Introduction: from the "New Ecology" to the New Ecologies Author(S): Aletta Biersack Source: American Anthropologist, Vol

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Introduction: From the "New Ecology" to the New Ecologies Author(s): Aletta Biersack Source: American Anthropologist, Vol. 101, No. 1 (Mar., 1999), pp. 5-18 Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/683337 Accessed: 26-09-2017 18:15 UTC

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This content downloaded from 108.179.181.195 on Tue, 26 Sep 2017 18:15:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms ALETTA BIERSACK Department of Anthropology University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403-121 8

Introduction: From the "New Ecology" to the New Ecologies

An earlier ecological anthropology defined its project within the compass of the idealism v. materialism debate. Culture was an adaptive tool, instrumental rather than formal; it was intelligible with respect to its material effects, not as the idealists would maintain in terms of itself, as an autonomous, self-determining order of reality. This argument was mounted with respect to bounded, stable, self-regulating, local, or at best regional entities and the environment they inhabited. All of the premises of the earlier ecology have since been challenged, and today's ecologies symbolic, historical, and political radically depart from the reductions and elisions of the ecological anthropology of the past. In particular, the new ecologies override the dichotomies that informed and enlivened the debates of the past nature/culture, idealism/materialism and they are informed by the literature on transnationalist flows and local-global articulations. This introduction positions Rappaport's work within this historical shift from a polarized field of mutually exclusive frameworks to today's synthetic new ecologies and their antireductive materialism. Rappaport's work, produced over three decades, serves, in and through its own transformations, as a bridge between the reductive materialism of the past and a new-matexialist ecology. [Rappaport, ecological anthropology, materialism v. idealism, the new materialism]

So much has been happening in ecology recently that (symbolic, historical, and political), indicating their con- we, students and colleagues of Roy A. Rappaport, nection to but also deviation from anterior frameworks. would be remiss in failing to explore where ecology The third section announces what I call the new material- has been alld where it is going in tribute to him. This con- ism, a materialism that ovemdes the dichotomies and de- temporary issues forum provides a series of soundings in bates of the past idealism v. materialism, for example, the new ecologies prepared by those who collaborated with and nature v. culture arld that undergirds the various new or learned from Rappaport and who wish to use the occa- ecologies. In the final section, I introduce the particular sion of his passing to explore the relationship of Rap- articles of this special issue and their contributions to the new directions of ecological anthropology. Taken together paport's work to today's reenergized ecological anthropol- they demonstrate the continuing value of Rappaport's writ- ogy and its emerging terrain. ings as arl open and provocative oeuvre. Here I initiate this task by casting a glance backward to the 1960s, when Pigsfor the Ancestors was written, first as a dissertation and then as a major monograph, and to the The "New Ecology" decade following the book's publication, when materialists and idealists alike stridently debated the merits and defi- Pigs for the Ancestors and Its Critics ciencies of the book. Rappaport would respond to his crit- Originally published in 1968, Pigsfor the Ancestors has ics in two key texts: the collection of essays called Ecol- garnered one of the largest anthropological audiences ever, ogy, Meaning, and Religion published in 1979 and the larger, surely, than Argonauts, Coral Gardens, Witcheraft, "Epilogue" to the "new, enlarged" edition of Pigs for the Oracles, and Magic, and The Nuer, to name a few indis- Ancestors published in 1984. Through these texts, Rap- pensable classics. The book, as well as the summary article paport distanced himself from the functionalism and re- published the year before, "Ritual Regulations of Environ- ductive matenalism of Pigs, made modest forays into an mental Relations among a New Guinea People" (1967), emerging political ecology, and developed an exemplary advanced a new ecology. Against Stewardian "cultural hypothesis about the complexity of the human condition. ecology," which took cultures as the units of analysis, the This history, a history that establishes Rappaport's work as "new ecology''l would focus on populations "in the eco- a precursor to today's emerging ecologies, is reviewed in logical sense, that is, as one of the components of a system the first section of this introduction. In the second section, I of trophic exchanges taking place within a bounded area" summanze some of the key foci of the new ecologies (Rappaport 1967:18). These exchanges occurred within an

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"ecosystem," deftned as "the total of ecological popula- their own interests. Adaptation, to the extent that it occurs, tions and nonliving substances bound together in material happens at the level of the individual or the household exchanges in a demarcated portion of the biosphere" rather than at the level of a chimencal system and in light (p.18). of particular rather than general, system-level stakes (see As in Vaydaany 1996; Vayda and McKay 1975). system-centered paradigm, so, too, in the new ecology: Rappaport defended populationsthe rather than cultures as part is subject to the regulatory force of the whole. units of analysisRather in the name of a purer materialism: like a thermostat, an ecosystem regulates itself in the face of perturbations, homeostatically maintain- ing "the cultures and ecosystems arevalues not directly commensurable. An of one or more variables within a range or ranges ecosystem thatis a system of matter and energy transactions permit the continued existence of the system" among unlike populations or organisms and between them (Rappaport 1968:4) through "information-carrying feed- and the nonliving substances by which they are surrounded. back loops" (Smith 1984:53; see Moran 1990). It does so "Culture" is the label for the category of phenomena distin- through the "negative feedback" of special mechanisms, guished from others by its contingency upon symbols. mechanisms that alter "the values of some variables in re- [1990:52, emphasis removed] sponse to changes in the values of others" (Rappaport 1968:4). In the new ecology, there would be no "eclectic conjunc- In the Maring case, ntual in particular, the kaiko, a pig tion of incommensurable and incongruent terms" sacrifice to ancestral guardians in times of war was the (1984:382). Apples would not be mixed with pears but the regulator. Maring warfare was held in abeyance as long as human species would be treated as "a species among spe- the debts to supernatural and ordinaty allies were outstand- cies" (p. 384) and in terms of naturally environed popula- ing, warfare being resumed only once the aggressors had tions (p. 384). An ecosystem is "a system of matter and acquitted themselves of these debts through the massive energy transactions among unlike populations or organ- slaughter of pigs in the kaiko, among other means. In isms and between them and the nonliving substances by preparation for the kaiko, pigs were accumulated and fat- which they are surrounded" (p. 381); and the texllls "eco- tened. As the pig herds mounted, the effort required to tend system and human population, taken in the ecological them also mounted until the demands upon women and sense are fully commensurable and congruent" (1990:55). their labor, in particular, reached the limits of tolerance. At What appeared purer to the new ecologists seemed dan- the behest of the women, the kaiko or massive slaughter of gerously reductive to other anthropologists. The reduction- pigs was then staged. Restoring the ratio of humans to pigs ism of the new ecology was clear enough in its rejection of to a tolerable level, the kaiko helped maintain "biotic com- cultures as units of analysis and in its embrace of popula- munities existing within their territories" (1967:17). It also tions instead, as well as in its instrumental view of culture. limited the frequency of fighting and distnbuted "pig sur- Culture was the tool that allowed human populations to pluses in the form of pork throughout a large regional adapt to the environment explicable, then, in terms of its population while helping to assure the local population of a material functions or effects. Robert Murphy, an early supply of pork" (p. 18) when the need for quality protein critic of this brand of ecology the "new ecology," as he was high. The kaiko was thus a multipurpose institution, called it (1970, see note 1) saw in its seeming embrace of monitoring the "[r]elationships between people, pigs, and environmental determinism a problematic departure from gardens," the "slaughter, distribution, and consumption of the environmental "possibilism" of the cultural ecology of pigs," the "frequency of warfare," and so on (Rappaport Julian Steward and others (see also Anderson 1973; 1968:3X). Sahlins 1969). The ecosystemic approach was "much in- Many cntics faulted Pigs for its functionalism, impugn- fluenced by biology," Murphy wrote (1970:164; see Lil- ing alleged "cybernetic entities" (Smith 1984:53, emphasis ienfeld 1978; Moran 1990), and tended "to fall into the lan- removed) as mere articles of faith. Two of Rappaport's stu-guage and method of the biologist" (Murphy 1970:165), dents, Susan Lees and Daniel Bates, would support a more explaining culture in naturalistic terms-specifically with assumption-free ecology, one that was less vulnerable to respect to its adaptive functions. However, "the charac- attack on empirical and theoretical grounds (1990:248- teristics of a culture are not easily reducible to survival val- 250). "It is possible to describe human-environment rela- ues" (p. 166). Instead of viewing human beings "in na- tionships systematically without assuming the self-regulat- ture," they should be studied "apart from nature and ing properties inherent in the ecosystem concept" (p. 249). opposed to it," Murphy contended (p. 168, emphasis in the Meanwhile, Andrew P. Vayda, Rappaport's doctoral su- onginal). "Ihis does not mean that the human sphere and pervisor and originally himself a proponent of the new the natural order are unrelated, but only implies that the so- ecology (Vayda and Rappaport 1968), would ultimately cial order is independent despite its ties with the environ- reject the system-centered nature of the approach, arguing ment" (p.168). instead for a focus on events and the individuals behind As the new ecology was trumpeting a purer materialism, them rational decision makers strategically pursuing other frameworks were accounting for culture in terms of

