I <3 Anthropology

Nearly a year since my last post – where does the time go? But I’ll be back! The good people at Savage Minds have called us to duty:

This idea is simple: in the next seven days, for a few thousand words, somewhere public on the Internet, write about why you like anthropology.

That’s right, a love letter to our discipline. I wonder what Foucault would have said about that sentence? But anyway, I am moved by the proposal, and hereby promise to pull this blog out of the mothballs to respond. If anyone’s out there, keep an eye on this space, and hopefully I’ll put something worth reading in front of it soon.

(Re)Programming currently under way:

Guns, Germs, Steel & Collapse
Spring 2010: INST 4990/5990, ANTH 4020/5005

Adam Henne, ahenne@uwyo.edu

This seminar will be a deep and critical reading of Jared Diamond’s influential work, beginning with his groundbreaking best-seller Guns Germs and Steel. Engaging with Diamond’s controversial ideas will lead us through archaeology, cultural anthropology, geography, ecology, history and post-colonial studies. We’ll explore major issues such as the birth of domestication and agriculture, the early state, colonialism and empire, and the political ecology of environmental destruction or conservation. Diamond’s personal example as an interdisciplinary thinker and popular writer will help us debate the role of academic disciplines and theories in the larger world.

TEXTS:
Diamond, J. 2005 [1997]. Guns, germs and steel: The fates of human societies. New York: Norton. [GG&S]
Diamond, J. 2005. Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. New York: Viking. [Collapse]
Errington, F. and D. Gewertz. 2004. Yali’s question: Sugar, culture and history. UChicago Press. [YQ]

January 11: Introduction

Who is Jared Diamond and why does he get a whole class devoted to him? We’ll do introductions, go over the syllabus, assignments and policies, take questions and etc. Please come to class with a ‘letter of introduction,‘ no more than 1 page, inc. name, major, preferred email, academic interests, and a photo – this helps me learn your name faster. And we’ll watch:
National Geographic 2005. “Episode One – Out of Eden.” Guns, Germs and Steel, Public Broadcast System (Lion Television).

January 18: MLK Day

No class on Martin Luther King Day: but please see the many interesting and relevant activities that make up the Days of Dialog [www.mlkdod.com/mlk2010/], including a highly recommended lecture by Philip Gourevitch, author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda [Wednesday 1/20, 5:00pm in the Wyoming Union Ballroom].

January 25: Explaining the world

GG&S: “Prologue – Yali’s Question” and “Part One – From Eden to Cajamarca” (pages 13-81).
YQ: “Introduction – On Avoiding a History of the Self-Evident and the Self-Interested” and “1 – What Do They (Should They) Want?” (pages 1-42).
Wolf, E. 1982. “Introduction” and “The World in 1400” in Europe and the People Without History. UCalifornia Press, pp. 3-72.

February 1: Agriculture & domestication

GG&S: Part 2 – pp. 83-191
Fowler & Mooney. 1990. “Origins of agriculture” and “Development of diversity” in Shattering: Food, Politics and the Loss of Genetic Diversity. University of Arizona Press, pp. 3-41.
Flannery, K. 1968. “Archaeological systems theory and early Mesoamerica,” in Anthropological Archaeology in the Americas, B Meggers ed. Anthropological Society of Washington, pp. 67-87.
Texts in orange: Required only for grad students – undergrads of course welcome to read them too.
Anderson 1998. Animal domestication in geographic perspective. Society and Animals 6(2): 119-135.
OR
Winterhalder & Kennett 2002. “Introduction,” in Human Behavioral Ecology and the Transition to Agriculture.

