Dissolving Nature and Culture:Indigenous Perspectivism in Political Ecology

[SanteriSatama]

Division between culture and nature is a metaphysical division. Can idealism and animism help to heal the divide, which is deeply connected to the subject-object division of post-Cartesian Enlightenment philosophy and the cover-up of the subject-object divide by materialistic monism?

Dissolving Nature and Culture: Indigenous Perspectivism and Political Ecology

Abstract:
Environmental movements have encountered significant dilemmas in advancing their claims for sustainability and protection of the nonhuman world. Environmentalism has typically articulated its claims in a conceptual language incorporating the antinomy of nature and culture. These concepts have created practical problems and conceptual paradoxes which have led to a strategic impasse. Diverse attempts have thus far failed to move beyond impasse because they inadequately unravelled the antinomy of nature and culture. The task engaged in here is not to privilege nature over culture, or to privilege culture by observing the socially constructed character of nature, or to examine the inner dialectical relations that connect them; nor is it to explore genealogical the deeper significance of the antinomy itself. Rather, this essay argues for stepping outside of this conceptual language into a different cosmology. This task is accomplished through an examination of the perspectivism and multinaturalism of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro,which he developed in his studies of Amazonian cosmology. It is argued that at the root of the problems of nature, culture and environmentalism are ambiguities and paradoxes having to due with the doctrines of naturalism and objectivism. These ambiguities and paradoxes can only be overcome by recognizing the reciprocal intentionality of humans,animals, spirits and other kinds of subjects.


Introduction

The idea that nature should be the central concept of environmental political theory seems like a self-evident proposition. That environmental politics and political ecology are about nature seems so obvious that it is not worth mentioning. However, the concept of Nature has been the subject of considerable controversy in the human sciences. In the last ten years or so nature has come under fire in political ecology (Chaloupka 2000,2007). Bruno Latour (2004), an anthropologist and philosopher of science at Institutd'Études Politiques de Paris, in his work on political ecology
Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, has gone as far as to say that the concept of Nature has stymied the conceptualization of political ecology. Green activists and ecologists have been shocked and defensive about these brazen attacks. They could not comprehend why intellectuals, supposedly sympathetic to their cause, would attack the idea of nature just as the environmental movement seemed to be gaining traction (e.g. Soule and Lease1995). But what was under attack, were not trees, rocks, deer, owls or wolves. The target was the concept of Nature that has had a dubious and infamous history in political theory and a dualistic and paradoxical relationship with its twin: Culture or Society. Also a target of criticism was the relations of authority these concepts establish among humans and between humans and non humans.
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I haven't yet read the whole article, posting this for care-full reading, thinking and feeling together. To stay in the forum's purpose and mission my own first guiding question is, what are the joints and possible disjoints between the article and naturalism of analytical idealism?

[SanteriSatama]

The link, can't see how to edit OP.
https://www.academia.edu/350233/Dissolv ... view-paper

[SanteriSatama]

The critique of these Western intellectual traditions “requires the disassociation and redistribution of the predicates subsumed under Nature and Culture: universal andparticular, objective and subjective, physical and moral, fact and value, the given and the constructed, necessity and spontaneity, immanence and transcendence, body and spirit, animality and humanity, among many more” (opt. cite). This “conceptual reshuffling” leads Viveiros de Castro to the concept of multinaturalism to describe the contrasting indigenous ontological categories. Whereas cultural relativism rest on the assumption of the unity of nature and the diversity of cultures, multinaturalism suggest the unity of spirit and the diversity of bodies.

At first glance, unity of spirit and the diversity of bodies resonates with That-which-experiences and alters. Interesting to note, dissolving the given and the constructed hooks with another discussion going on.

