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8/13/2019 Dissolving Nature and Culture- Indigenous Perspectivism in Political Ecology
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Dissolving Nature and Culture:
Indigenous Perspectivism in Political Ecology
Johannes MorrowPhD Student, University at Albany
Abstract:Environmental movements have encountered significant dilemmas in advancing theirclaims for sustainability and protection of the nonhuman world. Environmentalism hastypically articulated its claims in a conceptual language incorporating the antinomy ofnature and culture. These concepts have created practical problems and conceptual paradoxes which have led to a strategic impasse. Diverse attempts have thus far failed tomove beyond impasse because they inadequately unravelled the antinomy of nature andculture. The task engaged in here is not to privilege nature over culture, or to privilegeculture by observing the socially constructed character of nature, or to examine the innerdialectical relations that connect them; nor is it to explore genealogical the deepersignificance of the antinomy itself. Rather, this essay argues for stepping outside of thisconceptual language into a different cosmology. This task is accomplished through anexamination 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 rootof the problems of nature, culture and environmentalism are ambiguities and paradoxeshaving 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.
This paper was originally presented for fulfilling the requirements of RPOS 696, Spring2009 at the University at Albany. An earlier version was presented at the WesternPolitical Science Association Conference, 2009. This will also become of my dissertation.Comments are welcome, please cite with permission.
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Dissolving Nature and Culture:
Indigenous Perspectivism in Political Ecology
You whites possess the power of subduing almost every animal to your use. You are
surrounded by slaves. Every thing about you is in chains and you are slaves yourselves. I fear if I should exchange my pursuits for yours, I too should become a slave.
-Big Soldier (in Vine Deloria 1999)
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 1 (Chaloupka 2000,
2007). Bruno Latour (2004), an anthropologist and philosopher of science at Institut
d'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 Lease
1995). 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
1 I use environmental political theory and political ecology as interchangeable terms.
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of criticism was the relations of authority these concepts establish among humans and
between humans and nonhumans.
Part of the problem is that the strategy of appealing to Nature as a normative ruleagainst which society can be judged is it has lost its originality, authenticity and
persuasiveness in contemporary political theory. Environmentalism, for example is only
the latest iteration of political theory to appeal to nature as a source of political authority.
Liberal political theory, for example, beginning with Hobbes and Locke, initiated a long
tradition of justifying favored constitutional orders based assertions about human nature
and what is natural . The varying conceptions of nature in this tradition were used to
enable political orders that were ostensibly free, yet specifically limited what was
politically possible. Or course, this limit has always been a moving target but the
transformative character of the practice has had little influence on the structure of that
rhetorical strategy. This has made many people suspicious of the “naturalness” of the
various presentations of “nature” and therefor its authenticity and persuasiveness has
been undermined. It is not my intention to map out the history of this rhetoric for it is
well documented elsewhere and its criticism is taken up by much of contemporary
political theory and philosophy. I am interested, however, in mapping some of the
different attempts to “solve” the epistemological and ontological problems associated
with “nature” and the dilemmas encountered in this effort. This is not in order to show
that this effort is impossible or futile but rather to suggest a different way of looking at
the problem.
This style of political argumentation and the corresponding conception of science
defined as an inquiry into the separate domain of Nature, (“uncontaminated” by the
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rouge influences of Society), is a defining feature of modernism (Latour 1993). It is this
feature of modernism that is specifically problematic for conceptualizing and
empowering political ecology. Latour (2004) argued that the deployment of Nature in
political ecology actually makes politics impotent and hostage to the laws of necessity,
rather then empowering them. Whereas environmental scientists hoped that authority of
Nature would empower them to influence political processes in novel ways, the logic of
the “appeal to nature” is inherently limiting and disempowering. It is a demonstration in
what is impossible, or conversely, also what is necessary and unavoidable. Therefore,
because of environmentalism‟s relationship to this tradition of theorizing, it is heldcaptive by what it takes to be its strongest asset: scientism. Scientism grants
environmentalism an objective nature to know and speak for, yet at the same time
confines it to an arrangement that has historically supported industrialism and capitalism
(Chaloupka 2007).
This relationship between scientism and capitalism has been elaborated by a number
of traditions. The critical theory of the Frankfort School extended Marx‟s concept of
commodity fetishism into a general critique of “bourgeois thought” and instrumental
reason that included modern science and its technological products (Vogel 1996). The
main gist of these arguments was that the products of science and industry heighten the
domination and alienation of humanity in the name of liberating it. Heidegger and his
followers were also staunch critics of the relationship between scientism and technocratic
capitalism. Both schools of thought were pessimistic about overcoming the combined
power of modern science and capitalism. However, they also both tended accept the false
self-understanding of science and an ontological dualism between nature and culture.
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These problems have continued to bedevil political philosophy and specifically
environmental theory. Thus Latour (2004) argued that political ecology could not be
properly conceptualized before the antinomies of Nature and Culture were dissolved and
redistributed.
If we are at all intrigued Latour's provocative stance, one might ask what that means
for environmental theory? If not Nature, then what kinds of categories are suitable for
political ecology? What the green activists might reasonably ask is what sort of positive
vision does the redistribution of Nature (and Culture) reveal? This is a question that
'critics of Nature' are sometimes hesitant to answer because the question seems to demanda universal and totalizing alternative. What is often denied in this case is a symmetrical
and all-encompassing alternative to Nature and Culture as analytic and normative
categories and a general distaste of universals. While I think it is sufficient that some
theorists offer only critique or imaginative provocations to this conceptual dilemma, the
stimulus for this paper is that there are alternative ways of thinking about the
relationships between humans and nonhumans, „nature‟ and „culture‟. It is possible to
find more suitable and useful non-dualist analytic and normative categories that could be
employed in political ecology. I propose that the conception of indigenous perspectivism
as developed by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2005) is an insightful and heuristic example
for thinking through the dualism of Nature and Culture and unsettling their capture of the
environmental imagination. All this could be suggestive for positive concepts for
political ecology.
In addition to Viveiros de Castro‟s presentation of perspectivism, what follows has
been influenced and inspired by a generation of indigenous intellectuals that have sought
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to explicate and legitimate indigenous cosmologies. First among this cohort is the late
Vine Deloria Jr. It also includes a long list of other contemporary indigenous intellectuals
both within and outside academia2. The belief that indigenous thought has important
things to say about political ecology (and philosophy more generally) is joined by
Wittgenstein‟s invocation that when we come across a dualism or an antimony we ought
to dissolve it. Although there has been extensive debate and confusion about exactly what
Wittgenstein meant with that insight, this paper approaches the dissolution of Nature and
Culture in a very specific way.
As mentioned already above in regards to the Frankford School and Heidegger, theconceptual and strategic problems of the environmental movement have been
characterized as crisis of modernism (Chaloupka 2007). The specific feature of
modernism that are of interest for political ecology is scientism and the social domination
related with it. Laying, often invisibly and unchallenged, under all this are the doctrines
of naturalism and objectivism. Here lies the unquestioned and unquestionable boundary
of “reasonable” and “rational” thought as well as of science and progress. To address that
problem of Nature and Culture in philosophy and in environmental politics I believe it is
necessary to cross this boundary.
