1. Cultural Ecology
Julian Steward’s Cultural Ecology defines and distinguishes cultural ecology from fields such as human and social ecology and emphasizes that it seeks to explain the origin of certain cultural features and patterns that characterize different regions. According to Steward, cultural ecology is not interested in generalizations, or in the origin and routes of diffusion of a technology, but rather in the different uses of technologies and how those different uses may entail different social relationships in each environment. Steward emphasizes that cultural ecology offers both a problem and a method of analyzing data. The problem for the discipline is ascertaining whether the adjustment of human societies to their environments requires particular behaviors or whether they allow for a range of behavior patterns. Steward in his article used general examples of cultural behavior from around the world, not citing any studies that would attempt to explain them but instead focusing on general patterns such as the advantages of group hunting when large game was involved and the advantages of small groups for gathering berries. Steward discussed how use of technologies and different social structures arise as a result of the environment the groups of people inhabit. He argues that the role of cultural diffusion of technologies in explaining culture has been greatly overestimated, and he emphasizes the lack of determinism present. Steward’s argument was presented clearly, but adding sources from outside his own thinking would add a layer of validity and would eliminate confirmation bias.
2. Gender and the Environment
Rocheleau et al suggest in their article Gender and the Environment that there are real gender differences in experiences of, responsibilities for, and interests in the environment, but these differences are rooted in the social interpretation of biological and social constructs of gender, which vary by culture, class, race, and place and are subject to change both at the individual level and the social level. They introduce feminist political ecology, which connects some of the ideas of feminist cultural ecology and political ecology with those of feminist geography and feminist political economy. Gender in feminist political ecology is a critical variable in shaping resource access and control, interacting with a variety of other social factors. The authors use analysis of case studies to create what they call a “common perspective,” and state at the end of their article that feminist political ecology looks at the convergence of gender, science, and environment in both academic and political discussions and also in everyday life and in social movements. Much of their common perspective focuses on the multiple roles of women as producers, reproducers, and consumers, as well as their roles as caregivers at multiple levels in their communities and their clashes with specialized sciences that focus on a single domain. Based on the work done by Rocheleau et al, anthropologists should not hesitate to include feminist perspectives in analyzing relationships between cultures and the environments they live in. It would be helpful if the authors would elaborate on the case studies they analyzed.
3. The Benefits of the Commons
Berkes, D. Feeny, B. J. McCay, J. M. Acheson argue in their article The Benefits of the Commons that Hardin’s model of the “tragedy of the commons” is incorrect. They believe that success in managing common property can be achieved in ways other than privatization or government control, citing research carried out in the years since Hardin created his model. They also use their own case studies to defend the idea that communities dependent on common-property resources have used a variety of institutional arrangements to manage their resources with a range of success in achieving sustainable use, with ecological sustainability being used as an index of management success. Berkes et al describe the two characteristics common-property resources have, creating a definition of common-property resources that states it is a class of resources for which exclusion is difficult and joint use involves subtractability. Their second step of analysis involved creating a taxonomy of property-rights regimes, defining open access, private property, communal property, and state property. Case studies of hunting, fishing, and forest resource management are discussed, with an emphasis on the competency of locals to regulate and manage their resources and, in the case of the Thai forest, the incompetency of government to regulate common-property. Berkes et al discuss the limits of Hardin’s model and how to improve it, acknowledging the ability of users to self-regulate use of the common-property. The authors need to clarify at the beginning what they mean by environmental sustainability as that term can have many meanings.
4. So Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?
Sherry B. Ortner’s So Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture? functions as a review and visitation of a previous paper. Ortner’s work explores the origins of male dominance and how gender relations affect how we interpret and interact with our environment. We still have cultures with gender-segregated rituals and some that can be seen as egalitarian cultures. The research looks at the gender disparities and if one gender is more closely associated with nature or culture. The author cites contemporary studies of gender in specific cultures and studies exploring the emergence of male dominance and how genders are associated with different aspects of human life. Readers would be interested in her argument regarding the gender dichotomy and its influence on how humans relate to the environment as well as to find the potential sources of the gendered power dynamics and advantages/disadvantages and that relates to the nature-culture debate. The implication is the gendered difference in human-environment relations, and as a result cultures should look at how gender is interpreted and related to the environment as that can determine power structures. Ortner declares that the body is the nature-culture border that gender is situated upon, a statement I believe lends itself to further examination. Ortner reviewed her work and the findings of others in an objective manner, reevaluating information and hypotheses, and finding methods she used that she no longer supports- such as “seizing upon any indicator of male superiority” to label an entire culture as male dominant.
