Integrating Anthropology, Ecology, and Policy

Man, does this look relevant:

JOURNAL ARTICLE

Problem and Opportunity: Integrating Anthropology, Ecology, and Policy through Adaptive Experimentation in the Urban U.S. Southwest

David G. Casagrande, Diane Hope, Elizabeth Farley-Metzger, William Cook, Scott Yabiku and Charles Redman

Human Organization

 Vol. 66, No. 2 (Summer 2007), pp. 125-139 (15 pages)

Published By: Society for Applied Anthropology

https://www.jstor.org/stable/44127106

Abstract

Natural resource management agencies and governmental programs that fund research are increasingly calling for interdisciplinary research that integrates biological ecology and the social sciences in a way that can inform policy. One fundamental impediment to collaboration derives from the emphasis that biological scientists place on experimentation, which is generally not considered a viable option for anthropologists. We suggest that anthropologists could have additional influence on policy by collaborating with biological ecologists in manipulative experiments that include human subjects. Critical to this approach are the participation of research subjects in research planning and willingness on the part of social and biological scientists to rapidly adopt new hypotheses and control scenarios that may emerge from shifting political and ethical contexts—what we call "adaptive experimentation." We provide an example of an adaptive experiment being conducted at Arizona State University, which situates urban landscaping, water conservation, and human behavior within the context of problem definition in water management policy.

Hope for 2021

Anthropologists, like poets, are unacknowledged legislators of the world. Perhaps 2021 will change that, and permit the more healthy development of intelligent contributions on the part of anthropologists and poets toward achieving a more perfect union, and certainly a saner society. I see more than little reason to remain skeptical, but here’s hoping for the best.

Isaac Asimov on Climate Change

Guaranteed to be the best single ad that you will see for visualizing the extent and seriousness of climate change (aka global warming) and the planetary significance of the problem as it confronts us all as a species. As Asimov clearly articulates, a problem that affects a species necessitates a species-wide solution. This, if anything, and arguably more than anything, should unite the human species on this planet to work together in serious and concerted measure for the mitigation of the climate crisis.

Social Morality, Empathic Anthropology: A Critical Review (2015)

Works Reviewed

Joao Biehl, 2004. Life of the mind: The interface of psychopharmaceuticals, domestic economies, and social abandonment. American Ethnologist 31.4: 475-96

Peter Redfield, 2005. Doctors, Borders, and Life in Crisis. Cultural Anthropology 20.3: 328-61.

C. Jason Throop, 2008. On the Problem of Empathy: The Case of Yap, Federated States of Micronesia. Ethos 36.4: 402-26.

“For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.”

—Michel Foucault (1978)

This essay presents a critical review of socio-political formations of morality and an ethics of empathy—what might be understood as an empathic anthropology—as discussed in three ethnographic accounts, two of which explicitly address questions of bio-power, humanitarianism, and care (Biehl, “Life of the Mind” and Redfield, “Doctors, Borders, and Life in Crisis”), the other which focuses more on questions of empathy and social articulations and mediations of “shared feeling” and connections to a common or at least communally intelligible sense of self (Throop, “On the Problem of Empathy”).  The main common thread that links these accounts is the matter of human value and worth as an ethical subject, how morality and empathy are socially felt and figured, and how ethics is reinforced or reified according to socio-political exigencies and economic imperatives.

Bio-power, Bare Life, and Networks of Care and Exclusion

Medicine can be economically defined as the application of science to the treatment of disease.  Illness whether physical, psychological, neurological, whether somatic or social in origin, develops and manifests itself within structured networks of human-environmental interactions.  To study any illness is to take account of its ecology.  The study of illness necessitates a dynamic and ecological approach.  Epidemiology is as much a matter for sociological and ethnographic analysis as it is for any other paradigm, particularly where human subjects—psychological, social, and moral personalities—are concerned.  This is the perspective adopted by Joao Biehl in his (2004) account of the infirmary at Vita and specifically in the case of Catarina.  Biehl’s ethnography can be understood as “thick description” in many senses of the term.  It is in any case a detailed and sensitive work of sociological analysis.  It is neither economical nor to the purpose of this essay to examine Biehl’s account in comprehensive detail.  What is the primary point of concern here is the extent to which Biehl’s use of the concepts bio-power, bare life, morality and ethics, empathy and care cast light on the larger anthropological question of subjectivity and the social morality of the self at the intersection of the empathic “other.”

