The Antilist

Fifty early anthropological works by women and Indigenous, minority, and other non-white-male anthropologists

compiled by E. N. Anderson

The purpose of this list is to make it clear that early anthropology was absolutely not a white male preserve or an enterprise confined to some sort of colonial elite.  It was very much a science of the “others”–women, immigrants, ethnic minorities.

This list is confined to early works by women and by Indigenous and minority anthropologists.  I have tried to confine my attention to works written and published before 1950.  In several cases, though, I include books based on early research but not published until later (e.g. Weltfish 1965).  After 1950, the number of women and Indigenous or minority anthropologists becomes far too large to be confined in a list like this.  Special mention should be made of Mary Douglas, whose work began before 1950 but properly belongs to a later period (her first major publication was 1963).

Far from having to scrounge to find material, I generated this list in an hour or so (acknowledgements to Patrick Walton for some suggestions).  The problem was limiting the list to manageable size.

I also let my own biases run rampant here–it’s all ethnography and mostlyNorth America.  If you want to find equivalent materials in other fields of anthropology, go to it.  There is no shortage of material!

I have had to exclude archaeology (apologies to Dorothy Garrod, Kathleen Kenyon…), non-English sources (apologies to Germaine Dieterlen, G. Calame-Griaule, Maria Montessori…), and references to people who did wonderful work, published some, but never got out a major book of wide importance (apologies to Lucy Freeland, Anna Gayton, Arthur and Ely Parker [Morgan's informants]…).  Saddest of all is a need to exclude nonwhite “informants,” often the actual authors of major works, who made valuable contributions but did not have actual anthropological or ethnographic training or formal publication venues.  Some did eventually get the author credit they deserved, such as Black Elk, Fernando Librado Kitsepawit, and Tom Sayach’apis.  It should be remembered that early anthropologists published vast amounts of actual texts recorded from such informants.

Even today, too few anthropologists give author credit to their coworkers in the field.  There are, however, many important and worthy exceptions.  See e.g. Birds of My Kalam Country by Ian Saem Majnep (Auckland: Auckland Univ. Press, 1977), Native Ethnography by Russell Bernard and Jesus Salinas Pedraza (Newbury Park: Sage, 1989), and my own Animals and the Maya in Southeast Mexico by E. N. Anderson and Felix Medina Tzuc.

Sometimes, early collections of texts have been redone and reissued recently as literature rather than as a supplement to an ethnography; see e.g. Hanc’ibeyjim, ed./tr. William Shipley, The Maidu Indian Myths and Stories of Hanc’ibyjim (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1991), which consists of myths and tales recorded by Roland Dixon in 1902-03.

It is often claimed today that the dominance of “white males” in early anthropology means that it was some sort of Establishment field.  This claim is made in ignorance not only of the materials in this list, but also in ignorance of the fact that being a “white male” was no guarantee of privileged status in early 20^th century America and England.  Anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant feelings were rampant and extreme.  If one was a Jewish immigrant inAmerica like Franz Boas or Edward Sapir, or a Jew inEurope like Emile Durkheim, one did not have an automatic easy time.  InAmerica, many of the early anthropologists were Jewish and/or immigrants or children thereof.  Consider also Malinowski, the Polish immigrant toEngland.  When impeccably White Establishment figures did get involved in anthropology, they were often rebels and radicals (e.g. Elsie Clews Parsons).

Some might argue that few of the following made major contributions to theory–though of course this is not true of Benedict, Mead, Paredes, or some of the others.  However, all actually made highly important contributions to ethnography–the theory, art, and science of providing adequate or useful descriptions of cultures.  In this age, that major achievement is too often ignored.  In that area, Bunzel, Fletcher, Hewitt, La Flesche, Stevenson, and many of the others below made pathbreaking contributions ranking with those of the Greats (Morgan, Boas, Cushing, Powell, etc.).  Further, some of the later writers below, like O’Neale and Powdermaker, were pathbreakers in areas only now becoming recognized as important.   One must conclude, alas, that these contributions were neglected because of sexism and racism.  I keep hoping this list will correct some of that.

15 particularly worthwhile sources are starred below.

Benedict, Ruth

**1923  The Concept of the Guardian Spirit inNorth America.  American Anthropological Assn., Memoirs, 29.  Classic work of great theoretical importance.  Deserves to be resurrected.

**The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

This classic work is still current.  There is a huge literature on it inJapan.

The above two works are less well known than Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1934) but are very much better.

Beynon, William

Barbeau, Marius, and William Beynon (collectors); John Cove and George MacDonald (eds.).  1987 (re-editing of material collected and originally published in the early 20^th century).  Tsimshian Narratives. Canada,Museum ofCivilization, Mercury Series, #3.  In spite of the multiple authorship, this is Beynon’s book.  He was a Tsimshian chief (with a white father—but the Tsimshian inherit matrilineally), trained in ethnography by Marius Barbeau.  The collecting and information on the stories was basically Beynon’s work.  This is one of the greatest of all the old-time text collections.

Blackwood, Beatrice

1935  Both Sides of Buka Passage. Oxford:OxfordUniv.Press.  Classic ethnography of aSolomon Islandssociety.

Buck, Peter (Te Rangi Hiroa)

1959  Vikings of the Pacific. Chicago:Univ.ofChicago.  This book summarizes his work throughoutPolynesiain the 1930s and 1940s.  Buck, an indefatigable ethnographer who produced many standard accounts of Polynesian groups, was part New Zealand Maori.  Though not raised in a particularly traditional manner, he took his background very seriously.

Bunzel, Ruth

**1929  ThePuebloPotter. New York:ColumbiaUniv.Press.  One of the first books to look seriously at women’s work as creative and culturally important.

See also 1992  Zuni Ceremonialism.  Recently reissued byUniv.ofNew Mexico Press; orig. 1930s.

One of the more important early ethnographers.  Her works are classics in their fields.  Several of her important works came out after 1950 (e.g. Chichicastenango, a Guatemalan Village, American Ethnological Society, 1952).

Busia, K. A.

1958  The Position of the Chief in the Modern Political System ofAshanti. London:OxfordUniv.Press for International African Institute.

Busia went on to become president of his nativeGhana.

Colson, Elizabeth

1953 (but work and most writing done before 1950).  The Makah Indians. Minneapolis:Univ.ofMinnesota.

Colson went on to a distinguished career as an Africanist.  Her earlier work on the Makah of the Olympic Peninsula is of interest here not only for the early date but for its value as one of the first ethnographies to deal seriously with education and with modern cultural realities (as opposed to “the ethnographic present”).

de Laguna, Frederica

1972  Under Mount Saint Elias.  Smithsonian Institution, Contributions to Anthropology, #7.

The most important work by one of the leading figures in North American ethnography.  Late date, but much of the research for it was done before 1950, and she was publishing long before.

Deloria, Ella

1932  Dakota Texts.  Papers of the American Ethnological Society, 14.  Vine Deloria’s aunt; a Boas student.

Dozier, Edward

1954  The Hopi-Tewa ofArizona.Univ.ofCaliforniaPublications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, 44, pp. 259-376.  Classic ethnography of Dozier’s own people.

Drake, St. Clair

**1945  Black Metropolis. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.

Pathbreaking ethnography by an African-American social scientist.

Dube, S. C.

1955 IndianVillage. Ithaca:CornellUniv.Press.

One of the founders of anthropology inIndia.

Fei Hsiao-tung

**1939  Peasant Life inChina. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

In the interests of space, I list only the most famous of Fei’s many major contributions to anthropology.

Fletcher, Alice, and La Flesche, Francis

1911  TheOmahaTribe.  Bureau of American Ethnology, Annual Report XXVII (for 1906).  This great classic–sometimes called the greatest ethnography of all time–is only one (though the most important) of a number of works on theOmahaand their relatives by this brilliant and intrepid team.  La Flesche was anOmahahimself (like most early Native American ethnographers, he was part White, but raised as a Native person.  See under La Flesche, below).

On Fletcher, a paradoxical and deep individual, see the excellent biography by Joan Marks: A Stranger in Her Native Land (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1988).

Frazier,E. Franklin

**1962  Black Bourgeoisie. Ithaca:CornellUniv.Press.  2nd edn (first was before 1950).  Classic ethnography; Frazier, a Black sociologist, was writing in theChicagotradition of ethnographic sociology.

Garfield, Viola

1939  Tsimshian Clan and Societey. Univ.ofWashingtonPublications in Anthropology, 7, pp. 167-349.

Gunther, Erna

1945  Ethnobotany ofWestern Washington. Univ.ofWashingtonPubls. in Anthropology, Vol. X, #1.  Still in print.

Hewitt, J. N. B.

1903  Iroquoian Cosmology.  Bureau of American Ethnology, Annual Report for 1899-1900 (vol. 21).  This mammoth work is the main achievement of one of the first Native Americans trained in anthropology.  It is also, by a very slight margin, the first major ethnography by a Native American.  Hewitt was a Seneca Iroquois whose long and distinguished service at the BAE involved a great deal of editing, linguistic work, referencing, etc.  See also:  Seneca Fiction, Leegends and Myths, collected by Jeremiah Curtin and J. N. B. Hewitt, ed. by Hewitt; BAE-AR 32 for 1910-11, issued in 1918.

Hsu, F. L. K.

1948  Under the Ancestors’ Shadow. New York:ColumbiaUniv.Press.

Classic ethnography of a village inYunnan.  Hsu went on to become a major figure in the culture-and-personality field.

Hunt, George

Franz Boas with George Hunt.  1921.  Ethnology of the Kwakiutl.  Bureau of American Ethnology, Annual Report 35.

Listed as by “Franz Boas,” this incredible achievement is actually by George Hunt, a half-Scottish, half-Tlingit man raised among the Kwakwaka’wakw (“Kwakiutl”).  He was trained by Boas and wrote in response to Boas’ questions and queries; Boas edited the result.  The Hunt family is still important and still producing artists and ethnographers.

Hurston, Zora Neale

**1978 (reissue of 1935 work)  Mules and Men. Bloomington:IndianaUniv.Press.

Now well known as an African-American writer, Hurston was trained in folklore studies by Boas.  This book is the main result of her researches.  It has become something of a classic.  It is somewhat fictionalized–she made it more interesting by casting herself as the heroine of several of the stories she collected!  Her classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God also shows the Boas influence.

Iyer, Diwan Bahadur, and L. K. Ananthakrishna.  1935.  TheMysoreTries and Castes.  4 vols. (2-4 completed by H. V. Nanjundayya).  Classic survey.  There are other early ethnographic surveys by British-trained Indian researchers; forMysore, the gazetteer of 1926, edited by C. H. Rao.

Jones, William

1939  Ethnography of the Fox Indians.  Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 125.  Jones was part Fox and was raised among the Fox.  He gave his life for the cause; while conducting ethnographic research among Philippine headhunters, he had his head collected.  This book was published posthumously.

Kelly, Isabel

Kelly, Isabel, and Angel Palerm.  1950.  The Tajin Totonac. Washington: Smithsonian Insitution,InstituteofSocial Anthropology, Publication 13.

Kelly also did important research on the Paiute of theGreat Basin.

Kenyatta, Jomo

**1938  FacingMount Kenya. London: Secker and Warburg.

Malinowski’s star student found better ways to make himself useful than continuing a career in anthropology, but he did produce this work–perhaps more “consciousness raising” for his people than objective ethnography, but still a wonderful “insider’s view.”

La Flesche, Francis

1921-30  The Osage Tribe.  Bureau of American Ethnology, Annual Reports, 36:35-604; 39, 31-630; 43, 23-164; 45, 529-833.

Incredible achievement by one of the best ethnographers of all time.

1963  The Middle Five. Madison:Univ.ofWisconsin(new edn.; original pub. y Small, Maynard and Co. inBostonin 1900).  Autobiographical narrative by one of the best of the early Native American ethnographers.

Laird, Carobeth

1976  The Chemehuevis.  Banning:MalkiMuseumPress.

1984  Mirror and Pattern.  Banning:MalkiMuseumPress.

Carobeth Laird was, briefly, the wife of John Peabody Harrington.  An incomparable field worker, she did not publish under her own name until sought out by Harry Lawton of theUniversityofCcalifornia,Riverside.  She then produced several superb books, including autobiographical ones as well as the above ethnographic classics.  Though late in date, these report pre-1950 research.

Marriott, Alice

1945  The Ten Grandmothers. Norman:Univ.ofOklahoma.  Classic account of Kiowa women (one of the first studies to focus on women).

1948  Maria, the Potter of San Ildefonso. Norman:Univ.ofOklahoma.  Probably the first ethnographic work to focus on the accomplishments of a woman in a traditional small-scale community.

Mead, Margaret

**1938-   The Mountain Arapesh. AmericanMuseumof Natural History, Anthropological Papers, vol. 36, part 3; 37:3; 40:3; 41:3.

Margaret Mead is too well known to need introduction or much referencing.  She wrote a number of other important works before 1950, contributing a great deal to ethnological theory (she more or less invented what is now called gender theory).

Murie, James

1981  Ceremonies of the Pawnee. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, Contributions to Anthropology #21.  Originally written early 20th century, but unpublished.  Murie was another protege of Alice Fletcher, with whom he collaborated on the classic account The Hako: A Pawnee Ceremony (BAE-AR 22, for 1900-01, issued 1904).

O’Neale, Lila

**1932  Yurok-Karok Basket Weavers. Univ.ofCaliforniaPublications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, 13, pp. 1-155.

This little gem was one of the first anthropological studies to take “tribal-society” women and their artistic work really seriously.  It is well ahead of many or most works on that issue done today.  One finds it somewhat difficult to believe it was written more than 60 years ago.

Paredes, Americo

**1958  With His Pistol in His Hand. Austin:Univ.ofTexas

I’m bending it a bit on both the date and the “nonwhite” status of this Texas Chicano, but it isn’t every day that a technical anthropological monograph becomes a major Hollywood film (“The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez”).  Anyway, it’s a superior book and a particularly early example of a serious Mexican-American approach.  Paredes, one of the great teachers and folklorists, recently passed; his tradition continues in the work of José Limón and others.

Parsons, Elsie Clews

1936  Mitla, Town of the Souls. Chicago:Univ.ofChicagoPress.

1939 PuebloIndian Religion. Chicago

Parsons, Elsie Clews, and Esther Goldfrank.  1962.  Isleta Paintings. Washington,DC: Smithsonian Institution.  Two leading women anthropologists in collaboration.

Elsie Clews Parsons was one of the larger-than-life figures of early anthropology.  Tough, savvy, and radical to the core, she was a leading feminist, pacifist, civil rights agitator and sometime socialist.  She also married money, and used her fortune to fund anthropology.  See A Woman’s Quest for Science by Peter Hare (New York: Prometheus Books, 1985), an affectionate portrait by a relative rather than a detached historical study; it quotes great amounts of personal material.

Phinney, Archie

1934  Nez Perce Texts. ColumbiaUniv.Contributions to Anthropology, 25.  Another Boas student, Phinney was Nez Perce, and collected most of these tales from his grandmother.

Powdermaker, Hortense

1939  After Freedom: A Cultural Study of theDeep South. New York: Viking.

1950 Hollywood, the Dream Factory. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.

1933  Life in Lesu. New York: Norton.

An important theorist, explorer of new fields of research, and student of Boas.  “After Freedom,” a study of a Black community inLouisiana, was part of a wave of studies of African Americans in the 1930s (see Frazier, above).  The “Hollywood” book anticipates modern “cultural studies” and does a better job than most of the latter.  She produced several important works after 1950, also.

Rasmussen, Knut

1927  Across ArcticAmerica. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

**1929  Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos.  Reports of the Fifth Thule Expedition, vol. 7, part 1.

Rasmussen was the son of a Danish father and a Greenland Eskimo mother; he was raised as an Eskimo.  Probably the most traditional in upbringing of any of the “third world/fourth world” ethnographers, he may well also have been the greatest.  His work is unsurpassed, for sheer ethnographic quality, by any anthropologist of any origin.

Reichard, Gladys

**1950  Navaho Religion. New York:ColumbiaUniv.Press.

Space permits listing only the greatest of Reichard’s countless contributions.  This book was of major theoretical importance in its time, and remains unsurpassed—though now out of date in approach, etc.—as an account of the subject.  (It is to be found in many a Navaho home today.  Anthropologists asking Navaho about their religion are often directed to this book.)

Richards, Audrey

**1948  Hunger and Work in a Savage Tribe. Glencoe,IL: Free Press.

Classic account.  Richards founded the field of nutritional anthropology, and her studies have never been surpassed.  A “high-born British lady,” she was happy in the wildest and most difficult “bush.”

Spott, Robert

Spott, Robert, and A. L. Kroeber.  1942.  Yurok Narratives. Univ.ofCalif.Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. 35, #9, pp. 143-256.

Spott, a traditional Yurok from northwestern California, was trained as an ethnographer by Kroeber and became an excellent researcher.  (For an interesting comparison piece, see To the American Indian by Lucy Thompson [Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1991], the autobiography of a Yurok woman.  It originally appeared in 1916.)

Stevenson, Matilda Coxe

1904  The Zuni Indians.  Bureau of American Ethnology, Annual Report 23.  Classic ethnography.  Stevenson is famous for her feuds with the Zuni, and with Frank Cushing, who identified with them strongly.  She still managed to collect a formidable amount of information on them.  She was so outraged at sexism in academia that she organized a Woman’s Anthropological Society of America in 1885.  (And you thought nobody did things like that till the 1970s!)

Underhill,Ruth

1946  Papago Indian Religion. New York:ColumbiaUniv.Press.

Weltfish, Gene

**1965  The Lost Universe. New York: Basic Books.

A study of the Pawnee.  One of the finest ethnographies of the Boasian tradition.

Wheeler-Voegelin, Erminie

1938  Tubatulabal Ethnography. Univ.ofCaliforniaAnthropological Records #2.

Yang, Martin

1945  AChineseVillage: Taitou,ShantungProvince. New York:ColumbiaUniv.Press.

5th century BC  Socrates, Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides; Herodotus provides brief ethnographies ofEgypt,Scythia, etc., and launches cultural relativity with an ironic story about Greeks confronting endocannibalism

4th  Aristotle; Chinese social theory launched by Mencius, Shang Yang, Shen Pu-hai and others

3rd  Xunzi, Han Feizi, Dao De Jing.  Major social thought that fed into Western social thought from the 17^th century

98 AD  Germania by Tacitus (ca. 55-ca. 120); the first “ethnography” and very much the inspirer of the tradition

14th century AD   Ibn Khaldun, Tunisian theorist of cycles and systems

early 1500s  Europeans in New World and elsewhere, and English inIreland, develop modern colonialism and imperialism

1542  Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, by Bartolome de Las Casas (1484-1576); full-out attack on the extermination of the Native Americans by Spanish colonialism; first work of its kind

1580 (approx.)   “Of Cannibals” by Montaigne (1533-1592); highly sympathetic treatment, launches idea of cultural relativity

1590  Death of Bernardino de Sahagun, whose Codex Florentinus, using “native” accounts to construct a full-length ethnography, was finished around 1580

1596-1650  René Descartes; argued for empirical experimental science and for natural laws; with Francis Bacon, critical for invention of “science” as we know it

1651  Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes; “the life of man in his natural state is poore, solitary, nasty, brutish and short”

1690  Essay Concerning Human Understanding, by John Locke (1632-1704)

1718  Society of Antiquaries founded inLondon(after informally meeting since 1706); classical antiquities and some ethnography

1748, Spirit of Laws, by Baron Montesquieu (1689-1755); first serious use of worldwide ethnographic comparison to establish social theory; draws heavily on Chinese sources.  Also,

Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (David Hume, 1711-76; it’s redone from the Treatise of Human Nature, 1739-40).

1712-1778  J.-J. Rousseau; major writings relevant to anthro in 1750s; lifelong critic of European society; far from idealizing the “noble savage” (he never used the phrase), he had some perceptive things to say about apes and humans, anticipating Darwinin some things. 1762, his Du Contrat Social critiques Hobbes and Locke and adds much (including a lot of healthy cynicism) on how society really works.

Ca. 1750  Word “civilisation” coined inFrance; popularized by Mirabeau.

Ca. 1770  “Ethnologie,” “ethnologisch” and “Völkerkunde” coined by August Schlözer atUniv. of Göttingen,Germany.

1772, Ernst Platner:  New Anthropology for Doctors and Philosophers:  With Special Consideration to Physiology, Pathology, Moral Philosophy, and Aesthetics.  Early if minor work about “anthropology.”

1775, Blumenbach’s Treatises on Anthropology (Eng edition; of the original editions, the Latin of 1770 is important)

1776  Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith, 1723-1790)

1786  William Jones, inCalcutta, reads paper presenting evidence that Sanskrit is related to European languages; Indo-European is born.  Meanwhile, inRussia, P. Pallas begins publishing his Comparative Vocabularies of the World’s Languages.  Comparative philology (and, thus, scientific linguistics) can be said to date from this year.

1788  Antropologie ou science générale de l’homme by Alexandre-César Chavannes; first book to use the word in the title.  Inconsequential, however, and the word did not really get going until:

1798,  Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, by Immanuel Kant, introduces the word “anthropology” to mainstream discourse.  The book was perhaps closer to sociology or social psychology (both fields that trace directly to Kant) than to modern anthro, but is in the direct ancestral lineage of all three.  Some brilliant insights and good political commentary, but also, alas, all too much evidence that Kant was a man of his time in re sexism and racism.  Still worth reading for the insights.

1798, also, and very significantly, Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), Essay upon the Principle of Population.  This was the bleak book that made “Malthusianism” a bad word and got political economy called “the dismal science.”  The sixth edition, 1826, was considerably less bleak.

1806, Rasmus Nyerup’s call for a Danish museum of antiquities; under Nyerup, Thomsen, etc. this museum really developed scientific archaeology

1813  Researches into the Physical History of Man (1st edn), by James C. Prichard.

Vedel-Simonsen inDenmarkproposes Stone-Bronze-Iron Ages sequence.

1821  Champollion deciphers the Rosetta Stone

1830-33, Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell; establishes concepts of uniformitarianism, stratigraphy, and the very long time scale for the earth and its development.

1835  Henry Rawlinson copies cuneiform texts; translates the Persian, pub. 1838; deciphers Babylonian by 1851

1836  C. J. Thomsen, Guide to Northern Antiquities, establishes the sequence Stone, Bronze and Iron ages.  (Work extended by J. Worsaae, his student, in 1850s.)

1836-38, J. Boucher de Perthes identifies stone tools contemporaneous with extinct megafauna in the Pleistocene; as he put it, “Practical people came to look…they did not suspect my good faith, but they doubted my common sense.”  (Quoted in Lowie, History of Ethnological Theory, p. 7.)  Widespread acceptance came in the 1850s.

1837  Founding of Aborigines Protection Society (the early equivalent of today’s Cultural Survival),England

1839  Founding of Societe Ethnologique de Paris

1841, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan by John L. Stephens (1805-1852); his Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, 1843.

1842  Founding of American Ethnological Society, with Albert Gallatin (1761-1849, Swiss-born) as first president; H. R. Schoolcraft, H. Hale, etc.

1843  Founding of Ethnological Society of London, as a spinoff from the Anti-Slavery League and influenced by the Aborigines Protection Society

1846-48  Potato blight and bad weather cause famine acrossEurope.  This coincides with the early peak of socialism and nationalism as ideologies, leading to a rash of revolutions and to new heights of social thought.

1847, Broca begins his physical anthropology work (most active publishing, 1870s)

Austen Henry Layard’s Nineveh and Its Remains reports early Mesopotamian archaeology; sells 8000 copies in the year, “which,” Layard wrote, “will place it side by side with Mrs. Rundell’s Cookery”–the Julia Child of the 19th century

1848  Karl Marx and F. Engels, Communist Manifesto.

John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy.

Gallatin publishes his final work on American Indian languages in long introduction to Horatio Hale’s book Indians of North-West America; scientific linguistics firmly established in America.

1850  Social Statics, first book by Herbert Spencer (1820-1903); steady and active publisher thereafter; particularly influential in 1860-1885 period.  Spencer, notDarwin, gave us “social Darwinism,” which, as various people have pointed out, should be called “social Spencerism.”

1851, League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois (Lewis Henry Morgan: 1818-81).

Auguste Comte’s Systeme de Politique Positive (1851-54); his Cours de Philosophie Positive was 1830-42. (Auguste Comte, “father of sociology,” was yet another neo-Kantian; he lived 1798-1857).

1854, Rise of pseudo-scientific racism with A. de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inegalité des races humaines.  Nott and Glidden, American racists, wrote similar books in 1854 and 1857.

1856 (excavated), 1857 (studied): First Neanderthal to be recognized as an early human (by T. H. Huxley and others)

1858, Darwin and Wallace jointly publish the theory of evolution through natural selection

William Pengelly invents stratigraphy in excavation, using natural strata in excavatingBrixhamCave

1859, Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin.

Beginning of paleolithic archaeology: J. Prestwich begins publishing; Boucher de Perthes and others meet inFrance, recognize that the material soon called “paleolithic” is very early in date; Charles Lyell formally announces this inEngland.  The fact that this andDarwin’s publication occurred in the same year is no mere coincidence.

1860  Thomas Henry Huxley debates Samuel Wilberforce atOxfordand soundly defeats him, establishing evolution as a formidable foe of traditional religious creationism.  (Huxley was called “Darwin’s bulldog,” since the retiringDarwinhated debates.  Huxley also coined the word “agnostic” to describe his religious attitudes.)

Britainis reading Dickens, Carlyle, Macaulay….

1861, Ancient Law by Henry Maine; holds that patriarchy was the original form of social organization among Classical European peoples (but NOT everywhere)

Das Mutterrecht by J. Bachofen; holds that matriarchy was the original form everywhere.

1863  Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, by Thomas Henry Huxley

1864, Fustel de Coulange’s Cité antique, social study of Greek and Roman cities

1865, J. McLennan’s Primitive Marriage (much expanded into Studies in Ancient History, 1876); puts the real spin on the matriarchy theory, and introduces much of the modern terminology for marriage studies, including “exogamy” and “endogamy”

J. Lubbock’s Pre-Historic Times; 2edn 1872.

1867, first volume of Marx’ Capital (last vol. published posthumously in 1894; Marx lived 1818-83)

1868, Museum für Völkerkunde opens inBerlin; the great neo-Kantian liberal and ethnologist, Adolf Bastian, director.

L. H. Morgan, The American Beaver and His Works, published.  (On top of inventing modern anthropology, Morgan essentially invented animal behavior studies and the whole idea of comparing animal to human society and behavioral complexity.)

1869, Bastian and Rudolf Virchow establish the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory, and start the journal Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, still a major journal last I looked.

1869-70  “The Worship of Animals and Plants,” article in the Fortnightly Review by J. McLennan, introduces the theory of totemism

1871, Morgan’s Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity (introduces the anthropological concepts of kinship “systems” and of “social organization”).

Darwin’s Descent of Man.

Edward Burnett Tylor’s (1832-1917), Primitive Culture, the book that launched the modern use of the word “culture.”   That definition is still used.  The book was standard inEngland for decades.  Tylor later became the first anthropology professor atOxford.

Anthropological Institute ofGreat BritainandIrelandestablished; name coined by Huxley.  Later became the Royal A. I.

J. O. Dorsey begins work on Cegiha (Omahalanguage); arguably the first thorough anthropological-linguistic field research.

H. Schliemann begins work atTroy, working there and nearby till his death in 1890; over the years, his assistant Doerpfeld develops techniques of stratigraphy and other modern archaeological methods.

Talk about the Axial Year…!

1870-1900  Golden age of imperialism; US Indian Wars (peak in 1870s), “Great Game” in Central Asia (started earlier), “Scramble for Africa” (esp. 1880s and 1890s), British takeover of Malaysia, Dutch consolidation in Indonesia, etc.  Anthropology develops partly as a reaction against this, partly as an accommodation.

1875  Frederick Ward Putnam (1839-1915) becomes curator of Peabody Mus.

1875-80, first Paleolithic art research: Marquis de Sautuola inAltamiraCavediscovers the art 1875, publishes it in 1880 after research

1877  Morgan’s Ancient Society

1878-9, Erminnie Platt Smith studies the Tuscarora; first major ethnographic research by a woman; she trains J. E. B. Hewitt first as assistant, then as ethnographer, and he goes on to a distinguished career with the BAE–the first Native American anthropologist; Smith thus pioneered the technique (later perfected by Fletcher and Boas) of getting local indigenous people to take over the ethnographic project.  Unfortunately, Smith’s work was cut short by her untimely death in 1886.

1879, US Congress establishes USGS and BAE.  First BAEAR (Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Report), 1880.   Frank Cushing (1857-1900) at Zuni, 1879-1884.

1883, Tylor starts teaching at Oxford, thanks to General Lane Fox Pitt Rivers funding a post along with his museum there.

1883-4  Franz Boas (1858-1942) carries out his Inuit field work.  1885-6, Boas assists Bastian at Mus. for V.

1883  W. M. Flinders Petrie begins work inEgypt.  Major publications include Tell el Amarna, 1894, and Royal Tombs of Abydos, 1901.

1884  Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Frederick Engels (1820-1895)

1885, Women’s Anthropological Society founded by Matilda Coxe Stephenson in protest to Anthro. Soc. ofWashingtonexcluding women.  The WAS lasted till around 1899, when the new AAA arose (1898) and opened its doors to all genders and ethnicities

1886, Putnam becomes Peabody Professor of Anthropology at Harvard, but no real instruction there till 1890.

1887  Le suicide, by Emile Durkheim, 1858-1917.

F. Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Community and Society), sociological classic that greatly influenced ethnology

1887-88, First and main Hemenway Expedition; Cushing and several archaeologists launch major study of the Southwest

1888  American Anthropologist begins (started by the Anthropological Society of Washington).  Boas begins teaching at Clark U (leaves 1892; to AMNH in 1895).

1889  Tylor, address to RAI, “On a Method of Investigating the Development of Institutions, Applied to Laws of Marriage and Descent,” introduces the term and theory of “cross-cousin marriage”; in a comment, Francis Galton (statistician, eugenicist, racist, sometime president of the RAI) introduces Galton’s Problem

1890  First edition of The Golden Bough by James Frazer (1854-1941).  The final, definitive edition in many volumes came out in 1911-15.

First really modern archaeology: Flinders Petrie at Tell el-Hesi,Palestine, uses techniques of stratigraphy, cross-dating, and careful excavation of all artifacts, developed by him inEgyptand by Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers inEnglandover preceding decade

1891, John Wesley Powell (1834-1902), “Indian Linguistic Families of America North of Mexico,” published in 7th BAEAR

Edward Westermarck, The History of Human Marriage, 1st edn.; definitive 5th edn., much larger, 1921

1892, Alexander F. Chamberlain receives the first PhD in anthropology in theUS(under Boas atClark; a very fine anthropologist, Chamberlain became sickly and died young).  Anthro begins at U. of Chicago, but with Frederick Starr, a geologist and not very good ethnographer; in spite of giving out two early PhDs, to Merton Miller and David Prescott Barrows, in 1897, Chicago didn’t start real anthro till Fay-Cooper Cole got there in 1924 and Sapir in 1925; and then it was still under Sociology till 1929, giving a strong, still-enduring flavor to the Dept. there.  Starr and Barrows were “lost” to administrative positions, and Miller was never heard from again, soChicagowas not really a player till Cole.

1893  Columbian Exposition.  Lots of archaeology and ethnology on display; material from Mancos, CO, leads John Harshberger to coin term “ethnobotany” in 1895

1894  First archeology PhD in US: George Dorsey under Putnam at Harvard.  Cyrus Thomas’ mound researches published in BAEAR for 90-91.  Livingston Farrand teaches anthro atColumbia(with W. Ripley; Boas arrived in 1896).

B. Spencer and F. Gillen begin their classic joint work in centralAustralia.  Spencer was an ethnographer, Gillen a local who started by helping with details and wound up becoming an excellent ethnographer in his own right.

Arthur Evans begins work onKnossos(excavates Minos’ palace in 1900).

1897-1902  Jesup Expedition

1898-9 Torres Straits Expedition, led by Alfred Cort Haddon.  (Haddon’s The Study of Man, an early four-field text, pub 1898.)  This expedition was the first serious field work by British anthropologists.  W. H. R. Rivers, brought along as psychologist, does the first field work in psychological anthropology.

1900 RolandDixonPhD; 2nd in US, 1st at Harvard (under Putnam).

Wilhelm Wundt, Völkerpsychologie, published; a leading psychologist’s statement on culture and psych.

1901, anthropology begins at UCB: A. L. Kroeber and P. E. Goddard.  (1902-3, Putnam there, organizes it.  Boas opposed, Putnam supported, the new department.)  Kroeber was Boas’ first Ph.D. atColumbia(I think 1901)

1902  Pyotr Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution.

1903, Durkheim & Mauss’ Primitive Classification.

Max Uhle publishes major work onPeru.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.

1904-5, Die protestantische Ethik usnd der Geist des Kapitalismus pub., in 2 parts, by Max Weber (1864-1920.)

1906  Alice Fletcher and Joseph La Flesche, The Omaha Tribe, classic ethnographic collaboration between Anglo andOmaha ethnographers, published in BAEAR.

1908, Rites de passage by Arnold van Gennep.  Georg Simmel, Conflict and the Web of Group-Affiliations (Ger. orig.)

1911, Boas’ Mind of Primitive Man

1912  Formes elementaires de la vie religieuse, by Durkheim

Piltdown skull and accompanying material discovered; quickly championed (and possibly created) by Arthur Keith; attacked by Ales Hrdlicka and many others

1913  Sigmund Freud, Totem und Taboo (Eng transl. by A. A. Brill, 1918)

1914-18, Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) stuck in Trobriands (as war internee allowed to do field work)

1915, Cours de Linguistique Generale issued by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye from notes on lectures given 1907-11 by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)

1921  Sapir’s Language (and, in the same year, Otto Jesperson’s book by the same title and with the same “educated layperson” reader in mind; the contrast is dramatic; Sapir is fully 20th century, Jesperson thoroughly 19th)

1922  A. R. Radcliffe-Brown’s Andaman Islanders and Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific.  (ARR-B’s classic articles came out soon after: “The Methods of Ethnology and Social Anthropology,” 1923; “The Mother’s Brother inSouth Africa,” 1924.  Known for his devotion to Durkheimian theory, R-B had had an earlier devotion to Kropotkin that earned him the nickname of Anarchy Brown.)

1922-3, Weber’s Gesammelte Aufsaetze zur Religionssoziologie (collected essays on sociology of religion; core works published originally in 1916-19; Weber’s core economic work was also collected and published in 1922-3)

1923, Ruth Benedict’s The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America published; neglected classic, much better than Patterns of Culture

1925, Marcel Mauss’ (1872-1950) Essai sur le don (The Gift) published.  Not translated till 1954!

A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955) and Malinowski both in US.

Knowledge

Conservation Basics

Caring as the Most Basic of All

The one word is care.  If we care about each other and the environment, we will act responsibly.  If we do not care, we will not only lose all in the future, we will have no life worth living, now or ever.  This book will look at how other cultures constructed care for the environment, human and natural.

Caring must be about other humans as well as “nature.”  Indeed, separating the two is a problem for modern society; other societies have often avoided it, not making a hard distinction.  We cannot afford to remain indifferent to the plight of the billions of people now suffering from environmental decline and disaster.  We also can no longer afford to divide into warring nations, warring environmental ideologies, warring economic theories, and above all warring religions.  We have to unite against the greatest threat to life in the history of the planet:  our own devastating tide of pollution and misuse. As the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico say, “we are all kernels on the same corncob” (Cajete 1994:165).

Caring includes love for the natural environment, or at least some sort of attachment to some of it; genuine concern for other people; and awareness that we are all in this together, and will live or die together.  We—both humans and nonhumans—are all in this together. 

Care, to mean anything, also has to have a strong component of self-efficacy (Bandura 1982, 1986).  If we do not think we can do anything, we will not do anything.  We simply have to have some confidence that we can actually care for the world, and some awareness of how to do it.

So the problem is threefold:  Loving and caring about our environments; prioritizing care for them; and solidarity in defending and saving them. 

Learning to live sustainably and within limits involves loving nature (Milton 2002), or at least not hating it.  It means avoiding the false choice of “people vs nature,” “jobs vs owls” (Goodstein 1999).  That false choice has given us both “progress” that is mere wanton destruction and “preservation” that is mere displacement of local people from their lands (Brockington et al. 2008; West et al. 2006). 

Care means respect.  If one thinks the subject of one’s care is unworthy of respect as a valued being, one will not care much for it or about it. 

The Problems

The world environmental problems have been largely solved, as far as technology and economics goes.  We know what to do, or at least enough to make a good start now and develop more knowledge as we go on.  Simply planting trees and preserving areas of biodiversity would solve many of the problems; nothing could be conceptually easier, yet we are not doing it on anything remotely close to an adequate level.

All problems come down to one common ground:  resource exhaustion.  The resource may be water, genetic diversity, human potential, fossil fuels, or open space.  The problem is the same:  we are using too much of it. 

Worldwide, the most intractable environmental problem now is accommodating a fast-growing population already well above seven billion.  There are not enough resources on the planet to give that many people a middle-class western-style livelihood.  By midcentury there will be 9 to 10 billion people, and, contrary to hopeful claims, there is every indication that population increase will not stop there, unless major action is taken.  At some point, such a runaway growth must end in a crash, if studies of natural animal populations apply to humans—which they almost certainly do.  The classic Malthusian mechanisms bring excess numbers down.

To survive, we have to stop population growth and stop resource overuse.  Fortunately, the solution for high birth rates is both clear and simple, and does not involve the draconian policies invoked in the past by India and China.  Everywhere that modern medicine and education for girls have been introduced, birth rates drop like a plummet, usually approaching zero population growth in a generation or two.  I actually watched this happen in Hong Kong and again in Mexico during the years I spent doing field work there.  Completed family sizes fell steadily and rapidly.

 The medicine component must include a full range of birth control technologies, but not only that; keeping children alive by providing shots and other public health needs is just as important.  Parents know they can raise all their children; they do not have to have three children to be sure of raising one.

As to resource overuse, its simplest cause is waste due to short-term, narrow planning as opposed to long-term, wide planning (Anderson 1996, 2010).  We fail to consider downstream users.  We fail to consider our own futures.  We fail to consider other lives than human ones.  This occurs in several contexts:  the desperation of the poor, the thoughtlessness of the rich.

There are several different problems here.  Fishers and loggers may directly overharvest resources, leading to collapse of that specific resource base.  Pollution is different:  it involves production of one good while damaging others.  Still different is destruction that costs everyone, and has no motive other than status and conformity (as in McMansions and lawns).  Still more deplorable are outright arson and vandalism.  All these require slightly different cures. 

Resource misuse is made worse by poor education.  At present, education worldwide is not only failing at this task, it is getting rapidly worse in many areas.  The education system has to change to make people active workers for improvement, instead of passive receptacles for factoids to spit out on standardized tests.  High administrators, testing corporations, and government servants who oversee education conspire to reduce it to this sort of mindless cramming.  It is incompatible with learning one’s environment, and incompatible with caring about anything.  Children are now cut off from nature (Louv 2005, 2011).  Many urban children grow up without ever seeing the starry sky or a butterfly.  Attention to other cultures’ spiritual and aesthetic aspects, so common in the 1950s and 1960s, has suffered an eclipse.  Environmentalists talk less and less of loving nature, more and more of doom through pollution and oil depletion.   Too many of the proposed solutions are technocratic fixes.  We are not going to save the world by grim sewage-treatment.  Would you educate your children by scaring them to death and then promising hi-tech?  If that doesn’t work with them, why should it with anyone?

Today, religion and culture are much less involved in such matters.  Religion often sets itself against learning and education.  Nationalist and political ideologies also disregard the environment and are often anti-intellectual across the board; recall the violent attacks on education, learning, and book knowledge by the Nazis, the Maoists, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, and countless other such groups.  The contrast between the extreme stress on environmental learning in the religions of traditional small-scale societies could not be greater. 

Many have blamed “capitalism,” usually without defining it.  We have underestimated the importance of economic lock-ins, both economic and psychological.  The throughput economy and the world’s commitment to fossil fuels, monocrop agriculture, and other evils has survived major changes.  Culturally, this lock-in involves lack of motivators for caring about nature and people-in-nature.  We have alternatives:  ideals of fairness, justice, egalitarianism, community, solidarity, charity, caring, mercy, peace, family farms, beautiful landscapes, efficiency and “waste not, want not.” 

Even the purest capitalist boss in the worst days of Victorian England or 1930s Shanghai had a set of cultural beliefs, often far more ancient than capitalism.  The basic concept “men vs. nature” goes back thousands of years earlier.  The capitalist bosses also had a set of knowledge and practices derived from their work (“you just can’t make quality furniture with unseasoned pine wood”).  The boss was thus not thinking “capitalism”; he was thinking within a far more comprehensive, specific, and contingent framework.

The throughput-maximizing world, and its corporate rulers, has dangerous political consequences (Anderson 2010; Bunker and Ciccantell 2000; Eichenwald 2000; Humphreys et al 2007; Juhasz 2008).  Yet we are now so committed to it that any change is immediately attacked as costing too much, hurting the workers who depend on the system, and so on.  To some extent this is true; yet not fixing the system will devastate all of us, sooner rather than later. 

Even conservation becomes a tragedy, when local people are displaced.  Externalizing the costs of conserving onto the very people who preserved the resource till now is immoral as well as inefficient (Anderson 2005; Brockington et al. 2008; Haenn 2005; West et al. 2006).

            However, this does not really tell us when people will value nature over artificiality:  natural plants over lawns, for instance.  It also does not tell us when they will value the welfare of the community over the welfare of their families, or the welfare of their families over the welfare of themselves as individuals.  Economics cannot deal thoroughly with these questions, because they are questions about the ultimate goals of actions, and economics is classically concerned with alternative ways to reach goals, not with predicting the goals themselves.

            Recent attempts to save the biota by appealing to economics, politics, and legal remedies have not succeeded.  Worldwide, people have learned to emulate the western value on artificial things and environments.  People want machines, lawns, beef, and paved streets.  They no longer want traditional foods, fabrics or formulas. 

Social science can go somewhat farther.  We know that the current situation, with extremely rich and powerful elites dominating a vast working mass, has happened many times before, and we know what happens:  to the extent that the mass becomes hopelss and dispirited, individuals become alienated from the community.  Either they become passive, or they become narrowly “individualist.”  When people feel hopeful and want to improve their lives, they are far more prone to think widely and expansively, and work for the community (see Bandura 1982).

            Most actual working conservation and environmentalism is concerned with more simple, direct matters.  Largely, these are means, not ends.  We use cars to get somewhere, computers to write and cipher.  We fish and farm for food to survive.  All means, to whatever ends, have costs, normally including environmental costs.  Willingness to clean up the means and produce fewer environmental costs is thus a major problem.  No one wants to pay for cleanup; all want to enjoy the benefits of it.  Large firms can pass on the costs of pollution and overuse to the weaker members of society.  Here again unity and community is necessary.  Only by uniting can these weaker members exert power over the large operators and force them to internalize the costs of production.

Actual Solutions

Solutions for the environment have to minimize throughput by using less and being more efficient, and maximize diversity by saving species, cultures, languages, cultures, tasks, lifestyles. 

We have made a start, worldwide, on  recycling, efficient production, clean energy, good farming, reforestation and tree farming or selective cutting, sustainable fishing and hunting, etc. 

We need to put this to work, but prioritize matters accordingly:

–Public health with full range of contraceptive services.

–Bans on further biodiversity reduction, especially deforestation, extinction of species, overhunting, extension of monocrop agriculture. 

–Education, especially environmental education involving actual hands-on use, certainly including education of girls.  This includes informal education and the  media.

–Reforestation, sustainable management, simplification, a shift to a less consumptive economy, efficiency, pollution control, etc.—i.e. a shift from short-term, narrow gains to long-term, wide-flung benefits and from throughput to efficiency.  

–Institutional means—accounting, laws—must make the above economically profitable:  No subsidies; severance fees; transform fees; high garbage charges.  An entire economic structure  using rules to drive efficiency, sustainability, and simplicity instead of waste, drawdown, and techno-worship.

–Environmental organizations and laws, conservation and management measures,  pragmatic helping.

–Concern for the poor—the neglected majority of humanity  In short, environmental justice.

–Scientific research on all these questions, and the propagation of such knowledge by all means possible.

–Environmental health is necessary to individual health, but also to the health of society; it is to society what bodily health is to the individual.

–Not only nature but—if anything still more—decent houses fitted into their sites, native landscaping, foods, arts, health, intensive diversified small farming, etc.  Lots of solutions to push directly.

–Diversity maintenance:  biodiversity, cultural diversity, social diversity, human diversity and individualism.  Diversity is not a perfect measure of ecological health, but is a sine qua non.  It means a lot more than species counts.  This is key, and involves a massive revaluing of diversity, including cultural differences.

            All this requires what I call “process goals”:  Goals that can never be achieved, but that we need to strive for anyway.  World peace, total health, and a fully saved environment are examples.

Levels of Concern

            All the above breaks out into three levels of concern:

            –Immediate conservation issues:  saving forests and sea turtles, stopping cancer-causing pollution, stopping the waste of fresh water.  This is largely economic, though often simply aesthetic.  But it requires a strong community morality.  Traditional societies did a lot of this, from saving seeds and breeding livestock to terracing and paddy-building, careful water management, and sacred groves.  Usually, immediate economic needs were served as well as long-term protection.  Even the most sacred groves were used.  Only a few remote sacred mountains and similar places were genuinely shunned.

            –General concern for the environment.  This is less coupled to economics.  There are always economic interests who attack environmentalism, conservation, and sustainable management as “trees versus jobs.”  Traditionally, environmental concern of this sort was, in many or most societies, managed at the level usually called “religion” by outsiders.  The local people may have considered it more a matter of reverence, moral concern, and spiritual bonding rather than “religion” in the strict church-on-Sunday sense.

            –The still wider question of political solidarity and caring.  This does not necessary involve “the environment” at all.  If a polity is unified, people will naturally manage for future generations.  If it is torn by disunity to the point of real civil conflict, there is little or no hope.  Most of the world today is somewhere between those extremes, and solidarity  needs to be foregrounded.  Traditionally, solidarity was, again, a religious and ethical matter.  It was decoupled from religion as nationalism rose in the 17th and 18th centuries.  It has taken on a strange life in the 20th and 21st, with cross-cutting loyalties to religion, nation, political party, political ideology, occupational ties, and even Facebook and other electronic communities.  Reviving a community solidarity that will bond people together to preserve their immediate environment is proving fiendishly difficult.  People are often more prone to work to save “the rainforest” (conceived as an utterly remote place) than their neighborhood trees.  I suppose people who actually live in the rainforest may be trying to save the Arctic.

            In considering other cultures and their environmental management, we will need to look at these levels analytically.

