The Commons in History: Culture, Conflict, and Ecology

2. Culture in Common?

2 Culture in Common? To the medieval mind such landscapes were liminal places, where humanity might encounter the supernatural . . . in early medieval Scandinavian cosmology, where the utgard (the same term was used of the common waste beyond the farmland) was inhabited by monsters and was dark. . . . The association of wilder spaces beyond cultivation with spiritual or mythical sites is a global phenomenon, reflected in the widespread occurrence of sacred groves and forests, or revered mountains and rivers, often subject, . . . to communal forms of guardianship . . . . They were spaces where ritual, such as the “beating of the bounds,” with its attendant claiming of boundary markers, took place and folk memory played a vital part. Minor features in the landscape, both natural and man-made, along the open boundaries across common land were claimed and named. Symbolism was often powerful: the liminality of the common waste was reflected in its association with the dead, notably as the places of gallows and gibbets.1 The discovery that one’s home or business is on the site of an old Indian graveyard is a horror movie cliché. Many ghost stories (such as those of M. R. James) involve the arrival of ancient spirits that have been antagonized by the taking of property. Disrupting long-held communal rights to land might be seen to stir up supernatural forces, and such apparent superstitions and rumors may have a functional basis. The rational management of the commons is helped, perhaps, by appeals to the irrational. Christopher Rodgers and his colleagues researched the environmental history of English and Welsh commons and 44 Chapter 2 note that commons were associated with the supernatural and the irrational. The boundary of a commons was often a boundary between the wild of the waste and the tamed cultivated fields. This question of how culture, including social norms and human institutions, helps or hinders an understanding of the historical commons and future sustainable history is the subject of this chapter. Culture is a vast, complex, and shifting area of discussion that is perhaps easier to ignore, and any attempt to deal with it is likely to be incomplete at best. Even defining the term culture is difficult. The literary theorist Terry Eagleton notes that it “is said to be one of the two or three most complex words in the English language.”2 In this context, culture deals with the beliefs and practices relating to the management and meaning of the commons. The writer and activist David Korten has developed a useful description: Culture is the system of beliefs, values, perceptions, and social relations that encodes the shared learning of a particular human group essential to individual survival and orderly social function. It serves as the interpretive lens through which the human brain processes the massive flow of data from our senses to distinguish the significant from the inconsequential, assign meaning, and shape our behavior: “This plant will kill you. That one is food.” . . . The processes by which culture shapes our perceptions and behavior occur mostly at an unconscious level. It rarely occurs to us to ask whether the reality we perceive through the lens of the culture within which we grew up is the “true” reality. We just take for granted that it is.3 An illustration of the cultural underpinnings of commons comes from the Maine lobster fishing grounds in New England . Fishing is a classic example of the “tragedy of the commons ,” and efforts to regulate fishing at an international level (such as European Union’s Commons Fisheries Policy) often fail.The anthropologist James Acheson suggests that the Maine lobster fishery, which is regulated by local people, provides a model of management that might be applied more widely to Culture in Common? 45 enhance sustainability. For generations, local lobster catchers have maintained a commons, rationing access to prevent the lobsters from being overexploited. Acheson argues that while the management makes economic and environmental sense, cultural factors are important in making it work. Strong traditions and norms are used to make this sustainable system function. For example, there is strong hostility to new fishers. According to Acheson, it takes a long time to be accepted as a fisher, and even those who belong to local fishing families may have difficulty joining the community. He suggests that it is best to start young to learn the norms of the lobster community as one grows up. Those who break the most important...