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Chapter Two Why Meanings Matter: Culture, Concepts, and Behavior When I was young my father would always pump some water at night. In the morning he would take a ladleful of water, go outside, greet the sun, toss the water, and let out a whoop. When I asked my father what he was doing, he said that he was giving the chickens a drink of water. When I was older, my mother told me that it was his way of saying thanks to the Creator for the bounty of life. My father lived to be eighty-seven. —A Menominee elder IN 1940 THE German-born American anthropologist Franz Boas introduced the notion of cultural relativism to the social sciences. The underlying idea was that we should withhold from judging the behavior of members of other cultures and instead should engage in understanding people’s behavior on the basis of their own models of the world, the way they themselves make sense of it. Taking the perspective of cultural relativism is helpful to our purposes in two ways. First, it allows us to understand the meanings produced by individuals, meanings that guide both an individual’s judgments and behavior. Second, it helps us to avoid the mistake of failing to consider other people’s point of view, their individual and cultural models of the environment, a mistake that leads to cultural misunderstandings and negative judgments, including conflicts between Native Americans and European Americans. That meanings matter should not come as a surprise to anthropologists . In fact, one might argue that anthropology is mainly concerned with the process of discerning meanings within specific contexts and the 10 Why Meanings Matter 11 understanding how different cultural groups make sense of their existence . The anthropologist Clifford Geertz viewed culture as a web of meaning within which individuals carry out their daily activities and which they use to make sense of their actions. Though we see some shortcomings of Geertz’s view, in general we subscribe to the idea that people’s behavior should be understood within the meanings that they themselves ascribe to their actions. This makes intuitive sense. One does not need to conduct research to know that the value of a great many objects must be measured in meanings and not solely in dollars. Most Americans would condemn the act of burning the U.S. flag, although a flag is easily replaced, because a flag symbolizes many important meanings. A wedding ring does not have the same value at the jewelry store that it has after the wedding, when it has been imbued with meaning. We believe that environments, just like wedding rings and the American flag, have meanings, and these meanings matter for environmental decisionmaking. As we noted in chapter 1, human decisionmaking often fails to adhere to an economic framework, one in which competing kinds of values can be placed on a common scale and traded off against each other. This fact leaves many policymakers and decision theorists chagrined; they see the unwillingness of people to place a dollar value on a lake in Ontario as a refusal to face the inevitable trade-offs required in resource allocation (see, for example, Baron and Spranca 1997; Tetlock 2003). The lake in Ontario is viewed by these people as a “protected value,” that is, one protected from tradeoffs with money or most other goods. How can we have a policy on national parks or selling mining leases on federal lands in the absence of some notion of what these lands and parks are worth? Although these sorts of protected values have been roundly criticized, we find it hard to imagine that they would have evolved if their consequences were uniformly negative (see Frank 1989 for a nice elaboration of this general point). The phrase “the tragedy of the commons” refers to the notion that, without punitive regulations, resources held in common will be rapidly depleted because each individual will overweight his or her own needs relative to the needs of others. And indeed, when regulation is absent and individual utility is paramount, the commons suffers heavily. This phenomenon suggests that there are contexts where individual rationality (in the sense of each individual maximizing their personal gains) leads to disaster and that it may be possible to do “better than rational.” One such context is represented in the tropical rain forest of northern Guatemala, where we have been studying the forest-management practices of three cultural groups. In chapter 1 we described how...

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