Biehl’s account places high premium on the embedded nature of subjectivity and the structured networks of power that mediate social experience and political placement and definition of medical patients in treatment scenarios.  Such “treatment” as he observes in places like Vita, however, leaves much to be desired.  His stated interest in this study is “in the place of psychopharmaceuticals in local ecologies of care and in the ways they affect changes in human values and subjectivity” (476).

Psychopharmaceuticals present for Biehl many problems, not the least of which being that their deployment leads all too often to negligence, mismanagement and malpractice.  Because Catarina’s condition for so long goes unrecognized and improperly diagnosed—and therefore all but entirely untreated, and indeed if anything exacerbated—Biehl sees her outcome (“destiny” is the word he most often employs in this connection) as not only a medical failure but a “social death.”  Catarina suffers abandonment in the worst way a human can—abandonment by her family, by her community, by the medical doctors and establishment such as it was, and ultimately by the entire political economy and society that fails to provide the infrastructure and appropriate channels for the proper diagnosis of illness and the administration of care.

Administration, in Biehl’s account, is figured as a term of opprobrium.  The reduction of medical service to yet another crisis management scenario—a perpetual “triage” situation that can itself be factored as the manifestation of a social apparatus reduced to “bare life”—is in Biehl’s assessment yet another case of a neoliberalist reduction of human needs to impersonal and depersonalized “containments” at the basest clinical level.  Pharmaceuticals, even the wrong pharmaceuticals, are applied and patients are pushed off to families or otherwise medically untrained and ill-equipped to provide the necessary care.

Places like Vita are in Biehl’s account themselves symptomatic of larger social, economic, and moral degradation.  People like Catarina are rendered “ex-human” and treated accordingly by a system that has itself been stripped of its humanity and value for the dignity and care of the human person.  The problem, in short, is social and systemic.  Biehl writes:

Seen in this light, Vita is a social symptom, not a solution.  It is an outcome of recent political and economic readjustments that have driven large segments of the population further into poverty and despair.  This harshness is amplified by a malfunctioning universal health care system—a supposed democratic gain of the late 1980s—and complicated by new pharmaceutical possibilities.  … The destinies of the useless, so to speak, are determined by a whole new array of networks, and as formal institutions either vanish or become nonfunctional and as government becomes increasingly remote from the citizenry, the household is further politicized. (Biehl 2004:484)

The household, one might add, is further rendered socially dysfunctional, as the case of Catarina makes clear.

Biehl expands on the point of personal devaluation and social abandonment in such a neoliberal economy:

That so many are regarded as socially and morally superfluous testifies to the further dissolution of the country’s moral fabric.  The Brazilian middle class, for instance, has historically acted as a buffer between the elite and the most vulnerable, as both guardian of morality and advocate of progressive politics.  In the wake of the country’s democratization and fast-paced neoliberalization, however, this vein of moral sensitivity and political responsibility has been largely replaced by sheer contempt, sociophobia, or sporadic acts of charity like the ones that sustain Vita. (484)

Thus, in the final analysis, the problem of Vita is the problem of a disintegrated society, a society in which the very concept of the social has been rendered meaningless outside of a narrowly circumscribed sphere of those considered to be worthy members of social life.  The “human” is here valued to the extent that one can be factored and figured to be an economically productive member and not pose too much of an inconvenience to others as a result of illness or disability, whether that problem arises for genetic reasons or just a matter of bad environment situated within an even larger structural network of broken life and diseased relationships. The problem of Vita, as in the case of Catarina is a problem of abandonment at every level of social and economic life.  Abandonment is at once seen to be symptom and cause of the larger and more pervasive disease of social dissolution in the wake of an increasingly fractured world.

