and political issues. It also examines the MRWMG’s particular composition and decision-making processes, and considers how these both define and limit the types of discourses and activities of the group. By making these dynamics more transparent, and by putting forward some suggestions for change, the paper hopes to encourage greater inclusion of social issues and social science research in environmental management.
Introduction The Mitchell River catchment runs across Cape York, from the Dividing Range to the Gulf of Carpentaria. In the last several decades it has experienced increasingly severe ecological problems: widespread land degradation; feral animal and weed invasions; soil salinity, and growing concern about water quality and environmental flows. It also has some major social issues: conflicts over the ownership of land and resources, highly uneven distributions of wealth and influence; areas of severe unemployment and poverty; some barely viable economic practices – with related anxieties about security of access to essential resources – and a range of complex socio-political tensions. There is a diverse range of groups in the catchment, including indigenous communities, graziers, fishers, farmers, miners and tourism operators.1 For most of the 20th century the remoteness of the region meant that these groups carried out their activities with relative independence from each other, and from wider social and political pressures. The environmental effects of their various forms of land and resource use were also, apparently, quite isolated. However, the increasingly rapid development of Cape York has made its ecological problems both more visible and more pressing, requiring greater communication and cooperation from local resource users. In the early 1990s the formation of the Mitchell River Watershed Management Group seemed to be a major step towards integrated catchment 1
Detailed ethnographic accounts of these groups, the local environmental issues and the Mitchell Catchment Group are provided elsewhere (Strang 1996, 1997, 1998, 2001, 2002, 2004). A useful comparative analysis of catchment groups is provided by Carr (1994), and some insights into Aboriginal experiences of involvement in environmental management are offered by Sinnamon (1992).
© Veronica Strang
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management, and the achievement of social and environmental sustainability in the region. However, like many such catchment groups, the MRWMG is led and advised by natural or environmental scientists and, despite avowed intentions to consider the catchment holistically, the group focuses more or less exclusively on ecological rather than social issues. It keeps the door firmly closed to discussion of social and political concerns within the region, and only makes the most minimal use of social science research or social scientists themselves. This paper considers the development of the MRWMG, its composition and decision-making processes, and suggests some reasons why it may have found it difficult to integrate social and environmental issues in the watershed. It also makes some suggestions about how more integrated research and management might be achieved.
People and issues in the Mitchell River catchment area Along the Mitchell River, the major indigenous population (of approximately 1200 people) lives near the estuary in the ex-mission reserve area of Kowanyama, but there are also some smaller groups clustered in Mareeba and Dimbulah. With diversifying economic activities and aspirations for great self-sufficiency, access to land and resources is a key issue for these groups, and several land claims are underway. In Kowanyama there are also major concerns about decreasing fish stocks, lower environmental flows, water quality in the river, and recent falls in pressure in the bore water which is the settlement’s major water supply. For the Aboriginal communities environmental problems are far from being merely technical issues, and the pollution or degradation of water resources has impacts on their well-being at a variety of levels. The western savannahs of Cape York are largely taken up by cattle stations, the majority of which are run by European graziers. After some difficult times in the 1990s, cattle prices have recovered somewhat, and most stations are busily intensifying production, building dams and improving pastures. In an area with delicate soil structures and extreme wet and dry seasons their activities have had significant ecological effects, most particularly in terms of land degradation and concomitant effects on the aquatic ecosystems. The identity of the graziers is closely bound up with the settlement of the region, and the drive to make the land productive in European terms. However their particular values are under pressure: Native Title is increasingly challenging their tenure of the land, and local conservationists have become more successful in questioning primary producers’ assumptions about what constitutes good environmental management. Over the last decade there has been considerable – and often lively – debate in the catchment about the appropriateness of this form of land use in such an ecologically vulnerable area. Meanwhile, despite some revival of the industry, as a small rural minority in an increasingly urbanised population, the graziers have slipped down the socio-economic scale, from being a leading voice in Australian affairs to being a marginalised and – in their view – undervalued community. Their response to this slippage has been to try to increase ‘productivity’ further, and thus regain their former standing. Plainly this conflicts with other groups’ visions of how to ensure the catchment’s long-term ecological sustainability. Fishing is important to several groups in the catchment area. Some make use of the Tinaroo Dam, which is regularly stocked for recreational fishing, but many more fishers from the populated east coast travel across the peninsula to the Gulf coast and river estuaries, and to the waterholes and lakes in other parts of the catchment. Overfishing has severely depleted local fish stocks, with major implications for the commercial fishing industry in the Gulf, recreational use of the area, and the local Aboriginal communities, for whom fishing remains a primary source of bush food.
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Cattle in the Mitchell River catchment.
Kagara mine, Mt Garnet
Farming near Mareeba.
Irrigation in the Mareeba-Dimbulah area
Brolgas in the Mitchell Catchment
Tourists canoeing in the Meereba wetlands
Images of people and issues in the Mitchell River catchment area
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Historically there were several key mining areas in the watershed, most famously along the Palmer River, which flows into the Mitchell. The catchment therefore has a number of old – and not so old – mine sites leaching poisonous chemicals and heavy metals into its headwaters, with attendant water quality problems. In addition, the alluvial mining still being done along the Palmer continues to degrade the river and creek banks and to increase turbidity in the water. Though many of the small mines in the Mitchell catchment area have now gone, the large mines that remain, along with other major mining companies in Cape York, have retained a central position in the local and regional economy, with the status and influence that this confers. The industry has made robust efforts to construct more positive relationships with other groups in the catchment, and to respond to concerns about the impacts of mining activity, but its core values remain at odds with the interests and values of some of the other groups. A key aspiration, from an industry perspective (along with an obvious desire to strike it lucky and stay on the right side of recent environmental legislation) is to encourage a celebration of its cultural heritage and greater valorisation of its activities. Also in the headwaters of the Mitchell river is the Mareeba-Dimbulah irrigation area, which supports intensive farming. Since tobacco production ceased to provide a profitable crop following its deregulation in 19952, local farmers have diversified, and now grow mangos, avocados, grapes, some tea and coffee, and increasing amounts of sugar cane. This diversification – and most particularly the expansion in cane – has meant much more intensive use of the land, with a lot of clearing and infilling on farms, more frequent crops, and greater dependence on irrigation, with consequent impacts on the aquatic ecosystem. As in other parts of Australia, there is a widening rural-urban divide in the region. Farmers have gone from being well regarded by the wider population to a more equivocal position in which they are increasingly accused – by some groups – of being responsible for widespread environmental degradation. Many of them feel deeply resentful of this accusation and related demands to conform to ever stricter environmental regulation. Meanwhile, their economic position has become more tenuous, and the security of their access to water is threatened by competing demands for supplies for local urban development and pressure to maintain sufficient environmental flow for ecological sustainability. These factors not only undermine the farmers’ ability to maintain financial viability: they also challenge their beliefs and values about who they are, and what constitutes productive use of the land. Quite different views on what constitutes productivity are held by the growing numbers of conservation organisations and government agencies with an interest in the Mitchell River. The catchment area has several national parks and a variety of small tourism businesses: caravan parks and camping areas, as well as ecologically oriented ventures such as the Mareeba Wetlands and the Julatten Bird Park. The people involved in these are more inclined to see ‘natural amenity’ and biodiversity as the most productive and worthwhile aspects of the environment, and sometimes perceive other ideas about productivity – such as those integral to grazing and farming – as being in conflict with these values.
Dis-integrated Catchment Management Over the last two decades, increasing evidence of ecological problems in the catchment area has fired debates about environmental management and challenged 2
Prior to the deregulation of the industry, the Mareeba-Dimbulah area was Australia’s major tobacco growing region. Despite protests from growers, tobacco has now been phased out, with the last crop from Mareeba being sold in February 2004.
