Paige West

Seeing (and Doing) Conservation Through Cultural Lenses

In this paper, we first discuss various vantage points gained through the authors’ experience of approaching conservation through a “cultural lens.” We then draw out more general concerns that many anthropologists hold with respect to conservation, summarizing and commenting on the work of the Conservation and Community Working Group within the Anthropology and Environment Section of the American Anthropological Association. Here we focus on both critiques and contributions the discipline of anthropology makes with regard to conservation, and show how anthropologists are moving beyond conservation critiques to engage actively with conservation practice and policy. We conclude with reflections on the possibilities for enhancing transdisciplinary dialogue and practice through reflexive questioning, the adoption of disciplinary humility, and the realization that “cross-border” collaboration among conservation scholars and practitioners can strengthen the political will necessary to stem the growing commoditization and ensuing degradation of the earth’s ecosystems.

Global assemblages, resilience, and Earth Stewardship in the Anthropocene

In this paper, we argue that the Anthropocene is an epoch characterized not only by the anthropogenic dominance of the Earths ecosystems but also by new forms of environmental governance and institutions. Echoing the literature in political ecology, we call these new forms of environmental governance “global assemblages”. Socioecological changes associated with global assemblages disproportionately impact poorer nations and communities along the development continuum, or the “Global South”, and others who depend on natural resources for subsistence. Although global assemblages are powerful mechanisms of socioecological change, we show how transnational networks of grassroots organizations are able to resist their negative social and environmental impacts, and thus foster socioecological resilience.

The use of farmers' knowledge in coffee agroforestry management: implications for the conservation of tree biodiversity

In agroforestry systems, the survival of shade trees is often the result of farmers deliberate selection. Therefore, how communities generate knowledge and apply it to resource management practices influence the potential for biodiversity conservation of agroforestry systems. In this study, we investigated the use of knowledge by farmers to manage coffee (Coffea arabica) agroforests and the consequences for the conservation of tree biodiversity and composition of surrounding forests. We interviewed 50 coffee farmers to investigate their shade tree preferences and sources of knowledge of the properties of shade trees and coffee management practices; we also conducted tree inventories in 31 coffee farms and 10 forest sites in La Sepultura Biosphere Reserve in Chiapas, Mexico. Our results showed that farmers are modifying agroforests according to their knowledge and tree preferences, and that the resulting agroforest is lower in tree diversity and dominated by pioneer and farmers preferred tree species as ...

Biocultural approaches to well-being and sustainability indicators across scales

Monitoring and evaluation are central to ensuring that innovative, multi-scale, and interdisciplinary approaches to sustainability are effective. The development of relevant indicators for local sustainable management outcomes, and the ability to link these to broader national and international policy targets, are key challenges for resource managers, policymakers, and scientists. Sets of indicators that capture both ecological and social-cultural factors, and the feedbacks between them, can underpin cross-scale linkages that help bridge local and global scale initiatives to increase resilience of both humans and ecosystems. Here we argue that biocultural approaches, in combination with methods for synthesizing across evidence from multiple sources, are critical to developing metrics that facilitate linkages across scales and dimensions. Biocultural approaches explicitly start with and build on local cultural perspectives — encompassing values, knowledges, and needs — and recognize feedbacks between ecosystems and human well-being. Adoption of these approaches can encourage exchange between local and global actors, and facilitate identification of crucial problems and solutions that are missing from many regional and international framings of sustainability. Resource managers, scientists, and policymakers need to be thoughtful about not only what kinds of indicators are measured, but also how indicators are designed, implemented, measured, and ultimately combined to evaluate resource use and well-being. We conclude by providing suggestions for translating between local and global indicator efforts.Biocultural approaches combining local values, knowledge, and needs with global ecological factors provide a fruitful indicator framework for assessing local and global well-being and sustainability, and help bridge the divide between them.