The question of “care” in this configuration is a matter for morality, which is in Biehl’s account a matter for little optimism or hope at any level.  Catarina’s condition is the condition of a “humankind” that is little in the way of “human” and even less in the way of “kind.”  Biehl’s diagnosis is not encouraging.  At least he sheds some light on the systematic scale and magnitude of the problem.  This one can only conclude is better, perhaps, than nothing.  Bio-power and bare life are in Biehl’s account simply the way the world…at least the way of the world in the place called Vita.

Bare Life and Crisis Management

In the case of Doctors without Borders, humanitarian action and care become figured as the application of the techniques of crisis management in matters of medical urgency.  The politics and practice of Doctors without Borders (DWB) speak to a genuine human concern but without the commitment of long-term (medical or political) investment beyond addressing the basic, “bare life” concerns of the crisis situation.  In Redfield’s account (2005), humanitarianism is treated not as an “absolute value” but is instead understood as “an array of particular embodied, situated practices emanating from the humanitarian desire to alleviate the suffering of others” (330).

DWB for Redfield can be understood as morally invested in the health and human dignity of the peoples served through their intervention, but ultimately uncommitted or not adequately committed to an amelioration of the large scale humanitarian needs, which amounts for Redfield in many ways to a maintenance of a perpetual state of crisis and crisis intervention.  Redfield praises their humanitarian work but criticizes DWB for what he regards as a politics and philosophy of short-term interventionist solutions and a lack of an “overriding conceptual strategy of development or a political ideal” (338).  To put it another way, DWB is too limited to efforts to address “bare life” and human concerns at the level of “zoology” (Agamben’s zoe over bios).  The model of the “camp” illustrates this problem in Redfield’s account:

The camp arranges itself around an effective rationale of immediate concerns localized within biological necessity.  There are bodies to cleanse, to shelter and protect from hunger and disease.  There are children to weigh, inoculate, and categorize by the circumference of their upper arms. … Life itself is exposed beneath the language of rights invoked to defend it and the protest against conditions that produced the camp in the first place.  In this setting, human zoology exceeds biography: those whose dignity and citizenship is most in question find their crucial measurements taken in calories rather than in their ability to voice individual opinions or perform acts of civic virtue.  The species body, individually varied but fundamentally interchangeable, grows visible and becomes the focus of attention. (Redfield 2005:342)

Redfield further comments on an “ethic of refusal” on the part of DWB: refusal, that is, to commit to long-term political investment in the application of medical and humanitarian care.  DWB “operates as a technical agency, alongside other NGOs, to administer a substitute for medical government amid what it identifies as a political failure.”  “Yet,” Redfield continues, “this action rests squarely on a central, categorical paradox: the more successful MSF [DWB] is at protecting existence in the name of a politics of rights and dignity, the more this temporary response threatens to become the norm.”  DWB, that is, “remains attached to the language of urgency” and it is this attachment to the language of urgency that, in Redfield’s view, prevents its organization from more serious and long-term political investments. The language of urgency establishes a particular ethos of care and treatment: “An established oppositional ethos takes shape within a definitional claim to humanitarian ethics.  Therefore, in the face of continuing disaster, MSF responds with a defense of life that both recognizes and refuses politics” (Redfield 2005:343).  All this is another way of saying, as Redfield claims on the following page, that DWB advances a “minimalist biopolitics” (344).

DWB, in Redfield’s critique, despite its best efforts and intentions, maintains and operates within a business of bare life management.  Thus, Redfield concludes, “the problem before us is not crisis per se but the very codification of crisis into a state, a condition of action, and the subsequent limiting of emergency to within these borders” (347).

Empathic Acts and Moral Performance

Throop’s (2008) analysis of the cultural and phenomenological mediations and conditions for the emergence of “empathetic acts” and what he describes as “empathetic attunements” bears much relevance on the foregoing and is especially applicable to the larger question of the ways in which ethical subjects become constituted cross-culturally.