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itself, with respect to patterns and meanings. The argument of the paperback edition of Ecology, Meaning, and Reli- that culture is intelligible through its own principles rather gion). But if human life is poised amid multiple, irreduc- than through biological functions was announced in the ible orders of determination, natural and cultural, there can great structuralist treatises of the 1960s, when English be no environmental detet7ninism. Rather than offering translations of Levi-Strauss's Totemism, The Savage Mind, causal explanations, ecology provides "a perspective from and Elementary Structures of Kinship became available. which problems [can] be defined'' (Rappaport 1984:334). Totemic food taboos are "good to think," for exam- "Whereas a 'purely explanatory' use of the ecological for- ple legislated through the intellectual work of classifying mulation might attempt to account for cultural forms in and ordering within an indigenous "science of the con- terms of their adaptiveness the use of the formulation as a crete" (Levi-Strauss 1966; see Douglas 1966 for a famous problematic proposes that the adaptiveness of those forms exemplification of the argumentWand they are intelligible is always open to question" (p. 335, emphasis in the origi- as such rather than in terms of any biological or ecosys- nal). Furthermore, if culture's instrumentality (or "practi- temic dividend. cal reason") is no longer guaranteed, however "good to Influenced by structuralism's distinction between nature think" in the structuralist sense particular aspects of culture and culture, rendered in quasi-mythic narratives of a "pas- might be, not all ideology-representations of gender, for sage" from the one to the other, Marshall Sahlins's Cultllre example (Buchbinder and Rappaport 1976)will prove and Practical Reason provided a sustained assault on cul- functional or adaptive. tural materialism and all extant ecologies, cultural or new. This argument strips ecology of functionalist premises The book asked: Should "the cultural order ... be con- and directs analysis toward an empirical study of the inter- ceived as the codification of man's actual purposeful and pragmatic action" or should "the world . . . be understood action of culture and nature and its outcomes, problematic as mediated by the cultural design, which gives order at or not.2 The problem that Rappaport would focus upon was once to practical experience, customary practice, and the capitalism and its malaises. According to Rappaport, relationship between the two" (1976:55)? From the book's maladaptation occurs when special-purpose subsystems very first page, Sahlins's answer is clear: "the distinctive take on general-purpose functions, promoting their own in- quality of man" is terests but at the expense of a more general welfare. Is it really true that what is good for General Motors is good for not that he must live in a material world, circumstance he the country? Rappaport rhetorically asked (1978:6142). shares with all organisms, but that he does so according to a A tendency toward "usurpation," an appropriation of gen- meaningful scheme of his own devising in which capacity eral functions by special-purpose subunits such as corpora- mankind is unique. It therefore takes as the decisive quality of tions, is inherent in capitalism, a system in which "It . . . culture . . . not that this culture must conform to material con- straints but that it does so according to a definite symbolic becomes increasingly possible for ever-more narrowly de- scheme which is never the only possible one. [p. viii] fined interests to become regnant in larger socioeconomic systems" (1993:300). Against the instrumentalist view that "human cultures are As of the 1979 anthology Ecology, Meaning, and Reli- formulated out of practical activity and behind that utilitar- gion and the 1984 "Epilogue" to the "new, enlarged" edi- ian interest" (p. vii), Sahlins argued (humanistically as tion of Pigs for the Ancestors, then, Rappaport had con- much as out of any structuralist penchant) that cultures are cluded that human life is interstitial, poised between nature self-determining human products explicable in terms of and culture. To be human is to live the relationship be- their own principles and logics (see also Sahlins 1969). tween nature and culture and to inhabit a world predicated on that relationship. Rappaport's redefinition of ecology, Rappaport Responds no longer as a functionalism premising the adaptive utility of culture but as a heuristic device for discovering dysfunc- The penod of the 1960s and 1970s saw a schism be- tional aspects of human-nature relations, together with his tween idealism and materialism (see discussion in Ortner insistence on the complexity of the human condition, at 1994), a schism that Sahlins's rhetorical question reflected. Rappaport would ultimately point a way beyond the ideal- once significant and natural, reoriented ecology toward an ist/materialist impasse by retreating from ecofunctionalism investigation of human-nature relations in nonreductive and by embracing an exemplary hypothesis about the hu- and nondeterministic terms, a reorientation Rappaport man condition and its complexity. Again and again (and himself pursued in his cntique of capitalism and more gen- most recently in his last monograph Religion and Ritual in erally in an "engaged," applied anthropology (1993, the Making of Humanity [1999]) Rappaport would re- 1994a, 1994b). The stage was set for an ecology or ecolo- hearse the argument that the human species is "a species gies that would avoid the either/or of idealism versus mate- that lives in terms of meanings in a physical world devoid rialism and that would venture onto the terrain of what has of intrinsic meaning but subject to causal law" (back cover come to be known as political ecology.