Pragmatics of Conservation

Modern American experience shows that one needs only a few activists who love the environment and scientists who know the risks to it, if there are enough responsible users of the resource to generate some long-term considerations, and also enough socially responsible people to see that general or broad welfare depends on it.  This combination gave us the national forests in the 19^th century, the wildlife protection laws in the early 20^th, and the clean air, wilderness, and other acts of the 1970s.  All these happened in spite of the powerful dominance of throughput and resource-consumptive interests in American political economy.  Usually, it succeeds only when people across the political spectrum can see the broad social needs; the current world situation in which conservatives are almost entirely anti-environment is extremely dangerous.  It was not so in earlier times.  Much, if not most, of the major environmental legislation in American history was enacted during the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon.

This suggests that not everyone need have the powerful combination of love and ideology that animated John Muir and Rachel Carson.  In fact, the more the economy depends on holistic management of a resource, the less this strong self-conscious ideological position is needed. 

Resource preservation typically occurs when:

1.  The necessity for it can be so obvious and immediate that no one can miss it, and any community of users will develop enough working morality to keep each other honest.  This is the case with Maine lobsters (Acheson 2006; McCay and Acheson 1987), Los Angeles Basin water (Ostrom 1990), and Southeast Asian rice paddies. 

2.  The necessity for it can be obvious in the long run, to the point where a functioning community will get together and save it even though it is not immediately endangered.  This is the case with the national forests, much water conservation, and so on, but it is quite rare outside of democratic government action in modern societies, or religious protection through taboos and sanctification in more traditional ones.  Religion, social morality, or personal concern are necessary for this case.  Economic self-interest is never enough.  The pressures to exploit and run are too great.

When only rational material interest is involved, almost nobody ever manages or saves unless it is clearly an essential resource whose loss for even one day would be devastating.  Water is the most conspicuous and universal example, yet even water is chronically wasted.  Locally, topsoil, forests, fish, and agricultural resources are managed this way, but it takes effort and strict enforcement. 

3.  The resource can be saved for (ostensibly) other reasons.  This is where religion, recreation, and aesthetics are most vital.  Much that seems just religious is really exemplary of the previous two cases—fengshui groves, for instance.  But much is saved for aesthetics and then turns out valuable for other reasons, or is obviously valuable for many reasons but aesthetics is the decisive key.  National Parks, biodiversity, traditional cultural forms, and the like depend on this.  It is necessary in proportion to how wasteful and anti-nature the wider society is.

When only aesthetic or religious care is involved, people save, but often less than adequately.   Lock-down preservation is less a serious method of saving than a failure of management or a lazy solution to management problems.  Purely emotional saving also gives us problems with saving only the “charismatic megafauna” (or minifauna, as the case may be), or saving only “pretty” places even when these are of far less ecological concern than the “less pretty” ones.  We have saved most of America’s desert mountains but rather little of the wetlands.  Yet wetlands are far more valuable for conserving water, biodiversity, soils, and other benefits.

New Environmental Ethics

Ethics must begin with the general rule:  In the end, all action and morality has to be evaluated in terms of help versus harm.  For obvious reasons, long-term and wide interests have to transcend short-term narrow ones, but even that has to be evaluated (often case by case) in terms of overall help and harm. That is the only ultimate measure—the real Categorical Imperative.  (Kant’s idea, “act as though your every action could be a universal law,” ignores diversity; even identical twins require different things.) 

Essential for bioethics is compassion for all beings; creation care.                               

Among the corollaries are:

–Learning, knowledge, and self-improvement as basic moral charges.

–Responsibility, including simplifying, recycling, proacting to protect, etc.

–Tolerance and valuing diversity.

–A strong pragmatic sense of the need to balance human needs and conservation.

Civil and human rights are essential for all public goods (Anderson 2010).  However, they are not adequate for environmental protection, as the situation in the United States shows.  Eonomics exists within a moral shell.  Morals drive laws, laws create market structures.

Government, ideally, balances the private sector, with neither getting too big.  Both giant firms and the US Army Corps of Engineers have gotten above the law and above environmental common sense.  Both unregulated markets and uncontrolled big government have ruined whole countries.  Grassroots democracy, with environmental and social justice, appears better.  North and northwest Europe has done well with this general mix, but one might argue they had a pre-existing culture of environmental stewardship.  However, countries like Korea and Japan have also done fairly well with a mix.  Above all, however, accountability, recourse, transparency, and actually listening to scientific experts are the really desirable goals for a polity.

Any new ideology must be concerned with all beings.  It must foreground direct, proactive compassion and caring. What really matters is actively working for the common good, which in general means tolerance and mutual aid, but must mean a condign lack of tolerance and acceptance for hatemongers and anti-environmental activity of all kinds.  Ideally, this would resemble some traditional religions (Chinese Daoism, for instance) in being based on clear sight of the world and love for nonhuman beings.  Compassion for all beings, and idealization of simplicity, are two particularly common values in traditional religions, and we desperately need them now.

The ideal political system would be one where groups were interlocked and mutually interdependent.  They would be like fibres in a complex textile, except that one must imagine a fabric of ever-changing, ever-morphing fibres.  The fibres keep pulling away, or changing shape and length to fit the pattern.  A polity is a fabric made up of living threads, constantly weaving themselves into new tangles.

Group hatred is the worst in terms of world effects, having led to genocides that killed hundreds of millions of people in the last couple of centuries, but ordinary bloody-mindedness is fatal too. 

Success at driving solidarity against selfishness and against rejection games has come from not only from religion, but also from communities in general, as well as political parties science, the military, voluntary organizations, Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programs, labor unions, and other organizations.  It can come from “imagined communities” (Benedict Anderson’s famous term for nations and other created large-scale forms; B. Anderson 1991).  All communities are imagined, but, also, all effective ones have some reality to them.  Of these, science, voluntary organizations, and 12-step programs have been eminently successful bridge-builders; religion, nationalism, and the military are great at bonding but generally negative at bridge-building.  Degree of emotional appeal, degree of emotional involvement, voluntariness, education level, and the degree to which people believe the order is “natural.” 

            The world needs a blanket organization or linkage that would integrate all possible conservation and environmental groups.  We have to cooperate now, and help the “bottom billion” (Collier 2007), as well and the nonhuman lives on the planet, before the rest of us need help.  If we wait, it will be too late; resource exhaustion and global warming will be beyond fixing. 

Communities of Conservation

A “community,” here, is a group of any kind that realizes we’re all in this together.  People need to take care of their own families and immediate circle to maintain community.  This requires some sort of emotional interaction: arts, ritual, worldview, political action, or religion.  The most important lesson of anthropology may be that these cultural elaborations of discursive practice are absolutely necessary in creating and maintaining communities, and above all in creating and maintaining moral and responsible behavior as defined and constructed by those communities.  Without emotionally and aesthetically compelling forms, there is weak community and no environment care.  Traditional societies have an advantage in being able to combine community maintenance, morality, and ecology into one thing—traditional environmental ideology, usually a part of religion—and make it so persuasive that no one can evade it.  As we see from the results of modernization, the more care, the more one can resist the dreadful carrot-and-stick approach of contemporary economic development (Dichter 2003; Ellerman 2005; Li 2007; Stiglitz 2003):  “We promise you wealth (some day!) if you give us your resource base for destruction, and if you don’t we’ll take over your land and destroy your resource base anyway.” 

Community can lead to rather rapid changes, in either direction.  A society can shift from a sensible, future-oriented elite to a presentist, irresponsible one.  Japan turned from highly conservationist under the Tokugawa (Totman 1989) to rather destructive under the Liberal Democratic Party (Kirby 2011).  The United States was the world leader in conservation during its most “rugged individualist” periods, 1890-1910 and 1960-1980.  During more conformist periods, it lost that edge.  Evidently, what is needed is responsibility for the common good, which takes both individualism and collectivism.

People in Nature

The best way to do this is through the Native American view that plants and animals are actually persons who are part of one’s society.  Next is the land or landscape sense:  we are in an environment we create, shape, and manage—a garden or mixed farm writ large.  Both of these demand emotional involvement, and make almost inevitable the cultural construction thereof in ceremonies and arts.  These are the cultures that produce the stunning environmental art we know from Northwest Coast animal sculptures, Australian Aboriginal paintings of “country,” Chinese landscapes, and Balinese temple rituals.

Worst is the idea of nature and separate from and conflicting with human interests.  This reaches an extreme in the common Western Hemisphere view that nature must be destroyed and replaced by totally artificial landscapes, agriculture being confined to monocrops in neat rows.  We live in a world where the natural is often considered uncouth, disgusting, or at best “underdeveloped.”  At best, it means that anything done to save nature must inevitably be seen to conflict with human interests.  This is the anti-environmentalists’ stock theme, but unfortunately it is basic to a dangerous and unfortunate side of western environmentalism, too:  the side that advocates “deep ecology,” clearing the Great Plains to turn them back to the animals, or nature reserves that displace indigenous people. 

This view of nature accompanies a view of humans as “individuals vs. mass” or, with America’s “tea party” movement, “individuals vs. government.”  This can lead to the extreme, antisocial individuality of the Republican far right.  Others opt for the mass to the point that the individual is seen as necessarily subjected to harsh top-down codes and mass conformity (as in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre [1984, 1988], or the radical religious right).  Even far more temperate individualist philosophers like John Rawls (1971) and Tom Scanlon (1998) explicitly excluded the environment in their considerations (see my posting “Ethics” at www.krazykioti.com).   All these views oppose the individuals-in-society and society-in-nature view of many traditional societies.

A state of despair has entered many people in the last generation.  Especially important in creating this mood of hopeless passivity has been the rapid decline of individual control over one’s world, as giant corporations and government bureaucracies take over more and more of life.  Our social reality is one of Big Oil, Big Agribusiness, the World Trade Organization, and the rest of the litany, not excluding Big Science and corrupt university administrations.  We are weak in the face of them, and so we lose heart.  Consider the despair shown by the contemporary right-wing belief, from the WTO down to the Tea Party, that total corporate domination is the best we can hope for—that all government and free agency is necessarily worse. 

It has destroyed any sense of closeness to or dependence on the nonhuman world.  It has been cultivated by powerful extractive interests:  big oil, big agribusiness, big chemical, and so on. 

These would have been unable to do the damage they have done without the failure of community.  If people were still solidary with each other, let alone the nonhuman persons of the world, they would have been able to withstand the pressures of the giant corporate extractive interests.  Everywhere people have been able to assert community solidarity (specifically across class and ethnic boundaries), they have been able to get at least some traction against corporate destructiveness.  The extreme case was in the Solomon Islands, where a copper mine ruined the land and livelihood of a local group.  The group fought back:  bows and arrows against the full corporate might of one of the world’s most powerful corporations.  The mine shut down.

A world of Kantian subjects, debating and negotiating their community’s rules, is impossible under extreme views.  Yet conservation and sound environmental management depend on precisely such dialogues.  Managing resources depends on revaluing humans. 

Thinking Too Narrowly

There are four major reasons why people think in too narrow terms (Anderson 1996, 2010).  First, we discount the future far too heavily.    Second, we also discount humans and other beings if they are not part of our immediate face-to-face world.  To some extent, this is necessary; I simply can’t be as involved with a farmer in India as as am with my children. We take it too far in modern America, however; we hardly know our neighbors.  Third, people bicker over trivia instead of uniting to save the world.  Fourth is simple laziness.  The human animal shares with dogs and cats a healthy value on resting up for whatever the future may bring. 

Humans under stress or attack move toward more short-term considerations.  When one is under threat one has to deal with that threat immediately (Anderson 2010; Bandura 1982).  Everything else has to wait.  Therefore, long-term, wide-flung planning must always swim upstream (Anderson 1996).  It depends on solidarity—the wide-flung connections and responsibilities—and solidarity itself must always swim upstream. 

All bad habits of thought have been enormously increased by the new economic order:  salaried managers rather than bosses, service workers rather than manufacturing and farming proletariat, and government-corporate fusion rather than separation.  The world is now run by individuals who migrate back and forth from government to industry, working for salaries and bonuses rather than because their careers are on the line.  They are typical bureaucrats:  unaccountable, nonresponsible, and unconcerned about the future of the enterprise.  They have secular ideologies and are not emotionally involved in their work, which in any case changes every few years.  The old capitalist boss at least had his job and his pride on the line.   He could be responsible and even conservationist if it suited him.  The modern bureaucratic CEO cannot be even if he wants to be; the directors and shareholders will not let him.

Lester Brown (2009) speculates on a world war or similar violence as the hungry “take to the streets,” but the hungry are too weak to do much.  It is those still declining, not those on the bottom, who resort to violence.  We have to start a hopeful program (such as Brown’s “Plan B,” now up to a 4^rd version; Brown 2008, 2009) and push for it, now, before real shortage comes.

            The sort of “liberalism” represented by the “critique of environmentalism” (which sees environmentalism as mere elite snobbery) is obviously opposed to every point in every environmental or conservation program, and must be forthrightly attacked.  This critique is a part of the old Marxist attack on anything that delays industrial progress; it was the attitude that made the Communist-led societies the worst polluters of all.  The same is true of the sort of “conservatism” that opposes all environmental regulation.  It is a complete betrayal of all classic conservative principles, from thrift to family values. 

I have seen the same thing with loggers, who were all too willing to serve as the storm troops for their cynical bosses when environmentalists protested the rape of the old-growth forests (Helvarg 1997).  The loggers, of course, lost their jobs when they “won.”  I have seen the same with farmers dealing with soil erosion and stockherders dealing with overgrazing. 

Perhaps the greatest need today is investigative reporting on abuses of power—environmental destruction and its dirty politics.  We are now aware of the emotional nature of politics (Marcus 2002; Westen 2007).  This not only helps us with modern politics; it also shows us why religion was the driver for resource management in earlier times. 

I have seen the same thing with loggers, who were all too willing to serve as the storm troops for their cynical bosses when environmentalists protested the rape of the old-growth forests (Helvarg 1997).  The loggers, of course, lost their jobs when they “won.”  I have seen the same with farmers dealing with soil erosion and stockherders dealing with overgrazing. 

Once I thought it was high ideals and commitments that drove history.  Then I thought it was rational choice, or at least that rational-choice models were good enough to score.  Now I find that Ibn Khaldun (1958), Albert Bandura (1982), Aaron Beck (1999), Roy Baumeister (1997), and similar thinkers have the predictive power—basically, models based on individuals looking at reality and reacting with varying degrees of raw emotion rather than overall utility maximization.  People act within a general framework where perceptions of self-efficacy drive either sober coping or high-emotion maladaptive reacting, and where evil is all too common as a response. 

Effective opposition to conservation comes when vested interests draw on short-term narrow planning.  Often they wind up appealing to hate.  The hate has usually been right-wing (but often left-wing too), but the short-sightedness has often been liberal or populist, and often in the very best causes—cheap hydroelectric power, public health, affordable housing.  Conservation was a broadly based middle-of-the-road to conservative cause for most of its history.  Its identification with the left wing dates to the takeover of right-wing politics by the giant corporations in the 1950s and of left-wing politics by the urban educated voters in the 1960s.  

People are social, but not social enough.  Social disunion often leads to social rejection, and social rejection often leads to social hatred.  The “culture wars” and “debt increase wars” that got out of control in the early 21^st century in the United States ran beyond anything that could benefit special interests; hatreds on all sides of the political landscape took on a life of their own.  These spilled over into environmental management via an attack on environmentalism that quickly escalated beyond anything that even the oil companies could have reasonably wanted.  Politicians seriously proposed ending all environmental regulation, and even the government’s public health activities. 

Anti-environmental forces keep up the divisive rhetoric; the most obvious recent case has been in the wholly spurious science of global warming denial, and the way it has been hyped not only by those who profit (the energy companies and heavy polluters) but also by conservatives and Marxists worldwide (see Hoggan 2009; Mooney 2005; Oreskes and Conway 2010; Powell 2011). 

America was settled as a nation of small farms.  Government policy, however, has favored large plantation-style operators almost from the beginning (Bovard 1991).  This has been due especially to the political power of southerners, often plantation owners, during several key periods of history.  Plantation policies displaced the Anglo-Celtic tradition of mixed farming on small independent family farms.  The death of the family farm in the United States  came in several waves:  the 1920s, the 1950s, the 1980s, and the 2000s (see e.g. Bovard 1991 for at least the earlier parts of this).  These tracked periods of Republican ascendency, but, especially in the 1920s and 1950s, the worst offenders were southern Democrats.  (Through the 1950s and 1960s, agricultural policy in the United States was dominated by Senator James Eastland, D-MS, who long headed the relevant Senate committee; his Sunflower Plantation was one of the largest farms in the world, and had some of the worst labor practices.) 

Unnaturalism

            I use the word “unnaturalism” to refer to the belief that something artificial, no matter how expensive and damaging, is better than anything natural.

            Most damage that humans do to the environment is done for reasons that are at least understandable, and usually perfectly good: making a living, making useful goods, getting more security and safety and comfort.  There remains a fair amount, however, that is done solely because the natural is seen as inherently bad and wrong.

            The most ancient, widespread, and universal bit of unnaturalism is modifying one’s own body.  Perhaps the second most universal human trait (after language) is painting and decorating oneself to become “more beautiful.”  Often, this merely highlights natural features.  However, in the modern world, it has led to the “extreme makeover.”  Everything natural about the body must be “corrected.”

            With civilization came huge showy buildings, often not for the living but for the honored dead.  Kings learned to show their power by maintaining a lavishly expensive lifestyle, even in the afterlife.  Robes and jeweled crowns may not be comfortable wear, but they show wealth.  Transportation by litter was no faster than by foot, and not much more comfortable either, but it looked impressive.  Public spaces showed how well the elite could build, create, and manage. Interestingly, this all appeared independently in the New World civilizations as well as in all the Old World ones.  It is endemic to the urban world.  Farmers and others who worked with nature were considered to be uncouth and backward—an attitude surviving today in most of the world.  Even for the masses, the city seems preferable to nature. 

            Unnaturalism took a far more extreme and ugly turn in the Near East, in the centuries just before Christ.  Grave sages concluded that the flesh, and indeed the entire material world, is downright evil.  Of this more later.

            A major rise of unnaturalism came with status consumption in the era of exploding world trade, from about 1500.  This phase involved a renewal of extreme sexual repression among the Puritans, Jansenists, and other religious movements of the time.  It also produced lawns, and clipped and pruned gardens.  It produced huge mostly-empty houses with airless rooms and constant remodeling, and other unpleasant and expensive environmental manipulations.  This is carried to obsessive levels in America today, where many suburbanites spend virtually their entire free time and disposable income maintaining the lawn and “working on the house.”  This Puritanical activity is unique in human history in the degree to which it combines waste of money, unnecessary environmental damage, and sheer unpleasantness to the doer. 

            Finally, modern science—at root an accommodation and understanding of nature—has been overextended and misused to sell extremely damaging things solely because they are unnatural:  unnecessary Caesarian sections, bottle feeding of infants, cosmetic plastic surgery, the whole lunacy of “virtual reality,” and finally the hermetically sealed modern environment.  Many mothers today fear to let their children go outside at all—there might be snakes and spiders (Louv 2005, 2011—and my own bemused observations in American suburbia). 

The rise of Caesarian sections is an extreme case.  Caesarians can be life-saving, but 2/3 of Caesarians in the United States are unnecessary.  Brazil has even higher rates.  Caesarians not only cost much more than normal births but carry forty times the risk of maternal death.  Clearly, rational self-interest is not driving this epidemic, except for the “rational self-interest” of certain greedy doctors (Wagner 2006).

Other cultures never moved so far beyond ordinary status consumption.  China developed or copied monumental architecture, industrial-style farming, and other unnaturalist ways of doing business.  Deforestation, wetland drainage, and similar practices were common.  However, China never abandoned the ideal of “harmony” with the world or the love of natural landscapes and natural beauty.  Traditional China had ambiguous attitudes toward the untended wild, but was strongly positive toward the spontaneous and natural.  And at least they enjoyed wine, sex and song rather than “working on the house!” The coming of Maoist Commuism, with its “struggle against nature” and the panoply of western unnaturalist ideas, was a shock to China and the Chinese, and had devastatingly bad effects.  The idea that “progress” meant destroying nature at all costs was soon firmly established, however.  This, among other things, involved selling a quite new concept of “nature” to the Chinese world.  The idea of “nature” as a separate thing, innately bad, was completely alien to the Chinese.  It resonates much better with a Christian west, raised to see the body as evil, human nature as inclined to sin, and the individual as born in Original Sin.

Other ancient civilizations, including those of the New World and southeast Asia, were even less fond of unnatural and unnecessary modifications of the world—though even they had their body-painting and monumental architecture.

            From these and many other examples, we can loosely classify some unnaturalism as simply human.  Some is a product of civilization.  Later came problems of the western world specifically, from anti-materialism to the Industrial Revolution’s fetish of technology.  In general, unnaturalism seems usually about status:  nothing shows one’s status better than one’s ability to waste a great deal of money on doing something flagrantly counter to common sense.  This is a “natural” urge, but increasingly expressed through unnatural means.  In body decoration and status consumption, expensive and unnecessary showing-off to make one’s point is known as “costly signaling” in behavior studies, “conspicuous consumption” in the social sciences (Veblen 1912).

            Mercifully, at most points there has been an opposite, if not always equal, reaction.  Nature flourishes, and people are more self-conscious about valuing it when there is an unnaturalist alternative staring them in the face. 

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SCIENCE AND ETHNOSCIENCE

E. N. Anderson

Dept. of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside

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SCIENCE AND ETHNOSCIENCE

E. N. Anderson

Dept. of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside

Part 3.  Case Study:  Classification

One fact that is devastating to the view that science is purely a cultural or social construction is the broad consonance between folk and scientific systems of classification.  People everywhere classify plants and animals about the same way, recognizing categories like “bird,” “snake,” and so on (Atran 1990; Berlin 1992; Brown 1984).  Moreover, they focus on inferred biological relationships.  They classify dogs with dogs, cats with cats, and oak trees with beech trees, rather than—say—shepherd dogs with sheep and human shepherds, hounds with ducks, cats with grass, and oak trees with potatoes.

People classify things.  The fundamental, original purpose of this is to make the world manageable.  If we had to react to every stimulus as a new and unprecedented thing, we would never get out of bed in the morning.  Thus, as Kant (1978) pointed out, we assimilate and differentiate as we need to.   Humans seem to be natural classifiers.  Modern psychology confirms Kant’s points:  we essentialize categories, treating things we class together as if they were “the same” and exaggerating the differences of things we put in different categories (Atran 1990; Atran and Medin 2008).

Classifications are fundamentally about being useful.  We classify so that we can identify edible and useful plants, dangerous or poisonous animals, types of tools we need for projects, breeds of dogs used for different tasks, types of paintings (Impressionist, abstract expressionist, op-art…).  Most classifications are developed from actual interaction with the things we are classifying.  We classify them in ways that make for maximal efficiency in using them.

However, our love of classifying runs far beyond utility.  We classify all manner of things, and learn about them.  Folk biology everywhere includes an incredible number of names and facts, many of them essentially useless to the people who know them.  The Maya, for instance, have names for all manner of tiny insignificant birds, and know their life histories.

We classify everything:  dogs, personality types, ideas, gods, kinfolk, potatoes (some Peruvian farmers know hundreds of varieties by sight), and kinds of love.  People even develop classifications for fun, like the classifications of imaginary creatures (unicorns, dragons, and so on) in fantasy books.

Conversely, people may develop classifications to keep people in line—from those endless classifications of sins and impurities in the Bible to those endless classifications of traffic violations in the modern civil codes.  So one main, and universal, use of classification systems is to maintain control not only over natural complexity but also over people’s lives and social actions (Bowker and Star 1999; Foucault 1970).

Classifications range from legally defined, like types of property, to biologically based, like types of fir trees.  Classifications may be very clear, simple, and sharp, like classifications of living elephants:  there are only two, not much like each other, and not at all like any other animal.  Conversely, classifications of philosophic theories are so endlessly argued by philosophers that one may wonder whether the reason for having the classifications at all is to stir up debate.  Obviously, we will never have an accepted classification of philosophies.

Classifications may be universal (modern scientific nomenclature—among scientists, at least), cultural (English bird names), or at lower levels.  My classification of foods I like is unique to me.  My children’s classification of foods they would not eat was an all too significant family reality in their early years, but is of no significance today.

Classifications may be broadly true in some sense.  The modern scientific classifications of chemicals, stars, and living things are grounded in real and demonstrable facts.  We classify animals and plants on the basis of biological relationships.  Linnaeus had to infer these from appearance, and brilliantly saw that flowers are basic rather than leaves, stems, and roots.  We can now use cladistic analysis backed up by comprehensive genetics, and prove directly the genetic relationships we once had to infer.

On the other hand, classifications can be ad hoc, or plain wrong, or utterly ridiculous, like José Luis Borges’ “Chinese encyclopedia” parody cited in Foucault (1970:xv).

The purpose of classification is not to be right but to be useful.  Even Borges’ is useful:  it is intended to shock the reader into thinking about the whole philosophical issue of classification.  Anyone reading it realizes it is a joke, because the units are totally non-comparable; a real system has to have units that are comparable, in ways that matter within that particular system.  In technical terms, there has to be an “emics” to the system.

A great deal of research has been devoted to the history and cross-cultural variation of classification.

Kinship terminology has received by far the most effort.  Kinship is unique in that it is equally important and elaborate in all cultures.  It is the only realm in which every culture has an elaborate, precise, formalized, and almost universally known system.  Australian aboriginals may not have elaborate physics or chemistry, but their kinship systems are so formal and elaborate that many brilliant English-speaking scholars have spent years unsuccessfully trying to analyze them.  Thus they provide ideal material for comparative analyses of human thought.  Therefore, theorizing about family and kin has always been basic to anthropology.  Lewis Henry Morgan’s vast classic work Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity (1871) put the seal on kin classification as a major field for anthropological endeavor (Trautman 1987).

Since the 1870s, much work has been devoted to taxonomies of animals and plants, and sometimes other living things (like fungi).  Comparative work has shown that people everywhere see real biological relationships, and use them as one basis for classifying.  This has even led authorities on the subject to postulate that people have a natural tendency to classify on the basis of perceived basic similarities (Atran 1990; Berlin 1992; Brown 1984).

In classifying living things, every culture has a general classification systems versus special purpose classifications.  Brent Berlin found that this distinction is basic and apparently worldwide (Berlin 1992).  The general system is the one based on apparent biological relationships or real-world appearance.  It is the one that provides everyday names.  Everywhere, it is based on inferred similarities out there in nature.  Everywhere, if you simply ask “what is that?” you get the name in the general system.  The name of an animal or plant is always understood to be its name in the general system unless you specify otherwise.  Local utilitarian factors influence all general purpose systems (Hunn 1982), but do not determine them, so they end by looking very much like the modern international scientific system.

On the other hand, Roy Ellen has long emphasized real differences between cultural classification systems (e.g. Ellen 1993).  Similarly, Geoffrey Lloyd (2007) has found many areas that are not accurately perceived in folk biology.  He makes much of the microorganisms, which are irrelevant to his case, but he makes the more serious point that traditional classifications generally fail at the higher levels.  Nobody seems to have words for “mammal,” and many cultures lack a word for “animal.”  Plants are variously assembled.  Carol Kaesuk Yoon (2009) has recently held that there is a “clash” between “instinct”—the natural categorization that humans do—and “science.”  She maintains this because genetics has now shown that fish fall into several classes, with the bony fish closer to humans than to cartilaginous fish.  One might add that birds are closer to some “reptiles” (dinosaurs) than those are to other reptiles.

So science is indeed a cultural construction.  Even modern classifications are not 1:1 maps of biology, and folk systems certainly are not.

Yet, in fact, folk and traditional people see natural categories astonishingly well—not as well as the best modern geneticists, but well enough to show that nature is hard to ignore in these matters.  Sometimes the traditional small-scale societies had views closer to modern genetics than the Linnaean biologists did.  Fungi were still “plants” when I was an undergraduate, but the indigenous peoples of Mexico correctly place them closer to animals (Hunn 2008; Lampman 2008).  I found that the Yucatec Maya categorize orioles according to the best modern analysis.  And certainly my friends on the Hong Kong waterfront were aware that “fish” (yu) was a functional class (swimming aquatic life), not a natural biological one.  They knew from inspection, for instance, that cuttlefish were closer to octopi than to bony fish, though cuttlefish were “fish” and octopi were not.  It is significant that this example translates perfectly; folk English does the same thing.

The point is that it is constructed on the basis of ongoing interaction with reality.  (Even those unicorns are based on reality, at a couple of removes.  The original “unicorn” was the rhinoceros, and tales of it—a huge horselike creature with one horn in the middle of its forehead—were duly interpreted as reasonably as possible:  a horse with a narwhal tusk for a horn, the Europeans having no other one-“horned” animal to compare.)  Obviously, no society could exist if it did not base its knowledge on truth learned by experience.

One proof is the development of dictionaries in Arab (Carter 1990) and Chinese civilizations.  Technical vocabularies specialized on particular subjects, such as horses (Carter 1990) or drugs and medicines, show the classification systems appropriate to those matters.  Early Arabic dictionaries sometimes arranged words by linguistic domains, and these were much like ours or anyone else’s.  The early Greek and Latin writers also classified plants and animals in ways not irrational or incomprehensible.  They are not the same as our ways, but they are close enough that we still use many of Theophrastus’ and Pliny’s names as scientific names, either for the same plants or for similar or related ones.  (Still, one sometimes wonders about the more modern sages!  Kaktos, Greek for a kind of thistle, wound up applied to some plants that have nothing in common with thistles except prickliness.  Dozens of other names were similarly applied any old way, just to recycle a Greek name, no matter how inappropriately.  This started early; kardamon, another thistle, had already—and mysteriously—become the name of a spice in late antiquity.)

Special purpose classifications classify plants and animals in relation to human wants and needs. In Hong Kong, when I asked “what is that fish?” I got the name in the general system, relating fish to fish—classifying them as soles, sharks, groupers, and so on.  I slowly learned there were many other ways to classify fish:  by price, by technique used to catch them, by habitat, by sacred and ceremonial significance, and by eating qualities.  These were five separate, salient, well-known systems.  They were not merely ad hoc.  The fishermen never confused them with the basic system (Anderson 1972).  When I asked “what is that fish?” I always got a name from the basic system, never “a netted fish” or the like.

Proof that even the arcana of fish classification can suddenly become important is found in the striking book Trying Leviathan by D. Graham Burnett (2007).  This book is the history of a trial that took place in New York City in 1818 to decide whether a whale was a fish or a mammal.  The state had passed a law requiring inspection of fish oil, with a fee to be paid by the seller.  This being New York, a whale-oil dealer immediately challenged the law on the basis of science:  whales had recently been classified as mammals by Linnaeus and Cuvier.  This early example of New York chutzpah got him haled into court.  The trial involved the formidably brilliant icthyologist Samuel Mitchill as witness for the defense, but the verdict went against the dealer, since the plaintiff could establish that the state legislature had passed the law based (at some remove) on the supposition that whales were fish and whale oil would be inspected.

This was long before Darwin.  There was no obvious reason to prefer lactation, air-breathing and live birth over fins, aquatic habitat, and streamlined shape as classification markers.  The lawyers were astute enough to realize that classification could be ambiguous; they made reference to the “duck-billed beaver” (platypus) and other anomalies.  Not only New York lawyers find whales confusing.  My fishermen friends in Hong Kong told me that whales and porpoises were anomalous because they looked like fish but acted intelligent (unlike fish) and were “like pigs” internally.  My friends thought these creatures were uncanny, and avoided catching them.

In anthropology, studies of classifying everything from religious ceremonies to art objects have continued to proliferate.  An unwise attack on such studies was launched in the 1960s by Marvin Harris (1966, 1968) and others.  Harris chose to criticize a study of Maya firewood knowledge by Duane Metzger and Gerald Williams (1966), branding it—and by extension all such research—as “trivial.”  He could not have picked a worse target.  The Maya depend on firewood for cooking and warmth.  They live in a wet climate where good dry wood is hard to find and must be carefully chosen.  Like hundreds of millions of other people around the world, they spend up to several hours a day searching for firewood.  Knowing how to get the best wood in the shortest time is a life-and-death matter for them.  Firewood use is a matter of enormous councern worldwide, since about 1/3 of all the wood used in the world goes for this purpose, greatly contributing to global warming and deforestation.  Nothing could be less trivial, either to the Maya or to the planet.

An area in which folk classification is infamously important, inaccurate, and pernicious is “race.”  Americans are addicted to the notion that everything important is genetic and that genetics is a simple science.  (Many have wondered how a nation of overachieving immigrants from all manner of other cultures can believe this.)  Thus, as noted above, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve (1994) give us a “Latino race” with an IQ of 89!  Quite apart from the absurdity of such aggregated measures of intelligence, Herrnstein and Murray simply ignored the fact that Latinos can be white, black, Native American, East Asian, or any and all mixtures of these.  Similar confusion surrounds “Black” Americans, Native Americans, and other categories.  We have lately been inflicted with something called “race medicine,” which prescribes different drugs for Black and White Americans.  Yet there is a total continuum.  Millions of Whites are part Black, and almost all Blacks are part White—frequently 15/16, since anyone with any African appearance is called “Black.”  These 15/16 Caucasian patients are given “Black” drugs!  Even such appalling bureaucratic monstrosities as “Asian-Pacific Islander”—the creation of arbitrary Census Bureau labeling—have become “real” to Americans.  This shows how “race” classifications can not only change arbitrarily but can be invented out of whole cloth.  The strange, if not downright surrealistic, history of “race” labels has been well covered in anthropology by Lee Baker (1998), Audrey Smedley (2007), and Jonathan Marks (Marks 2001), among others.

Even Linnaean classification is related to economic and aesthetic theories of the Enlightenment elite (Foucault 1970).  Foucault also saw many other interesting aspects of classification that go far beyond its immediate utility.  He wrote:  “Take…animal and plant classifications.  How often have they not been rewritten since the Middle Ages according to completely different rules:  by symbolism [the medieval use of animal and plant symbols], by natural history, by comparative anatomy, by the theory of evolution.  Each time this rewriting makes the knowledge completely different in its functions, in its economy, in its internal relations” (Foucault, in Chomsky and Foucault 2006:26; cf. Foucault 1970).  There is some truth in this, but Foucault misses the key point that actual everyday classification of creatures did not change significantly during this period.  Dogs were dogs, cats were cats, whales were whales.  Nor, of course, was it “completely different in its functions”; it still functioned largely to let people name what they saw, and give similar names to similar creatures.

Over centuries, many new plants and animals were added to European knowledge, necessitating major changes in everyday words and usages, but the basic system did not change.  However, Foucault is correct in that elite scholars’ interests and perspectives really did change.  The Medieval churchmen were more interested in animals as symbols than in animals as animals (see e.g. Herbert Friedman’s superb account of birds in art, 1980; also Rowland 1978).  The function vs. anatomy tension lies behind the whale trial described above, and did indeed affect how we folk speakers classify whales, but we still talk about the “whale fishery,” as well as “shellfish” and “cuttlefish” and other non-anatomical “fish.”  Darwin profoundly changed human thought, but not folk taxonomical usage.

Consider the European goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis).  In the Middle Ages it was a symbol of Christ, and thus the child Christ is shown holding one in many Renaissance paintings.  In Linnaeus’ taxonomy it got its present name—just its old Latin name, doubled—and was classed with finches.  Anatomists then separated the finches into several groups—they turned out to be more different inside than outside—and the goldfinch got its own family, Carduelidae (which includes a lot of its relatives).  Darwinians have gone on to debate the actual relationships and membership of the Carduelidae.  So Foucault is right.

But not right at the deepest level.  Throughout all of this, the goldfinch remains a goldfinch, and every English speaker who notices birds knows it.  Germans similarly call it a distelfink, “thistle finch,” as they have for centuries, in honor of its regular food (thistle seeds).  Folk classification still makes it a “finch” along with zebra finches and Mexican ground finches, although we now know these birds are not closely related.

This emphasizes a difference between folk and elite understandings.  This is not so much a matter of better or worse education, or of snobbism, but of needs.  We ordinary people, and this includes scholars and scientists on their off days, need to have a quick, convenient, pragmatic label to refer to things we regularly interact with.  Scientists need to have labels based on understanding of deeper, less obvious, but more biologically important processes.

Hence scientists refer to C. carduelis in the lab and in the technical literature, but call it a “goldfinch” when they see it in their thistle patch.  Anywhere in the world, if you ask “what’s that?” as a small yellow finch with a red face flies by, you’ll be told “a goldfinch” (or local equivalent).  You will never be told “that’s the Christ child,” and you would not have been told that in the Italian Renaissance, either.  The medieval symbolic system is very much a special purpose classification, and the medieval artists knew that.

Medieval and Renaissance artists and writers often spoke of four levels of symbolism—traditionally defined as “image, symbol, metaphor, and allegory” or something similar (see e.g. Schneider 1992:17).  This survived in religious music until the present.  A good, and thoroughly modern, example is Mississippi John Hurt’s “Slidin’ Delta Blues,” in which the image–a train nicknamed “Slidin’ Delta”—is a symbol of parting from one’s love, which is a metaphor for death, which is an allegory for transcendence.  Hurt sings:  “Lord, I’m goin’ somewhere / I never been before,” where the “somewhere” is a faraway real place, death, mystical experience, and Heaven, depending on the level at which one is listening.

“Totemism,” in the broad sense, is similar.  Classifying people into Eaglehawk and Crow moieties or into Wildcat and Coyote moieties does not mean that people are animals.  It is not the basic classification of the traditional peoples that use this system, either, contra Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss (1963).  It is simply the use of well-known animals as symbols for social groups (Lévi-Strauss 1962, 1963).  This is a special purpose system, and it depends on the prior existence and widespread knowledge of the basic or general system.  It often depends also on knowing the animals’ habits.  Wildcats were associated in California Native cultures with valleys, coyotes with mountains, and thus valley and lowland animals are in the Wildcat moiety, hill and mountain ones in the Coyote moiety.  People are distributed according to birth rather than residence, however.  One is automatically in one’s father’s moiety, no matter where one lives.  What has happened is that human social divisions are projected onto nature.  “Nature” and human society are not radically separated in Native American cultures, so this is a “natural” thing to do (Durkheim and Mauss 1963).

Such social classifications are universal; consider our school mascots.  Symbol, metaphor, and allegory are amazingly important to humans (Lakoff and Johnson 1980).

An odd kind of “classification” is found in linguistic gender and other grammatical systems.  German, Spanish, and other gender systems are notoriously decoupled from sexual reality; “maiden” is neuter in German.  Several Australian languages have four genders: masculine, feminine, neuter, and useful plants (Lakoff 1990 discusses one such language).  Many languages, including Chinese and Maya, have classifying particles, added to numbers and demonstratives, that identify broadly the type of noun to follow.  Thus Chinese says yi ben shu “one volume book” and yi tiao yu “one length fish.”  This allows one to see that Yucatec Maya has a category for “plants” in general:  there is no actual word for “plants,” but there is a classifier (k’ul) that includes all and only plants.

Maps are, in a sense, another form of classification.  Not all cultures make maps, but all have extremely detailed knowledge of places and paths in their environments (Hunn 1991, 2008).  The idea that small-scale societies are  somehow intuitively aware of the environment without making mental maps or representations of it is wrong (Istomin and Dwyer 2009).

Yet, humans seem compelled to think causally.  This is another inborn habit of thought.  We have to find a motive.  Typically, we first look for an active, thinking agent.  If that fails, we look for a covering law—not usually a formal one, just a rule of thumb that will serve.  Only if that too totally fails do we accept blind chance, or probabilistic factors, as a reason (see e..g Nisbett and Ross 1980).  As Geoffrey Lloyd says, “humans everywhere will will use their imaginations to try to get to grips with what happens and why, exploiting some real or supposed analogy with the schemata that work in otherwise more mundane situations” (Lloyd 2007:130).

Aristotle described four types of cause, or rather of aition (pl. aitia), which has also been translated “factor” (Aristotle 1952:9, 88f).  The first is material cause—what the object we are contemplating is made of.  This would not occur to modern people as a “cause”—the hickory wood does not cause the baseball bat—but Aristotle was thinking partly of the elements of Greek thought.  Earth, air, fire, and water were generally thought to have dynamic qualities that made them evolve into things.  Chlorine purifies water by virtue of its violently oxidizing nature, which destroys bacteria and toxins; this is an example of material cause in action.

Second is formal cause: the definition of the object, its pattern, its essential character.  A baseball bat is a rounded stick made of hickory wood, and is patterned so as to hit balls in a game. Third is efficient cause—the direct, proximal cause, specifically the causing agent, of an action.  The bat is made by a factory to be sold to a player, who then uses it to hit a ball; the chlorine is bubbled through water, where it reacts chemically with toxins and bacterial membranes.  Fourth is the final or ultimate cause, the reason for the action or object:  the water is purified so people can drink it safely; the bat is used in a game for the purpose of entertaining people.  This last can go into infinite regress:  the bat is to hit a ball, so that the game will go on, so that people will be entertained, so that they will enjoy life and buy the sponsors’ products, so that….  And this only scratches the surface of Aristotle’s theory of cause, and he was only one Greek philosopher (see Lloyd 2007:108-130).

The endless debate on cause in philosophy since Aristotle need not concern us, since we are here considering folk and traditional knowledge.  In that realm, our heuristics and biases play out at their most florid.  Aristotle’s efficient cause is stated in agent terms.  This default attribution to intentional action by an agent gives us the universal belief in gods, spirits, and other supernatural beings.

SCIENCE AND ETHNOSCIENCE
E. N. Anderson

Dept. of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside

Part 2.  European Science as Ethnoscience:  Science in Europe before International Science Came

Recently, historians of science have reacted against the old model of evaluating former beliefs in light of current knowledge.  This is surely the right thing to do.  However, it often leads to evaluating former beliefs as if they were a homogeneous body of lore, decoupled from real-world experience.  One could, for instance, recount the medical knowledge of 1600 as if it were a single, coherent system, based on logical reasoning, with no input from experience or practice.  This is not really how people think, and certainly not how science and medicine developed.  People interact with their patients and surroundings, learn from that as well as from books, and come up with individual knowledge systems that may or may not have much in common with those of their contemporaries.  The current histories of science thus take account of agency, and the role of interaction with reality.

Near East and China to Europe

Science gets around.  Three particularly important cases of early-day knowledge transfer are particularly well documented:  the spread of medical lore from Greece to the Near East in the early Islamic period; the spread of medicine and other technical lore between China and the Near East in the Mongol period; and the spread of science from both the above to Europe in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

The first two cases joined early, for Near Eastern medical knowledge was flowing to both Europe and China in the 1200s and 1300s.  However, the two-way nature of the latter flow, and the radical differences in structure and cultural background, make it more reasonable to treat them intially as separate histories.

Europe before 1500 participated in a general rise of science in the Eurasian and African world.  Greek learning was long forgotten in the west, but Arab and Byzantine scholars reintroduced it, first to Moorish Spain, then to Sicily and upward through Italy.  There had been a huge flow from the Greek world into Arabic and Persian cultures from 700 to 1000, but essentially none the other direction.  After this time the flow almost entirely reversed.  Translation into Arabic shrank considerably (Lewis 1982:76), but translation from Arabic into western languages picked up.  At first, almost all of it was within the Arab-influenced worlds of Spain and Italy, but it spread rapidly beyond those spheres.  Greek learning spread to west Europe directly (Freely 2009:165177, and see below), but spread largely via the Arabsd..

The great Salerno medical school, just south of Naples, was apparently started by Arabs in the early 8^th century.  Legend said the school was founded by an Arab, a Jew, a Latin and a Greek.  It flourished by 850; it blossomed from about 1000 AD as the center of Islamic-derived learning in Europe.  Constantine the African (ca. 1020-1087), from Tunis or near it, was instrumental in transferring Arabic knowledge into Italy at this time, including his translations (and those of his student John the Saracen, 1040-1103) of works including al-Abbās, and Hunayn ibn Ishāq’s versions of Aristotle and Galen, though his translations were far from the best imaginable (Kamal 1975:189, 662-3; Ullman 1978).  (Hunayn, a Christian, came out under his Christian name of Iohannitius.)  Constantine worked in Salerno or nearby Montecassino.

Indian numerals were Arabized in the 9^th century, and then developed into Arabic numerals, which slowly entered Europe in the late middle ages and early Renaissance.  The most important transfer of Indian into Arabic numeration came via al-Khwārazmī in Baghdad.  He became so famous as a mathematician that his name entered the world’s language.  “Algorithm” is a corruption of “al-Khwārazmī.”  This word first appeared in a thirteenth-century translation, Algoritmi de numero indorum, “Al-Khwärazmī on Indian numbering” (Hill 1990b:255;  “Logarithm” is a deliberately-coined metathesis of “algorithm”).   He contributed greatly to algebra (Arabic al-jabr, “figuring”), and his work on it was translated into Latin in the 12^th century, by Robert of Chester and then again by Gerard of Cremona.  Trigonometry followed the same course, possibly from India, certainly from Islam, at a somewhat later date.  (On this and other mathematical transfers, see Freely 2009:133, with forms of numbers well shown, from ancient Brahmi to modern; Hill 19990; Mushtaq and Berggren 2000, esp. pp. 182, 187.)   The most important name in transferring Arabic numerals into Europe (in the 990s) was Gerbert of Aurillac, who became Pope Sylvester II (Lewis 2008:328-329)—one of the few popes to have any distinction in learning outside of theology.

The Arabs and other Near Easterners also made enormous contributions to technology and agriculture, but these are poorly known, because the contributors were rarely literate and literate people were rarely interested (Hill 1990b).  A few agricultural handbooks exist, and show great sophistication.  We know this lore was transferred to Europe, but we have few details.

The Salerno medical school remained the greatest in Europe throughout the early middle ages.  This school translated the Arab Taqwim as-sihha by the Christian Arab Ibn-Butlān (d. ca. 1066) as the Tacuinum sanitatis, which remained the basic medical manual in Europe for centuries (Tacuinum Sanitatis 1976).  It is still in print in several languages, though now more for its beautiful early-Renaissance plates than for its advice.  The latter, though, is still good; it survives today in the standard clichés about moderation in diet, moderate exercise, rest, and so forth, familiar to everyone from doctors’ talk and pop medical books.  These saws trace directly back to the Tacuinum.

It, in turn, was the basis for the Salernitan Rule, the versified guide to health that was the Salernan school’s most famous product (Arikha 2007:77, 100ff.).  Sir John Harington translated it into English around 1600.  His famous translation of one line is still frequently and justly quoted:

“Use three physicions still:  First Doctor Quiet,

Next Doctor Merryman, and Doctor Diet” (Harington 1966:22).

The Latin original, ibid., is:

Si tibi deficiant medici, medici tibi fiant

Haec tria, mens laeta, requies, moderata diaeta; literally, “if you need doctors, get three:  a happy mind, rest, and a moderate diet.”