It is a recognized truth in the science of ethics (morality) and philosophical anthropology that a precondition for ethical treatment is recognition of the other a priori as a valuable moral agent.  Such recognition is rooted in a common humanity and a sense of the value of the life of another.  Ethics is rendered impossible without the recognition of the value of the other.  Throop makes this point in his article in various ways.

Ethical recognition among the Yap of Micronesia arises from a bodily engagement with the world, cultural and otherwise, and a cultivated empathic awareness (the “empathetic attunement”) as a result of “ongoing acts” of one’s “embodied stream of awareness” (Throop 2008:404).  This emergence of empathetic awareness and attunement not only brings into being a recognition of ethical value but provides and enforces the conditions for any practice of care within the society.  To recognize the other as an ethical subject who is worthy of moral treatment not only implies but in a very real sense necessitates care as a matter of course.  The very notion of “care” is inconceivable outside of an awareness of the other as an ethical being and moral subject—in other words, as a human equal at least in the sense of equal potential for the development of health in all senses.

To see another as ethically important is to see that other as valuable and entitled to good treatment as one would expect in a social order of shared values and responsibility.  One is responsible for another because one is a moral agent and recognizes the other as a moral agent.  This is at the most basic and vital level the theoretical beginnings for any engaged sociality, which is a precondition for care of any kind.

Throop’s account of empathetic awareness and practices among the Yap brings to the fore the recognition that empathy does not emerge necessarily and in all situations with equal force or assurance.  Empathy, Throop explains, “is configured culturally” and it arises and is affirmed under particular conditions (406).  The contingent and configurational nature of empathy is an important anthropological reality and is central to any serious understanding of ethics and particularly as ethics informs conditions for care.

Trouillot and the 'Savage Slot': A Short Review (2015)

Trouillot (1991) identifies a crisis of epistemology and disciplinary legitimation in anthropology as a social science and academic discipline.  Such a crisis is by no means limited to anthropology, though in many ways it is most acutely located and pronounced in the epistemological domain assumed by its objects and methods of inquiry, or rather its putative ‘object’ of inquiry—namely, the savage ‘Other.’  This crisis of course is nothing other than the crisis of the postmodern condition, a condition of knowledge ruptures and “an ongoing collapse of metanarratives in a world where reason and reality have become fundamentally destabilized” (20).  Trouillot’s purpose here is to historicize anthropology and specifically with respect to the causes and conditions of its formation as an academic discipline.

According to Trouillot’s analysis, anthropology arose in response to ongoing colonization projects which began in force during the early modern period and continued into the 19th century and of course, in some corners of the world, on into the present day.  Anthropology developed its disciplinary scope and apparatus by exploring and cataloging the conditions of the ‘savage’ or ‘native’ other, the non-Western ‘other’ who became an object equally of fascination and revulsion according to various colonialist agendas.  This is Trouillot’s account—although of course it is not entirely accurate and does shortchange much of the good that anthropologists have done in the interest of preserving the cultures and languages and lifeways of the rapidly disappearing natives whether due to colonialist expansion projects or simply cultural disintegration or destabilization from, as it were, the ‘inside.’  Setting such concerns aside, Trouillot is quite reasonable to suggest that within the discipline of anthropology, there is great need to reexamine epistemological premises and methodological assumptions about the nature of the science and the ‘objects’ of study (and what points of significance and grounds for legitimation exist for carrying forward a research program, and one which would take anthropology into more productive purpose and beyond the ‘savage slot’).

Trouillot suggests a redirection of disciplinary focus both in terms of epistemology and in terms of semiology (that is to say, in knowledge systems and symbolic structures).  The postmodern crisis is in many ways at its core a crisis of the very nature of knowledge and the very nature of what it means to be human, and how the human has been conceived and constructed and deployed in various rhetorical contexts to myriad political purposes over the centuries—and indeed, from the very beginnings of all of human evolution.  Anthropologists will need to take this situation much more seriously and will need to reevaluate their position vis-à-vis systems of knowledge production and political networks of power, however situated in contemporary terms or constructed from an historical perspective.