5. Chronically Unstable Bodies
Aparecida Vilaça’s article Chronically Unstable Bodies: Reflections on Amazon Corporality addresses the idea that humanity is a concept that will be continually defined, and the form the body takes relies on perception. Vilaça uses a case study of the Wari’ people living in Brazilian Amazonia near the Bolivian boarder and discussed their concepts of kwere-, or the body, and jam-, which is defined as soul but can also mean the capacity to jamu, or transform. According to Vilaça, various Wari’ myths “suggest the soul is not a fixed ontological attribute, but a capacity linked to specific relational contexts.” She describes the story of the baskets women used to weave being able to walk, but when one woman saw them she found their bouncing along the path comical and laughed, offending the baskets and causing them to refuse to ever walk on their own again. Her main finding is that everything exists as a perspective for the Wari’, and physical form and appearance depends primarily on the perspective of whomever is looking, and she believes that the fact that nothing is concrete and that everything is a perspective helps to explain the “general lack of interest in the origin of body substances shown by indigenous Amazonians.” Vilaça’s article was well written and clear, though it does take a couple readings to fully comprehend her terminology. Her discussion of the transformation of the corporeal encourages reevaluating how humans define themselves not only on their own but also in relation to their environment.
6. A Cyborg Manifesto
Donna Haraway writes in her article A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century that “social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction.” Her primary focus is on humanity turning into cyborgs, beings that combine animal and technology, existing in both a natural and inorganic world. She brings into her argument the idea of cyborgs in modern medicine without giving examples, instead moving into the idea of the cyborg being “a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality,” a singular compilation of imagination and material reality. Haraway’s article focuses on the potentials and possibilities of cyborgs, claiming them a connection between nature and culture, though her main argument is to see from multiple perspectives about the nature of a cyborg world, as a “single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters.” Haraway presents a discussion of the perceptions of the body and its relationship to the nature-culture divide. Though her end argument is valid, situations should not be viewed from a single vantage point, her overall style and choice of examples create a flow that is disorienting for the reader. It is clear that she is attempting to put into practice her idea of non-restrictive thinking through her style, but it is difficult to read. Haraway will make a point, then bring in an example that surprises the reader- from the new status of bestiality in a cyborg world to the potential for cyborgs to avert the nuclear apocalypse.
7. Seven Billion and Counting
David Bloom’s 7 Billion and Counting addresses the issue of population growth- mainly through giving statistics of different nations population sizes and growth (both current and predicted). He informs readers of the countries that currently hold the top two positions for largest population (China with 1.35 billion people, India with 1.24 billion). He goes on to discuss the UN Population Division discussing population growth and stating that less developed regions have been experiencing higher population growth than more developed regions for a long time. According to Bloom, nearly 97% of the 2.3 billion increase in population projected to occur by 2050 will take place in the less developed regions of the world. The most economically fragile countries will bear the brunt of the population growth, while Europe’s growth will remain flat. Bloom continues to give statistics of population growth, including the density of regions- Asia has a population density of 132 people per km2, which is higher than that of Africa, Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean. Overall, Bloom gives a number of useful facts for population growth, including predicted areas of heavy growth and data on urbanization, but the information is presented with little to no interpretation. He does not present an argument, just raw data for the reader to digest and analyze on their own. Bloom does not present an opinion, but instead disseminates the information regarding the amount of space humanity will occupy in the future and where the least amount of space available per body will be.
8. The Bhopal Disaster and Corporate Culture
Bhopal: Vulnerability, Routinization, and the Chronic Disaster written by S. Ravi Rajan provides readers with the story of Bhopal, India and the chemical disaster that destroyed the community. A gas leak from a factory owned by the Union Carbide Company killed thousands, and caused cancer in survivors. A company background is provided, including their decision to open a plant in Bhopal in 1969, and the regulations they failed to follow (namely putting the MIC unit next to a densely populated neighborhood and heavily used railway station, as well as neglecting to put in appropriate safety features and creating a management culture that did not pay attention to safety, both factors resulting in between half and two-thirds of the engineers hired when the plant was commissioned resigning and being replaced by those less skilled and under-qualified). After the leak, Union Carbide managed to leave Bhopal ruined but the shareholders better off- the company was restructured and a settlement was made with the Indian government that was not enough to handle the victims’ medical costs. Rajan presents an account looking less at the events taking place in Bhopal after the spill, but more at how Union Carbide responded, or rather did not respond, to the emergency. He did discuss advocacy for victims, and the idea of corporate cultures existing and the study of them so they may be held accountable for their actions. Rajan addresses the issue of organization and the body, and the culture surrounding new structures of interaction and responsibility.