The Salerno school also produced the Articella (“little art”), a handbook that, “by the mid-thirteenth century…was the foundational textbook for most medical teaching in the West.  It included the Hippocratic Aphorisms and Prognostics; Galen’s short Ars parva; the medically essential and thus ubiquitous treatises On Pulses and On Urines; and the extensive compendium of Galenic writings by Hunayn ibn Is’haq (Johannitius), the Isagoge Ioannitii in tegni Galeni, in the translation by Constantinus Africanus” (Arikha 2007:77).  Many other Italian translating projects were active (Freely 2009:126ff.).

Through it and other channels, the work of Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980-1037; see Avicenna 1999) became standard.  Ibn Sina hailed from the far east of the Iranian world, near Bukhara.  He was a thorough-going Aristotelian, committed to investigation of the world, though convinced that intuition was vital in providing that.  His enormous Canon of Medicine was translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona (1114-1187), along with perhaps a hundred other Arab works.  Gerard had moved to Toledo to learn Arabic, and remained there (Freely 2009:128; Pormann and Savage-Smith 2007:164), in that world which still remembered “convivencia.”  This was surely one of the most stunning examples of knowledge transfer in all history (Covington 2007; Kamal 1975:663; Ullman 1978:54).  One suspects that Gerard did not single-handedly translate all of them, but the achievement was fantastic nonetheless.  Avicenna’s Canon work remained standard in Europe into the 17^th century.  Gerard also translated Ptolemy’s Almagest, and basic works of Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Al-Hazen, Thabit, Rhazes, al-Zahrawi, and Al-Khwarizmi, the last being the first algebra to reach Europe.  He also translated much alchemy (Hill 1990a:341), which, be it remembered, was a perfectly reasonable science in those days; much of modern chemistry descends from it.  Certainly, few people in history have been so important, and very few so important yet so little known.

Also active in Toledo were the Jewish translator and writer Abraham ibn Ezra (1086-1164; Freely 2009:129) and several others.

Fibonacci, famous for developing the sequence of numbers that specifies the pattern of developing plant structures, learned much from the Arabs, using al-Khwarizmi’s algebra works in Latin (Covington 2007:10)—presumably Gerard’s translation.  Faraj ben Salim, a Sicilian Jew, translated more of Rhazese as well as Ibn Jazlah, al-Abdan, and others.  As late as the 16^th century, Andrea Alpago of Belluno was translating or retranslating more of Avicenna (Kamal 1975:664, following Hitti).  Another Italian, Stephen of Pisa, was active at Salenro and in the Middle East (Ullmann 1978:54).

Botany transferred actively, largely in the form of herbal medicine in the tradition of Dioscorides.  The Arabs had vastly increased the number of items in the Dioscoridean materia medica, and Europe slowly adopted many of these, though unable to access some that were strictly Near Eastern (Idrisi 2005).

Spain was key to transmission.  The Arabs conquered it in 711, ruled most of it into the 11^th century, and retained a foothold at Grenada until 1492.  At peak, under the late Ummayads in the 10^th century, Cordova (the capital) reportedly had 200,000 houses, 10,000,000 people, 600 inns, 900 baths, 600 mosques (with schools), 17 universities, and 70 public libraries, the royal one containing 225,000 books (Kamal 1975:8), or, by other estimates, 400,000 (Lewis 2008:326).  The Ummayad golden age ended, but subsequent dynasties did surprisingly well keeping civilization alive, and slowly Europe realized that there was something worthwhile here.

The climax of Spanish appropriation of Islamic knowledge came in the 11^th-13^th centuries, under Alfonso the Wise (late 13^th century) and other relatively enlightened monarchs.  Moorish Spain was a center of Arab and Islamic civilization.  Works spread all over the world from there; Yusuf al-Mu’taman’s geometry book of the 11^th century was taken by Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) to Cairo, whence it went on all over the Islamic world, being republished, for example, in Central Asia in the 13^th century (Covington 2007).  At that time or earlier, Spanish travelers even went to Egypt and Syria, and possibly Central Asia, in search of knowledge (Kamal 1975:662, citing the medieval writer al-Maqrizi).  Ibn al-Baytar (d. 1248), a famous Andalusian physician and herbalist, traveled in the Near East and listed hundreds of remedies; many herbal drugs are still called by his name.

Around 750, the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII sent ‘Abd al-Rahman II of Andalus an elegant Greek manuscript of Dioscorides.  Seeing this as obviously far more useful than most pretty gifts, the Jewish minister Hasdai ibn Shaprut had it translated, with the gift-bearing ambassador and a monk providing the Greek, and several Arabs helping with the Arabic and with the plant identifications (Lewis 2008:331).  Arabic versions of Dioscorides were eventually brought into Latin, but, as we have seen, most Arabic medical knowledge came later and via Italy.

Even love poetry moved north; Andalusian song, sometimes learned via captured singing-girls, inspired the troubadours (see e.g. Lewis 2008:355).  Christian captives went the other way, and influenced Andalusian Arab songs; they often have chorus lines in (rather butchered) medieval Spanish, often with definitely racy words.

A vast range of Spanish and Italian words come from Arabic, including a huge percentage of traditional medical terms, and many have gone on into English, ranging from “syrup” and “sherbet” to “soda,” “cotton,” “alkali,” “antimony,” “realgar,” and “lozenge,” to say nothing of such well-known scientific terms as “algebra,” “algorithm,” “alchemy,” and most of the names of the larger stars.  The Arab definite article “al-“ is often a dead giveaway for Arabic origin.  The “l” gets assimilated to many initial consonants, giving Spanish words like azulejo “tile” (Arabic az-zulej) and azafrán “saffron” (az-zafaran).  The standard Spanish word for thin noodles,  fideos, is Arabic; the proper classical Arabic is fidāwish (see Zaouali 2007:116 for the word and a medieval recipe), fideos being the Andalusian Arabic pronunciation.  Today the word is often mistakenly taken as a plural.

Spain was, of course, a center of Arabic learning, which could easily be translated directly.  Al-Maqqari wrote of its capital in the 10^th century:  “In four things Cordoba surpasses the capitals of the world…the greatest of all things is knowledge—and that is the fourth” (Freely 2009:107; the other three were local buildings, including the mosque which still survives).   Ibn Zuhr (Avenzoar to Europeans, transcribing the Andalucian pronunciation of his name) flourished ca. 1091-1162.  His more famous student Ibn Rushd (1126-1198, known in Latin as Averroes, approximating the Andalucian dialect pronunciation of Ibn Rushd) became a standard source of medical and scientific knowledge for medieval Europe.  He was enormously influential on St. Thomas Aquinas, and through him on all subsequent European thought.  It is not impossible that Europe would never have developed modern science without Averroes.  Averroes was an Aristotelian, and his version of Aristotle remained standard in Europe, being definitively superseded only after the original Greek texts became widely known.

Averroes also wrote “The Incoherence of the Incoherence,” an answer to al-Ghazzali’s “The Incoherence of the Philosophers,” a mystic’s attack on rational thinking.  Though one standard story claims that al-Ghazzali got the best of it and ended philosophy in Islam, actually Averroes’ answer was fairly successful, and science continued to flourish in the Islamic world, succumbing more to later economic decline than to al-Ghazzali’s mysticism.  Other scientists included Abulcasem (Abu al-Qasim).  Translation effort culminated with Arnold of Villanova (d. ca. 1313), who translated Avicenna, Al-Kindi, Avenzoar and others.

Some knowledge flowed the other way.  Little, if any, of it was scientific; it was more in the line of fun.  Some medieval Arab songs in Spain had Spanish-language choruses—significantly, written to be sung by slave-girls used for sexual purposes.  Spanish food got into Muslim cooking; “a primitive sort of puff pastry” was fulyātil, from the medieval Spanish word for “leafy” (Perry 2007:xii).  We will return to the story of Spain.

Italy, however, was also a major transfer zone, with Muslim control of Sicily (and briefly part of south Italy) critically important.  Sicily fell to Roger the Norman, who with his successors developed one of the most tolerant realms of the Middle Ages; seeing the value of Islamic knowledge, he and his successors, especially Frederick II, tolerated Muslim communities and oversaw a great deal of translation and learning.  One result was Frederick’s great treatise on falconry, De Arte Venandi cum Avibus, which is probably the only medieval work that is still the standard textbook in its subject (Frederick 1943).

South France produced the famous Tibbon family of Jewish translators, who rendered many works into Hebrew; then they or others translated on into Latin.  They were especially active in the 13^th century (Pormann and Savage-Smith 2007:164-165).  They may have made the greatest single contribution to the translation effort, vying with Gerard of Cremona.  The enterprise ranks among the most astonishing examples of knowledge transfer in all history.

Universities, Crusaders and their doctors, knightly orders centered in Cyprus and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, and ordinary travelers became more and more a part of the effort, until the path was well-beaten and no longer a matter for a few heroic travelers.

Even the British Isles contributed translators, including Adelard of Bath and Michael Scot.  Rober Bacon learned much from translations of Arabic lore.  Later, in the 17^th century, Jacobus Golius introduced Descartes to Alhazen’s work and other relevant texts; Alhazen’s work on optics now survives only in Latin translation.

By 1200, Paris had 40,000 inhabitants, 4000 of whom were students (Gaukroger 2006:47).

Students were then as they are now; “as the contemporary saying went, [they learned] liberal arts at Paris, law at Orleans, medicine at Salerno, magic at Toledo, and manners and morals nowhere” (Whicher 1949:3; cf. Waddell 1955, esp. pp 176 ff).  Nothing has changed since, except for the addresses of the most prestigious universities.  The “contemporary saying” was presumably said by older professors, who never fail to claim that the younger generation is going to hell, and never remember that their elders said the same thing about them.  It is particularly amusing to hear aging ‘60s people complain about today’s amazingly tranquil and industrious young. 

Religion was both enabler and opponent of all this.  Plato was the basis of early theology.  The rise of Platonism explains such things as the Seven Deadly Sins:  Greek philosophical annoyances rather than Biblical taboos.  Aristotle was outlawed for much of these earlier centuries; the idea that God was present in all his creation—the physical world—was anathematized as heresy (see Gaukroger 2006:70-71).

Oddly, Greek learning did not penetrate Europe directly until long after classical Greek works were well known via the Arab routes.  In fact, the Greeks themselves recovered much of it from the Arabs (Herrin 2008); the Dark Ages were not nearly so dark in Byzantium as in the west, but still much was lost.  Greeks such as Gregory Chioniades (late 13^th-early 14^th C) eventually came to translate Arab advances in astronomy, medicine, and related fields (Herrin 2008:274).  Somewhat before this time, medical study has revived in Byzantium; dissection began again (after longstanding Christian bans) around the 11^th century (Herrin 2008:228).

Western Europeans came to Byzantium for commerce and crusades in the high middle ages.  The infamous Fourth Crusade of 1204 led to European occupation of the city for almost 60 years.  During this period, such Westerners as William of Moerbeke read and translated Aristotle, Galen, Archimedes, and other scientific greats (Herrin 2008:278-279).

Meanwhile, Greeks from the Byzantine world appeared in the West, in time to teach Petrarch and convert him to trying to rediscover Greek classics in their original form.  Burgundio of Pisa first translated Galen from Greek to Latin, around 1180 (Kamal 1975:663).  Others, including the Jewish Bonacosa, followed over the next century.  Byzantine delegations continued, and the 15^th century emerged as a major turning point, establishing Greek learning as more or less de regueur for serious scholars, at least in Italy (see Gaukroger 2006:89-90).  The story of the rediscovery of classical learning is too well known to need retelling here; what interests us at this point is that direct work with the Greek sources came long after much classical learning was known through Arabic refraction.

With the rise of early modern science, it was the Europeans’ turn to seek out Near Eastern knowledge in its actual homeland.  Leonhard Rauwolf traveled extensively in the Near East in the 16^th century, to be followed in later centuries by Adan Tournefort (a father of taxonomy) and many others.  The classical sources were by then well known in Europe; Rauwolf and Tournefort were more interested in gathering new knowledge through actual field work.  They are among the great ancestors of modern-day field biologists and anthropologists.

India, China and Japan became well known only later.  Portuguese and then Dutch enterprise (the latter especially in Japan) led to a flood of knowledge coming back to Europe.  The Jesuit missionaries, who focused on East Asia as their initial mission field, were particularly important; they idealized Chinese culture, arguing enthusiastically for its philosophy, governance, food, medicine, and anything and everything else (on medicine, see Barnes 2005).  “New Christians” may have been important too, if the example of Garcia da Orta (the Jewish-background writer on Indian medicines) is representative.  A veritable translating industry introduced East Asian medicine to Europe in the mid-17^th century, with moxibustion in particular intriguing the Dutch in Japan (Cook 2007:350-377).  Even Thomas Sydenham, the very image of the “new science” in medical form, was fascinated by moxibustion and recommended it (Cook 2007:372).  Concepts did not get across, but practices and especially drugs did.  As Cook (2007:377) says:  “Culture certainly made translating the whys and wherefores as understood by one group extraordinarily difficult.  But it was no barrier to useful goods or the business of how to do something.”

The flood of medieval Arab material was almost all Aristotelian, and it led to an enormous revolution in European thought in the 12^th and 13^th centuries (Ball 2008; Gaukroger 2006).  The highly idealistic, other-worldly, broadly Platonic worldview of the Dark Ages gave way to a view that valued investigation of real-world things.  God’s plan as revealed in the actual experienced world became a major goal of investigation.  This was to be the key reason for scientific investigation for the next several centuries, as we shall see in the next section.

Traditional churchmen, however, caviled at the new rationalistic, worldly, logical approach.  They felt that “taking too strong an interest in nature as a physical entity was tantamount to second-guessing God’s plans” (Ball 2008:817).

This view rose in parallel to, and may have been derived from, the Muslim reaction against Aristotelianism.  In the Near East, but not in Europe, Muslim reaction triumphed in the end.  Extreme reactionary religiosity, associated with the Hanbalite legal school, begat the Ash’arite view that speculation on the world was impious.  This received a huge boost through al-Ghazāli’s savage attacks on the “philosophers” in the 12^th century.  Hanbalite thinking has more recently given rise to the Wahhabism that swept the Islamic world in the late 20^th and early 21^st century.  Wahhabism was espoused by the Saud family in Saudi Arabia, and their oil wealth gave them the ability to propagate it worldwide, leading to Al-Qaeda terrorism, widespread attacks on girls’ schools, and many other manifestations.  Islam is as diverse as Christianity; the Hanbalites are to the other legal schools as the hard-shell southern Baptists are to the mainstream Christians.

Ash’arism might not have triumphed, however, had not the Mongols swept through the Middle East, followed closely by the even more devastating epidemics of bubonic plague from 1346 onward.  These multiple blows ruined economy and culture, and left the region prostrate.

Science withered or ossified.  Folk wisdom continued to increase, and so did science in some marginal areas of Islam such as India and Central Asia.  But in general the torch was passed to Europe.  The roles of the Middle East and Europe were reversed.  Thus, writing on Ottoman Turkish medicine and natural history after the Turkish empire had passed its noon, Bernard Lewis reports that “they did not think in terms of the progress of research, the transformation of ideas, the gradual growth of knowledge.  The basic ideas of forming, testing and, if necessary, abandoning hypotheses remained alien to a society in which knowledge was conceived as a corpus of eternal verities which could be acquired, accumlated, transmitted, interpreted, and applied but not modified or transformed” (Lewis 1982:229).  Lewis also notes lack of interest in the rest of the world.  He correctly says it is more typical of human societies than is the ethnographic curiosity of Europe in the modern period.  But the ancient Greeks and the early medieval Muslims had been more attentive to “the others.”

Lewis contrasts this strongly with the great days of early Islam, when the Near East was the scientific center of the world.  The Ottoman twilight may be an extreme case, but I encountered exactly those attitudes among older Chinese scholars in Hong Kong in 1965 and 1966.  Many of them told me soberly that the traditional fishermen I studied had six toes and never learned to swim.  A minute’s observation on the waterfront on any warm summer day would have sufficed to disprove both claims, but the claims were old and were in the Chinese literature, and that was enough!  Such attitudes trace back to the declining days of the Ming Dynasty in the 1500s, and are not unknown earlier, but (as in Islam) they do not hold universally until economic and political decline set in.  Nothing could be farther from genuine traditional ecological knowledge; those same fishermen (and the Yucatec Maya I later studied) constantly tested and added to their pragmatic knowledge of their worlds.

The Origins of Early Modern Science

Things were very different in Europe.  Early modern science arose after Near Eastern and other sciences were incorporated there.  Perhaps from China or the Near East came the idea of garden as microcosm of the world; this idea led many to start gardens in which they tried to grow everything they could find (Cook 2007:30).

One odd pioneer was Paracelsus (1493-1541; see Thick 2010:200).  Wildly nonconformist and eccentric, he dabbled in mining, alchemy, medicine, and philosophy during a wandering life working as miner, chemist and doctor.  He believed all nature and life were chemical, and could be reproduced in the chemist’s or alchemist’s laboratory.  Cemistry and alchemy were not differentiated at this time—they were one science.  He made, or at least established in the literature, perhaps the two most important breakthroughs in liberating modern science from Greek mistake:  he saw that diseases were separate entities in their own right, and not just forms of humoral imbalance; and he saw that at least some chemical elements—mercury and sulphur, to be exact (and he added salt)—were not compouinds of earth, air, fire and water, but were actual elements themselves.  The first of these profound insights was taken up later by Sydenham and others.  The second was not to be fully developed until Lavoisier.  Still, the idea was out there; the seed was sown.

Medieval herbals gave way successively to Brunfels’ major one of 1530-36, Fuchs’ great book of 1542, and then in the late 16^th century the truly great work of Dodoens (Cook 2007; Ogilvie 2006).

Of course, a dramatic moment was the coming of New World plants to Europe, first in the rather small work of Nicolas Monardes of Sevilla (1925), but then in the enormous and stunning achievement of Francisco Hernandez in the late 16^th century.  Thought by some recent writers to be lost, or buried in imperial Spanish libraries, it was actually made available by the Lynx Academy (made famous by Galileo’s membership; Freedberg 2002; Saliba 2007).  It was republished in Mexico in an obscure wartime edition (Hernandez 1942), which languishes almost unknown; a new edition is needed.

Meanwhile, Bernardino de Sahagun was getting Aztec students and colleagues to record their knowledge, in the monumental Codex Florentinus (Sahagun 1950-1982).  These ethnoscience studies of Mexico are among the greatest achievements of plant exploration and of ethnography.

Only shortly before, Las Casas had led the successful movement to have Native Americans declared by the Catholic Church to be fully human and entitled to all human rights then recognized.  This was the beginning of the end for the appalling practices of early Spanish settlement, when Native Americans were enslaved and worked to death, or fed alive to dogs because they were cheaper than dogfood (Las Casas 1992; Pagden 1987; Varner and Varner 1983).  Las Casas risked his life for decades; the settler interests were openly after him.  Few political battles in history have been more heroic or more important.  Interestingly, Las Casas was the conservative in these fights; the modernizing “humanists” took the position that the conquerors had full rights to do anything they wanted to the “savages.”

Spain in the late 16^th century was thus a dynamic place of forward thinking and spectacular achievement.  Monardes may have heard the masses of the great Sevillan composer Francisco Guerrero.  The year of Guerrero’s death, 1599, saw the birth in Sevilla of the master paiter Velásquez.  Contemporary with Guerrero, the incomparable Tomas Luis de Victoria was shuttling between Spain and Rome (where Palestrina composed his vast repertoire at the same time).

“New Spain” in the New World was rapidly catching up.  Spanish composers moved to Mexico and South America, where they taught the locals, initiating a period of Baroque music that is little known but unexcelled; among other things, Estebán Salas in Cuba became the first African-American to compose classical European music.  In the 17^th century, Juan Ruiz de Alarcón migrated from his obscure Mexican birthplace to Spain, where he became one of the great dramatists and an absolutely unexcelled master of the Spanish language.  (He was one of those writers who can make strong men weep simply from the beauty of the sounds, even if they do not understand the Spanish.)  In short, Spain—including “New Spain”—in the 16^th and early 17^th centuries was fully participant in the brilliant and innovative civilization of Western Europe, along with Italy, France, the Netherlands and England.  Spain’s melancholy decline set in before the full scientific revolution (or non-revolution), but not before scholars like Monardes and Hernández had contributed in a major way to it.

Ogilvie (2006) cautions that the new discoveries in Europe and the Near East were far more important in the development of botanical science than these rather sketchily-known New World discoveries.  However, these did indeed have a major effect (Gaukroger 2006:359; even so, Bernardino de Sahagun’s great work on Aztec knowledge, now known as the “Florentine Codex,” was not known in Europe at that time.)

Arabic learning, by this time, was entering Europe via Arabic-literate European scholars as well as immigrant Arabic-speakers like Leo Africanus (d. ca. 1550)  Leo taught Arabic to the European Orientalist Jean-Albert Widmanstadt, 1506-ca 1559).  A contemporary was Guillaume Postel (1510-1581), whose astonishing career has recently been reconstructed (Saliba 2007:218-220).  Postel served on a mission to Constantinople, where he apparently learned Arabic or at least developed an interest that led to his doing so.  He read and annotated technical works of astronomy and probably other sciences, and briefly taught Arabic in Paris.  People like him evidently alerted Copernicus to Arabic astronomy, which clearly influenced Copernicus.

Just as Greek had been the exciting new language to Petrarch and his generation, Arabic was to the 16^th century.  Arabic manuscripts are widely found in old European libraries (notably the Vatican and, of course, Byzantine libraries), and were not read by Arab travelers alone.  With the Lynceans and their colleagues seeking out knowledge from the Aztecs to the Arabs, Europe was suddenly a very exciting place.

An example of knowledge flow from the Near East to Europe may be of interest.  The idea of circulation of the blood seems to have started in Islamic lands.  Bernard Lewis (2001:79-80) records that “a thirteenth-century Syrian physician called Ibn al-Nafīs” (d. 1288) worked out the concept (see also Kamal 1975:154).  His knowledge spread to Europe, via “a Renaissance scholar called Andrea Alpago (died ca. 1520) who spent many years in Syria collecting and translating Arabic medical manuscripts” (Lewis 2001:80).  Michael Servetus picked up the idea, including Ibn al-Nafīs’ demonstration of the circulation from the heart to the lungs and back. William Harvey (1578-1657) learned of this, and worked out—with stunning innovative brilliance—the whole circulation pattern, publishing the discovery of circulation in 1628 (Pormann and Savage-Smith 2007:47).  Galen and the Arabs thought the blood was entirely consumed by the body, and renewed constantly in the liver.  They did not realize that the veins held a return flow; they thought the arteries carried pneuma, the veins carried nutrients. Harvey’s genius was to see that blood actually circulates continually, ferrying nutrients to and from the whole body in a closed circuit.

The Dawn of Rapid Discovery Science

Europe has progressed fairly continuously since the final eclipse of the Roman Empire, though there were some checks in the 14^th, 17^th, and 18^th centuries as well as in the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Knowledge in particular has risen steadily, even through those difficult periods.

Europe after 1500 presents a strikingly different case from both medieval Europe and the other civilizations of the world.  The flow of Near Eastern, Chinese, and Indian learning to Europe was one major input into the rise of what Randall Collins (1998) called “rapid discovery science.”

Yet, the new wave really began with Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, William of Ockham, and other medieval thinkers, and they of course were drawing on those Arab sources.  This makes rather a slow process of the famous “scientific revolution” beloved of earlier generations of historians.  The current feeling is that dragging out a “revolution” over many centuries is ridiculous.  We live in an age, after all, when the computer revolution took only a generation.

The most comprehensive study of the intellectual background to the “revolution” is that of Gaukroger (2006, 2010).  Gaukroger sees a development from the scholasticism of the high medieval period, with its Aristotelian natural philosophy, to modern science.  Before the high middle ages, Plato and Christian dogma had been riding high, inhibiting learning.  Gaukroger provides very important observations on Plato, Augustine and Manicheanism (Gaukroger 2006:51-54).  Aristotle was rehabilitated thanks to the Arabs and to Thomas Aquinas.

One might argue, in defense of the old term, that what happened in the 17^th century was the most momentous single change in all human history, rivaled only by the origin of agriculture.  (The latter was also a very slow process, leading to fights about whether it was a “revolution” or not.)  I will, here, follow Collins, and refer to the event as the invention (basically between 1540 and 1700) of rapid discovery science, rather than as a “scientific revolution.”

The new, empirical, discovery-oriented, innovation-seeking science arose in the 17^th century, pursuant to the work of Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), William Harvey (1578-1657), René Descartes (1596-1650), and their correspondents.  Francis Bacon first emphasized the need for experiments to prove claims and advance knowledge; he was opposing magic and dogma based on anecdotal evidence, as well as sheer ignorance.  He also emphasized the need for cooperation; the lone-wolf savant was already a dated concept!   Like other scientists, he wished to strip away the veil of Nature and disclose her; she had been a goddess who “loved to hide herself,” and was still poetically so represented (Hadot 2006).  After Bacon, tension arose between scientists who wished to strip her and romantics who preferred the veil (Hadot 2006).

One remembers that religion and science were not opposed then; in fact science was seen as the discovery of God’s laws in nature.  Descartes and Boyle were great religious thinkers as well as scientists.  The great astronomer Johannes Kepler studied a supernova and realized that the star that guided the Magi to Jesus might well have been such; he sought records and regularities, calculated a date for Jesus’ birth (by then it was known that it was not 1 AD), and coupled it with astrology—still a science then, though a dubious one (Kemp 2009).  Kepler also believed in the Pythagorean music of the spheres, seeing earth and nature moved by heavenly harmonies “just as a farmer is moved by music to dance” (quoted in Kemp 2009).

The revolution was real, if slow. (See Bowler and Morus 2005 for the canonical story; Gaukroger 2006, 2010 for much more detail and a much more radical view.)  It involved finding more and more real-world problems with ancient atomism, mechanism, humoral medicine, and almost everything else, and thus more and more reason to go with new knowledge rather than old teachings.

A fascinating insight into the mind of the time is Malcolm Thick’s detailed biography of Sir Hugh Plat (1552-1608; Thick 2010).  Plat was an Elizabethan tradesman, a brewer by background, who succumbed to the insatiable curiosity of the time.  He never made a significant contribution to anything, but he worked with beaver-like intensity on chemistry, alchemy, food, medicine, cooking, gardening, and every other useful art he could find.  He amassed an incredible collection of ideas, methods, and tricks, most of which he tried himself.  Plat is important not because of what he accomplished but because his story was typical.  There were thousands of ordinary people in Europe of the time who became downright obsessive over useful knowledge or simply science for science’s sake.  They wanted to help the world and to advance learning.

Plat’s work is fascinatingly comparable to an almost exact contemporary, Song Yingxing (1587-1666?), who, oddly enough, has found a biographer at almost exactly the same time as Hugh Plat (Schäfer 2011).  Song was a much more organized, and one gathers a much more intelligent, man than Plat, and produced a famous work instead of a flock of rather ephemeral items, but the mentality was the same:  an obsessive urge to find out absolutely everything about useful arts.  Yet Song’s interests died with him, and no one like him existed in China for centuries.  Plat, on the other hand, was soon forgotten in the rush of new learning.

The same contrast—so bitter for China—is visible in herbals.  At the same time, Li Shizhen was compiling the greatest herbal in Chinese history and the greatest in the world up to his time (Li 2003, Chinese original 1593).  Li’s work was the culmination of a great herbal tradition going back for millennia.  But he was almost surpassed in his own lifetime, and was surpassed soon after it, as the new European herbal movement grew from strength to strength;  Rembert Dodoens’ breakthrough herbal came in 1554, to be followed by John Gerard’s (based on Dodoens’) in 1633 and Parkinson’s in 1629.  Li remained the standard of Chinese herbals until the late 20^th century.  Thus, in herbal wisdom as in useful knowledge, China was still up with the west in the 1590s, but had fallen hopelessly behind by 1650.  (One reason was the fall of the Ming Dynasty and its replacement by the often-repressive and scientifically sluggish Qing.)

Through all human history, people had followed received wisdom unless there was overwhelming reason to change.  The revolution consisted of the simple idea that we should seek new knowledge instead, using the best current observations.  These were ideally from experiments, but perfectly acceptable if they came from exploration and natural history, like Galileo’s work on astronomy (published in 1632), or even from pure theory, like Newton’s Principia mathematica (1687).

Robert Boyle (1627-1691) stated the case for experiment over received tradition in The Skeptical Chymist (2006/1661; cf. Freely 2009:214-215), taking the extremely significant extreme position that even when he had no better theory to propose, he would not accept hallowed authority—he would wait for more experiments.  This is, of course, precisely the position that Thomas Kuhn said was hopeless, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1962).  But it worked for Boyle.

It is no mere coincidence that, just as earlier scholars had their “republic of letters” and Galileo and his friends their “Lynx Academy,” Boyle depended on an “Invisible College” for stimulus and conversation.  Scientists may study vacuums, but they cannot work in one.  The sociology of science is vital.

Much of the revolution consisted of new opportunities to observe and test.  Consider the persistence of Hippocratic-Galenic medicine.  Few indeed were the people in premodern times who had Galen’s opportunities to observe, experiment, learn, teach, and synthesize.  He had the enormous medical university in Pergamon, the whole resources of Rome, and his practice with gladiators and other hard-living people to draw on.  He was a brilliant synthesist and a dynamic writer.  The reason he was not superseded until the 17^th century was that no one could really do it.  No one had the technology, the theories, the infrastructure of labs and hospitals, or the observational opportunities.  The Arabs and Chinese could, and did, supplement his ideas with enormous masses of data, information, and further qualification, but they were wise not to throw Galen over. Radical rejection of his ideas was not fully accomplished until the 19^th century.  By then, modern microscopes, laboratories, and experimental apparatus were perfected.  Soon Galen’s anatomy was extended by Harvey, Willis and others; his lack of recognition of diseases as specific entities was challenged by Paracelsus, then devastated by Sydenham.  This was a long, slow process, and followers of the eccentric Paracelsus were considered quacks and outsiders in the 16^th century (Thick 2010).  The newness and uniqueness of syphilis had much to do with the change in attitude.

The same was true in chemistry.  Boyle’s courage in throwing out received wisdom on alchemy, particles, the nonexistence of vacuums, and elemental natures did not help him go beyond the ancients in regard to basic theory.  He discussed the atomic theory, but it too lacked real evidence at the time.  Above all, he realized that the world had proved to be far more complicated than the Greeks or the Renaissance scholars thought; he reviews dozens of sophisticated chemical experiments that proved this amply.  Old view simply would not fit.  But the future was unclear.

He could see that earth, air, fire and water were not much of a story, but he had no way of conceiving of the idea that earth, air and water were actually made up of simpler elements that were, or were comparable to, metals.  This involved reversing all conventional wisdom, which held that the basic elements combined to produce the metals.  This reversal was ultimately reached by Lavoisier in the 18^th century.  It had to wait until improvements in experimental technique had isolated oxygen, nitrogen, and so forth.  Such a change in thinking was incredibly difficult to achieve, and truly revolutionary.  Finding out something new merely adds to knowledge, but this was a matter of turning upside down the whole basis of European thinking!  The earth-air-fire-water cosmology was basic to all aspects of (older) knowledge.  The recognition that these four substances broke down into simpler elements, rather than vice versa, was terribly hard-won.

Such new classification systems were extremely important.  Biological classification also underwent a basic paradigm shift.

The classification of living things, traditionally ascribed to Linnaeus, derives as much or more from the brilliant work of John Ray (1627-1705), an exact contemporary—in birth date at least—of Boyle.  Ray was a natural historian, fascinated with plants and birds, and a key person in uniting field work with laboratory work (specifcially dissection; but note that the botanists had been there before him).

Ray developed the modern species concept—the idea that those organisms which can interbreed with each other form a species (Birkhead 2008:31). In fact, Ray coined the term “species” in its modern use (Wikipedia, “John Ray”).  He also rejected both the idea that each species has to be viewed as a unique item (as Locke implied) and that it is merely one variant on a more general Platonic type; he pioneered the modern science of classification on the basis of picking out important traits of all sorts to distinguish species and group them taxonomically (Gaukroger 2010:191-194).  He thus foregrounded reproduction and reproductive structures, later shown by Linnaeus to be the really criterial things to look at in classifying plants.

With this system, sex mattered.  Anatomy mattered, and reproductive anatomy mattered more than superficial structures; Ray was a great pioneer in elucidating the reproductive anatomy and physiology of birds.  (In this he built on a great tradition, going back to surprisingly sensible if often wrong ideas of Aristotle’s.)  Leaving descendents mattered; Darwinian evolution depends on Ray and Linnaeus more than on the infamous Malthus.  Without this concept and its implications, there was no reason not to classify plants by their leaves, as many botanists did.  (The leaf-dependent botanists were later to attack Linnaeus for the “immorality” of his “sexual” system.)  Trees could be classified by their timber value.  We shall consider below a much more recent question over what to do with whales.

Ray’s work led to further development by Adan Tournefort, explorer of the Near East.  (I first encountered Tournefort as the man dubiously honored by Brassica tournefortii, a loathed and hated weed from North Africa that has invaded my southern California homeland.  But it tastes good—it is a wild broccoli—and thus I have a soft spot in my heart, or rather in my stomach, for it.)  The taxonomic work of Tournefort and his contemporaries led directly to Linnaeus.

Less beneficial, perhaps, was Ray’s crucial role in developing the “argument by design” for the existence of God (Birkhead 2008).  Later made famous by William Paley, this survives as the universal argument for “intelligent design” today.  It had the advantage of setting Darwin wondering what really caused the design in the world.  Natural selection was his answer—firm enough that a modern intelligent design advocate (like Francis Collins) must assume God, like modern artificial-intelligence designers, uses it to fine-tune his creation.

New and rigorous classification systems for stars, minerals, mental illnesses, and everything else imaginable were to follow, and they had and have their own costs and biases (Foucault 1970; Kassam 2009).  Today we have whole classification systems for everything from universes to subatomic particles.  Atoms, when discovered, were thought to be the true atoms of Greek thought—the final particles that could not be subdivided further.  (“Atom” comes from Greek atomos, “uncuttable.”)  Another bad guess.

This new wave’s creators saw themselves as a “Republic of Letters” (Gaukroger 2010; Ogilvie 2006:82ff; Rudwick 2005).  Educated people all over Europe were in constant correspondence with each other.  This correspondence was relatively unmarred by the hatreds and political games that made daily life in Renaissance Europe so insecure.  People respected each other across lines of nation and faith.  The common language, Latin, was not the property of any existing polity.  Members in this borderless but well-recognized Republic treated each other according to unwritten, or rarely-written, rules of respect and courtesy.

Science and humanities were one.  Describing a typical case, Martin Kemp (2008) points out connections between Peter Breughel’s extremely accurate and innovative representations of landscape and the maps of Abraham Ortelius, a cartographer who was a friend of Breughel.

Of course, all academics will realize that those rules of respect did not extend to debates about theory!  A Protestant could respect and tolerate a Catholic or Jew, but if anyone dared to cross his pet idea on plant reproduction or the treatment of ulcers, the words flew like enraged cats.  That was part of the game—part of business in the Republic of Letters.  This information flow presaged the value of scientific journals (invented in the 18^th century but not really important till the 19^th), and then the Internet; the vast network held together by letters in the 17^th century was exactly like the scientific network on the Internet today.  All the Internet has added is speed—important, to be sure.

Religious solidarity and debate stood behind much of the vigor of debates in science, with Protestants and Jews always being on the defensive at first, and having to argue trenchantly for their beliefs.  This led them to be both original and persistent in thinking (Merton 1973; Morton 1981).  But, also, the wars of religion in the 16^th and 17^th centuries led to major cynicism about organized religion, and contributed mightily to retreat into science as an alternative way of knowing the Divine Will and into the Republic of Letters as an alternative and more decent way of being social.  The skepticism that surfaces in Montaigne, grows in Bayle, and climaxes in Voltaire fed a search for truths that were not simply matters of unprovable church dogma.

This development was exceedingly slow and uneven, because, contrary to conventional wisdom, the middle ages had plenty of sophisticated observation and argument, and the 17^th and even 18^th centuries had plenty of obscurantist, mystical, and blindly-Aristotelian holdovers.  Brilliant adversarial argument, technological progress, and economic benefits of forward research were all sporadic and contingent.  They did not suddenly cut in at the glad dawn in 1620 or 1650 or any other year.

What did cut in was neatly summarized by van Helmont, the Dutch physician who proved plants grew through combining air and water:  “Neither doth the reading of Books make us to be of the properties [of simples], but by observation” (quoted in Wear 2007:98).  Helmont had much to do with inventing the modern concept of “disease”—a specifiably entity, distinct from its symptoms.  The coming of plague and syphilis, clearly entities though very changeable in symptomatology and clearly different from anything in Herodotus or Galen, had more to do with the origin of this concept; people simply could not ignore them.

Significantly, Helmont’s own work was badly flawed, not least because of his many mystical and even visionary “observations” (see Andrew Wear 2000).  17^th-century science did not suddenly discover Truth in the face of learned Error.  In fact, Galen’s and Avicenna’s old books remained much better guides to medical practice than Helmont’s rather wild ideas.  What mattered was that Helmont, and many others, were breaking away from reliance on the books, and rapidly developing a science based on original observation and test.  Their willingness to endure false starts as the price of radical breakthrough is far more important, to science and to history, than their initial successes at replacing the classics with better ideas.

Deborah Harkness (2008) has shown that this type of activity—feverish quest for anything new, exciting, and informative—was exceedingly widespread in Elizabethan England, and by inference in much of urban Europe.  Everyone from farm workers and craftsmen to lords and high court officials was frantically seeking anything new.  Things that improved manufacturing and promoted profit were especially desired, but people were almost as obsessed with new stars, rare plants, and odd rocks as with more solid matters like improving metallurgy and arms manufacture.  This ferment contrasts with China’s relatively staid attitude to innovation.  Even the works of Elman and of William Rowe, which do disclose much inteletual and craft activity in early modern China, have not produced anything similar.  The Tiangong Kaiwu was roughly contemporary with, and similar to, Hugh Plat’s Elizabethan work that gives its name to Harkness’ volume, but unlike Plat’s book it was an isolated incident, not a presage of more and better to come.  Similarly, Li Shizhen’s great herbal came out at almost exactly the same time as the comparable works of Dodoens and Gerard.   (The relations of those two—with Gerard as plagiarist extraordinaire—are described in detail by Harkness).  But Li’s was the last great Chinese herbal, Dodoens’ the first great European one.  By the early 1600s, Europe had surpassed China.

Harkness wisely includes alchemy and astrology among the useful sciences (see above on the Near East); no one at that time had a clue that one could not turn lead into gold or dirt into silver.  Recall that earth was still an “element” then; gold and silver were not.  Equally amazing things were being done daily in smelting and refining.  Similarly, everyone could see the sun’s influence on all life, and the moon’s control of tides; inexorable logic “proved” that the other heavenly bodies must have some influence.  The problem was that reality did not follow logic or common sense.

Moreover, alchemy, at least, sometimes worked.  We have a careful eyewitness account of a modern Central Asian alchemist turning dirt into gold (cited in Idries Shah’s Oriental Magic, 1956).  Fortunately, the account is extremely perceptive, allowing us to perceive that the good sage was simply panning a very small amount of finely disseminated gold out of a very large amount of alluvial soil. He added a good deal of magical rigmarole, but the actual process is clear.  He seems to have been genuinely convinced he was making the gold; finely disseminated gold in alluvial dirt is far from easy to see.  Countless such alluvial separations must have lain behind alchemy.  Similarly, mercury can extract gold from crushed auriferous rock, and is routinely used for that purpose today; if the gold particles are too small to see—as they often are—an alchemist would surely have thought he was turning rock to gold, via the “mercuric” power that led to naming the liquid metal after the trickster and messenger god.  And of course much of alchemy was spiritual, not physical.

The basic hopelessness of alchemy, however, was proved by Robert Boyle, in The Skeptical Chymist.  Boyle critiqued Galen, Paracelsus, and Helmont for reductionism without evidence, and upheld a view that was, indeed, skeptical; he saw no way to simplify chemistry.  He did not really substitute a new paradigm for an old one.

What mattered was that loyalty to and reliance on the old texts had given way to loyalty to independent verification and reliance on one’s own experiments and observations.  Boyle was not afraid to admit frank ignorance and to throw out theories without having much better to substitute.  Earlier generations, even though they were perfectly aware of the imperfection of old texts and the benefits of observation, did not trust their own innovative findings unless those clearly improved on all that had gone before.  Science thus progressed slowly and cautiously.  Boyle did not throw caution to the winds, but he had come to be a leader in a generation that preferred their own experiments to old stories, no matter how little their new experiments appeared to accomplish.  They were on the way to the modern period, when hypotheses and theories are expected to fail and to be superseded in a few years, and when “hard science” departments tell university libraries not to bother keeping journals more than a year or two (as I observed during my years chairing a university library committee).

Europe the Different

Floods of ink have been expended on why China, India and the Near East did not pick up on their own innovations, and why it was a tiny, marginal backwater of the Eurasian continent that exploded into rapid discovery science.

Clearly, it is Europe that is the exception.  The normal course of human events is to see knowledge advance slowly and fairly steadily, as it has done in all societies over thousands of years.  Chinese and Near Eastern science did not stop advancing when Europe took over the lead; they kept on.  Nor did the Maya, Inuit, Northwest Coast Native peoples, or Australian Aborigines stagnate or cease advancing at any point in their history.  They kept learning more.  Archaeology shows, in fact, that most such societies kept increasing their knowledge at exponential rather than linear rates.  Certainly the Northwest Coast peoples learned dramatically more in the last couple of millennia.  But the exponent was very small.  Europe’s since 1500 has been much larger.  In the 20^th century, the number of scientific publications doubled every few years.  The doubling time continues to decrease.

This is quite unnatural for humans.  People are normally interested in their immediate social group, and in getting more liked and admired therein.  All their effort, except for minimal livelihood-maintenance, goes into social games and gossip.  (People do not work for “money”; they work for what money can buy—necessities and status.  Once they have the bare necessities, and perhaps a tiny bit of solitary enjoyment, everything else goes for social acceptance and status.)  Devoting oneself to science—to the dispassionate search for impersonal truth—is truly weird by human standards.  We still think of people with this interest as “nerds” and “geeks.”  Many of them are indeed somewhat autistic.  When I started teaching, I thought young people were interested in the world.  All I had to do was present information.  I learned that that was the last and least of my tasks.  The great teachers are those that can get the students interested in anything beyond their immediate social life.

In fact, interest in learning more about the natural world is—in my rather considerable experience—actually considerably greater in traditional small-scale societies than in modern, science-conscious Europe and America.  I have spent many years living with Maya farmers, Northwest Coast Natives, and Chinese fisherfolk, and certainly the level of interest in nature and natural things was much greater among them than among modern Americans.  They were correspondingly less single-mindedly obsessed with social life.  They lacked, for example, the fascination with “celebs” that reveals itself in countless magazines and TV programs, and that much earlier revealed itself in ancient Greek and Roman adulation of actors and gladiators.  They were also much quicker to pick up skills and knowledge from other people and peoples than American farmers and craftspeople are.

Why did Europe in the 16^th and 17^th centuries suddenly become obsessed with Japanese medicines, Indonesian shells, and Near Eastern flowers?  Why did so many Europeans take breaks from the Machiavellian social games of their age to study such things?  Pliny had studied, and indeed invented, “natural history,” but his work became a “classic”—quoted, cited, unread, and unimitated—in its own time; natural history grew under Arab care, but truly flourished only in post-1400 Europe.

No such changes took place in the other lands.  If anything, they went the other way.  Near Eastern science declined sadly during this period.  (The Ottoman Empire was a partial contrast, but its history seems almost more European than Near Eastern at this time.)  India was preoccupied with horrific invasions and conquests by Tamerlane, Babur, and lesser lights.

China spent this period trapped in the Ming Dynasty, whose frequently-unstable rulers and frozen, overcentralized bureaucracy stifled change.  Technological and scientific progress did occur, but it was slow.  Ming and Qing autocracy is surely the major reason—revisionists to the contrary notwithstanding (see e.g. Anderson 1988; Mote 1999 gives the best, most balanced discussion of the issue, suspending judgment but making a solid case).  In spite of Li Shizhen and his great innovative herbal of 1593, Chinese science was always deeply attendant to the past, discouraging innovative theories and ideas.  This point has been greatly overmade in western sources (often to the point of racism), and is now a cliché, but it is not without truth.  I have heard many educated Chinese strongly maintain points inscribed in old books but clearly and visibly wrong for present conditions.  In Hong Kong I was repeatedly told, for instance, that the fishermen I studied could not swim.  Anyone could see otherwise on a walk along any waterfront on any warm day.  But the old books said fishermen don’t swim.  In fairness to the Chinese, I have run into the same faith in books, as opposed to observation, in the United States and Europe.

China in the Song Dynasty was ahead of Europe in every field, and ahead of the Near East in most areas of science and enquiry.  The Mongol Empire, and its continuation in China’s Yuan Dynasty, instituted in massive knowledge transfer (Anderson ms.; Paul Buell, ongoing research; Buell et al 2000), leveling the playing field and introducing many Chinese accomplishments to the western world.  Gunpowder, cannon, the compass, printing, chemical technology, ceramic skills and many other innovations spread across Eurasia.  However, the Mongol yoke was repressive in China.  The end of Yuan saw violence and chaos.  The new Ming Dynasty brought in much worse autocracy and repression.  After an uneven but fairly successful start, the dynasty settled down after the 1420s to real stagnation.

A significant and highly visible symptom is the paralysis of philosophy.  The spectacular flowering of Buddhist, Taoist, and Neo-Confucian thought under Song and Yuan had a deeply conservative tinge, but at least it was a massive intellectual endeavor.  Highly innovative ideas were generated, often in the name of conservatism.  (An irony not exactly unknown in the western world; someone has remarked that all successful revolutions promise “return to the good old days.”)  By contrast, the only dramatic philosophical innovation of the Ming Dynasty was that of Wang Yangming.  Wang was a high official with a brilliant career as censor and general.  He retired to propagate his personal mix of Confucianism and Buddhism, an “inner light” philosophy strikingly similar to Quaker thought but maintained also by a profound skepticism about worldly success and worldly affairs in general.  He moved Confucian philosophy much closer to the quiestism and mysticism of monastic Buddhism. Wang was one of the key figures in turning Chinese intellectuals inward toward quietism, which in turn was one of the causes of China’s failure to equal Europe in scientific and technical progress.

Larry Israel (2008) has given us a superb dramatic account of Wang’s subduing of an apparently psychopathic rogue prince of the Ming Dynasty.  It is another side of Wang.  By a combination of absolutely brilliant generaling and political savvy (not without Machiavellian scheming), he parlayed a very weak position with about 10,000 troops into a total victory over a huge rebellion involving—according to Wang’s reports—100,000 total troops, many of them hardened bandits and outlaws.  Wang is described as maintaining perfect cool through it all, and showing perfect timing.

