Anthropology and Nature

270 Pages·2013·4.53 MB·English

by  Kirsten Hastrup

Anthropology and Nature
On the basis of empirical studies, this book explores nature as an integral
part of the social worlds conventionally studied by anthropologists. The
book may be read as a form of scholarly “edgework,” resisting institutional
divisions and conceptual routines in the interest of exploring new modali-
ties of anthropological knowledge making.
The present anthropological interest in the natural world responds
to large-scale natural disasters, new health concerns, and global climate
change, increasingly stressed in scientififi c and public debates. This has given
rise to a keen sense that nature matters to society at many levels, ranging
from the microbiological and genetic framing of reproduction, over co-
species development, to macro-ecological changes of weather and climate.
Given that the human footprint is now conspicuous across the entire globe,
in the oceans, on the continents, and in the atmosphere, it has also become
clear that society matters to nature. While the perspectives of the natural
and the social sciences may diffff er, they are increasingly dependent on each
other for a comprehensive understanding of the mutual constitution of nat-
ural and social forms. The book opens up a creative space for reflflection on
the composite and integrated life-worlds of people beyond old dualisms.
Kirsten Hastrupis Professor of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen.
Routledge Studies in Anthropology
1 Student Mobility and Narrative 8 The Social Life of Climate
in Europe Change Models
The New Strangers Anticipating Nature
Elizabeth Murphy-Lejeune Edited by Kirsten Hastrup
and Martin Skrydstrup
2 The Question of the Gift
Essays across Disciplines 9 Islam, Development, and Urban
Edited by Mark Osteen Women’s Reproductive Practices
Cortney Hughes Rinker
3 Decolonising Indigenous Rights
Edited by Adolfo de Oliveira 10 Senses and Citizenships
Embodying Political Life
4 Traveling Spirits Edited by Susanna Trnka,
Migrants, Markets and Mobilities Christine Dureau and Julie Park
Edited by Gertrud Hüwelmeier
and Kristine Krause 11 Environmental Anthropology
Future Directions
5 Anthropologists, Indigenous Edited by Helen Kopnina and
Scholars and the Research Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet
Endeavour
Seeking Bridges Towards Mutual 12 Times of Security
Respect Ethnographies of Fear, Protest
Edited by Joy Hendry and the Future
and Laara Fitznor Edited by Martin Holbraad
and Morten Axel Pedersen
6 Confronting Capital
Critique and Engagement in 13 Climate Change and Tradition
Anthropology in a Small Island State
Edited by Pauline Gardiner The Rising Tide
Barber, Belinda Leach and Peter Rudiak-Gould
Winnie Lem
14 Anthropology and Nature
7 Adolescent Identity Edited by Kirsten Hastrup
Evolutionary, Cultural and
Developmental Perspectives
Edited by Bonnie L. Hewlett
Anthropology and Nature
Edited by Kirsten Hastrup
First published 2014
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
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© 2014 Taylor & Francis
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material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Anthropology and nature / edited by Kirsten Hastrup.
pages cm. — (Routledge studies in anthropology ; 14)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Anthropology—Philosophy. 2. Philosophy of nature. 3. Human
ecology—Philosophy. I. Hastrup, Kirsten.
GN33.A446 2013
301.01—dc23
2013008576
ISBN: 978-0-415-70275-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-79536-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by IBT Global.
Contents
List of Figures vii
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
1 Nature: Anthropology on the Edge 1
KIRSTEN HASTRUP
2 More-than-Human Sociality: A Call for Critical Description 27
ANNA TSING
3 Qualifying Coastal Nature:
Bio-conservation Projects in South East India 43
FRIDA HASTRUP
4 Engaged World-Making: Movements of Sand,
Sea, and People at Two Pacifific Islands 62
MARIA LOUISE BØNNELYKKE ROBERTSON AND CECILIE RUBOW
5 Political Ecology in a More-than-Human
World: Rethinking ‘Natural’ Hazards 79
SARAH J. WHATMORE
6 Islands of Nature: Insular Objects and
Frozen Spirits in Northern Mongolia 96
MORTEN AXEL PEDERSEN
7 Establishing a ‘Third Space’? Anthropology and
the Potentials of Transcending a Great Divide 108
ANDRE GINGRICH
vi Contents
8 The Inevitability of Nature as a Rhetorical Resource 125
STEVE RAYNER AND CLARE HEYWARD
9 Divide and Rule: Nature and Society
in a Global Forest Programme 147
SIGNE HOWELL
10 Life at the Border: Nim Chimpsky et al. 166
GISLI PALSSON
11 Human Activity between Nature and Society:
The Negotiation of Infertility in China 184
AYO WAHLBERG
12 Broken Cosmologies: Climate, Water,
and State in the Peruvian Andes 196
KARSTEN PÆRREGAARD
13 Of Maps and Men: Making Places
and People in the Arctic 211
KIRSTEN HASTRUP
14 Designing Environments for Life 233
TIM INGOLD
Contributors 247
Index 253
Figures
8.1 Nature is externalized to be observed (after Ingold 1993). 129
8.2 Myths of nature (after Holling 1986; Thompson 1987). 135
8.3 Myths of the economy (after Holling 1986). 136
8.4 Planetary Boundaries (Adapted by permission from
Macmillan Publishers Ltd: Nature; Rockstrom et al.,
Copyright 2010). 140
10.1 The evolutionary position of humans among primates. 175
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Preface and Acknowledgements
This volume takes anthropology a step forward by addressing nature
directly, not as external to social life but as an integral part of it. The book
may be read as a form of scholarly edgework, resisting institutional divi-
sions and conceptual routines in the interest of exploring new modalities
of anthropological knowledge making. It is also a book that testififies to the
generative power of anthropology, as engaged in discovering, defifi ning, and
creating signififi cant objects, relations, and scales. Such generative power
always rests on the edge between reasonable certainty about the workings
of the world, and the manifest uncertainties just beyond the horizon.
For anthropologists the empirical work implies directing their attention
towards the complex meshwork of human life as lived, and this is precisely
what the chapters of the book set out to demonstrate in each their own
way. In the process of ethnographic exploration, the chapters testify not
only to the entanglement of things natural and things social, but also to
the entwinement of analytical perspective and ethnographic material. This
allows for new ways of perceiving and scaling the object of anthropology,
and we sense how a vital and creative space for future anthropological
studies opens up, acknowledging that all worlds are emergent, and that
science therefore always operates on the edge of the known. The book thus
paves the way for further probing into the co-constitution of species, of
animate and inanimate elements, of social and biological potentialities, and
of human and other life forms. Along such fault lines, new worlds emerge
as objects of anthropological interest, through which they may become
temporarily manifest.
Anthropological knowledge interests always reflfl ect pressing concerns in
the world, primarily because anthropologists work with the world. Wars,
religious conflfl icts, colonial or postcolonial problems, issues of equality or
discrimination, battles over land-rights, epidemic diseases, hunger catas-
trophes, economic crises, and so forth have been subjected to anthropologi-
cal interest in the course of its history. At present the intense interest in the
natural world is partly a response to large-scale natural disasters and global
climate challenges, and to a keen sense that nature matters to society. It
matters at many levels, ranging from the micro-biological constituents of