![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The other day I posted an incomplete version of my Cultural Anth paper in a f-locked post. I finished the beast on Sunday evening. We workshopped them in class today, but I haven't actually incorporated any changes in to the text. I'm going to post the whole beast here, because I'm curious what people think - I'm looking for more external input, basically. So if you're curious as to what it is that has been eating my time, if nothing else, you can have a look. First off, though, I'm going to post the general guidelines we were given. At the end of it, I'm going to abstract the comments I got from my workshop partner and people can tell me if they agree, or note of they can think of anything else I might want to change or that I could do to strengthen the paper generally. If anyone wants to read it in its entirety (I'm not posting figures or bibliography, for reasons of space and laziness), let me know and I can e-mail it to you instead :)
Guidelines
a. Focus on one of the key concepts for the course: Power, History, Culture, Society, Symbolism, Practice, Idealism/Materialism, Subject/Other, Representation/Identity, Agency. You can be comparative between concepts or between a concept and topic (e.g. History to Idealism; or Agency to evolution). However, the main subject and argument of your essay should be theoretically link one of these key concepts in social theory and cultural anthropology. [Obviously I went with Identity :x]
b. You may focus on a concept not listed above after discussion with and approval from the instructor.
c. Engage with a theorist and/or theoretical school that is not on the syllabus. Possible selections include (but are not limited to): Mead, Sahlins, M. Harris, Pierce, Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Latour, etc. Do so while engaging the themes of the class that we have talked and read about (or that are on the syllabus). I want your argument to be a dialogue between you, our class sources and the outside sources located by you.
Grounding Identity: Historical Ecology, Habitus, and Imagined Communities"
How do people incorporate the physical environment into their identity, and their conceptions of the communities to which they belong? Human cultures do not exist in a vacuum – social interactions take place in a physical as well as a social milieu. Studies of identity often focus on the latter at the expense of the former. The relationships between humans and their ecological contexts are important, however. They have historical dimensions, and continue to be shaped by daily interactions. Cultural perceptions of both the landscape and the group’s relationship to it can be major facets of identity at a number of levels. Three theorists whose ideas can assist in exploring these relationships are Benedict Anderson, Pierre Bourdieu, and William Balée. Balée’s ideas provide a foundation for grounding concepts introduced by Bourdieu and Anderson in humanity’s relationships with the ecological environment.
Any exploration of this issue encounters several potentially problematic terms and concepts. What is nature? What is the landscape? What is a community? The following definitions will facilitate and clarify the discussion:
Biosphere: Balée defines the biosphere as “that part of the earth suffused with life,” (1998:13). This paper adopts the term, with intent of conveying the location of humanity inside that context.
Community: Drawing on Anderson’s work, a community is herein defined as an imagined horizontal comradeship based on the perception of shared values (Anderson 2006[1983]:6-7). Communities are not inherently exclusive – individuals may belong to multiple communities.
Environment: The physical context of existence of individuals and communities – the intersection of the biosphere and landscape.
Identity: For the purpose of this paper, identity refers to either perceptions of an individual’s relationship to or with a community, or shared conceptions of community composition. These perceptions and conceptions can be either avowed or ascribed.
Landscape: The cultural perception of meaning inherent in features of the physical environment. This includes both the built and natural environment, and is intended to problematize the concept of nature and the natural.
In addition to these key terms, Balée’s theoretical approach merits explanation. Historical ecology is an anthropological approach which seeks to better contextualize the relationships between humanity and the biosphere. Historical ecologists see those relationships as both reciprocal and dialectical. Historical ecology draws on the strengths of other anthropological approaches to this issue, while rejecting other aspects. Cultural ecology, for instance, examines similar questions about the relationships of human societies to the natural environment over time. However, this approach creates a false dichotomy between nature and culture; historical ecologists see the two in dialogue with each other. Likewise, they reject the principle of environmental determinism that is fostered in cultural ecology, and do not limit their exploration of their broader question to ‘egalitarian’ societies. This is something historical ecology has in common with the cultural materialism approach, with which it also shares an investment in the scientific method. The temporal relationship is viewed as historical, however, rather than evolutionary (Balée 1998:2-4). In his words, “Historical ecology actually involves the empirical investigation of relationships between humans and the biosphere in specific temporal, regional, cultural, and biotic contexts, regardless of their relationship to (or incorporation into) nation states,” (Balée 1998:3). It is an investigation of human influence within the biosphere, geared towards identifying and analyzing the effects of historical events and processes.
How then do these relationships affect how human communities understand themselves? How do they influence the formation of group identity and how, in turn, does the culture-bound understanding of those relationships affect attitudes towards the environment? Two contexts are constructive for investigating these questions: history, and practice. The importance of the historical dimension is linked to historical ecology, because the actual past practices of communities play a role in the formation of their identities through their interactions with the broader the biosphere. The constructed nature of history – what communities believe about their own past – is a different but related consideration. The historical context also includes habitus. Bourdieu calls it “a product of history, [that] produces individual and collective practices – more history – in accordance with the schemes generated by history,” (Bourdieu 1990[1980]:54). Practice is a direct result of historical contexts, but because of the unconscious nature of habitus, its role in the production and experience of identity deserves special consideration.
History
Three of four precepts of historical ecology lain down by Balée are explicitly historical. The first is that “much, if not all, of the nonhuman biosphere has been affected by human activity,” (Balée 1998:14). This precept is the main reason this paper avoids the use of the term ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ in reference to environment and landscapes. All forms of human societies have a great capacity for transforming the biosphere (though neither destructiveness nor environmental stewardship is inherently human) (1998:22). The second historical precept (third of the four total) states that:
“…different kinds of sociopolitical and economic systems…in particular regional contexts tend to result in qualitatively unlike effects on the biosphere, on the abundance and speciosity of nonhuman life forms, and on the trajectory of subsequent human sociopolitical and economic…systems.” [Balée 1998:22]
This effect on the historical trajectory consequently impacts on the identity of the subsequent systems and cultures. The third historically grounded precept is the last: “Human communities and cultures together with the landscapes and regions with which they interact over time can be understood as total phenomena,” (Balée 1998:24). This is related to the dialectical nature of their relationship. Humans turn the environment into landscape – the biosphere itself becomes culture.