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some of the well established forms of land use. The Mitchell River Catchment Management Group was formed in the early 1990s, with the idea of bringing land- and water-using groups together to discuss common environmental issues and initiate collective action. More recently, it has been incorporated into the regional Northern Gulf Resource Management Group. In some respects these bodies have been very successful in raising funds for local projects directed towards, for example, weed control, getting fish screens installed in the irrigation system, or planting trees in areas particularly vulnerable to salinity. Their activities have served to raise local awareness of ecological issues. However, despite all of these efforts, relatively little impact has been made on the much larger social and ecological problems within the catchment. Not only is it pretty much ‘business as usual’, but further intensification and development means that, in general terms, resource usage could be said to be becoming less rather than more sustainable. The principles of integrated catchment management are purportedly holistic, encompassing social, economic and environmental issues. However, it appears that in the Mitchell, as elsewhere, current formulations of catchment management actually exclude or repress socio-cultural issues. This is not to suggest that there is some kind of conspiracy to impose a particular paradigm, but that such exclusion is simply the practical outcome of the structures and processes of contemporary catchment management. As Kapferer has noted, the institutional structures themselves are problematic (1995, see also Pearson and Sanders 1995), and as Hornborg and Kurkiala point out: ‘the political, economic and ecological aspects of marginalisation all have a conceptual as well as a material dimension’ (1998: 8). Like most such organisations, the catchment group responsible for ‘managing the Mitchell’ approaches its task from a largely technical and atheoretical managerial perspective. Its discourses focus on specialised technical, ecological and, occasionally, economic issues. Thus the group makes considerable use of natural science research (for example work on the catchment area’s soil profile, hydrology, aquatic species and freshwater water quality), and sometimes conducts its own ‘social’ surveys. But it tends not to consider in-depth ethnographic or sociological studies at all, although considerable research of this kind has been done in the region. Of course, by virtue of its diverse membership the Mitchell catchment group brings together some very different cultural and sub-cultural perspectives on what constitutes ideal forms of environmental engagement. It claims to recognise the need to understand and integrate these varied perspectives equitably in any managerial scheme. In reality though, the reductive model of environmental management that dominates the group’s discussions is not equipped to engage with broader social and cultural issues. And, although many subtle social negotiations surround the management process, when it comes to deciding what actions to take, and how to spend resources, the decision-making is invariably framed by this particular natural science paradigm. This means that other more holistic ways of conceptualising human environmental relationships – for example indigenous perspectives – are not properly encompassed (see Bennett 1999, Rose and Clarke 1997), and nor are the more complex analytic approaches of the social sciences. Thus, by focusing determinedly on purely technical issues, and treating these as if they were somehow separate from human beliefs and behaviour, catchment groups effectively suppress more complex debates, and exclude other forms of knowledge and value. I would suggest that there are several reasons for this. An obvious one is that while it is relatively easy for groups to agree about purely technical matters, some of the larger socio-cultural issues in the catchment area are much more controversial, and laden with political tension. Keeping them firmly outside the discussions is generally seen as necessary to maintaining harmony within the group. It is also fair to say that a
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focus on technical concerns has enabled the MRWMG to construct working relationships that might otherwise not have occurred. However, such relationships are delicate, and can only function by, to some extent, ‘pasting over’ social and political tensions. In this sense, while superficially successful, they also serve to maintain rather than challenge a particular status quo. Another obvious reason concerns the composition of catchment groups. Because of their explicitly ‘environmental management’ remit, these groups are generally led and facilitated by people with specialised expertise in ecological areas. The problems that are put on the table therefore tend to reflect the particular interests and ways of conceptualising catchment dynamics of these people. There is a related issue about the kinds of knowledge that can be engaged with. As well as being led by technical environmental specialists, most catchment groups are largely composed of people who have – and therefore valorise – what they categorise as ‘practical’ types of knowledge.3 While farmers and graziers might approach subjects such as soil profiles or introduced plant species from a perspective that differs considerably from that of local conservationists or natural scientists, they feel that they can speak more or less the same language, or at the very least ‘related dialects’. They are (and feel) far less able to engage with unfamiliar forms of social and cultural analysis, and they are therefore much less inclined to regard this kind of knowledge as having value.4 This distrust applies to indigenous worldviews and to ethnographic accounts, and I would argue that the exclusion of both of these from catchment group discourses is not a coincidence. There is an obvious political dimension to consider. In Cape York, a significant number of the people involved in primary production are members of the National Party or One Nation, and fiercely resistant to indigenous land claims or indeed any interference with their own tenure. The participation of anthropologists in land rights debates has led to the promulgation of a negative image of the discipline. Working in the Mitchell River area I have heard a number of pejorative and sometimes bizarre stereotypes about anthropologists and their research, most particularly since the establishment of Native Title rights in 1993. This opposition is manifested in a variety of ways, ranging from mutterings about ‘stirrers’ and ‘troublemakers’, to more impassioned diatribes about land tenure, and outright attempts to prevent anthropologists and indigenous groups working together to map important cultural sites on cattle stations. Inevitably this greater tension has also made some of the groups involved less inclined to learn about or incorporate indigenous perspectives into their thinking about environmental management, and has not encouraged catchment groups to valorise ethnographic research or include social scientists in their activities. There is also a more subtle issue to consider in the fact that indigenous and ethnographic perspectives are both left out in the cold. As I have argued elsewhere (Strang, forthcoming), anthropological forms of knowledge and analysis are the intellectual product of a long-term multicultural exchange between anthropologists and many cultural groups. Much of this interaction has involved indigenous peoples. The anthropological canon could therefore be said to owe as much to indigenous forms of knowledge as it does to classically ‘Western’ forms of science. Although obviously very different in most respects, Aboriginal Law and ethnographic research do have some important elements in common. Both are determinedly holistic and concerned with the multiple interconnections between all aspects of human life, and between humans and their environments. Both are far more focused on the immediate and specific qualities of everyday existence than with creating the highly reductive and generalised models upon which most natural sciences depend. Although anthropology does, in the end, try 3
As Monica Minnegal points out, social interactions often entail ‘practical knowledge’ too (pers.comm). There is a large area of literature considering different kinds of knowledge and the ways in which these intersect with political institutions (eg. Foucault 1972, Fardon 1995, Attwood and Arnold 1992).
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to produce reduced and ‘generalisable’ outcomes, these remain largely qualitative and do not mesh readily with reductive quantitative information. Anthropologists would tend to argue that any further reduction of their research would seriously compromise its value, and cease to provide the contextual information upon which its insights depend. So there are several major problems here. Anthropological practice is not infrequently damned by association with some difficult political issues. Ethnographic research produces information in a form that most of the people in catchment groups find hard to engage with. And it is difficult for anthropologists to provide useful insights – for example into the complexities of beliefs and values about the environment, totemic cosmologies, or implicit systems of social and economic obligation – without the ‘millstone’ of a detailed ethnographic context. These obstacles to integration mean that the majority of people involved in the MRWMG – local water users and industries, catchment coordinators, conservationists, and government employees – have had little or no contact with social science research or any opportunity to consider what it actually entails. Although the catchment group has accessed a useful array of ecological data, and is well advised by a number of natural scientists, its vision of social issues and cultural matters owes more to popular media and to minimalist marketing survey techniques than to serious academic investigations. Thus, when the coordinator of the Northern Gulf group was asked how they set about accommodating social issues, she responded that they had this well covered because their coordinators ‘talked to a lot of people’.5 Similarly, a particular trend amongst catchment groups in Australia has been to ask professional natural scientists – full members of the academic community or established consultants – to become members of the group, provide advice and do research. Meanwhile the limited social research that is conducted by catchment groups (usually confined to small surveys or occasional focus groups) is generally done ‘in house’ by catchment coordinators, or by employing market researchers or students for one-off external projects. This is partly a funding issue: unless catchment groups recognise the value of serious social research, they – and the related funding bodies – are unlikely to provide sufficient funding to cover it adequately or employ professional social scientists. But perhaps this tendency also reflects an anxiety about having to engage with complex qualitative data and difficult social issues, and a concomitant desire to control the scope of investigations so that this is not required. Catchment groups are not alone in this regard: environmental policy makers and resource managers are often equally unfamiliar with the systemic nature and scientific rigour of the social sciences, the kinds of information that disciplines like anthropology can produce, and how in-depth social research can and should inform environmental management. In a larger social context, the exigencies of political life (and the need to manage vast amounts of information effectively) have led to a much stronger demand for quantitative outputs that are – above all – brief and highly accessible. While these have considerable utility in many respects, they are generally very specialised, and not well suited to unravelling the multiple, tangled and unquantifiable relationships through which humans interact with all of the other aspects of a shared ecosystem. These realities have led to widening gaps in the relative status of social and natural scientists, to major differences in the levels of support that they receive, and to a more fragmented academic community in which natural and social scientists have little opportunity to exchange knowledge. Although policy rhetoric favours interdiscip5
In reality, although the coordinator was dismissive in this regard, the group has actually been involved in several social survey exercises. However, although the outputs from these may have been informative, they appear not to have been incorporated into the way that the group conceptualises catchment issues or proposes solutions.
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linary collaborations, these are rarely designed or funded in ways that are genuinely integrative of more holistic, qualitative sciences. Anthropologists tend to find that applied projects require them to compress ethnographic research so much that it is then difficult to deliver the complex insights into human-environmental relationships that are its most useful contribution. Pressures to fit investigations into a more reductive technical paradigm emerge in a number of ways: through the provision of insufficient time and funds to conduct in-depth research; through a demand for highly reductive forms of output; and, more generally, through the dominance of technical and managerial paradigms in interdisciplinary teamwork and debate. This inequality is unfortunate, because the changes in behaviour and values that might enable more sustainable environmental engagement cannot happen without significant social and cultural change. If catchment management is enacted from the confined perspective of a largely reductive technical paradigm, with only token efforts to get to grips with the social and cultural complexities, this seems very unlikely to come about. Obviously making use of social science research is not going to work any miracles either, but the insights that it provides, for example into people’s deeply held environmental beliefs and values, and the social issues that are most important to cultural groups, could certainly help to elucidate the impediments to change, and point to some potential ways forward.
Integrating Anthropology It is beginning to be acknowledged that there is an intellectual and practical need for better incorporation of social science research into catchment management, and for more effective collaborations between social and natural sciences. Genuinely integrated catchment management would contain a range of forms of analysis in which reductive and ‘user-friendly’ types of information are complemented by holistic, in-depth forms that, though perhaps more unwieldy, get to grips with the less tractable types of data. This suggests that a key basis for successful integrated research is the establishment of partnerships on the basis of equality between the various disciplinary approaches, so that the academic and intellectual integrity of each can be maintained. To achieve this equality6, social scientists need to be more active in initiating contact and communication with catchment groups, other managerial agencies and with natural scientists. They need to find ways to demonstrate the utility and accessibility of qualitative and in-depth forms of social analysis. They need to be creative in devising outputs that, without compromising their intellectual value, enable other groups to familiarise themselves with what social scientists do, and how they do it. In working with catchment groups, anthropologists also need to try to defuse the political concerns of some of the participants without undermining their own ethical positions. This is a far from easy matter, but efforts to widen understandings about social research might alleviate some of the prejudices that practitioners encounter. Similarly, although there are potential pitfalls, it would prove useful to discuss these thorny issues more openly with natural scientists, and with the people involved in catchment management and environmental planning. This imperative for communication is echoed within educational institutions, where the social sciences would doubtless benefit from being more visible and more active in building bridges with the natural sciences. At an intellectual level, some positive outcomes might be achieved if anthropologists could persuade their natural science colleagues that non-reductive and 6
One should really say ‘regain’ this equality, as historically subjects like anthropology have been, if anything, more than equal in status to the natural sciences.