It is interesting to compare him with his near-contemporary Michel de Montaigne, another soldier turned sage.  Wang was far higher up the administrative and military ladder than Montaigne, but had the same ambivalence about it and the same desire to retire to meditative and isolated pursuits as soon as he could.  The great similarity in lifetrack and the real similarity in philosophy does not extend to any similarity in the effects of their thoughts over the long term.  Montaigne’s skepticism and meditative realism were enormously liberating to European intellectuals (see e.g. Pascal’s “thoughts”), and Montaigne thus became a major inspiration of the Enlightenment.

Montaigne remained less quiestist and escapist than Wang, but the real difference was in the times.  If the world had been different, Wang might have started a Chinese enlightenment, and Montaigne might have turned Europeans inward to arid meditation.  Wang’s thought was perfect at feeding the escapism of Chinese intellectuals faced with a hopelessly stagnant and degenerate court.  Montaigne’s rather similar thought was perfect at feeding the idealism and merciless enquiry of European intellectuals in a time of rapid change, dynamic expansion of empires, and terrific contestation of religion and rising autocracy (cf. Perry Anderson 1974).

A huge part of the problem was that Chinese intellectuals served at the mercy of the court, and the Ming court was erratic and punitive, regularly condemning innovators and critics of all kinds (Wang barely survived).  By contrast, many of Europe’s first scientists were minor nobles who had little hope of major advancement but no fear of falling far.  Moreover, like scientists everywhere until the 21^st century, they were males who had long-suffering wives to do the social and family work.  Today, married female scientists still usually have all the responsibility of remembering birthdays, organizing children’s parties, and being nice to the boss at dinner; some resent it, some enjoy it, but all recognize it is a special and unfair burden.  Throughout the world in premodern times, science was the preserve of males, and at first of well-born ones.  Only they had the leisure and resources to pursue science.  They were often young and adventurous.  Today, the average age of scientists who make major innovations and get Nobel prizes is around 38 (Berg 2007); in math and physics it is considerably younger than that.  In the Renaissance and early modern period, averages would have been even lower, because of the shorter lifespans of those days.

Benjamin Elman (2005) has shown that the clichés about China’s failure to learn from Europe are not adequate accounts.  The Jesuits in the 17^th and early 18^th centuries did not bring modern European science; they brought Aristotelian knowledge and old, pre-Copernican astronomy, already discredited in Europe.  The Chinese already had science as good as that.  The Jesuits failed to introduce calculus and other modern mathematics.  The Chinese took what they could use—clocks, some mapping techniques—and saw correctly that the rest was not worth taking.  The Jesuits lost their China foothold and eventually were closed down totally (to be revived much later), and China had no real chance to learn until other missionaries flooded into China in the 19^th century.  However, they continued to benefit from, and develop, the knowledge they learned from the Jesuits.  (Interestingly, this point had been made 60 years earlier by the anthropologist A. L. Kroeber [1944:196], without the materials available to Elman—showing what can be done by a relatively unbiased scholar in spite of the lack of any good information on just how successful Chinese science was.)

Elman systematically compares scientific fields ranging from mathematics and engineering to botany and medicine.  (Among other things, he notes that western medicine had some impact at the same time that the indigenous Chinese medical traditions were moving from a focus on cold to a more balanced focus on both cold and heat as causes of illness.  Like most premodern peoples, their naturalistic medical traditions gave heavy importance to those environmental factors.)  He misses the one that would best make his case:  nutrition.  Chinese nutritional science was ahead of the west’s till the very end of the 19^th century.  This was one case in which the west should have done the learning.

After that, China learned about as fast as any country did.  Japan did not get its famous clear lead over China in borrowing from the west till late in the 19^th century.  Elman sums up a general current opinion that China’s loss of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 was not because China was behind technologically, but because China was corrupt and misgoverned.  The Empress Dowager’s infamous reallocation of the navy’s budget to redecorate the Summer Palace was only one problem!

This being said, the Chinese were indeed resistant to western knowledge, slow to realize its importance, slow to take it up, slow to see that their own traditions were lacking.  Elman is certainly right, both intellectually and morally, in stressing the Cinese successes, but he may go a bit far the other way.  He sometimes forgets that only a tiny elite adopted any western knowledge.  He admits the Jesuits had no effect outside the court circles—they were sequestered from the people.  In fact, China missed its chances till too late, and its borrowings were then interrupted by the appalling chaos of the 20^th century.  Only in the 21^st century did China finally drop its intellectual isolationism.

A Few Notes on Later Change

Science as a reliable cranker-out of money-making technologies is a 19^th-century perception.  During the period of the (supposed!) “scientific revolution,” craftsmen, not scientists, made the profitable innovations.  The brilliant and pathbreaking innovations in agriculture, textiles, dyeing, mining, and other arts, from the 1400s on (after Europe had internalized Moorish introductions), are all anonymous.  While Bacon and Descartes were making themselves famous, the really important technological developments were being made by farmers and laborers, whose names no one recorded but whose deeds live on in every bite we take and every fibre we wear.  Few things are more moving, or humbling, than realizing how much we now owe to countless unnamed men and women who lived quiet good lives while the rich and famous did little besides pile up corpses, or, at best, write learned Latin tomes of speculation.

On the other hand, though some at the time said that science only satisfied “idle” curiosity, the very use of the invidious word “idle” indicates that more “serious” game was afoot.  Besides the obvious utility of medicine, there were countless works on transport, mining, agriculture, water management, architecture, and every other art of life.  As recognized in the old phrase “Renaissance man,” a well-known artist, politician, or literary person might make scientific advances in practical fields.  Most famously, Leonardo da Vinci made contributions (or at least plans for contributions) to many.

All this was learned much less rapidly than we once thought.  It took generations for the whole complex of observation, experiment, open publication, and forward-looking, inquiring, argumentative science to take wide hold.  Moreover, the founders’ mistakes conditioned science for years, or even centuries.  Worst in this regard was Descartes’ claim that nonhuman animals are mere machines, without true consciousness.  Not until the late 20^th century was this idea—so pernicious in its effects—definitively excised from serious science.

However, the idea that Descartes is responsible for the mind-body dualism or the idea that animals are mere machines is based on the assumption that major cultural change occurs because a brilliant individual has a great insight which then trickles down.  This is not how culture change occurs.  It comes from continual interaction with the natural and social world, leading to general learning and constantly re-negotiated conclusions.  Descartes merely put fancy words to what had been church dogma for 1600 years.  He had his influence, but it was minor.

Medicine too reveals a slow, halting progress.  Notable innovators were Hooke, Boyle, and Thomas Sydenham, who developed from the Helmontian canon further ideas of nosology—systematic classification of named disease entities, rather than mere description of symptoms and inferred humoral causes—and laid the foundations for modern epidemiology (Gaukroger 2006:349-351; Wear 2000).  Boyle, ever the innovative and devoted mind, even counseled learning medical knowledge from Native Americans, long foreshadowing modern plant hunting (Gaukroger 2006:374).  However, Galenic medicine held sway through the 19^th century, and in marginal areas right through the 20^th.

However slow and uneven this all was, dynamic, forward-looking figures like Galileo, Descartes (who invented mathematical modeling as a systematic scientific procedure), Hooke, and Boyle did indeed transform the world.  The really critical element was their insistence on observation and experiment.  Europe previously (and even for a long time after) never could shake off the devotion to prior authority.  Rapid discovery science came when people realized that Aristotle, Avicenna, and other classics were simply not reliable and had to be tested and supplemented.

European expansion and the rise of entrepreneurship has long been a prime suspect in all this (Marx, Weber, and almost everyone else in the game mentioned it).  The correlation of maritime expansion, discovery, nascent mercantile capitalism, and science—the four developing in about that order—is too clear to ignore.

This had a background not only in the Mediterranean trade (Braudel 1973) but also in the European fishery, which developed early, and expanded into a high-seas, far-waters fishery by the 1400s (see e.g. Cook 2007:7-8).  This led to Europe’s taking full advantage, quickly, of Chinese and Arab maritime advances.  They developed navigation and seamanship to a unique and unprecedented level by 1450.  Holland and Portugal, the most dependent on fisheries of any nations (anywhere), took the lead.

After that, mercantile values took over: need for honest dealing (within reason!), enterprise, factual information, and above all keeping up on every bit of new knowledge and speculation.  Everything could be useful in getting an advantage in trade.  Even clear prose (necessary to scientific writing, at least today) may owe much to this need of merchants for simple, direct information (Cook 2007:56; 408-409).  The whole organization of the new science was influenced by the organization and institutions of the new mercantile capitalism.  Also, merchants wanted tangible signs of their travels and adventures: gardens, curiosity cabinets.

This classic theory has recently received a powerful boost from Harold Cook, who traces out the rise of Dutch business and science in Matters of Exchange:  Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (2007).  He shows that Dutch science was very much a matter of cataloging and processing the new items the Dutch were discovering in Indonesia, Japan, Brazil, and elsewhere.

Terms like “scientist” and “biology” date from the 19^th century, as does “science” in its modern sense.  (“Scientist,” coined by William Whewell, was not really a new word; it merely replaced earlier terms like “savant” and “scient,” which had become obsolete.)

In the early modern period, the people in question were simply called “scholars,” because no one clearly separated science from theology, philosophy, and other branches of knowledge.  Enquiry was enquiry.  Only in the 19^th century did disciplines become so distinctive, formal, and methodologically separate that they had to have their own names.

By the late 19^th century, folk knowledge of the world had separated from formal knowledge so completely that yet another set of new terms appeared.  Consider the term “ethnobotany,” coined in 1895 by John Harshbarger to refer to the botanical knowledge of local ethnic groups.  This was an old field of study; Dioscorides really started it, and the 16^th-century herbalists did it with enthusiasm—Ogilvie (2006:71) called it “ethnobotany ante litteram.”  Linnaeus drew heavily on folk knowledge in his botanical work.   China had a parallel tradition; Li Shizhen drew on folk wisdom.  But no one saw folk botany as a separate and distinctive field until the 1890s, when science became so formalized and laboratory-based that the old folk science became a different thing in people’s minds.

Conclusions on Science History

Looking back over the preceding sections, we see that the main visible difference was the explosion of trade and conquest, especially—but far from solely—in the 15^th and 16^th centuries.  This brought Europe into a situation where it was forced to deal with a fantastically increased mass of materials to classify, study, and deal with.  It simply could not ignore the new peoples, plants, animals, and so on that it had acquired.

Exactly the same problem faced the Greeks when they grew from tiny city-states to world empire between 600 BCE and 300 BCE, and they did exactly the same thing, leading to the scientific progress of the period.  The golden age of Chinese philosophy was in a similar expansionist period at the exact same time, but Chinese science peaked between 500 and 1200 A.D., with rapid expansion of contacts with the rest of the world.  The Arabs repeated the exact story when they exploded onto the world scene in the 600s and 700s.  In all cases, stiffening into empire was deadly; it slowed Greek science in the Hellenistic period, and virtually shut down Chinese and Near Eastern science after the Mongol conquests.  These conquests did much direct damage, but their real effect was to introduce directly—or create through reaction—a totalitarian style of rule.  China’s Yuan and especially Ming dynasties were hostile to change and innovation; Qing was less so, but not by much.  The change in the Near East was even more dramatic.  The spectacular flood of scientific works suddenly shut off completely after the Mongols (and the plagues that soon followed).  There was hardly a new book of science from then until modern European scientific works began to be translated.  Even today, the Near East lags almost all the rest of the world—including some far less developed regions—in science.  As expected, the worst lag is in the most autocratic countries.  The least lag is found in the more politically sane nations, such as Turkey, where both liberal Hanafi Islam and a European window have led to greater openness.

Europe and America have not, so far, suffered totalitarian death, but the United States from 2010 onward shows exactly how this happens.  The far right wing of the Republican party took over the House and Representatives and most states in that year, and immediately began a full-scale assault on the funding, the independence, and the freedom of teaching of the research and teaching institutions of the country, from grade school to the National Science Foundation.  An almost total defunding of science was advocated.  In education, teaching was under attack, with proposals to replace trained and independent teachers overseeing classes of 20-30 by low-skilled persons with low salaries and no job security put in charge of classes of 60-80.  Something very much like this happened in Ming and Qing China.

It also happened many times over in Europe, but there were always countries where scientists and scholars could take refuge:  the Netherlands in the 17^th century, England in the 18^th, France in the 19^th, America in the 20^th, and various lesser states at various times.  The European world’s fractionation saved it.  No one state could take over, and no one could repress all science.  In China, by contrast, the paranoid Ming Dynasty could shut down almost all progress throughout the whole region.  In the Near East, the Turkish and Persian empires did more or less the same thing.

In Europe, a feedback process developed.  The freer states promoted trade and commerce, which in turn stimulated more democracy (for various well-understood reasons).  This stimulated more searches for knowledge, which were relatively free of dogmatic interference.  Any forward knowledge could provide an advantage in trade.  The rise of Republican anti-intellectualism in the United States tracked the replacement of trade and commerce by economic domination through giant primary-production firms, especially oil and coal interests.

Religion

Another factor was the tension between religious sects.  Robert Merton (1973) and A. G. Morton (1981) pointed out a connection between religious debate and science.  Merton saw Protestantism as hospitable ideologically.  I find Morton’s explanation far more persuasive.  He thought that the arguments between sects over “absolute truth” created a world in which people seriously maintained minority views against all comers, argued fiercely for them, and sought proof from sources outside everyday society.  They were used to seeing truth as defensible even if unpopular.

Cook (2007) confirms this by noting how many religious dissenters wound up finding refuge the Netherlands—Spinoza and Descartes are only the most famous cases—and how many more resorted to publishing, teaching, or researching there.  Cook takes pains to point out that Dutch leadership in intellectual fields rapidly declined as the Netherlands lost political power, religious freedom, and mercantile edge (the three seem to have declined in a feedback relationship with each other; see also Israel 1995 for enormous detail on these matters).   Gaukroger (2006) has argued, reasonably enough, for a much more complex relationship, but I think Merton’s theory still applies, however much more there is to say.

Accordingly, the separation of science and religion is a product of the Enlightenment, and the “conflict” between science and religion is an 18^th-19^th-century innovation (Gaukroger 2006; Gould 1999; Rudwick 2005, 2008).  Before that, scientists, like everyone else, took God and the supernatural realm for granted (though there were exceptions by the 18^th century).  Few saw a conflict, though the separation was beginning to be evident in the work of Spinoza and Descartes.  They deserve some of the blame for separating the natural from the moral (see Cook 2007:240-266).  Descartes inquired deeply into passions, mind, and soul, developing more or less mechanistic models whose more oversimplified aspects still bedevil us today.  Scientists like Newton and Boyle were not only intensely religious men, but they saw their science as a pillar of religious devotion—a devout exploration of God’s creation.  As late as the 18^th century, Hume still argued that no one could seriously be an atheist, and was astonished when he visited France and met a roomful of them (Gaukroger 2006:27).  God was already seen as a clockmaker by the 14^th century (Hadot 2006:85, 127), and by the 17^th it appeared to many scientists that their job was to understand the divine clockwork.

The conflict of science and religion arose only after Archbishop Ussher and other rationalists overdefined the Bible’s position on reality, and had their claims shown to be ridiculous (Rudwick 2005, 2008).  Between fundamentalist “literalism” and 19^th-century science there is, indeed, an unbridgeable gap.  However, no one who reads the Bible seriously can maintain a purely literalist position.  There are too many lines like Deuteronomy 10:16:  “Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart.”  (This line is repeatedly discussed in the Bible, from the Prophets down to Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, which discourses on it at great length.)  And the “Virgin Birth” is hard to square with Jesus’ lineage of “begats” traced through Joseph.  Be that as it may, today we are stuck with the conflict, sometimes in extreme forms, as when Richard Dawkins and the Kansas school board face off.

A conflict of science and philosophy arose too, but stayed mild.  Philosophy, however, fell from guiding the world (through the middle ages) to guiding nations (through the Renaissance and early modern periods) to guiding movements (through the 19^th century) to being a game.  By the mid-twentieth century it had some function in guiding science, but had ceased to be a living force in guiding the world.  Economics has replaced it in many countries.  Extremist political ideology—fascism, communism, and religious extremism—has replaced it elsewhere.  Philosophical ethics have thinned out, though the Kantian ethics of Jurgen Habermas and John Rawls have recently been influential.

Mastering Nature

The early concern with “mastery” of nature has been greatly exaggerated in recent environmentalist books.  It was certainly there, but, like the conflict with religion, it was largely a creation of the post-Enlightenment world.  And it was not to last; biology has now shifted its concern to saving what is left rather than destroying everything for immediate profit.

The 19^th century was, notoriously, the climactic period for science as nature-mastering, but it was also the age that gave birth to conservation as a serious field of study.  Modern environmentalists read with astonishment George Perkins Marsh’s great book Man and Nature (2003 [1864]).  This book started the modern conservation movement.  One of the greatest works of 19^th century science, it profoundly transformed thinking about forests, waters, sands, and indeed the whole earth’s surface.  Yet it is unequivocally committed to mastery and Progress, not preservation.  Marsh forthrightly prefers tree plantations to natural forests, and unquestioningly advocates draining wetlands.  He wished not to stop human management of the world, but to substitute good management for bad management.  His only sop to preservation is an awareness of the truth later enshrined in the proverb “Nature always bats last.”  He knew, for instance, that constraining rivers with levees was self-defeating if the river simply aggraded its bed and eventually burst the banks.

This being said, the importance of elite male power in determining science has been much exaggerated in some of the literature (especially the post-Foucault tradition).  Scientists were a rare breed. More to the point, they were self-selected to be concerned with objective, dispassionate knowledge (even if “useful”), and they had to give up any hope of real secular power to pursue this goal. Science was a full-time job in those days.  So was getting and holding power.

A few people combined the two (usually badly), but most could not.  Scientists and scholars were a dedicated and unconventional breed.  Many, from Spinoza to Darwin, were interested in the very opposite of worldly power, and risked not only their power but sometimes their lives.  (Spinoza’s life was in danger for his religious views, not his lens-making innovations, but the two were not unrelated in that age.  See Damasio 2003.)  Moreover, not everyone in those days was the slave of an insensate ideology.  Thoreau was not alone in his counter-vision of the good.  Certainly, the great plant-lovers and plant explorers of old, from Dioscorides to Rauwolf and Bauhin and onward through Linnaeus and Asa Gray, were not unappreciative of nature.

And even the stereotype of male power is inadequate; many of these sages had female students, and indeed by the end of the 19^th century botany was a common female pursuit.  Some of the pioneer botanists of the Americas were women, including incredibly intrepid ones like Kate Brandegee, who rode alone through thousands of miles of unexplored, bandit-infested parts of Mexico at the turn of the last century.

We need to re-evaluate the whole field of science-as-power.  Governments, especially techno-authoritarian ones like Bismarck’s Prussia and the 20^th century dictatorships, most certainly saw “science” and technology as ways to assert control over both nature and people.  Scientists usually did not think that way, though more than a few did.  This leads to a certain disjunction.  Even in the area of medicine, where Michel Foucault’s case is strong and well-made (Foucault 1973), there is a huge contrast between medical innovation and medical care delivery.  Medical innovation was classically the work of loners (de Kruif 1926), from Joseph Lister to Maurice Hillebrant (the designer of the MMR shots).  Even the greatest innovators in 19^th-century medicine, Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur, worked with a few students, and were less than totally appreciated by the medical establishment of the time.  Often, these loners were terribly persecuted for their innovative activities, as Semmelweis was in Hungary (Gortvay and Zoltán 1968) and Crawford Long, discoverer of anesthesia, in America.  (Dwelling in the obscurantist “Old South,” at a time when black slavery was considered a Biblical command, Long was attacked for thwarting God’s plan to make humans suffer!)  By contrast, medical care delivery involves asserting control over patients.  At best this is true caring, but usually it means batch-processing them for convenience and economy—regarding their humanity merely as an annoyance.  No one who has been through a modern clinic needs a citation for this (but see Foucault 1973).

SCIENCE AND ETHNOSCIENCE

E. N. Anderson

Dept. of Anthropology

University of California, Riverside

Part 1.  Science and Ethnobiology

Science and Knowledge

The present paper questions the distinctions between “science,” “religion,” “traditional ecological knowledge,” and any other divisions of knowledge that may sometimes be barriers in the way of Truth.

I will make this case via my now rather long experience in ethnobiology.  Ethnobiology is the study of the biological knowledge of particular ethnic groups.  It is part of what is now called “traditional ecological knowledge,” TEK for short.  Ethnobiology has typically been a study of working knowledge:  the actual pragmatic and operational knowledge of plants and animals that people bring to their daily tasks.  It thus concerns hunting and gathering, farming, fishing, tree-cutting, herbal medicine, cooking, and other everyday practical pursuits.  Ethnobiological research has focused on how people use, name, and classify the plants, animals and fungi they know.

As such, it is close to economic botany and zoology, to archaeology, and to ethnomedicine.  It is a part of human ecology, the study of how humans interact with their environment.  It overlaps with cultural ecology, the branch of human ecology that concerns cultural knowledge specifically.  Cultural ecology was essentially invented, and the term coined, by Julian Steward (1955).  Steward attended very seriously to political organization, but his earlier students generally did not, which caused his later students to coin the further term “political ecology” (Wolf 1972), which has caught on in spite of some backlash from the earlier students and their own students (Vayda 2008).  Human/cultural/political ecology has produced a huge, fast-evolving, and rather chaotic body of theory (Sutton and Anderson 2009).

Like many of my generation, I was raised in a semi-rural world of farms, gardens, ranches, and craft work.  I learned to shoot, fish, and camp.  Many formative hours were spent on the family farm, a small worked-out cotton farm in a remote part of East Texas.  (My father was raised there, but the family had abandoned it to sharecroppers by the time I came along.)  I learned about all this through actual practice, under the watchful eyes of elders or peers.  Naturally, I learned it much better than I learned classroom knowledge acquired in a more passive way.  Thus I was preadapted to study other people’s working knowledge of biota.

Logic also makes this a good entry point into the study of theoretical human ecology.  It is the most basic, everyday, universal way that humans interact with “nature.”  It is the most direct.  It has the most direct feedback from the rest of the world—the nonhuman realm that is so often out of human control.  The philosopher may meditate on the nonexistence of existence, or on the number of angels that can dance on the point of a pin, but the working farmer or gatherer must deal with a more pragmatic reality.  She must know which plants are the best for food and which will poison her, and how to avoid being eaten by a bar.

In Comte’s words, we need to know in order to predict, and predict in order to be able to act (savoir pour prévoir, prévoir pour pouvoir).

How do we know we know?

For many people, even many scientists, it is enough to say that we see reality and thus know what’s real.  This is the position of “naïve empiricism.” There is no problem telling the real from the unreal, once we have allowed for natural mistakes and learned to ignore a few madmen.  Reality is transparent to us.  The obvious failure of everyone before now to see exactly what’s real and what isn’t is due to their being childlike primitives.  Presumably, the fact that almost half the science I learned as an undergraduate is now abandoned proves that my teachers (who included at least one Nobel laureate) were childlike primitives too.

Obviously this does not work, and the ancient Greeks already recognized that people are blinded by their unconscious heuristics and biases.  Francis Bacon systematized this observation in his Novum Organum (1901/1620).  He identified four “idols” (of the “tribe, den, market, and theatre”), basically cultural prejudices that cause us to believe what our neighbors believe rather than what is true.  Later, John Locke (1979/1697) expanded the sense of limitations by providing a very modern account of cognitive biases and cognitive processing limitations.  The common claim that Locke believed the mind was a “blank slate” and that he was a naïve empiricist is wrong.  He used the expression tabula rasa (blank slate) but meant that people could learn a wide variety of things, not that they did not have built-in information processing limits and biases.  He recognized both, and described them in surprisingly modern ways.  His empiricism, based on careful and close study, involved working to remove the “idols” and biases.  It also involved cross-checking, reasoning, and progressive approximation, among other ways of thought.

Problems with Words

Ethnobiology has normally been concerned with “traditional ecological knowledge,” now shortened to TEK and sometimes even called “tek” (one syllable).  By the time a concept is acronymized to that extent, it is in danger of becoming so cut-and-dried that it is mere mental shorthand.  The time has come to take a longer look.  This paper will not confine itself to “TEK,” whatever that is.  I am interested in all knowledge of environments.  I want to know how it develops and spreads.

Science studies and history of science have made great strides in recent decades, partly through use of anthropological concepts, and in turn have fed back on anthropological studies of traditional knowledge.  The result has been to blur the distinction between traditional local knowledge and modern international science.  Peter Bowker and Susan Star (1999) have produced descriptions of modern scientific classification that sound very much like what I find among Hong Kong fishermen and Northwest Coast Native people.  Bruno Latour (2004, 2005) describes the cream of French scientists thinking and talking very much as Mexican Maya farmers do.  Martin Rudwick, in his epochal volumes on the history of geology, describes great scientists speculating on the cosmos with all the mixture of confusion, insight, genius, and wild guessing that led Native Californians to conclude that their world was created by coyotes and other animal powers.  Early geological speculation was as far from what we believe today as California’s coyote stories.

Similar problems plague the notion of “indigenous” knowledge.  Criticisms of the idea that there is an “indigenous” kind of knowledge, as opposed to some other kind, have climaxed in a slashing attack on the whole idea by Matthew Lauer and Shankar Aswani (2009).  They maintain “it relies on obsolete anthropological frameworks of evolutionary progress” (2009:317).  This is too strong—no one now uses those frameworks.  The term “indigenous” has a specific legal meaning established by the United Nations.  However, there is a little fire under Lauer and Aswani’s smoke.  The term “indigenous knowledge” does tend to imply that the knowledge held by “indigenous” people is somehow different:  presumably more local, more limited, and more easy to ignore.  Some, especially biologists, use this to justify a few that non-indigenous people (whatever that means) somehow manage to have a wider, better vision.

Similarly, the term “traditional ecological knowledge” has been criticized for implying that said knowledge is “backward and static….  Much development based on TEK thus continues to implement homogenous Western objectives by coopting and decontextualizing selected aspects of knowledges specific to unique places, eliminate their dynamism, and focus more than anything else on negotiating the terms for their commodification” (Sluyter 2003, citing but rather oversimplifying Escobar 1998).  Most of us who study “TEK” do not commit these sins.  But many people do, especially non-anthropologists working for bureaucracies.  Their international bureaucratic “spin” has indeed made the term into a very simplistic label (Bicker et al. 2004, and see below).

The implication of stasis is particularly unfortunate.  Traditional ecological knowledge, like traditional folk music, is dynamic and ever-changing, except in dying cultures.  Many people understand “traditional” to mean “unchanged since time immemorial.”  It does not mean that in normal use.  “Traditional” Scottish folk music is pentatonic and has certain basic patterns for writing tunes (syncopation at specific points, and so on).  New Scottish tunes that follow these traditions are being written all the time, and they are thoroughly traditional though completely new.   Similarly, traditional classification systems can and do readily incorporate new crops and animals.  Traditional Yucatec Maya knowledge of plants is still with us, but over 25 years I have seen their system expand yearly to accommodate new plants.

People are notoriously prone to invent new traditions (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983).  “Tradition,” more often than not, means “my version of what Grandpa and Grandma did,” not “my faithful reproduction of what my ancestors did in the Ice Age.”

And, of course, modern international science is hardly free from traditions!   “Science” is an ancient Greek invention, and the major divisions—zoology, botany, astronomy, and so on—are ancient Greek in name and definition.  Theophrastus’ original “botany” text of the 4^th century BC reads surprisingly well today; we have added evolution and genetics, but even the scientific names of the plants are often the same as Theophrastus’, because his terms continued in use by botanists.  Coining scientific names today is done according to fixed and thoroughly traditional rules, centuries old, maintained by international committees.  Species names of trees, for instance, are normally feminine, because the ancient Romans thought all trees had female spirits dwelling in them.  Thus even trees with masculine-sounding genus names have feminine species names (e.g. Pinus ponderosa, Quercus lobata) Traditions of publication, laboratory conduct, institutional organization, and so on are more recent, but are older than many of the “traditional” bits of lore classed as “TEK.”

It is no more surprising to find that Maya change and adapt with great speed than to find that laboratory chemists use the same paradigms and much of the same equipment that Robert Boyle used more than 300 years ago.

Finally, the differences between traditional (or “indigenous”) knowledges and modern science are not obviously greater than the differences between long-separated traditional cultures.  Maya biological knowledge is a great deal like modern biology—enough to amaze me on frequent occasions.  Both are very different from the knowledge system of the Athapaskan peoples of the Yukon.   Similarly, the conduct of science in the United States is quite different from that in China or Japan.  National laboratory cultures have been the subject of considerable analysis (see e.g. Bowker and Star 1999; Latour 2005; Rabinow 2002).  And modern sciences differ in the ways they operate.  Paleontology is not done the way theoretical physics is done (Gould 2002).  Thus Latour (2004) and many others now speak of “sciences” rather than “science,” just as Peter Worsley (1997) wrote of “knowledges” in discussing TEK and popular lore.

If one looks at high theory, traditional knowledge and modern science may be different, but if one looks at applications, they are the same enterprise:  a search for practical and theoretical knowledge of how everything works.  Similarly, if one looks at discovery methodology, traditional ecological knowledge and formal mathematical theory seem very different indeed, but traditional and contemporary ecology or biology are much more alike.

I can only conclude that instead of speaking of “ethnoscience,” “modern science, “traditional knowledge,” and “postmodern knowledge,” we might just as well say “sciences” and “knowledges” and be done with it.

Therefore, pigeonholing TEK in order to dismiss it is unacceptable (Nadasdy 2004).  By the same token, bureaucratizing science, as “Big Science” and overmanaged government agencies are doing now, is the death of science.   As Michael Dove says:  “By problematizing a purported division between local and extralocal, the concept of indigenous knowledge obscures existing linkages or even identities between the two and may privilege political, bureaucratic authorities with a vested interest in the distinction (whether its maintenance or collapse).”  (Dove 2006:196.)

Problems with Projecting the “Science” Category on Other Cultures

A much more serious problem, often resulting from such bureaucratization, has been the tendency to ignore the “religious” and other beliefs that are an integral part of these knowledge systems.  This is not only bad for our understanding; it is annoying, and sometimes highly offensive, to the people who have the knowledge.  Christian readers might well be offended by an analysis of Holy Communion that confined itself to the nutritional value of the wine and cracker, and implied that was all that mattered.  Projecting our own categories on others has its uses, and for analytic and comparative purposes is often necessary, but it has to be balanced by seeing them in their own terms.  This problem has naturally been worse for comparative science that deliberately overlooks local views (Smith and Wobst 2005; also Nadasdy 2004), but has carried over into ethnoscience.

On the other hand, for analytic reasons, we shall often want to compare specific knowledge of—say—the medical effects of plants.   Thus we shall sometimes have to disembed empirical scientific knowledge from spiritual belief.  If we analyze, for instance, the cross-cultural uses of Artemisia spp. as a vermifuge, it is necessary to know that this universally recognized medicinal value is a fact and that it is due to the presence of the strong poison thujone in most species of the genus.  Traditional cultures may explain the action as God-given, or due to a resident spirit, or due to magical incantations said over the plant, or may simply not have any explanation at all.  However, they all agree with modern lab science on one thing:  it works.

We must, then, consider four different things:  the knowledge itself; the fraction of it that is empirical and cross-culturally verifiable; and the explanations for it in the traditional cultures in question; and the modern laboratory explanations for it.  All these are valuable, all are science, and all are important—but for different reasons.  Obviously, if we are going to make use of the knowledge in modern medicine, we will be less interested in the traditional explanations; conversely, if we are explicating traditional cultural thought systems, it is the modern laboratory explanations that will be less interesting.

The important sociological fact to note is the relative independence or disembedding of “science,” in the sense of proven factual knowledge, from religion.  Seth Abrutyn (2009) has analyzed the ways that particular realms of human behavior become independent, with their own organization, personnel, buildings, rules, subcultures, and so on.  Religion took on such an independent institutional life with the rise of priesthoods and temples in the early states.  Politics too developed with the early states, as did the military.  Science became a truly independent realm only much later.  Only since the mid-19^th century has it become organizationally and intellectually independent of religion, philosophy, politics, and so on.  It is not wholly independent yet (as science studies continually remind us).  However, it is independent enough that we can speak of the gap between science and religion (Gould 1999).  This gap was nonexistent in traditional cultures—including the western world before 1700 or even 1800.  Many cultures, including early modern European and Chinese, had developed a sense of opposing natural to supernatural or spiritual explanations, but there were no real separate institutional spheres based on the distinction.

However, we can back-project this distinction on other cultures for analytic reasons—if we remember we are doing violence to their cultural knowledge systems in the process.  There are reasons why one sometimes wants to dissect.

Inclusive Science

I use “science” to cover systematic human fact-finding about the world, wherever done and however done.  Traditional people all include what we moderns call “supernatural” factors in their explanations.  Thus, we have to take some account of such ideas in our assessment of their sciences (Gonzalez 2001).  This is obviously a very broad and possibly a bit idioyncratic usage, but it allows comparison.  It is imperfect, but alternatives seem worse.

Science is about something—specifically, about knowing more, and perhaps improving the human condition in the process.  The appropriate tests are therefore outcome measures, which are usually quite translatable and comparable between cultures.

I might prefer “sciences,” following Latour (2004) and Eugene Hunn (2008), but I share with Joseph Needham a dedication to the idea of a panhuman search for verifiable knowledge. Since the first hominid figured out how to use fire or chip rock, science has been a human-wide, cumulative venture, responsible for many of the greatest achievements of the human spirit.  Yet the traditions and knowledge systems that feed into it are very different indeed.  Science is a braided river, or, even more graphically, a single river made up of countless separate water molecules.

Science gives us sciences, but is one endeavor.  Attempts to confine scientific methodology to a single positivist bed have not worked, and modern sciences are institutionalized in separate departments, but neither of these things destroys the basic reality and unity of the set of practices devoted to knowledge-seeking.  Even today, in spite of the divergence of the sciences, we have Science magazine and “big science” and a host of other recognitions of a basic system.

All narrow definitions are challenged by the fact that the ancient Romans invented the term “science” (scientia, “things known,” from scire “know”).

The Greek word for science was episteme (shades of Foucault 1970), and the more general words for “knowledge” were sophos “knowledge” and sophia “wisdom, cleverness.”  Sciences, however, were distinguished by the ending –logia, from logos, “word.”  Simpler fields that were more descriptive than analytic ended in –nomos “naming.”  It is interesting that astrology was a science but astronomy a mere “star-naming”!  Another ending was –urgia “handcraft work,” as is chirurgia,the word that became “surgery” in English; it literally means “handwork.”

The Greeks worked terribly hard on most of what we now think of as “the sciences,” from botany to astronomy.  In the western world, they get the major credit for separating science from other knowledges.  Aristotle, in particular, kept his accounts of zoology and physics separate from the more speculative material he called “metaphysics.”  (At least, he probably called it that, though some have speculated that his students labeled that material, giving it a working term that just meant “the stuff that came after [meta, ‘beyond’] the physics stuff in his lectures.”)

The Greeks also gave us philosophia, “love of wisdom”—the higher, rigorous attention to the most basic and hard-to-solve questions.  This word was given its classic denotation and connotation by Plato (Hadot 2002).  They used techne for (mere) craft.  Yet another kind of knowledge was metis—sharp dealing, resourcefulness, street smarts.  The quintessential metic was Odysseus, and east Mediterranean traders are still famous for this ability.

The ancient Greeks (at least after Aristotle) contrasted science, an expert and analytical knowledge of a broad area, with mere craft, techne. This has left us today with an invidious distinction between “science” and “technology” (or “craft”).  The Greeks were less invidious about it.  Arts were usually mere techne, but divine inspiration—the blessing of the Muses that gave us Homer and Praxiteles—went beyond that.  We now think of the Muses as arch Victorian figures of speech, but the ancient Greeks took them seriously.

Allowing the Greeks and Romans their claim to having science makes it impossible to rule out Egyptian and “Chaldean” (Mesopotamian) science, which the Greeks explicitly credited.  Then we have to admit, also, Arab, Persian, and Chinese science, which continued the Greek projects (more or less).  Privileging modern Euro-American science is patently racist.  Before 1200 or 1300 A.D., the Chinese were ahead of the west in most fields.  We can hardly shut them out.  (True, they had no word for “science,” but the nearest equivalent, li xue “study of basic principles,” was as close to our “science” as scientia was at the same point in time.)  Once we have done that, the floodgates are open, and we cannot reasonably rule out any culture’s science.

Words for “science” and scientists in English go back at least to the Renaissance.  The OED attests “science” from 1289.  The word “scientist” was not invented till W. Whewell coined it in 1833, but it merely replaced earlier words: “savant” from the French, or the Latinate coinage “scient,” used as a noun or adjective.  These words had been around since the 1400s.  (“Scient” had become obsolete.)

Thus, I define “science” as systematic, methodical efforts to gain pragmatic and empirical knowledge of the world and to explain this by theories (however wildly wrong the latter may now appear to be). Paleolithic flint-chipping, Peruvian llama herding, and Maya herbal medicine are sciencs, in so far as they are systematized, tested, extended by experience, and shared.  The contrast is with unsystematized observation, random noting of facts, and pure speculation.  In this I agree with scholars of traditional sciences such as Roberto Gonzalez (2001) and Eugene Hunn (2008; see esp. pp. 8-9), as well as Malinowski, who considered any knowledge based on experience and reason to be science, and thus found it everywhere.

The boundaries are vague, but this is inevitable.  “Science” however defined is a fuzzy set.  Even modern laboratory science grades off into rigorous field sciences and into speculative sciences like astrophysics.

Science is based on theories, which I define as broad ideas about the world that generate predictions and explanations when applied to pragmatic, empirical engagement with particular environments.  This allows me to consider folk views such as the beliefs supporting shamanism along with modern scientific theories.

On the other hand, in small-scale traditional cultures, cutting off “science” creates an artificial distinction.  Such societies do not separate science from other knowledge, including what we in English would call “religion” or “spiritualism,” and analysis does violence to this.  It is worth doing anyway for some comparative and analytical purposes, but most of the time I find it preferable to talk about “knowledge.”  For most purposes, I am much more interested in understanding traditional knowledge systems holistically. For some purposes, however, we need to analyze, and all we can do is live with the violence, remembering that “analysis” literally means “splitting up.”

Chinese, Arab, Persian, and Indian civilizations, and probably Maya and Aztec ones, did have self-conscious, cumulative traditions of fact-seeking and explanation-seeking.  The Near Eastern cultures actually based their science on the Greeks, and even used the Greek words.  Both “science” and “philosophy,” variously modified, were taken into Arabic and other medieval Near Eastern languages.  The Chinese were farther afield, as will appear below, but Joseph Needham was clearly right in studying their efforts as part of the world scientific tradition.  However, it is also necessary to study the ways that traditional Chinese knowledge and knowledge-seeking was not like western sciences.  I will argue at length, below, that both Needham and his critics are right, and that to understand Chinese knowledge of the environment we must analyze it both on its own terms and as scientific practice.

Finally, there is an inevitable tendency to back-project our modern views of the world on earlier days.  Astrology and alchemy seemed as reasonable in the Renaissance as astronomy and chemistry.  There was simply no reason to think that changing dirt into gold was any harder than changing iron ore into iron.

There was even evidence that it could work.  Idries Shah (1956) gives an account by an observant traveler of an alchemist changing dirt to gold in modern central Asia.  The meticulous account makes it clear that he was actually separating finely disseminated gold out of alluvial deposits, but he was evidently quite convinced that he was really transforming the dirt.  More recently, reconstructed alchemical experiments turn silver yellow (superficially, however).  Apparently alchemists were fooled into thinking this was a real change, or at least could be developed into one (Reardon 2011).  Scientists are thus now studying alchemy to see just what those early chemists were doing.  They were not just wasting their time.  They had high hopes and were not unreasonable.  Ultimately they proved wrong, and duly hung up their signboards.  Such is progress—and they were not the last to have to give up on a failed project; we do it every day now.

The old “Whig history” that starts with Our Perfect Modern Situation and works back—seeing history as a long battle of Good (i.e. what led to us perfect moderns) vs. Evil—is long abandoned, but we cannot avoid some presentism (Mora-Abadía 2009).  Obviously, even my use of the term “science” for TEK is something of a presentist strategy.  Thus “science” is a rather arbitrary term.  I shall use it, with some discomfort, for that part of knowledge which claims to be preeminently dedicated to learning empirical and pragmatic things about environments and about lives.

Overly Restrictive Definitions of “Science”

I strictly avoid using it to mean solely lab-based activities.  I follow the Greeks in using it for Aristotle’s legacy, not just for the world of case/control, hypothesis-generation, hypothesis-testing, and formal theory.  This form of science was canonized by Ernst Mach and others in the late 19^th century.  This usage is inadequate for many reasons.  Among other things, it relegates Aristotle, Galen, Tao Hongjing, Boyle, Li Shizhen, Harvey, Newton, Linnaeus, and even Lyell and Darwin to the garbage can.  Mach certainly did not want this; he was trying to improve scientific practice, not deny his heritage.

We can hardly balk at the errors of traditional societies.  Much of the science I learned as an undergraduate is now known to be wrong:  stable continents, Skinnerian learning theory, “climax communities” in ecology, and so on.  We allow them into our histories of science, along with phlogiston, ether, humoral medicine, the mind-body dichotomy, and other wrong theories once sacrosanct in Western science.

In my field work in Hong Kong, I found that many Chinese explained earthquakes as dragons shaking in the earth.  Other Chinese explained earthquakes as waves caused by turbulent flow of qi (breath, or vital energy) in the earth.  The Chipewyans of north Canada explain earthquakes as the thrashing of a giant fish (Sharp 1987, 2001).  When I was an undergraduate, most American geologists did not yet accept the fact that earthquakes are usually caused by plate tectonics, and instead invoked scientific explanations just as mystical and factually dubious as the dragons and fish.  They blamed earthquakes on the earth shrinking, or the weight of stream sediments—anything except plate tectonics (Oreskes 1999, 2001).    One should never be too proud about inferred variables inside a black box.

Unlike emotions, which have clear biological foundations, scientific systems can be seen as genuinely culturally constructed from the ground up.  Chimpanzees make termite-sticks and leaf cups, but the gap between these and space satellites is truly far greater than the gap between chimp rage and human anger.  It is true that chimps in laboratory situations can figure out how to put sticks together to get bananas, and otherwise display the basics of insight and hypothesis-testing (de Waal 1996; Kohler 1927), but they do not invent systematic and comprehensive schemes for understanding the whole world.  People, including those in the simplest hunter-gatherer societies, all do.

Many historians restrict “science” to the activity popularized in western Europe by Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Harvey, Boyle, and others in the 16^th and 17^th centuries.  This usage is considerably more reasonable.  The “Scientific Revolution” involved a really distinctive moment or Foucaultian “rupture” that led to new worlds.  However, much excellent work has recently cut it down to size.  In fact, we now know that calling it a “revolution” drew a somewhat arbitrary line between these sages and their immediate forebears.  They were self-consciously “Aristotelian” against the “Platonism” of said forebears, but this looks very much less distinctive when one considers Arab and Persian science.  Aristotelianism had come to Europe from the Arabs in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, and the “revolution” was really a slow evolution (Gaukroger 2006).

A valuable term for the unified tradition that embraces European science since 1500 and world science since 1700 or 1800 is “rapid discovery science” (Collins 1998).  Rapid discovery science is very different from traditional science, but the difference is one of degree at least as much as of  kind.

The period from Galileo to 1800 may be defined as early modern science. Unlike both its primarily Near Eastern ancestors and its post-1800 descendent modern international science, it was largely a European enterprise.  Many criticisms have been made of its Eurocentric biases.  It did indeed display a rather distinctive and basically European worldview:  dualistic, excessively rational, dismissing or belittling the rest of the world, and more than somewhat sexist.  However, as we shall see, it depended in critical ways on nonwestern science for both data and ideas.  It was never isolated and could never really ignore the rest of the world’s knowledges.

A common terminological use is to restrict “science” to modern laboratory-based scientific practice, and the most closely similar field sciences.  This science develops formal theories (preferably stated in mathematic terms), generates hypotheses from the theories, tests these according to a formal methodology, discusses the results, and awaits cross-confirmation by other labs.  The problem with this usage is that it rules out virtually all science done before the 19^th century.  In the early 20^th century, Viennese logicians attempted to theorize such science as exceedingly formal, even artificial, procedure, with very strict rules of verification or—more famously—“falsification” (Popper 1959).

But this rules out not only all earlier science but even most science done today.  Field science can’t make the grade.  As Stephen Jay Gould (e.g. 1999) often pointed out, paleontology does not qualify.  We can hardly experiment in the lab with Tyrannosaurus rex.  Indeed, historians and social scientists (such as Thomas Kuhn, 1962) have repeatedly pointed out that few lab men and women follow their own principles—they go with hunches, have accidents, and so on.  The most hard-core positivist scientists admit this happily in their memoirs (see e.g. Skinner 1959).  Thus, I shall not use “science” in the above sense.  I shall use the term modern laboratory science for the general sort of science idealized by the positivists, but without losing sight of the fact that even it does not follow positivist guidelines.

However, no one can deny that there was a general movement in the 19^th century to make science and the sciences more self-conscious, more rigorous, more clearly divided, and more methodologically consistent (see e.g. Rudwick 2005 on geology.)  Contrary to much blather, this was not a “European” enterprise.  It already involved people on both American continents, and it very soon included Asians.  Modern medicine, in particular, owes as much to Wu Lien-teh for his studies of plague and to Kiyoshi Shiga for his studies of dysentery as it does to any but the greatest of the European doctors.  (Shiga won what may be the least enviable immortalization in history, as the namesake of shigellosis.)  Moreover, many of the European founders did their key work in the tropics, as in the pathbreaking work of Patrick Manson and Ronald Ross on malaria and Walter Reed on yellow fever.  Therefore, I will use the term modern international science to refer to the new, self-conscious enterprise that began after 1800.

As Arturo Escobar says, “…an ensemble of Western, modern cultural forces…has unceasingly exerted its influence—often its dominance—over most world regions.  These forces continue to operate through the ever-changing interaction of forms of European thought and culture, taken to be universally valid, with the frequently subordinated knowledges and cultural practices of many non-European groups throughout the world” (Escobar 2008:3).  Escobar, among many others, speaks of “decolonializing” knowledge, and I hope to contribute to that.

