Building a New Biocultural Synthesis: Political-Economic Perspectives on Human Biology

18. Nature, Political Ecology, and Social Practice: Toward an Academic and Political Agenda

Chapter 18 Nature, Political Ecology, and Social Practice: Toward an Academic and Political Agenda S0ren Hvalkof and Arturo Escobar Ecological approaches in the social sciences and the humanities are experiencing a renaissance in many parts of the world in the form of what is now frequently called "political ecology." Political ecology has been characterized as "an emerging agenda" in third world and environmental studies . Different disciplines and fields (e.g., geography, anthropology, history , sociology, feminist theory, ecological economics, environmental history, historical archaeology) seem to be engaged in a novel reformulation of the relationship between society and nature, humans and environment , biology and history, which could be encompassed under the generic term political ecology (Bryant 1992; Peet and Watts 1996). This new interest in "ecology" and "nature" is evidently spurred by the increasing environmental crisis that societal development has inflicted upon human livelihood on a global scale. At the heart of this new interest lie important intellectual and political questions. On the one hand, the politicization of political ecology has been fostered by the introduction of the canon of sustainability in the third world development debate and by the emergence of social movements represented by a multiplicity of organizations and interests, ranging from environmental NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) to indigenous peoples' struggles-all staking claims over the production of nature and the control ofnatural resources. In the academic world, on the other hand, postmodern and poststructuralist deconstruction and critiques of essentialism have raised fundamental questions regarding the very constitution of the modem knowledge and cultural configuration-the modem "episteme"-governing our relations to "nature.'" 425 426 Building a New Biocultural Synthesis The combination and ordering of the terms political and ecological suggest that nature's "housekeeping" needs to be recontextualized in a social field significantly larger and more complex than that of biological imperatives. Such a "socialization" ofecosystems and environmental relations is not new to anthropology, where approaches seeking to theorize the relationship between humans and the natural environment-such as cultural ecology, human ecology, and social ecology-have long been in existence . However productive these different conceptualizations might have been, they have almost without exception operated within a Cartesian universe , where the place and constitution of "nature" and its human/social adversary are already given, making impossible radical challenges to the underlying episteme. A dichotomized view of nature and society-also embedded in the separation of subject and object of knowledge-became a founding principle ofmodernist paradigms. Political ecology tends to dissolve these boundaries. Defined as the study ofmanifold constructions ofnature in contexts ofpower, political ecology scrutinizes the ecological in ways that incorporate into the inquiry human decision making, political strategies, preferences and choices, cognitive mapping of the social and the natural, as well as operating at various scales and domains. It also brings to the fore the question of the construction and identity of "nature" and "the natural," assuming that it can no longer be taken for granted; in doing so, political ecology makes visible the political implications that follow from a significant questioning of the underlying epistemic order. Contrary to most postmodern discourses, in which this questioning takes place with little regard for social and political accountability, political ecology intensifies anthropology's endemic tension between theory and practice. As we shall argue, it also provides novel elements toward re-imagining such a relation. To anticipate our argument, political ecology highlights the fact that social movements in particular are becoming central to both struggles over nature and our attempts to theorize the natural. To the extent that social movements can be seen as defending local meanings and practices of nature-that is, as movements of ecological attachment to culturally defined territories-they can also be seen as mediating our practice as anthropologists and experts ofthe naturaVculturai. Social movements and political ecology thus constitute a rich conceptual and political space for rethinking questions of reflexivity, writing, and intervention in ways that are theoretically sophisticated and consciously political. Political ecology can thus be seen as an appropriate space for articulating a new theory of Nature, Political Ecology, and Social Practice 427 practice and a new practice of theory for anthropology (Escobar 1996, n.d.; Hvalkof 1996). In this chapter, we seek to provide the rudiments of an anthropological political ecology following the orientation sketched above. After providing a brief historical overview of the anthropological involvement with ecology in the first part of the chapter, we move on to discuss the...