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holistic approaches can provide a useful way to locate specialised ecological analyses in a larger social context, and bring diverse disciplinary perspectives together in a way that is systematic and productive for all concerned. Anthropology cannot be compressed into a natural science paradigm, but more specialised natural sciences do not suffer the same problems when encompassed in the larger ‘contextualising’ frameworks of social science: good hydrological analyses will still be good hydrological analyses, even if social scientists elucidate the complex relationships between social action and hydrological outcomes. Plant and animal studies within catchments lose neither value nor meaning if social scientists show how these are affected by different cultural values and forms of environmental engagement. A final point: there is nothing to be gained – and much to be lost – from a contest between the social and natural sciences. There is, on the other hand, much to gain from using anthropology and related social sciences to consider the relationships between practical ecological issues and what people think, feel and do, and in this way assisting a common endeavour to achieve social and environmental sustainability.
References Attwood, B. and J. Arnold (eds) 1992. Power, Knowledge and Aborigines. Special edition of the Journal of Australian Studies, Clayton, Victoria: La Trobe University Press in association with the National Centre for Australian Studies. Bennett, S. 1999. White Politics and Black Australians. St Leonards NSW: Allen and Unwin. Carr, A. 1994. ‘Grass-roots and green-tape: community-based environmental management in Australia’. PhD thesis. Australian National University. Fardon, R. (ed.) 1995. Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge. London, New York: Routledge. Foucault, M. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock. Hornborg, A. and M. Kurkiala (eds) 1998. Voices of the Land: Identity and Ecology in the Margins. Sweden: Lund University Press. Kapferer, B. 1995. ‘Bureaucratic erasure: identity, resistance and violence – Aborigines and a discourse of autonomy in a North Queensland town’. In Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local, edited by D. Miller, pp. 69-90. London, New York: Routledge. Pearson, N. and W. Sanders 1995. Indigenous Peoples and Reshaping Australian Institutions: Two Perspectives. Canberra: Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Discussion paper, No. 102/1995. Rose, D. and A. Clarke (eds) 1997. Tracking Knowledge in North Australian Landscapes: Studies in Indigenous and Settler Ecological Knowledge Systems. Casuarina NT: North Australia Research Unit. Sinnamon, V. 1992. ‘Gulf of Carpentaria coast and river management: an Aboriginal management agency perspective’. Paper presented to the Queensland Environmental Law Association Annual Conference. May 1992. Strang, V. 1996. ‘Sustaining tourism in Far North Queensland’. In People and Tourism in Fragile Environments, edited by M. Price, pp. 51-67. London: John Wiley. —— 1997. Uncommon Ground: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental Values, Oxford. New York: Berg. —— 1998. ‘Competing perceptions of landscape in Kowanyama, north Queensland’. In The Archaeology and Anthropology of Landscape: Shaping Your Landscape, edited by P. Ucko, and R. Layton, pp. 206-218. London: Routledge.
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—— 2001. ‘Negotiating the river: cultural tributaries in Far North Queensland’. In Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place, edited by B. Bender and M. Winer, pp. 69-86. Oxford, New York: Berg. —— 2002. Life down under: water and identity in an Aboriginal cultural landscape. Goldsmiths College Anthropology Research Papers. No. 7. London: Goldsmiths College. —— 2004. ‘Close encounters of the Third World kind: indigenous knowledge and relations to land’. In Development and Local Knowledge: New Approaches to Issues in Natural Resources Management, Conservation and Agriculture, ASA 2000, Volume 2., edited by A. Bicker. J. Pottier and P. Sillitoe, pp. 93-117. London: Routledge, Studies in Environmental Anthropology Series. —— Forthcoming. ‘A happy coincidence? Symbiosis and synthesis in Anthropological and Indigenous Knowledge’.
INFORMED CONSENT AND MINING PROJECTS: SOME PROBLEMS AND A FEW TENTATIVE SOLUTIONS Martha Macintyre Centre for the Study of Health and Society & School of Population Health The University of Melbourne
Informed consent is increasingly perceived as a means of ensuring that people’s human rights are respected – whether as the subjects of research, the recipients of medical treatment or the citizens of a nation where economic projects are being developed. It has been acknowledged as a major issue for indigenous people who are minorities within nations such as Brazil, Australia, The United States and Canada. As an anthropologist working in the area of social and economic impact assessment in Papua New Guinea, I have become aware of the complex ways that the interests of mining managers, scientists assessing environmental risk, and social analysts reporting on local socio-economic impact and responses intersect when ‘informed consent’ is raised as a problem. This paper explores the ideological, political and practical problems associated with gaining informed consent for mining projects. While it concentrates on the contradictory and contentious issues that have emerged in the Papua New Guinean situation there are parallels that can readily be drawn with many other countries where resource development occurs.
Introduction Informed consent is increasingly perceived as a means of ensuring that people’s human rights are respected – whether as the subjects of research, the recipients of medical treatment or the citizens of a nation where economic projects are being developed. It has been acknowledged as a major issue for indigenous people who are minorities within nations such as Brazil, Australia, The United States and Canada.1 Working in the area of social and economic impact assessment, I have become aware of the complex ways that the interests of mining managers, scientists assessing environmental risk, and social analysts reporting on local socio-economic impact and responses intersect when ‘informed consent’ is raised as a problem. This paper concentrates on the political and practical problems associated with gaining informed consent for mining projects. The issue of informed consent for mining projects that affect communities in developed and developing countries has arisen in the context of widespread criticism of past practices. Campaigns by international organisations such as Mine Watch, OxfamCCA and Earthworks2 initially concentrated on the environmental damage generated by mining and the problems faced by communities when damage occurs that threatens their livelihoods and public health. Over the past five years there has been a noticeable shift from advocacy concentrating on environmental issues to campaigns based on human rights. The two issues are now interwoven so that often it appears that the 1
See, for example, the document produced by a United Nations committee, ‘A preliminary working paper on the principle of free, prior and informed consent of indigenous peoples in relation to development affecting their lands and natural resources’, http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_e.aspx?m=123. Also The Report of The Consultation on the Future Role of the World Bank Group in the Extractive Industries (Extractive Industries Review), Striking a Better Balance (2003, vol.1: 18-ff) illustrates the ways that human rights issues now permeate understandings of corporate responsibility, ‘the social licence to operate’ and the rights of citizens in matters such as social and environmental impact.
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Oxfam-CAA has a Mining Ombudsman project which advocates for communities affected by mining in developing countries. The Annual Reports of the Mining Ombudsman are published and available on their website, http://www.oxfam.org.au/campaigns/mining/index.html
© Martha Macintyre
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major issue in gaining informed consent is to ensure that high environmental standards are adhered to – the assumption being that local communities have the same priorities as Western environmentalists. As a prominent Papua New Guinean professor of law has recently pointed out, this assumption is often ill-founded, especially in the period prior to a mining agreement: … it can be said that the most vociferous and aggressive environmentalists are those who are located or based in developed, or rich, countries. Because their governments take care of their basic survival needs they can push their environmental arguments through the media to advance their own career prospects or their own agenda. Poor people located in underdeveloped or developing countries depend wholly on mining, metal or other developmental efforts for their survival because their governments do not provide the basic survival needs of society. These people would, therefore, usually like to see the construction and continuation of these developmental activities even if these damage the environment to some extent.(Borida n.d.: 3)
Borida’s argument emphasises the differences between mining in developing countries, where large projects bring employment, services and infrastructure that governments cannot afford and mining in countries such as Australia and the United States where unemployed people have social services to fall back on. The arguments about rights of veto often ignore the economic imperatives that people in remote communities in the Pacific experience when faced with a proposal to mine. Local campaigns about environmental destruction in Papua New Guinea are almost always at their most vociferous when the mine is closing or closed – rarely before it begins3 . Having worked on two mining projects in Papua New Guinea, I have observed the negotiation processes with communities prior to the beginning of mining and have been struck by the fact that the concerns of community representatives are usually those that are best described as social and economic rather than environmental (Macintyre and Foale 2003, 2004). Rightly or wrongly, the affected people generally perceive the mining project as a form of development, poverty alleviation and as a chance to be linked to the wider (and richer) world. In Australia, North and South America and some Asian countries, concerns have focussed especially on the land rights of indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities – groups who often have been marginalised during colonisation and so tend to live in the remote areas where mining often occurs. The emphasis on free, prior and informed consent is therefore strongly linked to their political arguments about sovereignty, land rights and the attempt to redress many of the wrongs perpetrated in the past. In most of Melanesia (Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands – but not Noumea) indigenous people have retained customary land tenure over their lands and very little has been alienated by governments. This means that the situation relating to informed consent is very different from that pertaining to Aboriginal peoples’ rights over land in Australia, Canada, Indonesia and in some parts of Asia and the United States. Moreover, the variation in legal rights means that variation in processes for gaining informed consent will necessarily be great. In this brief paper I want to raise 3
Mining on Bougainville in PNG did not generate very much environmental criticism in the first decade of operations but the degradation became a political issue as unrest relating to a range of economic arrangements increased and political sovereignty became the goal of many Bougainvilleans. Since the mine closed, many international environmental groups have rallied around the issues of environmental destruction – see, for example, the report by one group on Bougainville Indigenous Environmental Watch, http://www.wetlandecosystems.com.au. At Ok Tedi, the environmental problems were a major factor in BHP’s withdrawal from operations and international environmentalists have become increasingly concerned. But as Richard Jackson’s 1982 study Ok Tedi: the pot of gold demonstrates, these issues were far less contentious during the first decade (Jackson 1982: 87-136).