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The New Ecologies of magic, fertility rituals, totemism, cosmology, mythology, classification schemes, and the like, symbolic ecol- The new ecologies have complex, hybrid genealogies. ogy, that study of a culturally variable poetics of nature, is They emerge in the context of older ecologies, but they already, albeit implicitly, powerfully present. It inheres in also distance themselves from these earlier ecologies and Levi-Strauss's "science of mythology" as well as in the ally with other analytical traditions (for example, political "symbolic anthropology" of the 1960s and 1970s, in the economy, symbolic anthropology, and historical anthro- ethnosemantics of the 1950s and 1960s, and in the original pology). In what- follows, I suggest the complexity of the work on "primitive" classification by Durkheim and pedigrees as well as the relationship between the new and Mauss (1963). the old ecologies as I continue to inquire into what is us- The question of how nature is variably socially con- able, what problematic, in the Rappaportian legacy in an structed was explicitly posed in the 1980 anthology Na- effort to determine what is genuinely new in the directions ture, Culture anXl Gender, edited by Carol MacCormack and issues of today. The three ecologies I discuss, all too and Marilyn Strathern and opening with an essay by Mac- briefly, are symbolic ecology (ethnoecology, as Kottak re- Cormack, "Nature, Culture and Gender: A Critique," on fers to it [this issue]), historical ecology, and political ecol- the cultural construction of nature. The anthology was pro- ogy. voked by Sherry Ortner's "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" which read the triangle of the MacCormack- Symbolic Ecology Strathern anthology in ways that MacCormack and Strath- ern considered ethnocentric (cf. Merchant 1979). A neolo- Rappaport is well known for his distinction between gism, symbolic ecology is explicitly in evidence in the "cognized" and "operational" models, a distinction that op- work of Levi-Strauss's successor at the Ecole des Hautes poses "the model of the environment conceived by the Etudes, Philippe Descola (1992, 1994, 1996). In fact, people who act in it" (1968:238) to an objective, scientific, something like symbolic ecology has taken root in a range quantifiable depiction of "the physical world" (p. 237). of disciplines, from the study of landscape and place in art The operational model, at least in theory, extraculturally history and cultural geography to ecocriticism in literary ("objectively") reflects an equally extracultural ("objec- studies to the study of the social and historical construction tive") reality. The cognized model constitutes cultural un- of nature in history. derstandings of that extracultural reality. In its original guise, the distinction referred to the gulf between "emic" Historical Ecology views- the "local knowledge" of Geertz's writings (1983) or the ethnosemantic taxonomies that Rappaport actually At midcentury, an underlying opposition between na- cites (1984:337)possibly a flawed mimesis, on the one ture and culture informed a wide range of anthropological hand, and "etic" (objective, scientific, true) representations theorizing. Levi-Strauss's "grand narratives," whether they of an objective reality on the other hand. pertained to totemism or to "elementary structures of kin- While the two models may not be "isomorphic" (p. ship," featured a "passage" from the merely sensible (in 337), Rappaport's key question pertained not to the truth structural linguistic terminology, the phonetic) to the also value of emic models "the extent to which [cognized intelligible (the phonemic), from the unregulated to the models] are identical with what the analyst takes to be real- rule-governed, and from nature to culture (1963, 1966, ity" (1979b:989but to their utility, whether "they direct 1969). behavior in ways that are appropriate to the biological The very language of an older ecological anthropology well-being of the actors and of the ecosystems in which premised a dichotomous relationship between culture and they participate" (p. 98; see also Rappaport 1968:238- nature. In it adaptation signified cultural accommodations 239). Is a particular cognized model really "good to think" to an extracultural, a priori "environment." The paradigm (Levi-Strauss 1963), or does it promote behavior that is positivistically envisioned nature as "a thing, the realm of maladaptive or destructive (see, for example, Buchbinder extra human objects and processes existing outside society and Rappaport 1976)? Since operational models were true, . . . pristine, God-given, autonomous; . . . the raw material the distinction between operational and cognized models from which society is built " (Smith 1984:2). Culture was was ultimately a distinction between nature and culture, the figure within nature's ground. Tim Ingold expresses fact and fiction. the paradigm well: In focusing narrowly on utility, Rappaport continued to We tend to envisage the environment as a vast container filled explore adaptive processes (present or absent) in an in- with objects . . ., like a room or stage-set cluttered with furni- creasingly policy-relevant anthropology (1993, 1994a, ture and decorations. From this analogy comes the classic 1994b). But, by the same token, he failed to lay the founda- ecological concept of the niche, a little corner of the world an tions for a full-fledged poetics of nature focused upon the organism occupies, and to which it has fitted itself through a social construction of nature. Through innumerable studies process of adaptation. If a vase be removed from an alcove, a