The colonization of the New World illustrates all of these precepts and demonstrates the historical dimension the relationship between identity and landscape. In particular, the creolization of the landscape in the New World was as essential as print capitalism in the development of nationalism and the imagination of national communities. Europeans did not come alone across the Atlantic. They brought plants, animals, and ideas about the proper way to interact with the environment - habitus. The new setting, its native peoples included, resisted these importations with varying degrees of success. The dynamics of colonization transformed landscape along with other aspects of culture that play in to identity.
Alfred Crosby explores several dimensions of the creolization of the landscape in his book, Ecological Imperialism: the Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Part of Crosby’s argument is that the shape colonization took in specific areas correlates directly to the suitability of the native environment to European agriculture. American colonists transformed their new lands to pasture, and soon found familiar Old World plants growing therein. New Englanders were dealing with the familiar and ubiquitous dandelion by the mid 17th century. Imported forage crops quickly outcompeted native grasses. It was no accident that an environment so well suited to growing European crops and sustaining European styles of farming would become so dominated by European culture. Crosby even refers to the eastern third of North America as a neo-Europe, reflecting the level of this ecological dimension of colonization: “These regions are the arenas in which native and alien species had their most significant competitions in the post-Columbian and post-Cookian era, and in which the results made possible the Europeanization of the whole lands,” (Crosby 2004[1986]:146-9, 155, 157).
Crosby’s book focuses on how Europeans purposefully and accidentally altered the ecology of the lands they encountered. The changes that came about were extreme – Crosby likens them to the mass extinction of species at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch, 1.8 million years ago (Crosby 2004[1986]:271). He makes little mention of the transformative effects of these ecological changes on culture, or identity, for indigenes and newcomers alike. While his research fails to consider Balée’s second historically grounded precept by not considering culture along with ecology, Crosby provides the groundwork, so to speak, for further exploration. There are many examples of how introduced species affected native cultures in colonial lands, though one of the most famous is certainly the adoption of the horse by Native American plains cultures. Although typically viewed as a successfully and wholly beneficial adaptation, the change to a horse focused culture completely disrupted traditional lifeways. According to historian Pekka Hämäläinen:
“Horses helped Indians do everything – move, hunt, trade, and wage war – more effectively, but they also disrupted subsistence economies, weakened grassland and bison ecologies, created new social inequalities, unhinged gender relations, undetermined traditional political hierarchies, and intensified resource competition and warfare.” [Hämäläinen 2006:834]
The deep transformation of their culture resulted in a deep shift in their identity, as horses became the focus of community life.
The colonizers themselves underwent significant cultural changes in response not just to their new environment, but also through their efforts to transform it into a more familiar landscape. While Crosby remarks on the ultimate success of their venture, a complete transformation was never possible. Europeans could not simply transplant their ideas about how landscapes should be structured and the practices involved in producing them to new areas of the biosphere with new contextual considerations – plants, animals, and people – without some compromise and change. New colonial identities were grounded in the landscape through the experience of transformation and the practical concessions made to the local ecology.
Benedict Anderson dwells on the importance of New World creoles in the development of nationalism, and the experience of creolization in the production of the new framework for consciousness necessary for communities to imagine themselves as nations. The experience centers on the power of pilgrimage and print-capitalism in allowing colonials (and for Anderson, the power of imagining nations lies clearly in the hands of the colonial populations) to conceive of themselves as a community (Anderson 2006[1983]:65). While these factors were certainly notable, in particular the power of print capitalism to draw readers in to a shared sense of horizontal comradeship, that comradeship also arose through the shared experience of transforming of the landscape.
Historian James Horn examines the influence of this transformation on English Colonists arriving in the Chesapeake in the seventeenth century. They arrived to find an imposingly, (apparently) wild world, teeming with new flora and fauna. To English eyes, “[t]he land was seen in terms of the commodities it would in time yield,” – quite a different philosophy from the native peoples (Horn 1994:127). The land was a wilderness to be tamed, and a promised land full of the bounty of Providence. English attitudes towards the environment derived from the concept of improvement. This included the introduction of new crops and new farming techniques and the incorporation of marginal land in to the broader agricultural system, or the conversion of new land to landscapes. Improvement was a structuring structure – a cognitive template that guided how the English perceived their role in the biosphere. It was part of their habitus (Bourdieu 1990[1980]:53). Habitus, however, is part of a “dialectical relationship that is established between the regularities of the material universe of properties and the classificatory schemes of the habitus, (Bourdieu 1990[1980]:140). When the properties of the material universe (the environment: in this case, the ecological, social, and geographical setting of the Chesapeake) become irregular, the classificatory schemes of the habitus (improvement) must adapt.
To the colonial eye, the New World appeared ripe for improvement. In contrast, the practices employed at home had only limited practicality for enabling improvement. For example, though the English experimented with crops such as tobacco at home, the availability of land in the Chesapeake resulted in a massive increase in the scale of production (Horn 1994:128-130). Colonial planters also engaged in new relationships of production to improve their land and better extract resources from the biosphere, first through the use of indentured servants, and later through slavery. Although they shared a common social value with residents of their home country, colonial farmers employed drastically different practices. This shift was facilitated by the particular social value of improvement. These practices, in turn, affected the conception of that social value. Horn notes that it was in the New World that improvement came to be linked with civility – the transformation of society from a state of nature to a perceived English ideal (Horn 1994:130). This reflects the dialectical nature of habitus and practice, and their link to the environment.