[SanteriSatama]

Diversity of bodies is not in ontological contradiction with alterhood. Main difference is the enduring aspect of alter's armour as European subject vs. fluid flow of transformations between various animal peoples, dead and spirits, as spirit keeps changing its clothes of appearance. Politics remains politics and diplomacy between alter appearances, but is clearly and consciously extended also to humans in clothes of other animals:

From indigenous perspectives, the science of the body is the process of communicating and negotiating with its spirits or souls (some peoples claim that an individual has a plurality of souls) and the other spirits or spiritual forces affecting them(e.g. the spirit of smallpox, for disease; the spirit of jaguar perhaps, in the case of fright or trauma). An object is always an insufficiently analyzed subject. I want to emphasize the notion that the processes of knowing and knowledge, from an indigenous point of view, are a „political art or diplomacy.‟ This is the case with something like „ecosystem‟s management‟ or its indigenous equivalent. From the indigenous perspective the ideal is a dialogue and political negotiation (consistent with the notion of diplomacy) of diverse perspectives and interests, rather than the idea of intervention in a mechanical system of feedback loops. This is an ongoing, give and take that requires constant attention in order to maintain and renew beneficial relationships

[JustinG]

what are the joints and possible disjoints between the article and naturalism of analytical idealism?

I've not read all the article, but I think idealism can be distinguished from indigenous perspectives in that idealism (like physicalism) tends to characterise the experienced world as illusory or merely the appearance of a 'deeper' reality.

Indigenous perspectives, from what I understand of them, have less appearance/reality and transcendence/immanence dualisms. In spiritual terms, this may be reflected in the difference between a grounded, embodied spirituality and one that tends towards dissociation and disembodiment.

[Lou Gold]

Here's a marvelous essay on the indigenous perspective, it's loss and some thoughts about how the lessons might be embraced within modernity.

Hold a Blossom to the Light

In 1975, when the flood of goods from outside was threatening the Waorani way of life, the local missionaries tried to stem the tide. But when they restricted the flow of radios, T-shirts, sunglasses, and baseball hats, the Waorani simply expanded their contacts with nearby oil exploration camps and tourists. Going so far as to clear an airstrip at one location, "they invented rituals, imitated the activities of an oil camp, and sang songs to the helicopters, with the hope that they would unleash a rain of gifts".

Eventually the missionaries realized the hopelessness of the situation. One of them, Jim Yost, remarked to Davis,

As romantics we idealize a past we never experienced and deny those who knew that past from changing. We forget perhaps the most disturbing lesson of anthropology. As Levi-Strauss said, "The people for whom the term cultural relativism was invented, have rejected it". (p. 290)
The "cultural relativism" Levi-Strauss was referring to includes the notion that every culture has its own distinctive values worth preserving. Surely it does. Yet it is also true that the members of the culture itself may prefer change over becoming museum exhibits. We can hardly preserve them against their will, whether by dictating their values to them or artificially isolating them.

Davis hones the issue to a fine sharpness when he quotes Yost as saying,

Nothing thrills the Waorani more than killing game and cutting down big trees. It's what so many people don't understand who haven't lived in the forest. You don't have to conserve what you don't have the power to destroy. Harming the forest is an impossible concept for them.
When Davis interjects, "They don't know what it means to destroy", Yost goes on:

They have no capacity to understand. In a world of such abundance, the word "scarcity" has no meaning. It's what makes them most vulnerable. It's the same with their culture. When you've lived in complete isolation, how can you understand what it means to lose a culture? It's not until it is almost gone and when people become educated that they realize what's being lost. By then the attractions of the new way are overpowering, and the only people who want the old ways are the ones who never lived it.
You can easily imagine that a similar sense of the indestructible abundance of natural resources must have seized the early European settlers of the American West. And in a rather different way, the inexhaustible supply of computing power now invites the impoverishment of our cultural mores and institutions through their transfer to the shallow and much-too-automatic pathways of silicon.

Historically, there appears to be an element of tragedy in all this. We stumble along in ignorance and, by the time we realize the subtle ways our actions have caught up with us, the damage and loss are already irrevocable.

But one function of tragedy is to shock us into wakefulness. With this wakefulness comes a new ability to stand back and look at ourselves critically in the very moment of acting. And this in turn brings greater moral responsibility. Surely by the time of the settling of the American West there was much less innocence in the relations between settler and environment than there was for the Waorani. And it would be hard to excuse as innocent at all the widespread narcosis evident in the way we have yielded so passively to mass media and digital technologies today, allowing them to cut us off from vital openness toward the full-fleshed qualities of our human and natural contexts. We, after all, have as examples the Waorani and many other cultures, not to mention a reasonably objective knowledge of our own history. The Waorani had none of this.