Indigenous cosmologies of the Americas do not proceed from the precepts of Nature
and Culture. Instead they propose a multidimensional and transformational universe of
diverse subjects or persons that apprehend reality from distinct points of view. From the
indigenous cosmological point of view, multinaturalism replaces naturalism as an
ontological basis and perspectivism replaces objectivism as the epistemological and
2 A very incomplete list includes Leo Little Bear, Gregory Cajete, Elizabeth Lyn-Cook, Jack Forbes, LindaHogan, Taiaiake Alfred, Winona Daluke, Craig Womack, Robert Warrior, Nimachia Hernandez.
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normative stance. Together, perspectivism and multinaturalism support a protean and
negotiated order of political relations incorporating all beings. All boundaries from this
perspective are contingent and mediated, including those domains associated with „nature‟
and „culture‟.
Understanding indigenous cosmologies has been a difficult and problematic
enterprise (Smith 1999; Deloria 1996). The concepts of Nature and Culture in indigenous
contexts prevent adequate understandings of indigenous practices and their intellectual
contributions (Forbes 2001). A thorny multitude of anthropological problems having to
do with questions of understanding, interpretation, context, commensurably, translationand appropriation are involved in pursing a claim like this. Needless to say these are all
important problems and the subject of considerable controversy. This essay necessarily
takes an a stance on all these issues; comment will be limited, however, to the explicit
epistemological and ontological questions that are raised and form the main content of
this essay. One of the anthropological problems engages the tightly intertwined and
problematic intellectual projects of indigenous ethnology, nature/culture and political
ecology. Because of their intertwined condition, if we can better understand the
categories informing indigenous worldviews, then we will have made considerable
distance in redistributing the concepts of Nature and Culture. Thus if we get some idea of
what the redistribution of Nature and Culture looks like in a certain context, then we may
gain some insights for political ecology that might travel to other contexts.
As I hope to show, the concepts of perspectivism and multinaturalism are fully
reflexive and apply to themselves. Following from this, the characterization of
indigenous cosmologies and the suggestive insights for political ecology are but one
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contingent point of view developed for my specific purposes. It is by no means the only
or best way of looking at indigenous worldviews or the final or complete suggestions for
political ecology. If a little is learned about each and a few insights are garnered, then this
will have been a successful endeavor.
This essay begins by illustrating how the construction of nature and culture as
antinomies creates conceptual and practical problems for environmental politics. I argue
that these problems have created an impasse for environmental politics and political
ecology as practical political strategies, as well as conceptualizations and arguments
about environmental theory and advocacy. Next I survey various efforts to resolve thenature/culture problem. Within environmental studies the culture/nature problem has been
addressed primarily in two ways: The first strategy attempts to enfold culture within
nature, while the second strategy attempts to incorporate nature into culture. This, of
course, is a gross simplification and some the complexities are addressed and discussed. I
argue that both strategies have thus far failed because of conceptual reasons having to do
with the constitution of nature and culture. The work of Bruno Latour (1994; 2004) plays
an important role in coming to this conclusion and his work helps to set up my argument
about indigenous perspectivism. Next, Viveiros de Castro‟s conceptualization of
indigenous perspectivism is presented as a way of dissolving „nature‟ and „culture‟ and
redistributing their referents across a diverse field of subjects. This „redistribution‟ might
stimulate environmental political theorists to think more creatively and imaginatively
about their subject matter. Finally, I suggest that indigenous traditional ecological
knowledge and management are one practical and political application of indigenous
perspectivism to environmental policy.
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The Impasse Created by the Nature/Culture Problem
The traditional approach and dilemma for environmental theory is how to include
humans and 'culture' into the natural world in a just and sustainable manner. Or
conversely, others formulate the problem as how to properly include „nature‟ and
nonhumans into „culture‟ and the human world in a just and sustainable manner. With
both strategies the ideal is some kind of balance or harmony between the two apparently
distinct domains. In other words, the problem is how to bridge the „Great (ontological)
Divide‟ between Nature and Culture, between the nonhuman and the human. This
approach to environmental theory, I will argue, has led to an impasse.In the West, the ontological divide between humans and nonhumans has also meant a
hierarchical of valuation of „culture‟ over „nature‟ as well as the subjects and objects
associated with this divide such as humanity and animality, men and women, civilization
and savagery, animate and inanimate along with many other „dualisms‟. This has
contributed, at least in part, to the continuing domination and denigration of those
domains of life perceived to be on the „natural‟ or 'object' side of the dichotomy.3 While
the problem is recognized in the environmental literature as the need to affect some kind
of consilience between these two domains of life and their associated social spaces, there
is little agreement about how to go about this intervention or the criteria for its resolution
(Brown and Toadvine 2007; Biersach and Greenberg 2006; Wilson 1998; Dickens 1996;
Peet and Watts 1996; Vogel 1996; Cronon 1995; Oelschaeger 1991). But before this
3 It should be noted however that each of these dichotomies have a unique history and logic that do not allline up evenly on one side or the other. Populations and practices identified as unnatural, like gays andlesbians, have been the target of hierarchical valuation (Haraway 1988). The „unnatural‟ is another leg on
the axis of Nature and Culture.
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consilience can be affected and the impasse breached, the conceptualization of those
domains identified in the West as „nature‟ and „culture‟ must be reformulated.
The separation of culture from nature is a problem for environmental politics in two
very specific ways: one more theoretical and the other more practical, both of which have
led to an impasse. In the first case the separation of culture and nature creates difficulties
in making conceptually coherent arguments for the respect, preservation and protection of
animals, forests, and other features of the environmental landscape.4 When, for example,
deep ecology and other ecocentric environmental perspectives attempt to include the
„human animal‟ within the „natural‟ domain they lose the normative appeal of „nature‟ as
a balanced or homeostatic „system‟ in contrast to a cu ltural sphere gone astray. In other
words, when culture is enclosed within nature, nature becomes an endorsement of the
status quo, because the critical distinction dissolves. The construction of Nature and
Culture as antinomies needs to be addressed before these critical questions can be
answered.
Alternatively, assessing the worth of nonhuman life in terms of its cultural value to
humans seems to be at the source of the original problem: that is, central to the processes
that have led to environmental destruction in the first place. For example, anthropocentric
arguments in favor of assessing an „appropriate‟ social utility to the „costs‟ of „natural
resources‟ can only, under ideal circumstances, protect what is currently valued by a
market regime. The utilitarian approach can never attribute an intrinsic value to anything.
4 The identification of conceptual problems in argument does not automatically mean weakness in politicalaction. It does however, at the very least, point to potential vulnerabilities. The stronger claim, which I amalso making, is that many environmentalists misunderstand the fundamental character of the problem theyseek to redress.
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The assimilation of nature to culture, understood in this way, seems no more adequate to
addressing the culture/nature problem.
The „practical‟ aspect of the problem is the issue of environmental justice. This
problem is encountered when certain „natures‟ are privileged over certain people or
„cultures‟. Ecocentric environmental organizations are often perceived as privileging the
protection of certain animal species and habitats against the survival and welfare of
humans and their problems of poverty and injustice. Ecocentric approaches to
environmental policy unfortunately, tend to ignore the pressing needs of low-income
communities (people of color, the Global South) and view their problems as notsufficiently „environmental‟ to warrant their concern. As an example of this, Giovanna Di
Chiro (1995) relates a story about local residents in south central Los Angeles who were
fighting to stop plans to build a solid waste incinerator in their community which would
pollute the surrounding air and water. When community activists asked the Sierra Club
and the Environmental Defense Fund for assistance, these environmental organizations
told them that their problem was a “community health issue” and not an “environmental”
one. Rather than see poor communities as victims of environmental degradation,
ecocentric approaches often blame the victim as a cause or aggravating condition of these
problems. The specter of Third World „overpopulation‟ as the major threat to the global
environment is part of this way of thinking. William Chaloupka (2000) points out that a
strain of authoritarianism in the environmental movement often puts them in league with
conservatives who exploit these ecological arguments self-servingly to rationalize
inequality and injustice.