Anthropology and STS: Generative interfaces, multiple locations

In this multi-authored essay, nine anthropologists working in different parts of the world take part in a conversation about the interfaces between anthropology and STS (science and technology studies). Through this conversation, multiple interfaces emerge that are heterogeneously composed according to the languages, places, and arguments from where they emerge. The authors explore these multiple interfaces as sites where encounters are also sites of difference—where complex groupings, practices, topics, and analytical grammars overlap, and also exceed each other, composing irregular links in a conversation that produces connections without producing closure.

An Anthropology for 'the Assemblage of the Now'

At this point within anthropology, it has been well documented that conservation organisations are institutions of governance and governmentality, that the projects that they devise offer particular visions of the world, and that these visions impose order on human/non-human assemblages. Conservation projects thus offer a vision of how the world is and how it ought to be, as well as a plan to alter the world so that it conforms to that desired vision. Sometimes these impositions of order succeed and sometimes they fail. It is also well documented that people, including conservation scientists, anthropologists, and the indigenous and non-indigenous inhabitants of various conservation areas, all assume (1) that their perspectives on how the world works mirror the actual structure of the world, (2) that their ideas about how the world should be, mirror the moral/ethical logics and the appropriate socio-biophysicality of the real, and (3) that their own plans for getting to the best socio-ecological world possible are the most appropriate plans. Sometimes these perspectives, ideas, and plans intersect and sometimes they do not. Finally, anthropologists have shown, repeatedly, that all of this is intertwined with

Holding the Story Forever: The Aesthetics of Ethnographic Labour

Since the late 1970s, anthropologists have examined ethnography as a form of textual production (Marcus and Cushman 1982; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Geertz 1988; Marcus and Fischer 1986) and as a politicised dialogue between ethnographer and ‘other’ (Crapanzano 1980; Dumont 1978; George 1995; Rabinow 1977). This literature suggests that ethnography is what you write and how you write it (Clifford 1986; Geertz 1973) but not a record of social realities (Marcus and Fischer 1986). Drawing on these critiques, more recent analyses of ‘fieldwork’ examine the very notion of ‘the field’, the centrality of fieldwork to anthropology and the contradictory nature of the discipline in which we are expected to examine an interconnected and deterritorialised world and conduct long periods of research in one ‘localised’ setting (Gupta and Ferguson 1997, 4). Gupta and Ferguson question whether, given the questions we ask in this postcolonial globalised world, we can continue to valorise ethnographic fieldwork as the central experience of anthropology. Marcus (1997) has argued that ethnography is a form of social production that hinges upon ‘complicity’ between anthropologist and ‘other’. For him, the presence of an anthropologist is a constant marker of other places and ways of being in the world and, because of this, anthropologists can access people’s ideas about other places, times and peoples (Marcus 1998, 119). Therefore, fieldwork elucidates and makes connections (p. 120). The anthropologist’s presence makes a perhaps inarticulatable ‘elsewhere’ present for the informant. Complicity is then an affinity between the anthropologist and the informant that ‘arises from their mutual curiosity and anxiety about their relationship to a third’, and this ‘third time space’ is what creates the bond between the two (p. 122). These productive critiques leave a central part of the social relations of ethnography unexamined. They fail to examine the ways in which anthropologists themselves experience the practice of ethnography and the ways in which ‘the field’

The Politics of Earth Stewardship in the Uneven Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is not only an epoch of anthropogenic dominance of the Earth’s ecosystems, but also an epoch characterized by new forms of environmental governance, institutions, and uneven development. Following the literature in political ecology, we are calling these new forms of environmental governance, “global assemblages.” A key argument from a political ecological perspective is that socio-ecological changes historically disproportionately impact communities in the Global South, and minority and low-income communities in the Global North. While global assemblages are powerful mechanisms of socio-ecological change, we demonstrate the ways transnational networks of grassroots organizations can challenge their negative social and environmental impacts, and thus foster socio-ecological resiliency.