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some of the problems that emerge from a ‘catch-all’ appeal to informed consent. My examples will mainly be drawn from Papua New Guinea, because I draw on my own experience there working on mining projects, but the situation elsewhere is often similar.
Who gives informed consent from a ‘community’? Definitions of community are extremely problematic in the social sciences. In the context of mining exploration, when ‘community consultations’ often begin, the community is usually defined in terms of those who reside in the ‘affected area’ (another extremely difficult notion), those who have legal rights to land there and those who have customary claims or cultural associations. In many places, the community of people living in a specific area does not necessarily coincide with the group who are customary landowners. This is especially the case in countries where, because there is little employment in remote or rural areas, so many people move away in search of work. In places where customary ownership is recognised, such as Papua New Guinea, this means that at the time of exploration and negotiation, those who are have received formal education and are more familiar with the ‘modern’ world are often away in towns. The same scenario occurs in the Philippines, in Canada and in Australia. In some areas of Indonesia such as Kalimantan and West Papua, where the indigenous peoples have not been able to exclude immigrants from heavily populated areas of Java and Sumatra, the ‘traditional landowners’ are outnumbered by immigrants – many of whom have lived there for generations and so could be considered legitimate members of a ‘community’, even though they might not have customary claims to land. In the case of Indonesia, where resettlement has been managed by the State, these migrants have legal titles granted by the State. Effectively, this is similar to some areas of Australia where various lease arrangements obtain, but Aboriginal people will retain customary rights. The issue then is – who is to give consent? Is the question one of effect on a community of people who live, work and have rights to some areas of land? Or is the consent to be obtained from those who are indigenous and have customary rights to the land, even when these are not recognised by the State? Is the group who is to give consent to be defined in terms of residential status, customary rights, legally recognised rights according to the national law or genealogical connection to the original customary owners?
Which people in a community give consent? The same question has different implications too with respect to the idea of representation and recognition of traditional or customary political rights. In Papua New Guinea this issue has particular problems with respect to the constitutional rights of all Papua New Guineans as citizens. For example, if a community of customary landowners deal with a mining agreement in terms of customary modes of representative authority, the legal rights of young adult men and women are often ignored. Male clan leaders will usually be recognised as ‘speaking for’ the community. However, at Bougainville, Porgera and most recently on Lihir women have voiced their dissatisfaction with the processes that initially excluded them on the grounds of ‘custom’. Women from Africa, India and North and South America make similar criticisms. At the conference “Women and Mining: Voices for Change” held in Madang in August 2003 (organised by Oxfam-CAA and The World Bank) women from nineteen countries unanimously agreed that women must be consulted and their consent given before any project is established. They appealed to their human rights and their rights as citizens of their respective countries.
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Women’s Voices and Women’s Rights Bougainville and Lihir are both places where land is held and transmitted matrilineally. However, at the time of exploration and negotiation, women from these communities were unfamiliar with processes of political meetings. Few spoke English and many did not feel confident to challenge their menfolk – even when they disagreed with them. As time passed they realised that in many instances men had used their positions as clan ‘spokesperson’ or representative to effectively disenfranchise their wives, sisters and their sisters’ children. In societies such as these, men compete for rights over land and some used the mining negotiations to ‘win’ land from other clanspeople. In a few instances where a woman was the last remaining member of her group, male relatives by marriage (all of whom were living on the land and therefore part of ‘the community’) used the mining negotiations to gain control over land that would otherwise have gone to her clan’s people who were not at that time resident. In the past, on Bougainville and Lihir, systems of customary land tenure and the complex traditions that excluded women from having a political voice meant that a woman and her kin could never ‘lose’ land. Land could not be transferred outside the clan without complex ritual exchanges that were witnessed by all concerned. But from the mining company perspective they are gaining consent from ‘traditional owners’ in ways that men and women (at that time) agreed were in accordance with customary decision-making procedures. Years later, when women realise that their male relatives agreed to the use or destruction of land that they can never regain, many feel doubly betrayed. They believe now, that had they been made aware of the implications of giving up rights to land, they would have chosen differently from their men. After all, in these cultures women are the ‘breadwinners’ who grow the food for their families. They maintain that they should have been informed by the company of all implications and been able to give or refuse consent by virtue of their constitutional and human rights. While many concede that at that time, women were reluctant to attend meetings or speak out, they argue that, based on previous experience of the impacts of mining on subsistence and on the lives of women and children, responsible miners should have ignored the appeal to ‘custom’ and proceeded according to the national laws and to The United Nations Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women.
Absent Customary Landowners and Present Community Members In Melanesia, as in most developing countries, when a mining project is established the value of land alters. It can have a cash value attached where previously none had existed. Its former uses no longer determine its primary value. For example, the caldera where the mine is located on Lihir was not used for gardens because it is a geothermal region. The ground was very hot in some places, warm in others. One group used the hot rock pools to cook food, but generally the land was not valued highly because it was unsuitable for gardens. On the fringes, people who had come to live on Lihir as spouses or who had no land rights were given access to this low value land to garden. In some cases they had been there for generations – they were part of the community. According to Lihirian customary law they had no ‘traditional’ land rights and the clan owners were correct in excluding them from any negotiation. However, as residents on the land, they would have to move and re-establish rights in another area. The mining company was committed to providing relocation housing for Lihirians who had to move. But the landowners could legitimately claim that these other people were simply ‘tolerated visitors’ and not entitled to housing. Should their consent have been required? At the same time, as on Bougainville, many highly educated Lihirian people, especially those with professional qualifications, had left the island to find employment.
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They had not lived there as adults and had no houses on their lands. Many had married non-Lihirians – who of course had no customary rights to land there. Sometimes people had lost touch and did not know where their relative was living. But these people often had a much better understanding of the implications of industrialisation and social change than did resident landowners. Some had even worked on other mining projects. As non-residents at the time of negotiation, with no gardens or houses, but with dormant rights that traditionally they could re-invoke if they returned, should they be among those who give informed consent? This is a crucial question – because in most developing countries there is an influx of ‘returnees’ seeking employment near family and in a place where they have land rights. These people usually return to find employment after the mine has begun. Because of their higher education, broader understanding of industrialisation and their rights as citizens, this group is often retrospectively very critical of the negotiations. In my experience in Papua New Guinea and from reading about mining projects in Indonesia and Brazil, these employed returnees are usually the leaders in political opposition to the mining agreements. They are the most articulate in their appeals to both customary and legal rights – and they are often able to make their case better because they can speak the language of mining company managers and are able to forge alliances with pressure groups outside. In my opinion, these people should not be denied a voice in any process that affects land to which they are legitimately entitled by custom. But their absence means that ‘prior consent’ is often impossible to gain. In Papua New Guinea, where newspaper advertisements are generally placed by negotiating companies as a means of informing absentees and inviting applications for employment, the first year rarely ‘picks up’ even half of those who actually return once the project is underway. In places such as the Philippines and Central American nations, where many absentees are working in other countries on contracts, the process of return is even more prolonged. Gaining prior consent presents great difficulties that are often glossed over because the political criticisms emerge long after the mine has begun. People ‘forget’ that at the time of initial negotiation the population was small, leadership was in accordance with traditions that have since changed, ideas about representation were not in question and the ‘community’ comprised a different set of people with different interests. The problem of who constitutes ‘the community’ and who is enfranchised to give consent at varying stages is likely to be a highly political issue in Papua New Guinea. In some project areas the arguments about land ownership have led to fights, lawsuits and major social problems. Given the influx of migrants that accompanies mining projects, the subsequent intermarriage and the inevitable land transfers that occur over time, the designation of those with voting rights at any specific time is a complicated business. Already on Lihir there are political moves to disenfranchise people who have married in from other groups and the children of such ‘mixed marriages’. While these decisions have been made in order to exclude ‘outsiders’ from the benefits, royalties and dividend payments, they would no doubt prevail in any debate about voting rights. Such measures can be discriminatory (some ‘outsiders’ have lived on Lihir for generations) and certainly deny the human rights of self-determination and those of citizenship under the PNG constitution. In a period where ‘ethnic’ fighting between people who claim traditional land tenure and those who have settled there for reasons of employment is increasingly common – the civil unrest in the Solomon Islands being but one recent instance – it is naïve to suggest that the ‘traditional landowners’ is a natural, easily-defined category.