9. The Body, the Chemical-Lawn, and the Search for Social Acceptance
The Lawn-Chemical Economy and Its Discontents, written by Paul Robbins and Julie Sharp, is an analysis of the use of chemicals in maintaining “healthy” lawns. The authors discuss the green-washing of chemical companies, such as changing their names from things like Spraytech and Chemlawn to the more eco-friendly sounding Greenspace Services, as well as the expanse of the chemical-lawn monoculture. The chemical-lawn monoculture contains aesthetics such as a grassy pastoral area, utilizing non-native species in areas where native species could thrive. The maintenance of a chemical-lawn monoculture is high-input, forcing homeowners to remove weeds and spray the land with chemicals that research has shown to be commonly tracked in homes, are persistent in indoor environments, accumulate in dust on surfaces and carpets, lead to persistent contamination on clothing, and may be more dangerous to children than initially assumed due to chronic exposure. The authors also discuss to a large extent the social context of the chemical-lawn, presenting information on how a lawn is interpreted in the neighborhood (“representing a public statement about private behavior” as they put it), demonstrating class values in middle-class neighborhoods through property values. According to Robbins and Sharp, local enforcement is not the only director of high-input ecologies; chemical industries also shape the ecology. The authors also discuss alternatives to the chemical-lawn and resistance movements against the high-input lawn as well. The authors present through citations of scholarly research a background on individuals searching for status in property through chemicals and the damage chemical companies do.
10. Ethics Primer
Richard J. McNeil’s Ethics Primer for University Students Intending to Become Natural Resource Managers and Administrators presents for the reader a basic rundown of what ethics is, a brief description of a few ethical theories including consequentialism (with its subtype utilitarianism), rule-based theories, rights-based theories, intuitionism, and virtue ethics, as well as providing sample ethical concepts and moral dilemmas for the reader to familiarize themselves with. McNeil provides clear definitions and examples for the concepts, and covers not only theory but the idea of moral considerability, the idea of a moral agent (one who has the capacity to make decisions regarding the morality of their proposed actions and to act upon those decisions), a moral subject, a moral community, and moral extensionism (or the idea of expanding rights to beings outside of the human species). In addition to summarization of ethical concepts, McNeil also provides summary points for readers, emphasizing that there is no uniform system of ethics that all philosophers subscribe to and that different standpoints and conclusions are possible. He provides at the end three points of advice on how to consider ethical questions, namely that one can always gain deeper understanding of ethics and develop more skills, personal work and occasional discussion with trained philosophers can increase understanding, and we must have humility and patience in order to have meaningful discussions. Ethical concepts can help us evaluate our distinctions between human and non-human, nature and culture, and how the physical form of beings can influence moral decisions.
11. Nature of Gender
Andrea Nightingale’s The Nature of Gender: Work, Gender and Environment discusses historical feminist perspectives on gender as it relates to the environment. Nightingale asserts that her goal is to explore the production of social inequalities and environments by examining how and when gender and other forms of differences became involved in environmental issues. She states that three key strands are discernable in existing work on gender and the environment. There is an essentialist conceptualization of gender and environment, which the author disagrees with. It states that women inherently better understand the importance of environmental protection, and one of its biggest flaws is that it assumes that all women have the same sympathies and understanding of environmental change. There is also a materialist conception, which argued that the relationship between women and their motivation to protect the environment was based on their material realities. Agarwal was a significant writer on this conception, arguing for a clear focus on gender, and defining ecological feminisms as the differences between men’s and women’s experiences and knowledge in relationship to their environment. The third key strand is feminist political ecology, which itself has three key themes, including gendered knowledge (ways in which access to scientific and ecological knowledge is structured by gender), gendered environmental rights and responsibilities, and gendered politics and grass roots activism. Gender of the body is an important identity to look at when discussing the relationship with the environment- and Nightingale emphasizes that gender is a process by which subjectivities are produced and shift spatiotemporally.