Euro-American rational science arose in a context of technological innovation, imperial expansion, power jockeying (as Foucault reminded us), political radicalism, and economic dynamism.  We now know, thanks to modern histories and ethnographies of science, that European science was and is a much messier, more human enterprise than most laypersons think.  The cool, rational, detached scientist with his (sic!) laboratory, controlled experiments, and exquisitely perfect mathematical models is rare indeed outside of old-fashioned hagiographies of scientists.  Rarer still is the lackey of patriarchal power, creating phony science simply to enslave.  (Rare, but far from nonexistent; one need think only of the sorry history of racism and “scientific” sexism, up to and including Lawrence Summers’ famous dismissal of women’s math abilities.  One could always argue that Summers is an economist, not a scientist.)

More nuanced conclusions emerge from the history of science (as told by e.g. Martin Rudwick 2007, 2008) and the ethnography of science (e.g. Bruno Latour 2004, 2005).  These show modern international science as a very human enterprise.  Most of us who have worked in the vineyard can only agree.  (I was initially trained as a biologist and have done some biological research, so I am not ignorant of the game.)  These accounts bring modern science much closer to the traditional ecological knowledge of the Maya, the Haida, or the Chumash.  I have no hesitation about using the word “science” to describe any and all cultures’ pragmatic knowledge of the environment (see below, and Gonzalez 2001).

One can often infer the theory behind traditional or early empirical knowledge.  Sometimes it is quite sophisticated, and one wishes the writer had been less modest.  Therefore, a solid, factual account should not be dismissed because it “doesn’t speak to theory issues” until one has thought over the implications of the author’s method and conclusion.  This is as true if the account comes from a Maya woodsman or Chinese herbalist as it is when the account comes from a laboratory scientist.

We thus need a definition of “science” broad enough to include “ethnoscience” traditions.  The accumulated knowledge and wisdom of humanity is being lost and neglected more than ever, in spite of the tiny and perhaps dwindling band of anthropologists who care about it.  The fact that a group does not have a “thing” called “science,” and even the fact that the group believes in mile-long fish and dinosaur-sized otters (as do the Chipewyan of Canada; Sharp 2001), does not render their empirically verifiable knowledge unscientific.

Considering all folk explanations, and classifying the traditional ones as “religion,” Edward Tylor classically explained magic and religion as, basically, failed science (Tylor 1871).  He came up with a number of stories explaining how religious beliefs could have been reasonably inferred by fully rational people who had no modern laboratory devices to make sense of their perceptions.  Malinowski’s portrayal of religion as emotion-driven was part of a general reaction against Tylor in the early 20^th century.

Indeed, Tylor discounted emotion too much.  On the whole, however, there is still merit in Tylor’s work.  There is also merit in Malinowski’s.  Science, like religion and magic, partakes of the rational, the emotional, and the social.

Basic Science:  Beyond Kuhn and Kitcher

“I can’t remember a single first formed hypothesis which had not after a time to be given up or greatly modified.  This has naturally led me to distrust greatly deductive reasoning in the mixed sciences.”  (Darwin, from his notebooks, quoted Kagan 2006:76)

All my life, I have been fascinated with scientific knowledge—that is, knowledge of the world derived from deliberate, careful, double-checked reflection on experience, rather than from blind tradition, freewheeling speculation, or logic based on a priori principles.

Thomas Kuhn’s classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, anticipated by the brilliant work of Ludwig Fleck on medical history) concentrated on biases and limits within scientific practice.  Kuhn was attending to real problems with science itself.  This contrasts with, say, critiques of racism and sexism, which are necessary and valuable but wre already anticipated by Francis Bacon’s critiques of bias-driven pseudoscience (Bacon 1901, orig. ca. 1620).

From all this arose a great change in how “truth” is established.  Instead of going for pure unbiased observation, or for falsification of errors, we now go for “independent confirmation.”  David Kronenfeld (personal communication, 2005) adds:  “Science itself is also an attitude—probing, trying to ‘give nature a chance to say no,’ and so forth….science is not a thing of individuals but is a system of concepts and of people.”

A result is not counted, a finding is not taking seriously, unless it is cross-confirmed, preferably by people working in a different lab or field and from a different theoretical framework.  I certainly don’t believe my own findings unless they are cross-confirmed.  (See Kitcher 1993; for much more, Martin and MacIntyre 1994.)

Indeed, the new face of positivism demands  what is called VV&A:  “Verification (your model correctly captures the processes you are studying), validation (your code correctly implements your model) and authentication (some group or individual blesses your simulation as being useful for some intended purpose)” (Jerrold Kronenfeld, email of Jan. 7, 2010).  This is jargon in the “modeling” world, but it applies across the board.  Any description of a finding must be checked to see that it is correct, that the descriptions of it in the literature are accurate, and that advances knowledge, strengthens or qualifies theory, or is otherwise useful to science.

In short, science is necessarily done by a number of people, all dedicated to advancing knowledge, but all dedicated to subjecting every new idea or finding to a healthy skepticism.  We now see science as a social process.  Truth is established, but slowly, through debate and ongoing research.

Naïve empiricist agendas assume we can directly perceive “reality,” and that it is transparent—we can know it just by looking.  We can tell the supernatural from the natural.  This is where we begin to see real problems with these agendas, and the whole “modernist program” that they may be said to represent.  Telling the supernatural from the natural may have looked easy in Karl Popper’s day.  It seemed less clear before him, and it seems less clear today.

We have many well-established facts that were once outrageous hypotheses:  the earth is an oblate spheroid (not flat), blood circulates, continents drift, the sun is only a small star among billions of others.  We also have immediate hypotheses that directly account for or predict the facts.  We know an enormous amount more than we did ten years ago, let alone a thousand years, and we can do a great deal more good and evil, accordingly.

However, science has moved to higher and higher levels of abstraction, inferring more and more remote and obscure intervening variables.  It now presents a near-mystical cosmology of multidimensional strings, dark matter, dark energy, quark chromodynamics, and the rest.  Even the physicist Brian Greene has to admit:  “Some scientists argue vociferously that a theory so removed from direct empirical testing lies in the realm of philosophy or theology, but not physics” (Greene 2004:352).

To people like me, unable to understand the proofs, modern physics is indeed an incomprehensible universe I take on faith—exactly like religion.  The difference between it and religion is not that physics is evidence-based.  Astrophysics theories, especially such things as superstring and brane theory, are not based on direct evidence, but on highly abstract modeling.  The only difference I can actually perceive is that science represents forward speculation by a small, highly trained group, while religion represents a wide sociocultural communitas. Religion also has beautiful music and art, as a result of the communitas-emotion connection, but I suppose someone somewhere has made great art out of superstring theory.

The universe is approximately 96% composed of dark matter and energy—matter and energy we cannot measure, cannot observe, cannot comprehend, and, indeed, cannot conceptualize at all (Greene 2004).  We infer its presence from its rather massive effects on things we can see.  For all we know, dark matter and energy are God, or the Great Coyote in the Sky (worshiped by the Chumash and Paiute).

On a smaller and more human scale, we have the “invisible hand” (Smith 1776) of the market—a market which assumes perfect information, perfect rationality, and so on, among its dealers.  The abstract “market” is no more real than the Zapotec Earth God, and has the same function:  serving as black-box filler in an explanatory model.  Of course Smith was quite consciously, and ironically, used a standard theological term for God.

The tendency to use “science” to describe truth-claims and “religion” to describe untestable beliefs is thus normative, not descriptive.  It is a rather underhanded attempt to confine religion to the realm of the untestable and therefore irrelevant.  (This objection was made by almost every reviewer of Gould 1999.)

We have abstract black-box mechanisms in psychology (e.g. Freudian dynamic personality structure), anthropology (“culture”), and sociology (“class,” “discourse,” “network”).  Darwin’s theory of evolution had a profoundly mysterious black box, in which the actual workings of selection lay hidden, until modern genetics shone light into the box in the 1930s and 1940s.  Geology similarly depended on mysticism, or at least on wildly improbable mechanisms, to get from rocks to mountains, until continental drift showed the way.  Human ability to withstand disease was for long a totally black box.  The usual wild speculations filled it until Elie Metchnikoff’s brilliant work revealed the immune-response system, and gave us all yogurt into the bargain.  It was Metchnikoff who popularized it as a health food, having seen that people in his native Bulgaria ate much yogurt and lived long.

At present, organized “science” in the United States is full of talk about “complex adaptive systems” that are “self-organizing” and may or may not have an unmeasurable quality called “resilience.”  They may be explained by “chaos theory.”  All this is substantially mystical, and sometimes clearly beyond the pale of reality; no, a butterfly flapping in Brazil can not cause a tornado in Kansas, by any normal meaning of the word “cause.”  “Self-organizing” refers to ice crystals growing in a freezing pool, ecological webs evolving, and human communities and networks forming—as if one could explain all these by the same process!  In fact, they are simply equated by a singularly loose metaphor.

When traditional peoples infer things like superstrings and self-organizing systems, we label those inferences “beliefs in the supernatural.”  The traditional people themselves never seem to do this labeling; they treat spirit forces and spirit beings as part of their natural world.  This is exactly the same as our treating dark energy, the market, and self-organization as “natural.”

Surely if they stopped and thought, the apologists for science would recognize that some unpredictable but large set of today’s inferred black-box variables will be a laughingstock 20 years from now—along with phlogiston, luminiferous ether (Greene 2004), and the angle of repose.

More:  they would have to admit that a science that is all correct and all factually proved out is a dead science!  Science is theories and hypotheses, wild ideas and crazy speculation, battles of verification and falsification.  Facts (whatever they are) make up part of science, but in a sense they are but the dead residue of science that has happened and gone on.  (See Hacking 1999; Philip Kitcher 1993.  These writers have done a good job of dealing with the fact that science is about truth, but is ongoing practice rather than final truth.  See Anderson 2000 for further commentary on Hacking.)

The history of science is littered with disproved hypotheses.  Mistakes are the heart and soul of science.  Science progresses by making guesses (hopefully educated ones) about the world, and testing them.  Inevitably, if these guesses are specific and challenging enough to be interesting, many of them will be wrong.  This is one of the truths behind Karl Popper’s famous claim that falsification, not verification, is the life of science (Popper 1948).

Science is not about established facts.  Established, totally accepted truth may be a result of science, but real science has already gone beyond it into the unknown.  Science is a search.

Premodern and traditional sciences made the vast majority of their errors from assuming that active and usually conscious agents, not mindless processes, were causal.  If they did not postulate dragons in the earth and gods in the sky, they postulated physis (originally a dynamic flux that produced things, not just the physical world), “creative force” (vis creatrix), or the Tao.

Today, most errors seem to come not from this but from three other sources.

First, scientists love, and even need, to assume that the world is stable and predictable.  This leads them into thinking it is more simple and stable than it really is.  Hence motionless continents (Oreskes 1998), Newtonian physics with its neat predictable vectors, climax communities in ecology, maximum sustainable yield theory in fisheries, S-R theory in psychology, phlogiston, and many more.

Second, scientists are hopeful, sometimes too much so.  From this come naïve behaviorism, from a hope for the infinite perfectability of humanity (see Pinker 2003); humanistic psychology (with the same fond hope); astrology; manageable “stress” as causing actually hopeless diseases (Taylor 1989); and the medieval Arab belief that good-tasting foods must be good for you (Levey 1966).

Third, some scientists like to take out their hatreds and biases on their subjects, and pretend that their fondest hates are objective truth.  This corrupted “science” gave us racism, sexism, and the old idea that homosexuality is “pathological.”  Discredited “scientific” ideas about children, animals, sexuality in general (Foucault 1978), and other vulnerable entities are only slightly less obvious.

It gave us the idea (now, I hope, laid definitively to rest) that nonhuman animals are mere machines that do not feel or think.  It gives us the pathologization of normal behavior.  Much or most diagnosed ADHD in the United States, for instance, is clearly not real ADHD; other countries have only about 10% our rate.  Most extreme of all ridiculous current beliefs, and thus most popular of all, is the idea that people are innately selfish, evil, violent, or otherwise horrific, and only a thin veneer of culture holds them in place.  This has given us Hobbes’ state of nature, Nietzsche’s innate will to power, Freud’s id, Dawkins’ selfish gene, and the extreme form of  “rational self-interest” that assumed people act only for immediate selfish advantage.  Three seconds of observation in any social milieu (except, perhaps, a prison riot) would have disproved all this, but no one seemed to look.

Given all the above, critics of science have shown, quite correctly, that all too much of modern “science” is really social bias dressed up in fancy language.

An issue of concern in anthropology is the ways that, in modern society, some mistaken beliefs are classified as “pseudoscience,” some as “religion,” and some merely as “controversial/inaccurate/disproved science.”   In psychology, parapsychology is firmly in the “pseudoscience” category, but racism (specifically, “racial” differences in IQ) remains “scientific,” though equally disproved and ridiculous.  Freudian theory, now devastated by critiques, is “pseudoscience” to many but is “science”—even if superseded science—to many others.  It is obvious that such labels are negotiable, and are negotiated.

The respectability and institutional home of the propounder of a theory is clearly a major determinant.  A mistake, if made at Harvard, is science; the same mistake made outside of academia is pseudoscience.  Pseudoscience is validly used for quite obvious shucks masquerading as science, but nonsense propounded by a Harvard or Stanford professor is all too apt to be taken seriously—especially if it fits with popular prejudices.  One recalls the acceptance as “science” of the transparently ridiculous race psychology of Stanford professor Thomas Jukes and Harvard professor Richard Herrnstein (see Herrnstein and Murray 1994, where, for instance, the authors admit that Latinos are biologically diverse, mixed, and nonhomogeneous, and then go right on to assign them a racial IQ of 89).

All this is not meant to give any support to the critics of science who claim “it” (whatever “it” is) can only be myth or mere social storytelling.  It is also not meant to claim that traditional knowledge is as well-conceived and well-verified as good modern science.  It is meant to show that traditional knowledge-seeking and modern science are the same enterprise.  Let us face it:  modern science does better at finding abstruse facts and proving out difficult causal chains.  We now know a very great deal about what causes illness, earthquakes, comets, and potatoes; we need not appeal to witchcraft or the Great Coyote.  But the traditional peoples were not ignorant, and the modern scientists do not know it all, so we are all in the same book, if not always on the same page.

Thus, science is the process of coming to general conclusions that are accurate enough to be used, on the basis of the best evidence that can be obtained.  Inevitably, explanatory models will be developed to account for the ways the facts connect to the conclusions, and these models will often be superseded in due course; that is how science progresses.

“Best evidence” is a demanding criterion, but not as demanding as “absolute proof.”  One is required to do the best possible—use appropriate methods, check the literature, get verification by others using other models or equipment.  Absolute proof is more than we can hope for in this world (Kitcher 1993).

Purely theoretical models provide a borderline case.  Even when they cannot be tested, they may qualify as science in many areas (e.g. theoretical astrophysics, where experimental testing is notoriously difficult).  Fortunately, they are usually testable with data.

The need to test hypotheses with hard evidence does not rule out the study of history.  Archaeological finds showed that the spice trade of the Roman Empire was indeed extensive.  This validated J. Miller’s hypothesis of extensive spice trade through the Red Sea area (Miller 1969), and invalidated Patricia Crone’s challenge thereto (Crone 1987).  We are, hopefully, in the business of developing Marx’ “science of history,” as well as other human sciences.

We are also now aware that “mere description” isn’t “mere.”  It always has some theory behind it, whether we admit it or not (Kitcher 1993; Kuhn 1962).  Even a young child’s thoughts about the constancy of matter or the important differences between people and furniture are based on partially innate theories of physics and biology (see e.g. Ross 2004).  Thus, traditional ecological knowledge can be quite sophisticated theoretically, though lacking in modern scientific ways of stating the theories in question.

Science and Popular “Science”

It thus appears that science is indeed a social institution.  But what kind of social institution is it?  Four different ones are called “science.”

First, we have the self-conscious search for knowledge—facts, theories, methodologies, search procedures, and knowledge systems.  This is the wide definition that allows us to see all truth-seeking, experiential, verification-conscious activities as “science,” from Maya agriculture to molecular genetics.  This can be divided into two sub-forms.  First, we can examine and compare systems as they are, mistakes and all—taking into account Chinese beliefs about sacred fish, Northwest Coast beliefs about bears that marry humans, Siberian shamans’ flights to other worlds, early 20^th century beliefs in static continents, and so on.  Second, we can also look at all systems in the cold light of modern factual analysis, dismissing alike the typhoon-causing sacred fish and the tornado-causing Amazonian butterfly.  Fair is fair, and an international standard not kind to sacred fish cannot be merciful to exaggerated and misapplied “western” science either.

Second, it is “what scientists do”—not things like breathing and eating, but things they do qua scientists (e.g. Latour 2004).  This would include not only truth-seeking but a lot of grantsmanship, nasty rivalries, job politics, and even outright faking of data and plagiarism of others’ work.

Third, it is science as an institution:  granting agencies, research parks, university science faculties, hi-tech firms.  Many people use “science” this way, unaware that they are ruling off the turf the vast majority of human scientific activities, including the work of Newton, Boyle, Harvey, and Darwin, none of whom had research institutes.

Fourth, we have science as power/knowledge.  From the Greeks to Karl Marx and George Orwell, milder forms of this claim have been made, and certainly a great deal of scientific speculation is self-serving.  Science does, however, produce knowledge that stands the tests of verification and usually of utility.  It is our best hope of improving our lives and, now, of saving the world.

What is not science is perhaps best divided into four heads.

First, dogma, blind tradition, conformity, social and cultural convention, visionary and idiosyncratic knowledge, and bias—the “idols” of Bacon (1901).  These have sometimes replaced genuine inquiry within a supposedly scientific tradition.

Second, ordinary daily experience, which clearly works but is not being tested or extended—just being used and re-used.  Under this head comes explicitly non-“sciency” but still very useful material: autobiographies, collected texts, art, poetry and song.  These qualify as useful data, if only as worthwhile insights into someone’s mind.  All this material deserves attention; it is raw material that science can use.

Third, material that is written to be taken seriously as a claim about the world, but is not backed up by anything like acceptable evidence.  In addition to the obvious cases such as today’s astrology and alchemy, this would include most interpretive anthropology, especially postmodern anthropology.  Too many social science journal articles consist of mere “theory” without data, or personal stories intended to prove some broad point about identity or ethnicity or some other very complex and difficult topic. However, the best interpretive anthropology is well supported by evidence; consider, for example, Lila Abu-Lughod’s Veiled Sentiments (1985), or Steven Feld’s Sound and Sentiment (1982).

Fourth, pure advocacy:  politics and moral screeds.  This is usually backed up by evidence, but the evidence is selected by lawyers’ criteria.  Only such material as is consistent with the writer’s position is presented, and there is very minimal fact-checking.  If material consistent with an opposing position is presented, it is undercut in every way possible.  Typically, opponents are represented in straw-man form, and charged with various sins that may or may not have anything to do with reality or with the subject at hand; “any stick will do to beat a dog.”  Once again, Bacon (1901) was already well aware of this form of non-science.

The Problem of Truth

The problem of truth, and whether science can get at it in any meaningful way, has led to a spate of epistemological writings in anthropology, science studies, and history of science.  These writings cover the full range of possibilities.

The classic empiricist position—we can and do know real truths about the world—is robustly upheld by people like Richard Dawkins, whose absolute certainty not only extends to his normal realm (genetics; Dawkins 1976, a book widely criticized) but to religion, philosophy, and indeed everything he can find to write about.  He is absolutely positive that there are no supernatural beings or forces (Dawkins 2006).  He has said “Show me a relativist at 30,000 feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite” (quoted in Franklin 1995:173)  Sarah Franklin has mildly commented on this bit of wisdom:  “The very logic that equates ‘I can fly’ with ‘science must be an unassailable form of truth’ and furthermore assumes such an equation to be self-evident, all but demands cultural explication” (Franklin 1995:173).

At the other end of the continuum is the most extreme form of the “strong programme” in science studies, which holds that science is merely a set of myths, no different from the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis or any other set of myths about the cosmos.  Its purpose, like the purposes of many other myths, is to maintain the strong in power.  It is just another power-serving deception.  Since it cannot have any more truth-value than a dream or hallucination, it cannot have any other function; it must maintain social power.  This allowed Sandra Harding to maintain that “Newton’s Principia Mathematica is a rape manual” because male science “rapes female nature.”  This reaches Dawkins’ level of unconscious self-satire, and has been all too widely quoted (to the point where I can’t trace the real reference).  Dawkins might point out that Harding surely wrote it on a computer, sent it by mail or email to a publisher, and had it published by modern computerized typography.

Bad enough, but far more serious is the fact that the “strong programme” depends on assuming that people, social power, and social injustice are real.  Harding’s particularly naïve application of it also assumes that males, females, and rape are not only real but are unproblematic categories—yet mathematics is not.  How the strong programmers can be so innocently realist about an incredibly difficult concept like “power,” while denying that 2 + 2 = 4, escapes me.

Clearly, these positions are untenable, but that leaves a vast midrange.

The empiricist end of the continuum would, I think, be anchored by John Locke (1979/1697) and the Enlightenment philosophers who (broadly speaking) followed him.  Locke was not only aware of human information processing biases and failures; his account of them is amazingly modern and sophisticated.  It could go perfectly well into a modern psychology textbook.  He realized that people believe the most fantastic nonsense, using a variety of traditional beliefs as proof.  But he explains these as due to natural misinference, corrected by self-awareness and careful cross-checking.  He concluded that our senses process selectively but do not lie outright.  Thus the track from the real world to our knowledge of it is a fairly short and straight one—but only if we use reason, test everything, and check deductions against reality.

Locke’s optimism was almost immediately savaged by David Hume (1969 [1739-40]), who concluded that we cannot know anything for certain; that all theories of cause are pure unprovable inference; that we cannot even be sure we exist; and that all morals and standards are arbitrary.  This total slash-and-burn job was done in his youth, and has a disarming cheerfulness and exuberance about it, as if he were merely clearing away some minor problems with everyday life.  This tone has helped it stay afloat through the centuries, anchoring the skeptical end of the continuum.

Immanuel Kant (1978, 2007) took Hume seriously, and admitted that all we have is our experience—and maybe not even that.  At least we have our sensory impressions: the basic experiences of seeing, smelling, hearing, feeling, and tasting.  They combine to produce full experiences, informed by emotion, cognition, and memory of earlier experiences.  This more or less substitutes “I experience, therefore maybe I am” for Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”; Kant realized not only that thought is not necessarily a given, but, more importantly, that sensory experience is prior to thought in some basic way.  He worked outward from assuming that experience was real and that our memory of it extending backward through time was also real.  Perhaps the time itself was illusory.  Certainly our experience of time and space is basic and is not the same as Time and Space.  And perhaps the remembered events never happened.  But at least we experience the memory.  From this he could tentatively conclude that there is a world-out-there that we are experiencing, and that its consistency and irreducible complexity make it different from dreams and hallucinations.

In practice, he took reality as a given, and devoted most of his work to figuring out how the mind worked and how we could deduce standards of morality, behavior, and judgment from that.  He was less interested in saving reality from Hume than in saving morality.  This need not concern us here.  What matters much more is his realization that the human brain inevitably gives structure to the universe—makes it simpler, neater, more patterned, and more systematic, the better to understand and manage it.  Obviously, if we took every new perception as totally new and unprecedented, we would never get anything done.

Kant therefore catalogued many of the information-processing biases that have concerned psychologists since. Notable were his “principle of aggregation” and “principle of differentiation,” the most basic information-processing heuristics (Kant 1978).  The former is our tendency to lump similar things into one category; the latter is our tendency to see somewhat different things as totally different.  In other words, we tend to push shades of gray into black and white.  This leads us to essentialize and reify abstract categories.  Things that refuse to fit in seem uncanny.  More generally, people see patterns in everything, and try to give a systematic, structured order to everything.  From this grew the whole structuralist pose in psychology and anthropology, most famously advocated in the latter field by Claude Lévi-Strauss (e.g. 1962).

Hume and Kant were also well aware—as were many even before them—of the human tendency to infer agency by default.  We assume that anything that happens was done by somebody, until proven otherwise.  Hence the universal belief in supernaturals and spirits.  This and the principle of aggregation gives us “other-than-human persons,” the idea that trees, rocks, and indeed all beings are people like us with consciousness and intention.

Kant’s focus on experience and the ways we process it were basic to social science; in fact, social science is as Kantian as biology is Darwinian.  However, Kant still leaves us with the old question.  His work reframes it:  How much of what we “know” is actually true?  How much is simply the result of information-processing bias?

People could take this in many directions.  At the empiricist end was Ernst Mach, who developed “positivism” in the late 19^th century.  Well aware of Kant, Mach advocated rigorous experimentation under maximally controlled conditions, and systematic replication by independent investigators, as the surest way to useful truths.  The whole story need not concern us here, except to note that controlled, specified procedures and subsequent replication for confirmation or falsification have become standard in science (Kitcher 1993).  Note that positivism is not the naïve empiricist realism that postmodernists and Dawkinsian realists think it is.  It is, in fact, exactly the opposite.  Also, positivism does not simply throw the door open to racist and sexist biases, as the Hardings of the world allege.  It does everything possible to prevent bias of any kind.  If it fails, the problem is that it was done badly.

Kant did not get deeply into the issue of social and political influences on belief, but he was aware of them, as was every thinker from Plato on down.  Kantians almost immediately explored the issue.  By far the most famous was Marx, whose theory of consciousness and ideology is well known; basically, it holds that people’s beliefs are conditioned by their socioeconomic class.  Economics lies behind belief, and also behind nonsense hypocritically propagated by the powerful to keep themselves in power.

By the end of the 19^th century, this was generalized by Nietzsche and others to a concern with the effects of power in general—not just the power of the elite class—on beliefs.  This idea remained a minority position until the work of Michel Foucault in the 1960s and 1970s.  Foucault is far too complex to discuss here, but his basic idea is simple:  established knowledge in society is often, if not always, “power/knowledge”:  information management in the service of power.  Foucault feared and hated any power of one person over another; he was a philosophic anarchist.  He saw all such sociopolitical power as evil.  He also saw it as the sole reason why we “know” and believe many things, especially things that help in controlling others.  He was especially attracted to areas where science is minimal and need for control is maximal:  mental illness, sexuality, education, crime control.  When he began writing, science had only begun to explore these areas, and essentially did not exist in the crime-control field.  Mischief expanded to fill the void; there is certainly no question that the beliefs about sex, women, and sexuality that passed as “science” berore the days of Kinsey had everything to do with keeping women down and nothing to do with truth.  Since his time, mental illness and its treatment, as well as sexuality, have been made scientific (though far from perfectly known), but crime control remains exactly where it was when Foucault wrote, and, for that matter, where it was when Hammurabi wrote his code.

A generation of critics like Sandra Harding concluded that science had no more grasp on truth than religion did.  Common such “science” certainly was; typical it was not.  By the time the postmodernists wrote, serious science had reached even to sex and gender issues, with devastating effects on old beliefs.  The postmodernists were flogging a dead horse.  Often, they kept up so poorly on actual science that they did not realize this.  Those who did realize it moved their research back into history.  Finding that the sex manuals of the 19^th century were appalling examples of power/knowledge was easy.  The tendency to overgeneralize, and see all science as more of the same, was irresistible to many.  Hence the assumption that Newton and presumably all other scientists were mere purveyors of yet more sexist and racist nonsense.

A “strong programme” within science studies holds that science is exactly like religion: a matter of wishes and dreams, rather than reality.  This is going too far.  Though this idea is widely circulated in self-styled “progressive” circles, it is an intensely right-wing idea.  It stems from Nazi and proto-Nazi thought and ideology (including the thought of the hysterically anti-Semitic Nietzsche, and later of Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man, both committed and militant Nazis, and influenced also by the right-wing philosopher and early Nazi-sympathizer Paul Ricoeur).  It is deployed today not only by academic elites but also by the fundamentalist extremists who denounce Darwinian evolution as just another origin myth.  The basically fascist nature of the claim is made clear by such modern right-wing advocates as Gregg Easterbrook (2004), who attacked the Union of Concerned Scientists for protesting against the politicization of science under the Bush administration.  Easterbrook makes the quite correct point that the Union of Concerned Scientists is itself a politically activist group, but then goes on to maintain that, since scientific claims are used for political reasons, the claims are themselves purely political.  He thus confuses, for example, the fact that global warming due to greenhouse gases is now a major world problem with the political claims based on this fact; he defends the Bush administration’s attempt to deny or hide the fact.

Postmodernists dismiss science—and sometimes all truth-claims—as just another social or cultural construction, as solipsistic as religion and magic.  Some anthropologists still believe, or at least  maintain, that cultural constructions are all we have or can know.  This is a self-deconstructing position; if it’s true, it isn’t true, because it is only a cultural construction, and the statement that it’s only a cultural construction is only a cultural construction, and we are back with infinite regress and the Liars Paradox.  The extreme cultural-constructionist position is all too close to, and all too usable by, the religious fundamentalists who dismiss science as a “secular humanist religion.”

If we trim off these excesses, we are left with Foucault’s real question:  How much of what we believe, and of what “science” teaches, is mere power/knowledge?  Obviously, and sadly, a great deal of it still is, especially in the fields where real science has been thin and rare.  These include not only education and crime control, but also economics, especially before the rise of behavioral economics in the 1990s.  “Development” is another case (see Dichter 2003; Escobar 2008; Li 2007).  Not only is rather little known in this area, but the factual knowledge accumulated over the years in this area is routinely disregarded by development agents, and the pattern of disregard fits perfectly with Foucaultian theory.  To put it bluntly, “development” is usually about control, not about development.  Indeed, coping strategies for most social problems today are underdetermined by actual scientific research, leaving power/knowledge a clear field.

However, this does not invalidate science.  Where we actually know what we are doing, we do a good job.  Medicine is the most obvious case.  Foucault subjected medicine to the usual withering fire, and so have his followers, but the infant mortality rate under state-of-the-art care has dropped from 500 per thousand to 3 in the last 200 years, the maternal mortality rate from 50-100 per thousand to essentially zero, and life expectancy (again with state-of-the-art health care) has risen from 30 to well over 80.  Somebody must be doing something right.

Medical science largely works.  Medical care, however, lags behind, because the wider context of how we deal with illness and its sociocultural context remains poorly studied, and thus a field where power/knowledge can prevail (Foucault 1973).

Here we may briefly turn to Chinese science to find a real counterpart.  The Chinese, at least, had deliberately designed, government-sponsored case/control experiments as early as the Han Dynasty around 150 BC (Anderson 1988).  The ones we know about were in agriculture (nong; agricultural science is nongxue), and Chinese agriculture developed spectacularly over the millennia.  It is beyond doubt that this idea was extended to medicine; we have some hints, though no real histories.  Unfortunately most of the work was done outside the world of literate scholars.  We know little about how it was done.  A few lights shine on this process now and then over the centuries (e.g. the Qi Min Yao Shu of ca. 550, and the wonderful 17^th-century Tiangong Kaiwu, an enthusiastic work on folk technology).  They show a development that was extremely rigorous technically, extremely rapid at times, and obviously characterized by experiment, analysis, and replication.

In medicine (yi or yixue), the developments were slow, uncertain, and tentative, because of far too much reliance on the book and far too little on experience and observation (see e.g. Unschuld 1986).  However, there was enough development, observation, and test—corpse dissection, testing of drugs, etc.—to render the field scientific.  Even so, we must take note that it was far more tradition-bound and far less innovative than western medicine after 1650 (cf. Needham 2000 and Nathan Sivin’s highly skeptical introduction thereto).   Medical botany and nutrition are probably the most scientific fields, but medical botany ceased to progress around 1600, nutrition around the same time or somewhat later.  It is ironic that Chinese botany froze at almost exactly the same time that European botany took off on its spectacular upward flight.  Li Shizhen’s great Bencao Gangmu of 1593 was more impressive than the European herbals of its time.  Unfortunately, it was China’s last great herbal until international bioscience came to Chinese medicine in the last few decades.  Herbal knowledge more or less froze in place; Chinese traditional doctors still use the Bencao Gangmu. By contrast, European herbals surpassed it within a few years, and kept on improving.

Best of all, thanks to the life work of the incredible scholar H. T. Huang (2000), we know that food processing was fully scientific by any reasonable standard.  Chinese production of everything from soy sauce to noodles was so sophisticated and so quick to evolve in new directions that, in many realms, it remains far ahead of modern international efforts.  Thanks to H. T. and a few others, we can understand in general what is going on, but modern factories cannot equal the folk technologists in actual production.

One thing emerges very clearly from comparison of epistemology and the historical record:  using some form of the empirical or positivist “scientific method” does enormously increase the speed and accuracy of discovery.  Intuition and introspection also have a poor record.  Medieval scholars, both Platonists and Aristotelians, relied on intuition, and did not add much to world science; much of the triumph of the Renaissance and the scientific “revolution” was due to developments in instrumentation and in verification procedures.  Psychologists long ago abandoned introspective methods, since the error rate was extremely high.  Doctors have known this even longer.  The proverb “the doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient” is now many centuries old.

The flaws of the empirical and positivist programs are basically in the direction of oversimplification.  Procedures are routinized.  Mythical “averages” are used instead of individuals or even populations (Kassam 2009).  Diversity is ignored.  Kant’s principles of differentiation and aggregation are applied with a vengeance (cf., again, Kassam 2009, on taxonomy).  The result does indeed allow researcher bias to creep in unless zealously guarded against—as Bacon pointed out.  But, for all these faults, science marches on.  The reason is that the world is fantastically complicated, and we have to simplify it to be able to function in it.  Quick-and-dirty algorithms give way, over time, to more nuanced and detailed ones, but Borges’ one-to-one map of the world remains useless.  A map of the world has to simplify, and then the user’s needs dictate the appropriate scale.

The full interpretive understanding sought by many anthropologists, by contrast, remains a fata morgana.  It is fun to try to understand every detail of everyone’s experience, but even if we could do it (and we can’t even begin) it would be as useless as Borges’ map.

On the other hand, we need that attempt, to bring in the nuances to science and to correct the oversimplifications.  A purely positivist agenda can never be enough.

Case Study:  Yucatec Maya Science

Anthropology is in a particularly good place to test and critique discussions of science, because we are used to dealing with radically different traditions of understanding the world.  Also, we are used to thinking of them as deserving of serious consideration, rather than simply dismissing them as superstitious nonsense, as modern laboratory scientists are apt to do.  I thus join Roberto Gonzalez (2001) and Eugene Hunn (2008) in using the word “science,” without qualifiers, for systematic folk knowledge of the natural world.

The problem is not made any easier by the fact that no society outside Europe and the Middle East seems to have developed a concept quite like the ancient Latin scientia or its descendants in various languages, and that the European and Middle Eastern followers of the Greeks have defined scientia/science in countless different ways.  Arabic ‘ilm, for instance, in addition to being used as a translation for scientia, has its own meanings, and this led to many different definitions and usages of the word in Arabic.

In Chinese, to know is zhi, and this can mean either to know a science or to know by mystical insight.  An organized body of teaching, religious or philosophical, is a jiao.  The Chinese word for “science,” kexue, is a modern coinage.  It means “study of things.”  It was originally a Japanese coinage using Chinese words.  The Chinese borrowed it back.  Lixue, “study of the basic principles of things,” is a much older word in Chinese, and once meant something like “science,” but it has now been reassigned to mean “physics.”  Other sciences have mostly-new names coined by putting the name of the thing studied in front of the Chinese word xue “knowledge.”   But non-science knowledges are also xue; literature and culture is wen xue “literary knowledge.”  We can define Chinese “science” in classical terms, without using the modern word kexue, by simply listing the forms of xue devoted to the natural (xing, ziran) world as opposed to the purely cultural.

Yucatec Maya has no word separating science from other kinds of knowledge.  So far as I know, the same is true of other Native American languages.  The Yucatec Maya language divides knowledge into several types.  The basic vocabulary is as follows:

Oojel to know  (Spanish saber).

Oojel ool to know by heart; ool means “heart.” Cha’an ool is a rare or obsolete synonym.

K’aaj, k’aajal to recognize, be familiar with (Spanish conocer in the broader sense)

K’aajool, k’aajal ool to “recognize by heart” (Spanish reconocer):  to recognize easily and automatically.  (The separation between ool and k’aaj is so similar to the Spanish distinction of saber and conocer that there may be some influence from Spanish here.)

K’aajoolal (or just k’aajool), knowledge; that which is known.

U’ub- to hear; standardly used to mean “understand what one said,” implying just to catch it or get it, as opposed to na’at, which refers to a deeper level of understanding.

Na’at to understand.

The cognate word to na’at in Tzotzil Maya is na’, and has been the subject of an important study by Zambrano and Greenfield (2004).  They find that it is used as the equivalent of “know” as well as “understand,” but focally it means that one knows how to do something—to do something on the basis of knowledge of it.   This keys us into the difference between Tzotzil knowing and Spanish or English knowing:  Tzotzil know by watching and then doing (as do many other Native Americans; see Goulet 1998, Sharp 2001), while Spanish and English children and adults know by hearing lectures or by book-learning.  It seems fairly likely that a culture that sees knowledge as practice would not make a fundamental or basic distinction between magic, science, and religion.  The distinction would far more likely be between what is known from experience and what is known only from others’ stories.  Such distinctions are made in some Native American languages.

Ook ool religion, belief; to believe; secret.  Ool, once again, is “heart.”

So Chinese and Maya have words for knowledge in general but no word for science as opposed to humanistic, religious, or philosophical knowledge.  Unlike the Greeks, they do not split the semantic domain finely.

Let us then turn to “science” in English.  The word has been in the language since the 1200s.  One reference, from 1340, in the OED is appropriately divine:  “for God of sciens is lord,” i.e. “for God is lord of all knowledge.”  The word has been progressively restricted over time, from a general term for knowledge to a term for a specific sort of activity designed to increase specialized knowledge of a particular subset of the natural world.

Science can also be seen as an institution:  a social-political-legal setup with its own rules, organizations, people, and subculture.  We generally understand one of two things:

1) a general procedure of careful assemblage of all possible data relevant to a particular question, generally one of theoretical interest, about the natural world.

2) a specific procedure characterized by cross-checking or verification (Kitcher 1993) or by falsifiability (Popper 1959).  Karl Popper’s falsifiability touchstone was extremely popular in my student days, but is now substantially abandoned, even by people who claim to be using it and to regard it as the true touchstone of science.  One problem is that falsifiability is just as hard to get and insure as verifiability.  We all know anthropological theories that have been falsified beyond all reasonable doubt, but are still championed by their formulators as if nothing had happened.  Thus, as of 2009, Mark Raymond Cohen 2009 is still championing his idea that Pleistocene faunal extinctions forced people to turn to agriculture to keep from starving—a theory so long and frequently disproved that the article makes flat-earthers look downright reasonable.

Another and worse problem is that Popper’s poster children for unfalsifiable and therefore nonscientific theories have been disproved, or at least subjected to some rather serious doubt.  Adolph Grunbaum (1984; see also Crews 1998, Dawes 1994) took on Freud and Popper both at once, showing quite conclusively that—contra Popper—Freudian theory was falsifiable, and had in fact been largely, though not entirelyi, falsified.  As with Cohen, the Freudians go right on psychoanalyzing—and, unlike Cohen, charging huge amounts of money.  Marx’ central theory was Popper’s other poster child, and while it does indeed seem to be too fluffy to disprove conclusively, its predictions have gone the way of the Berlin Wall, the USSR, and Mao’s Little Red Book.

We are well advised to stick with Ernst Mach’s original ideas of science as requiring specialized observational techniques (usually involving specialized equipment and methodology) and, above all, cross-verification (Kitcher 1993).  On the other hand, David Kronenfeld points out (email of Jan. 7, 2010) that Popper’s general point—one should always be as skeptical as possible of ideas and subject them to every possible test—is as valid as ever.  Clear counter-evidence should count (Cohen to the contrary notwithstanding).

The question for us then becomes whether the Maya had special procedures for meticulously gathering data relating to more or less theoretic questions about the natural world, and how they went about verifying their data and conclusions.

The Maya are a different case, since they do not have any terminological markers at all (unlike the Chinese with xue), they do not have a history of systematic cumulative investigation and replication, and, for that matter, they do not have a concept of “nature.”  All of the everyday Maya world is shaped by human activities.  Areas not directly controlled by the Maya themselves are controlled by the gods or spirits.  Rain, the sky, and the winds, for instance, have varying degrees of control by supernaturals.   Ordinary workings of the stars and of weather and wind are purely natural in our English sense, but anything important—like storms, or dangerous malevolent winds—has agency.  This makes the idea of “natural science” distinctly strange in Maya context.

However, the Maya are well aware that human and supernatural agency is only one thing affecting the forests, fields, and atmosphere.  Plants, animals and people grow and act according to consistent principles—essentially, natural laws.  The heavens are regular and consistent; star lore is extensive and widely known.  Inheritance is obvious and well recognized.  So are ecological and edaphological relationships—indeed there is a very complex science of these.

To my knowledge, there is no specific word for any particular science in Maya, with the singular exception of medicine:  ts’ak.  Ts’ak normally refers to the medicines themselves, but can refer to the field of medicine in general.  In spite of a small residual category of diseases explained by witchcraft and the like, Maya medicine is overwhelmingly naturalistic.  People usually get sick from natural causes—most often, getting chilled when overheated.  This simple theory of causation underdetermines an incredibly extensive system of treatment.  I have recorded 350 medicinal plants in my small research area alone, as well as massage techniques, ritual spells, cleansing and bathing techniques, personal hygeine and exercise, and a whole host of other medicinal technologies (Anderson 2003, 2005).  Some are “magic” by the standards of modern science, but are considered to work by lawful, natural means.  More to the point, medicine in Maya villages is an actively evolving science in which the vast majority of innovations are based either on personal experience and observation or on authority that is supposed to be medically reliable.  (Usually the authority is the local clinic or an actual medical practitioner, but a whole host of patent medicines and magical botánica remedies are in use.)  New plants are quickly put to use, often experimentally.  If they resemble locally used plants, they may be tried for the same conditions.  In the last five years, noni, a Hawaiian fruit used in its native home as a cureall, has come to Mayaland, being used for diabetes and sometimes other conditions.  It is now grown in many gardens, and is available for sale at local markets.  It has been tried by countless individuals to treat their diabetes, and compared in effectiveness with local remedies like k’ooch (Cecropia spp.) and catclaw vine (uncertain identification).  I have also watched the Maya learn about, label, and study the behavior of new-coming birds, plants, and peoples.  Their ethnoscience is rapidly evolving.  The traditional Maya framework is quite adequate to interpret and analyze new phenomena and add knowledge of them to the database.

This makes it very difficult to label Maya knowledge “traditional ecological knowledge” as opposed to science.  It is not “traditional” in the sense of old, stagnant, dying, or unchanging.  Nonanthropologists generally assume that traditional ecological knowledge is simply backward, failed science (see e.g. Nadasdy 2004).  They are now supposed to take account of it in biological planning and such-like matters, but they do so to minimal extent, because of this assumption.

Until modern times, the Maya did not have the concept of a “science” separate from other knowledge.  They also lacked the institution of “science” as a field of endeavor, employment, grant-getting, publishing, etc.  Now, of course, there are many Maya scientists.  Quintana Roo Maya are an education-conscious, upwardly-mobile population.  The head of the University of Quintana Roo’s Maya regional campus is a local Maya with a Ph.D. from UCSC in agroecology.

This might not matter, but Maya knowledge also includes those supernatural beings, mentioned above.  This was a problem for Roberto Gonzalez and Gene Hunn as well, in their conceptualization of Zapotec indigenous knowledge as science.  The Quintana Roo Maya are a hardheaded, pragmatic lot, and never explain anything by supernaturals if they can think of a visible, this-world explanation, but there is much they cannot explain in traditional terms or on the basis of traditional knowledge.  Storms, violent winds, and other exceptional meteorological phenomena are the main case.  Strange chronic health problems are the next most salient; ordinary diseases have ordinary causes, but recurrent, unusual illnesses, especially with mental components, must be due to sorcery or demons.

One could simply disregard these rather exceptional cases, and say that Maya science has inferred these black-box variables the way the Greeks inferred atoms and aether and the way the early-modern scientists inferred phlogiston and auriferous forces.  However, discussion with my students, especially Rodolfo Otero in recent weeks, has made it more clear to me that much of our modern science depends on black-box variables that are in fact rather supernatural.  Science has moved to higher and higher levels of abstraction, inferring more and more remote and obscure intervening variables.  Physics now presents a near-mystical cosmology of multidimensional strings, dark matter, dark energy, quark chromodynamics, and the rest.  The physicist Brian Greene admits of string theory:  “Some scientists argue vociferously that a theory so removed from direct empirical testing lies in the realm of philosophy or theology, but not physics” (Greene 2004:352).

Closer to anthropology are the analytic abstractions that have somehow taken on a horrid life of their own—the golems and zombies of our trade.  These are things like “globalization,” “neoliberalism,” “postcoloniality,” and so forth.  Andrew Vayda says it well:  “Extreme current examples…are the many claims involving ‘globalization,’ which…has transmogrified from being a label for certain modern-world changes that call for explanation to being freely invoked as the process to which the changes are attributed” (Vayda 2009:24).  “Neoliberalism” has been variously defined, but there is no agreed-on definition, and there are no people who call themselves “neoliberals”; the term is purely pejorative and lacks any real meaning, yet it somehow has become an agent that does things and causes real-world events.  There is even something called “the modernist program,” though no one has ever successfully defined “modern” and none of the people described as “modernist” had a program under that name.  Farther afield, we have the Invisible Hand of the market, rational self-interest, money, and a number of other economic concepts that suffer outrageous reification.  The tendency of social sciences to reify concepts and turn them into agents has long been noted (e.g. Mills 1959), and it is not dead.

The real problem with supernatural beings, Maya or postmodern, is that they tend to become more and more successful at pseudo-explanation, over time.  People get more and more vested interest in using reified black-box postulates to explain everything.  The great advantage of modern science—what Randall Collins (1999) calls “rapid discovery science”—is that it tries to minimize such explanatory precommitment.  The whole virtue of rapid discovery science is that it keeps questioning its own basic postulates.

If we can claim “science” for superstrings, neoliberalism, and rational choice, the Maya winds and storm gods can hardly be ruled out.  At least one can see storms and feel winds.  Black-box variables are made to be superseded.  We cannot use them as an excuse to reject the accumulated wisdom of the human species.

Dept. of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside

Gene@ucr.edu

www.krazykioti.com

Preface

These papers began life as papers delivered at various learned venues since 2003.  They report some new field work, and a great deal of new thinking about older field work.  Since 1989, I have done research in and around Chunhuhub and Presidente Juarez, Quintana Roo, on Yucatec Maya development and ethnobiology.  Some of this work has theoretical or ethnographic significance, and a great deal of it has some relevance to current development issues.  It seems reasonable to bring my recent writings together in the present format, and make them available as a package.  I am also leaving these writings, deliberately, in a rather informal style and format, and posting them to my website, rather than trying to write them up as a formal publication.  I would rather have them free and accessible in all senses of the word, for students and professionals in the field of agricultural and rural development.