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niche remains for a small object that might approprlately fill in short, a socially and culturally mediated nature. Rap- the vacant space; by analogy it is implied that the ecological paport's description tells us how "Social and spatial struc- niche of an organism is independently specified by the essen- tures are dialectically intertwined in social life, not just tial properties of the environment, which impose the condi- mapped one on the other as categorical projections" (Soja tions of functioning to which any occupant must conforrn. 1996:631). Furthermore, the capacity of a delimited terri- Thus, the very notion of adaptation entails that niches exist in the environment prior to the organisms that fill them. I=he en- tory to support its various populations, human and nonhu- vironment sets the problem, in the form of a challenge; the or- man, its "carrying capacity," is no mere dictum of nature; it ganism embodies the solution, in the form of its adaptive re- measures the demographic capability of a particular district sponse. [Ingold 1992:41] given social organizational stipulations of that district (as the "estate" of a clan or the territory of a clan cluster), so- What this paradigm suppresses is the way in which the cially shaped reproductive patterns, and cultural under- environment is historically and culturally produced through human-nature interactions. Marx and Engels were standings (see Fricke 1997; Kelly 1968; Kertzer and Fricke among the first to argue that "a 'nature [which] preceded 1997). human history . . . no longer exists anywhere' " (quoted in A resurgent human or cultural geography devalues time Smith and O'Keefe 1996:286), and Marx wrote that " 'It is in favor of space (see, for example, Agnew and Duncan as clear as noon-day that man, by his industry, changes the 1989). Yet we do not need an Einstein to tell us that there is forms of the matenals furnished to him by Nature, in such never the one without the other. The old millennium closes a way as to make them useful to him' " (quoted in Lansing with a "new Europe," a "former Yugoslavia," and a world 1991:11). To the extent that nature presents itself to hu- filled with incipient and dying nationalities. Space is rela- mans as so much raw material to fashion, space is no tive socially and historically produced. Historical ecol- longer a container, field, or ground that holds, engulfs, or ogy-that branch of ecology that focuses on the produc- supports other things but is itself a contingent product, a tion of space (or "nature") and the activities, technologies, sediment of human practice, a construction in the material informing ideas and values, and social relations of that pro- and not merely semantic sense of that word in short, an duction intrinsically addresses the spatiotemporal and its artifact (see Eckersley 1992; Escobar 1999; Harvey 1996; relation to the social (Giddens 1983). It also considers the Hvalkof and Escobar 1998; Ingold 1992; Lansing 1991; way in which ideas and thought become imprinted in the Lansing and Kremer 1993; Smith 1984; Soper 1995, landscape through human activity. As Carole Crumley has 1996). As "the embodiment of past activity" (Ingold observed, historical ecology "traces the ongoing dialectical 1992:50), the environment is itself made; it is the histoncal relations between human acts and acts of nature, made product of various social relations (of production and re- manifest in the landscape. Practices are maintained or production, kinship, exchange, etc.) (Ortner 1994:379; see modified, decisions are made, and ideas are given shape; a Fricke 1997; Kelly 1968; Kertzer and Fricke 1997; Kottak landscape retains the physical evidence of these mental ac- 1980; Lansing and Kremer 1993). The relationship be- tivities" (1994:9; see also Kirch and Hunt 1997). In this, tween humans and the environment is actually dialectical, historical ecology has an obvious affinity to symbolic ecol- for, in the course of reshaping nature, society gradually ogy (see Biersack, this issue). reshapes itself. Thus, the development of resources invari- Historical ecology replaces environmental determinism, ably has a double impact: upon interethnic relations, pre- first, with a notion of space as itself contingent, and, sec- vailing social arrangements, and imagined futures (see ond, with a dialectical understanding of the relationship be- Biersack, Ernst, and Gezon, this issue), as well as upon the tween human populations and the environment (see CnJm- environment. Instead of the nature-culture dualism, what is ley 1994; Kirch and Hunt 1997; Lansing 1991; Lansing required, according to this argument, is "an understanding and Kremer 1993; Soja 1996; Soper 1995). On both counts that proceeds from a notion of the mutualism of person and it differs from what the famous French historian Fernand environment" (Ingold 1992:40) and of the reciprocity be- Braudel (1980) called geohistory, an environmentally de- tween nature and culture (see Anderson 1973:184-193; Harvey 1996; Kottak 1980; Lansing and Kremer 1993; termined positivistic history, for it roots the so-called envi- Sahlins 1964). ronment in human agency and its interactions with nature. Much of the descriptive material of Pigs for the Ances- By the same token, historical ecology is inherently anthro- tors actually concerns this "production of space" (Lefebvre pocentric, not ecocentric, as Pigs was.3 In rooting the so- 1991; Smith 1984). When Rappaport tells us that Tsem- called environment in a homo-faber humanity, historical baga Maring territory is divided into three subterritories, ecology is also, to a degree, technocentric. Although ideal- districts that correspond, albeit roughly, to patterns of so- ism rendered instmmental action immaterial, historical cial segmentation (1968:17-28), he is describing not the ecology rehabilitates the focus on "practical reason" "niche" he thinks he is describing but a space that has been (Sahlins 1976) of an older materialism, but without the re- "built" through social relations and the activities thereof ductionism of that materialism.

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Political Ecology technology; yet, also in part as a critique of capitalism, political ecology focuses upon these very ravages. In some of At the time of Rappaport's fieldwork (from October the writings of the Frankfiurt School, human-nature rela- 1962 to December 1963), the Manng had experienced tions are themselves envisioned as power relations, rela- about eight years of contact and had not yet been mission- tions that (in the language of key texts in the political ecol- ized (1967:18), linkages to external markets, administra- ogy literature [Eckersley 1992: chs. 4-5; Harvey 1996: ch. tions, and cultural orders were minimal, and political econ- 6; Horkheimer and Adorno 1972; Jay 1973: ch. 6]) result omy approaches in anthropology were merely fledgling. in a pernicious "domination of nature." The perspective Consequently Pigs would ignore world history, global displaces class conflict with "the larger conflict between flows, and core/periphery asymmetries. Moreover, the de- men and nature" (Smith 1984:29), without as well as bates of the 1970s that the book would inspire largely over- within capitalism and also in all those interstitial "contact looked the book's political inadequacies (but see Friedman zones" (Pratt 1992) that capitalism and colonialism create. 1974). The shift from class relations and their asymmetries to hu- Few places in the world today have not been signifi- man-nature relations and their asymmetries establishes a cantly affected by global flows, colonial projects, and the political ecology of truly anthropological proportions- penetration of capitalism (Wolf 1982), and ignoring how one that encompasses the ecological malfeasances of capi- contemporary locales or regions are impacted by colonial- talism (Rappaport 1993, 1994a, 1994b) but also any eco- ism and market penetration, not to mention nation-states violence that lies temporally or spatially beyond capital- themselves, all but discredits any analysis. One of the dia- ism's orbit, in effect widening the temporal and spatial critical features of today's ecologies, according to Bates scope of political ecology beyond that of political econ- and Lees, is the rejection of the kind of culture-as-island omy. approach that Pigs and other ethnographies of its era em- As importantly, political ecology focuses on a range of ployed: "In contemporary human ecology there is never an differences clifferences of class but also of gender, race, assumption of timelessness or total isolation. While his- and ethnicity and the politics of difference they spawn. torical change and external influence might once have been Nature itself is "tamed" or ravaged as "other." Much of to- regarded as annoying distractions or distortions of indige- day's political ecology is more properly understood as a nous systems, they are now the focus of attention" merger of political economy with cultural studies, itself an (1996:2). outgrowth of post-Marxist frameworks founded on a cri- Originally designed to examine resource access and tique of traditional MaIxism's inadequacy as cultural cri- utilization within an overarching world-system framework tique and as a manifesto for cultural politics per se (Hall (Wolf 1972 [see Peet and Watts 1994:238,1996:4]), politi- 1980).4 Colonialism founded upon myths of "race," cal ecology shares certain concerns with political economy "progress," and "civilization"-is more self-evidently (Bryant 1992; Greenberg and Park 1994; Peet and Watts "cultural" than global capitalism (see Comaroff and Coma- 1994, 1996). Like political economy, political ecology ex- roff 1991, 1997; Plumwood 1993; Said 1993; Thomas plores "the role of power relations in determining human 1994). At the same time colonialism's historical relation- uses of the environment" (Bates and Lees 1996:9) and "the ship to capitalism is undeniable. Like gender, "race" has relations between human society, viewed in its bio-cul- become as basic a trope in the political ecology literature as tural-political complexity, and a signif1cantly humanized class is in traditional Mar7eist analysis (Rocheleau et al. nature" (Greenberg and Park 1994:1). As grand theory and 1996). Political ecology traces "the links between ecology master narrative, political ecology concentrates on the his- and imperialism" (Peet and Watts 1994:248) of "environ- tory of capitalism and its critique and in particular on the mental racism"-the inequalities in environmental risks unevenness of development that that history has produced and degradations occasioned by imperialism and colonial- on a global scale (Smith 1984), for capitalism commands ism (Kottak, this issue) and the movements to promote not only cheap labor but also cheap natural resources on "environmental rights" (Johnston 1995) and "environ- the margins of its market-driven empire. Drawing on po- mental justice" (Harvey 1996) that they inspire. litical economy, political ecology insists on the inadequacy Allied to, but also distanced from, political economy, of the older ecologies, which were oblivious to local-global political ecology provides an arena in which the strengths articulations as well as to linkages between the village and and limitations of traditional political economy can be de- the nation-state, specifically with respect to their units of bated in light of present concerns with local-global, na- analysis (see Brosius, Ernst, Gezon, and Kottak, this issue). tional-global, and national-regional articulations and the For all its affinities to political economy, political ecol- complex causation (including cultural causation [Sahlins ogy's interests merely overlap with those of political econ- 1994]) unleashed by these, as well as power asymmetries omy, and the differences are as important as the similan- that are discursively created-asymmetnes of race and ties. As a critique of capitalism, traditional political economy gender, for example. How much "structural efficacy" or was oblivious to the environmental ravages caused by "structural power" (Wolf 1999 and this issue) does the

