Anthropological Insights: Culture, Environment, and Knowledge Systems
Key Anthropological Concepts
The anthropological perspective involves making the strange familiar and vice versa, characterized by four key approaches:
- Holistic: This approach uses multiple kinds of data to capture the whole picture, connecting all parts of life.
- Comparative: To understand human experience, one must compare and contrast many examples. This avoids labeling anything as “normal,” questions one’s own assumptions, and embraces diversity. For example, Orlove challenges us to question our own assumptions about work, how time functions, and how we divide our time, encouraging a non-ethnocentric view. Instead, we compare experiences and notice similarities and differences without judgment or labeling one as backwards.
- Field-Based: This refers to the practice of ethnography.
- Historical: This considers change over time, recognizing that cultures are not static (evolution/development) or “stuck in the past” or primitive. It critiques the idea of progress/improvement. For example, Lake Titicaca fishing practices have changed over time; some elements, like balsa design, remain integral, while others adjust to the environment.
Cultural Relativism
Cultural relativism involves noticing similarities and differences, understanding that cultures are different but neither is inherently right or wrong. It means not judging (us/them) and trying to understand things within their context. It is a step forward, respecting other cultures, but it does not always lead with curiosity or seek to understand another perspective.
The Commons
A commons is open for multiple uses, the opposite of private property. These are resources held in common for the benefit of the community. For example, parts of Lake Titicaca are a commons, including shared fishing grounds, distinct from reed beds which can include private property.
Tragedy of the Commons
The “Tragedy of the Commons” suggests that people’s individual greediness causes them to wreck shared resources for everyone. When people abuse a commons, it becomes depleted, harmed, or destroyed. Local management is often preferred over government intervention.
Cultural Evolutionism
Cultural evolutionism posits that culture is an adaptation to the environment (deterministic), an “adaptation strategy.” It attempted to apply biological evolution to culture, assuming that what works stays, and that culture is like biology. This perspective often places cultures in the past, understanding culture as solely derived from the environment. If culture were only from the environment, one should be able to find neat cultural geographic groups, which is not the case. Ford was an evolutionist who sought to identify correspondence between environmental zones and cultural zones. This approach is racist, assuming that Europeans/whites are more complex/advanced than everyone else, and that it is “natural” for simple/inferior people/cultures to die off.
Cultural Essentialism
Cultural essentialism involves: Reducing a group to one feature; assuming Homogeneity, where everyone in a group has a specific feature; and asserting Fixity, meaning this feature is timeless. Strategic Essentialism involves drawing on one’s stereotypes to exert power, playing into emotional appeals (e.g., wearing traditional clothes to congressional legislation).
Ethnocentrism
Ethnocentrism is seeing your own way of living as superior and seeing others as backwards or primitive. One should speak from an “I” perspective and avoid labeling things as “normal.” Everyone is ethnocentric; one should catch oneself when making assumptions and reframe them.
Cultural Ecology
Cultural ecology views culture as the “superorganic factor,” not just another variable that can be added to an ecological formula. The environment sets limits on possibilities for cultural practices, but there are multiple ways of approaching a problem, allowing for “possibilism” and room for creativity, thus not being deterministic. It replaced cultural evolutionism. It focuses on creative problem-solving for environmental conditions (functionalist), where culture serves a practical/adaptive purpose. Cons: It is unidirectional, disregards how people shape their environment, and its functionalist approach (explaining how culture helps people adapt to their environment) ignores art and things without function, and does not take beliefs seriously. Example: Regarding nuts as a food source, a cultural ecologist might assume people of Kissidougou decide where to set up villages based on where the forest is, but it is actually the people shaping their landscape here.
Ethnography
Ethnography is the signature method and product of research, developed to study non-literate peoples. It involves taking data of everyday life and making records, often focusing on marginalized people. It is written as a counter-perspective, using a holistic approach to “capture the native’s point of view” by living as they do, including language, food, and housing. Example: Lines in the Water is an ethnography that fights against the narrative that the death of the commons is inevitable by sharing the lives of the people of Lake Titicaca, a silenced and marginalized group that has not been listened to in decision-making processes.
Knowledge Systems and Fieldwork
Indigenous Technical Knowledge (ITK) Approach
The ITK approach takes seriously the knowledge and interpretations of the environment, translating Indigenous knowledge into scientific terms. It shows how Indigenous Peoples can contribute to conservation and sustainability, supporting Indigenous land claims, activists, and earning government recognition. Example: In the Amazon, people assume there is no agriculture because it does not look like conventional agriculture. However, in the jungle, the Kayapo cultivate 85% of the plants, increasing richness and creating “ecozones” that maintain and increase biodiversity, demonstrating they are not destroyers. The environment shapes options for cultivation (not monoculture), illustrating possibilism, but they also shape their environment to be better for their agriculture.