The shift in habitus entailed by the shift in practice affected more than just the colonial powers. For example, the transformation of South Carolinian estuaries to rice cultivation went hand in hand with the transformation of free African populations to New World slaves. The complex cultural renegotiations undertaken by all populations involved in that transformation lie beyond the scope of this paper. A few notes serve to highlight the relationship between practice, habitus, and the environment. Rice was an African cultivar first, and the people responsible for its production in the New World brought their practices of cultivation with them. Historian Peter Wood notes that the routine of rice cultivation remained the same as it passed westward across the Altantic (Wood 1974:59-62). Some slaves experienced a limited continuity of practice in their ecological engagement in the way, but the social context was very different. African rice farmers may have structured their practices in the same way, but the framework of operation for that structure changed. Habitus, that is, changed for them as well.
Habitus operates at two levels – the communal and the individual. In both cases, it is a facet of identity. It lays the groundwork for the common perception of shared values that allows members to identify their fellows and themselves in the horizontal comradeship of community. If Anderson claims that creole print capitalism gave rise to a new way of conceiving broad group identity as a nation – a structure of habitus – then surely the creolizations of peoples in the New World through the context of creating and experiencing new creolized landscapes also provided shared bases of experience for conceiving these newly communicable identities.
Anderson is so focused on the expansive nature of print capitalism and its power for creating communities by engaging with readers as a cohesive horizontal group (Anderson 2006[1983]:27, 30) that he overlooks other important media, such as art. Like printed texts, art is a problematic unifier. Although it bypasses the issue of literacy, both access and production are limited by social divisions such as class. It is still a useful tool for examining how groups perceive and construct their relationship with the environment, and how that relationship contributes to their identity.
Michael North examines the links between capitalism, Dutch hegemony, and art in his book Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age. As Dutch maritime power expanded and incomes generally rose within the Netherlands, people across a broader swath of social classes could afford, and consequently invested in, art. Art was one of the outlets acceptable to protestant values for exhibiting wealth, but the subject matter nevertheless became more secularized over time. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, one of the more popular subjects depicted was landscapes, including seascapes. North attributes this to two factors. First, innovation in painting techniques made landscapes cheaper to produce. Second, the function of paintings changed over the course of the century from a focus of religious devotion to a purer aesthetic value. North links this change to the influence of Calvinism. Interestingly, the taste in art across Dutch social classes was fairly consistent – the quantity and quality of the pieces and the prestige of the particular artists demonstrated more differentiation than the subject matter (North 1997[1992]:101, 104, 129-130). The increased availability and secularization of art in an expanding market reflects the many of the changes Anderson notes in the print market.
North notes that one reason for the popularity of landscapes in contrast to historical and mythological was that no specialized knowledge or education was necessary to understand their content (North 1997[1992]:134). Much like a novel or newspaper assumed community with the reader, landscapes leveled the ideological playing field of art. What’s more, they depicted (and shared) landscapes – cultural conceptions of the environment. Dutch landscapes included ships at sea and in port, farmlands, polders and canals, and hunting scenes – transformed landscapes, and dominated oceans (fig. 1). In the same way as print, this art communicated and perpetuated conceptions of the human – and specifically Dutch - relationship with the environment. It contributed in the same way to the horizontal conception and experience of shared identity as a nation.
The Dutch are only one example of how the relationship to the landscape depicted in art could be explicitly nationalistic. Nineteenth century America provides another, more overtly associated with a national movement. Landscape paintings were one way in which nineteenth-century Americans constructed their identity as separate from Europe. They dwelt on the perceived wildness of their frontiers as a source of vitalization for their people. The Hudson River School of painters embodies this tradition, influenced by Thomas Cole’s landscapes of upstate New York (fig. 2) Kaufmann refers to this process of the naturalization of the nation – a reimagining of the American relationship with its environment and of American identity relating the nation to the land. This trend in art was coincident with a naturalizing trend in literature, epitomized by and in some senses culminated in Thoreau’s Walden (Kaufmann 1998:669, 672-673).
Here again, the historical nature of man’s relationship with the environment represented through the cultural media of print as well as art, constructing identity (specifically national identity).
The post-Columbian history of the New World illustrates three of Balée’s precepts of historical ecology: the creolization of the landscape shows the extent to which humans have the ability to affect the diversity of the biosphere and how that can ipact the subsequent development of new cultural systems. It also demonstrates how the relationship between communities and the landscape is a total phenomenon – separating one from the other creates a false opposition that obscures their dialectical relationship. Examining the historical dimension also reveals how environment and engagement with the biosphere can affect habitus. Part of the total historical relationship between communities and landscapes, then, affects the production and reproduction of identity, including national identity.
Practice
Practice is how individuals engage with habitus to create and reproduce its structures, integrating themselves into communities by assimilating and spreading shared values and producing new history. Practices are produced at the intersection of the habitus (as productive product of the past) and the objective reality of the present (Bourdieu 1990[1980]:56). The most important aspect of practice for this exercise is the direct interaction between individuals and their landscapes. Bourdieu provides a useful example in his discussion of symbolic capital among the Kayble of Algeria. Peasants objecting to observed movement away from traditional practices decry a lack of respect for the established modes of ritualized interaction with their landscape. According to Bourdieu:
“Everything in the peasant’s practices actualizes, in a different mode, the objective intention revealed by ritual. The land is never treated as a raw material to be exploited, but always as the object of respect mixed with fear (elhiba): it will “settle its scores,” they say, and take revenge for the bad treatment it receives from a clumsy or over-hasty farmer. The accomplished peasant “presents” himself to his land with the stance appropriate when one man meets another (i.e., face to face) and with the attitude of trusting familiarity he would show a respected kinsman.” [Bourdieu 1994:70]
In this case, the traditional Kayble relationship with the landscape actuated through specific ritual practices provides a criterion for evaluating adherence to group values. The symbolic capital accrued through observance of proper practice situates the identity of the practitioner inside the traditional community. Conversely, those who disrespect the traditional practices, and the ritual relationship with the landscape, disrespect the group and distance themselves from that community. Stated more plainly, the Kayble’s agricultural practices (their relationship with the environment) are an important building block in their conception (or imagination) of their community.