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"world system" have? How much countervailing efficacy cal/existential cum semiotic reality (Csordas 1994) and in a can local entities and publics acquire through strategic broadly conceived "cultural studies" focused on cultural practices? How unified is capitalism itself, or is it refracted politics and political economy (Hall 1980). Synthetically and pluralized through various hybridizations and syncre- attending to the textual and the semiotic, on the one hand, tisms? history, politics, economy, and biology, on the other, is As a new, yet vigorous, field, political ecology has no what I mean by the term the new materialism. In all cases, settled paradigm or paradigms, and whatever debates it "Culture is not simply understood as a system of significa- will spawn are presently being worked out. Already detect- tion, but as a sign system articulating with exo-semiotic able, however, is the same tension between centered and processes" (Gottdiener 1995:30). And this is not only the decentered models between paradigms that emphasize crucial gesture but the def1ning feature of the new ecolo- totalities ("ecosystem," "capitalism," "world system," gies. "state") and a kind of systemic or structural determinacy, In its quest for a pure (population-centered) materialism, on the one hand, and an anti- or postparadigmatic insis- the "new ecology" precluded the study of incommen- tence on the destabilizing and decentering power of the op- surabilities biology and history (Escobar 1996, 1999; positional, the local, and the particular, on the other. (This Hvalkof and Escobar 1998), meaning and natural law distinction has recently been announced as a distinction be- (Rappaport's post-Pigs corpusWand their intersections. tween structural and poststructural approaches [Escobar However, any attempt to explain behavior in terms of "ob- 1996; Peet and Watts 1996].) Attention might focus, for jective circumstances" and "material needs" overlooks the example, upon practices and discourses, particularly those fact that so-called objective circumstances and material involving resistance and social movements (Peet and needs are sociohistorical products. Rooted in the collective Watts 1996) as well as local, regional, and even national imagination and the projects it spawns, desire as much as particularities, as they stand in relation to global linkages need motivates human-nature relations, producing and flows or in relation to one another. To the extent that Dionysian, Apollonian, or spartan economies, as the case traditional Marxism appears inadequate for ecotheory, the may be (see Sahlins 1972, explicitly a contribution to eco- bond between political ecology and political economy will nomic anthropology but equally a contribution to the new become attenuated, and political ecology will develop in- ecologies). Consequently, the new ecologies address a re- stead "as a specialized branch of critical social theory" ality that is deHlned precisely in terms of incommen- (Peet and Watts 1996:36) and cultural studies. surabilities and their conjunctive real-world effects. Over against the dualistic thinking of earlier ecologies, it Ecology and the New Materialism has always been possible to configure nature/culture in dialectical or interactive terms (Kottak 1980; Lansing and As has recently been argued, there is in the very terms of Kremer 1993; Rappaport 1980), in ways that bring nature the debate between idealists and materialists either a di- within the cultural realm without effacing nature's auton- chotomization of nature and culture (see Descola and Palsson 1996) etic versus emic, for example-or a re- omy from the cultural realm. The reality that is generated duction of the one to the other. For the idealist, culture throughis the conjuncture of nature and culture is anthropo- sui generis, explicable in its own terms autonomous and centric, rooted in the activities and conceptualizations of self-determining. Materialists, on the other hand, at least human beings, a life-world, a term I use not merely in the the "vulgar" ones (Friedman 1974), explain culture in phenomenological sense but in the stronger material sense, terms of nature, rendering culture epiphenomenal. with respect to a world-out-there that has been appropri- Today there is a growing insistence on the need to resist ated, acted upon, crafted, transformed, a world generated both kinds of reduction in the name of a new synthesis. in and through human-nature interactions. Now a world-in- Much of the impetus comes from those who wish to reha- here, this lived anxl utilized reality is signified by the mind bilitate a focus on extratextual realities within a reformed but also consumed, commodified, given, fashioned, or oth- semiotics, one that takes up the sign within a "social con- erwise processed and deployed. In this new usage, life- text" and links it to "the exo-semiotic realms of economic world refers to an indivisible material/symbolic/politi- development and political conflict" (Gottdiener 1995:vii). callsocial/historical reality in which the nature-culture Gottdiener is a sociologist, yet his "socio-semiotics," a cn- divide is bridged in the name of a new "monist" (Descola tique of pure, idealist semiotics, has parallels in all of the and Pilsson 1996) ecological anthropology, inherently an social and human sciences. It is found in the wntings of ecology of incommensurabilities, predicated on the fact Edward Said and his explorations of the relationship be- that human life "lies betwixt and between" (Levi-Strauss tween text (or the "world of the text" of hermeneutic ap- 1984Was Rappaport himself would have it, neither nature proaches [Ricoeur 1980]) and the world (historical, politi- nor culture but precisely both. cal, and economic) (Said 1983). It is represented in a Pigs for the Ancestors arguably concerns such a life- resurgent phenomenology focused on the body as a physi- world. In this particular case, any model of human-nature