Trouillot calls for a critical re-envisioning of the scientific, sociopolitical, and historical project that anthropology by definition and in every term of practice is (as “the most humanistic of sciences and most scientific of the humanities,” a characterization hopefully not altogether out of fashion to our postmodern ears).  This, in short, is what Trouillot means by conducting a critical reassessment, “an archaeology of the discipline” (17).  To this purpose, Trouillot implores anthropologists “to find better anchor for an anthropology of the present, an anthropology of the changing world and its irreducible histories” (40).

Much indeed has changed in the discipline and in the world since 1991.  The critique that Trouillot advanced, and a more carefully examined epistemological basis for anthropological work, is if anything more necessary now than ever.  Trouillot at least points the direction to possibly productive lines of inquiry towards this effort.

The crisis of legitimation remains.  What anthropology can hope to bring to the crisis will depend in large measure on how clearly it is able to understand its own position within that crisis, and how well it can articulate a reasonable solution, however limited by its approach and circumscribed by conditions of the times.  Anthropology should be well poised to address matters of history and matters of epistemology.  In a real and vital sense, these are the very bedrock issues in any human social science.

References

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1991. Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness. In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. Richard G. Fox. School of American Research Press.

Agamben, Hutchinson, Waquant: Human Valuation and Agency in a Neoliberal Economy

The readings from Agamben, Hutchinson, and Waquant address the matter of human value and the constitution of human agency, and its limits, within systems of sovereignty and structures of power.  All of this bears relevance to Graeber’s project concerning the cultural logic of debt and its links to violence and power.

For Agamben, the question of human value and political agency is factored in terms of the distinction between zoe and bios.  Agamben derives these terms from Aristotle (Politics) and draws on Foucault’s work on bio-power.  The key point that Agamben seems to be making is that human agency reduced to the level of “bare life” (as opposed to meaningful political participation) is what characterizes political systems, including modern democracies, that work to exercise power and control over the very conditions of human existence at every level of social and political life.  All politics becomes biopolitics, the politics of bare life (Agamben 1998:3).  Moreover, this “politicization of bare life as such,” Agamben argues, “constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical thought” (4).  Agamben advances the idea that “the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power” (6).  It is not difficult to see how these ideas inform the theoretical structure of Graeber’s debt analysis.

Hutchinson observes how “government structures everywhere are… dependent on the enforced ‘forgetting’ of the violence that inevitably upholds them” (69).  I am not sure to what extent such a claim can be applied in any absolute sense to all types and forms of government whether in Sudan or any other nation.  However, it is a pointed observation and very much connects with Graeber’s observations about how structures of power work to foster violence and naturalize assumptions about the proper role of debt in human relations and every level of social life.  Perhaps this could also apply to matters of bio-power and bare life.  I am not entirely sure about the connection, but perhaps it is one worth considering.

Waquant tries to connect the rise of a neoliberal economy with a specific cultural logic (much as in Graeber’s account) that not only disregards but explicitly punishes and disempowers the poor and other marginal groups to a position of perpetual bare life under the administration of techniques of bio-power and economic control.  Her intellectual project in Punishing the Poor is, as she describes it, “intended as a contribution to the historical anthropology of the state and of the transnational transformations of the field of power in the age of ascending neoliberalism” (Wacquant 2009:xviii).  The cultural logic of a neoliberal economy supported by an unregulated penal state, in which poverty is the crime and it is the poor who are punished for being poor, is in Wacquant’s account at root the result of a kind of neo-Darwinian emphasis on competition that valorizes individual acquisition and personal responsibility while it pushes the burdens of the state essentially onto the backs and shoulders of the poor.

Debt in Wacquant’s critique is configured not so much as political punishment (though it is, de facto, that) as it is the abandonment of all sense of social responsibility.  It is on the basis of this critique that bare life is structured as an economically basic and politically enforced state of affairs.  Neoliberalism, Wacquant argues, “is constitutionally corrosive of democracy” (313).  Again, Graeber’s analysis applies in this connection, particularly on the link between debt and violence, and politics and power—the codification of a politics of bare life (in which almost all are mostly barely getting by) and the reduction of the human being to the animal body. Debt is business and business is booming.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

--. State of Exception. 2005. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Graeber, David. 2014. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing.