Any Quintana Roo Maya of my age remembers a time when the Maya communities of that beautiful state were isolated and self-sufficient.  Their grandfathers remembered a time when Quintana Roo was, de facto, an independent country, ruled by the Maya and almost closed to outsiders.  It broke off from Mexico in the “Caste War” of 1846.  The central area, where I work, was theoretically reconquered in 1901.  Parts of it, including the areas I have lived, were not actually brought into Mexico until much later, and then on their own terms; the last open battle (so far as I know) was actually fought in Dzula, which is just east of my own town of Chunhuhub (then uninhabited).  The Maya faded into the forest and did not lose that battle.  Today, central Quintana Roo, the “Zona Maya,” is effectively run by the Maya, or at least by their educated elites.

But the area is far from its isolated subsistence-farming past.  Some communities well known to me remain surprisingly close to that state, but all are now on passable roads with regular public transport, all have radio and TV, all have modern public schools, all have clinics or at least easy access to nearby ones, and all are well supplied with multinational goods.  None now qualifies for the Mexican folk definition of extreme remoteness:  “Where the Coca-Cola truck does not go.”

Thus, in some cases actually within my own memory, the villages of interior Quintana Roo have entered the global economy and become incorporated into global politics.  During this time, also, Mexico has privatized its ejidos; all the Maya villages were ejidos until 1993, and most of them for years after, but all are in various stages of privatization today (see Anderson 2003, 2005, and Anderson and Medina Tzuc 2005; citations follow Chapter 1 below).  They lag far behind the rest of Mexico in this, however, for Maya communal ties run deep, and management for shifting cultivation requires frequent reassignment of land.

The Maya have responded to globalization in many ways, summarized in various papers below.  Here, I need to mention quickly the wider scene in which they find themselves.  Mexico has become more privatized, more open to international corporations, and more participant in world corporate culture.  The richest man in the world is a Mexican entrepreneur, Carlos Slim.  (A Lebanese-Mexican, he is a reminder that Mexico is a melting pot like the United States, not solely a “Hispanic” country.  Maya, Lebanese, and dozens of other indigenous and immigrant ethnic groups exist and contribute.)  Giant corporations impinge more and more on the lives of the Maya, and not in beneficial ways.  The vast, cancerously-growing tourist world of coastal Quintana Roo is ever closer.  More and more young people go off to work in the cities.  More and more urban products crowd the shelves of small Maya stores.  More and more trucks roll through Chunhuhub, increasingly a transit hub on the Merida-Chetumal route.  The full story of southeast Mexican development is outside the scope of the present volume, and is being told by a number of better qualified Mayanists than I (see e.g. Faust 1998; Haenn 2005), but must be mentioned here by way of context.

Suffice it to say that vague jargon-words like “globalization” and “neoliberalism” are hopelessly inadequate to capture the ferment of private enterprise, state interference, drug-cartel infiltration, foreign investment, and Maya doggedness and adaptability that is modern Quintana Roo.  Use of such words should be discouraged; they cover rather than revealing.  The truth is that giant corporations are increasingly taking over the world, with the full aid and support of governments, especially First World ones.  This is not the automatic and general process implied by “globalization,” and it is the absolute antithesis of the “Free Market” concept ostensibly advocated by neoliberalism.  Quite the reverse:  the giant firms are sustained, subsidized, defended, and supported by governments (as I have shown at length in my book The Pursuit of Ecotopia, Praeger 2010).  The free market is left to the small players—such as the Maya.  They have to make their way without help or support, and are in the position of a small individual running a race on foot while the large players drive cars.  Needless to say, the large players generally win.  The Maya have done amazingly well by hanging in the game at all.

A word might be said about my career as a Mayanist.  In 1987, my university, the University of California-Riverside, engaged the great Mexican ethnobotanist Arturo Gomez-Pompa to be the first director of the University of California’s Mexico research program, housed at UCR.  Arturo is a stunningly charismatic and inspiring person, and quickly got many of us in anthropology absorbed in his Maya work.  We hired accordingly—we are now a major center of Maya archaeology—and I retooled my research from East Asia and Canada to the Yucatan Peninsula.  My field sites in Asia were not only not longer feasible for financial reasons, but they no longer existed at all; the bays I researched in Hong Kong and Malaysia were filled in and covered by factories and apartments, and the fishing villages I studied had dispersed.  Wishing for a site I could study over a long period and with some collaboration, I jumped at the chance to work with the Maya.

Our student at the time, Denise Brown, now director of Latin American studies at the University of Calgary, carried out a survey of communities in the Yucatan Peninsula, and informed me that Chunhuhub in Quintana Roo would be the perfect place for me.  I had learned to trust her judgment, and checked the place out in 1989.  Indeed she was correct: the place has been a dream of a field site.  It was traditional enough to have everything I wanted to study in the way of traditional Maya culture, but also modernizing rapidly and self-consciously.  It was on a main road and within range of many smaller, more conservative communities.  It had good food and the some of the friendliest people in the world, priding themselves on being “tranquil”—tranquilo is the most commonly stated value in town—and cheerfully getting along.

I returned for sustained field work in 1991, living in a small concrete shed in the compound of Pastor Valdez, a schoolteacher (later school principal in Presidente Juarez, and still later retired).  Helpful, knowledgeable and tranquilo, he and his familiy were always a delight.  I began to question everyone in the area about everything.  My old friend Eugene Hunn visited, and discovered the man who became my main consultant, then field assistant, and finally compadre and coauthor:  Don Felix Medina Tzuc.  Don Felix has told his story (Anderson and Medina Tzuc 2005), so I need not say more, except that we have become close friends and real family.  The Maya take compadrasco (godparenthood) very seriously, and to be joint godparents establishes a very real family relationship.  I receive field help, warm support, and endless free food; I provide financial help, especially for schooling.

I passed through in 1993 and returned for sustained field work in 1996.  At that time I discovered and became closely involved in the lives of the Dzib family of Presidente Juarez.  Don Adriano was much like Don Felix, though less outgoing.  His daughter Maria Aurora Dzib Xihum became a field assistant, and family relations were cemented when I provided sodas and photography for her wedding to Jaime Cen—thus becoming compadre.  I have since put her (and one of Don Felix’s granddaughters) through school.

I have returned almost every year since, with four months more of field work in 2001.  I am now too old for sustained research in the Yucatan bush, but I can never leave the place for long.

I was a convert to historic approaches and to multisited views long before those became popular.  I have worked with published historic sources and with historian friends (notably my colleague at UCR, Rob Patch; see Patch  1993. 2002).

The multisited work is more interesting.  I have worked extensively in Chunhuhub, a large, self-consciously modern town, and in Presidente Juarez, a small, isolated, intensely conservative village.  I have visited and done quick projects in several other towns, notably Xpichil, which is again different:  militantly traditionalist (“cruzoob”) in religion, and highly enterprising in farming and crafts.  My students and coworkers have done research in more.  Also, through the 1990s, an informal groups of Maya ethnographers organized American Anthropological Association panels almost every year.  The core group consisted of Betty Faust, Ellen Kintz, Alicia Re Cruz and myself; many others gave papers, and we networked with most Mayanists that worked in Mexico.  I visited several sites long enough to know those communities from personal experience as well as from books.  (See Faust 1998; Kintz 1990; Re Cruz 1996.)

I have also followed friends to the city.  Two have made it to California.  One is a legal immigrant from Chunhuhub now long resident Los Angeles, where I interviewed him on occasion.  He maintains a large, never-finished house in Chunhuhub but rarely goes there.  The other was a young friend who got as far as San Francisco, as I learned from a sudden surprising late-evening phone call from that city!  He lasted a couple of years before being found by the migra and sent home.  Much more numerous are people from these towns in the cities of Quintana Roo.  Here they often sink into a depressing urban lower class, living heavily on junk food and having mostly idle, empty lives, spent watching TV and listening to commercial music (work being scarce and education hard to get).  Many, however, have done stunningly well:  my friend at Nissan, my god-granddaughter finishing her training as a legal assistant (hopefully on the way to lawyer), and many more.  Young people from other villages have been even more successful.  I first knew Francisco Rosado May, from the municipio town (county seat), when he was a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz.  He has had a meteoric rise in education circles in Quintana Roo, and now heads a new Maya-focused university campus in Jose Maria Morelos, the nearest big town to Chunhuhub.

Out-migration brain-drains the villages, but the young migrants often return, or stay in close contact with the home.  They bring back wealth, but not very much, and rarely invested in the villages.  The demographic safety valve is a mixed blessing (on Mexican migration, see the wonderful studies of my late and much lamented colleague Michael Kearney, 1996, 2005; also the beautifully done and wonderfully contexted study of Morocco by David Crawford, 2008).  Fortunately, the Maya towns are in no danger of being totally drained of working-age people, becoming villages of the very old and very young, like some towns I know in other parts of Mexico, and also in my earlier field work site of the New Territories of Hong Kong.

I thus developed a fair time depth and geographical spread for comparison, which I hope has deepened my analyses.  Certainly it helped my understanding, and I recommend it to all field workers.

With retirement, I have drifted back into a more East Asia-focused research project, focusing now on documentary sources.  My Maya field work remains among the brightest and most wonderful spots in my life, and I will continue to visit and keep watching.

I am deeply grateful, as always, to my Maya friends, to my coworkers (notably including Betty Faust) and students, to my wife Barbara, and to the University of California, Riverside (which provided financial as well as logistic support).

The indigenous people of Yucatan call themselves “Maya,” more correctly “Maayaj,” but this seems a late (though pre-Spanish) term related somehow to the mid-northern city of Mayapan, extended to all speakers of the language only in the last few centuries (as recently argued by Matt Restall, 2004). The term originally related primarily to the language (maayaj t’aan, “Maya language”), a very uniform one across the Peninsula. The term “Yucatec,” current in the literature, is a modern Spanish coinage based on a multiple misconstrual. It is established and hard to avoid, but incorrect and misleading.

Transcribing the Maya language has evolved over time. For the old dictionary entries, I have added in parentheses the modern spelling, which is based on Spanish orthography (e.g. j represents the sound represented by English h; in the older system it was written h).

I dedicate this book to the young people of Quintana Roo, and to my wonderful Maya families, the Medinas of Chunhuhub and the Dzibs of Presidente Juarez.  Dios bo’otik.

E. N. Anderson, 2011

Crawford, David.  2008.  Morocan Households in the world Economy:  Labor and Inequality in a Berber Village.  Baton Rouge, LA:  Louisiana State University Press.

Faust, Betty B.  1998.  Mexican Rural Development and the Plumed Serpent.  Westport, CT:  Greenwood.

Kearney, Michael.  1996.  Reconceptualizing the Peasantry:  Anthropology in Global Perspective.  Boulder:  Westview.

—  2004.  Changing Fields of Anthropology:  From Local to Global.  Lanham, MD:  Rowman and Littlefield.

Kintz, Ellen.  1990.  Life under the Tropical Canopy:  Tradition and Change among the Yucatec Maya.  New York:  Holt, Rinehart, Winston.

Patch, Robert.  1993.  Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1648-1812.  Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press.

—  2002. Maya Revolt and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century.  Armonk, NY:  M. E. Sharpe.

Re Cruz, Alicia.  1996.  The Two Milpas of Chan Kom:  A Study of Socioeconomic and Political Transformations in a Maya Community.  Albany:  SUNY Press.

Restall, Matthew.  2004.  “Maya Ethnogenesis.”  Journal of Latin American Anthropology 9:64-89.

Chapter 1.  Underdeveloping and Overdeveloping the Maya

The Quintana Roo Maya and Development

In twenty years of research on the agriculture and forestry of the Yucatec Maya of southeast Mexico, I have seen many ideas come in from the great outside world.  Some succeed, many fail.  In spite of the anthropologists’ litany of “community participation” and “cultural sensitivity,” the predictor is usually supply and demand:  where there is a market, the Maya will work to develop supply capability; where there is no market, traditional subsistence methods are better than the introductions.  Government or international help is, however, needed to help develop markets and to provide expert knowledge of how to mobilize for them and connect to them.  When this has done, some important successes have followed.  Implications for realistic policies go beyond the obvious, and will be discussed.

The Yucatec Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula, southeast Mexico, have preserved a system of agriculture that dates back to ancient Maya civilization.  It has modernized and changed with the times, but keeps essential features at least 3,000 years old.  Thus it has certainly shown its resilience—though the Classic Maya “Collapse” in the 9^th-10^th centuries proved it had limits.  It is currently outperforming alternatives in most of the Yucatan Peninsula, while changing to incorporate new ideas that fit with its basic commitment to shifting agriculture based on maize as staple and over 100 minor crops.  Considerable research over the last 60 years has shown the reasons for its resilience, which boil down to superb understanding of the harsh Yucatan environment and use of an enormous range of resources and techniques that allow fine-tuning in particular situations while remaining flexible overall.  Knowledge is substituted for capital.  More important is the use of ritual and ceremony to involve people collectively in the enterprise.  This is clearly the key to the overall resilience of the system.  This way of dealing with the natural world has broad implications for our resource-short and warming planet.

The Yucatec Maya have been cultivating the Yucatan Peninsula for about 5,000 years.  For almost 3,000 years, this cultivation has supported a civilized society—that is, one with towns and something like a state society.  For about 2,000 years, the Maya have had a defined elite, a great art style, and sophisticated writing (Sharer and Traxler 2005).  A still rather mysterious collapse in the 9^th and 10^th centuries led to decline in population and settlements.  Cities in the central lowlands were abandoned.  The causes of this collapse are still controversial.  Excessive use of resources, but also drought, warfare, and political disunion, are generally considered to be involved (Demarest 2004; Webster 2002).  Cities like Mayapan survived the collapse, however, and continued to flourish almost or quite up to the Spanish conquest.

This civilization was supported by a highly sophisticated agricultural system. The staple food is maize.  Under Maya conditions it yields around 1,000 kg/ha or more, up to 2,000 in good conditions.  While low by US standards, these are high yields for tropical locations with poor soils.  However, the crop is very susceptible to droughts, floods, and hurricanes.  These are all common in the Yucatan Peninsula, so people must often fall back on root crops such as manioc, sweet potatoes, and makal (Xanthosoma yucatanense), as well as other back-up staples.

The environment is not kind.  Crops are menaced by extreme heat and dryness in spring and early summer, extreme storminess with occasional hurricanes in late summer and fall, surprisingly cold midwinters, and wild fluctuations from year to year.  The land is rocky, with shallow soils.  The forest is diverse and lush but thorny; a local proverb says that “every plant has thorns and every animal bites or stings.”  Well, not quite, but one’s introduction to the Yucatan bush is apt to be an encounter with a chechem (Metopium browni), a poison ivy plant 100 feet high and often 4 feet thick, or a subin (Acacia gaumeri complex), which has thorns and attracts wasps and biting and stinging ants.

Maize grows in swidden fields—they are cut in midwinter, burned in the early part of the dry season before fire can spread, then cleared of burned timber and planted.  They are replanted the next year, then abandoned to grow back for anywhere from 5 to 50 years, depending on soil fertility.  The Maya have an extensive soil terminology and are experts at assessing soils.  The soils of the Yucatan vary from extremely rocky and barren to light but fertile.  In wet areas, the variation is from acid muck that grows nothing useful to rich, fertile alluvial loam.  Ruin mounds provide both good indications of where the good soil is, and quite good planting places themselves.

The Maya system remains the only viable one in most of the Yucatan Peninsula.  Since Spanish colonization in the early 16^th century, outsiders have tried monocrop cultivation of cotton, sugar, rice, sesame, and dozens of other crops.  All fail, even industrial-style cultivation of maize, the Maya staple.

The one exception was henequen, an agave used for hard fibre.  It flourished as a monocrop because it is native to the Yucatan landscape and perfectly adapted there.  Unfortunately, Yucatan’s henequen industry was ruined by competition with nylon, as well as with the development of cheaper henequen production in Africa and Brazil.  Henequen still grows, occasionally used for fibre, also for a cheap form of mescal liquor and other purposes.

The Maya house is a good example of a locally made item with low ecological impact.  It is made of local hard wood, often harvested from areas that will be cut for milpa.  It is thatched with palm fronds from species of Sabal.

The Yucatec grow an incredible range of crops, and use an even more incredible range of wild products.  There is no second-most-important crop after maize.  Sweet potatoes, squash (several species), beans (several species), manioc, tomatoes, and chiles are all important.  Fruit is extremely important, not only as food but as the main commercial enterprise of the area.  Oranges, other citrus, mangoes, coconuts, papayas, mameys, watermelons, and other species are grown for sale, and dozens more species are eaten locally.  People will try anything; I have seen grapevines and apple trees, which do not fruit in the tropical climate, but which were points of pride to their owners, who simply wanted to try them out.  Meat is fairly common in the Quintana Roo diet, because every homegarden is well stocked with chickens.  Most have ducks and pigs.  Some have sheep and cows and even tamed peccaries and deer.  Wild game includes deer, paca, agouti, game birds, and so on, but has been shot out of the Chunhuhub area, where I do my research.  Wild plant foods are important famine staples, and include a huge range of roots, fruits and shoots.

Important here is the ability of the system to add and incorporate new crops.  The Spanish brought hundreds of species from Europe, the Near East, and later southeast Asia (via the Philippines—administered as part of Mexico in Spanish colonial times).  The modern world has introduced yet more.  I was rather surprised to find the Hawaiian medicinal fruit noni (Moringa citrifolia, Rubiaceae) as a rapidly spreading introduction around three years ago.  It is used to treat diabetes.  It is now grown in hundreds of gardens in the area.  The Maya also learn to recognize and name new weeds, and sometimes find uses for them.

Maize is often intercropped with beans, squash, and other foods, and dooryard gardens with dozens of species provide a great deal of the agricultural produce.

Especially noteworthy are medicinal plants, both tame and wild.  I recorded a full 350 medicinal species in the area, and other investigators have recorded comparable numbers from other communities in the Yucatan.  Tests have shown that many of these plants are effective antibiotics, antifungals, analgesics, and anti-inflammatories.  Some cure itches, rashes, canker sores, and the like more effectively than local drugstore remedies.  Plants are used for everything from childbirth (B. Anderson et al. 2004) to skin fungus.

The major compilation by Arellano Rodríguez et al (2003) lists almost 900 species of plants known to the Yucatec.  Most have recorded Yucatec names and uses.  More have been added since it came out.  I believe this is the largest ethnobotanical inventory documented for any small indigenous group in the world.

Other plants are used for a wide variety of reasons.  Eek’ or tinto, also known as “logwood” and Haematoxylon campecheanum, produces a black dye widely used even today and extremely important worldwide until the rise of synthetic dyestuffs.  This tree was cut in earlier centuries and sent to Europe to be rasped up to make dye.  It has extremely hard wood, and is difficult to cut and to rasp up; in Europe, being sent to rasp up logwood was a serious punishment reserved for criminals.  In Yucatan, pirates usually cut it during slow seasons.  The Maya rarely did.  The cut trees have sprouted back as dense thickets of shoots, and formed impenetrable jungles where jaguars and jaguarundis hold out.

The Maya agroecosystem has evolved over 5,000 years to use the harsh environment of the Yucatan Peninsula in an efficient way (see longer accounts in Anderson 2003, 2005, 2006; Anderson and Medina Tzuc 2005; Faust et al 2004).  This involves, first of all, using almost everything.  In addition to the food and medicinal plants, many items are used for local crafts and building.  Woodsmen and -women know the value of every tree for construction and firewood.  Plants are used for musical instruments, insect repellents, religious ceremonies, and crafts.  About 700 species are known in the Chunhuhub area (Anderson 2003), and almost all of them are used for something.  Animals are less utilized, but everything worth hunting is hunted and eaten.  All this takes the pressure off any one resource.  Using everything lightly means that there is every incentive to preserve the whole system intact, and no incentive to destroy one resource.

The exception is that large animals are almost completely shot out in areas around large towns (including Chunhuhub).  People lack iron and sometimes protein in the diet, and ge hungry for meat.  Hunting is a local tradition.  However, powerful cultural rules used to keep hunting within sustainable and manageable levels (Anderson and Medina Tzuc 2005) and locally still do.  Some families have recently taken to market hunting, which devastates the game, and even with traditional controls the dense populations of many villages put intolerable pressure on game.  This is, however, a recent development.  Traditional rules sustained game until the last two or three decades.  The system is slowly adjusting to the new shortage.

Another emerging problem is excessive shortening of the swidden cycle.  This is not yet a major problem in Quintana Roo, but it is in Yucatan state, where many areas are degrading.  Forest resources are especially hard hit.  On the other hand, the Maya manage regrowth such that trees grow up fast.  The regrowth is dominated by leguminous bushes and trees, which fix nitrogen and rapidly restore soil fertility.  Thousands of years of swiddening has led to gradual takeover by leguminous trees (notably species of Acacia, Leucaena, Lysiloma, and Piscipula), which now overwhelmingly dominate second growth in most of the area.  Selective cutting also leaves useful species like the chicle tree (Manilkara sapota), valued for fruit as well as chewing gum.  Palms, especially the xa’an used for thatch, are also selectively preserved, as are many other species.

The traditional system requires a great deal of knowledge of the environment.  The Maya farmer must know dozens or hundreds of plants and animals, including all their uses, the times they are available, the ways to get them and process them, and the problems with obtaining and managing them.  Maya farmers are exquisitely attuned to soils, weather, fire control, seasons, and changes.  They monitor the actions of their neighbors, and accommodate accordingly.  They often act in concert to protect a resource from overuse or abuse—making individuals cut firebreaks, for instance.  They maintain trails, cut small firebreaks around valuable seedling trees, preserve wild beehives and ant nests, and watch for the growth of anything edible or usable in the forest.  A Maya forest is never really wild.  It is managed, and is constantly being monitored.  No patch of forest goes for long without hunters, medicine collectors, honey-seekers, and other foragers.  All this depends on an incredible amount of practical knowledge, both general and specific.

No one person could know all of it, so information was distributed in the community.  People were proud of particular expertise they might have.  According to interest and experience, one might be an expert hunter, or bean farmer, or beekeeper, or curer, or religious officiant (hmeen), or logger, or other specialist.  All working adults in the community knew who they were and where to find them, and they were frequently consulted.  This stands in marked contrast to the classic approach toward culture as universally shared knowledge.  Culture is, rather, distributed cognition.  A community can know dozens of times as much as an individual could possibly learn.

Management depends also on morality, and this is maintained by religious belief.  Pre-Columbian Maya traditions have integrated well with Catholicism, and more recently, to a lesser extent, with Protestantism.  Traditional ceremonies such as prayers for rain (ch’a chaak) and ceremonies to pray for or thank the gods for good harvests (loh) were common in former times.  Unfortunately, puritanical non-Maya priests and pastors in both Catholic and Protestant churches have combatted these, with devastating results to the management system.  Without a supportive belief in forest spirits, field spirits, and other local supernatural beings, people are tempted to break rules against overhunting, overcollecting, and careless burning of fields.  The great advantage of religion is that it keeps even quite desperate people from rulebreaking, even when they are alone, unobserved, and safe from being caught (see the above references and citations therein).  One of the communities I study told the visiting priest not to come back when he tried to interfere with their land-oriented ceremonies.  Representing land management religiously is absolutely fundamental in Maya culture (Faust et al 2004; Redfield and Villa Rojas 1934; the latter provides a thorough account that was still valid a generation ago).  Religion and ceremony are necessary to bring people together, get them to work together, and motivate them to keep their rules.  The landscape and resource management rules, unlike many religious customs in this world, are hard-headed pragmatic ones.

The outsiders’ development schemes in the Yucatan Peninsula have generally involved monocropping.  It never works, because diseases and pests rapidly build up in the tropical environment.  Recently, monocropping has often involved artificial fertilizers and pesticides.  This generally fails in the Yucatan.  Fertilizers run off the rocky fields and contaminate the water supplies.  Pesticides kill local insect-eating creatures and thus lead, paradoxically, to pest outbreaks; overuse of pesticides led to huge outbreaks of whiteflies, which destroyed commercial cropping of chiles, tomatoes, and other vegetables in the major farming areas of Yucatan in the 1990s.  Locusts, always a problem locally, have probably also increased with pesticide use.  Other outsiders’ ideas, often equally impractical, have been introduced repeatedly, leading to a certain cynicism (Hostetler 1996; see also Dichter 2003 for the worldwide truth of this observation).

The Maya love and care for the forests, and this care is represented in and maintained by religion.  The Hispanic Mexicans, by contrast, follow the Mediterranean pattern of idealizing urban life, looking down on agriculture, and sharply separating religion from secular pursuits.  They traditionally had little ideological reason to care for landscapes.  Fortunately, this is changing fast, and environmentalism has come to the Yucatan Peninsula, though not without major problems (Haenn 2005).

Development schemes aimed at traditional small-scale rural communities rarely succeed.  Most accounts can be arranged along a line from those that blame it on stupidity or blind tradition to those that blame it on conspiracy.  Whatever the cause, the accounts usually agree on one thing:  The small traditional communities are passive victims.  Sometimes, both these attribution myths are combined into one romantic claim:  the suffering poor are only trying to maintain their sacred traditions.  Sometimes it goes with considerable blaming-the-victim.

Of course, in many, many cases the communities are indeed brutalized, often by outright violence that can include mass murder and genocide (as in Cambodia in the 1970s and Guatemala in the 1980s).  However, I fear that many writers have a vested interest in turning their subjects into pure victims—so beaten down and oppressed by the government or the donors that they cannot perform.

Fortunately, there are some situations in which outcomes are better in spite of everything.  For the last 20-odd years I have been visiting and studying the town of Chunhuhub, a Yucatec Maya community in central Quintana Roo, Mexico.  This town has managed to remain quite prosperous as rural Mexico goes.  One would never confuse it with Beverly Hills, but few go hungry and all have decent if usually home-made housing.

In those 20 years, Chunhuhub has become more prosperous, but the process has been erratic.  Development plans have come and gone in the area.  Chunhuhub usually rejects them, and when it does try them they generally fail.  But, meanwhile, Chunhuhub, or its residents, have done quite a few things on their own initiative.  These also have erratic histories, but some of them succeed.  I apologize at the outset for lack of statistics.  I have not collected many, and the government collects no valid ones in this area.  I have to go with my own observations and some aggregated household data.

Failed projects

Some failed plans of the past now need consideration.  Many communities, in Mexico as in the US and elsewhere, have developed a huge cynicism about government plans in general.  The government is fond of bringing in a great new plan just before an election, handing out money to carry out the project, and then canceling the whole thing once the election is over.  Naturally, a few iterations of this game lead to the situation reported by Ueli Hostetler (1996):  the villagers invest the donated money in beer and have a big party.  At least they get that much out of it.  Otherwise, the money is invested in (say) pigpens, then lost when the government abruptly cancels the project, half done.  A half-finished pigpen is no use; a party at least gets the community together.

At best, the government may stay around long enough to get the plan up and running, but the people abandon it as soon as the funding stops.  This happens when the plan is just fine as long as some funding is coming in, but otherwise is not profitable enough to be worth doing.

All this has caused many people, from American inner cities to African savanna villages, to suffer from “project fatigue.”

Many specific plans fail because of biological and agronomic ineptness.  First and foremost are the endless attempts to convert land to cattle.  This is the curse of Latin America in general (Painter and Durham 1995).  Millions of acres of highly productive forest have been converted to poor-quality pasture land, which often degrades into desert.  One main reason is the high prestige of cattle ranching in Hispanic culture.  In Quintana Roo, there are many natural grasslands that are excellent cattle-raising country, so the idea has its merits.  However, someone should have realized that there was a reason why grass was not everywhere.  Attempts to convert forest to grassland have quickly led to the realization that it generally does not work.  Grass requires moisture-holding, non-acid soil.  Excessively drained areas, excessively acid areas, and excessively wet areas don’t work for grass, but produce superb and very valuable forests.  Many such areas were cleared for pasture, and became desert instead, until the forest could regrow.  The Maya clear and burn small cornfields, which promptly regrow to healthy forest, but the huge areas cleared for pasture are more problematic.  They burn too easily (partly because of pasture grass, if  it establishes at all).  They are too big for easy seed-settling.  They were usually cleared too thoroughly—scraped with bulldozers or the like.

All manner of crops have been tried in Quintana Roo, with varying success.  Sugar does all right, but not well, in the most fertile areas.  Rice failed because of poor soil and high costs.  Sesame failed because of low yields.  Chiles and tomatoes failed because large-scale plantings become targets for every pest and disease in the tropics.  The grim roll goes on and on.  Fortunately, tropical fruit grows as if it had found its true paradise, and several vegetables do well too.  Maize, the staple food, does fairly well—not by Iowa standards, but at least by local ones.  So there is plenty of success in farming, if it is carefully done, on a small scale, with mixed crops.

The grim litany of projects that never got off the ground is fairly long, but not worth considering in detail.  One idea popular in the 1980s was package loans for agriculture, involving loans that required the farmers to use pesticides and fertilizers according to what was supposed to be best practice.  There was a strangely close correspondence between the agrochemicals deemed “best practice” and the firms that supplied funds to relevant government employees.  The Maya were in no position to risk capital, did not trust the government (for the obvious reason among others), and found that the pesticides and fertilizers were counterproductive in their situation.  The packages disappeared by 1990 (when I began serious work in the area).

Many other plans surfaced at local farmers’ fairs in larger towns.  These had some direct or indirect influence on Chunhuhub but had no real presence there.  Schemes to popularize local handicrafts were sensible, but Chunhuhub Maya do not make many.  Honey production, both from European honeybees and from native stingless bees (Melipona becheii), was a much better idea, since Chunhuhub produced huge amounts of honey, but Africanized bees and parasitic mites (Varroa and other spp.) invaded and ruined the industry.

An example of true developer cluelessness was rabbit growing (cunicultura).  This has often been tried in Mexico and elsewhere.  Thomas Dichter in Despite Good Intentions (2003) tells stories from West Africa, where the poor rabbits immediately died of tropical diseases.  They survive in Mayaland—there are native cottontails—but are less successful than the chickens, pigs, goats, ducks and turkeys that already make a Maya homegarden a meat factory.  Moreover, the Maya could not bear to kill and eat anything so cute!  The bunnies became children’s pets.

Projects for commercial production of tomatoes, chiles, and similar vegetables got off the ground with initial success, but succumbed to the twin problems of pest buildup and distance from markets.  Chunhuhub is a very remote community, and there are many much closer to the urban markets that absorb commercial vegetables.  The population of Chunhuhub is around 6,000, but almost everyone grows their own vegetables, so there is little internal market.  Extremely successful vegetable gardening is practiced by several families in town, but there is no market for their surplus.  The pest problem was due directly and specifically to pesticides.  These wiped out natural predators of whiteflies, which carry viral diseases.  The whiteflies multiplied beyond all measure, ruining large-scale vegetable production in most of the Yucatan Peninsula.  Chunhuhub had many fewer problems with this, because it was isolated from contagion and above all because Chunhuhubians do not use much pesticide, but there were enough pests to keep production suboptimal.

In other communities, such as Yaxcaba and neighboring towns in Yucatan state, attempts were made to develop velvetbean as a cover crop (Juan Jimenez-Osornio, personal communication) and, when that failed, to use chopped-up vegetation as mulch (John Tuxill, personal communication).  The Maya found little value in these techniques, which add dubiously useful but quite onerous steps to an already labor-intensive agricultural system. The green manure crops had worked very well in other areas of Latin America.  The Maya were lukewarm, partly because of project fatigue, partly because their homegardens were already fertile and bean-filled, while their fields weren’t really worth the added effort and expense.

On the other hand, I observed that they developed vegetable raising in those villages without much outside input.  Once again, the Maya are good at finding out what activities are actually worth the time and labor invested, while outside development agents rarely consider such tradeoffs.

Medicinal herbs could be produced on a large scale, and they command a ready sale; many are illegally exported to the United States for the migrant south Mexicans working there.  Several attempts to raise medicinal herbs in Quintana Roo have failed, however, partly because of hurricanes, partly because it is still cheap to collect wild herbs, but mainly for the usual reason:  no one thought to develop marketing channels.

The biggest problem after simple biology has been marketing.  South Mexico has only recently acquired an international urban sector.  Marketing to well-to-do people in, or from, other countries was not a normal part of life until very recently.  Thus, it was not a concept.  (Mahogany and other precious woods were not an exception, because they were absorbed within the Mexican economy until the 1990s.  Only the honey was a major exception; the Yucatan Peninsula produces superb honey, and the Maya love beekeeping.  Yucatan provided fully 15% of the honey in international trade until recently.  Tragically, parasites, African bees, and Chinese competition have now devastated the honey economy.)  Realizing that American tourists want fresh fruit and will pay almost any price for it came as a total, and totally delightful, surprise to the Maya—but they were on it right away, trucking oranges and watermelons by the million to Cancun and the other tourist ports.  Slower to come is the realization that there is an almost infinite export potential here too.  Still slower is the realization that the international market will pay top dollar for well-seasoned tropical woods and wood products, for medicinal herbs, for local exotic vegetables, and, above all, for a chance to see a tropical rainforest up close and personal.  But all these things are coming, from quality woodwork to ecotourism.  The future depends on the degree to which Quintana Roo’s many entrepreneurs can develop sophisticated marketing skills.

Successes

By far the major planned success was the introduction of mechanized agriculture around 1980.  Most of the Yucatan Peninsula is limestone with very shallow soil, unsuitable for agriculture, but along the rim of the central hill country are valleys with deep, rich alluvial soils washed off the hills.  Only about 5% of Chunhuhub’s land is like that, but that 5% is concentrated in one broad level plain very near town.  With mechanical pumps to bring up underground water and a tractor to pull a plow, this land is incredibly fertile.  For the first dozen years of the project, however, the pumps or the tractor were generally broken, with spare parts almost impossible to find.  By the mid-1990s the situation was more reliable, and by 2000 the mecanizada was in full operation most of the time, producing vast amounts of maize, watermelons, tomatoes, citrus, mangoes, and other crops.

A major success, but not because of its plan, was the “citrus corridor” idea created in the late 1980s.  (This was a period of considerable activity since Mexico’s dominant political party, the PRI, felt seriously challenged for the first time in its history; it did indeed lose the presidency shortly thereafter.  The PRI was desperately trying to buy votes by extensive projects.  This worked well in Quintana Roo; the projects sometimes succeeded and the PRI stayed in power.)  A strip 1 hectare wide was cleared along some of the highways in southern Yucatan and neighboring Quintana Roo, and the government funded local people to plant citrus there.  Water was developed where necessary.  Communities received funding.  The idea was to plant oranges and use the fruit to make juice concentrate.  A huge plant was set up at Akil, Yucatan, to make the concentrate.  As so often, the government had given no thought at all to marketing.  The juice concentrate cost twice as much to produce as that from Brazil.  Thus the project was hopeless.  However, on their own initiative, the Maya soon learned that there was a huge market for fresh oranges and orange juice in Cancun, Merida, and other nearby towns.  They developed this market by themselves.  Some towns already had fresh fruit marketing networks; others, like Chunhuhub, had to start from scratch, but did so immediately and successfully.  The people of Chunhuhub found they could also use these channels to sell watermelons, avocadoes, mangoes, bananas, and so on, produced from homegardens and increasingly from the mecanizada, and this is now the town’s major income source.

Even more successful, and in fact now world famous (Freese 1997; Primack et al 1998), is the Plan Forestal (Forest Plan).  This is a federal and state project to work with Maya communities to manage their forest resources.  Quintana Roo’s forests are full of valuable woods, such as mahogany.  They also have game animals, medicinal herbs, and a wealth of flashy birds and lizards that tourists love to watch.  The Forest Plan focused on the valuable woods.  Government biologists work with Maya villages and individual ranchers to develop management and conservation plans; the communities pay a small fee, the government provides top-quality biological advice and some help with accounting and with enforcement.

The plan worked stunningly well, mostly because there was a pool of highly trained biologists and administrators.  It has extended to game conservation and ecotourism, on a limited and experimental scale, with enough success to make further efforts highly desirable.  One community, Nohbec, has even satisfied the exceedingly strict German standards for sustainable forest management, and thus can export mahogany and other woods to Germany at a premium price.  As in Hong Kong, there are side benefits:  even communities that are not part of the plan see how successful conservation and sustainable management are, and now try to act accordingly.  However, the Plan Forestal ran into troubled waters as it aged; early commitment and enthusiasm began to be subverted by local dissention and political problems (Haenn 2005).

Chunhuhub has, by and large, not participated, though it has been a headquarters town and has reaped some benefits.  In other towns, the plan worked stunningly well, mostly because there was a pool of highly trained biologists and administrators.  It extended to game conservation and ecotourism, on a limited and experimental scale, with enough success to make further efforts highly desirable.  One community, Nohbec, has even satisfied the exceedingly strict German standards for sustainable forest management, and thus can export mahogany and other woods to Germany at a premium price.  There are side benefits:  even communities that are not part of the plan see how successful conservation and sustainable management are, and now try to act accordingly.

However, the Plan Forestal ran into troubled waters as it aged; early commitment and enthusiasm began to be subverted by local dissention and political problems (Faust et al. 2004; Haenn 2005).  Many communities participated in it and developed forestry and related industries with great success, but the Chunhuhub citizens agreed overwhelmingly not to participate.  Instead, they went their own way.  At first they drastically overcut precious woods—mahogany, Spanish cedar, etc.—and faced an economic crash.  This taught them better planning, and as more precious-wood trees reached commercial size, Chunhuhub managed its forests in a more sustainable way.  Attempts to grow plantations of cedro did not work well; tip borers made the trees grow crooked, and anyway cedro grows so well by itself that plantation growing is hardly necessary.

In the meantime, the ejido system of communal landholding and collective management has largely ended.  Changes in Mexican law in 1993 allowed privatization of ejido land.  The Maya of Quintana Roo resisted this for a long time, but privatization finally came to Chunhuhub from 2005 onward.  The effects of this are still not certain.  One thing that is clear is that many ejido families had largely given up farming to follow the computer or other technological dreams, and the families still farming wanted more chance to be flexible and independent in their land management.  This can only increase the rapidly growing disparity between rich and poor in the community.  The future will be interesting.

Indigenous successes

While government plans were having mixed success, the Maya were busily doing their own developing.  This was most conspicuous in the case of fruit marketing noted above, but there have been many other changes.

Particularly interesting was the evolution of the CEBETA school.  CEBETA is a string of technical schools roughly equivalent to American community colleges.  The Mexican government generously provided one to Chunhuhub, again in the late 1980s.  Assuming that a successful farm town like Chunhuhub would want agriculture, it provided only that.  However, the Maya were more aware of world futures than the developers were, and wanted computer training.  They insisted with dogged and indomitable persistence, and computer training went in.  The school and its programs survived a major scandal in 1996.  As so often, Chunhuhubians took matters into their own hands, forcing out incompetent leadership.  Later a hurricane that destroyed the computers; they were replaced, again at local insistence.

This was part of a wider mission of education.  The Maya of Chunhuhub are self-consciously modernizing and education-demanding.  This sets them apart from many of the smaller communities in the area, which are far less education-conscious.  Chunhuhub is still reflecting its (re)settlement in the late 1940s by a particularly dynamic, intelligent, and upwardly mobile group of young men, largely of the Xool, Tun, and Pat families; these families are now well represented not only in local business ownership but in skilled work and professional circles all over Quintana Roo.  I was sure of getting good service when I took my Nissan car in for maintenance in Chetumal, because the head of the repair shop was a Xool from Chunhuhub.  Chunhuhub has become a major producer of teachers and similar educated workers, who have fanned out all over south Mexico.

Otherwise, the innovations in Chunhuhub have focused on new products.  Most interesting was noni, a Polynesian medicinal plant (Morinda citrifolia).  It is used in Hawaii for almost everything, but the Maya know it especially as a diabetes reliever.  It appears to work; at least the Maya swear by it, but they always use it with Cecropia leaves and other local traditional remedies, so cannot really factor out which plant is really responsible for the truly striking relief they often enjoy.  In any case, noni was completely unknown in southeast Mexico till about 2004, since which it has exploded, and is now found in countless gardens and sold widely in towns.

Other new crops, such as South American passion fruit, have entered the area and expanded since I began to work there.

Another newcomer is sheep.  The Yucatec Maya did not traditionally keep sheep, which they call “cotton animals” (h-taman), in spite of Colonial Spanish introduction.  As of 1991, Chunhuhub had a few sheep, in the care of a shepherd who—like many village shepherds the world over—was a gentle, simple soul whose world hardly extended beyond his flock.  From the late 1990s, however, mutton was saleable.  There was both tourist demand in and around Cancun and demand by mutton-loving Central and North Mexicans who had moved to the area.  So more and more Maya have added tough, heat-resistant tropical sheep to their dooryard gardens.

Sheep do not automatically succeed in the region.  Another, more remote town, Presidente Juarez, tried repeatedly to develop sheep-farming, but the sheep were eaten by jaguars.

Cattle have also increased locally, though this is limited by Chunhuhub’s unsuitability for cattle production.  Good quality grass will not grow on the thin limestone soils and dense tropical clays that cover most of it.  Cattle flourish exceedingly several miles to the south, on natural savannahs.

Meanwhile, a slow but steady increase in local prosperity results from sale of fruit, ornamental plants, thatch, nonprecious woods, medicinal herbs, and many forest products.  Chunhuhubians are also extremely good at finding part-time jobs—from cake decorating to acting as clowns at parties.  I recorded about 60 such informal part-time occupations in 1996.  Obviously, the Chunhuhubians could do much more, and very often fail to succeed in their endeavors, but they have a good track record overall, especially compared to externally imposed schemes.

The Problems

Thus, while the government brings in new plans that are rarely successful, the people of Chunhuhub find their own ways to succeed.  Among other things, they seem always able to come up with just enough capital, thanks to the extended family.  Everyone has a relative with a good job somewhere.  Capital was a serious limit on agricultural improvement when I started working in Chunhuhub 20 years ago, but from the early 1990s it was not a serious problem except during the recession of 1993-94.  Individual families, however, run short of cash, especially after the frequent hurricanes and droughts.  Microlending could be improved in the area.  The Mexican government’s intricate and enormous bureaucracy puts countless hurdles in the way of start-up businesses, and this is an enormous disincentive to enterprise, especially marketing.

The government’s plans usually founder on one rock:  Marketing.  It simply does not occur to anyone in south Mexico’s development universe that a product needs a market, and that the market has to be lucrative enough to pay the costs of production and transportation with a little over for profit.  This is a common failing of government schemes and NGO plans everywhere in the world.  The Maya, by contrast, are amazingly good at finding the tiniest niche market that will actually pay well.  In other parts of Latin America, where Maya and other local communities produce products of global importance, international NGO’s that focus on marketing have really helped local communities.  This is true in regard to coffee, cacao, Guatemalan Maya weavings, and other products (for coffee see esp. Jaffee 2007).  Too often in the Yucatan world, questions of profitability are seldom raised.  Similar stories of Maya vs. outside development abound (see Faust et al. 2004).

Meanwhile, Quintana Roo develops with horrific speed, but the development is almost entirely in the realm of tourism, and the capital comes largely from outside.  Giant international hotel chains and other corporations have taken over a great deal of the state and almost all of its actual development.  They have produced a strange world of posh resorts totally cut off and insulated from Mexican reality.  Going from the Maya villages to a gated multi-star tourist complex is a truly surrealist experience.  These resorts depend largely on food, fuel, and other goods from outside Quintana Roo and usually from outside Mexico.  They interface with the Maya largely by hiring Maya villagers as construction workers, chambermaids, and other unskilled labor.

This should not be exaggerated, since the Maya are rapidly getting better educated and finding more jobs in the higher sectors of the labor force.  The canny villagers of Tulum have been particularly successful at corraling tourists and tourist dollars, beating many international entrepreneurs on their own ground!  The tourism center of Playa del Carmen has turned into something of a Quintana Roo Maya capital, with major education centers, employment opportunities, government agencies, and more.  The people who have dealt with a difficult environment for 3000 years are not yet broken by the new forms of difficulty.

Unfortunately, tourism and Central American location have also brought drugs, and cartel activity and the inevitable political corruption are abundantly evident.  So far, Quintana Roo has avoided the terrible costs paid by northern and central Mexico, but the future is cloudy.  Drugs, tourism, and the few other highly profitable activities ongoing in Quintana Roo are all financed and controlled from outside.

In spite of the success of the Maya at finding places in this world, the overall effect is to keep the Maya down.  They are not given much place; subsidies, tax breaks, and other lavish inducements go to outside firms that are, ultimately, in competition with the Maya for development opportunities.  The “development of underdevelopment” is visible in many villages, especially those drained of their young workers by the vast tourist sector.

These tales can be matched from around the world (Dichter 2003; Stiglitz 2003).  Since WWII, billions of dollars have been spent on development.  Some $60 billion are now spent every year (Dichter 2003:104).  There is now widespread admission that the money has not solved the problem (Dichter 2003; Stiglitz 2003; cf. studies in Faust et al. 2004).

Thomas Dichter (2003) points out that part of the problem lies in the way development assistance is done.  Complex and often byzantine bureaucracies invoke complex and expensive procedures, often badly targeted.  Mistakes amplify through the system.  There are the usual problems of bureaucracy—lack of accountability, top-down control by out-of-touch administrators, and the like.  Dichter sees the rise of a huge “development industry” as the root of the problem.  Certainly, the data in the present paper support his conclusions.

One wonders.  There are too many signs that the agencies know all too well what they are doing to the world economy, and continue to do it anyway (cf. Ascher 1999).  The world does virtually nothing about the huge trade barriers invoked by the rich nations against the poor ones (Stiglitz 2003).  Above all, farm subsidies are enormous in the First World—the United States gives every American farmer an average of $57,000 a year in direct payouts, and at least as much again in indirect support.  European subsidy levels are similar.  Yet the international agencies do everything possible to eliminate subsidies in the Third World.  One also recalls the point above about agricultural “packages” and giant international firms.  Many development plans are not at all well-meaning foolishness, but are very clever and very evil.  They are intended to exploit the poor and keep them down, rather than to help them (Ascher 1999; Hancock 1991).

It seems a bit too neat that the cumulative effects of World Bank, IMF, and WTO policies are to keep the Third World addicted to commodity exporting and minimum-wage, low-value-added industry (Humphreys et al. 2007; Stiglitz 2003—with some reading between the lines based on my own interviews with World Bank personnel and former World Bank personnel).  The First World has gone on to the information economy, hi-tech, and efficiency—all founded on a formidable education-and-research establishment.  The agencies do everything they can to discourage this, by forcing Third World countries to defund education, research, extension, and indeed all public services.  At the same time, they invest heavily in developing the most primitive and backward sectors of the economy: mining, plantation agriculture, oil extraction.  Whatever the intentions, the effect is to keep these countries as fiefs of the rich nations.