February 8: Population & the state

GG&S: Chapts. 15, 17-19
Lewellen, T. 2002. “Evolution of the state,” in Political Anthropology, pp.
Rapp, R. 1977. Gender and class: An archaeology of knowledge concerning the origin of the state. Dialectical Anthropology 2(1-4):309-16.
Clastres, P. 1979. excerpts from Society Against the State.
Guest TBA

February 15: Technology & germs

GG&S: Part Three – pp. 193-292
Inhorn & Brown 1990. The anthropology of infectious disease. Annual Review of Anthropology 19:89-117.
Headrick, D. 2010. “Horses, disease and the conquest of the Americas 1492-1849” in Power Over Peoples, pp. 95-132.
Guest: TBA

February 22: Why not China?

GG&S: Chap. 16, Epilogue pp. 405-417
Abu-Lughod, Janet. 1989. “Studying a System in Formation,” in Before European Hegemony. Oxford University Press, pp. 3-42
Pomerantz, K. 2001. “Chapter 4” in The Great Divergence (Princeton, pp. 166-208).
Guest: Michael Brose, History.

March 1: On proximate and ultimate causes

GG&S: “Epilogue – The Future of Human History as a Science,” pp. 403-425.
YQ: the rest of the book, pp. 43- 259. BUT! Concentrate primarily on Chap. 9 “Hewers of Wood and Drawers of Water” and “Conclusion: On Listening.”
Vayda, AP. 2009. “Causal explanation as a research goal: Dos and don’ts,” in Explaining Human Actions and Environmental Change, AltaMira pp. 1-48.
Fausto-Sterling, A. 1985. “Putting woman in her (evolutionary) place,” in Myths of Gender. Basic Books, pp. 156-204.
OR
Peet, R. 1985. The social origins of environmental determinism. Annals of the AAG 75(3): 309-33.

March 8: Ecology & culture — other kinds of agency

Geertz “The impact of the concept of culture on the concept of man, “ in The Interpretation of Cultures.
Bateson, G. 1972. excerpt from Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Ballantine, pp. 440-47.
West, P. 2005. Translation, value and space: Theorizing an ethnographic and engaged environmental anthropology. American Anthropologist 107(4): 632-42.
O’Connor 1997. Working at relationships: Another look at animal domestication. Antiquity 71: 149-56.
Castree & MacMillan 2001. “Dissolving dualisms,” in Social Nature, pp. 208-24.
OR
Ingold, T. 1990. An anthropologist looks at biology. Man 25(2):208-29.

March 15: Spring Break

Paper #1 due no later than 5:00pm on Friday, March 19^th.

March 22: “Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

Collapse: Prologue and Part One, pp. 1-75.
Tainter: 2006. Archaeology of overshoot and collapse. Annual Review of Anthropology 35:59-74.

March 29: Past Societies

Collapse: Part Two, pp. 77-308. and ONE of the following:
Rainbird, P. 2002. A message for our future? The Rapa Nui ecodisaster and Pacific Island environments. World Archaeology 33(3):436-51.
Dugmore et al. 2007. Norse Greenland settlement: Reflections on climate change, trade, and the contrasting fates of human settlements in the North Atlantic Islands. Arctic Anthropology 44(1):12-36.
Aimers, J. 2007. What Maya collapse? Terminal classic variation in the Maya lowlands. Journal of Archaeological Research 15(4): 329-77.

April 5: Modern Societies

Collapse: Part Three, pp. 309-416.
Brothers, T. 2002. Deforestation in the Dominican Republic: A village-level view. Environmental Conservation 24(3): 213-23.
Uvin, P. 2001. Reading the Rwandan Genocide. International Studies Review 3(3).
Guest: TBA

April 12: Practical Lessons

Collapse: Part 4, pp. 417-525, and “Further Readings” addendum pp. 555-560.
Diamond 2009. Op-ed: Will Big Business Save the Earth? The New York Times Dec. 5. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opinion/06diamond.html
Parker et al. 2008. The Little REDD Book. Oxford: Global Canopy Programme.
www.amazonconservation.org/pdf/redd_the_little_redd_book_dec_08.pdf
Winninghof 2004. Green capitalism. Salon Dec. 4. http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2004/12/08/sri/print.html
+ do some searching of the environmental blogosphere, i.e.:

• noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/
• www.treehugger.com/take_action/
• www.grist.org, etc.

