Lecture notes
Summary all Lectures Political Ecologies
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This is a summary of all the lectures of the course Political Ecologies, written in English. It is structered in bullet points.
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Summary Lectures Political EcologiesLecture 1: Genealogies (Introduction)
Nature has become a short term for the non-human?
Genealogies
= tracing histories, roots, how certain ideas and concepts become stabilized across
time.
About tracing lines of descent.
Different from history: genealogies is about going back but not necessarily in a linear
way.
The history of the present: how norms have become how they are, giving
them historical depth.
As a method: the story of how ‘nature’ and ‘nonhuman’ came to be defined, studied
and engaged in certain ways.
What might be other ways of thinking about these topics?
Why were these other ways and histories forgotten, or repressed? (the
political dimension).
PART 1: ‘NATURE’ IN ANTHROPOLOGY - HISTORY, DEVELOPMENT EN DEBATES
‘Nature’
Has many meanings: essential utility/inherent force/material world.
In anthropology: most mentioned in the ‘nature-culture’ debate.
Whether ‘biology’ or ‘culture’ determines human features, utilities, and
potential.
How are ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ intertwined?
Relations with material environment and making distinctions between human and
non-human world.
Recent surge with engagement with nature, nonhumans or more than human worlds
in general.
‘Anthropocene’
The current epoch we are living in, since the 2000 the term is used.
‘New epoch defined by the unprecedented effect of human activity (Crutzen and
Stoermer 2000).
‘Climate change’ due to accumulation of carbon caused by human activity.
Humanity transformed to a geological force irrevocably altering the world as we know
it.
Transformation of planetary scale altering human lives, trajectories and destinies in
dramatic and unpredictable ways.
Nature can no longer be seen as ‘background’ to human activity.
What does it mean to be ‘human’ in the Anthropocene?
Nature’s futures tangles with all aspects of the human condition.
Rethinking difference and non-difference.
How did human and nonhuman futures come to be deeply entangled and
endangered.
How do we rethink difference and non-difference (between humans, between
species).
How can we think of more-than-human compositions and assemblages.
In conversation with history, politics, ethology, literature, commerce, violence,
natural and social sciences.
Nature’s futures tangled with all aspects of the human condition
,Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1869)
He was a polymath: geologist, geographer, explorer, botanist, naturalist and
anthropologist.
He was a strident critic of colonialism: rejected racist theories of ‘inferitority’ of
indigious people.
The book ‘Cosmos’: A sketch of a physical description of the universe.
Cosmos (Greek term): universe as inter-related, interactive entity.
Thinking about the earth as one living organism where everything is
connected.
There are many cosmologies but also it is one organism?
The natural history of humans is inseparable from human history of nature:
‘progressive habitability of the surface of the globe’.
People’s futures depend not only on nature, such as food or earth materials,
but only on migration, colonialism and other social processes.
Not the only way relations between human and natural worlds was conceived in
anthropology.
Over the next centuries nature and human have become divided.
Tension between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ (Philippe Descola)
Colonial expansion and detailed information on how ‘non-moderns’/’primitives’ plants
etc as kin, ancestors or doubles.
‘Exotic’ forms of thinking that did not make clear distinctions between humans and
non-humans.
So, forms of ‘irrational thinking’.
For example, totemism (Durkheim) and animism: a system of belief where a
natural object has a specific significance for some people why it is adopted as
kin.
Explanations sought for phenomena seen to run counter to reason, because
‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are seen as belonging to different ontological orders, or
modes of being.
Crystallization of the nature and human divide in Europe.
But we as anthropologists have also been forced to see the relations between
the two.
Animals are not only utilized for the human as food and other goods, but are also
good for thinking through.
Francis Galton ‘nature and nurture’: heredity and human improvement as part of
social-scientific study of greatness/genius.
Wallace: humans are not subject to environmental pressures the way other
organisms are to argue against unexamined theory of race and racial difference.
Against ‘the survival of the fittest’ (Darwin), because humans are not
dependent on the survival of the fittest but can regulate offspring in different
ways.
Boas: against social evolution and espoused cultural relativism.