These people consider the landscape an active participant in the community. Bourdieu’s account demonstrates how the Kayble anthropomorphize their lands, imbuing it with human desires for respect and revenge. They Kayble treat it as a respected kinsman. They identify it as human, situating it in their own social dynamics. They identify with the landscape through practice, and the relationship is consequently part of who they are, as individuals as well as a group.
The Ka’apor of Brazilian Amazonia, Balée’s fieldwork subjects, participate in a complex relationship with other elements of the biosphere that is played out on a daily basis. Balée refers to these interactions as ‘activity contexts’ to highlight the reciprocal nature of the activities – the Ka’apor are not simply using the plants (Balée 1992:49). These activity contexts represent quantifiable exhibitions of practice. Historical ecology is empirical – it quantifies engagement with the biosphere. Individual Ka’apor’s devote much of their time to subsistence level activities, and specifically to swidden gardening. Their language reflects the significance of these activities: one of two words for planting, yittim, is the same term used for the burial of human bodies (Balée 1992:50, 52). As with the Kayble, their relationship with their environment provides a basis for their identity. The word Ka’apor reflects this as well – Balée translates it as “the footprints of the forest,” (Balée 1992:16).
Even in contemporary societies, individuals engage with their environments in ways that impact on their identity. Seasonal changes, including extremes of weather and precipitation, affect practice at very basic levels, dictating changes in modes of dress, lodging, transportation, and subsistence (availability of foods). The experience of those changes, and the practical ways of responding to them, enmesh individuals in their cultures and communities. To use a personal (but not unique) example, the varied experience of the seasons, or even climate, in different regions of the world can reinforce identification with a particular area and the associated community by challenging expectations (habitus) and causing nostalgia.
The ongoing dialectic of human engagement in the biosphere is also reflected in global politics, exemplified by the Kyoto Protocol instigated by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This project aims to induce national governments to pass laws regulating (and restructuring) practices perceived to have a negative effect on the biosphere. The articles of the Convention recognize human influence on climate change, and clearly state its objective in reducing negative impact:
“The ultimate objective of this Convention and any related legal instruments that the Conference of the Parties may adopt is to achieve, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the convention, stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” [United Nations 1992:4]
The stance of nations on environmental concerns relate to how they are perceived by outsiders. National policies also provide individuals with structures or tools to evaluate their own relationship to the national community. This relationship is enacted through practice – individual actions guided by their understanding of their role in the biosphere, structured by habitus.
Moving away from broadly conceived communities such as nations, within North America, individuals can practice different modes of engagement with the biosphere that draw them in to smaller communities. Hunters provide an excellent example of this. David Petersen, who identifies himself as a hunter (and specifically a true, nature, or spiritual hunter) and a neo-animist or eartheist, explores some of the social dynamics of hunting in his book Heartsblood: Hunting, Spirituality, and Wildness in America. The text is an unabashed defense of hunting, or of a certain kind of hunting. Following Stephen Kellert, he divides hunters in to three categories: those who hunt for subsistence (utilitarian or meat hunters), those who hunt for sport and trophies (dominionistic or sport hunters), and those who hunt to experience “nature” by engaging with the biosphere as a predator . Petersen’s philosophy is essentially animism grounded in evolution: humanity evolved as hunters and gatherers. “The hunt is, or should be, a quiet, deeply personal rite, an active sacrament that reconnects us to our human/humane roots and realigns us with the wild (being the only true) nature, our one and only home: past present, forever,” (Petersen 2000:7, 18, 27, 43, 53-4).
Petersen categorizes modern American hunters based on their practice, which he views as a reflection of attitude towards nature, a term he takes to be self-explanatory. Utilitarian hunters see nature as a practical means of subsistence. Dominionistic hunters see animals as dangerous beasts against which they can prove their personal prowess in (according to Petersen) increasingly unfair competition. They are more likely to rely on complex modern technology, hunt purely for the thrill of the kill, and take advantage of game farms. He characterized nature hunters as having a deeper respect for nature and natural creatures (for the biosphere, that is), and hunted specifically to foster feelings of engagement (2000:43-45, 54-55). Practice, then, reflects identity within the more generalized hunting community.
Petersen uses himself as an example of this last type throughout the book. Describing his preference for bow hunting over using a rifle, he explains how it is part of his identity: “I’ve been bending bows and flinging arrows since I was old enough to kiss the girls and like it – plenty long enough for it to have become integral to who and what I am,” (Petersen 2000:174). Bow hunting differs from hunting with a gun in several aspects, and for Petersen they affect his level of engagement. “For me, packing a high-powered rifle queers the whole hunting deal.” He continues in the following paragraph, with a sentiment that nicely exemplifies the relationship of practice on habitus and identity in regards to the engagement with the biosphere:
“In contrast, when weasling through the woods in camouflage, carrying a weapon that requires me to get within slingshot range of my prey, the calming down, the slowing down, the personifying of Ortega’s “alert man” all comes easy; all come, that is, natural. When hunting well – “playin’ in the groove,” as a musician friend would phrase it – I feel invisible, confident, alive … [sic] like a proper predator with purpose and a plan; an actor rather than an audience. And I can hit that groove only with a stickbow and camouflage.” [Petersen 2000: 175]
Conclusion
Benedict Anderson’s concept of the imagine community provides a useful tool for exploring how group identity in conceived, and the historical dimension of nationalism. Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus and practice reveal how identity is produced, experienced, and reproduced. William Balée’s historical ecology, however, refocuses this social theory on humanity’s broader ecological context. Environment does not determine identity, any more than it determines culture. It does, however influence its construction, on both an individual and community level. Identity is historical, structured through habitus, which is itself reinforced and recreated through practice – practice and habitus can not be separated from the landscape, and the ecological environment.