This content downloaded from 108.179.181.195 on Tue, 26 Sep 2017 18:15:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 12 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST * VOL. 101, NO. 1 * MARCH 1999 relations that presupposes a dichotomous rather than dia- ecology- represents a different angle of vision on the lectical relationship between nature and culture is neces- same multiplex spatiotemporal reality as the various new sarily circular. As Rappaport shows, Maring ecology is ecologies synergistically merge. driven by culture- by supernatural doctrines concerning ancestral beings, their hunger for pork, and their require- Ecological Essays in the New Materialism ment that descendants who have benefited by their support I said at the outset that this collection offers several in war thank them through pig sacrifices. It is the pigs-for- soundings in the new ecologies and purports no exhaustive the-ancestors logic of the kaiko that accounts for the very exploration. The collection illustrates the sheer productiv- ovexproduction and resulting imbalances that the massive ity of engaging with the Rappaportian legacy a legacy pig slaughter of the kaiko corrects. In requiring the escala- that in part anticipates the new ecologies, in part blocks tion of pig production, the kaiko creates those very pertur- their realization, and that has implications as well for other bations that its culmination, the sacrifice of pigs thus pro- domains of inquiry (evolutionary sociology, the anthropol- duced, resolves. The reality in which the kaiko intervenes ogy of religion, and semiotics [Watanabe and Smuts, this is therefore already internal, a cultural product. The kaiko issue; Wolf, this issue]). The collection strives to establish exists in and functions with respect to a reality that is gen- what is usable, what problematic, in the oeuvre by way of erated through human-nature interactions, and this reality must be studied through the very ecology of incommen- exploring the varied terrains of the new ecologies. This anthology opens with two essays written by senior surabilities that the new ecology, in its pure materialism, rejected. anthropologists: Eric Wolf, best known for his work in po- Already there is an incipient language to describe such a litical economy, and Conrad Kottak, an ecologist who reality. Marx, for example, is attributed with coining the taught for many years with Rappaport at the University of term humanized nature to signify an "environment" that is Michigan and whose essay reflects more recent trends in produced through human activity (Lansing 1991; Lansing both his own thinking and that of Rappaport in his later and Kremer 1993). The distinction between "first" and years. Wolf and Kottak share an insistence on the need to "second nature," originally Hegelian (Smith 1984:19), op- incorporate political economy into the heart of political poses what is made and historical and therefore "second" ecology. This is the muted but unmistakable theme of to the original, pristine nature (the garden to the wilder- Wolf's contribution. To the extent that power relations are ness, for example [Biersack 1996]). "The impress of this understood in structural, institutional, or systemic terms, 'first nature' is not naively and independently given, . . . Wolf's concept of "structural power" (1994, 1999, this is- for its social impact always passes through a 'second na- sue) is cnacial. "This term rephrases the older notion of 'the ture' that arises from the organized and cumulative appli- social relations of production', and is intended to empha- cation of human labour and knowledge" (Soja 1996:626). size power to deploy and allocate social labor.... Struc- Two other terms also signify a postnatural (Escobar 1999), tural power shapes the social field of action so as to render spatiotemporal reality, at once material and semiotic: land- some kinds of behavior possible, while making others less scape and place. These terms are especially important for possible or impossible" (1994:219). Kottak's "linkages" symbolic and historical ecologies. Landscapes and places approach (this issue; also Kottak and Colson 1994) is a are semio-scapes and semio-locales, suffused with mean- methodological contribution to the study of that structural ing (Feld and Basso 1996; Hirsch 1995); they are made power. It "emphasizes the embeddedness of communities through acts of discursive-cum-material construction. in multiple systems of different scale" (this issue, p. 31) in The ecology of"humanized" or"second" nature, of a multitiered and globalizing world. However, even in a landscape and place, forswears functionalist assumptions context of globalization, anthropologists must attend to and the problematics of adaptation to focus upon a spa- "the specifics of local culture and social structure" and the tiotemporal horizon generated homocentrically rather than impact ofthese specifics upon ecological outcomes (p. 31). ecocentrically through nature-culture interactions, the ma- This caveat is not just for the political-economy oriented terial exchanges thereby set in motion, and the vanous acts political ecologist but for the vulgarly materialist ecolo- of signification that inscribe the world. With respect to this gist. "People must come first. Cultural anthropologists world, "[m]ateriality, representation, and imagination are need to remember the primacy of society and culture in not separate worlds" (Harvey 1996:322), and "[t]here can their analysis and not be dazzled by ecological data" be no particular pnvileging of any one realm over the (p. 33). other" (p. 322). "The space of nature," being socially pro- WolSs emphasis upon structural power resonates with duced, "is . . . Ellled with politics and ideology, with rela- Rappaport's own interest in systems, and Rappaport's un- tions of production, with the possibility of being significantly mistakable affinity to political economy became more and transformed" (Soja 1996:626). Given the complexity of more pronounced as he delved into what he called "en- this ecological object, each new ecology that I have dis- gaged anthropology" (see, especially, 1994b). However, cussed symbolic ecology, historical ecology, political anthropologists are increasingly concerned with discursive

This content downloaded from 108.179.181.195 on Tue, 26 Sep 2017 18:15:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms BIERSACK / INTRODUCTION: FROM THE NEW ECOLOGY TO THE NEW ECOLOGIES 13 practices and their politics and efficacy and with decen- bureaucratization. ... What began [with the Penan] as a se- tered fields and their contestations rather than with struc- ries of critiques of top-down environmental manage- ture or system per se. In this context, the symbolic or dis- ment ... is increasingly being appropriated" as "local cursive is no collective representation of an anterior and communities and grassroots social movements" (pp. extrasymbolic reality, no metonym of an extradiscursive 49-50) are progressively enveloped and displaced. This totality, but, rather, a materially consequential instrument. politics of displacement is accomplished discursively, Ithis approach to discourse is political rather than herme- through "a shifting pattern of marginalizations and privile- neutic, a matter of focusing upon the "discursive field" as a gings that occur as the terms of the debate"-controlled at field of " 'things said' " and their power (Foucault l991a: higher levels "shift" (p. 50). 63), rather than upon a phenomenological, experiential, or Against the presumption that subaltern environmental "lived" reality (Ricoeur 1980). Where the approach differs movements are empowering and liberatory (Peets and from the transactional analysis of the 1970s is, first of all, Watts 1996), Brosius suggests instead the emasculation of in its awareness of the political effects of action, and sec- oppositional politics through the discursive strategies of ondly, in its refusal to focus upon institutional totalities, the state, as these are developed in dialogue with environ- concentrating instead upon a dispersion of (often compet- mental institutions themselves. Brosius's essay can be read ing) practices and powers. The more self-consciously Fou- as an essay in Foucauldian "governmentality," a term that cauldian the inquie, the greater the attention paid to the Foucault developed to talk about the combination of "dis- "disciplinary" power of various "apparatuses" and "tech- ciplinary" and juridical forms of power-of managerial niques." Where it differs from symbolic anthropology is in forms of power based on the creation of microspaces and its politicization, historicization, and decollectivization of the micropolitics of surveillance on the one hand, and insti- representation. Discourse contests, negotiates, positions, tutional structural power (Wolf, this issue) on the other. and through its representations creates; and, under determi- "[We] need to see things not in terms of the replacement of nate circumstances, it has its own productivity and political a society of sovereignty [with its institutional and juridical and material effects. power] by a disciplinary society" (Foucault 1991b:102), a Rappapport's "anthropology of trouble" (1993) was an replacement that Foucault had chronicled in his brilliant anthropology of"disorder" (1994a): an anthropology of Discipline and Punish; rather, "in reality one has a triangle, systemic inversion in which "lower order" entities usurped sovereignty-discipline-government" (p. 102) a combina- the functions of "higher order" entities, displacing moral tion of different kinds of power and method. Brosius's case and ecological values associated with policy and govern- study poses several important questions. What is the rela- ance with the economic values of the market. Pete tionship between discourse and governmentality? When Brosius's theme in "Green Dots, Pink Hearts" is similar: and how are oppositional politics effective in their effort to the way in which "moral or political imperatives" are ef- undermine governmentality? When and how does "decen- fectively displaced at the expense of environmental values. tering" occur? Yet he locates this displacement and its logic and politics Lisa Gezon's "Of Shrimps and Spirit Possession" also within ecological activism and its discursive practices considers subaltern, subnational initiatives to curb the en- rather than in systemic disorders. Focusing on the Sarawak croachments of a majority, although the efficacy of the ef- campaign against logging in the l990s, Brosius shows how forts she describes remains to be seen. In "Of Shrimps and indigenous actors and their initiatives are enveloped and Spirit Possession," Gezon shows us how the Antankarana, displaced by "institutions for local, national, and global en- an ethnic group living in northern Madagascar, deploy rit- vironmental surveillance and governance" (p. 36). These ual to stake a claim to marine resources in their attempt to institutions the Malaysian state and Malaysian and fend off the ethnically dominant Merina of central Mada- "Northern" environmental NGOs "inscribe and natural- gascar as well as international competitors. Within an en- ize certain discourses," privileging some actors and margi- compassing ethnic politics of some historical depth, An- nalizing others, and in the process displace indigenous tankarana leaders employ a rhetoric of spirits and spirit