ITK: Kimmerer and Shebitz Example
Kimmerer and Shebitz’s work on restoring sweetgrass involves listening to elders, validating Indigenous Knowledge. They found that picking/harvesting is good for sweetgrass, which was opposite to what science initially suggested. Their data (density, height, biomass) and narrative style, with sweetgrass as an actor, and expected sections, helped legitimize their findings. This work critiques ITK by suggesting that there may not be a good translation of these things, and that we may need to adjust science to account for and include all different kinds of knowledge. Trying to intervene without ITK is like building a house on sand, lacking proper understanding.
Informant/Participant Observation
Participant observation involves observing while participating, an immersive approach to understanding people’s lives. It requires building trusting, friendly, and personal, long-term relationships. Researchers collect better data and conduct better research after building rapport, unlike other scientific research where one might keep distance as a scientist. It is neither distant nor objective. Cons: It can lead to deeper understanding without broader generalizations, as rapport cannot be built with everyone, and it does not yield statistical facts.
Participant-Observation Stages
The initial stages involve an “outsider” or “fly-on-the-wall” approach, where one writes down everything (e.g., going fishing, going to the market, buying food to cook). This is fieldwork. Example: Shever making stew with women and also with the men who did construction, demonstrating participation in gendered activities.
Indigenous People
The term “Indigenous people” often groups many different peoples into one bucket, which can be reductionist. It refers to the colonized, not the colonizers/Europeans. There is a stereotype of them being natural environmentalists because they use/wear natural items, exoticizing them and focusing only on difference. Being close, caring, or in tune with nature is sometimes viewed as backwards, leading to assumptions about their beliefs. This assumes homogeneity, timelessness, and fixity (essentialism).
Territorial Use Rights Fishing (TURF)
TURF involves sharing the territory and relying on an interconnected society; the exploration of TURF highlights that culture matters a lot. Key elements include:
- Clearly Defined Boundaries: Lake Titicaca has shared knowledge of whose territory is whose. Village meetings set boundaries, and they adhere to them (e.g., more totora, planning days of the week).
- Rules for Management: There is a shared understanding of who gets what. In fishing, the owner gets half, then divides the rest among helpers.
- Inclusive Decision-Making Process: (Example needed from original text, but not provided).
- System of Monitoring and Enforcing: Lake Titicaca uses harpoons, taking oars, and leaving people naked as enforcement methods.
Cons: This framework misses culture, the creativity of how they do what they do. While TURF protects against the Tragedy of the Commons, Orlove’s addition suggests something is missing: they need to add shared cultural values. It is more than just TURF laws that protected Lake Titicaca.
Culture
Culture is a complex concept with several key characteristics:
- It makes us unique.
- It is learned, not biological.
- It is never isolated nor static, but innovative.
- No culture is better than another.
Culture infuses everything, including making rules and regulations; cultural understanding is critical when intervening or choosing not to. There is often resistance to extreme pressure. Culture is a “complex whole” but not an object, making it impossible to list all its elements. Culture is a process that is always changing. It is an active process, and everyone is active in creating it, but they cannot make it by themselves or into whatever they want. Culture is about both solving practical problems and developing beliefs and values, and it is about conflict and disagreement as much as commonalities and agreement.
Definitions of Culture: Key Thinkers
Tylor (The Bucket)
“Culture, or civilization…is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”
Tylor’s definition presents culture as a list of things—goods, clothes, etc.—equating culture with civilization. It tends to categorize people into “buckets” based on one characteristic, similar to early maps of Native American tribes.
Ford (Minecraft House)
“Culture consists of traditional ways of solving problems…culture…is composed of responses which have been accepted because they have met with success; in brief, culture consists of learned problem-solutions.”
Ford, a Darwinian cultural evolutionist, believed culture serves an evolutionary purpose. From an evolutionary perspective, culture is a way of solving problems, implying there is a right and wrong way.
Malinowski (Tools)
“This Social heritage is the key concept of cultural anthropology is usually called culture…culture comprises inherited artifacts, goods, technical processes, ideas, habits, and values.”
Malinowski builds on Tylor’s definition, adding practical elements that Tylor did not emphasize.
Geertz (Tangled Web)
“The concept of culture I espouse is essentially a semiotic one…Believing…that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be these webs.”
