Organizer: Michael R. Dove, East-West Center
Chair: David Frossard, Colorado School of Mines
Discussant: Arun Agrawal, Indiana University
The relationship between the social and the natural sciences is problematized today over issues such as the definition of science, the validity of scientific authority, and the counter-critique of post-modern authority. This relationship is most problematic in fields like natural resource development, where social scientists now practice on what was long regarded as the uncontested turf of natural science. The contest between the social and natural sciences is particularly salient in Asia, where some of the world's most sophisticated "scientific" schemes of natural resource development have come into conflict with some of the world's most sophisticated indigenous regimes of natural resource development. The studies presented in this panel will examine the contest over interpretation engendered by these conflicts. One study examines the implications for this contest of redefining pastoral Chinese landscapes as synthetic versus natural spaces; a second reinterprets orthodox views of Southeast Asian grasslands as "degraded forests" in terms of privileging forest-versus grassland-based systems of production; a third interprets farmer redirection of crop science in the Philippines as an indigenous critique of not the technology but the ideology of this science; and a fourth examines the implications of anthropological conventions regarding what methods are appropriate for studying "cultural" versus "natural" subjects. The panel's aim is to contribute both to the understanding of natural resource development in Asia and to the wider debate over the respective roles-and authority-of the social and natural sciences in illuminating this development.
Boundaries of Knowledge as Contested in Asian Grassland Environments
Dee Mack Williams, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
In contemporary social science literature, a landscape is generally understood as a composition of man-made spaces upon the land. This means that landscapes are not natural features of the environment but synthetic spaces, functioning and evolving not in strict accordance with natural laws but to serve a community of symbol-creating members. Landscape studies have thus opened the door for potentially explosive ideological combat: who is best qualified to interpret and represent localized land forms? Natural scientists have historically been authorized to represent and speak for nature, but their authority no longer goes unchallenged, either within the academy or among the public at large. Recent multi-national and multi-disciplinary research projects on the grasslands of Mongolia and China provide a useful opportunity to explore the fault lines of this intellectual turf battle, and to consider the implications not only for interdisciplinary cooperation, but also for wider political struggles over environmental issues.
Privileged Ecotypes in Southeast Asia: Ecological Models, Authority, and Bias in
Environmental Representation
Michael R. Dove, East-West Center
Recent critical scholarship suggests that many previous ideas about the nature of the "forest" (e.g., its unchanging condition and lack of human inputs) were erroneous. Anthropologists have contributed to the corrected vision of forests (e.g., that perturbation is the norm and that human influences are ubiquitous). On the other hand, anthropologists have failed to problematize the concept of the forest itself. "Forest" continues to be a land-cover category that is privileged over others, as reflected in the domination of environmentalist critiques by "rainforest fundamentalism" and the associated over-emphasis on "deforestation" in global change studies. What is needed here is to ask: (1) how real the category of "forest" is; and (2) who benefits by its dominance of the resource landscape. Anthropology now possesses the conceptual tools to deconstruct the resource landscape and direct attention to long-invisible parts of it, in much the same way that "subaltern" studies have directed attention to deprivileged elements of the social landscape. A part of the resource landscape that has been especially de-privileged is secondary, fire-climax successions such as Imperata grasslands. The conception of these grasslands in science and policy will be examined, drawing on primary fieldwork in Indonesia and secondary sources for the rest of Southeast Asia. Particular attention will be paid to the way that conceptions of grassland (and forest) have been borrowed from one discipline by another, and how such trans-disciplinary linkages have been used to augment, or undermine, scholarly authority.
Asia's Green Revolution, and Peasant Distinctions Between Science and Authority
David Frossard, Colorado School of Mines
In the thirty years of Asia's Green Revolution, natural scientists and their allies have been extraordinarily successful: they have created not only high-yielding crops and technologies but also elaborate representations of progress and modernity in which adoption of the new crops is a central theme. In particular, expatriate scientists and development-industry experts have been successful in representing themselves as the single legitimate voice of Asian farmers in matters of agricultural development. Although some farmers (and social scientists) have found the new technologies ecologically or socially problematic, their objections have rarely been heard outside narrow academic confines. In one exceptional Philippine case, dissatisfied farmers have successfully reached a larger audience of politicians and policy-makers with their concerns, causing a major international crop-development institution (the International Rice Research Institute) to expend considerable resources to maintain its political legitimacy. The farmers reached this larger audience through astute partnerships with local academics and activists; through unexpected appeals to the very values of science, progress, and modernity espoused by scientists; and through skillful use of nationalist symbology and political theater. When farmers are able to speak for themselves in such a powerful way, they not only gain political legitimacy, but also implicitly cast doubt on supposed dichotomies like tradition/modernity or, indeed, social science/natural science. This thesis will be explored drawing on recent research with local farmer organizations in Luzon.
Counting Things and Interpreting Ideas: Anthropological Conventions in the Use of
"Hard" Versus "Soft" Models
Michael Fisher, University of Kent
Past anthropological forays into the natural sciences have been motivated by a search for tools with which to describe ethnographic settings in more "rigorous" terms. The typical result of these forays has been unsatisfactory: good descriptions of natural resource management systems were produced that contained but pale reflections of the principal subject, people and their activities. It is suggested here that these failures are due to implicit conventions in anthropology-in particular conventions pertaining to numerical representation-regarding what to observe and how. This is seen most clearly in anthropology's use of computer science. There were early successes with simulation models in anthropology, in which (e.g.) the constructive semantics of kinship were played out over whole populations, food procurement strategies were reconciled with local ecology, and tabla improvisations were related to the constituent "formulae" used by musicians. These successes were not followed up, however, because the nature of early computer representations was not appropriate for anthropology. This study will draw on fieldwork in South Asia and the Pacific to demonstrate how computer science can be used to represent conventional ethnographic subjects. The implications of this for representations of natural resource landscapes by the natural and social sciences will be explored.