Due to similar environmental pressures/influences, diversity between people
is created.
Giving the right conditions, status can be contained by people everywhere.
Kroeber: the social as ‘superorganic’, argued that biology has no place in
anthropology.
These divisions are never so schematic.
John Berger (1926-2017)
Wrote ‘ways of seeing’: about how we see things in the capitalist century have been
different than before.
, Ways of seeing are not natural, but are shaped by our environment.
Such as by the camera.
‘Why look at animals’: polemical critique of marginalization of animals under
capitalism.
Often imagined captured in a zoo and cages.
Animals positioned in human activities, clothes, etc.
PART 2: THE ‘POLITICAL’ IN POLITICAL ECOLOGY
Natural vs. political (Paul Robbins)
The imaginaries of nature: serve as a backdrop of new stories of life crisis.
Mass coffee production is a big industry with mass deforestation, monocropping,
decrease of biodiversity, soil erosion, heavy pesticide use, water pollution.
It has a human cost: producers in the global South vs. the customers in the
global North.
Political ecology
Contextual and critical approaches.
Viewing ecological systems as power-laden rather than politically inert.
New ways of looking and understanding the ‘nature’ and environmental problems.
A lot of similarities with ‘economy’: management of the household → management on
a larger scale.
Economy as a part of ecology.
‘Political’: “The general liberal consensus that ‘true’ knowledge is fundamentally non-
political (that overtly political knowledge is not ‘true’ knowledge)” (Edward Said
1978).
“The adjective political is used as a label to discredit any work for daring to
violate the protocol ….”
Politics is placed against rationality.
Unpacking the ways in which we came to think of things as objective facts.
They have become objective facts because of the political relations
they are embedded in.
Politics is operating in our everyday life.
Political vs. apolitical ecologies (Robbins 2012)
Ecoscarcity: tension between population growth and finite resources of the earth.
Malthus’ basic theory: When there is more population than resources there is created
a point of crisis.
Graphhhh
Often related to social policies: distribution of resources, not everyone can be
fed.
People consummate often through the air pollution and consumption
emissions.
Small numbers of people (often the richests) can consume large parts
of resources, so overpopulation is only part of the problem.
Demographic explanations are very limited explanations.
Modernization: The apolitical assumption is that ecological problems and crises
throughout the world are the result of inadequate adoption and implementation of
‘modern’ techniques and tools.
The green revolution (post WW2)
Increased use of mechanization, irrigation, fertilizers, and pesticides.
Greatly increases efficiency of lands, short-term profitability.
Decreased world hunger.
, Soil erosion, biodiversity loss, ground and surface water
contamination.
Apolitical: you put the solutions on technologies and deny the underlying power
inequalities, unequal distribution of resources and other underlying focus at work.
This can create other unforeseen problems.
Problems can evolve because of underlying problems instead of the wrong
technology.
Creates a new revolution (William 1968) where overpopulation can create political
instability and with that can end in war.
Political commitment to social justice.
Political ecology has been deeply rooted in ecological and environmental
movements, propelled by the environmental crisis (rooted in activism).
Political ecologies: roots
Marxist political economy:
The degradation of the environment is a fundamental feature of capitalism.
Capitalist production requires the extraction of surpluses from labor and
nature.
No room for common property (‘commons’): understanding of the land as a
sharing property is no longer possible, someone has to own it.
New ways of organizing labor and nature.
Peasant studies:
Urgency to understand the world’s poor agricultural communities (1960s-
1970s).
Revolutionary movements.
Social unrest in rural areas and political movements of agrarian communities.
Peasants frustrated the aggressive development efforts.
Looking at the ‘primitive’ to see/define us.
Two concepts: moral economy and everyday resistance (Thompson and
Scott).
Feminist development studies/critical development research:
In the post-WW2 era, development assistance and investment swept the
globe, led by large multilateral lending agencies. Many poured into projects
ranging from agricultural intensification to dam building and industrial
development.
Use of the term ‘underdeveloped’.
Point that human-environment interactions and processes are gendered.
Indigenous knowledge of environmental processes.
Postcolonial studies.
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