End
-would like to see more of the theoretical groundwork established in the historical section re-iterated in the Practice section
-more clear take-away points
-ground examples more firmly in to the theory
-fewer rhetorical questions asked to reader, just say what you want to say
Thanks to anyone who perseveres through all of that ;)
Guidelines
a. Focus on one of the key concepts for the course: Power, History, Culture, Society, Symbolism, Practice, Idealism/Materialism, Subject/Other, Representation/Identity, Agency. You can be comparative between concepts or between a concept and topic (e.g. History to Idealism; or Agency to evolution). However, the main subject and argument of your essay should be theoretically link one of these key concepts in social theory and cultural anthropology. [Obviously I went with Identity :x]
b. You may focus on a concept not listed above after discussion with and approval from the instructor.
c. Engage with a theorist and/or theoretical school that is not on the syllabus. Possible selections include (but are not limited to): Mead, Sahlins, M. Harris, Pierce, Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Latour, etc. Do so while engaging the themes of the class that we have talked and read about (or that are on the syllabus). I want your argument to be a dialogue between you, our class sources and the outside sources located by you.
Grounding Identity: Historical Ecology, Habitus, and Imagined Communities"
How do people incorporate the physical environment into their identity, and their conceptions of the communities to which they belong? Human cultures do not exist in a vacuum – social interactions take place in a physical as well as a social milieu. Studies of identity often focus on the latter at the expense of the former. The relationships between humans and their ecological contexts are important, however. They have historical dimensions, and continue to be shaped by daily interactions. Cultural perceptions of both the landscape and the group’s relationship to it can be major facets of identity at a number of levels. Three theorists whose ideas can assist in exploring these relationships are Benedict Anderson, Pierre Bourdieu, and William Balée. Balée’s ideas provide a foundation for grounding concepts introduced by Bourdieu and Anderson in humanity’s relationships with the ecological environment.
Any exploration of this issue encounters several potentially problematic terms and concepts. What is nature? What is the landscape? What is a community? The following definitions will facilitate and clarify the discussion:
Biosphere: Balée defines the biosphere as “that part of the earth suffused with life,” (1998:13). This paper adopts the term, with intent of conveying the location of humanity inside that context.
Community: Drawing on Anderson’s work, a community is herein defined as an imagined horizontal comradeship based on the perception of shared values (Anderson 2006[1983]:6-7). Communities are not inherently exclusive – individuals may belong to multiple communities.
Environment: The physical context of existence of individuals and communities – the intersection of the biosphere and landscape.
Identity: For the purpose of this paper, identity refers to either perceptions of an individual’s relationship to or with a community, or shared conceptions of community composition. These perceptions and conceptions can be either avowed or ascribed.
Landscape: The cultural perception of meaning inherent in features of the physical environment. This includes both the built and natural environment, and is intended to problematize the concept of nature and the natural.
In addition to these key terms, Balée’s theoretical approach merits explanation. Historical ecology is an anthropological approach which seeks to better contextualize the relationships between humanity and the biosphere. Historical ecologists see those relationships as both reciprocal and dialectical. Historical ecology draws on the strengths of other anthropological approaches to this issue, while rejecting other aspects. Cultural ecology, for instance, examines similar questions about the relationships of human societies to the natural environment over time. However, this approach creates a false dichotomy between nature and culture; historical ecologists see the two in dialogue with each other. Likewise, they reject the principle of environmental determinism that is fostered in cultural ecology, and do not limit their exploration of their broader question to ‘egalitarian’ societies. This is something historical ecology has in common with the cultural materialism approach, with which it also shares an investment in the scientific method. The temporal relationship is viewed as historical, however, rather than evolutionary (Balée 1998:2-4). In his words, “Historical ecology actually involves the empirical investigation of relationships between humans and the biosphere in specific temporal, regional, cultural, and biotic contexts, regardless of their relationship to (or incorporation into) nation states,” (Balée 1998:3). It is an investigation of human influence within the biosphere, geared towards identifying and analyzing the effects of historical events and processes.
How then do these relationships affect how human communities understand themselves? How do they influence the formation of group identity and how, in turn, does the culture-bound understanding of those relationships affect attitudes towards the environment? Two contexts are constructive for investigating these questions: history, and practice. The importance of the historical dimension is linked to historical ecology, because the actual past practices of communities play a role in the formation of their identities through their interactions with the broader the biosphere. The constructed nature of history – what communities believe about their own past – is a different but related consideration. The historical context also includes habitus. Bourdieu calls it “a product of history, [that] produces individual and collective practices – more history – in accordance with the schemes generated by history,” (Bourdieu 1990[1980]:54). Practice is a direct result of historical contexts, but because of the unconscious nature of habitus, its role in the production and experience of identity deserves special consideration.
History
Three of four precepts of historical ecology lain down by Balée are explicitly historical. The first is that “much, if not all, of the nonhuman biosphere has been affected by human activity,” (Balée 1998:14). This precept is the main reason this paper avoids the use of the term ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ in reference to environment and landscapes. All forms of human societies have a great capacity for transforming the biosphere (though neither destructiveness nor environmental stewardship is inherently human) (1998:22). The second historical precept (third of the four total) states that:
“…different kinds of sociopolitical and economic systems…in particular regional contexts tend to result in qualitatively unlike effects on the biosphere, on the abundance and speciosity of nonhuman life forms, and on the trajectory of subsequent human sociopolitical and economic…systems.” [Balée 1998:22]
This effect on the historical trajectory consequently impacts on the identity of the subsequent systems and cultures. The third historically grounded precept is the last: “Human communities and cultures together with the landscapes and regions with which they interact over time can be understood as total phenomena,” (Balée 1998:24). This is related to the dialectical nature of their relationship. Humans turn the environment into landscape – the biosphere itself becomes culture.