April 19: Political ecology

Lansing et al 2007. “Rappaport’s rose: Structure, agency, and historical contingency in ecological anthropology,” in Reimagining Political Ecology, A. Biersack, ed. Duke University Press, pp. 325-57.
Le Billon, P. 2001. The political ecology of war: natural resources and armed conflicts. Political Geography 20: 561-84.
Robbins, P. 2004. excerpts from Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 3-40.
Biersack, A. 2008. “Introduction” from Reimagining Political Ecology. Duke University Press, pp. x-xx.

April 26: Disciplines, audiences and ethics

Diamond, J. 2008. Annals of anthropology: Vengeance is ours. The New Yorker April 21, p. 74.
Balter, M. 2009. Vengeance bites back at Jared Diamond. Science 324 (May 15).
and at least ONE of the essays on the ‘vengeance’ controversy linked on our website.

Rhonda Shearer, “Jared Diamond’s Factual Collapse“
Alex Golub, “Jared Diamond is Diluting my Brand“
Nancy Sullivan, “Light Elephants and Dark Revenge in the New Yorker“
Alex Golub, “Melanesian Vengeance, Western Vengeance, and Natural Vengeance“
Andrew Mack, “Big Conservation in Papua New Guinea“
Alan Bisbort, “Jared Diamond’s Tall Tale Gives Journalism a Bad Name“
Michael McManus, “Hello from Papua New Guinea… By the Way, We Read the New Yorker“
Douglas Edward Biber, “Did Daniel Wemp Really Say That?“
Paige West, “Hearing Stories, Telling Stories“
Valerie Alia, “Media, Misrepresentation, and Indigenous People“

Cronon, W. 1993. The uses of environmental history. Environmental History Review 17(3): 1-22.
Wilcox, M. 2009. “Marketing conquest and the vanishing Indian,” in Questioning Collapse, McAnany & Yoffee, eds. Cambidge, pp. 113-41.
Brosius, JP. 1999. Analyses and interventions: Anthropological engagements with environmentalism. Current Anthropology 40(3).

Finals week

Paper #2 due in my mailbox no later than 5:00pm on Friday May 7th.

Collapse: Prologue and Part One, pp. 1-75

Tainter, J. 2006. Archaeology of overshoot and collapse. Annual Review of Anthropology 35:59-74.

Abstract

For the panel “Naturecultures in Latin American Fields and Forests” at the Society for Cultural Anthropology spring meeting in Santa Fe this May:

Forests, Fields, Fences: Trees and Territoriality in Southern Chile

“A tree farm is not a forest” is an important reminder from the activist sector that categories matter when we apply them to naturecultural landscapes. A new form of market-based regulation – forest certification – troubles such relatively clean demarcations of landscape; it appears that a forest is often not a forest either. The stakeholder space of the Forest Stewardship Council provides a venue for actors throughout (and outside) the forest sector to articulate territorial politics with environmental values. Indigenous Mapuche activists speak of the timber plantations that dominate southern Chile as a tactical occupation of their territory, and the pine monoculture as an invading army. “Forest,” in turn, represents intact territory and the resources to maintain traditional lifeways. Timber companies advocate for “responsible forestry,” including plantations, as a form of economic development crucial for the protection of Chile’s fragile democracy. Environmentalists speak in similar terms about biodiversity conservation and intact forests as the common patrimony of “all Chileans,” a construction that elides territory and ethnic difference. The FSC as an organization tries to hold these competing definitions in tension, while providing a technology of eco-labelling that brings ethically-minded Northern consumers into the loop. In this paper I describe four ‘territorial moments’ in the emergence of FSC-Chile, whereby fields, forests and fences take on competing meanings across the Chilean forest ecumene. These vignettes help illustrate the active role that forests and fields play in the ongoing theater that is Latin America’s particular legacy of marginality, hybridity, dictatorship and democracy.