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In the context of human needs, it might appear that an anthropocentric or a human
centered approach would be better suited to the problems of environmental justice. But
this is hardly the case. The economic utility typical of anthropocentric approaches has
never been very helpful to these particular human communities: That is the vast majority
of people that live in material poverty and in the Global South. To the contrary, these
communities more often than not share the fate of their flora and fauna brethren. The
objectification of the „natural‟ world as exploitable natural resources has its corollary in
the treatment of human communities as labor resources or expendable obstacles to
„progress‟. The same logic of domination operates in both domains.
Attempts to Resolve the Nature/Culture Problem
Within the literature on environmental theory, those that aim to incorporate the
human and the cultural into a unified field of nature are most associated with a
„wilderness or nature tradition.‟ This tradition decidedly resolves the nature/culture
problem toward the pole of Nature. The second tradition is a diverse and eclectic corpus
incorporating post-Marxist, poststructuralist and postmodern engagements with
environmental studies. This tradition resolves the nature/culture problem toward the pole
of Culture. This is said with a fair degree of tentativeness, because theorists from these
perspectives often think they are accomplishing something different, like transcending
nature and culture via dialects, materialism or discourse. These two traditions correspond
to the two camps that most bitterly fought the „Nature Wars‟ of the nineteen nineties
where greens accused postmodernists of undermining the environmental movement by
claiming that “nature” was “socially constructed” (Chaloupka 2000). Within this body of
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work, those that failed to critically examine and unpack the mutual constitution of Nature
and Culture as antinomies were unable to provide an adequate theoretical basis for
political ecology. The argument will proceed by examining how nature was conceived
and the dilemmas confronted by these conceptions.
The Nature/Wilderness Tradition
Central to the project of resolving the nature/culture problem in the direction of
nature is the claim that Nature can in some way tell us the right ways to live and organize
the polity. Advocates of deep ecology often take up this claim. Deep ecology is amethodologically diverse grouping of ecological perspectives, claiming intellectual
heritage from thinkers as diverse as Spinoza, Heidegger, Henry David Thoreau, John
Muir, Aldo Leopold among many others (Oelschaeger 1991). Two main principles of
deep ecology are egalitarianism between humans and nonhuman and the belief that nature
is characterized by a fundamental harmony or balance. The modern environmental
movement in the United States originated in the transcendentalism of Henry David
Thoreau and John Muir. In deep ecology, the transcendental spiritual 'nature' of Thoreau,
mets the scientistic „objective‟ nature of ecology. Insofar as this was and is the case,
Nature or wilderness plays a spiritual role for the environmental movement that is not
easily reconciled with its tendencies toward scientism.
Aldo Leopold‟s concept of the Land Ethic in A Sand Country Almanac is one
expression of the uneasy relationship between the 'spiritual' and 'scientific' aspects of
environmentalism and the competing tendencies toward immanence and transcendence.
The Land Ethic was a profound criticism of industrial society and an attempt to bridge
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the gap between scientific concerns for a detached objectivity of ecological systems and
the ethical concerns about making normative judgments on what was right for the land
and for nonhumans. He concluded that, “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the
integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends
otherwise” (Leopold, cited in Oelschlaeger 1991: 238). Leopold used the metaphor of a
community to advocate for human responsibility toward the land and all its creatures
within a single “biotic community.” Leopold‟s emphasis on community attempted to
bring humans, physically and ethically, into the natural world.
What was unclear, however, was the question of what and whose criteria of„preservation‟ should be used to make such judgments. Although the direction Leopold
wanted to go seemed fairly clear, once the logic is made explicit, it is unlikely that
Leopold‟s argument can get us there. Specifically, he wanted to transcend the
culture/nature chasm as a historical process, a chasm that he saw growing ever wider in
his own lifetime. He believed, as did Thoreau, that nature, left to its own devices, would
thrive and maintain a harmonic balance. He also thought that humans had something to
learn from this ecological balance. Leopold could have had in mind Thoreau‟s claim that,
“In wildness lies the preservation of the world.” But as „wildness‟ disappeared, the
opportunity to learn from wild 'nature' was ra pidly disappearing. This „preservationist‟
attitude forms part of the basis for deep ecology and specifically the claim outlined above
that nature has values and can tell us the right way to live.
But if wilderness and nature are more than a description of what ecologists
currently observe, then we must rely on the ecologist's values about what should be
preserved and what constitutes a balanced system. If these values and judgments do not
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come solely from the description of „nature‟, then „culture‟ must be influencing the
judgments and understanding of those values. But if you remember, „culture‟ was
supposed to be the cause of wilderness destruction and therefore sanitized from
ecologists‟ observations. Alternatively though, couldn‟t this situation be described as one
of competing values within „culture‟ or between cultures rather than between a pristine
„nature‟ on the one side and a corrupted „culture‟ on the other? Although culture was
supposed to be enfolded into nature, in the the model of deep ecology, the dualism and
separation would appear to be necessary for a critical point of view. Once the subjective
elements of values and political choices was allowed to enter the model, the conceptualwaters of deep ecology were considerably muddied. What the Nature versus Culture
construction provided environmentalists was a privileged access to an objective truth and
certainty as well as a source of authority beyond cultural values and political debate
(Latour 2004; Chaloupka 2000, 2007). This is, however, an untenable position
conceptually, and anti-democratic as political strategy and policy.
A more recent attempt to resolve the ontological separation of culture and nature in
the direction of a nature is made by Max Oelschaeger (2007). He makes a strong case that
the current environmental problems, and the problems of industrial society more
generally, are rooted in this ontological divide. Combining elements of poststructuralism
with post-Darwinian theory he argues that the culture/nature separation occurred with the
acquisition of language some 50,000-200,000 years ago. This is contrary to the view that
the distinction is a historically recent and culturally relative achievement. But because
Oelschaeger believes that the separation is a linguistic construction and not in a physical
quantity located in the brain, he argues that it is possible and necessary to loosen the grip
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of the narratives of cultural and natural separation, perhaps through Gramscian counter-
hegemonic narratives.
However, this displacement of the nature/nature distinction to the acquisition of
language grants entirely too much to those same dominant Western narratives. It glosses
over qualitative differences in language that point to a deep linguistic relativity (Lee
1996). There is agreement here that the culture/nature distinction is a linguistic
construction, but we cannot assume that the culture/nature distinction or even the
concepts of „culture‟ and „nature‟ are human universals without first submitting them to a
“rigorous ethnographic critique” (Castro 2005: 36). Although Oelschaeger‟s account is an
attempt to shore up the weaknesses and ambiguities found in the Land Ethic, it does not
do any better and likely moves us further away from the target. The ecological attitude,
exemplified by Leopold‟s Land Ethic, is a workable raw material that I will use as a
stalking horse to compare and contrast with the concepts of perspectivism and
multinaturalism.