The colonization of the New World illustrates all of these precepts and demonstrates the historical dimension the relationship between identity and landscape. In particular, the creolization of the landscape in the New World was as essential as print capitalism in the development of nationalism and the imagination of national communities. Europeans did not come alone across the Atlantic. They brought plants, animals, and ideas about the proper way to interact with the environment - habitus. The new setting, its native peoples included, resisted these importations with varying degrees of success. The dynamics of colonization transformed landscape along with other aspects of culture that play in to identity.
Alfred Crosby explores several dimensions of the creolization of the landscape in his book, Ecological Imperialism: the Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Part of Crosby’s argument is that the shape colonization took in specific areas correlates directly to the suitability of the native environment to European agriculture. American colonists transformed their new lands to pasture, and soon found familiar Old World plants growing therein. New Englanders were dealing with the familiar and ubiquitous dandelion by the mid 17th century. Imported forage crops quickly outcompeted native grasses. It was no accident that an environment so well suited to growing European crops and sustaining European styles of farming would become so dominated by European culture. Crosby even refers to the eastern third of North America as a neo-Europe, reflecting the level of this ecological dimension of colonization: “These regions are the arenas in which native and alien species had their most significant competitions in the post-Columbian and post-Cookian era, and in which the results made possible the Europeanization of the whole lands,” (Crosby 2004[1986]:146-9, 155, 157).
Crosby’s book focuses on how Europeans purposefully and accidentally altered the ecology of the lands they encountered. The changes that came about were extreme – Crosby likens them to the mass extinction of species at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch, 1.8 million years ago (Crosby 2004[1986]:271). He makes little mention of the transformative effects of these ecological changes on culture, or identity, for indigenes and newcomers alike. While his research fails to consider Balée’s second historically grounded precept by not considering culture along with ecology, Crosby provides the groundwork, so to speak, for further exploration. There are many examples of how introduced species affected native cultures in colonial lands, though one of the most famous is certainly the adoption of the horse by Native American plains cultures. Although typically viewed as a successfully and wholly beneficial adaptation, the change to a horse focused culture completely disrupted traditional lifeways. According to historian Pekka Hämäläinen:
“Horses helped Indians do everything – move, hunt, trade, and wage war – more effectively, but they also disrupted subsistence economies, weakened grassland and bison ecologies, created new social inequalities, unhinged gender relations, undetermined traditional political hierarchies, and intensified resource competition and warfare.” [Hämäläinen 2006:834]
The deep transformation of their culture resulted in a deep shift in their identity, as horses became the focus of community life.
The colonizers themselves underwent significant cultural changes in response not just to their new environment, but also through their efforts to transform it into a more familiar landscape. While Crosby remarks on the ultimate success of their venture, a complete transformation was never possible. Europeans could not simply transplant their ideas about how landscapes should be structured and the practices involved in producing them to new areas of the biosphere with new contextual considerations – plants, animals, and people – without some compromise and change. New colonial identities were grounded in the landscape through the experience of transformation and the practical concessions made to the local ecology.
Benedict Anderson dwells on the importance of New World creoles in the development of nationalism, and the experience of creolization in the production of the new framework for consciousness necessary for communities to imagine themselves as nations. The experience centers on the power of pilgrimage and print-capitalism in allowing colonials (and for Anderson, the power of imagining nations lies clearly in the hands of the colonial populations) to conceive of themselves as a community (Anderson 2006[1983]:65). While these factors were certainly notable, in particular the power of print capitalism to draw readers in to a shared sense of horizontal comradeship, that comradeship also arose through the shared experience of transforming of the landscape.
Historian James Horn examines the influence of this transformation on English Colonists arriving in the Chesapeake in the seventeenth century. They arrived to find an imposingly, (apparently) wild world, teeming with new flora and fauna. To English eyes, “[t]he land was seen in terms of the commodities it would in time yield,” – quite a different philosophy from the native peoples (Horn 1994:127). The land was a wilderness to be tamed, and a promised land full of the bounty of Providence. English attitudes towards the environment derived from the concept of improvement. This included the introduction of new crops and new farming techniques and the incorporation of marginal land in to the broader agricultural system, or the conversion of new land to landscapes. Improvement was a structuring structure – a cognitive template that guided how the English perceived their role in the biosphere. It was part of their habitus (Bourdieu 1990[1980]:53). Habitus, however, is part of a “dialectical relationship that is established between the regularities of the material universe of properties and the classificatory schemes of the habitus, (Bourdieu 1990[1980]:140). When the properties of the material universe (the environment: in this case, the ecological, social, and geographical setting of the Chesapeake) become irregular, the classificatory schemes of the habitus (improvement) must adapt.
To the colonial eye, the New World appeared ripe for improvement. In contrast, the practices employed at home had only limited practicality for enabling improvement. For example, though the English experimented with crops such as tobacco at home, the availability of land in the Chesapeake resulted in a massive increase in the scale of production (Horn 1994:128-130). Colonial planters also engaged in new relationships of production to improve their land and better extract resources from the biosphere, first through the use of indentured servants, and later through slavery. Although they shared a common social value with residents of their home country, colonial farmers employed drastically different practices. This shift was facilitated by the particular social value of improvement. These practices, in turn, affected the conception of that social value. Horn notes that it was in the New World that improvement came to be linked with civility – the transformation of society from a state of nature to a perceived English ideal (Horn 1994:130). This reflects the dialectical nature of habitus and practice, and their link to the environment.
The shift in habitus entailed by the shift in practice affected more than just the colonial powers. For example, the transformation of South Carolinian estuaries to rice cultivation went hand in hand with the transformation of free African populations to New World slaves. The complex cultural renegotiations undertaken by all populations involved in that transformation lie beyond the scope of this paper. A few notes serve to highlight the relationship between practice, habitus, and the environment. Rice was an African cultivar first, and the people responsible for its production in the New World brought their practices of cultivation with them. Historian Peter Wood notes that the routine of rice cultivation remained the same as it passed westward across the Altantic (Wood 1974:59-62). Some slaves experienced a limited continuity of practice in their ecological engagement in the way, but the social context was very different. African rice farmers may have structured their practices in the same way, but the framework of operation for that structure changed. Habitus, that is, changed for them as well.