12. The World is So Queer
In Alex Carr Johnson addresses heteronormativity in nature writing in his article How to Queer Ecology: One Goose at a Time. Organized into steps, Johnson’s article provides a guide for re-conceptualizing nature, particularly addressing the nature-as-purity mythos, as well as the dichotomy of seeing nature as ideal, pure, and holy, but also evil, dangerous and dirty. The data that Johnson extrapolates his argument from comes from not just personal experience as a queer man, but also from the nature writing of others. He is looking for a discussion- bringing up and challenging the idea that monogamous heterosexuality is the norm. For Johnson, queering ecology is the study of dynamics across all phenomena, all behavior, and all possibility. He decided to change his conceptualization of nature after reading an essay insisting that the ideal human qualities can be found in heterosexual, monogamous wild geese. Johnson provides examples of non-heteronormative animals, stating that assuming geese (and by extension the rest of the non-human world) are straight is easy, but limiting. Queering ecology enables humans to imagine an infinite number of possible natures, and he insists we use the more-than-human world as an indication of the diversity and capacity of all life. The “body” in his work is perceived in terms of monogamous heteronormativity, a perception Johnson desperately wishes to change. He wants the body, human and beyond, to be seen as a multitude of possibilities, complexities, and paradoxical ironies- he wants people to see the world for the queer place it is.
13.Race and the EPA
But I Know It’s True, written by Melissa Checker, explores the racial biases in seemingly objective environmental science. Framed around the story of Hyde Park, an area in Augusta, Georgia surrounded by factories, a power plant, and located on a flood plain where Checker volunteered in a community organization full-time. It is a historically African-American area, with high levels of both poverty and chemical contamination. Though everyone in Hyde Park knew their land was contaminated, testing found high levels of certain toxins that were claimed to not be a significant threat. It is up to the individual running the tests to decide which health effect will be studied, as well as which chemical to test for. There is also an issue of scientists using a healthy white male as the standard no matter the situation. Many communities are also exposed to a number of chemicals, making it even harder to assess the result as the chemicals mix and the individual’s sensitivity and exposure to each varies. EPA protocols also do not include input from the community, which in the case of Hyde Park was a major oversight as researchers did not know that residents had been dumping imported soil over their old dirt to try and push down the toxins. Health officials were also reported to be hostile and disbelieving when community members sought help, and Checker suggests that stereotypes may be used by health officials when they do not know the community. Checker states that scientists are working on using a more holistic approach to environmental testing, working on getting community members involved.
14.Carrying Capacity
Carrying Capacity’s New Guise: Folk Models for Public Debate and Longitudinal Study of Environmental Changeby Lisa Cliggett addresses the faults in the carrying capacity model. Cliggett suggests we reframe carrying capacity as a folk model as it does not successfully capture the multifaceted process of the human-environment link, and it tends to blame the victim. Cliggett cites the Gwembe Tonga Research Project (GTRP), which is the longest and most systematic longitudinal studies in Africa, studying the displacement of villages that had to move approximately 100 miles downstream after the construction of the artificial Lake Kariba. Cliggett defines carrying capacity as the maximum number people that a given land area will maintain in perpetuity under a given system of usage without land degradation setting in. She also provided a list of some of the problems most often cited in literature on carrying capacity as well, including the assumption of equilibrium, difficulty in measuring food resources, inability to account for human preference in taste and labor expenditure, assumption of full use of food resources, assumption of homogeneity across the landscape, assumption of an isolated group/region, an ahistorical view of a process that fluctuates in short- and long-term time frames, and the concept not addressing the issue of the standard of living. The main concern with carrying capacity is that it generalizes a complexity of interactions that cannot be glossed over- and carrying capacity can rise through society and technology. Carrying capacity is difficult to measure as well especially as people have a variety of ways of coping with scarcity of resources.
15.Food for the Body
Bringing the Moral Economy back in . . . to the Study of 21st-Century Transnational Peasant Movements by Marc Edelman discusses national and international agriculture. According to Edelman, global networks of peasant and small farmer organizations link coalitions of national groups that operate across boarders. He provides a brief history of the formation of the transnational movement, citing the main drive for organizing as the 1980s world farm crisis that was set off by the liberalization of global agricultural trade. Farmers fought with giant corporations over intellectual property rights, and a transnational coalition called Via Campesina was formed. The coalition has a highly heterogeneous membership, and its political campaigns and demands focus on human rights, sustainable agriculture, agrarian reform, and biodiversity and genetic resources.