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Informed Consent The requirement of informed consent is morally incontestable, since not to inform people of the nature and implications of a mining project effectively amounts to fraud. But it is also impossible to achieve. What information should be given? Much of the criticism of issues of information to affected communities has been made by external international critics who concentrate almost exclusively on environmental damage. Even where this is acknowledged, as in Ok Tedi and Bougainville, the extent and nature of the damage is disputed by antagonists. There are major problems in communicating scientific studies to communities where people are illiterate and where their understandings of their natural environment differ from those of scientists. In many developing countries traditional understandings of the environment derive from religious or cosmological knowledge systems and from their use of resources. Developing ways of explaining scientific predictions, models of environmental impact and understandings of temporary and permanent transformation is an essential component in the process of informing people. The research work in this area is only just beginning and as yet the majority of environmentalist activists and mining companies do not draw upon it. Environmentalist critics usually draw on a fanciful image of indigenous people as ‘natural stewards and custodians’ and of the environment prior to mining as being in some homeostatic balance with the human population. Mining companies operate with another idea – that of the environment and the population as ‘undeveloped’. Both are usually incorrect in their assumptions. There is a burgeoning literature from environmental and social scientists on the topic of ‘traditional’ ecological knowledge and the ways that it meshes (or more usually fails to mesh) with Western scientific models of environmental transformation (see for example, Bulmer 1982; Macintyre and Foale 2004; Scoones 1999; Van Helden 1998). These studies reveal that ‘informing’ people with accurate scientific information prior to or at the beginning of a project will not be very useful. However, offering simplified lay explanations as part of the process of gaining consent lays companies open to the justified claim that they did not give detailed and accurate information. Moreover, as the company is presumably trying to gain community consent, the problem of unbiased information is paramount. Should the company provide the information or should some neutral party be responsible? Does an unbiased neutral party exist? Who would fund the process? If it was the mining company, would this not lead to questions of influence? The emphasis on environmental damage derives from the interests of people in Western industrial societies whose concern derives from a longer history of environmental transformation, ecological degradation and species loss in their own countries. The social problems that tend to arise around mining operations in undeveloped countries are often of more concern to local people than the environmental issues. At the ‘Women and Mining’ conference mentioned above, the impacts that women thought were most negative were all social in nature: alcohol consumption, violence, increases in crime, economic disparities, gambling, prostitution, family breakdown, the changes in authority structures, in-migration, problems of disaffected youth and the introduction of new diseases, most particularly HIV/AIDS. Mining companies at the beginning of a project have their own reasons for ‘playing down’ the likelihood that these problems will emerge and small rural communities tend to not believe that ‘their community’ would be subject to such changes. On Lihir, when I was initially consulting with community representatives about the terms of reference for long-term social monitoring, there was considerable disagreement between groups about the criteria to be employed. While the women’s organizations supported the use of United Nations Human Development indices and CEDAW, the men in the landowners’ association questioned the idea that any international comparisons should
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be used and said that they considered my inclusion of human rights measures as ‘irrelevant’. While I doubt that any of them would claim this now (ten years later), their parochialism and blithe optimism about the resilience of their ‘culture’ in the earlier period stands as a warning to those who place great emphasis on the ‘prior’ aspect of consent as obviating later problems. In my view, a commitment to ‘free, prior and informed consent’ necessarily entails a commitment to a process of educating and informing people about the ‘worst case’ scenarios and the likelihood that some of these will eventuate. This means undertaking thorough environmental and social risk assessments and communicating the findings to local people in ways that are comprehensible to them. It also means undertaking research to determine the most culturally appropriate way of transmitting this information and wherever possible ensuring that people actually understand the scientific information prior to making a decision. The most devastating environmental damage from mining and the most socially disruptive impacts have often been those which have either not been predicted, or were perceived – by the communities, if not the anthropologists who did initial social impact studies – as unlikely. Obviously companies have been working to improve their environmental impact predictions, but it does suggest that in the interests of transparency in future, even ‘low risk’ predictions should be fully communicated and the reasons why the company perceives them as ‘low risk’ presented so that people can make their own judgements. Unless companies are prepared to inform people fully and, in the context of worst-case scenarios, present strategies for the company’s role in averting and avoiding negative impacts, I believe ‘informed consent’ will not be attainable. The information and explanations will require educational programs in local languages and using media and materials that are unfamiliar to many of the people in remote communities. This task is not simple. It requires research into local understandings; education about the scientific methods used by engineers, environmental scientists, geologists, hydrologists and others; and communication of complex predictions and alternative scenarios. My experience on Lihir – where computer-generated images, videos, graphs and a range of pictorial depictions of mining activities have been used – suggests that unless people have some prior familiarity with these representations they are confusing and often disregarded. While this might not be consonant with the experiences of NGOs, I think the discrepancies are attributable to the fact that NGOs they are rarely (financially) able to undertake detailed scientific research that assesses environmental impact; nor do they have the resources to evaluate local comprehension of information given in pamphlets or awareness exercises. Such procedures will inevitably add considerable costs in the early stages of a project and would necessitate major changes to the ways that mine financing is currently structured. It is unlikely that banks will finance a project that can be vetoed by local people at any stage. The campaigns for ethical investment that are currently being waged by groups who want to reassure mining companies that being socially responsible will encourage people to invest have so far had limited success. Company directors are likely to find it hard to convince potential shareholders that ‘being ethical’ by having veto provisions in an agreement will have a necessarily positive effect on the value of their shares.
Determining levels of consent Providing information is likely to be an expensive operation and assessing whether consent has been given will be similarly difficult and costly. The idea of ‘informed consent’ is derived from Western European traditions of Human Rights and the freedom of the individual citizen. It assumes a nation state exists to protect and
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maintain the rights of people and that all people will be equal under the law. The appeal to ‘rights’ also assumes rational individual choice so that each person is deemed capable of making decisions in respect of his or her interests and the group he or she identifies with – whether that is an ethnic group, a clan or a political party. In view of the legal and philosophical tradition on which this principle rests, the only decisive way of determining community response or consent would be a plebiscite by secret ballot with ‘one person/one vote’. Even then, the decision about whether a decisive vote would be a majority, consensus or some proportion in favour, would need to be agreed upon prior to the vote. In order that the results of such a vote be legally acceptable it would have to be conducted in accordance with fair and transparent electoral principles. This would require preparation of an electoral roll of all eligible voters; management of the plebiscite to ensure that there was no fraud, undue pressure or bribery of participants and no tampering with ballot boxes or results. Once again the question of who would finance and manage such a process would be a contentious issue. Ideally the government should be the initiator and the agent for the plebiscite – but as the community might be in conflict with the government over approval of the mine, this would be problematic. The OK Tedi case in Papua New Guinea also illustrates the problems that arise when the government is a shareholder. If the mining company financed and conducted the process, there would be an easy inference of bias and special interest that could taint the result.
Some brief conclusions and opinions I believe that the catch-cry for ‘free, prior and informed consent’ is easily made and very hard to implement faithfully. If a commitment is to be made in good faith, then I think that it cannot be made without a detailed presentation of principles, processes and responsibilities. Given the changes in who constitutes the ‘affected community’ and ‘customary landowners’ prior to and over the life of a mine I think that the emphasis on ‘prior’ consent is not going to solve the problems its proponents envisage. In my opinion it would be more realistic, and ultimately more just, to require that agreements between local communities and mining companies are regularly reviewed and that there is a process of continuing education and dissemination of information relating to negative impacts associated with the right of communities to withdraw consent. I think that the right to renegotiate the agreement should be established from the outset and that any changes in mining processes, ore through-put, employment policies or other procedures that could have a negative effect on the natural or social environment must be made the grounds for review and renegotiation. The implications of a commitment to free, prior and informed consent are extensive for the community and financially costly for the government or company who has to undertake the procedure. Undertaking a census; compiling an electoral role of people in accordance with the principles of who is rightfully a ‘customary owner’; accurately informing people of all the issues they are consenting to in an open and appropriate way; ensuring that the vote is conducted democratically and being prepared to accept a negative vote from the community as an effective veto are part and parcel of a commitment to ‘free, prior and informed consent’. In my view, neither the mining companies nor the NGO proponents have really considered the implications of free, prior and informed consent, nor how it might be reasonably achieved. In cases where gross disregard for the rights of local communities has been associated with the establishment of a mine, such as at Freeport in Indonesia, the government wanted the mine to proceed and was prepared to forcibly remove local people who did not agree. If a company were intending in such
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circumstances to seek community consent, then an oppressive State would still be able to forcibly evacuate the area and so deprive people of all land as well as their rights. I strongly support the objective of requiring community consent for projects but I fear that, without having any clear guidelines or processes outlined, negotiating consent will become a token activity that is no advance on ‘community consultation’ – which at present can mean anything from all of the processes I have suggested above to having an informal chat with a few men who designate themselves ‘community leaders’. Unless commitment is matched by an agreement to a clearly-defined set of principles and processes it will be a sham.
References: Borida, S. n.d. ‘Extractive industries and the environment – socio/economic dilemma facing developing countries’. Paper delivered at PNG University of Technology, Lae, Papua New Guinea. Bulmer, R.N.H. 1982. ‘Traditional conservation practices in Papua New Guinea’. In Traditional Conservation in Papua New Guinea: Implications for Today, edited by L. Morauta, J. Pernetta, and W. Heaney, pp. 59-77. Boroko, PNG: Institute of Applied Social and Economic Research. Extractive Industries Review, 2003. Striking a Better Balance. Washington, World Bank Jackson, R. 1982. Ok Tedi: the Pot of Gold. Port Moresby: The University of Papua New Guinea. Macintyre, M and S. Foale 2003. ‘Global imperatives and local desires: competing economic and environmental interests in Melanesian communities’. In Pacific Island Societies in a Global World, edited by V. Lockwood, pp. 149-164. New York: Prentice Hall. Macintyre, M. and S. Foale 2004. Politicized ecology: local responses to mining in Papua New Guinea. Oceania 74 (3): 231-251. Scoones, I. 1999. New Ecology and the social sciences: what prospects for fruitful engagement? Annual Review of Anthropology 28: 479-507. Van Helden, F. 1998. Between Cash and Conviction: The Social Context of the Bismarck-Ramu Integrated Conservation and Development Project. Port Moresby: The National Research Institute.