Habitus operates at two levels – the communal and the individual. In both cases, it is a facet of identity. It lays the groundwork for the common perception of shared values that allows members to identify their fellows and themselves in the horizontal comradeship of community. If Anderson claims that creole print capitalism gave rise to a new way of conceiving broad group identity as a nation – a structure of habitus – then surely the creolizations of peoples in the New World through the context of creating and experiencing new creolized landscapes also provided shared bases of experience for conceiving these newly communicable identities.
Anderson is so focused on the expansive nature of print capitalism and its power for creating communities by engaging with readers as a cohesive horizontal group (Anderson 2006[1983]:27, 30) that he overlooks other important media, such as art. Like printed texts, art is a problematic unifier. Although it bypasses the issue of literacy, both access and production are limited by social divisions such as class. It is still a useful tool for examining how groups perceive and construct their relationship with the environment, and how that relationship contributes to their identity.
Michael North examines the links between capitalism, Dutch hegemony, and art in his book Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age. As Dutch maritime power expanded and incomes generally rose within the Netherlands, people across a broader swath of social classes could afford, and consequently invested in, art. Art was one of the outlets acceptable to protestant values for exhibiting wealth, but the subject matter nevertheless became more secularized over time. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, one of the more popular subjects depicted was landscapes, including seascapes. North attributes this to two factors. First, innovation in painting techniques made landscapes cheaper to produce. Second, the function of paintings changed over the course of the century from a focus of religious devotion to a purer aesthetic value. North links this change to the influence of Calvinism. Interestingly, the taste in art across Dutch social classes was fairly consistent – the quantity and quality of the pieces and the prestige of the particular artists demonstrated more differentiation than the subject matter (North 1997[1992]:101, 104, 129-130). The increased availability and secularization of art in an expanding market reflects the many of the changes Anderson notes in the print market.
North notes that one reason for the popularity of landscapes in contrast to historical and mythological was that no specialized knowledge or education was necessary to understand their content (North 1997[1992]:134). Much like a novel or newspaper assumed community with the reader, landscapes leveled the ideological playing field of art. What’s more, they depicted (and shared) landscapes – cultural conceptions of the environment. Dutch landscapes included ships at sea and in port, farmlands, polders and canals, and hunting scenes – transformed landscapes, and dominated oceans (fig. 1). In the same way as print, this art communicated and perpetuated conceptions of the human – and specifically Dutch - relationship with the environment. It contributed in the same way to the horizontal conception and experience of shared identity as a nation.
The Dutch are only one example of how the relationship to the landscape depicted in art could be explicitly nationalistic. Nineteenth century America provides another, more overtly associated with a national movement. Landscape paintings were one way in which nineteenth-century Americans constructed their identity as separate from Europe. They dwelt on the perceived wildness of their frontiers as a source of vitalization for their people. The Hudson River School of painters embodies this tradition, influenced by Thomas Cole’s landscapes of upstate New York (fig. 2) Kaufmann refers to this process of the naturalization of the nation – a reimagining of the American relationship with its environment and of American identity relating the nation to the land. This trend in art was coincident with a naturalizing trend in literature, epitomized by and in some senses culminated in Thoreau’s Walden (Kaufmann 1998:669, 672-673).
Here again, the historical nature of man’s relationship with the environment represented through the cultural media of print as well as art, constructing identity (specifically national identity).
The post-Columbian history of the New World illustrates three of Balée’s precepts of historical ecology: the creolization of the landscape shows the extent to which humans have the ability to affect the diversity of the biosphere and how that can ipact the subsequent development of new cultural systems. It also demonstrates how the relationship between communities and the landscape is a total phenomenon – separating one from the other creates a false opposition that obscures their dialectical relationship. Examining the historical dimension also reveals how environment and engagement with the biosphere can affect habitus. Part of the total historical relationship between communities and landscapes, then, affects the production and reproduction of identity, including national identity.
Practice
Practice is how individuals engage with habitus to create and reproduce its structures, integrating themselves into communities by assimilating and spreading shared values and producing new history. Practices are produced at the intersection of the habitus (as productive product of the past) and the objective reality of the present (Bourdieu 1990[1980]:56). The most important aspect of practice for this exercise is the direct interaction between individuals and their landscapes. Bourdieu provides a useful example in his discussion of symbolic capital among the Kayble of Algeria. Peasants objecting to observed movement away from traditional practices decry a lack of respect for the established modes of ritualized interaction with their landscape. According to Bourdieu:
“Everything in the peasant’s practices actualizes, in a different mode, the objective intention revealed by ritual. The land is never treated as a raw material to be exploited, but always as the object of respect mixed with fear (elhiba): it will “settle its scores,” they say, and take revenge for the bad treatment it receives from a clumsy or over-hasty farmer. The accomplished peasant “presents” himself to his land with the stance appropriate when one man meets another (i.e., face to face) and with the attitude of trusting familiarity he would show a respected kinsman.” [Bourdieu 1994:70]
In this case, the traditional Kayble relationship with the landscape actuated through specific ritual practices provides a criterion for evaluating adherence to group values. The symbolic capital accrued through observance of proper practice situates the identity of the practitioner inside the traditional community. Conversely, those who disrespect the traditional practices, and the ritual relationship with the landscape, disrespect the group and distance themselves from that community. Stated more plainly, the Kayble’s agricultural practices (their relationship with the environment) are an important building block in their conception (or imagination) of their community.