Globalization has, of course, made all these trends and problems more dramatic and more intractable.  However, it has also greatly increased the options of ordinary people.  The Maya of Chunhuhub are an active, enterprising group with a large, rich land base, and are well positioned to take advantage of opportunities.  They have shown a striking ability to do this.  However, they have no way of accessing world markets for many of their products.  Their precious woods and ordinary standard-grade woods, in particular, have to be sent to the city mills for uncertain and often low-quality milling.  Quintana Roo’s wood industry has made attempts in the past to introduce high-quality curing, sawmilling, and production of high-end wood products, but all the fledgling firms have failed.  This has much to do with international marketing structures, including high standards in the developed countries.  However, precious woods are exported from one or two Plan Forestal communities to Germany under their sustainable tropical hardwoods program.  This will no doubt increase.

Basically, the point is that globalization and global development increase the options and opportunities of the global poor in the “global south,” but, unfortunately, globalization increases even more the options and opportunities of the First World and its giant multinational firms to exploit the Third World and keep its people prostrate.

If we actually want to see the rural people of the “global south” improve their lot, the way to do it is to encourage local initiative and to help with small-scale loans and with global marketing.  Local people are fully competent to do their own developing, but they cannot do it without some start-up capital and a lot of help accessing global markets.

Another bad idea that persists—this time unstated and unadmitted—is the old belief that wealth can come only from taking someone else’s money.  This idea keeps resurfacing because it is common sense.  The way we normally make money is to get it from someone.  Usually, this is through legitimate business:  I sell you a fish and get some cash.  Sometimes, robbery, theft, conquest, exploitation, or deception are the means.  Either way, cash is transferred from person A to person B, and that is how person B gets rich.

However, in ideal situations, wealth is created anew, rather than merely redistributed.   Turning raw materials into goods is only one way to do this.  More efficient production, more value added, more streamlined management, more knowledge, more rapid and smooth transfer of information, more streamlined ways of doing business (“lower transaction costs”), and more environment-friendly production techniques all make something out of nothing—or, at least, reduce costs, and therefore improve cost-benefit ratios.  The extent to which this is doable depends on the level of relevant education of the workforce.  (Note that word relevant.)

Fortunately, Mexico is more aware than many Third World countries of the need to improve people’s lives through overall wealth creation.  Education is universal and quite good.  An educated workforce is obviously more able to do hi-tech jobs, make new inventions, and go into high-value-added enterprises.  Also, rising wages force companies to modernize and become more efficient, to keep other costs down in the face of rising labor costs (Hayami and Ruttan 1985.)

Money for more education has to come from somewhere; it is part of the nation’s labor cost.  A skilled workforce costs a lot.  But, as Mexico is aware, an unskilled workforce is even more expensive when opportunity costs are figured into the equation.  The problem is that opportunity costs are too dicey for the conservative economists to contemplate.

Resource extraction is another case in point.  Mineral resources taken from Country A are lost to that country forever.  In today’s world of low commodity prices, they do not even bring in much money.  Resource extraction looks good only when one considers the world economy as a zero-sum game.  The rich get it (cheaply), the poor lose it; wealth is redistributed, not created.  To be sure, metals and some other goods are more efficiently and wisely used in a developed industrial system than in a nascent one, so there is good economic sense in taking copper from Papua-New Guinea and bringing it to Europe and America.  But the same can hardly be said for coffee, or sugar, or cattle, whose processing is still a fairly primitive matter even in rich nations.  The money spent developing cattle export would be better spent developing decent schools, or even meat-packing plants, in the exporting country.

This sort of zero-sum thinking underlies what George Foster called “the limited good hypothesis” (Foster 1965).  Foster found that people who see the world in zero-sum terms come to assume that even things like affection and justice are limited goods.  People living in closed economies with widespread low-key competition, or people who have to strive for power (always a limited good), are prone to think this way.  So, it appears, are international bankers and development workers.

What is forgotten is that, given a chance, the poor rural villages of the world could produce more scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs, teachers, and (yes) developers than all the First World put together.  The result would be wealth creation on an undreamed-of scale.

Wider Issues

The more naïve environmentalists will, at this point, object that this would trash the planet.  If everyone consumed like Americans…!

The truth is that a world of opportunity and fair dealing would be a more efficient world.  If commodity prices were at all fair, the rich would no longer have access to virtually infinite amounts of virtually free oil, minerals, sugar, and so on.  The huge SUV would no longer be competitive with the small economical car.  In fact, the car would not be competitive with public transport; people would not find it necessary to have their own cars.  If the metals columbium and tantalum were not extracted for pennies from a Congo torn by civil war over the ore—a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people—the American economy would not find it so cheap and easy to provide huge, overadequate computers on such a lavish scale; people like me, who use the computer merely as a glorified typewriter, would have much smaller, more efficient, longer-lived machines.  If Third World countries had decent wages and decent social support systems, the rural people, newly empowered and given a stake in their economy, would no longer be forced to cut down every bush for firewood or to pull up every tuft of grass for fodder.  They would be able to husband resources, control and manage them, use them sustainably.

The problem is that almost nobody thinks this is an achievable goal.  Limited-good thinking is perhaps the major reason for such hopelessness.  Today’s widespread cynicism typically takes the form of a belief that people are instinctively wired to destroy nature or to think in zero-sum terms (e.g. Ridley 1996).  This flies in the face of common experience; it is only in genuinely limited situations (most often, struggles for power in hierarchic systems) that people develop limited-good thinking.  Yet this is enough to make constant trouble for this imperfect world.

In fact, an evaluation of over 11,000 World Bank development projects showed that those with conservation goals were as successful at producing economic development as those that ignored conservation and simply went for the money (Kareiva et al. 2008).

It almost seems as if the world economy is not capitalist but feudalist.  We are back to the world of the robber barons in their castles on the Rhine.  Most of the world’s population is forced, by police or military violence and genocidal repression, to work for pennies.  They work in bare-subsistence farms, they live by their wits in urban slums, or they work in extractive or low-value-added industries that provide cheap commodities for the more affluent.  The affluent, having no economic incentive to conserve, use these commodities in a wasteful manner.  The resulting damage to the world’s ecosystem worsens yet more the plight of the poor.   Far from being capitalist, “neoliberal,” or some sort of new product of the mystical force of “globalization,” this economy is a throwback to an earlier age.

The cure is to focus first on providing the bare necessities of life:  water, fuel, food, and health care.  In the desperately overpopulated contemporary world, this last has to include the full panoply of contraceptive techniques, made freely available everywhere.  Then we can begin to think about the long term:  education, efficient use of resources, development of whole new industrial systems.  This will require spending money not on quick fixes but on huge systems that have slow and uncertain payoffs—not only education systems, but ecological reserves, sustainable development, research and extension, and the like. Be suspicious of anything that pays off in the short term.  If it is a good idea, private entrepreneurs will rush to do it without help.  Otherwise, it isn’t worth doing.

There are lots of other ideas that really work.  Even just controlling crime, or providing a road to market, can work wonders in certain places.

One need not—pace the anthropological establishment—totally revolutionize our views of the world or our political economy, though some revolution would surely be useful.  Anthropologists have done thousands of studies showing how foolish outside developers are, and how smart the locals are at surviving in spite of them (one that sums up a vast literature in one complex story is Tanya Li’s The Will to Improve, 2007; see also, again, Dichter 2003).  The anthropologists usually draw the perverse conclusion that what we need is for anthropologists to take over and end neoliberalism, or globalization, or some other meaningless mutisyllable nonsense.  No.  What we need is to give local people the simpler and more practical of the things they actually want, and then get the hell out of the way.

The one common denominator that all successful plans have, and that none of the failed schemes has, is that they actually give opportunities to ordinary people.  It is among the ordinary people of the world that we can and must seek and find salvation.

Based on a paper for the American Anthropological Society, San Francisco, 2008

References

Anderson, Barbara A.; E. N. Anderson; Tracy Franklin; Aurora Dzib-Xihum de Cen.  2004.  “Pathways of Decision Making among Yucatan Mayan Traditional Birth Attendants.”  Journal of Midwifery and Women’s Health 49:4:312-319.

Anderson, E. N.   2003.  Those Who Bring the Flowers.  Chetumal:  ECOSUR.

Anderson, E. N.  2005.  Political Ecology in a Yucatec Maya Community.  Tucson:  University of Arizona Press.

Anderson, E. N., and Felix Medina Tzuc.  2005.  Animals and the Maya in Southeast Mexico.  Tucson:  University of Arizona Press.

Arellano Rodríguez, J. Alberto; José Salvador Flores Guido; Juan Tun Garrido; María Mercedes Cruz Bojórquez.  2003.  Nomenclatura, forma de vida, uso, manejo  y distribución de las especies vegetales de la Península de Yucatán.  Mérida:  Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán.  Etnoflora Yucatanense no. 20.

Ascher, William.  1999.  Why Governments Waste Natural Resources.  Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press.

Demarest, Arthur.  2004.  Ancient Maya:  The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

Dichter, Thomas W.  2003.  Despite Good Intentions: Why Development Assistance to the Third World Has Failed.  Amherst & Boston:  University of Massachusetts Press.

Faust,  Betty B.; E. N. Anderson; John G. Frazier (eds.).  2004.  Rights, Resources, Culture, and Conservation in the Land of the Maya.  Westport, CT:  Greenwood.

Foster, George.  1966.  “Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good.”  American Anthropologist 67:293-315.

Freese, Curtis H. (ed.).  1997.  Harvesting Wild Species: Implications for Biodiversity Conservation. Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University Press.

Haenn, Nora.  2005.  Fields of Power, Forests of Discontent.  Tucson:  University of Arizona Press.

Hancock, Graham.  1991.  Lords of Poverty.  London:  MacMillan.

Hayami, Yujiro, and Vernon Ruttan.  1985.  Agricultural Development.  Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press.

Hostetler, Ueli.  1996.  Milpa Agriculture and Economic Diversification: Socioeconomic Change in a Maya Peasant Society of Central Quintana Roo, 1900-1990s.  PhD th., University of Berne, ethnology.

Humphreys, Macartan; Jeffrey D. Sachs; Joseph E. Stiglitz (eds.).  2007.  Escaping the Resource Curse.  New York:  Columbia University Press.

Jaffee, Daniel.  2007.  Brewing Justice:  Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.

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Primack, Richard B.; David Bray; Hugo A. Galletti; Ismael Ponciano (eds.).  1998.  Timber, Tourists and Temples:  Conservation and Development in the Maya Forest of Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico.  Washington, DC:  Island Press.

Redfield, Robert, and Alfonso Villa Rojas.  1934.  Chan Kom, A Maya Village.  Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Ridley, Matt.  1996.  The Origins of Virtue.  New York:  Penguin.

Sharer, Robert J., and Loa Traxler.  2005.  The Ancient Maya.  6^th edn.  Stanford:  Stanford University Press.

Stiglitz, Joseph.  2003.  Globalization and Its Discontents.  New York:  W. W. Norton.

Webster, David.  2002.  The Fall of the Ancient Maya.  New York:  Thames and Hudson.

Chapter 2.  A Partial Success:  Development and Brain Drain in a Yucatec Maya Town

E. N. Anderson

Barbara A. Anderson, DrPH, CNM

The past 20 years of globalization has impacted Chunhuhub, Quintana Roo, an historic center of Maya culture. This rural community has experienced rapid changes including telephone and computer services, reliable pumped water, and a technical college teaching agriculture (and computer use).  Orchard and field agriculture and livestock keeping have produced wealth for several families.  Poverty, however, continues.  Questions remain about responsible and sustainable development that retains cultural heritage, language, traditional foodways, low-impact agricultural and forestry practices, and traditional approaches to health and illness.

Chunhuhub: Historical perspective

The first author of this paper first saw Chunhuhub more than 20 years ago.  At that time it was a small, sleepy town, basically a wide place on the main road from Merida to Chetumal. Today, it looks almost the same.  A superficial observer might think that it was in the grip of immemorial tradition.  Anthropologists, however, will expect to find that Chunhuhub’s lack of change is the result not of forces for stasis but of dynamic forces that more or less balance out.  This is, indeed, what we do find.

This paper provides a broad-brush history of the Chunhuhub area and its changes over 20-odd years.  The focus is on what forces actually changed it, and what forces prevented the changes from making more visible difference in the town and the forests and fields around it.

Chunhuhub is a Yucatec Maya town.  Everyone is Maya except a few in-migrants and a few professional people (such as teachers and health workers).  Everyone except them and a few children knows Yucatec, though the young have largely shifted to Spanish for actual speaking use.  The town is solidly agricultural; many people are subsistence farmers, and the town’s income derives largely from sale of fruit, vegetables, and livestock.  Some timber is produced, including valuable mahogany.  Some maize is sold, but changing climate has made maize a very uncertain proposition—at best a subsistence crop.  However, it remains overwhelmingly the staple food, though increasingly supplemented by wheat flour and sugar products.

The town was pre-Columbian.  Relics show a long history.  There was a flourishing Classical Maya town here, a dispersed but fairly large post classic population, and then a large Spanish Colonial town, mentioned in many colonial documents (E. Anderson 2005).  It became known for sugar and rum.  It was destroyed in 1846 in the Caste War.  Resettlement came in the 1940s, by young men moving west from the old “rebel Maya” towns of east-central Quintana Roo (on which see Villa Rojas 1945; see also Redfield and Villa Rojas 1934 on traditional Yucatec Maya culture).  It became a formally recognized ejido in the late 1940s, and has grown steadily since, as have other towns in the eastern “Zona Maya.”

Chunhuhub has about 6,000 residents.  Census information is inadequate (those figures that exist are cited in Anderson 2005), but one can safely say the town has a young population, thanks to recent settlement and much in-migration, plus high fertility.  On the other hand, the demographic transition has come (largely since ENA began research there).  Completed family size—by defnition, the size of families now too old to have more—is around seven children, but young families are stopping at two to four (Anderson 2005).

Social changes

Looking over the town today, the most visible change from 1989 is the new market building.  It stands in the center of town, on the main road, and is large and impressive.  However, it is not what it appears to be.  It has rather few tenants, and these are very small local efforts.  Much more significant is the new town hall on the other side of the k’iiwik (town square—oddly enough, pronounced almost exactly the same as the Latin root civic- “central city” that gives us “civic” and “civilization”). The town operated from a tiny shed in 1989; this shed has now degraded to a storage unit.  The new town hall is capacious and well built, and a point of civic pride. It is equipped with computers.  The new building is already getting too small and humble-looking for the town’s more forward-looking members.  Many of them want a new municipio (county) with Chunhuhub as the county seat; at present it is a remote part of the huge and sprawling municipio of Felipe Carrillo Puerto.

The computers imply, correctly, that another highly desirable new touch is the coming of reliable electricity.  Chunhuhub had recently gotten electric service when ENA first did sustained field work there in 1991, and the service was only intermittent.

Another new touch that is even less visible but equally important is the phone booth between the market and the church.  Chunhuhub had no phone service till the turn of the 21st century.  (The phone certainly made life and field work easier for ENA.)  Piped water now comes reliably to central homes, and more and more streets are paved in addition to the main Merida-Chetumal road (the only paved road in 1989).  Notable also is the partial restoration, or at least partial re-roofing, of the old colonial church, reduced to a ruined shell by the 1846 war.  It was used from the 1940s on, but remained a shell till 2000, when re-roofing began.  However, repairs are reduced, because the congregation is very thin indeed.  Most Chunhuhubians still think of themselves as Catholic in some sense, but only some 200 are actively so, versus over 300 active Protestants.  The Protestant churches, however, remain fragmented, small and frail.  Chunhuhub is about as secular a town as the world affords.  Well under 10% of the population are regular churchgoers.  This contrasts strikingly with other local towns, which tend to be solidly Catholic, solidly Protestant, or solidly Cruzoob.

Probably Chunhuhub’s most important agent of change is slightly south of the town proper:  the CEBETA school.  A CEBETA is a technical school, somewhere between a US high school and junior college.  This one teaches agriculture and elementary computer science.  It has been an enormous source for upward mobility, but in the process it has led to a steady outflow of skilled, educated people from the town.

In general, the town seems more prosperous.  There are more masonry houses, fewer pole-and-thatch ones.  After writing that the town has no restaurant in the original version of this paper, we were delighted to find that the family that has long sold fried fish on the highway has finally gotten the capital to open a well-appointed new restaurant (we have not yet tried it), and privatization has led to the birth of a couple of small food stalls in ranchos along the road south.  The fact that the restaurant is named “El Trailero” (the trucker) indicates one main source of clientele.

The prosperity comes partly from government transfer payments, but largely from sale of fruit, vegetables and livestock on the burgeoning market of Cancun and the Maya Riviera, where anything fresh and local can command a good price.  However, agricultural modernization has been slow and halting, because of lack of capital and because of competition from better-placed or better-capitalized sources.  Many people are basically subsistence farmers, selling just enough to buy minimal clothing and tools.  Others are successful orchardiers, vegetable growers, and/or livestock raisers, often mixing all three and also selling corn in the increasingly rare times when they have a surplus.  Most people who want more than trivial amounts of cash, however, must do nonfarm work.  A striking range of local part-time jobs attests to their creativity in this regard (Anderson 2005).  No one goes hungry any more, but some live on a very poor and monotonous diet, sometimes limited to government relief plus whatever comes from the homegarden and the forest.  On the other hand, since Chunhuhub is an ejido with at least some collective institutions surviving, landless farm workers are few indeed; everyone has some sort of patch of ground.  Homegardens typically include 30-40 species of useful plants and sometimes over 90, as well as chickens, ducks, turkeys, pigs, and often cattle and sheep.

The biggest and most important change in the last 10 or even 20 years, however, is hidden on a back street at the east end of town:  the new clinic.  Until 2007, primary health care services came via a tiny, increasingly shabby clinic in the center of town.  Finally, well-appointed, well-built comprehensive clinic was constructed.  It has dental and primary health care services and health education, with posters lauding the virtues of breastfeeding, folic acid, and other health education issues. It is staffed by nurses and doctors fulfilling national service obligations. There is a local transport vehicle dedicated to the clinic, improving the management of trauma and emergency obstetrical situations.  Weekend coverage may be slim, as exemplified in the study we did on the parteras in the region. We have published some of the heroic stories of managing these medical complications in hurricanes before this clinic and reliable transport service were initiated (B. Anderson et al. 2004).

In an effort to understand the role that traditional birth attendants (parteras) play in Chunhuhub and the surrounding smaller communities, we conducted a compressed ethnography of all identified and willing parteras. Through word-of-mouth with our local field assistant and a Spanish-speaking graduate student, we identified 6 practicing parteras, five of whom agreed to participant in our in-depth interviewing. The sixth partera had just lost her husband and the home was disrupted and in grief. She declined to be involved in the study.  (The methodology, identified themes, results, informed consent, and institutional review board approval are described in B. Anderson et al. 2004.)

There has been a great deal of work done on Maya parteras.  We acknowledge in particular the work of Betty Faust, Brigette Jordan, and Sheila Cosminsky (see review in B. Anderson et al. 2004). One area of research of particular interest to BAA as a nurse-midwife with wide global experience was the decision-making processes used by these practicing parteras in the identification and management of childbirth difficulty or emergency. The skill and techniques used by parteras in managing normal births is well documented, and all across Mexico, as in many regions of the world, babies are born into their capable hands. But what do they do when childbirth becomes problematic or life-threatening? When the otherwise marvelous process of birth becomes a nightmare? As a nurse-midwife, BAA has witnessed many maternal deaths around the world; so often quick referral and rapid intervention could have saved mother, baby or both. BAA has seen parteras blamed for deaths and asked herself if she could have done better, given the circumstances.

Our team decided to find out what these parteras in this community, with over 224 cumulative years of experience among them, knew about managing complications of childbirth. Using Christina Gladwin’s decision tree model (1989), we identified and examined themes used by these parteras when faced with a crisis childbirth and we mapped their sequential steps in making decisions about interventions. We listened to their voices, their stories, told using their terms. In interviewing, we did not attempt to label their descriptions with our standard diagnostic categories, to “correct” their actions, or to educate them about our ways. We deferred intervention,  leaving the syncretism of traditional practices and modern health care to the parteras and health professionals of Mexico.

One point evolving from our study which is salient to this presentation was the agreement by all interviewed parteras that young woman in the community are not interested in learning the skills and art of being parteras. The parteras said that many young woman think this role is not part of the “modern” world. Yet, the community lacks primary health care coverage on a 24-hour basis, particularly on weekends; roads still get closed by hurricanes, and there has been little local involvement in identifying and training youth for health careers. Who will care for the birthing mothers and babies? The parteras have always been there and a social vacuum is emerging as the parteras age. This problem is not unlike the global shortage and aging of health professionals, particularly nurses, currently a top priority for programming by the World Health Organization.

While the Mexican government has done a commendable job of placing primary health care clinics in population centers of 5000 or greater, there has been little local involvement in identifying and training youth for health careers in their own environment. Unlike many regions of the world, the community health worker concept does not seem very operational.  Talented young persons are not tapped to study nursing, pharmacy, and midwifery—all services that could be incorporated into the PHC setting in Chunhuhub.  It is essentially impossible for residents to obtain education in these areas without moving to large centers where they can attend college; Chunhuhub is too far for commuting.

A final, recent change in Chunhuhub’s health scene has been the opening of a tiny, struggling center for traditional medicine in the former government clinic.  This center is part of a small chain opened and run by a husband-and-wife team from central Mexico, Enrique Gálvez Garcia and Columba Marín Martínez.  They found Maya traditional medicine to be highly effective (cf. Anderson 2003—a source known to and used by them) and have developed many teas, salves, and other preparations, as well as a useful and well-done booklet (Marín Martínez et al. 2008).  They also provide massage and have the services of one of the above-noted parteras on call.  One hopes for great things, but previous attempts to commercialize traditional medicine in the Zona Maya have not done well; local families can do it for themselves, and visitors are few.

Interface with the “modern” world

Chunhuhub privatized its ejido several years ago.  The collective ejido land system was not abolished, but the land was leased on on long-term leasehold, rather than being reassigned every couple of years.  The latter was the ideal system when subsistence farming of maize by swidden techniques was the universal way of life.  Now, commercial fruit orchards, small-scale livestock rearing, and vegetables are slowly replacing subsistence farming, and they require longer-term investment with secure land tenure.  The result has been the rise of small ranchos lining the road southward.  These show varying degrees of investment, especially in fruit trees and cattle, but they represent a major change in the landscape.  A student, Maria DiGiano, is now studying this process in Chunhuhub and neighboring towns.

Of problems, clearly the first and foremost is the brain drain of educated young men and women.  In the Midwest of our childhood, people often said of small farm towns:  “Around here, anyone with any git-up-and-go has got up and gone.”  Chunhuhub is undergoing the same process 60 years later, and constantly reminds us of that line. A surprising number of the best and brightest have stayed; Teodomiro Tun Xool runs the town pharmacy, Andres Sosa teaches in the schools, Gabriel Medina farms with his father, and many other old friends are still there, making a decent living.  But most of the educated have gone on, scattered all over Mexico, teaching, working in businesses and government bureaus, working with computers.

There is, in fact, little to do with an education in Chunhuhub.  The training in computers was of no use at all for years, but now at least the town hall has a computer, and more are beginning to show up in businesses.  The training in agriculture might be seen as more valuable, but in fact Chunhuhub’s agriculture is mainly subsistence-level—far from the hi-tech and industrial agriculture for which CEBETA trains its students.  Attempts to apply such techniques in Chunhuhub have failed for lack of accessible markets.  With today’s roads, and the enormous expansion of tourism in Quintana Roo, markets could be developed and market farming on Chunhuhub’s fertile soils could prosper.  But lack of capital and the brain drain have hindered this.  Moreover, global warming has caused a major drying of climate (as occurred in previous warming episodes such as the Medieval Warm Period) and probably some exacerbation of storms, making agriculture more problematical than it was when we began research.  The difference has been quite striking to us, and, of course, to the Maya.

Considerations of this sort underlie the lack of expected changes in Chunhuhub.  Some things one does not see on the main street are a gas station, a hotel, a modern store of any kind (except Don Teodomiro’s drug store), and a private clinic.  (There is a place to buy gasoline out of tanks in a private house, but not an actual gas station..)  Nearby José Maria Morelos and Felipe Carrillo Puerto have all these things, and forward-looking colleges as well.  They are municipio towns (equivalent to county seats).  Still, a town as large and rich as Chunhuhub should be expected to have them.  It does not, because there are relatively few enterprising people and relatively few actual or potential customers.  These facts are part of a vicious cycle:  the flight of the enterprising deprives the town not only of their skills, but also of their buying power.

Chunhuhub shows a major problem with the explosion of tourism in Cancun and the “Maya Riviera”:  It has shown no tendency to spread to the interior.  It has drained away the young people, to work in construction and hotels and businesses, but has not led to growth of businesses or facilities anywhere more than a mile from the coast.  The long highways from Cancun to Merida and Chetumal are astonishingly wild; they cut through deep forest, and one can see coatis, parrots, and even the occasional deer from the road. Ecotourism development has occurred in a very small way at Tres Garantias and a few other spots, and of course at the major archaeological sites such as Coba and Chichen Itza, but one really would expect an ecotourism development at a place like Chunhuhub.  The natural beauty, the richness of wildlife, the facilities for bird watching, the huge and unexplored archaeological sites nearby, and the town’s wonderful hospitality and superb food might be expected to lure anyone.  But there is nothing.

The Quintana Roo government has recently expanded development southward from Cancun, and is now focusing on developing the coast due east of Chunhuhub, a previously low-key and rather wild area.  This will take the pressure off Cancun, and bring many more opportunities to the Chunhuhub area.  On the other hand, it is yet another development that will concentrate economic activity on the coast and turn the interior into a mere source area for labor.  One can easily imagine a better fate:  an ecotourism project in Chunhuhub (similar to ones already common in some parts of the Yucatan Peninsula), with local foods, local handicrafts, local medicines, local forest products, and so on, to give the adventurous tourist a real sense of Maya life.  This need not be the sort of crass commercialization seen in many such schemes; if much of the planning were left to local people, they would see to that.

Lying behind all this are government programs that are not well targeted for places like Chunhuhub.  For obvious reasons (but to the annoyance of Chunhuhub residents), governments have focused efforts on the tourism corridors.  Many rather brief efforts have been made to develop agriculture and forestry.  These have not caught on, for various reasons that we have detailed in previous books and papers (see esp. Anderson 2003, 2005, 2006, 2010; Anderson and Medina Tzuc 2005; Faust et al. 2004).

The basic problem with all of them has been failure to think about marketing.  Marketing efforts have been nonexistent, or have been limited to selling a few items out of government offices in Felipe Carrillo Puerto, not a destination town. Entrepreneurs in the tourist towns sell primarily the cheapest and lowest grade of souvenir items:  T-shirts, mass-produced small gift items, alcohol.  The high-quality items available to tourists in Mexico City, Taxco, Oaxaca, or Puebla are singularly rare. A few small stores have specialized in them, but lasted only a short time, due to undercapitalization and under-advertising.  The mass market of Cancun is not highly sophisticated, but much more discerning and affluent tourists are appearing there, and to a much greater extent in Playa del Carmen and Tulum.  (These two towns, south of Cancun and nearer to Chunhuhub, have become the sophisticated tourist’s alternatives to Cancun.)  Chunhuhub’s agricultural products, including highline items like honey, could appear there.

Quality woodworkers could use Chunhuhub’s wood.  It still depresses us to see a log burned for lack of market when we know that that log would bring several thousand dollars if it could be seasoned and brought back to southern California’s quality woodworking trade.  ENA has researched this issue at length on both ends of the supply chain, and found that the problem was Mexico’s tight export policies combined with the problems of starting a quality wood-seasoning operation (kilns, etc.) in Quintana Roo.  Such operations did start off and on over the years, and ENA interviewed the owners and also the owners of sawmills that could have entered the field.  The problem was lack of local markets and lack of facilities for export.

Honey was once a major product, and possibly could be again—the honey is of the highest quality and bees love the area.  However, the international crisis in honey production caused by Africanization of the bees, epidemics of mites, and pesticide overload has damaged production seriously.

Commercialization of tropical fruits and vegetables could expand to include real Maya foods: chicozapote, mamey, chaya, and others.  Game farming is possible.

Clearly, by far, the best thing to happen to Chunhuhub in its short modern history has been education, especially CEBETA.  The clinic and the coming of reliable water and power have been major blessings.  The most obvious visible changes in town have had much more modest effects; the market is a boondoggle, the church repairs have done little, and only the improved city hall is a benefit.  Underlying all this has been the increasing demand for quality fruit and vegetables, and to a lesser extent valuable woods, which have allowed the town some modest prosperity while remaining agricultural.

There is a series of feedback loops that keeps poor towns poor.  These towns are brain-drained, and the more obvious immediate solutions to their problems—improved education, in particular—make the brain drain worse.  Development of nearby urban areas also makes brain drain worse.  Chunhuhub has suffered less than many; whole towns closer to the zona turistica are virtually depopulated, left to the very old and very young.  (At least the workers can come home every weekend, unlike the Mexican migrants working in the United States.)  Moreover, the agricultural, industrial, and crafts developments that would have been created by those young people will remain forever undone.  Those who would have created them are sometimes working as teachers, computer operators, and skilled workers, but too often they are working for corporations as wage laborers. A tremendous amount of human potential is being wasted.

At the same time, food security is impacted (Anderson 2006).  Global warming is making traditional maize-bean-squash farming increasingly difficult, and may make it impossible.  Similar warming in the Medieval Warm Period was apparently the cause of the collapse of Maya civilization after 800 (Gill 2000, confirmed by many subsequent studies).  Even small differences are fatal, since maize is somewhat marginal here in any case.  The first change that happens when climate warms is a lengthening of the late spring drought into summer, which is fatal to maize.

Partly as a result, the indigenous diet is changing, replacing high nutrient beans, corn, squash and other local fruits and vegetables with sugar, sodas, and white flour. This dietary change contributes to insidious obesity and diabetes epidemics, coming crises in the poorer regions of the world.  Food security is a major issue for the poorer members of the community.

Deforestation is currently not a major problem, since moving to the city at least alleviates demographic stress.  However, the future is uncertain, because cattle-rearing, the bane of Latin America, has come to Quintana Roo.  Some areas have already been cleared and turned into nonnative grass pastures.  Conversion to cattle ranching would destroy not only the highly productive forest but the countless environmental amenities that go with it.  The consequences are uncertain but major.  At least this is not yet a major problem; cattle raising on the ejido has remained environment-friendly.  The cattle used are tough tropical stock that can handle local brush if they have a small amount of pasture, and major clearing is rendered difficult by the unsuitability of the land for quality grass.  No other huge ecological threat has emerged, though global warming can impact the forest seriously.

All this, more or less, brings home the ways that global forces play on the ground.  Anthropologists have recently been seduced by meaningless terms like “globalization,” “postcoloniality” and “neoliberalism.”  These terms say nothing and explain nothing.  They imply vast forces that somehow exist and act without having any real instantiation in real things or people.  Usually, they are used more or less as shorthand for real processes, notably the rapid globalization of capital via giant and increasingly multinational firms.  The problem, however, comes when they are treated as if they were real forces that acted on their own.  This sort of loose usage conceals more than it reveals.  If we are to deal with actual real-world problems and conditions, we have to specify how capital flows, government policies, and particular developments actually play out on the ground.  In Chunhuhub, this means the progressive increase in overall agricultural production and in wealth, the very slow but real development of government services, the massive brain drain, and above all the enormous, enterprise-strangling bottleneck caused by lack of marketing opportunities.

The wider lesson in all this is that going up against “neoliberalism” or other abstractions will not help the world.  We cannot get rid of “capitalism,” because “capitalism” in the classic sense no longer exists.  What does exist is individuals, governments, and firms deploying wealth in highly specific and particular ways.  These deployments create a worldwide system, which seriously needs to be changed, but which is not well described by a 19th-century term defined in other 19th-century terms.  Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory (Wallerstein 1976) offers more, though Wallerstein too resorted to broad abstract terms.  We need to work on these concepts to make them concrete and applicable in the 21st century.

Conclusion

For the future, are we to allow local communities to wither away, as brain drain pulls people to the cities?  Are we to allow those left behind to lose indigenous nutrition knowledge and become obese and diabetic from processed foods?  There are countless ghost towns in the United States and Europe that have been emptied by this process.  Perhaps many of them deserved the fate.  Farm work, especially for landless laborers, is hard, wearing, and often a ticket to nowhere, and we do not particularly regret the fate of many dead-end farm towns.  We do not believe that Chunhuhub and the other Maya towns deserve this.  The people there are some of the most dynamic, hard-working, thoughtful people we know, and they deserve better than to become maids and day laborers.

Based on a paper for the Society for Applied Anthropology, Merida, 2010

References

Anderson, Barbara A.; E. N. Anderson; Tracy Franklin; Aurora Dzib-Xihum de Cen.  2004.  “Pathways of Decision Making among Yucatan Mayan Traditional Birth Attendants.”  Journal of Midwifery and Women’s Health 49:4:312-319.

Anderson, E. N., with José Cauich Canul, Aurora Dzib, Salvador Flores Guido, Gerald Islebe, Felix Medina Tzuc, Odilón Sánchez Sánchez, and Pastor Valdez Chale.  2003.  Those Who Bring the Flowers:  Maya Ethnobotany in Quintana Roo, Mexico.  Anderson with José Cauich Canul, Aurora Dzib, Salvador Flores Guido, Gerald Islebe, Felix Medina Tzuc, Odilón Sánchez Sánchez, and Pastor Valdez Chale.  Chetumal, Quintana Roo:  ECOSUR.

Spanish edition:  Las Plantas de los Mayas:  Etnobotánica en Quintana Roo, México.  Tr. Gerald Islebe and Odilón Sánchez Sánchez.  Chetumal:  Colegio de la Frontera Sur.

Anderson, E. N.  2005.  Political Ecology in a Yucatec Maya Community.  Tucson:  University of Arizona Press.

Anderson, E. N.  2006.  “Wild Plum Shoots and Jicama Roots:  Food Security in Traditional Quintana Roo Maya Life.”  Paper, American Anthropological Association, annual conference, San Jose, CA

Anderson, E. N.  2010.  “Managing Maya Commons:  Quintana Roo, Mexico.”  In Leslie Main Johnson and Eugene S. Hunn (eds.), Landscape Ethnoecology:  Concepts of Biotic and Physical Space.  New York:  Berghahn.  Pp. 25-276.

Anderson, E. N., and Felix Medina Tzuc.  2005.  Animals and the Maya in Southeast Mexico.  Tucson:  University of Arizona Press.

Faust, Betty B. ; E. N. Anderson; John G. Frazier (eds.).  2004.  Rights, Resources, Culture, and Conservation in the Land of the Maya.  Westport, CT:  Greenwood.

Gill, Richardson.  2000.  The Great Maya Droughts.  Albuquerque:  University of New Mexico Press.

Gladwin, Christina.  1989.  Ethnographic Decision Tree Modeling.  Newbury Park, CA:  Sage.

Marín Martínez, Columba; Leonor Sosa Jarquín; Miguel Chan y Pat; Juventino Ortega; Bernarndina Góngora Tun.  2008.  Much’ meyajtik maaya ts’aak:  Manual de Remedios Prácticos para una vida saludable, Chunhuhub Q Roo.  Mexico City: ADMITE, S.C.

Redfield, Robert, and Alfonso Villa Rojas.  1934.  Chan Kom, A Maya Village.  Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Villa Rojas, Alfonso. 1945.  The Maya of East Central Quintana Roo.  Washington, DC:  Carnegie Institutino of Washington.  Publ. 559.

Chapter 3.  “Loving Nature” in Quintana Roo

In a recent book titled Loving Nature (2002), Kay Milton, of Queens University in Belfast, reframes political ecology in a truly radical manner.  “Radical” means “at the root,” and Milton indeed reshapes the field from the roots to the branch tips.  (I have reviewed it for Journal of Ethnobiology, hopefully forthcoming.)

The book takes a phenomenological position, getting inside people’s heads as far as possible, to see how people actually experience the environment.  This in itself is new to political ecology, though it has been done before by a very few environmental writers (notably Abram 1996).

The radical part of Milton’s book stems from a corollary agenda: her thorough readings of recent psychological research in the area of emotion and cognition.  After years of relative neglect, emotion had its turn in the 1990s.  Particularly interesting was the work of Hannah and Antonio Damasio (A. Damasio 1994).  They found that emotional messages project directly to the frontal lobes, especially via the basal frontal region.  Here emotion and cognition are brought together.  Emotion is generated initially in the limbic system (LeDoux 1996), though it ultimately involves activity in much of the brain.  The frontal lobes are the centers of planning, of social interaction, and indeed of anything that is complex—by which I mean not only complicated but also integrated at several levels of abstraction and remoteness.  For example:  I am now using phonemes to assemble words to make into sentences to convince you of my point so that you will go out and save the world.

Cognition requires this emotional input to function normally.  Lesions to the basal frontal lobes result in a disconnect of thought and feeling.  Emotions go out of control, sometimes becoming almost like animal reactions.  Cognition is cold and is cut off from reality.  Above all, ethical, moral, and even ordinary social behavior is dramatically compromised.  Caring, sensitive, well-socialized men and women turn into moody and irresponsible individuals—loose cannons, totally unable to function in normal social roles.  It turns out that the anterior cingulate cortex, central to the basal forebrain, is particularly important to social behavior.  It seems to be a center for integrating knowledge with social feelings, and thus for allowing reasonable and caring social behavior.

To cut a long physiological story short (see also LeDoux 1996), David Hume was right when he said, back in 1740, that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions” (Hume 1984:462).  “Slave” perhaps puts it too strongly, but the idea is correct.  Reason takes place only in response to felt needs mediated through emotions.  It has long been known that we cannot even “notice” stimuli unless we have some sort of mood reaction to them, even if we notice them at only an unconscious or preattentive level (Zajonc 1980).  We now know that we cannot think about them, plan to deal with them, or interact reasonably with them without constant and complex emotional input from the limbic system and probably elsewhere in the brain.  Through this we define goals, make plans, and interact with our human and nonhuman others.

Milton applies this new research to her findings on environmental politics.  Her recent “field” work has been at home; she has been studying environmentalism in the British Isles.  She finds that people become involved in so far as they love nature.  “Love” is a complex term, as we all know, and “nature” is defined variously by the various activists involved, but the conclusion stands:  environmental activists are brought into the fold by their intense feelings of care and attraction.  These Milton sees as heavily a matter of learning—of cultural conditioning, family background, and personal experience, all integrated into a phenomenological whole.  She is critical of E. O. Wilson’s innatist “biophilia” theory (Wilson 1984).  Indeed, her interviewees vary enormously in both the degree and type of love they feel for animals and “nature.”

Different activists have different passionately-held agendas.  This can lead to conflicts that are quite irrational, in the sense that they are emotional (rather than “rational”) and that they defy common sense.  She details several conflicts that have gotten out of hand, sometimes leading almost to violence within the usually-mild environmentalist community.

One that will be familiar to many of us is the conflict between those who wish to preserve all animals and those that wish to save local species by eliminating nonnative “pests” that “threaten” native fauna.  In her case study, the conflict is over ruddy ducks (Oxyura jamaicensis), which are genetically swamping the rare European white-headed duck (O. leucocephala).  The two are barely, if at all, distinct as species.  I was fortunate enough to see a white-headed duck a few years ago on one of its last refuges of purity, near Cordova, Spain.

Certainly the emotional message rings true enough.  We all know that saving the environment depends on loving it, or at least worrying about it.  Those who wish to save plants and animals generally have some personal warm feelings toward what they save.  Those who are not particularly loving toward nature, but still work for environmental causes, are usually motivated by another basic emotion: fear.  They are scared that pollution, global warming, and resource exhaustion will bring disaster.

The emotion-and-cognition linkage is radical shaker for human ecology, because ecological social science has been almost exclusively based on highly cognitive, rationalist theories of action.  We have all made what Damasio called Descartes’ Error (Damasio 1994): we of the human-ecology trade have regarded cool, rational, detached, objective thought as the only thing worthy of attention.  Emotions are so messy that they are written right out of consideration, or at least are not theorized very deeply.  Our “traditional people” are scientists, coolly analyzing and understanding their surroundings, classifying them in coolly rational ways (see e.g. Atran 1990; Berlin 1992), and pragmatically deciding what plants work best as medicine or what animals produce the most calories per unit hunting effort (see e.g. Smith and Winterhalder 1992) /1/.  In political ecology, the unexamined assumption has been that only rational self-interest motivates environmental use, and therefore everything is explained by political economy in the narrow sense.  (Marx, for the record, knew that people were impassioned.  Modern political economists sometimes remember this, but often do not.)

This has been a successful strategy for most of the last 50 years, because people everywhere do indeed judge empirically such matters as medical effectiveness and the usefulness of classification schemes.  Emotion necessarily enters in, but usually in the form of an active, engaged curiosity that makes people want to learn and apply knowledge.  Emotion as a powerful and tricky distorter is less often involved.  We can more or less ignore it, and treat knowledge in these simple, pragmatic realms as concrete and largely rational.

However, once out of those realms, emotion becomes more and more important.  It is especially critical when people plan for the future, and especially when they trade off short-term, narrow interests against long-term, wide ones.  Catching fewer fish now to save the fishery, cutting trees on a sparing basis, and preserving apparently “useless” wildlife are cases that seem beyond humans’ ability to plan rationally.

I do not mean to say that emotions are totally neglected in the literature; most good recent field work acknowledges the importance of intense human relationships with the nonhuman.  Eugene Hunn (1990), Enrique Salmon, Nancy Turner, Marianne and Ron Ignace, and many others have commented about this at our meetings.  We need to build on their work, including new findings and methods.

Milton shows that emotionality is particularly important in high-level planning, with conservation and preservation, with conflicts over resource use, or with political and social efforts to manage resources.  These things engage emotion.  People fight for what they love.  They then frequently find themselves fighting against people who love something different.  Do we save the (genetically pure) white-headed duck by massacring ruddy ducks that invade its range, or do we save all ducks and let gene flow take its course?

Moreover, we cannot just list the cognitive or rational material in one paper and then deal with emotions in another.  The vital importance of Damasio and Milton is in showing that cognition and emotion are not different things (not even in the unfortunates with lower frontal lobe lesions, who have to compensate somehow).  We will have to describe worldviews (Kearney 1984), which are the result of integrating cognition and emotion.

Typically, the resulting findings are not exactly “emotion” in the usual sense—raw love, hate, fear, and such—but a more complex phenomenological reality:  a whole view of the world that is broadly “realistic” but that is intensely colored and shaded by feelings of all types.  For an example:  the point is not that I love or hate or fear sycamores, but that when I see a sycamore I inevitably call up a vast number of intensely emotional images, ranging from the sycamores lining the streets of my childhood to the tragic death of certain favorite sycamores in the fire that almost got my house last October.  I also know more strictly cognitive, less emotional things about sycamores: that sycamores virtually identical to these shaded the dinosaurs, that sycamore wood is fairly useless, and that the name “sycamore” originally applied to a fig species.

This has made me newly aware of the importance of two kinds of ethnographic work, from the opposite ends of the historical spectrum of American ethnography.  At the beginning, we have Franz Boas, a neo-Kantian who seems to have had a strong sense of the phenomenological realities that Milton now analyzes.  He recorded, and got his students and colleagues to record, all manner of traditional texts, covering everything from practical knowledge to myth and epic tale.

Much more recently, we have ethnographies inspired by holistic theories of knowledge that include emotion, or at least feelings and attitudes.

On the one hand, Feld and Basso’s Senses of Place led off an important trail of studies of involvement with landscapes and locations.  (This has been paralleled or anticipted by a concern with such matters in geography [Tuan 1990], and other fields.)  On the other hand, several recent ethnographies of people in relatively wild landscapes have discussed in detail the problem of “knowledge” and the complexity of its higher-level representations.  Knowing too little beyond the northwestern North America literature, I have been particularly impressed with Robin Ridington’s Trail to Heaven (1988; see also Ridington 1990), Jean-Guy Goulet’s Ways of Knowing (1998) and Henry Sharp’s Loon (2001) /2/.  There are many others out there.  My other field areas, China and the Yucatan Peninsula, have produced some good work (e.g Faust 1998 for the latter).

This being said, I doubt if any of us here at the SEB meeting has done much questioning about emotions and feelings.  I certainly have not.  The field methods of those best qualified to deal with them—the cognitive anthropologists—are moving farther and farther toward a cut-and-dried, pencil-and-paper-test mode, taken from standard psychology.  Meanwhile, more experimentally oriented ethnobiologists become more and more like biologists, using the highly experimental and rational techniques of that science.  This automatically writes emotion out of the field.

Working with emotional knowledge is difficult.  It is poorly conceptualized.  Techniques for field research need to be developed.  In-depth interviewing has to be done.  Moreover, “talking about feelings” is notoriously difficult for many people—not just for stereotypic males.  Among the societies with which I work, the Northwest Coast Native peoples and the Maya share a widespread Native American pattern of being very quiet on these subjects.  I was involved in direct research on emotion in the Northwest, and observed several effective techniques for dealing with reserve.  The best, of course, is to find the culturally appropriate ways of communicating emotional messages.  These ways include subtle nonverbal cues, and the use of stories, artwork, and other indirect discourses.  When those fail, depth interviewing and other methods usually work.

I have not done anything similar among the Maya.  I have spent a year and a half living and forest-wandering with Maya friends.  During this time I have done much observing and heard a few significant and unprompted comments.  I can also benefit from the work of Faust and other writers.

Do the Maya of Chunhuhub love nature?  The question is problematic.  The Maya language does have a word for loving something (yakuntik), but, like many other languages, it has no word for “nature.”  This is not surprising, for the Maya manage all aspects of their landscape (Fedick 1996; Gomez-Pompa et al 2003).  On the other hand, they are aware of the autonomous qualities of the plants and animals they work with.  They recognize that domestic as well as wild beings have an integrity, perhaps even a personhood, quite separate from and outside of human lives.  They also make a distinction between tame and wild:  alakbij “raised by people” is opposed to ba’alche’ “things of the trees.” (And tame critters are ba’al najij “things of the house,” in opposition to the ba’alche’.)

I do not think a Maya would say in yakuntik le ba’alche’oob o (“I love the things of the trees”), except, perhaps, when prompted by a conservationist.  The Maya recognize that they are tightly bound up with those wild lives.  They feel a real and lively affection for them.  They might say they love birds and flowers.  But they do not think of wild things as a single category that is somehow lovable as a whole.  Such a view of “nature” is probably held only by those who are rather cut off from the wilder world—people in industrial and post-industrial civilizations.

On the other hand, many Maya clearly do love the forest—its trees, flowers, animals—in much the same way that preindustrial English loved the “greenwood.”  (“Hey, to the greenwood let us go, And there we shall see both buck and doe, Hart and hind and pretty little roe, In the greenwood…”  16^th century folk round.)   The forest (k’aax) is not “nature”; it is a managed space.  People have responsibilities toward it, such as keeping trails open, not overharvesting medical plants or game animals, and preventing forest fires.