BRIDGES AND ESCALATORS: METAPHORICAL ENGAGEMENTS WITH NON-SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE IN THE MILLENNIUM ECOSYSTEM ASSESSMENT Colin Filer Australian National University
This paper reflects on the way in which the Sub-Global Working Group of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment has tried to grapple with the role of local and indigenous knowledge in the construction of a ‘multi-scale’ assessment of the world’s ecosystems, and more especially, on the way in which these issues were addressed in a conference on ‘Bridging Scales and Epistemologies’ held in Alexandria in March 2004. The paper also deals with the very marginal role which anthropology and anthropologists have played in these deliberations, and hence with the question of what anthropologists should be saying about the efforts of ecologists to build the ‘bridges and escalators’ that will connect their scientific knowledge with the other forms of knowledge which lurk at the bottom of their own global food chain. The author’s reflections stem from his own role as the only self-confessed anthropologist in the Sub-Global Working Group, whose primary role has so far been to entertain the rest of the group with alternative metaphorical constructions of their work.
Introduction The relationship between anthropologists, environmental scientists and environmental managers is neither an eternal nor a globally uniform triangle, but one that normally has to be negotiated within the confines of a specific political context or policy process which may itself be the subject of an ethnographic study. This paper reflects on the way in which the Sub-Global Working Group of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment has tried to grapple with the role of local and indigenous knowledge in the construction of a ‘multi-scale’ assessment of the world’s ecosystems, and more especially, on the way in which these issues were addressed in a conference on ‘Bridging Scales and Epistemologies’ held in Alexandria in March 2004. Anthropologists have only played a marginal role in these deliberations, yet that only serves to underline the question of what, if anything, we can usefully say about the efforts of environmental scientists and environmental managers to build the ‘bridges and escalators’ that will connect their scientific knowledge with the other forms of knowledge which lurk at the bottom of their own global food chain.
The Millennium Assessment and its Sub-Global Working Group The Millennium Assessment (MA) is a 5-year old ‘work program’ which is organised along the same lines as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is sponsored by a similar range of global institutions, and is ‘designed to meet the needs of decision makers and the public for scientific information concerning the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being and options for responding to those changes’ (www.millenniumassessment.org). The scientists involved in this exercise are divided between four Working Groups, three of which are responsible for writing reports about the changing ‘Conditions’ of different ecosystems, recent or current ‘Responses’ to these changes, and plausible ‘Scenarios’ for their further transformation over the next 50 years – all at a global scale. The Sub-Global Working Group (SGWG), on the other hand, is drafting a report which looks at the relationship between conditions, trends, responses and scenarios through the eyes of several ‘sub-global’ assessments, each of which is meant to consider this relationship at more than one scale, and to provide
© Colin Filer
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useful information to ‘decision-makers’ at lower levels in the global hierarchy. Most of the members of the SGWG are directly involved in one or more of these sub-global assessments. My own membership of the SGWG has been contingent on my role as coordinator of a sub-global assessment of ‘coastal, small island and coral reef ecosystems’ in Papua New Guinea (PNG). This involves a preliminary assessment of the relationship between coastal communities and coastal ecosystems at the national and ‘local’ scales, followed by a more detailed assessment of the same relationship at the provincial and ‘community’ scales within Milne Bay Province. The second phase of the assessment will be an integral component of the Milne Bay Community-Based Coastal and Marine Conservation Project (MBCP), which is substantially funded by the Global Environment Facility, ‘implemented’ by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and ‘executed’ by Conservation International (CI). The second phase is to be undertaken through a contract between CI and the Australian National University and a sub-contract between the Australian National University and the University of PNG. Four years ago, when I first expressed an interest in organising this assessment, and therefore joining the MA ‘club’, another anthropologist (who shall be nameless) told me that I was heading straight into the jaws of global scientific managerialism, and would surely find this to be a deeply frustrating experience. As it turned out, my own willingness to join the club and the club’s eagerness to accept me were both premised on the political and financial complexion of the MBCP. The contribution of the two universities to the MBCP is funded by the UNDP, which is also a sponsor of the MA, and participation in the MA provides our research team with a cloak of scientific legitimacy for activities which might not otherwise be readily accommodated by CI’s vision of its task in Milne Bay Province. Of course, this strategic manoeuvre has not altered the political or theoretical complexion of the SGWG, but I was somewhat surprised to find that I was the only anthropologist in the group, especially considering that one very important part of its mandate has been to ‘bridge the gap’ between scientific knowledge and ‘local’, ‘traditional’ or ‘indigenous’ knowledge, and to establish protocols for the insertion of these ‘other’ forms of knowledge into ‘community-based’ assessments of local ecosystems. The dominant theoretical discourse in dealing with this part of the group’s mandate has been that of the Resilience Alliance (www.resalliance.org).1 This means that local or indigenous communities and their ‘knowledge systems’ are construed as elements in complex ‘social-ecological systems’ whose behaviour is the legitimate subject of systems ecology (see Berkes et al. 2004). The question then is whether and how to bridge a second ‘epistemological gap’ between this ecological perspective and that of anthropologists, like me, who prefer to view the world through the lens of political ecology (see Paulson and Gezon 2004).
Bridges, scales and epistemologies The first full meeting of the SGWG was held in Panama in June 2002. The minutes of that meeting record the group’s recognition of the ‘unique needs and circumstances faced by local assessments and/or those involving traditional/indigenous knowledge’. This was one of two problematic issues to be addressed in a conference on ‘Bridging Scales and Epistemologies’ that was originally meant to be held in combination with the 1 Carl Folke, Madhav Gadgil, Christo Fabricius and their various collaborators have been key members of the SGWG from the outset. A paper by Gadgil and his collaborators was circulated as a model for the conduct of community-based ecosystem assessments at an early stage in the process (Gadgil et al 2000), while Fabricius is currently (October 2004) editing a special issue of Ecology and Society that is devoted to the findings of some of the community-based sub-global assessments.
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second meeting of the SGWG in Kunming (China) in June 2003. That plan was scuppered by the outbreak of Secondary Acute Respiratory Syndrome, and the conference was eventually held in combination with the third meeting of the SGWG in Alexandria in March 2004. Each member of the SGWG was invited to nominate one or more scientists to be added to the list of participants in the conference because of their special expertise in one or other of the topics to be discussed. I nominated Peter Brosius because I thought that he would have something interesting to say about both of them. A couple of other anthropologists found their way to the conference, but we were still in a very small minority. In a paper presented at one of the plenary sessions, Brosius spoke about the competition and division between anthropologists and ‘local/indigenous advocates’ in the representation of ‘local local’ people2 and their knowledge on the world stage, where one set of voices is mediated by the conventions of social science, while the other is mediated by ‘transnational discourses of indigeneity’ (Brosius 2004: 7). The key question which he raised was why they both agree to treat local or indigenous knowledge as environmental, rather than political, knowledge: [I]n a ‘policy environment’ characterized by dispossession, where the threats to local communities result from the actions of ‘decision-makers’, of what relevance is indigenous knowledge of nature by itself, divorced from its significance with respect to the making of claims? (ibid: 12)
He went on to argue that the growing volume of the ‘local/indigenous’ voice in the transnational discourse of conservation has been accompanied and contradicted by the development of ‘large-scale’, ‘ecoregional’ planning and management strategies which prevent it from having any actual effect. And so, despite the unprecedented number of local/indigenous advocates present at the Vth World Parks Congress in 2003, Brosius reports that he left Durban feeling that an enormous weight of managerialism had descended over conservation, much as it once did on development, and that this state of affairs was in large part due to the efforts of major conservation organizations to consolidate their authority over global conservation practices. They are achieving this consolidation by establishing administrative technologies in which they are taken for granted as methodological gatekeepers. Increasingly conservation has become a gated community that one can only enter by accepting the methodological terms promulgated by major conservation organizations and donors. This has occurred as tools or approaches that originated as emancipatory moves became incorporated into the managerial apparatus of conservation. Once incorporated, they become tied to the imperatives of funding cycles, scaling-up, accountability to donors, and more (ibid: 17-18).
Brosius was too polite to say that he would leave Alexandria with the same feeling, but he might have suspected that the ‘local/indigenous advocates’ in his audience would express this sentiment anyway. In Alexandria, as in Durban, these characters outnumbered the anthropologists by five to one at the very least. Their views of the ‘epistemological bridge’ were set out in the report of a conference workshop session that was printed and circulated to all participants in the final plenary session (see Box 1). My own contribution to this final plenary session was partly motivated by my reaction to the views expressed by Brosius and the Indigenous Voice, but also reflected the role which I had come to play as the ‘anthropological joker’ in the SGWG – entertaining the rest of the group with alternative metaphorical constructions of their 2
This phrase was used to refer ‘peasants, farmers, fishers, or indigenous peoples, often living in out-ofthe-way places, frequently marginalized politically and economically’ (Brosius 2004: 4).