Edelman states that they want to take agriculture out of the World Trade Organization, as agricultural production is a means of livelihood and nourishment for peasants and small farmers, most of the world’s agricultural output is consumed domestically, and the World Health Organization is undemocratic and unaccountable, among other accusations. Among their other demands, there is the request for “just prices,” which Edelman defines as a transnational norm as opposed to a local norm, as well as “food sovereignty,” which they hope will replace “food security.” “Food security” refers to all people at all times have physical and economic access to adequate nutritious food, while “food sovereignty” prioritizes local production and peasant access to land, and upholds nation’s rights to implement supply management policies.
16.Agrarian Change
David Grigg provided in his article Ester Boserup’s Theory of Agrarian Change: A Critical Review an analysis of Boserup’s argument. Boserup claimes that population pressure is a major cause of change in land use, agrarian technology, land tenure systems, and settlement forms. She states that any given area will go through a series of stages of rising land use intensity, with the general trend being that as total output increases, output per head decreases. Boserup believes that economic growth is possible within traditional agriculture, though there are some assumptions made. Grigg’s actual critiques come in when he is listing the assumptions associated with Boserup, though some of the critiques he has he admits are addressed in her later works. The assumptions made by Boserup are as follows: population growth is taken as a given, though it is independent of food supply. Grigg mentions the improved medicine being one reason population increased, while commenting that Boserup argues but does not explore in detail the possibility that population may decrease and cause a change from intensive to extensive agriculture. The theory is confined to pre-industrial societies and excludes farmers who fit certain criteria, farmers are interested first in obtaining enough food and second in maximizing leisure, farmers at any given point area assumed to be aware of a wider range of techniques than those they practice, and spatial variations in land use intensity are assumed to reflect only variations in population pressure. Finally, many peasants may be reluctant to adopt a more intensive system not just because annual labor inputs are higher but because the labor is needed to create capital requirements is excessive.
17. Ethnoecology
In A View from a Point: Ethnoecology as Situated Knowledge by Virginia Nazarea, Nazarea introduces the term “ethnological approach” as coined by Harold Conklin, which was an attempt at understanding local understanding. People were amazed at how indigenous people could know so much about nature. This sense of amazement went in two different directions- one, which was to demonstrate Western scientific ignorance about other peoples’ ways of existing, and to point out its arrogance in dismissing anything that is different as inferior, and the other was to cross-reference native systems of classification to Western science and to demonstrate how native systems virtually match with Western systems. The first direction places value on local knowledge by reference to its internal coherence, while the second attempts to demonstrate perceived universals in patterns of classification. Nazarea asserts that the debate between the two approaches is one of trying to get the correct answer or the absolutely true story for two sets of fundamentally different questions. She believes that humans operate on perceptual universals while being shaped cognitively and behaviorally by culture. For her, ethnoecology serves as the investigation of systems of perception, cognition, and the use of the natural environment, and “incorporating contiguity and process as critical components of an engaged ethnoecology” pushes us toward a more dynamic and flexible investigation that will “admit the importance of ideological negotiation and positioning” (103). What is important to remember is that we cannot share a single vision; our perceptions of both the world and ourselves shape our world.
18. Coal Mining Dangers
Robert Todd Perdue and Gregory Pavela wrote their article Addictive Economies and Coal Dependency Methods of Extraction and Socioeconomic Outcomes in West Virginia on coal extraction in the Appalachian region. In their research, the authors found that coal mining dependent counties have higher rates of poverty and unemployment than other counties. There are two different types of mines- underground and mountain top removal. Mountain top removal destroys scenic mountains and their ecosystems, though they are they less common mine. Underground mines do not come without their own troubles- they typically have a longer legacy of mining, meaning their resources have likely already depleted to minimal amounts. The authors urge people living in the Appalachian region to move away from coal dependency as the world is already transitioning into other sources of fuel. There is little money to be made from coal mining in those regions because coal extraction is a primary industry, meaning coal is pulled from the ground, cleaned, and shipped to another location. The jobs may be thought of as good for the miners financially, but they ignore the risks to their bodies. The health of the miners is of course a risk- black lung has replaced mining accidents for the top killer of mine workers. Coal dust does not just affect the miners though- coal is a pollutant and the burning of it or chipping of it can damage the lungs. Using coal for utilities is unattractive due to increased regulation and pollution control costs as well.