Criticism of the Nature/Wilderness Tradition
Before moving on to the alternatives, the concept of nature/wilderness needs to be
explored. One of the conceptual difficulties with the Land Ethic‟s reformulation of the
„human-natural‟ relationship is that it lacks any historical/empirical referent. Most of the
places identified as „wilderness‟ in the Americas were places of Native habitation and
these landscapes were profoundly influenced by indigenous practices. The problem was
that Europeans misrecognized these landscapes as the 'natural' or original state of the
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world. They imagined that if humans disappeared from Europe, the landscape would
revert to something similar to the one that they found in America.5
The idea of an untouched and sublime wilderness has been a persistent idea since
these first European encounters in the Americas and continues to inspire the imagination
of environmentalists even though it is empirically and historically unsupported. William
Cronon (1983), the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography, and
Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, emphasized that the
abundance of game animals, wild edible plants and the large ancient trees that Europeans
encountered in colonial New England were all enhanced and cultivated by Native practices. Intentionally set fires played an enormous role in creating the „park -like‟
atmosphere of many New England landscapes. Clearing the detritus and brush promoted
old growth trees and berries in the open spaces, as well as new grazing grounds for game
animals. Natives also preferred the open spaces that the fires created for hunting and
travel. In another article, Cronon (1995) writes about the origins of the conservation
movement and the circumstances under which the national parks in the western United
States were created. The vast and empty so-called wilderness of the West, seen by well-
to-do vacationing Easterners, was the newly emptied “Wild West” created by the
processes of colonialism. Cronon points out that concern for disappearing wilderness and
the political motivation to preserve certain landscapes for future generations to
experience occurred precisely at the conclusion of the Indian wars and with the
confinement of Natives to reservations. War, disease and the internment of Natives made
the West safe to be enjoyed as wilderness and „untouched‟ pristine Nature, providing a
5 One famous expression of this idea that “in the beginning all the world was America,” is made by JohnLocke in the Two Treatises of Government, p. 158.
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temporary escape from the „infirmities of civilization‟ in the East. The irony was that the
form of life that created the economic wealth that enabled people to enjoy the „wilderness‟
of the West as a past-time, was the same root cause of the need for preservation in the
first place. Industrialization and colonization built cities and spaces felt to be lacking in
„nature‟ and causing „man‟ to become effeminate for lack of rugged wilderness to test „his‟
mettle on. For these reasons wilderness, or the idea of untouched pristine nature, is an
equivocal and problematic concept.
Beyond Nature?
A second generation of environmental theorizing sought to resolve the nature/culturedistinction on the side of culture. However, their efforts also led to a dead-end at a
problematic impasse. Studies that embrace the Culture pole of the nature/culture dualism
also face sticky theoretical and historical problems because they do not properly address
the mutual constitution of Nature and Culture. For example post-Marxist approaches to
environmental studies, see the nature/culture problem resolved through dialects or the
continual transformation of culture to nature and vice versa. The borders of nature and
culture at one particular time and place are never clear or certain. What can be known is
what Marxists and post-Marxists call second nature, which is acknowledged to be marked
by human labor, or in other words, thoroughly cultural. The commodification of human
labor and its products is the prime example of second nature. This is why post-Marxist
approaches are categorized in the tradition that resolves the nature/culture problem in the
direction of culture.
The conceptual hurtles throw up by Nature and Culture are encountered by Aletta
Biersach (2006), in an introduction she wrote to a collection of essays on political
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ecology. There she attempted to weld together an eclectic set of conceptual approaches
invoking culture/power/history/nature in an all encompassing critique. She strings
together, post-Marxism, functionalism, poststructuralism, feminism and postcolonialism
without adequately examining each of the approaches or inquiring into their compatibility
with one another. What is striking about this montage of theoretical approaches is the
ease at which the „modern critique‟ allows one to move back and forth between
incommensurate theoretical resources. What marks this grand critique as post-Marxist
perhaps is its intellectual heritage and social commitment and the double denunciation
that dialectical thinking enables. Dialectics allow for the rapid transition andtransformation of Nature to Culture as the essence of historical process. Nothing about
this is seen as contradictory. Rather, to the contrary, this is viewed as the unfolding of
truth and reality.
While the attempt at synthesis and the social commitments may be admirable we
might keep in mind Bruno Latour‟s suggestion for constructing political ecology:
Political ecologists have supposed that they could dispense with the conceptual work,without noticing that the notion of nature and politics had been developed over centuries insuch a way to make any juxtaposition, any synthesis, and any combination of the two termsimpossible. And even more seriously, they have claimed, in the enthusiasm of ecumenicalvision, to have “gotten beyond” the old distinction between humans and things, subjects of
the law and objects of science — without observing that these entities had been shaped, profiled, sculpted in such a way that they had gradually become incompatible (Latour,2004:3) Emphasis added.
It is not at all clear that the glue of culture and history can hold nature and politics
together without first carefully retracing the steps that created nature and politics as
contrary concepts.
Poststructuralist and postmodern approaches to environmental studies resist their
categorization into a single frame. Four positions can be identified depending on what
sort of status they grant to „nature.‟ Theorists taking the first position come essentially to
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the same conclusions as the post-Marxists; that is, that nature is knowable only though its
particular cultural manifestation. As a discursive artifact, nature is variously constructed
and contingent. Arturo Escobar‟s essay, “Constructing Nature: Elements for a
poststructuralist political ecology,” (1996) tak es up this position. The second position
simply denies the concept of nature has any real referent and relevance. The third position,
which is most characteristic of postmodernism, remains agnostic about nature,
recognizing that the ontological divide between nature and culture is inherently unstable,
yet unwilling to concede to its irrelevance. Instead, theorists in this group prefer to
explore the paradoxes and contradictions manifested by nature and culture as antinomies(e.g. Chaloupka and Cawley, 1993). Lastly, there are those that explicitly want to break
down the boundaries of nature and culture and to re-image the world. I do not address the
literature taking up the second and third positions. Rather I address them conceptually
with arguments from the forth position. I find this line of research the most interesting
and draw on their insights and criticisms to support my argument for perspectivism and
multinaturalism and the dissolution and redistribution of Nature and Culture.
Dissolving Nature and Culture as Antimonies
These „posthumanist‟ theorists, often feminist, are deeply suspicious of the
boundaries between nature and culture, and their associated divisions between humans
and animals, animate and inanimate, physical and mental. Donna Haraway writes,
“Nothing really convincingly settles the separation of humans and animals,” arguing for
the breakdown of the “last beachheads” of human uniqueness such as language, tool use,
social behavior, and mental states (Haraway, 1991: 193). For example, each of these
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„beachheads‟ had been chipped away at by studies of nonhuman primates (e.g. Haraway
1988). The implications of these claims are, of course, by no means slight. Haraway
understood, perhaps more than others, that the consequences of collapsing the ontological
partitions of „nature‟ and „culture‟ meant a redefinition of the „human‟ being and the very
meaning of „humanity‟. Later, I will argue that humanity needs to be understood in a
very distinct way.
These attempts to dissolve the nature/culture divide have provoked a backlash.