Hutchinson, Sharon Elaine. 1998. "Death, Memory and the Politics of Legitimation: Nuer Experiences of the Continuing Second Sudanese Civil War." In Richard Werbner, ed. Memory and the Podtcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power. London: Zed Books, pp. 58-70.

Wacquant, Loïc. 2009. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham: Duke University Press.

Graeber 'Debt' analysis II (Greiner 2015)

A key part of Graeber’s analysis of debt is the extent to which violence has been linked to debt and effectively encoded at the most basic level of organizational logic that structures and defines the way in which humans live and have lived for most of human history (the past 5,000 years).  Debt is linked to violence due to structural forms of unequal relationships between otherwise at least potentially equal human beings.  Violence works by the exercise of power by one person over another, and it is through networks of exchange, based on structured inequality, that power is formed and violence in turn forced and enforced.  This “legacy of violence,” as Graeber terms it, “has twisted everything around us.”  Violence—epistemic and social violence—due to the logic of debt, as expressed socially in terms of the “language of the business deal” and the culture of calculation, has corroded sociality at every level of human experience.  This violence is pervasive and has in many ways been rendered largely invisible.  The cultural logic of debt and the forms of social violence that enforce it have become normalized and go for the most part unnoticed and unquestioned.  This legacy of violence has come to define social existence in a fundamental way.  Every institution has been affected by and largely organized and defined by the logic of debt and the legacy of violence that supports and is in turn supported by it.  This is central to Graeber’s argument and illustrated in all of his examples.  Graeber writes:

It’s not just that war, conquest, and slavery played such a central role in converting human economies into market ones; there is literally no institution in our society that has not been to some degree affected.  The story told at the end of Chapter Seven, of how even our conceptions of “freedom” itself came to be transformed, through the Roman institution of slavery, from the ability to make friends, to enter into moral relations with others, into incoherent dreams of absolute power, is only perhaps the most dramatic instance—and most insidious, because it leaves it very hard to imagine what meaningful human freedom would even be like. (Graeber 2014:385-86)

This passage may be profitably compared with the following remarks about how slavery works by abstracting people from their social networks and relationships with others—all the organizing factors that define social existence and personal identity for any person as a moral being worthy of rights and respect.   Slavery is in Graeber’s account a process of extracting individuals from meaningful networks of social identity—one term he uses in this connection is human economies (which is in turn contrasted with the marketplace economies that operate according to the logic of calculation and business deal language).  Slavery in whatever form it takes is for Graeber social disempowerment, and it can be understood as “that process that dislodges people from the webs of mutual commitment, shared history, and collective responsibility that make them what they are, so as to make them exchangeable—that is, to make it possible to make them subject to the logic of debt.”  “Slavery,” Graeber continues, “is just the logical end-point, the most extreme form of such disentanglement” (163).  Slavery converts free human beings into indentured servants.  It does this through a structured economy enforced through violence and maintained through war.  Graeber says this is “a practice as old as civilization,” and it is a hard claim to refute.  Yet it is a practice as old as a certain model of civilization, one that has unfortunately come to define human civilizations over such a long and pervasive span of time that one can be excused for thinking that this is the way that humans simply are and that there is no hope for any other possible economic system or sociocultural way of life.  Graeber as an anthropologist, however, knows as well as anyone that this is not the way that all human societies have ordered their existence or structured their affairs.

It is not human nature but rather the perpetuation of certain models of human behavior and certain codes of language and law and institutional enforcement over time that has placed debt and slavery as the seemingly normal and natural definition for what is sadly and not without irony called “the human condition.”  If debt is the perversion of a promise and if slavery is the abstraction of a human being from meaningful networks of exchange, then it certainly stands to reason that these are conditions that can change.  Civilization can in every sense of the word always advance and evolve.  The next 5,000 years need not come to affirm the legacy of violence that has characterized human life on the planet from bad mistakes in the past.  Debt need not be destiny.  And slavery should not in any society or meaningful human culture come to be seen by any thinking person as simply the way that things are.