19. Death and Organ Transplant
In Margaret Lock’s Death in Technological Time: Locating the End of Meaningful Life, the question of when life ends is discussed through the lens of both North American (the stereotypical “Western” culture) and Japan. The author collected recent medical, philosophical, and media publications as her data. Lock discusses the reported cases of people who were pronounced dead by medical professionals and who later “came back to life,” which leads into her discussion of clarifying the concept of death and when exactly life ends. She covers briefly the history of medical advancements such as artificial respiration and organ transplant, and though her main concern is the point where we can determine a person has died, Lock presents a series of dichotomies in her paper. There is the division between Japan, which opposes organ transplantation in most cases and had declared brain death to not equal legal death, as well as that we cannot assign death to a measureable point in tie as it is a social process, and the North American region which is used to represent the “Western” point of view, a view that allows organ transplants and seeks to define a point of death, be it the death of the neocortex or the “whole brain” death. Lock also presents the division of culture and nature, insisting “culture has intruded into nature yet again in the guise of science.” This discussion is interesting because it introduces cultural differences in how death occurs, who declares death, whether it is an individual declaring death or a social consensus. The argument centers around the body and the perception of where a person’s “soul” or “center” is, which becomes a serious point of contention in cases of brain dead patients being used for organ donation.
20. Death in America
Elizabeth J. Emerick in her article Death and the Corpse: An Analysis of the Treatment of Death and Dead Bodies in Contemporary American Society provides not only an analysis of how American culture treats the concept of death and the actual dead body, but details regarding the appearance of the body as it dies and post-mortem. Through her research doing interviews and reading previous discussions on death and the human corpse, Emerick has found that medicine is for Americans a way to harness death- though through our increased medical knowledge, we also now know exactly what happens to a body throughout aging, dying, and decaying. Signs of aging are a constant reminder, and the signs that death is approaching and cannot be stopped cause a sense of anxiety and a loss of control. She goes on to discuss the idea that American’s have made dying more difficult now- declaring death used to be a simple matter of a lack of a pulse and not breathing, but now if one vital organ still functions, a person is not dead. Physically, after a person dies, the decomposition if they are not embalmed or entombed, starts after a few days and moves beyond the sensibilities of most people. Americans fear the corpse; the mortal remains of their departed loved ones- the body that cannot care for itself frightens us according to Emerick. Cadavers represent something else as well for Americans: the failure to stop death as a society. According to Emerick, our biggest fears are the unknown and the uncontrollable, both of which are manifested in death.
21. Consuming Pity
In Consuming Pity: The Production of Death Among the Cashinahua, an ethnography by Cecilia McCallum, the funerary practices of the Western Amazonia Cashinahua. The author uses not only interviews she conducted with the Cashinahua, but also cites academic papers books when discussing the perceptions of the body when alive and while dying. The article presents information about Melanesian people that could be cut down, and there are times when the author herself is unsure of the reasons behind behaviors and thus speculates. According to McCallum, the Cashinahua percieve death as a process brought about by human and cosmic agencies- with gender playing an important part in how the deceased moves into the afterlife and what their funerary practices will be. McCallum also discusses the difference between the eye soul (or the “true soul”) and the body soul. In moving into the afterlife, men’s’ true souls must confront hostile spirits and spirit monsters, ultimately reaching the heavens where they are “transformed into kin through the consumption of vegetable foods”, while women’s souls are taken to the heavens by their dead kin, and, like the men, they take an Inka (god) spouse (447). To ensure that the souls leave the village, the Cashinahua go through rituals, severing the ties between the soul and the physical world. One such ritual, no longer practiced, is endocannibalism, or the eating of one’s kin. It was restricted to certain subsets of the civilization, and it took place in two stages: the consumption of the flesh and the consumption of the bones, the first to ensure the body soul left and the second to ensure the eye soul left. Throughout the article, there is the idea of gender perceptions influencing the deaths and afterlives of Cashinahua people, and the idea of consuming the body to aid the release of the souls.