Reinventing Nature: Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction (1995), is collection of
essays dedicated to militating against the excesses of postmodernism and the „assault‟ on
the idea of nature in environmental theory. Gary Lease, a co-editor of this volume and a
professor in History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz,
declared in exasperation that: “Haraway wants to focus attention on the fact that even the
attempts to rescue the nonhuman from the human, to rescue nature from the onslaught of
modern technologized humanity, is itself a human construction” (Lease, 1995:3). Lease
then demurs by wondering “What can Haraway mean?” In this statement Lease hopes
that his audience with will be equally as frustrated as he is, and impatient, with doing the
careful thinking required for the conceptualization of political ecology. These comments
express an anxiety over the loss of Nature as source of objectivity and authority. Because
they fail to respond to the criticisms put forth by Haraway, Cronon and others, they lack
merit. Chaloupka argues that these defensive responses express a crisis in green theory,
perhaps similar to the crisis feminism went though over its „third wave‟ (Chaloupka,
2007).
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If there is any merit to these worries, it is the apparent lack of a positive program for
environmental theory. Haraway‟s program, for example, does not translate easily into
terms that are desired by environmentalists. This may be intentional, as she often wants to
push the limits of imagination for thinking about the world, both as it currently is, and as
it could be. That having been said, there are alternative models of ecology and politics
available. Indigenous perspectivism as I have been suggesting is one of them. Although
the formulation I present is specifically developed to address the nature/culture problem,
indigenous peoples have been expressing similar sentiments ever since confronted with
these peculiarly Western intellectual dilemmas. Luther Standing Bear, in Land of the
Spotted Eagle (1933), insightfully commented on the problem of viewing nonhuman
beings as „wild‟ and „wilderness‟: “Only to the white man was nature “wilderness” and
only to him was the land “infested” with wild animals and “savage” people. To us it was
tame” (Standing Bear, 1933: 38). The fact that modern environmentalism places a
positive valence on the concept of wilderness, and nature as wilderness, does not remove
it from its structural relationship to a colonial project. What is needed is not simply a
change in vocabulary, but a change in concepts and conventional ways of thinking and
acting.
Redistributing Nature and Culture
What this latter „post-nature‟ group (the group that resolves the nature/culture
problem in the direction of culture) may have in common is a desire to go beyond all the
modernist dualisms, exemplified by Nature and Culture, and an uncertainty of where to
go from there. What sort of world is envisioned without this ontological divide? My
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suggestion, (that is the insights I hope to show coming from indigenous cosmologies),
most closely follows the philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour in this work We
Have Never Been Modern (1993). In this work he argued that the necessary approach to
envision the world without Nature and Culture as opposing ontological domains is neither
modern nor postmodern, but rather amodern or nonmodern. He argues that the
uncertainties and ambiguities of postmodernism and poststructuralism depend on
theoretical moves that created the world as “modern.” Retracing the steps of these
theoretical moves is necessary to envision the world without Nature and Culture as
antinomies, because they were constructed as constitutive conditions of modernity(Latour, 1993).
Viveiros de Castro cites We Have Never Been Modern as an initial inspiration for his
article on perspectivism and multinaturalism. Latour coined the term „multinaturalism‟ to
distinguish it from cultural relativism and Viveiros de Castro has developed that concept
further in order to highlight certain feature of indigenous cosmologies. This should not be
a great surprise because the insights flow both directions : Latour cites Phillipe Descola‟s
anthropology of the Archurs of the Peruvian Amazon as an exemplar of holistic
knowledge. Hence, there is a dialogical process in these Western theoretical discussions
about transcending the dichotomizing tradition, where indigenous points of view are
beginning to make an impact. This essay, hopefully, adds to that intellectual exchange.
Viveiros de Castro, a Brazilian anthropologist at the National Museum of the Federal
University of Rio de Janeiro, began his research in indigenous Amazonia, but his essay
on perspectivism and multinaturalism reflects on themes covering indigenous thought
throughout the Americas. He argues that the concept of indigenous perspectivism cannot
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be reduced to current understandings of relativism “which at first it seems to call to mind”
(Viveiros de Castro, 2005:36-37). Rather, it resists the opposition between relativism and
universalism which characterize the dominant intellectual traditions in the West. The
critique of these Western intellectual traditions “requires the disassociation and
redistribution of the predicates subsumed under Nature and Culture: universal and
particular, 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 contrastingindigenous 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. Viveiros de Castro admits that all of these contrasts are
too neat and too symmetrical to be anything more than speculative, however they are
heuristic and edifying in the effort to unthink the dualism of nature and culture and the
conceptual traps they lead us into. What follows will attempt to show this.
Indigenous Perspectivism
Indigenous cosmologies of the Americas do not proceed from the precepts of Nature
and Culture. Instead they propose a multidimensional and transformational universe of
diverse subjects or persons that apprehend reality from distinct points of view. “Typically,
in normal conditions,” Viveiros de Castro writes, “humans see humans as humans and
animals as animals.” Conversely, “predator animals and spirits see humans as animals of
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prey to the same extent that animals of prey see humans as spirits or predator animals”
(Viveiros de Castro 2005: 38). More specifically:
Seeing us as non-human beings, animals and spirits see themselves as humans. They perceive themselves to be or become anthropomorphic when they are in their ownhouses or villages and experience their own habits and characteristics in the form ofculture. Thus they see their food as human food (jaguars see blood as manioc beer, thedead see crickets as fish, vultures see the maggots in rotting flesh as grilled meat, etc.).They see bodily attributes (fur, feathers, claws, beaks, etc.) as adornments or culturalinstruments, and they see their social system as organized in just the same way humaninstitutions (with chiefs, shamans, rituals, marriage rules etc.) (opt. cite).
Therefore, animals are people, or „persons‟ too. Seen in this way, the idea of community
or communities comes to life in a much more direct and literal sense, in comparison to
Leopold‟s idea of an ecological community in the Land Ethic. However, while ethical
concerns thoroughly permeate relations between human and nonhuman persons, the
underlying logic is significantly different. Rather than a homeostatic balance in a
mechanistic system, ethical relationships are seen to be continually negotiated among
diverse sorts of „persons‟ and entities that are considered to have agency or intentionality.
For many indigenous peoples of the Americas this idea extends to plants and other
aspects of the environment. The Achuar of the Ecuadorian rainforest, for example,
stipulate that many plants possess souls that are formally “identical to the one humans are
endowed” (Descola 2005: 22). This gives plants consciousness, intentionality and the
ability to feel emotions and communicate with each other and with humans. The
„perspectival‟ principle is illustrated by this example of the relations between salmon,
bears, cotton trees and humans:
If one is to follow the main myths, for the human being, the world looks like a humancommunity surrounded by an spiritual realm, including an animal kingdom with all
beings coming and going according to their kinds and interfering with each others' lives;however, if one were to go and become an animal, a salmon for instance, one would
discover that salmon people are to themselves as human beings are to us, and that tothem, we human beings, would look like naxnoq, or perhaps bears feeding on their
salmon. Such translation goes through several levels. For instance, the leaves of the
cotton tree falling in the Skeena River are the salmon of the salmon people. I do not
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know what the salmon would be for the leaf, guess they appear what we look like to the salmon unless they looked like bears. (Guedon 1984:141-42, cited in Viveiros de Castro2005: 51).
Predator-prey relationships exemplify the relational perspectives of the subject, where the
subject takes the form of the human being.