Love thus is felt as, and shows itself as, a caring, caretaking relationship combined with intense emotional and aesthetic responsiveness to the wild.  The operational word used all the time is the Spanish verb cuidar, to care for.  (My Maya is inadequate to come up with the Maya equivalents.  There are many Maya words that parcel out the semantic space of cuidar.)  It implies a warm, caring, emotional bond, as parent to child.  Unlike words for love, this word is constantly used in discussing human-nonhuman relationships.  Common also, for tame animals and plants, is alak- “raise” (as in alakbij “raised” or alaktik “to raise something; Spanish criar).  It too implies a relationship like that of a parent raising a child.

Of course, there is much variation in this.  My friend and coworker Felix Medina Tzuc and my landlord Pastor Valdez certainly feel that way, as I know from hundreds of field hours with them.  At the other extreme are a few Maya who share some of the traditional Hispanic Mexican value system, within which the wild is something to be destroyed as quickly as possible /3/.  The vast majority of the older Maya are closer to Don Felix and Don Pastor.  The young generally maintain a fondness for trees, birds, and other lives, but are growing away from it, orienting themselves toward town matters.  This means that the blandishments of developers and loggers are hard to resist.  Towns like Pich (in Campeche; described by Faust) are selling off their resources for destructive use.  Quintana Roo has done much better, so far, but the future is cloudy.

The caring response to the nonhuman world shows itself in treatment of plants and animals.  A Maya household is usually surrounded by (even buried in) flowers, and the houseyard is almost sure to include pets of various species.  Weeding is done selectively; weeds are rarely killed, but simply cut back, and useful wild plants are allowed to flourish in the field.  Traditional Maya of Chunhuhub are extremely kind and gentle with all these lives, whether tame or wild.  I have seen Maya discover a rabbit’s nest while weeding, carefully cover it up, and weed around it—though rabbits are a terrible pest of maize.  Maya that pick up ants to show me are careful to put down the ant, uninjured, heading the same way it was going when picked up.  I could multiply such stories indefinitely, and there are many more in the literature.  Maya are aware that everything can be useful, but there is more to it than that; the Maya are aware that we all depend on each other, and the world goes best if we all take care of each other.

I have no time here to describe the details of the worldview that results from this emotional attitude.  Suffice it to say that it informs a worldview and a cosmology that go far beyond simple emotions or simple ethnobiological cognition.  Faust (1998) and others have detailed much of this view, and I have some book manuscripts seeking publication that may add a bit.

A question raised by all this is how to study loving and caring in a more or less rigorous ethnographic fashion.

Obviously, the classic anthropological technique of participant observation over a long time is basic.  However, it is clearly not enough.  If it were, we would not be so lacking today.  Phenomenological and interpretive approaches may add some awareness, but they have yet to show that they can provide the rigor and accuracy we need.

Our standard ethnobiological techniques, especially the “ethnoscience” methods of Frake (1980) and others, are extremely valuable.  It is no accident that Feld and Basso are both excellent, highly trained users of that approach (Feld and Basso 1996), and so are many others among the names I mentioned above.  Feld’s book Sound and Sentiment (1982) is the best study of emotions I have seen in anthropology, and it relies on ethnoscientific methods, as well as interpretive and other ethnographic modalities.

A technique with great promise is the ethnographic decision-making methodology of Gladwin (1989) and others, as exemplified in studies in medical anthropology (Young and Garro 1994) and other areas.  However, as practised to date, it has been based on a neoclassicoal economic assumption of rationality.  People are assumed to be coolly rational choosers of the best means to reach predetermined goals.  This has been seen as needing some supplementation (see Garro’s introduction to Young and Garro 1994).  It is quite simple to make the technique much more powerful, by adding questions about feelings at each node point:  “How did you feel about that choice?”  “What did you feel when you saw the outcome?”  And the like.

The most valuable technique, and I believe indispensable, is depth interviewing.  This involves a long interview (1-3 hours) that targets feelings specifically.  One gets the subject to talk, and then encourages talking by making small inquiring noises.  Questions should be kept to a minimum, but should be asked whenever there is a chance to get the subject to go deeper into a topic—particularly an emotional topic.  One can directly ask “How did you feel about that?” or “Can you tell me just how you felt?” but it is often better to inquire about more concrete matters: just what was done, and why and how it was done.  Ideally, this gets the interviewee to tell detailed stories.  The value of such stories is well discussed in the literature (see the books mentioned above, to say nothing of many talks over the years at SEB meetings).  However, I find that stories are much more useful when eliciting them is part of a project including all the other techniques I have listed.  One also has to remember that stories are generally structured by cultural rules.  They do not reveal anything in a purely transparent way.  The ethnographer has to know the rules and formulas, and be aware of culturally standardized symbols and metaphors.

Psychologists use questionnaires to get at emotion.  I have not tried this, and do not know enough about the benefits and pitfalls to discuss the issue.  Clearly, questionnaires work, and produce useful results—at least with educated American and European subjects.  Whether they would work with traditional and indigenous rural people is another question.  Certainly, there would be problems.  The Native Americans are far from alone in their unwillingness to talk about emotional matters in a formal, abstract, set-piece context.  Even among Anglo-Americans, accused by virtually the entire world of constantly baring their hearts when everyone else wants them to shut up, one finds that rural males (at least) are very leery of opening up in formal or public contexts. I think that a good psychologist could design the right kind of questionnaire, but I doubt if it has been done.  The sorry experiences of IQ testing serve as cautionary notes.

Best of all techniques, as noted above, is finding out through participant observation how a culture structures discourse on emotions and worldviews, and then going with that.  The Maya, like many Native Americans, tend to use personal narratives.  The Chinese I knew in Hong Kong in the 1960s sometimes used stories, but they were more apt to use songs—traditional folksongs, with words improvised to express emotion, often in a highly symbolic way.  They also used philosophic discourse.  Most were educated (to varying degrees) in the old Confucian tradition, and could bend Confucian taglines and ideas to their purposes.  Confucius’ brief and rather gnomic lines served as projective devices; one could read many things into them, or interpret them in many ways.  Of course, nonverbal communication is always important, and in the Chinese case such things as seating at feasts, service at rituals, and position at tables in restaurants conveyed very important messages.  A great deal has been done with such nonverbal cues by writers like Edward Hall (1959) and Erving Goffman (1957), but the area has been rather neglected in recent years.

Milton herself used standard participant observation in connection with direct questioning and with thorough recording of conflict situations.  Obviously, emotions are going to come through in conflicts, and people who would otherwise not talk about such matters may wax very eloquent indeed.  Watching for such critical events is clearly important.

Emotions also come out in “total social fact” situations.  The classic total social event was the potlatch (Mauss 1990/1925).  Indeed, potlatches are the occasion for openly emotional rhetoric—speeches, dances, and many other forms.  Unfortunately, the Maya do not have anything even remotely comparable.  Their rituals are quiet, low-key, and highly formalized.  These rituals are also dying out.  Another problem with total social institutions is that emotionality tends to be highly structured; one is supposed to do, say, and even feel what the culture specifies.  Individual spontaneous response may or may not be revealed, or may be partially revealed.  Often, a space is left for particular types of personal emotions to come out, often in highly structured and symbolic ways, while other “emotional” expressions are purely formulaic.  The ethnographer has to be sensitive to such issues.

As Milton points out, saving the environment will be done only if people love it enough to take care of it.  We may not be able to save the environment, but we need to understand how people actually feel about it.

The popular literature is full of stereotypic indigenous people who are either noble savages in harmony with their environment or wasteful, destructive savages who wantonly destroy everything they see.  We are aware that people are not like that.  Whether in America, Britain, Quintana Roo, or the Yukon, people are complex creatures who combine love and care with fear, greed, hate, anxiety, and all the other frailties of the human condition.  Sorting out what feelings people have, and what feelings matter in what situation, is an empirical problem.

Restoration ecology is a moral enterprise.  It is a particular kind of commitment.  The restoration ecologist must place a high value on a quality environment, and be prepared to cooperate with many others in producing it.  Moreover, despite the hopeful name “restoration,” the restored environment is rarely a good copy of the old.  It may or may not produce some of the benefits of the lost earlier environment.  The restorer is working to produce a made environment that resembles the older world.  She is thus subject to criticism from all sides—from hard-core conservationists who want only “unspoiled nature,” from hard-core production-maximizers who want only high-yield crops, and from politicians who want only to cut taxes.  Somehow, the restoration project must go on, and must be sold as the best way to maximize overall benefits from the landscape.  Clearly, this must involve some emotionality, including tensions and conflicts /4/.

Maya knowledge and values are ideal for this.  The Maya are under no illusions about the “naturalness” of their environment; they can generally remember the year a particular tract of apparently virgin forest was last cut and farmed.  They manage the regrowth stages and the mature forest, often almost as thoroughly as they manage their fields.  They value the result as part of their world—not “natural,” not household, but something in between.

As an enterprise that blends morals and emotions with solid biology and ethnobiology, restoration ecology is a field that can benefit from awareness of the varied and complex emotional ties that humans have with their nonhuman environments.

Notes

/1/  At least, ethnobiologists, who generally assume a solid and nuanced rationality in their subjects, are well ahead of many political ecologists, who see human behavior as a mindless reflex of vast and abstract economic forces.  Things like “capitalism” and “globalization” produce all manner of behaviors.  Some writers seem to think that there is no need for any human agency at all.  The apparent assumption is that humans are purely economic animals, responding to economic abstractions as they respond to the tap of a hammer just below the kneecap.  Others assume that there is a Manichean struggle between indigenous or local people and outsiders, almost all the latter being agents of the vast evil capitalist-neoliberal-globalist conspiracy—even when they are clearly opposed to neoliberalism by normal-world standards (see e.g. Hayden 2003).  Fortunately, the best political ecologists are not at all like this; they may even hold positions that approach Milton’s, with the added advantage of being informed in the area of political economy (see e.g. Sheridan 1998; Cruz Torres, forthcoming).

/2/  Incidentally, the notably high representation of North Woods peoples in this area owes more than a little to the work of Irving Hallowell, a Boasian who was sharp enough to pick up on his mentor’s holistic view and develop it at a time when almost no other anthropologists had a clue; see Hallowell 1955.  Unfortunately, Hallowell was before his time, and the psychology available to him (Freudian theory and the like) was worse than useless in understanding human/wild interactions.  Even so, he did some brilliant work, and deserves full credit for pioneering.

/3/ Ironically, the Hispanic Mexicans are rapidly becoming environmentalist as the indigenous Mexicans pick up the traditional Hispanic-Mexican antipathy to nature (which is itself a continuation of ancient Roman urban values).

/4/  Restoration ecology can even be seen as rather like psychotherapy in this regard.  Albert Ellis’ rational-emotional therapy was based on an earlier realization of the union of cognition and emotion (see Ellis and Dryden 1987).  It proved highly effective in psychotherapy, and has inspired the even more widely used cognitive therapy of Aaron Beck (e.g. Beck 1976).

Based on a paper for the Society of Ethnobiology, Davis, CA, March 2004

References

Abram, David.  1996.  The Spell of the Sensuous.  New York:  Pantheon.

Anderson, E. N.  1996.  Ecologies of the Heart.  New York:  Oxford University Press.

Atran, Scott. 1990.  The Cognitive Foundations of Natural History.  New York:  Cambridge University Press.

Beck, Aaron T.  1976.  Cognitive Therapy of the Emotional Disorders.  New York:  International Universities Press.

Berlin, Brent.  1992.  Ethnobiological Classification.  Princeton:  Princeton University Press.

Cruz Torres, Maria.  2004? (in press, forthcoming).  Lives of Dust and Water.  Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Damasio, Antonio.  1994.  Descartes’ Error.  New York:  G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

Ellis, Albert, and W. Dryden.  1987.  The Practice of Rational-Emotional Therapy (RET).  New York:  Springer.

Faust, Betty B.  1998.  Mexican Rural Development and the Plumed Serpent.  Westport, CT:  Bergin and Garvey.

Fedick, Scott (ed.).  1996.  The Managed Mosaic.  Salt Lake City:  University of Utah Press.

Feld, Steven.  1982.  Sound and Sentiment.  Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press.

Feld, Steven, and Keith Basso (eds.).  1996.  Senses of Place.  Santa Fe, NM:  School of American Research.

Frake, Charles.  1980.  Language and Cultural Description.  Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press.

Gladwin, Christina.  1989.  Ethnographic Decision Tree Analysis.  Newbury Park, CA:  Sage.

Goffman, Erving.  1959.  The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life.  Garden City, NY:  Doubleday.

Gomez-Pompa, A.; Michael Allen; Scott Fedick; J. Jimenez-Osornio (eds.). 2003.  The Lowland Maya Area:  Three Millennia at the Human-Wildland Interface.  New York:  Haworth.

Goulet, Jean-Guy.  1998.  Ways of Knowing.  Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press.

Hall, Edward.  1959.  The Silent Language.  Garden City, NY:  Doubleday.

Hallowell, A. Irving.  1955.  Culture and Experience.  Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press.

Hayden, Cori.  2003.  When Nature Goes Public.  Princeton:  Princeton University Press.

Hume, David.  1984 (orig. 1740).  A Treatise on Human Nature.  New York:  Penguin.

Hunn, Eugene.  1990.   Nch’i-Wana:  The Big River.  Seattle:  University of Washington Press.

Kearney, Michael.  1984.  Worldview.  Novato, CA:  Chandler and Sharp.

LeDoux, Joseph.  1996.  The Emotional Brain.  New York:  Simon and Schuster.

Mauss, Marcel.  1990 (Fr. orig. 1925).  The Gift.  Tr. W. D. Halls.  London:  Routledge.

Milton, Kay.  2002.  Loving Nature.  London:  Routledge.

Ridington, Robin.  1988.  Trail to Heaven.  Iowa City, IA:  University of Iowa Press.

—  1990.  Little Bit Know Something.  Iowa City, IA:  University of Iowa Press.
Sharp, Henry.  2001.  Loon. Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press.

Sheridan, Thomas.  1998.  Where the Dove Calls.  Tucson:  University of Arizona Press.

Smith, Eric A., and Bruce Winterhalder (eds.).  1992.  Evolutionary Ecology and Human Behavior.  New York:  Walter de Gruyter.

Tuan, Yi-Fu.  1990.  Topophilia:  A Study of Environmental Perceptions, Attitudes, and Values.  Albuquerque:  University of New Mexico Press.

Wilson, E. O.  1984.  Biophilia:  The Human Bond with Other Species.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press.

Young, James, and Linda Garro.  1994.  Medical Choice in a Mexican Village.  Boulder, CO:  Westview.

Zajonc, Robert.  1980.  “Feeling and Thinking:  Preferences Need No Inferences.”  American Psychologist 35:151-175.

Chapter 4.  Yucatan Preserves and Lockdown Conservation

1

Over the last 20 years, I have made a couple of dozen visits, lasting anywhere from a day to six months, to the Yucatan Peninsula in southeast Mexico. Most of the time, totalling a year and a half, has been spent in the town of Chunhuhub, a rather paradisiacal community of Yucatec Maya people.

From the standpoint of conservation and resource management, Chunhuhub is in a fairly good situation.  It is an ejido, a collective land management unit in which the community allocates and manages the land.  Everyone lives in the central town and commutes to scattered fields.  The land was originally reallocated every couple of years, but now permanent cultivation and field-making is more common, and lands are increasingly being leased on a long-term basis.

The ejido has 14,330 hectares.  About 10,000 are maintained in forest; the wood is valuable, the soil is poor.  Mahogany was seriously overcut in the 1990s, leading to more sensible management involving replanting and protection.  Most of the other 4,330 are cropped on a shifting basis.  The trees or brush are cut, the land is cultivated for two years, and the field is then allowed to regrow.  It is not abandoned; regrowth is managed, and perennial crops such as manioc and fruit trees continue to flourish.  A few hundred ha are permanent cultivation.  In the town, almost every house lot has fruit trees and other economic perennials.  Shifting cultivation here is not a simple system.  It requires enormous skill and knowledge.  It is labor-intensive and quite land-intensive.  It is sustainable, at current population levels, and has been thriving for thousands of years in this area.

The ejido lands are badly overhunted, but in lands of less populous ejidos nearby, one still finds deer, peccaries, jaguars, and other tropical fauna.  The traditional Yucatec Maya have strict hunting rules:  they take only what they and their families and immediate neighbors need.  Even then, they will go hungry rather than kill many animals; no individual is allowed to take many.  They do not market-hunt.  Chunhuhub’s problems stem from its large population; even a very low take per person is too many now.

Many of Mexico’s ejidos have been privatized, since legal changes in 1993 allowed it, but the Maya have practiced community land management for thousands of years, and are not about to give it up.  They perceive what they think are problems with excessively open-access resources, but they adapt through parceling out land or through long leases at very low fees.

Quintana Roo has had for about 20 years a model forestry plan, the Plan Forestal (see Primack et al. 1998).  This plan is based on comanagement; Maya families and communities manage with technical help and advice from government foresters.  Chunhuhub has not opted to join this plan, but has learned a great deal from watching the fates of communities that have joined.

This brief picture introduces the kind of story we all want to see (for the full story, see Anderson 2003, 2005; Anderson and Medina Tzuc 2005).  So far, Chunhuhub is united in managing resources well, in a sustainable fashion.  They have learned from their mistakes.  Only overhunting remains uncontrolled, a problem for the future, and it too was sustainably managed until very recently.

Many things can happen to this rosy picture.  Some of them are good.  The Plan Forestal has allowed even better management of forests in many nearby communities.  At least one, Nohbec, is on the German government list of sustainable tropical producers; it is almost the only indigenous grassroots-managed community in the New World with that distinction.  Another, Tres Garantias, has very self-consciously saved its large wildlife and developed low-impact ecotourism.  Yet another, Caobas, has developed a sport hunting program that controversially includes big-game hunting of jaguars; the effect of this remains to be seen.

Rreserving of land by government and international agencies has been tried in Quintana Roo, with mixed results.  The vast Sian Ka’an reserve excluded the Maya who had been managing it sustainably for millennia.  They now often poach game in it, since the motives for maintaining sustainable management are gone.  A worse story is that of the Yum Balam reserve in the northern part of Quintana Roo.  This was established by, and at the initiative of, the local people—Yucatec Maya of the Kantunilkin community.  But as soon as the Mexican government got control of it, they forced the Maya off, restricting their rights to hunt and gather. The people, understandably bitter, have become enemies of the reserve they started (Betty Faust, personal communication, 2006).

Next door, in far more troubled and far less well-organized Campeche state, lies the vast Calakmul reserve—one of the biggest of the international biosphere reserves under UN oversight.  Its story is so complicated and troubled that only a truly brilliant ethnographer could do it justice.  Fortunately, one has stepped forward:  Nora Haenn, whose book Fields of Power, Forests of Discontent (2005) should be read by all serious students of indigenous rights to reserve lands.

Also next door are Guatemala, whose attempts to conserve large tracts of forest were never enforced and have collapsed (personal observation, plus long literature), and Belize, where excessive reserving of Maya lands has generated problems similar to those of Yum Balam (Richard Wilk, pers. comm.).

Farther afield, a number of stories are floating arouind in the literature.  At one extreme are areas that were extremely well manged by local people, have been “preserved” by displacing them, and have promptly gone into serious ecological decline.  I am personally familiar with some of these.  Tanzania has attracted much attention recently, notably through the excellent ethnography of James Igoe (see Igoe and West 2006 and references therein).  Local people, especially the Maasai, have been ruled off large tracts of land, sometimes for conservation, sometimes for the more outrageous reason that rich First World big-game hunters have bought the land and are using it for trophy hunting.  The Maasai are often reduced to starvation.  The land is ecologically collapsing.  Without Maasai management by burning and rotational grazing, brush and weeds invade the grassland.  The vast herbivore herds decline drastically as a consequence, the predators die for lack of herbivores.  My wife and I have personally observed this in excruciating detail in several of the place Igoe describes.

Another case we checked out is the Ranomafana international biosphere preserve in Madagascar.  Here the story was told by Janice Harper (2000).  Set up to save rare lemurs, this reserve impinged on traditional hunting, gathering, and shifting-cultivation lands of the Tanala (“forest people”), a small local minority subject to considerable discrimination.  The Tanala were restricted to lower, poorer land.  The Betsileo (a considerably larger and more “modernized” group) moved in to take advantage of new economic opportunities, and have subjected the Tanala to more than a little oppression and exploitation.  Harper reported on the devastating health consequences of all this for the Tanala.  Having visited the site with an international public health team, we can fully confirm her sad observations.  In this case, however, the danger to the lemurs from Tanala hunting and burning was real (though, I believe, considerably exaggerated by some in the original advocacy for the reserve).  The Tanala are not the careful, precise, conservationist farmers that the Yucatec are.  The whole thing could have been easily handled better, however.  As it is, once again, local support for the reserve is hard to find.

Still other cases are so complex that they defy summary, but reflect similar problems of insensitive outside forces ignoring the interests of local people.  Policy shifts (West 2006), shaky science (Lowe 2006), and colonialism (Agrawal 2005) are among the well-described problems that beset the creation and maintenance of protected areas.

In Australia we found a more hopeful story.  At Uluru (personal observation) and elsewhere (from many personal communications) we found that the all too familiar story. Aborigines were forced off the land, and the land promptly declined.  In this case, however, there was a happier ending.  The Australian government, forced to recognize their folly, has brought the Aborigines back to manage their land.  We saw the effects of this and briefly talked to Aboriginal managers at Uluru National Park and elsewhere.  Many species are being saved—so far, at least.  Perhaps more important is the enormous public relations effort around this.  White Australians are rapidly and dramatically changing their minds about Aborigines and Aboriginal land rights.

Another, and far sadder, story comes from Peru, as reported by biologist John Terborgh (1999).  Here the Matsiguenga people have prior rights in the vast Manu National Park.  Unlike most traditional indigenous people, the Matsiguenga lack sustainable management practices or conservation ideology (Alvard et al 1997; Allen Johnson, personal communication).  They live at such extremely low population densities, in such a vast and lush region, that they never had the incentive to develop these.  Today, however, confined to a fraction of their territory and provided with some degree of health and security, they are rapidly becoming a dense population, with the inevitable result.  Similar problems are widely reported from Amazonia.

Stories parallel to the above are not unknown from the United States.  Yellowstone National Park ruled the Corw and Shoshone hunters off the turf.  Great Smoky ies National Park threw out long-established Scots-Irish settler families.  Conversely, Yosemite gave full rights to the Yosemite Miwok, who lived there for decades, and Death Valley National Park has much more recently followed the Australian example by restoring management rights to the Timbika Shoshone after the park ecosystem came near collapse from lack of indigenous management.  A different kind of story involves less indigenous interests, especially mining and oil drilling, who have privileged access to public lands and who want these lands even more completely opened up to single-use, destructive exploitation that would have major economic benefits.  More clearly selfish persons wish to open up conservation lands to off-road vehicle use and similar destructive recreation.

The US has long had a strong, visible difference within the conservation universe between preservationists and advocates of what we would now call “sustainable use.”  Preservationists trace their descent from Thoreau, and later Muir.  Sustainable use finds a home in the work of George Perkins Marsh (2003 [1863]), and later Gifford Pinchot argued for it against Muir’s preservationism.  A fusion of sorts emerged in the Depression, for dealing with the Dust Bowl and other conditions, but the two streams have separated again, and there are now some pretty sharp conflicts between preservers and users.  Sometimes it is hard to construct a united front against the common enemy, the “use-once-and-throw-away” or “rape, ruin and run” developers.  This division is one reason why such developers have dominated world development and economic policy in recent years.

There is now a vast literature on this problem but much of it is vitiated by personal bias and narrow vision.  Conservation biologists like Terborgh overgeneralize from problem cases, and urge that all people be cleared off vast tracts of land, as the only way to save biodiversity and ecosystem services.  Anthropologists, naturally biased in favor of people and sometimes downright “speciesist,” react strongly against this.  Some anthropologists see no value in conserving biodiversity, forests, or other natural resources, and oppose any and all restrictions on local people, thus joining forces with American right-wingers like Richard Pombo.  Others are less extreme, but still believe strongly that in all cases the indigenous people have full, inalienable rights, that cannot be abrogated for even the most urgent and pressing global interest.

Recently, anthropologists have shown a strong tendency to attack even the least offensive acts of international conservation movement and its NGO’s, while giving the intnernational oil, mining, agribusiness, military, and other interests a free ride.  One wonders why this is so.  (Surely the genocides under way in Sudan and Iraq deserve at least some attention.)  I suspect that conservation seems an easy target.  Conservationists probably will not fight back, and some will even listen and change their bad behavior, always a desirable result. Also, anthropologists, many of whom aspire to be investigative journalists, love to go where the shock value is highest.  Everyone knows that the giant mining and oil interests have dubious records. Conservation NGO’s have generally better public images.  Going after them thus has higher shock value.  One must, also, deal with the less pleasant reality that much current anthropology, while claiming to be “progressive,” is actually based on extremist right-wing philosophies.  This lies behind at least some of the simlarity in rhetoric between anthropologists and Richard Pombo, Karl Rove, and George Bush.

We can usually discern three key categories of actors in these cases.  First are the local people, making a living, usually sustainably, from the land.  They may be indigenous or may not be.  Second are the conservationists.  Third are the powerful bureaucrats, generally more interested in maintaining control through strict discipline (Agrawal 2005; Scott 1998) than in either local people or local wildlife.  They are usually the real sources of the problems.  In the Yum Balam case, for instance, the Maya and the conservationists were in almost complete accord.  Meddling upper-level bureaucrats ruined the situation.

The ideal situation is that of Tres Garantias:  a community actively wants to save its resources, some for sustainable use and some for preservation and ecotourism, and is willing to work with biologists and government agencies to do so.  This is rare in the real world, but it would be much commoner if people would work on it.  The biggest problem is maintaining such a regime once it is established.  Every community has its boomers who want to cut all the trees now, take the money, and run off to the city.  The community has to be united to stop this.  Outside support is usually necessary to help them in this.  But if outside support looks like outside control, let alone outside bullying, almost every group will reject it.

Typically, at least in my experience and reading, indigenous people do want to maintain and preserve their livelihood, so it is theoretically easy to work with them.  Usually, the problem comes from outside.  Business interests offer cash incentives that are hard to resist, or governments use outright corruption and power to take over exploitation rights.  These are the people who are sophisticated enough to argue “free enterprise,” “economic benefits,” and “jobs vs owls” against conservation.  Small-scale local communities are easily swayed, if there is not an equally sophisticated counter-argument.  Environmentalists have to point out that loss of forests means loss of both jobs and owls, while preserving the forest preserves both.  Arguing that owls are cute, or that all nature has value, is not effective.

Also common, unfortunately, are situations in which local people want to destroy a major resource of worldwide significance.  This is what puts environmentalists in a serious bind.  One has to work with the locals and convince them to save the resource.  This may or may not work, and in any case it has to be kept up forever.  Any relaxation of the message, or any tactless or controlling attitude, seems to guarantee loss of the deal.

Most observers except the more traditional types of conservation biologists feel that indigenous people with very long histories of managing their lands should continue to do so.  This position seems hard to contest.  The main opponents outside of conservation biologists have been governments obsessed with managing everything from the top down.  They see indigenous people as the lowest of the social order, and regard management by such as automatically bad (see Agrawal 2005; Scott 1998; I have heard this sentiment expressed countless times in many countries).

Indigenous peoples without good management records still have prior rights as the real owners of the land, however much their ownership, and even their humanity, may be denied.  Australian Aborigines were not legally human beings until 1972.  Fortunately, Australian law and opinion have greatly changed since then.

On the other hand, various claims by nonlocal individuals may be argued against the local people.  I believe all countries and communities have some concept of “eminent domain.”  If an area is of extreme value to society at large, it may be taken, with compensation in most cases, without same in many. Taking land without compensation is banned by the United States Constitution /1/.  In other countries, however, it can arguably be justified in cases where conservation is of extreme benefit to the world, while the lands in question are rather marginal in utility to the local people.

Property rights in the modern world are often based on one or another tradition stemming from John Locke.  Locke held that an individual who developed an unused and unclaimed bit of land had a God-given right to it.  The Bible has no such line, but perhaps Locke was divinely inspired.  In any case, later advocates have argued that “private property” in general is a good, because it helps economic development.  The countercase is the socialist claim that private property leads to mismanagement, and that comprehensive planning is needed.  Both agree that developing land is basically a good thing.  Neither give much of a moral basis to preservation.

One can also force wise use (“sustainable” or the like) on local people, in the name of higher good.  Major arguments are now ongoing in the United States over when this is an unconstitional taking of rights and when it is not.  Few argues that taking a man’s right to use his knife to kill his neighbor is covered by the Constitutional ban on takings.  Conversely, few any longer argues for simple uncompensated land grabs.  There is a vast gray space in between.  This has recently led to a split Supreme Court decision over wetlands, in which a compromise position unpopular with most justices was finally adopted.  Denying development rights to wetlands is not exactly taking them, but may reduce their value to the owner by over 90%.  Conversely, society’s interests in preserving these most valuable and threatened of ecosystems have to be considered.  In a recent case, the court upheld an individual’s right to develop a wetland, but in such a locally tailored way that the case cannot be widely generalized as precedent.

So we have basic problems with balancing individual rights against society’s rights and needs.  This seems to shred the classic individualist and communalist positions in philosophy.  This seems to me a good thing, since individualism and communalism have always seemed to me to wind up with the same society:  arrogant bullies dominating abject, conformist subjects.  Individualist like Nietzsche and his followers (Rand, Hitler, etc.) idealize the bullies; communalists like Alasdair MacIntyre idealize the both the leadership model and the conformity.  (Anyone who thinks I am exaggerating this latter position is invited to read MacIntyre 1988 and imagine what society his recommendations would really create.)  Neither of these alternatives provides a hopeful model for environmental management.  Such management can be based only on a person-in-society, person-and-society-in-environment view.  However, an infinite range of such person-in-the-world philosophies can be imagined.

We can break out several problems. 1) are the local people a problem, from the point of view of conserving biodiversity or water or soil or whatever resource we are saving, or actually a good?  2)  If a good, how do we manage to keep them that way and not let them turn destructive?  (Indigenous people sometimes decide suddenly to chop down the rainforest to run cattle, or mine gold, so they can be like the whites.  The myth of the changeless “primitive” is still out there, and needs to be killed.)  3)  If destructive, do we displace them for the not-always-critical benefits of conservation?  4) how much do the few have to suffer before it is worth displacing them?   5) how much does “private property” count as a moral good?  6) how much does the state have rights, moral or other, to interfere in indigenous, local, or other community matters?  Should it be private property defender, utility maximizer, fair arbiter, or comprehensive planner?  People have quasi-religious views on these matters; Communism is widely called a folk religion, and private property has inaccurately been called a Biblical moral rule in some quarters.  7) Should the state preserve noneconomic amenities, such as lovely views and the chance for specific kinds of recreation, when these interfere with economic matters?  The reflex answer most people give is “no,” but the state routinely intervenes to save historic, artistic, and archaeological creations, often at enormous cost to the economy.

A whole separate class of problems concerns risk.  The relative risks of dealing with global warming have been much under debate lately.  Oil companies and their apologists argue that even if global warming is real, doing anything about it would unduly disrupt the economy.  Most of the rest of the world argues otherwise.  The risk of terrorism has led to expenditures by the United States government that are now in the hundreds of billions.  The same government has cut Food and Drug Administration research and monitoring to essentially zero, though food poisoning kills twice as many Americans every year as foreign terrorism has killed in all US history.  The Bush administration has also directed the FDA to allow one of the last broadly effective antibiotics to be used in cattle feed, thus guaranteeing that germs will evolve resistance to it and spread to humans.  Liberals may wish or dream that this is merely a pathology of the Bush administration, but it is actually quite typical of the situation worldwide, except in western Europe.  Relative risk assessment of environmental hazards has obviously not been a priority in the world.  The morality of the “precautionary principle” is not under debate; the problem is which way it cuts.  Oil companies use it to argue against greenhouse emissions control just as ably as environmentalists use it for the opposite.

This brings us to environmental justice, which is a whole separate class of issues.  I have treated it in a very summary but possibly useful report to my home university (Anderson 2006); I can make that report available to anyone interested.

So the ethical bases of all these depressingly complex matters are confusing.  Several different ethical traditions have been argued in environmental cases.  Most have been argued in the most outrageously one-sided way, by people whose real interest is in developing everything in sight or protecting everything in sight.  The ethics of balance, nuance, and compromise are less explored.  Since all “win-win solutions” have a bit of “lose-lose” about them, even the best-intentioned solutions annoy many people.

I will provide a laundry list of some common ethical positions, for purposes of stimulating discussion—a polite academic euphemism for starting a huge fight.

One of the commonest is the Golden Rule, varied into other precious metals—Confucius’ version of it, “don’t do to others what you don’t want done to yourself,” is sometimes called the Silver Rule.

Immanuel Kant’s development of this was based on the idea that one’s major actions should be usable as, or at least conformable with, universal laws.  This is, however, confusing.  He obviously does not mean that because I am eating Brussels sprouts (as I was when I thought out this part of the paper) I want everyone to eat Brussels sprouts on Sundays.  But could I be living a rule that people should eat healthy?  Or that everyone should have access to good food?  How do you decide what rule, or rules, are involved in a complex conservation situation?

Kant also held that one should always treat humans as ends, never as mere means to an end.  He recognized that soldiers defending their country must often give their lives for the country, but there are ways around the problem posed.  Less clear is how to deal with the case of local people displaced for conservation reasons.  They would seem to be pawns—humans sacrificed for forests or waters that are mere means, even though possibly the means for other, larger groups of humans to stay alive.  Many of the arguments in favor of leaving them on the land are formulated in a Kantian way.  Also Kantian is the troublesome issue of what to do about indigenous property rights to valuable knowledge.  If a group knows an AIDS cure and denies it to the world, the morality of doing so is debatable, but many strict Kantians defend the right to keep such knowledge secret.  (I have elsewhere elaborated on this genuinely vexing problem at inordinate length; Anderson ms.)

Yet, animal rights advocates can rejoin that animals too should be ends, not means.  Perhaps even “ecosystems,” if they exist.  (I don’t think they do, but that is a very debatable claim.)  A classic work on this and related concerns was the booklet with the delightful and significant title Should Trees Have Standing? (Stone 1974).  We could theoretically be trapped in an infinite regress when any action is too immoral to undertake, because it might possibly cause harm to some member of a “community of subjects.”  (I am deploying that Kantian phrase because it has just been used as the title of a book on animals, in which Lisa Raphals and I have yet more on this stuff; Anderson and Raphals 2007.)

The value of conservation is much clearer, and doing things for it are much more reasonable, if one is a utilitarian.  “The greatest good for the greatest number over the greatest time” is, in fact, the selling point of almost every serious conservation policy I have ever seen.  Conservation seems overwhelmingly a utilitarian project.  It allows us to sacrifice the livelihoods of a few fishermen today to save a fishery for the future.  It allows us to displace or control a few polluting users on a riverbank.  But, by the same token, it is subject to abuse.  Even granted the classic qualifier that “each one counts for one, no one for more than one” (see Sidgwick 1907), it tempts governments and moneyed interests to displace the poor for the benefit of the rich.  Enormously aiding them in this is the dishonest, but universal, accounting that does not count direct “natural economy” production.  The average farm family in Chunhuhub gets about $3,000 per year of products directly from their farm and forest.  This is not counted in any statistics (except mine).  One could eliminate all the subsistence farmers in western Quintana Roo and no economist would know or notice.  In fact, in many Mexican states, that is exactly what has happened.  The farmers are now in the United States.  They are generally making better livings, but they are on sufferance and under constant threat, and the whole situation seems a very bad one.  In other countries, subsistence hunting, gathering, and farming has been run down to almost nothing by economic policies that take no account of nonmarket production.  Of course, Mill, Sidgwick, or Brandt would never have countenanced such things, but they are gone from among us, and utilitarians of today have not really stepped forward.

A problem with utilitarianism is assessing what is the “greatest good.”  In conservation, it involves tradeoffs of incommensurable goods.  Clean water and rich topsoil are easy to deal with.  Less easy are biodiversity, healthy recreation, and ecological resilience, when compared with immediate economic gains.  The classic way to deal with this is through individual choice—at best left to the individual, otherwise summated through democratic elections.

This is why utilitarianism has been the general philosophy of democracies.  Dictatorships tend to be Kantian—they assume an ideal good, decisions on which are vested in the leaders, assumed to be the best of the best.  Communism goes directly back to Kant via Marx, and fascism goes back via Nietzsche.

Utilitarianism has also been the preferred philosophy of the environmental movement, and of at least one of the leading environmental ethicists: Holmes Rolston (1988).  Animal rights advocates, however, seem more apt to be Kantians, since they generally argue for the absolute moral imperative of treating animals as ends and ethical subjects.  Many critics of environmentalism have been, if not Kantians, at least anti-utilitarians.  The pervasive orientation of conservationists toward economic goals, and their use of utilitarian arguments, have not been popular with either private property ideologues or extreme preservationists.  Finally, Kantians have argued against drawing on indigenous knowledge for even the most vital lifesaving purposes, because of the problems of intellectual property rights.  I hope to deal with these issues in some work I am now doing (e.g. Anderson ms.).

Some of these problems with Kantianism have been addressed by John Rawls, some have not.  He assumes rational humans, and assumes they are the ends of action.  He created the “justice as fairness” doctrine, based on what a person would decide if he (sic) were “behind a veil of ignorance” as to where he would be in the world.  If one had an equal chance of being a starving Third World farmer, a millionaire, a bedridden cancer patient, a slave, or a college professor, one would naturally invoke policies that would make life better for the less fortunate, but one would try to avoid making it worse for the rich in the process.  This does not tell us much about the environment, a fact explicitly admitted by Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971:17, 512).  It does, however, save democracy from the more sinister forms of Kantianism (Rawls 1993); indeed, this appears to have been one of Rawls’ major motivations for writing.

Feminists and others have criticized Rawls for his assumption of rational, dispassionate, emotion-free, socially unembedded humans—classic Enlightenment males, not to put too fine a point on it.  In addition to the environment, the mentally ill and mentally incompetent get short shrift from such an ethic.  One cannot possibly devise a society on the basis of assuming (behind the veil) that one is a paranoid schizophrenic or a helpless comatose patient.  An ethic that deals with them simply has to be an ethic of caring, not rational dispassionate planning.   Various feminists have proposed a number of forms of an ethics of caring; Rawls answers them, more or less, in later work (Rawls 2001).  Many of these feminists assert that caring is innate and natural in women, a theory not very credible to anyone with experience of today’s gender-integrated university administrations.

However, the roots of the ethic of caring are not in feminism, but in Buddhist and Christian religion.  The Buddha based his ethic on compassion, explicitly extended to all life.  Jesus based his on “love,” meaning, of course, not sexual love, but something closer to familial love—the tolerance, support, help, and care we feel, or feel we should feel, for our closest kin and neighbors.  Jesus said little about the environment, but enough to make it clear that he followed the “stewardship” (Genesis 2) concept common in the Bible.  (See e.g. the parables involving husbandmen and crops.)  It is a middle course:  responsible, caring management of what God has given to us, rather than either thoughtless destruction or preservation.  The latter seems like neglect of what God has provided.  The Hebrew Bible has a large number of passages that denounce in no uncertain terms the wasteful or foolish misuse of resources.  Jesus’ relative quiet on this point has given too much slack to anti-environmentalists since, but they are clearly forcing their reading (see Breuilly and Palmer 1992).

Many environmentalists today are influenced rather strongly by religion, and the religious roots of environmentalism have been addressed in a series of volumes under the general editorship of Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim (see e.g. Tucker and Grim 1994; Waldau and Patton 2007).

One might think Aristotelian virtue ethics a difficult case to use as basis for environmentalism, but Louke van Wensveen has ably argued for it (van Wensveen 2000).

In short, every major ethical tradition has some advocates and some limitations.

It would seem that we should not be divided into moral camps.  We can be utilitarian about economic and medical issues, Kantian about basic human rights, Aristotelian about our needs to have integrity and commitment, Rawlsian about social justice, and caring about all.  However, I personally vote for the caring ethic as the covering ethic, because it entails all the others as inescapable corollaries.  If we care, we will do what’s best, treat people fairly, and help keep the environment sustainably producing what we need.  If we do not care, we probably will not be able to get anyone to do any of the above.

Possibly it is best to return to playground ethics for a foundation.  If Robert Fulghum is right that we learn everything important in kindergarten (Fulghum 1990), as he certainly is right about our proneness to get into burning beds and otherwise make environmental fools of ourselves (Fulghum 1989), then playground fairness, sharing, not taking the last one, and not throwing dirt in our playmates’ lunch may be all we really need.  Perhaps Rawls’ enormous, ponderous tome can be reduced to something like that.

Probably the most useful teaching is We’re all in this together. This needs no elaboration.  “An injury to one is an injury to all,” in a very literal sense, when the globe is one conjoined system.

The other basic is My rights stop where yours start. This traditional American proverb should actually solve, in principle, the property rights and risk issues.  Property rights do not, ever, under any law, include the right to use one’s property to murder or seriously and gratuitously harm anyone.  Just as a knife-owner cannot use the knife to murder his neighbor in cold blood, a conservation organization does not have the right to harm people by driving them off their traditional use lands and denying them access to materials they have depended on, over thousands of years, for survival.  But the indigenous people do not have the right to use their lands in a manner that devastates wide-flung benefits.  They cannot throw poison into a stream that becomes the water supply of a city.  Similarly, they do not, morally, have the right to exterminate a species or cut down a vitally important forest.  Legal negotiations based on this principle will not be easy or automatic, but they will be possible.

Another clear, but often neglected, moral ground is that long-term, wide-flung interests should be at least considered in comparison with short-term, narrow ones.  I would advocate privileging the long-term, partly because people naturally tend to discount such interests (Anderson 1996).  Of course, a trivial wide-flung interest has to give way to a desperately important narrow one, so this too takes careful balancing.

Finally, the most desperately needed moral position in the conservation and environment movement is solidarity. The enemies of the environment have proved startlingly solidary.  We hoped, back in the 1960s and 1970s, that they would be divided by self-interest; a giant oil company would not want water pollution, a logging firm would not want global warming to wipe out its forests, and an agribusiness firm would not want wood and paper to run out.  Instead, the giant corporations and their paid hirelings in governments around the world have presented an astonishingly solid, united front.  They have seen the threat of regulation as a general threat to all.

By contrast, environmentalists are a disunited and controversy-prone lot.  Anthropologists defending indigenous and local rights are, also.  And the environmentalists and anthropologists have come into serious conflicts.  This has lost battle after battle.  The giant corporations do not even need to move; they win without trying, by letting their divided enemies destroy each other.  The Byzantine Empire had to work to set barbarians against barbarians.  The giant polluting and wasting corporations today do not have to work.

As long as solidarity is not even recognized as a virtue by progressives, let alone pursued, the world environment will be a hopeless cause.

Solidarity will depend on some agreement about morals, and I hope this paper will make a few people think about that.

Note

/1/  Taking land without compensation was done anyway, especially from Native Americans.  Canadians may not realize that in the United States, Indian title was always recognized, so the many cases of land ripoff were outrageous open theft rather than simply asserting the terra nullius doctrine.  This slightly reduced, but did not stop, the theft of Indian lands.  Sheer land grab was usually concealed by unequal treaties, but frequently was simply bare-faced robbery.

References

Some Useful References on Environmental Ethics and the Social Background

Including those referenced above, but also a lot of other references I happen to find useful

Abram, David.  1996.  The Spell of the Sensuous.  New York:  Pantheon.

Agrawal, Arun.  2005.  Environmentality.  Raleigh, NC:  Duke University Press.

Alvard, Michael; John G. Robinson; Kent H. Redford; Hillard Kaplan.  1997.  “The Sustainability of Subsistence Hunting in the Neotropics.”  Conservation Biology 11:977-982.  Piro and Machiguenga data.

Anderson, Benedict.  1991.   Imagined Communities.  Revised edn.  New York: Verso.

Anderson, E. N. 1996.  Ecologies of the Heart.  New York:  Oxford University Press.

— 2001.  “Flowering Apricot:  Environmental Practice, Folk Religion, and Daoism.”  In: N. J. Girardot, James Miller, and Liu Xiaogan (eds.):  Daoism and Ecology: Ways within Cosmic Landscapes. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University, Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School.  Pp. 157-184.

—  2003.  Those Who Bring the Flowers.  Chetumal, Q. Roo, Mexico:  ECOSUR.

—  2005.  Political Ecology in a Yucatec Maya Community.  Tucson:  University of Arizona Press.

—  2006.  Environment and Social Justice:  Some Issues.  Report to the administration, University of California, Riverside.

Anderson, E. N., and Felix Medina Tzuc.  2005.  Animals and the Maya in Southeast Mexico.  Tucson:  University of Arizona Press.

Anderson, E. N., and Lisa Raphals.  2007.  “Taoism and Animals.”  In A Community of Subjects, ed. Paul Waldau and Kimberly Patton.  New York:  Columbia University Press.  Pp. 275-290.

Aristotle.  1955.  Ethics.  Harmondsworth, Sussex:  Penguin.

Atran, Scott.  2002.  In Gods We Trust.  New York:  Oxford University Press.

Attfield, Robin.  1991.  The Ethics of Environmental Concern.  Athens, GA:  University of Georgia Press.

Baskin, Yvonne.  1997.  The Work of Nature: How the Diversity of Life Sustains Us.  Washington, DC: Island Press.

Baumeister, Roy.  1997.  Evil:  Inside Human Violence and Cruelty.

Bierhorst, John.  1994.  The Way of the Earth:  Native America and the Environment.  New York:  William Morrow.

Bookchin, Murray.  1982.  The Ecology of Freedom.  Palo Alto:  Cheshire.

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—  1990.  The Logic of Practice.  Stanford:  Stanford University Press.

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—   1996.  Facts, Values, and Morality.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

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— 1991.   Tales of the Hasidim.  Tr. Olga Marx.  New York:  Schocken Books.

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—  1990  “Genesis and John Muir.”  ReVision 12:31-47.

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— 1994.  Earth’s Insights.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.

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—  1989.  It Was On Fire When I Lay Down on It.  New York:  Villard Books.

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Koenig, Walter, and Ronald Mumme.  1987.  Population Ecology of the Cooperatively Breeding Acorn Woodpecker.  Princeton:  Princeton University Press.

Kohlberg, Lawrence. 1983.  Moral Stages.  Basel:  Karger.

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Andy Light was a student of ours at UCR!

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(Why is this in here?  Because even dogs have ethics.  They apologize, share—rarely!—make peace, etc.  They provide a useful minimal model.)

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—  1907.  The Methods of Ethics.  London:  MacMillan.

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Turner, Nancy.  2005.  Earth’s Blanket.  Vancouver:  University of British Columbia.

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