22. Cryogenics, Transhumanists, and the Russian Orthodox Church
In Anya Bernstein’s Freeze, die, come to life: The many paths to immortality in post-Soviet Russia, she presents the conflict between transhumanists and the Russian Orthodox Church. Post-Soviet Russia is experiencing a decline in secularism, which has lead the Orthodox Church to push against the transhumanist movement that seeks to use technology to achieve immortality. Bernstein conducted interviews with cryogenicists and Dmitry Itskov (head of the Avatar Project, which aims to one day forgo the need for physical bodies all together), translated Nikolai Federov (who had the ultimate goal of using technology to overcome death and resurrect the dead), Alexander Bogdanov (who believed blood transfusions were the way to immortality and would create a “physiological collectivism” where people’s corporeal properties would be shared), and interviews with other Russian transhumanists and Russian Orthodox Church members. Her research delves into not only the history of transhumanism, but also the philosophy behind separating the brain and the body, as many of the transhumanists believe that what makes a person who they are is their brain. Her article argues “the physical body is not all that there is to the human,” and the way to immortality is not divided only between science and church, but between cryogenics, artificial bodies, blood transfusions, and the resurrection of those long dead. The paths to immortality are all rooted in the body, and the arguments against these paths center themselves in the culture/nature debate- arguing that it is unnatural and against God’s plan to even attempt eternal life.
23. Whiteness of Sleep
Biomedicine, the whiteness of sleep, and the wages of spatiotemporal normativity in the United States, written by Matthew Wolf-Meyer, is an analysis of the use of white bodies as the medical (and to a certain extent, the social) standard. Wolf-Meyer conducted both ethnographic and archival research in the Mid-West on sleep clinics and people suffering from sleep disorders, and what he found was that “whiteness” is no longer about the body, but the potential of the body. When Wolf-Meyer speaks of whiteness, he means the body that is orderly, benign, and unexceptional. Sleep patterns around the world vary, but in the United States, there is a set pattern for sleep that everyone is expected to follow- namely eight hours of sleep all at once, as opposed to the eight hours of sleep with a period of wakefulness in between that we had prior to the Industrial Revolution. People with sleep disorders are characterized as having a non-normative sleep schedule, which can severely impact their lives. They must rearrange their disordered sleep schedules into the orderly one that the rest of society follows, and in Wolf-Meyer’s analysis of sleep aid and sleep disorder treatment advertisements, he found that often the white body is the representative of obtaining orderly sleep. Advertisements using predominately white women to sell their sleep aid product are combined with a system that uses a healthy white male as the default human, and notes that racially marked hereditary problems are exclusively the burden of the non-white body.
24. Barriers of the Body
Richard Wilk’s Bottled Water: The Pure Commodity in the Age of Branding discusses the idea of commodifying a free and abundant resource. Wilk’s argument was that though branding had turned water into a consumer good, it has not ended the moral debate about rights and inequality. Water is a popular symbol of the natural world, and when coupled with the image of mountains it presents a pristine image, but Wilk argues that in addition to creating an idea of luxury water, bottled water has become a metaphor for the conquest over nature. He also presents the idea of the house and the home as extensions of the body, and anything that crosses the boundary between the private house and the public world is potentially dangerous and impure. This metaphor is used to explain those that mistrust the government and public water treatment facilities because they are removed from the production of what is coming into their home and have to trust a faceless entity to not poison them. Bottled water is marketed not only as more pristine than tap water, but also as a distinction of wealth, age, and gender. There is little opportunity to visibly reject the privatized water industry- the only real ways are not buying the water and using a reusable water bottle, but according to Wilk, that can be ambiguous and impractical. Choosing between the public water systems and private water means making a choice of who to distrust the least, which Wilk feels will not lead to a satisfactory outcome.
25. Conflict and Natural Resources
Arturo Escobar writes in his Difference and Conflict in the Struggle Over Natural Resources that the dominant models of development are invading every part of our lives. The struggle over natural resources often pit rich against poor not only within boarders but across them, and the resulting struggles are often led by women. The struggle also produces a questioning of capitalism. Escobar brings in the term difference-in-equality, wherein we as humans need to consider how to achieve the goal of equality while respecting difference. He insists that new forms of cultural differences are continuously being created, despite globalization. The idea that conflicts over access to and control over resources is a key factor in global crises is brought up, though Escobar seems more concerned with “cultural distribution conflicts”- ones that arose from the relative power accorded to various cultures and cultural practices in a historical context.
Escobar proposes we focus more on political ecology- the study of ecological distribution conflicts. This would involve accepting that the value of nature cannot be assessed only in economic terms- market prices cannot reflect the political and ecological practices that define and redefine the value of natural resources. If production under unequal distribution contradicts ecological processes, it also contradicts the cultural processes that are the core of people’s relationships to the natural world. It is important to realize that there may not be distinct lines for everyone with regards to the separation of culture, self, and the environment, but that should not stop us from striving for economic, ecological, and cultural distribution equally.