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Box 1: The Indigenous voice ‘The western scientific paradigm is embedded in a world view that is impacting the world through disciplines which impose values on governance, research, education – all of life. In this context the world view/paradigm of others – indigenous societies which are more horizontal and linked to nature – is denied and only elements of practice are permitted to surface. Actions are taken out of the western world view informed by science and thus tensions between the youth and elders emerge, knowledge is lost and undermined, language is threatened and biodiversity is diminished. Indigenous world views are seriously threatened, as has been witnessed in this conference, sometimes shattered….. ‘A bridge between epistemologies is not possible or not desirable because it produces invasion and domination. We can only – consciously – sit down at a table of dialogue, in a world where many worlds (or epistemologies) are welcome, where we can talk between us, and also talk with modern science. But at this table we need to leave behind arrogance and the wish or attitude to dominate. We have to come with humbleness, with eagerness to learn, with openness and respect. In this neutral space of encounter, what can everyone contribute, what is our gift? What is the gift of the scientist? Is the scientist prepared for a dialogue? Is he or she able to support us? Do they have the means to talk with us? Can they enter an alliance and commitment overcoming the limitations of their worldviews?’ (IKAP 2004).
work (see Box 2).3 In this instance, I was aiming to take issue with the assumption lurking in the conceptual architecture of the whole conference, that the world consists of a set of bounded spaces, at different scales, in which systems of different types, including ‘knowledge systems’, are piled on top of each like the layers in a club sandwich. But more importantly, perhaps, I was taking aim at the simplistic dualism which radically divides the knowledge of ‘modern science’ from that of ‘local’, ‘traditional’, or ‘indigenous’ peoples, and then seeks to recombine them in the policy process, while ignoring all the many other forms of knowledge (including hybrid forms of knowledge) which inform policy or management decisions at different levels in a political hierarchy. Box 2: Modernism unmasked Talk about building a bridge between epistemologies, and you’ll find yourself on a funny old road. A bridge makes sense only if it joins two points or places which are on roughly the same plane or level, otherwise the engineering can be tricky. One would also have to assume that they were not connected before, otherwise there would be no need to build a bridge in the first place. Then again, when you actually get down to the business of building a bridge, you are likely to forget about any third point or place which might otherwise be connected to either of the first two points or places. Bridge building is a very focused business. This metaphor could make sense of the synthesis of a pair of dismal sciences like economics and ecology, but will it fit the relationship between scientific and indigenous knowledge? Indigenous knowledge-holders might not think so, because the scientists will surely be the guys designing the bridge. That’s one problem. But the real sticky question is this: WHAT IS UNDERNEATH THE BRIDGE? Metaphorically speaking, it could be a six-lane motorway, a disused railway track, or a raging river. On the other hand, it might just be a tramp sleeping in a pile of old newspapers. On a bad hair day, it could even be the herd of elephants which threatens to consume the field of daisies so carefully watered by the tribe of communitarian gardeners who got involved in the Southern African sub-global assessment.
3
This is not a verbatim transcript of what I actually said in the plenary discussion, but a version which I elaborated on my laptop immediately afterwards and then circulated to other members of the SGWG.
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Now if it is a raging river, or even a herd of elephants, rather than a sleeping tramp or an old railway track, it could threaten to damage or destroy the fabric of the bridge. Indigenous people might welcome the prospect, if their knowledge is stuck at one end of the bridge, and they can see a bunch of hungry scientists heading towards them. Now let’s get real, folks. What is REALLY underneath the bridge? I guess it would have to be the things we know to be there, but which we have not thought about enough or do not want to think about too much. The American military-industrial complex, for example. Or the social construction of scientific inquiry and public policy on top of piles of dirty money. Or a gaggle of nonscientific and non-indigenous cosmologies and ideologies, including the notion that God is the one and only driver of ecosystem change. Or the real bundle of property relations which tells us who actually owns the ecosystems which are being driven under the bridge. So far so good. But what about SCALES? It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to think of building a bridge between two floors in a block of flats or a shopping mall. Come to think of it, the floors in a shopping mall are often connected by means of an ESCALATOR, and that sounds like a far better way of representing the connection of scales in a multi-scale assessment. Mind you, from my experience of shopping with my teenage daughter every weekend, I would have to say that there can be something depressingly similar about the landscape encountered on each floor. I guess it rather depends on whether one is actually hunting for a pair of trousers or an ironing board, or just waiting for the moment when one can escape to the car park and head for home. If this is the supermarket of science we are talking about here, I guess that many of our indigenous friends might feel the same way. Then again, some of them might be content to sell their knowledge in the Savage Slot shops formerly run by anthropologists like myself. And then we might wonder whether shops in this particular chain are only found on the ground floor, or whether you can find them on different floors in different malls, just like the Body Shop. Whatever the answer to that question, the fact remains that, in a multi-storey building, there is nothing very interesting in the space between one story and another story except a third story, and each story has a plot full of shops. Well there might be room for the odd tramp, if he could get past the security guards at the entrance, but the thought of a herd of elephants charging up an escalator in a shopping mall is seriously scary. Surely enough to send the Savage Slot shopkeepers, not to mention all the other merchants in the science market, heading for the exits in double quick time. Across the bridge, into the car park, into the car, and off to the countryside for a welldeserved break from the spatial connotations of modernistic metaphors.
I certainly could not claim that anthropologists were the only conference participants to take issue with this peculiar form of epistemology, but there was still a notable reluctance to challenge the purity, consistency and validity of the ‘local’, ‘traditional’, or ‘indigenous’ knowledge whose advocates were squaring off against the forces of scientific managerialism. If these folks appreciated the point of my own metaphorical deconstruction of these forces, as well as the point which Brosius had made about the political content of all forms of knowledge, they might have been less amused by the quotation with which I prefaced my own conference paper (see Box 3). Now this is certainly not the voice of indigenous wisdom. Nor would any selfrespecting anthropologist, let alone a systems ecologist or global scientific nomad, dream of representing an indigenous community and its environmental knowledge in these terms. So why would an anthropologist want to quote it? The answer is that this is the most ‘politically incorrect’ quotation which I have been able to extract from what many anthropologists might otherwise consider to be a well-grounded ‘nationalist’
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Box 3: A dissonant voice ‘Once upon a time in the not too distant past an international NGO decided to do nature conservation in the Wasi river basin. This was [an] understandable idea. The place was the environmentalist’s dream. Lots and lots of bush filled with a multitude of flying and biting things. A diverse bunch of unwashed and scabrous savages leading traditional lives that they punctuated with stories and wars to give it some meaning. No industry, no logging or mining, just a virginal tract of scrub… One must ask why the Wasis have not stuffed the place up themselves? Are they, as some of our NGO friends suspected, the possessors of native wisdom that has allowed them to live in harmony with nature for an interminably long time? Unfortunately not… The distressing fact is the Wasis would have destroyed the place were it not for the malaria and other parasites that kill most of their kids, sap their energy and make them mad. In essence, their population has not been able to get to the level where it can push the resources to the point of scarcity… The best thing the international NGO … could do would be to simply leave the Wasis alone while doing what they could to deter the nastier industries from entering the region… IF they could bring health, education and awareness to the villages, only then would there be a need to talk conservation’ (People Against Foreign NGO Neocolonialism 2003, quoted in Filer 2004: 1).
condemnation of ‘eco-imperialism’ or ‘scientific managerialism’, and perhaps the most forceful ever to emerge from PNG.4 It also seems that the anonymous author of this particular passage, in what is almost certainly a multi-authored document, is a ‘foreign nationalist’, because (s)he asks why the benighted members of the Wasi community ‘were unable to smelt steel, ponder nuclear physics and destroy the place like we did’ (my emphasis). So it appears that ‘we’ are not simply reading a national and nationalist response to a specific form of foreign domination, but encountering a far more complex set of personal, institutional and ideological relationships with the ‘national conservation community’ – if such a thing exists. One of the main points of my paper (Filer 2004) was to illustrate the inability of the international conservation community and its ‘scientific managers’ to simplify this set of relationships by constructing a meaningful ‘bridge’ between their own visions of biodiversity and the multiple forms of ‘local local’ knowledge which are at work within a state whose political leaders are themselves ‘indigenous people’ or ‘customary landowners’. This in turn was meant to set the stage for a consideration of the way in which these multiple forms of knowledge might be represented, in our sub-global assessment of PNG’s coastal ecosystems, as the formal properties of different resource management regimes. This is not the place to repeat the detail of the argument, but after the paper had been shortlisted for inclusion in the main conference publication, it was finally excluded for the interesting reason that it had a unique topic, different from that of any of the other papers (Walt Reid, personal communication, August 2004). If those other papers include the one by Brosius, then it would seem that our two versions of political ecology do not strike the bridge-building fraternity as two versions of the same argument.
A bridge too far? If the conference in Alexandria was meant to facilitate the collective drafting of the two chapters on ‘knowledge’ and ‘scale’ in the synthetic report of the SGWG, it may not have served its purpose very well, because members of the group have continued to agonise or wrestle over the content of these chapters in terms that are not markedly 4
Chapin (2004) has recently produced a ‘transnational’ version of this argument that is ‘correctly’ aligned with the Indigenous Voice. I am grateful to Peter Brosius for bringing this piece to my attention after I had completed the first draft of this paper.