. . . voices and indigenous initiatives with national and interna- possesslon to lnslst on resource ownership and autonomy tional ones. The moral high ground that the Penan at first in resistance to Merina and outside incursions. The fact effortlessly gained in the Sarawak campaign against log- that ritual is the genre deployed creates a tension between ging of the l990s was subsequently undermined by a coun- Gezon's and Rappaport's approaches. For Rappaport and tervailing campaign waged by the Malaysian state, ulti- his "new ecology," ritual was a regulator and an adaptive mately in dialogue with national and international NGOs, tool; for Gezon, ritual is a discursive instrument deployed in the name of public interests. As events unfolded, "the in an oppositional politics, an argument that dissociates discursive and institutional contours" of the issues were power and structure and that claims ritual, with all its sym- "shifted . . . away from the moral/political domain and to- bolism, for a "poststructural" political ecology (see Peet ward the domain of governmentality, managerialism, and andWatts 1994).

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My own contribution, "The Mount Kare Python and His transforms the amorphous social groups of Onabasulu so- Gold," combines symbolic ecology with historical ecology ciety into an Incorporated Landowner Group (ILG), "enti- to argue that Rappaport's "cognized models," insofar as fying" them as clan-stakeholders in an era of development. they motivate behavior, have as much "impact" as tangible Traditionally Onabasulu groups were not bounded, corpo- activities such as gold mining and, more to the point, that rate descent groups; now, it seems, through the reifications gold mining itself, at least in the part of the New Guinea of the State of Papua New Guinea, they are. While these highlands that the article concerns, must be understood certificates are among the instruments that the state has de- against a backdrop of mythology and cosmology and a lo- vised to monitor and manage development (see Brosius, cal poetics of nature, all of which motivates the present- this issue), Ernst shows- and rather against the grain of day enthusiasm for gold mining and other aspects of devel- Brosius's argument-how local constituencies manipulate opment. It follows that cognized models are among the these top-down managerial efforts for their own purposes, causes of the reality that "operational models" strive to de- exploiting the performative powers of the state to position pict, that operational models themselves attempt to mirror themselves with respect to that state and the resource de- a reality that is shaped through the interaction of culture velopment over which it presides. and nature. In this reformulation, the symbolic and the ma- Ernst provides a unique glimpse into another dimension tenal are no longer dichotomized the one "emic," the of the nature-culture dialectic: how society itself, as well as "etic," each belonging to its own ontological order but, ethnic identities and boundaries, are produced or trans- rather, the two interact in real time, and it is this interaction formed through the codifications of the state at a time of that has reality effects. Rappaport himself pointed the way capital-intensive resource development. His analysis poses to a more dialectical reading of the nature-culture relation- a crucial question about the genesis of Pacific modernity: ship when he argued that cognized models "direct behav- Is the contemporaC the product of a continuing tradition, ior" (1979b:98; also, 1968:238-239). In directing behav- an imposed and exogenous modernity, or is it the outcome ior, cognized models explain the environment as wrought. of the historical interplay of the two (see Carrier 1996; The implications are multiple: that cognized and opera- Friedman 1996; Lederman 1998; Sahlins 1994)? tional models refer to different moments of a reality that is John Watanabe and Barbara Smuts's essay "Explaining constituted in and through the symbolic, that repre- Religion without Explaining It Away" returns us to the sentation is a condition rather than merely a reflection of concerns of Wolf's opening essay, the form (rather than, as reality, and that, in an anthropocentric (rather than ecocen- in Brosius's essay, the politics and pragmatics) of lan- tric) ecological anthropology, symbolic ecology and his- guage. Rappaport's specific contribution to evolutionary torical ecology are inextncably linked. Since the context studies was through the study of ritual language. Rap- for this interaction is gold mining, any adequate ecological paport argued that, to the extent that language is unique to analysis must attend to the local-global articulations and the human species, so is the possibility of deception, for their impacts that the "new ecology" avoided. What spatial language can signify what is not present to the senses and language does an ecology that attends to local-global ar- what, in fact, does not exist. Sanctifying messages rescues ticulations require? At its close, the article argues for the the species from the perils of crippling uncertainty that this use of the terlll place, which allows us to spatialize local- possibility creates by guaranteeing the truth of the informa- global articulations as well as the dialectic of the symbolic and the matenal as older terms (environment, niche) do tion conveyed (see 1999 for the most recent iteration of the not. argument). Studying baboon greeting behavior, Watanabe In "Land, Stories, and Resources," Tom Ernst explores and Smuts's article extrapolates these observations for an another aspect of the dialectical relationship between na- evolutionary sociology founded upon the development of ture and culture. The setting is the Great Plateau in the inte- cooperation. rior of Papua New Guinea, several hundred miles south- Watanabe and Smuts transpose Rappaport's concern west of where Rappaport completed his Maring study in with the ritual roots of society onto an evolutionary scale the 1 960s. The Onabasulu live across the river from where that encompasses nonhumans as well as humans and that Chevron Niugini Pty Ltd heads up the Kutubu Petroleum asks as its central question: What makes social relations (of Development Project, largely to the benefit of the Fasu, peace, cooperation, production, and exchange) possible? neighbors of the Onabasulu. Like Brosius, Ernst is con- As the article makes clear, formalist contributions to evo- cerned with discursive practices and their political ecology. lutionary theory may be as important as functionalist ones. The stories that Ernst collected are told and retold in a In fact, as in Rappaport's own contributions to rltual stud- complex terrain, one that includes a local people, a mul- ies, they may be inseparable. The article also illustrates the ticultural region, the state, a multinational corporation, as utility for rethinking the disabling dichotomies of the well as the anthropologist himself. Among the discursive past in particular, individual/society, idealism/material- devices that Onabasulu deploy is the state-awarded certifi- ism, symbolic/behavioral approaches, and culturaUphysi- cate of group incorporation. Once awarded, a certificate cal anthropology for evolutionary sociology.