This is just an abstract – look for actual content some other time. Thanks to Jeremy Campbell for organizing!

Measuring green-ness

I’ve been meaning to put something up about this thing for roughly a million years – as you can see, it’s been almost an entire lifetime (for some small people…) since I last posted. Better late than never. So:

Ken Musgrave at Fast Company design/business mag has made the argument for Why We Need a Globally-Recognized Unit of Green. He cites the complications involved with decisions about materials in the design process – i.e. is ‘virgin’ bamboo a better (more sustainable?) choice than, say, recycled paper. Well, growing bamboo is much less resource-intensive than growing wood for paper, while a recycled product uses less (or no) raw materials. Using recycled materials isn’t “free,” though, given the energy costs of recycling and other inputs that might be necessary to break down the fibers or what-have-you. The choice puts unrelated environmental issues up against each other, as we weigh deforestation versus energy consumption versus chemical inputs, not to mention the carbon footprint of shipping raw materials and finished products… It’s an absurd algorithm, and one you’d probably rather not wade through in the supermarket aisle.

Musgrave proposes a standardized unit that compiles all those factors into a single index. Somebody, presumably a third-party certifier of some sort, can measure each product’s impact in terms of all the aforementioned dimensions, weight them somehow, and generate a single composite measure: “We can even call the labels something catchy–like ‘Greenies.’” I’m picturing the equation of ramified green measures with compounding parenthetical statements:

Paper ((70% post-consumer recycled(recycled using X method(Xmethod requiring 80 tons of chemical Y(chemical Y treated via process A and securely stored in site Q(shipped by truck from Scranton(etc.))))))  –>

= 3 ‘greenies’. Ba-da bing.

In a certain sense this is the same logic as the labels on organic food, certified timber, and so on. I’ve described those things elsewhere as ‘labor-saving devices,’ that is, technologies designed to save us the consumers that difficult labor of making ethical decisions about our purchases. We don’t need to know which farm the tomato comes from, what kind of manure the farmer uses, or anything else about it – if it has the organic label, we have it on good authority that at least some bad agro-things weren’t done to it.

What’s different about the proposed ‘greenies’ is the potential incorporation of everything. Organic standards are (sort of) clearly defined, nowadays by federal statute, but really only in terms of some chemicals that won’t appear in the product. It’s good information, but certainly doesn’t tell you everything you need to know in order to decide exactly which product is really the most green. A bunch of grapes conventionally-grown in Virginia represents the consumption of some nasty chemicals, but how does that compare to the ridiculous carbon footprint of the organic grapes that must be flown in from Chile? Only ‘greenies’ can tell us.

Obviously, this is just a thought experiment, but the places where it runs aground are where it gets really interesting. An auditor looking to assign a ‘greenie’ number to those grapes needs to know how to weigh pesticides against carbon footprint, but that’s a value judgment that would necessarily vary enormously from one person to another. I’m quite inclined toward the idea that local-conventional might be a better net environmental choice than organic-transnational; but my partner has a lot of chemical sensitivities and weights the presence of pesticides quite a lot more  heavily than I would. For any set of tradeoffs that our hypothetical auditor would need to weigh, we could imagine a dozen competing perspectives.  And that’s just considering the consumers’ values – if we try to include those of producers, laborers, and innocent bystanders? It never ends.

Roxanne’s Revenge

UPDATED: All a hoax! But at least we got punked by Roxanne herself and not by some blogger – I don’t really hold it against her.

I don’t know about the “nature” in this story, but the “culture” is too good to pass up. Remember Roxanne? Well, that’s Doctor Roxanne to you, and she got it the hard way. This is a warm-feeling kind of story, and not (just) from  the hip-hop nostalgia.