Geertz views humans as individual creators spinning webs of meaning. Language is central to culture, which he sees as an active, not passive, process of creation.
Rosaldo (Galactic Webs)
“In contrast with the classical view, which posits culture as a self-contained whole made up of coherent patterns, culture can arguably be conceived as a more porous array of intersections where distinct processes crisscross from within and beyond its borders. Such Heterogeneous processes often derive from differences of age, gender, class, race, and sexual orientation.”
Rosaldo argues against putting cultures into rigid “buckets,” emphasizing heterogeneity. Cultures crisscross and extend beyond borders, influenced by differences such as age, gender, class, race, and sexual orientation.
Abu Lughod (Chatter)
“The notion of culture…despite its long usefulness, may now have become something anthropologists would want to work against… Culture is the essential tool for making other…Despite its anti-essentialist intent, however, the culture concept retains some of the tendencies to freeze difference.”
Abu Lughod is an anti-culturalist who argues that the concept of culture inherently creates separation and emphasizes differences, often disregarding common humanity and the crisscrossing nature of cultural processes.
Case Studies and Applications
Kimmerer & Shebitz: “Reestablishing Roots of a Mohawk Community and a Culturally Significant Plant: Sweetgrass”
Goals
To find scientifically significant findings corroborating ITK, using ITK about sweetgrass to then conduct experiments based on their knowledge, adding scientific validation. Sweetgrass plays an economic and traditional role, and the goal is to restore cultural richness by bringing back a keystone plant.
Evidence/Data
The research is written with specific scientific sections and cites other sources to validate findings. It holds ITK up to science for comparison, sometimes placing science on a pedestal. Data is quantitative (height, biomass, density), reflecting a more Western approach.
Conclusions
The study suggests that ecologists often use “culture” incorrectly. It establishes a relationship of environment to people and people to environment (going beyond cultural ecology). Indigenous knowledge can be scientific, proving elders to be right that human intervention is good for the plant. We can restore sweetgrass; humans can have a positive impact on population growth and ecosystems. ITK acknowledges how Indigenous individuals can contribute to sustainability and conservation.
Kimmerer, “Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass”
“There is a barrier of language and meaning between science and traditional knowledge, different ways of knowing, different ways of communicating.”
ITK acknowledges how Indigenous individuals can contribute to sustainability and conservation.
Goals
To understand sweetgrass not merely as a product, but to understand the human-plant relationship, comparing a harvested group and a control group.
Evidence/Data
Data is presented as a story instead of data tables; it is qualitative, descriptive data. Success of growth is measured through descriptions of the plant. It incorporates Indigenous knowledge, records, and oral tradition, fostering a conversation between sweetgrass, science, and Indigenous knowledge. It notices similarities and differences without putting one on a pedestal, translating ITK into forms scientists will recognize, and aims to restore cultural richness by bringing back a keystone plant.
Critique
These different forms of knowledge do not neatly fit together. It feels wrong to try to reduce ITK so that it fits within our current framework; perhaps we need to change our framework and ideas about what science is and can include.
Conclusions
The study proved elders to be right: human interaction with sweetgrass makes it grow better. Reciprocity is essential; human interaction makes it reproduce. Humans can have a positive impact on population growth and ecosystems. Mohawk people’s culture is closely connected to sweetgrass, so it is not just about restoring/preserving the plant but also culture. Indigenous people have an ongoing and changing relationship with sweetgrass; culture adapts and did not stop.
Lines in the Water: Big Takeaways
This work highlights that it is not people versus the environment; a tragedy does not always occur when people use natural resources. Culture matters a lot; you cannot just add it to a list of factors, as culture infuses everything. You cannot understand the environment without understanding culture.
Chapter 1: Lines in the Water: Mountains
Chapter 3: Lines in the Water: Names
Chapter 4: Lines in the Water: Work
Chapter 5: Lines in the Water
This chapter emphasizes the historical aspect of anthropology, noting how new fish were introduced without considering cultural knowledge. The people are not “stuck in their ways.” Selling fish, large profit margins are not important; bartering for fish, with no set prices, slows down fishing practices when there is no more barley to trade for, preventing waste. Government requires fishers to register their boats, then obtain fishing licenses. The villagers show miraculous resilience to government and outside (conservation) interference. When trout and silverside were introduced, fishing practices changed. There is tension between local knowledge and external forces such as science and government policy, highlighting the fragile interconnectedness. The government changed not only the ecosystem but also local fishing practices and social structures, altering how people interact with each other, not just fishing, by changing their ecosystem. Local ecological knowledge is often ignored by top-down policies; Lake Titicaca is not just an environment. There is a dismissive attitude towards local knowledge.