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While the ideas that "Explaining Religion without Ex- and Rappaport echoed this point in his "Foreword" to the plaining It Away" addresses may seem less central to Rap- same work. paport's writings, they receive full, book-length treatment 3. Pigs was inevitably challenged for its inattention to in his last work, Religion and Ritual in the Making of H- agency and events (Lees and Bates 1990; Vayda 1996;Vayda and McKay 1975 [Rappaport's remarks on this feature of the manity, a book about sanctification; and Durkheim's soci- argument in 1984:396403, 1990:42X3 are germane]) and its ology of religion, as evidenced in Elementary Forms of Re- overemphasis upon an undemonstrated yet stipulated "sys- ligious Life arld other texts, is the constatlt touchstone of tem." However, Rappaport himself opened the door to a more Religion and Rimal in the Making of Humanity. actor-centered ecology when, in defense of his proposition that the Maring ecosystem was self-regulating, he spoke of Notes regulating selves rather than of system self-regulation. While the explicit Pigs paradigm was objectivist, system- or "mecha- Acknowledgments. This contemporary issues forum grows nism-" rather than action-focused, in actual fact the massive out of a panel called "Roy A. Rappaport: Assessments and slaughter of pigs is triggered when women complain about the Appreciations" that I organized for the 1997 annual meetings mounting size and increasing unruliness of the pig herds. of the Society for Applied Anthropology and the Political Maring women, who are the principal gardeners and pig hus- Ecology Society (PESO), held jointly in Seattle in March banders, have made a judgment that there are too many pigs 1997. In addition to the contributors to this special issue, and lobby for intervention. That the massive slaughter of pigs Kathryn Kozaitis and Susan Lees also gave papers on the is triggered when women complain about the mounting size panel. I should like to thank Conrad Kottak for helping me re- and unruliness of the pig herds suggests not that the "system" cruit panel participants, PESO and especially Jim Greenberg is "self-regulating" or that ritual is a "mechanism" for achiev- for listing the panel as a PESO panel, and Ed Liebow for as- ing homeostasis but, rather, that variables are consciously sisting me with organizational details. Skip Rappaport showed regulated by actors. Defending the notion of self-regulation, a keen interest in the panel and accepted our bouquet of papers Rappaport wrote, "Maring local groups are regulating the eco- as well as our occasional criticisms with characteristic warmth systems within which they participate, or to put it in the con- and grace. We all remember with gratitude Skip's many assis- verse, the domain of the regulatory operations of a local group tances and encouragements. Conrad Kottak has offered in- in this instance defines an ecosystem. Because a Maring local valuable advice in publishing the panel's proceedings. Thanks group is a component of the ecosystem which it regulates . . . also to Carolyn Cartier, a geography colleague, for her reading the ecosystem is by definition self-regulating" (1990:43). He of a draft of this introduction and her many comments and bib- concludes that the ecosystem concept should be maintained liographic tips. The American Anthropologist reviewers were "because there are suff1cient grounds . . ., at least in the case excellent, and the collection is far better for their candid and of anthropocentric systems, to be self-regulating and self- intelligent evaluations. I would also like to thank Bob and organizing" (p. 47). But this makes regulation an agent effect Linda Sussman for their help, guidance, and patience in the rather than a system function and the so-called system an- editorial and production processes. The maps, figures, and ta- thropocentric. bles were all created by Jerry Jacka, who is presently conduct- 4. Of course, cultural politics need not displace political ing research in Papua New Guinea and who is a doctoral stu- economy. Carolyn Merchant's The Death of Nature, for ex- dent in anthropology at the University of Oregon. Preparation ample, combines symbolic ecology's attention to the construc- of the artwork was funded through a Target of Opportunity tion of nature and its possible gendering (see Ortner 1974) award received from the Department of Anthropology, Uni- with an ecofeminist critique of capitalism. versity of Oregon. The most distinguished contributor to this Contemporary Issues Forum, Eric R. Wolf, died just two years to the day after delivering "Cognizing 'Cognitive Models' " in References Cited Seattle, Washington. We all felt privileged by Eric's participa- Agnew, John A., and James S. Duncan, eds. tion on our panel, and it is an honor to include here the Seattle 1989 The Power of Place: Bringing Together Geographical text he wrote in homage to his friend and colleague, Skip Rap- and Sociological Imaginations. Boston: Unwin Hyman. paport. Anderson, James N. 1. Ishe term new ecology was not used by either Rappaport 1973 Ecological Anthropology and Anthropological Ecol- or Andrew P. Vayda, his doctoral supervisor, but, rather, by ogy. ln Handbook of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Robert Murphy in his 1970 article "Basin Ethnography and John Honigmann, ed. Pp. 179-239. Chicago: Rand Ecological Theory." Rappaport and Vayda rejected the term McNally and Company. cultural ecology, a paradigm associated with the ecological Bates, Daniel G., and Susan Lees writings of Steward and HaxTis that they criticized (Vayda and 1996 Introduction. In Case Studies in Human Ecology. Rappaport 1968; see Vayda and McCay 1975:294; see discus- Daniel G. Bates and Susan Lees, eds. Pp. 1-12. New York sion of cultural ecology and the new ecology in Murphy 1970). and London: Plenum Press. 2. Actually Kottak made this point quite emphatically, in Biersack, Aletta rejecting the idealist or materialist alternatives that the na- 1996 The Human Condition and Its Transformations: Na- ture/culture dichotomy inevitably poses (see Descola and ture and Society in the Paiela World. Paper given at the Palsson 1996), at the close of The Past in the Present: History, annual meeting of the American Anthropological Associa- Ecology, and Cultural Variation in Highland Madagascar, tion, San Francisco, November 1996.

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