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different from those established in previous deliberations. I shall not attempt to review the course of this internal debate, because the rules of our game preclude citation and quotation, but the current drafts have now (October 2004) been posted to the public component of the MA website for all and sundry to make their comments. Readers of the knowledge chapter, in particular, can see that it has not made much of a compromise with any version of political ecology, and that is not so surprising, when one considers that the primary audience for all the working group reports is the collection of parties to various multilateral environmental agreements, like the Convention on Biological Diversity. Each of these agreements could be said to contain its own ‘political epistemology’, in which the connections between specific forms of knowledge, and the roles of their owners or advocates, have already been cast in global (if not managerial) concrete. However, this has not entirely removed the space for disagreement between the scientists involved in the Millennium Assessment. One of the standing jokes of the MA is that the authors of its conceptual framework report (MA 2003) only discovered the true extent of their mutual misunderstandings when they came round to the task of writing its glossary. A second round of lexicography is now seeking to reconcile the definitions adopted by each of the four working groups, including the definitions of local, traditional and indigenous knowledge that did not appear in the earlier glossary. A draft of the new glossary showed that three of the four working groups had adopted their own definitions of at least one of these forms of knowledge (see Box 4). Box 4: Contested definitions *Indigenous Ecological Knowledge: Local, community-based systems of knowledge that are unique to a given culture or society and have developed as that culture has evolved over many generations of inhabiting particular ecosystems. [Sub-Global Working Group] *Indigenous Ecological Knowledge: A cumulative body of knowledge, know-how, practices or representations maintained or developed by peoples with extended histories of interaction with the natural environment. [Conditions and Trends Working Group] *Indigenous knowledge: (1) the local knowledge that is unique to a given culture or society. It is the basis for local-level decision-making in agriculture, health care, food preparation, education, natural resource management, and a host of other activities in rural communities. Or (2) the knowledge that people in a given community have developed over time, and continue to develop. It is based on experience, often tested over centuries of use, adapted to local culture and environment, dynamic and changing. [Responses Working Group] *Traditional knowledge: knowledge held by members of a distinct culture and to which numerous members of the culture contribute to over time. It is acquired through past experiences and observations, through means of inquiry specific to the culture and generally concerns the culture itself or its local environment. [Responses Working Group]
Although I made some written comments on the merits of these definitions, I was unable to attend the combined working group meeting at which their reconciliation was last attempted. In the draft glossary which emerged from that meeting, ‘local’ and ‘traditional’ knowledge do not appear as terms demanding any definition, while the task of defining ‘indigenous’ knowledge has apparently been passed across to the International Council for Science, whose website (www.icsu.org) does not yield any indication of the likely outcome. This definitional stalemate was apparently the result of a dispute between representatives of the Sub-Global group and the Responses group on the question of which one had the greater definitional authority in this semantic domain (Marcus Lee, personal communication, October 2004). The question then left for me, as an anthropologist, is whether it makes sense to engage in any further debate
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with ecologists or economists about the ‘best’ definitions of each or all of the three forms of non-scientific knowledge which are still lurking in the bushes on the other side of the metaphorical bridge that we may never build, or just to make up definitions that fit the political context of the one sub-global assessment for which I am directly responsible.
Conclusion I do not wish to imply that the Millennium Assessment is a kind of Flat Earth Society, whose members can only talk about things which global conventions already know. Nor do I wish to suggest that my own role as joker, story-teller and part-time lexicographer in the Sub-Global Working Group should be taken as a model of what anthropologists ought to be doing in this kind of exercise. What I think we should not be doing is washing our hands of a process in which ‘local local’ people, knowledge or communities are going to be represented in any case, and pretending that the purity of our own brand of scientific knowledge will have its own distinctive impact on the policy process if we just keep talking to each other. From my own experience of this particular process, I would say that there is considerable scope for anthropologists to make strategic or tactical alliances with environmental scientists, systems ecologists, political economists, and transnational advocates of local or indigenous knowledge, to challenge the ‘top down’ approach to problems of environmental management. And yet I think it is also important for us to abandon the pretence that we specialize in the analysis of things which are said and done at the ‘local local’ scale, and have nothing special to say about things which are said and done at ‘higher’ scales, or about the links (if not the bridges) which connect the judgements or decisions made at multiple levels in a political hierarchy.
References Berkes, F., J. Colding and C. Folke 2004. Navigating Social-Ecological Systems: Building Resilience for Complexity and Change. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press. Brosius, J.P. 2004. ‘What counts as local knowledge in global environmental assessments and conventions?’ Paper presented at the conference on ‘Bridging Scales and Epistemologies’, Alexandria, March 2004. www.millenniumassessment.org/en/about.meetings.bridging.proceedings.aspx Chapin, M. 2004. A challenge to conservationists. World Watch Magazine, November/ December 2004: 17-31. Filer, C. 2004. ‘Hotspots and handouts: illusions of conservation and development in Papua New Guinea.’ Paper presented at the conference on ‘Bridging Scales and Epistemologies’, Alexandria, March 2004. www.millenniumassessment.org/en/about.meetings.bridging.proceedings.aspx Gadgil, M., K.P. Achar, A. Shetty, A. Ganguly, H. Nagendra, H.R. Bhat, J. Venkatesan, K. Krishna, K. Kunte, K. Moolya, L. Nandagiri, M.B. Nayak, R.J. Ranjit Daniels, S. Joshi, S. Patgar, S. Gunaga, K.A. Subramanian, S. Venkatachalam, U. Ghate and Y. Gokhale 2000. Participatory Local Level Assessment of Life Support Systems: A Methodology Manual. Bangalore: Indian Institute of Science, Centre for Ecological Sciences, Technical Report 78. IKAP (Indigenous Knowledge and Peoples) Network on Capacity Building in MMSEA (Mainland Montane SE-Asia), 2004. ‘Report of the Workshop on “Bridging Epistemologies – Indigenous Views”.’
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MA (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment), 2003. Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: A Framework for Assessment. Washington (DC): Island Press. Paulson, S. and L.L. Gezon (eds) 2004. Political Ecology across Spaces, Scales, and Social Groups. New Brunswick (NJ): Rutgers University Press. People Against Foreign NGO Neocolonialism, 2003. ‘Institutionalized neocolonialism in international NGOs operating in Papua New Guinea.’ http://www.forests.org/archived_site/today/recent/2003/pngnewc2.htm. Viewed 24 August 2004.
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SUSTAINABLE ENVIRONMENTS, SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES: POTENTIAL DIALOGUES BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGISTS, SCIENTISTS AND MANAGERS
CONTRIBUTORS Colin Filer holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. He has taught at the Universities of Glasgow and Papua New Guinea, and was Projects Manager for the University of Papua New Guinea’s consulting company from 1991 to 1994, when he left the University to join the PNG National Research Institute as Head of the Social and Environmental Studies Division. Since 2001, he has been the Convenor of the Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program at the Australian National University’s Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. He is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of WWF Australia. Jane Harrington has worked in both natural and cultural heritage management, and has a PhD in Cultural Heritage Studies. Her research has investigated community identity, attachment and place in the context of three World Heritage properties: Ayutthaya (Thailand), Avebury (England) and Magnetic Island (Great Barrier Reef, Australia). She is currently Resource Group Manager with Biosis Research in Sydney. David Hyndman holds the position of anthropologist with the Social Science Program of the Bureau of Rural Sciences. It is a qualitative research appointment concerned with natural resource management and social impact assessment in agricultural, forestry, fishing and indigenous communities. The main responsibility is program manager for a three-year contemporaneous monitoring and evaluation of the National Landcare Program.
Robert Levitus is currently a research fellow at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the Australian National University. There, he convenes courses in the Masters of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development, and writes on his long-term research in the Kakadu region of the Northern Territory and on aspects of Australian Indigenous development.
Martha Macintyre is a senior lecturer in Medical Anthropology at The Centre for the Study of Health and Society at The University of Melbourne. Her research concentrates on social and economic change in Melanesia and the human rights of people in the context of rising rates of crime. She also works as a consultant, monitoring and reporting the social impacts of two major mining projects in Papua New Guinea. Graeme MacRae originally trained as an architect, has worked as a builder and an organic gardener and now teaches anthropology at Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand. His current research is on development and environmental issues, religious architecture and landscapes in Indonesia and South India.
Beverley McNamara is a senior lecturer in anthropology and sociology and Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at The University of Western Australia. In 2005 she is coordinating both the Honours program and the Applied and Professional Practice unit.
Monica Minnegal is a senior lecturer in anthropology in the School of Anthropology, Geography and Environmental Studies at The University of Melbourne. Her primary research interests concern the articulation of social and ecological systems, and the processes that shape change in the ways that people understand relationships to each other and the land.
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Jane Mulcock is a postdoctoral research fellow in Anthropology and Sociology at The University of Western Australia. She is currently undertaking a study of cultural values and practices associated with native and introduced flora and fauna in urban settings, and is co-convenor of a new interdisciplinary Australian research network on the interrelationships between human and non-human animals.
Michael O’Kane is an anthropologist/research officer with the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority in the Alice Springs region of the Northern Territory, where his responsibilities include the documentation and protection of sacred sites in central Australia under the Sacred Sites Act. Michael’s research foci include notions of identity and environmentalism among the Irish Green Party, the expression of cultural context within modern environmentalism, power relations and hegemony as expressed through environmental discourse, and attitudes towards land management in central Australia.
Veronica Strang is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Auckland, and her major research interests, in Australia and the UK, are in human-environmental relations and land and resource use. She is the author of Uncommon Ground: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental Values (Berg 1997) and The Meaning of Water (Berg 2004).
Sandy Toussaint is an Associate Professor in Anthropology at The University of Western Australia. She has worked with Kimberley Indigenous communities for several decades, including on cultural matters related to landscapes, waters and laws. Experienced in cross-disciplinary research, in 2003 she was awarded (with Veronica Strang) a 3 year ARC-funded Discovery Grant for a project titled 'Under Water: a comparative ethnographic analysis of water use and natural resource management in Queensland and Western Australia'. Sandy's most recent publication is the edited book 'Crossing Boundaries: cultural, legal, historical and practice issues in native title' (MUP, 2004). David Trigger is Professor of Anthropology at The University of Western Australia. He has for some years been Discipline Chair for Anthropology and Sociology, and remains Director of the Centre for Anthropological Research, which is a small group specialising in carrying out commissioned and consultancy research in areas of applied anthropology.
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