All aspects of the landscape are not equally significant however. Different peoples
recognize different species, objects and locations as more or less powerful, more or less
imbued with spirit or subjectivity. The attribution of spirit or intentionality depends on
the particular place and on the „original instructions‟ or stories that established that place
and maintain the relationships between a particular „human‟ people and other nonhuman
peoples that share that place (Deloria 1997). The importance of place cannot be
underestimated when discussing indigenous cosmologies. It is central to notions of
identity, material welfare as well as conceptual formation. Physical and conceptual
geographies are in fact inseparable (Hernandez 1999). This fact is central to the idea of
traditional ecological knowledge which will be discussed further on.
The idea of universal sociality or agency is related “with the idea that the visible
form of every species is an envelope (a 'clothing'), concealing an internal human form
which is normally only visible to the eyes of the particular species, or to certain trans-
specific beings, such as shamans.” This incorporate the idea that the “internal form is the
spirit of the animal” which is “an intentionality or subjectivity which is for mally identical
with human consciousness, materialisable, let us say, in a human bodily schema
concealed behind an animal mask” (Viveiros de Castro 2005: 38) However, it is
important to note that this is not a dichotomous “distinction between an anthropomo rphic
essence of a spiritual kind, common to animate beings, and a variable bodily appearance,
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characteristic of each species,” because bodily appearance is “not a fixed attribute but
rather changeable and removable clothing” (opt. cite). In other words:
„This notion of clothing‟ is, in fact, one of the privileged expressions of universalmetamorphosis — spirits, the dead and shamans who assume animal form, animals thatturn into other animals, humans who are inadvertently changed into animals — anomnipresent process in the “highly transformational world” (Riviere 1994) proposed byAmazonian cultures (Viveiros de Castro 2005: 38).
The processes of transformation are ever present. This leads to the “possibility that a
hitherto insignificant being reveals itself (in dreams, in shamanic discourse) as a
prosopomorphic agent capable of affecting human affairs is always present. In this regard,
personal experience, one's own or that of others, is more decisive than any substantive
cosmological dogma.” Therefore the distinction between animals and spirits or animals
and plants seen in their spirit form is “not always clear or pertinent” (Alexiades 1999:194,
cited in Viveiros de Castro 2005). Something that appears as an animal, a plant or an
object of some sort might be a spirit in disguise of something of an altogether different
nature (Viveiros de Castro 2005: 39).
Knowing as a Way of Doing
This thoroughly social and relational ontology proposed by indigenous cultures of
the Americas implies a way of knowing altogether different from the objectivist
epistemologies arising from the naturalistic ontology of modernism and rhetoric of
Western science. The Western scientific ontology presupposes that, at the root of
everything, physical and universal laws (like gravity) govern and are the final cause of all
phenomena. Even the apparently most complex phenomena like human bodies and minds
or ecosystems, are the result of these physical laws and can in principle be reduced to
them. Knowledge of the world, from this perspective, is measured by the degree of
objectification that can be applied to an object or a process. Along these lines, Daniel
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Dennett has argued that we should attribute only the minimum amount of intentionality
necessary in order to explain a given action or phenomenon with the epistemological
ideal of „reducing intentionality to zero‟ (Dennett 1978).
Knowledge of an ecosystem, from the „Western‟ science perspective, exemplifies the
ideal of objectification. Ecosystems management attempts to identify the complex
mechanisms and feedback loops that govern an ecosystem so that they can intervene and
make adjustments. The efficacy of this approach depends on correctly identifying the
mechanisms and feedback loops in operation, as well as the short term and long term
anthropocentric requirements and aesthetic judgments. Biology, from this same „Western‟
perspective, is the objectification of the human body into its constitutive parts and the
processes which ultimately reside in the chemistry and physics of molecular biology.6 A
subject is always an insufficiently analyzed object. Therefore a Western evolutionary
biologist sees:
…humanity as built from animal foundations which are normally hidden by culture.Having once been „completely‟ animals, „deep down‟ we remain animals. By contrast,
indigenous thought concludes the inverse principle, that having once been humans,animals and other beings of the cosmos continue to be humans, albeit in a non-evidentway” (Viveiros de Castro 2005: 41)
If objectification is the name of the game in the epistemology of western science,
then subjectification is its counterpart in indigenous epistemologies. Gaining knowledge
about something means adducing the maximum amount of intentionality and agency to
that thing. This means that knowing involves understanding and participating in the
characteristic ways and customs of that subjective domain; in other words, seeing a
nature as culture. That is to say, acquiring knowledge is the processes of turning an
artifact or an object into a subject or agent.
6 It should be noted that the reduction of physics and chemistry to quantum physics has been considerablymore problematic project. This type of research depends, ultimately, on a faith in reductionism.
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Shamanistic practices and discourses exemplify this approach to knowledge.
Shamanistic knowing is a way of doing or interacting in the world and communicating
with diverse kinds of agents in order to manage the relations between humans and
nonhumans. Above all, shamans are capable of seeing others in their human form, what is
ordinarily not possible for most „laymen‟.
Seeing non-human beings as these beings see themselves (as humans), shamans arecapable of playing the role of active interlocutors in transspecific dialogues. But aboveall they are capable of returning to tell the tale, which is something that laymen arehardly able to do. The encounter with or exchange of perspectives is a dangerous process, it is a political art — a diplomacy (Viveiros de Castro 2005:42).
The ideal of knowledge here is nearly opposite to the ideal of objectification advocated
by western science. 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
(Cajete 2000). Social institutions incorporate shamanistic doctrines in the maintenance of
these relationships. Some of these occur on an everyday level though practices of
reciprocity and renewal. For example, making an offering of tobacco, coca leaves, corn
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dust or other „spiritual currency‟ is a typical act of reciprocity and thanks for use of a
plant or taking of an animal. Another example of reciprocity is the way Natives of the
Pacific Northwest throw their salmon bones back in the river so that they can return to the
ocean and be reborn (Menzies 2006). Respect is the appropriate attitude for these
relationships.
While respect and reciprocity are the social ideal for all relationships in indigenous
contexts, on another level, predatory relations are unavoidable. This necessitates
shamanistic interventions and ceremonial practices of renewal and sacrifice (Cajete 2000).
One could say that just living or existence accumulates a karmic debt, so to speak, thatmust be balanced. As mentioned above, humans are indebted to animals and plants, but
also rivers, ancestors, the earth, moon, and stars among many others. All these are
subjectivities with the intentionality to choose to grant humans and others the possibility
of life. From this cosmic perspective, humans may play as vital role to another
subjectivity which may be just as significant as water is for humans. Ceremonies like the
Sun Dance of the Great Plains indigenous nations and sacrifices like fasting contribute
and are vital to cosmic processes of renewal and continuity (Cajete 2000, Deloria, 1999).
The Tairona of northern Columbia, for instance, call themselves Elder Brother and view
themselves to be the keepers of the earth, their mother. They view all other humans as the
„Younger Brother‟ who they view as foolish and destroying the earth through a predatory
culture. They see their role as Elder Brother to balance the cosmic debt created by
Younger Brother, through spiritual practices and informing younger brother to the
worsening condition of earth (See Ereira 1993).
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Clearly, from a Western science perspective, these kinds of practices have little
ecological value and are viewed, for the most part, as superstitions. There are other
practices, however, like control burning, as mentioned before, practices of permaculture,
like planting crops together like corn, beans and squash that create a natural nitrogen
cycle and control weeds as well as knowledge of medicinal plants that can be understood
and appreciated from the „functionalist stance‟ of ecological science, wildlife biology and
chemistry. However, the point must be emphasized, that the different point of view on
these matters is exactly what is in contention. It is precisely because these „natural‟ beings
and objects are perceived as agents or subjects possessing intentionality that theserelationships cannot be very well interpreted according to a functional logic.