These people consider the landscape an active participant in the community. Bourdieu’s account demonstrates how the Kayble anthropomorphize their lands, imbuing it with human desires for respect and revenge. They Kayble treat it as a respected kinsman. They identify it as human, situating it in their own social dynamics. They identify with the landscape through practice, and the relationship is consequently part of who they are, as individuals as well as a group.
The Ka’apor of Brazilian Amazonia, Balée’s fieldwork subjects, participate in a complex relationship with other elements of the biosphere that is played out on a daily basis. Balée refers to these interactions as ‘activity contexts’ to highlight the reciprocal nature of the activities – the Ka’apor are not simply using the plants (Balée 1992:49). These activity contexts represent quantifiable exhibitions of practice. Historical ecology is empirical – it quantifies engagement with the biosphere. Individual Ka’apor’s devote much of their time to subsistence level activities, and specifically to swidden gardening. Their language reflects the significance of these activities: one of two words for planting, yittim, is the same term used for the burial of human bodies (Balée 1992:50, 52). As with the Kayble, their relationship with their environment provides a basis for their identity. The word Ka’apor reflects this as well – Balée translates it as “the footprints of the forest,” (Balée 1992:16).
Even in contemporary societies, individuals engage with their environments in ways that impact on their identity. Seasonal changes, including extremes of weather and precipitation, affect practice at very basic levels, dictating changes in modes of dress, lodging, transportation, and subsistence (availability of foods). The experience of those changes, and the practical ways of responding to them, enmesh individuals in their cultures and communities. To use a personal (but not unique) example, the varied experience of the seasons, or even climate, in different regions of the world can reinforce identification with a particular area and the associated community by challenging expectations (habitus) and causing nostalgia.
The ongoing dialectic of human engagement in the biosphere is also reflected in global politics, exemplified by the Kyoto Protocol instigated by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This project aims to induce national governments to pass laws regulating (and restructuring) practices perceived to have a negative effect on the biosphere. The articles of the Convention recognize human influence on climate change, and clearly state its objective in reducing negative impact:
“The ultimate objective of this Convention and any related legal instruments that the Conference of the Parties may adopt is to achieve, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the convention, stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” [United Nations 1992:4]
The stance of nations on environmental concerns relate to how they are perceived by outsiders. National policies also provide individuals with structures or tools to evaluate their own relationship to the national community. This relationship is enacted through practice – individual actions guided by their understanding of their role in the biosphere, structured by habitus.
Moving away from broadly conceived communities such as nations, within North America, individuals can practice different modes of engagement with the biosphere that draw them in to smaller communities. Hunters provide an excellent example of this. David Petersen, who identifies himself as a hunter (and specifically a true, nature, or spiritual hunter) and a neo-animist or eartheist, explores some of the social dynamics of hunting in his book Heartsblood: Hunting, Spirituality, and Wildness in America. The text is an unabashed defense of hunting, or of a certain kind of hunting. Following Stephen Kellert, he divides hunters in to three categories: those who hunt for subsistence (utilitarian or meat hunters), those who hunt for sport and trophies (dominionistic or sport hunters), and those who hunt to experience “nature” by engaging with the biosphere as a predator . Petersen’s philosophy is essentially animism grounded in evolution: humanity evolved as hunters and gatherers. “The hunt is, or should be, a quiet, deeply personal rite, an active sacrament that reconnects us to our human/humane roots and realigns us with the wild (being the only true) nature, our one and only home: past present, forever,” (Petersen 2000:7, 18, 27, 43, 53-4).
Petersen categorizes modern American hunters based on their practice, which he views as a reflection of attitude towards nature, a term he takes to be self-explanatory. Utilitarian hunters see nature as a practical means of subsistence. Dominionistic hunters see animals as dangerous beasts against which they can prove their personal prowess in (according to Petersen) increasingly unfair competition. They are more likely to rely on complex modern technology, hunt purely for the thrill of the kill, and take advantage of game farms. He characterized nature hunters as having a deeper respect for nature and natural creatures (for the biosphere, that is), and hunted specifically to foster feelings of engagement (2000:43-45, 54-55). Practice, then, reflects identity within the more generalized hunting community.
Petersen uses himself as an example of this last type throughout the book. Describing his preference for bow hunting over using a rifle, he explains how it is part of his identity: “I’ve been bending bows and flinging arrows since I was old enough to kiss the girls and like it – plenty long enough for it to have become integral to who and what I am,” (Petersen 2000:174). Bow hunting differs from hunting with a gun in several aspects, and for Petersen they affect his level of engagement. “For me, packing a high-powered rifle queers the whole hunting deal.” He continues in the following paragraph, with a sentiment that nicely exemplifies the relationship of practice on habitus and identity in regards to the engagement with the biosphere:
“In contrast, when weasling through the woods in camouflage, carrying a weapon that requires me to get within slingshot range of my prey, the calming down, the slowing down, the personifying of Ortega’s “alert man” all comes easy; all come, that is, natural. When hunting well – “playin’ in the groove,” as a musician friend would phrase it – I feel invisible, confident, alive … [sic] like a proper predator with purpose and a plan; an actor rather than an audience. And I can hit that groove only with a stickbow and camouflage.” [Petersen 2000: 175]
Conclusion
Benedict Anderson’s concept of the imagine community provides a useful tool for exploring how group identity in conceived, and the historical dimension of nationalism. Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus and practice reveal how identity is produced, experienced, and reproduced. William Balée’s historical ecology, however, refocuses this social theory on humanity’s broader ecological context. Environment does not determine identity, any more than it determines culture. It does, however influence its construction, on both an individual and community level. Identity is historical, structured through habitus, which is itself reinforced and recreated through practice – practice and habitus can not be separated from the landscape, and the ecological environment.
End
-would like to see more of the theoretical groundwork established in the historical section re-iterated in the Practice section
-more clear take-away points
-ground examples more firmly in to the theory
-fewer rhetorical questions asked to reader, just say what you want to say
Thanks to anyone who perseveres through all of that ;)
calm