Chapter 6: Lines in the Water
This chapter discusses Totora management, noting that some years less is harvested. It challenges the tendency to view things as wrong or outdated if they are different from our expectations of what is normal (like the floating islands, which were made recently). Cows eating totora: as it became more available, farmers slowly incorporated it. It challenges our instinct to reject (and label as wrong) things we have not experienced, urging us to compare our experiences to the villagers’ but not label them, simply taking in similarities and differences. Larger entities try to involve themselves in Titicaca’s environmental conservation, such as CENFOR. Totora is integral to daily life—people sleep on Totora mats, fishermen craft boats from it, farmers feed their cows with it, and fathers use it to build roofs. They possess deep knowledge of how to care for it—planting and replanting it in tune with the rainfall. They do not just take from the lake; they engage in a continuous reciprocal cycle of care.
“Ritual Regulation of Environmental Relations among the New Guinea People.”
This article suggests that rituals are important for regulating relationships between groups. It takes an ecological approach, which can be technical, scientific, and reductive, often not caring about religious reasons for practices like eating salted pork meat, using function to explain culture, which completely excludes the native’s point of view. It does not include or emphasize humanity, creating a space between scientist and subject, indicating a significant power difference. It touches on possibilism. Conflicts between groups are regulated by a ritual cycle, with victorious groups planting rumbim to indicate survival and mark territorial claims. Land redistribution is also determined through this ritual planting. Although Rappaport’s article incorporates elements of cultural ecology, such as seeking to understand the native point of view, it holds it up to science and puts science on a pedestal, therefore disregarding the beliefs of the Indigenous people compared to science.
Second Nature Video
What is “second nature” to one can be completely different for another, and assuming things based on our own “second nature” leads to assumptions about others. What looked like destruction (controlled fires) actually served to better support their soil and yield better rice. It challenged assumptions: Was the savanna threatening the forest? The pattern of grassy islands suggested otherwise. The historical focus involved looking at oral records and photography, comparing past and present. Forests used to be used as fortresses; now they protect against fires. The video compares wisdom with what science has to say, noting that researchers sometimes listen “more to the landscape than the people who live there.” The development research center did not believe elders, dismissing their knowledge as impossible. Landscapes are enriched by people. The video described their practices as “strange and bizarre” a couple of times, using dismissing language. Actually, forest area had increased, confirmed by elders, then further corroborated by photo evidence. The dynamics of vegetation undermine the assumption that people are always bad for the environment. The fires seemed like the opposite of being out of control, but ethnocentric biases caused us to label this as destructive. Here, in this environment, the fires allow for even more control, management, and richer ecosystems. The video questions “How clearly researchers interpret these findings.” It shows asking gender-specific questions to women and not direct questions (part of holism: do not let yourself and your priorities distract you from the important thing—their priorities, e.g., what crops and pests). Intricate knowledge of plants allows every activity to be optimized for vegetation dynamics (e.g., cows). Conservation and knowledge can be translated into the future: forests do not need to come in plastic bags. Anthropology deals with misinterpretation. More than one source/kind of data adds up to the whole picture; you cannot understand language without understanding how they talk about soil. There is deep and specific knowledge of each type of grass and plant. Evidence includes oral history. The practice of burning the land challenges arguments of unnecessary deforestation and environmental degradation. People surrounding Kissidougou are taught that the villagers living there are degrading the environment. A counter-perspective is that a commons will be decimated if left unregulated by a government or some other power. The video features the Sandaya and Tully people. Researchers took ITK elders seriously, seeking to understand. It acknowledges how Indigenous individuals can contribute to sustainability and conservation. They are limited by the resources in their environment, but they use them creatively: to stop fires, they make big firebreaks using cows to make the land barren. Changes over time: Elders experience a vastly different landscape in their lifetimes, from savanna to uncontrollable forest growth. They have changed their practices over time. Trees could not grow in the rocky and non-rich soil of the savanna, but the villagers discovered that through prescriptive cycles of planting, growing, and burning specific grasses and trees, they can enrich the soil to make it conducive to forest growth. Trees are important for more than just agriculture; they add protection from wildfires and outsiders. Even the country’s government forestation programs do not believe this, due to entrenched ethnocentrism left by colonialist powers that control the narrative. The environment-people relationship is oversimplified by government. Ideologies associated with cultural ecology are flawed.