From indigenous perspectives the relations between humans and nonhumans are
social. Humans, animals, plants and other beings exist and interact within a single socio-
cosmic domain and field of normativity. This may be recognized as animism. That people
typically recognize boundaries between themselves and other beings, which are only
transgressed under unusual conditions or by specially trained individuals is
perspectivism.7 From this point of view the persistent culture/nature distinction dissolves.
What is natural and given from one perspective, is cultural and enacted from another. The
cultural is the form of the universal and the natural is the form of the particular. This
leads to multinaturalism or the idea that there are many „natures‟ , but natures that are
always contingent and transformable.
This is the inverse principle to the one operating in western science. Viveiros de
Castro writes that:
7 There is at least one context in which boundaries are ordinarily crossed: dreaming, see Lee Irwin, 1996.
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In our naturalist ontology the nature/society interface is natural: humans are organismslike others, body-objects in 'ecological' interaction with other bodies and forces, all ofthem ruled by the necessary laws of biology and physics; 'productive forces' harnessnatural forces. Social relations, that is, contractual or instituted relations among subjects,can only exist internal to human society. But this is the problem of naturalism: how„non-natural‟ can these relations really be? Given the universality of nature, the status of
the human and social world is profoundly unstable and, as our tradition shows, it perpetually oscillates between a naturalistic monism (socio-biology or evolutionary psychology being two of its current avatars) and an ontological dualism ofnature/culture (culturalism or symbolic anthropology being some of its contemporaryexpressions) (Viveiros de Castro 2005: 45).
It was the „unstable‟ status of the human social world that I identified as a problem for
deep ecology and Leopold‟s attempt to create a conceptual basis for the land ethic. The
unstable status of „culture‟ is why the culture/nature distinction is such a persistent
problem. A naturalist ontology may provide a basis for the idea of an ecological system inhomoeostasis, but it cannot account for ethical questions or the anomalous status of
human beings as both „natural‟ and „non-natural‟ beings. Stated a little differently, in
terms of epistemology, naturalism has a reflexivity problem. It cannot apply to itself,
because when applied to itself, the self dissolves into an object, and objects do not have
knowing capacities, consciousness, intentionality, and so on. From the western
perspective, the culture/nature dualism must come back in to create a special knowing
subject: which is currently, but has not always been, the human species.
Universal Humanity
The common condition of humans, animals and other beings is humanity and not
animality. Whereas in popular evolutionary theory humans are, really at base, animals;
from the indigenous perspective, animals and other beings are, really at base, human. Our
ecocentric critic might argue that this is insufficient because it is still anthropocentric and
evaluates all life in terms of a human metric. But indigenous perspectivism is not
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anthropocentric, if by this we mean dominated by one set of interests and understanding
of the world. It is anthropomorphic, however, which is an important conceptual
distinction. Anthropocentricism is more like speciesism where the „human species‟ is a
special evolutionary achievement above all other forms of life. Anthropomorphism here
entails the idea that the form of the subject or spirit is prototypically a human form
(Viveiros de Castro 2005: 45).
This leads to a necessary distinction between the idea of humanity as condition and
humanity as a species. The conflation of these contrasting notions has led environmental
politics into the philosophical binds of the culture/nature dualism and the practicalmisrecognition of environmental justice as not sufficiently „environmental.‟ The idea that
environmentalists can speak about, or on behalf of, all of humanity in terms of
generalizations about its character or worries about third world „overpopulation‟ is an
example of the conflation of humanity as a condition of all life and humanity as a species.
The proposition that humanity is a general background condition for all being and
subjectivity makes humanity as species specific form very problematic. Indigenous
concepts of self and collectivity illustrate the need to distinguish these two concepts
(Viveiros de Castro 2005: 47).
One aspect of indigenous thought that has been widely commented on is the idea that
humanity stops at the boundaries of the group; a clear expression of ethnocentrism. On
the other hand, the animistic character of indigenous thought extends humanity well
beyond the borders of the group and human beings as a species to diverse forms of life.
What reconciles these two apparently contradictory principles is the idea that full
personshood is expressed through human particularity rather than through human
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genericity. Particular humanity or „peoplehood‟ is most closely associated with the
prototypical ontological perspective. This is why animals have their particular fur,
feathers, colorings and characteristic behaviors which are seen as cultural adornments and
performance rather than natural expressions of species determination. If the human form
is the model of the spirit and universality, then the animal body is the model of
particularity and full personhood. This particularization takes the form of body art and
adornment such as piercing and tattooing, as well as behaviors like food proscriptions and
prohibition and language; really all socialization. In other words, it is a habitus. Viveiros
de Castro puts it this way:…emphasis on the social construction of the body cannot be taken as the culturalisationof a natural substrate but rather as the production of a distinctly human body, meaningnaturally human. Such a process seems to be expressing not so much a wish to „de-animalise‟ the body through its cultural marking, but rather to particularise a body thatis still too generic, differentiating it from the bodies of other human collectivities aswell as from those of other species. The body, as the site of differentiating perspective,must be differentiated to the highest degree in order to completely express it (Viveirosde Castro 2005: 59) original emphasis.
What this repeats is the idea that culture is the form of universal and nature is the form of
the particular. The full expression of the self and personhood through particularization
and naturalization of the body severs the idea of species distinctiveness in favor of
particular peoplehood. Here, intra-species differentiation may be as significant as inter-
species differences. In this sense also, the dualist dichotomy of Culture and Nature
dissolve into a common humanity of the spirit and particular expressions of peoplehood. 8
A critic might argue that the colorings and fur of animals do not equate with
human tattoos or ornamentation because a human person can choose how to color their
8 There is perhaps an interesting analogy here with Agamben‟s idea of bare life in Homo Sacer . If a personis tripped down to bare life that is the human being at its most generic, but this genericity is, Agamden
points out, barely living; not dead but not really alive. This is what indigenous people has been sayingabout community and identity all along. “Killing the Indian to save the man,” is a kind of spiritual death
and loss of personhood. One „person‟ literally dies and becomes something else.
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hair or what tattoo to get, while a fox cannot choose its fur and colorings. In one sense
this is true. Tattoos and hair coloring are viewed as „free choices‟ and „self -expression‟ in
the popular culture of the West. However in indigenous contexts the expression of the self
resides closer to the expression of the collectivity. Tattoo practices, in the Pacific for
example, typically depict ancestral designs that follow authorized patterns that express
particular historical meanings and community recognized achievements among other
things. Tattoos are generally viewed as connecting a person with their ancestors and thus
enabling them to become more fully „Samoan‟, for example, and therefore more fully
achieving „personhood‟ or a „particular humanity‟ as I suggested. As for the fox, the first
rebuttal might ask how we know that the fox does not choose its coloring (at least in the
sense that Samoans “choose” their tattoos). It certainly is the conventional “coat” of their
ancestors, and perhaps it is the one they like the best? Arctic foxes do, after all, change
their colorings twice a year; and all foxes molt in the spring and grow thinker coats in the
fall. So perhaps in regards to choice, convention, and determination, the two examples
are at least closer than they might have initially appeared.