[SanteriSatama]

As romantics we idealize a past we never experienced and deny those who knew that past from changing. We forget perhaps the most disturbing lesson of anthropology. As Levi-Strauss said, "The people for whom the term cultural relativism was invented, have rejected it". (p. 290)
The "cultural relativism" Levi-Strauss was referring to includes the notion that every culture has its own distinctive values worth preserving. Surely it does. Yet it is also true that the members of the culture itself may prefer change over becoming museum exhibits. We can hardly preserve them against their will, whether by dictating their values to them or artificially isolating them.

Multinaturalism, which replaces cultural relativism in the OP essay, resonates at least on some levels with the relational interpretation of QM, interpretation that BK prefers. So, the people for whom the term multinaturalism is invented, the Western science people, have not outright rejected it.

The essay explains Animism beautifully. Shared humanity of all natures, people in their various clothes. To recognize other animals as fellow citizens, we need to recognize their humanity. Just like people of a tribe need to recognize the humanity of other tribes, and agree to be recognized as people by humans in different alter costumes of fur and feathers and what not.

Some people wear the disguise of a tool. Commodified, objectified people who objectify their nature as a tool. Their costume and appearance is their human choice. Also such people may prefer change over becoming museum exhibits in a tool museum. Maybe we keep changing costume between a tool and a tool user faster than we can think. So fast that the digital switch looks like an analogue amp, if we don't pay very care-full attention to that transformation back and forth. Make our attention a game of joking. When I realize that the joke was on me, I was fooled into a tool, and if I can laugh along the people at my embarrassment, what then?

Maybe stalk another joke, fur the lulz? Maybe reason some seerIyous phlossophy? Like, what's the point of first dissolving the subject-object distinction, and then going full subjectivism in the animist way of the reflection game, world filled with me as you? What about 3rd person? Sorry, couldn't help myself and served another dish of a joking fool. Just mind-full of coffee and cigs from now on. Existential philosophy in the adjunction of uppers from Arabia, grounders from America. Goes nice with a bottle of Absinthe.

Where was I?

[Soul_of_Shu]

The essay explains Animism beautifully. Shared humanity of all natures, people in their various clothes. To recognize other animals as fellow citizens, we need to recognize their humanity. Just like people of a tribe need to recognize the humanity of other tribes, and agree to be recognized as people by humans in different alter costumes of fur and feathers and what not.

Perhaps a noble ideal of the metacognitive creatures. I suspect a hungry crocodile will still recognize this alter-form as a possible meal, if one should happen upon its territory. Maybe the key is learning to translate and speak their language, like the wild-beast whisperers among us.

[SanteriSatama]

The essay explains Animism beautifully. Shared humanity of all natures, people in their various clothes. To recognize other animals as fellow citizens, we need to recognize their humanity. Just like people of a tribe need to recognize the humanity of other tribes, and agree to be recognized as people by humans in different alter costumes of fur and feathers and what not.

Perhaps a noble ideal of the metacognitive creatures. I suspect a hungry crocodile will still recognize this alter-form as a possible meal, if one should happen upon its territory. Maybe the key is learning to translate and speak their language, like the wild-beast whisperers among us.

The essay is really worth a read. Fine Young Cannibals, all peoples? People need to eat, the politics and transformations between natures is constantly negotiating who eats whom in which nature, so that all peoples are not all the time only predatory politics towards each other in all natures. Who are the people to eat and people not to eat, in this particulal nature? This kind of subjectivity does not arise from fixating to an object, but from asking and giving permission to eat and to be eaten, denying permission to eat and to be eaten in this or that nature. Personal, family line etc. dietary politics in the many-many natures of Amazonian abundance are mind boggingly complex.

Yes, language learning and translation is the key. In our family we like to joke with our dog-person family member about eating him, and the joke of translating his suspicious mind into our language is amusing because we would not really eat him. Unless very very hungry, and perhaps not even then.

[Soul_of_Shu]

This kind of subjectivity does not arise from fixating to an object, but from asking and giving permission to eat and to be eaten, denying permission to eat and to be eaten in this or that nature.

I give permission to humanity family to toss this alter corpse to the dogs once its mini-mind is abiding in transcorporeal dreamland ... though they may turn their noses up and ask in doggy-speak, 'where's the Kabo ?!'