Multinaturalism
With this way of thinking, the great dilemma of human versus nonhuman interests,
or anthropocentric versus ecocentric approaches to environmental politics dissolve into
the particular dilemmas of specific group of persons (human or nonhuman) versus other
group of persons (human or nonhuman). Of course, this hardly solves the „on the ground
problems of environmental politics or environmental justice. But I believe it does
dissolve the endless and intractable debates about social justice versus environmental
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preservation, human culture versus the natural world and their various iterations. It may
also help in another way. If the dichotomizing intellectual tradition that has led to the
culture/nation distinction in the first place has at all contributed the environmental
degradation we are currently experiencing, than thinking about these things differently,
through a different intellectual framework, may be one step toward establishing more
balanced and sustainable relationships among all beings.
Aldo Leopold was on the right path with the idea of an ecological community, but
he bumped up against an invisible wall in attempting to submit that idea to a naturalist
ontology. The precepts of naturalist ontology have had great difficulty and are perhapsincapable of accounting for subjectivity and dealing with them in an ethical manner. The
objectivist epistemology that is the twin of naturalism can only „objectify‟ the many
beings of the cosmos. Starting out with the premise that all things in the world operate
according to physical laws, objectivists conclude that all things in the world operate
according to physical laws. Anomalous phenomena that do not (yet) follow any (known)
physical laws will be deciphered in the future. Stated in that way the circularity I think
becomes clear. An article of faith must support the foundation of objectivist research
programs, where all „faiths‟ were supposed to have been eliminated. Worry about the
status of this „faith‟ underlies a number of projects in the post-empiricist philosophy of
science. W.V.O. Quine‟s argument for a „naturalized epistemology‟ and Stephen
Toulmin‟s arguments for an „evolutionary epistemology‟ can be viewed as efforts to
(re)establish a foundation for this faith.
Perspectivism and the social and relational ontology associated with it easily
assimilate the anomalous phenomena left over by objectivist research programs. But
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indigenous cosmologies also compete to interpret the so-called law governed phenomena
as well. We need not necessarily accept shamanistic epistemologies of subjectification,
although we may learn something from them in order to appreciate indigenous
cosmological perspectives. Empirical research is still possible within a perspectival and
relational ontology. To be clear, from the indigenous point of view, Native approaches to
knowledge are seen as more empirical and less doctrine driven in contrast to Western
objectivist approaches to knowledge.
Western ecological scientists and environmental managers can learn from indigenous
scientific traditions in the same way that indigenous peoples say they learn from bear orwolf peoples about how to hunt or from plant peoples about how to heal and so on.
Indigenous knowledge is not a static or self contained object locked to a „pre-modern‟
time-capsule (Fabian 1983). It is transformed and transferred through relations with other
peoples, human and nonhuman, and therefore remains a flexible and living process of
many indigenous communities.
The normative relationships established by indigenous perspectivism support
practices of traditional ecological knowledge. Traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK,
is one practical solution to the problems of environmental destruction (Cajete 2000; Little
Bear 2000; Deloria 1999). Traditional ecological knowledge is the communal and
intimate knowledge of indigenous peoples about their territories which promotes
environmental sustainability and biological diversity (Barsh and Henderson 2003; Berkes
1999; Brush and Stabinsky 1996).
TEK is first and foremost, a political solution to environmental management in
that it supports maximum autonomy and self-determination for indigenous nations and
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their territories. It does not require nor depend on the understanding or participation of
western scientists and environmental policy makers. It is only secondarily a knowledge
resource for the later (and the general public). In addition, the transmission of TEK
should occur under the terms and conditions established by the communities from whose
territory the knowledge originates. This is especially important because indigenous
knowledge has become the latest exploited commodity and site of colonialism in the
twenty-first century. Biopiracy is a clear example of the continuation of colonial relations
in the domain of intellectual property (Mgbeoji 2006: Shiva 1997; Brush and Stabinsky
1996;). Perspectivism is an attempt to present one aspect of the theoretical basis of TEKthrough indigenous cosmological categories. My hope is that this intervention would
support the greater autonomy, self-determination and intellectual confidence for
indigenous peoples as well as an increased interest in appropriate research in TEK by
non-indigenous scientists, environmental policy makers, as well as by the general public.
The theory of indigenous perspectivism contributes to environmental politics by
dissolving the impasse of the pernicious debate about „culture‟ and „nature‟. Within
indigenous cosmological framework the culture/nature distinction dissolves into the unity
of the spirit or a profound and universal humanity that incorporates all beings. Nature and
culture turn out to be distinctions particular to specific cultural perspectives, and not an
ontological condition fundamental to reality.
Perspectivism addresses the particular impasse faced by ecological thinkers who
want to conceptually reconcile human beings into the natural world. As it turns out, the
manner in which they were going about this reconciliation, while productive in some
respects, was highly problematic for conceptualizing political ecology and has led to a
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strategic impasse. Nature(s) are internal to culture(s) in the plural, and not the other way.
In addition, the concepts of culture and humanity, incorporated in these theories were
askew. As long as culture was thought to be an outgrowth or an emergent property of
nature and animality, then the dualism could not be breached. These ecological thinkers
were captured by a concept of the human being from evolutionary biology that was
confused with the concept of humanity as a condition for all beings. The correction to this
mistake and the way though the impasse is another perspective. Particular peoples
establish particular relations with a place and the other „peoples‟ that cohabitate the place.
The „doings‟ of establishing and maintaining these relationships, are the „knowings‟ of
indigenous epistemologies.
The concept of multinaturalism captures the idea that a community‟s fundamental
perceptions of nature are ontological and constitutive for its particular way of life. Using
the more familiar term of cultural relativism to describe the relationship between
indigenous worldviews and “Western” thought always leaves the status of the former
uncertain and a question of “mentality.” The perception of nature(s) are inseparable from
a perspective that is structured by a communities set of intellectual traditions.
Multinaturalism suggests that the differences in perspective are less to be found in the
subjective differences in the thinking, than in objective differences in worlds.
Conclusion
The conceptual and strategic problems of the environmental movement have been
traced back to a crisis of modernism. The features of modernism that are problematic for
political ecology are the doctrines of naturalism and objectivism and the rigid and
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hierarchical form of political authority it establishes and regulates. Unfortunately these
were precisely the doctrines that were often enthusiastically embraced by
environmentalists as the solution to environmental troubles rather than seen to be part of
the problem. They sought to deploy Nature, the domain of necessity, and they assumed
this would guarantee authority and political action. As we could see, from indigenous
perspectives there was a classic means ends disjuncture. The objectification of
nonhumans (and much of humanity) led to their disregard as „persons‟ with their own
ways of life, habits and, dare I say, culture.
If we take indigenous points of view seriously, then we might recognize adifferent way of understanding and relating to nonhuman persons as an expanded and
ongoing constitutional negotiation.9 Naturalism must give way to multinaturalism if we
are to fully extend the principles of respect and recognition to nonhumans. Perspectivism
and multinaturalism support a protean and negotiated order of political relations
incorporating all beings. All boundaries from this perspective are contingent and
negotiated, including those domains associated with „nature‟ and „culture‟. Thus, this
indigenous „model‟ of „cosmic politics‟ dissolves the antimonies of Nature and Culture
and redistributes the domains of necessity and spontaneity across a field of diverse
agential action.
9 For example, James Tully‟s arguments in Strange Multiplicity (1995) could apply very easily tononhumans. He suggests as much in his discussion of Bill Reid‟s “Canoe” and its mythological inter -species beings.
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