The second theme we're going to discuss this week is the politics of knowledge or rather the
relationship between knowledge and politics, this is another classic in anthropology and we're going
to look at two very different approaches to that similar in a sense but also quite different in what
they want to do with discussing politics and knowledge.
They are similar in the sense that they both examine policy and the political implications of policy
and contrast that to local knowledges. The two articles one written by Posey in the 1970s and
Fairhead and Leach in 1990s are empirically looking at similar cases.
Both examine patches of forest islands that appear to be natural but are not, they are
cultural in the sense of being man-made, and they use that distinction or the case study to examine a
dichotomy that we looked at last week between nature and culture, is basically assumptions about the
divide between human interventions and nature that
Lies behind what they think are the misunderstandings or the misconstructions of the problem done
by policymakers here.
They also set out to address policy makers and policies themselves from two different perspectives
that also reflects where they are talking from the time period in which they wrote. Posey writing in
the 1970s stressed correction, he wanted to get across that there is a valid form of knowledge that
is not your typical scientific knowledge that he calls
indigenous knowledge, and that this should be used and be understood by policymakers in order to make
better decisions, so he really wants to have an impact on policy through better knowledge. Fairhead and Leach
Writes from a Foucauldian tradition where knowledge in itself is much more suspect it's seen
as having in and of itself political consequences and specifically scientific knowledge.
So they focus on the mistakes that are made and how these are reproduced and the kind of
How power effects that these mistakes happen. So let's begin with the Posey article his research was
done in the 1970s in Brazilian Amazon among Kayapó indigenous people and as I said
He stressed throughout the lack of studies on indigenous knowledge
so you see the article is full of classifications, indigenous knowledge use of classifications to
show that this is also some kind of valid knowledge that should be taken seriously by biologists and
by scientists and policymakers.
The main point of the article is to show that what appears as natural i.e. a natural
forest is the result of management and creation by the Kayapó indigenous people
He centres his case around a phenomenon that has been studied by many before him the so-called apêtê
the forest islands. They look like these sort of scattered old forests in an otherwise open
landscape so what they look at is remains of all forest and policymakers have thought that
these are really the only things that are left by the destructive practices of the indigenous people
they are left a few patches of forest in place the rest has been destroyed by slash and burn and
similar practices this is turning the case completely on its head argues Posey, they are created by
indigenous people and would not exist without them, and it goes through a quite complex process of
how these
forests are created, over how forest islands are created, they are created by taking compost heaps
from existing forest which are then left to rot they are beaten and moved into new areas they are
sort of mixed with other substances such as soil from termite mounds and then carefully neutered
and extended over the years until you have a new
new forest island. They do this because they are created as a refuge in terms of
trouble and in terms of war for instance, so in addition to having useful plants such as food plants
they also have other useful plants such as medicines for instance so you can almost think of them as
concentrated gardens created throughout the landscape
With shelter for hiding food to eat and and medicine
further these forest islands then are linked with corridors, as the people move through the landscape they
pick and collect seeds and roots and plant them along the paths between the different forests and in
that way create a landscape where they can move through it and find useful things as they move
through the landscape
and these corridors together with their gardens are managed through fire, which we will get back to in a bit. So
rather than having indigenous people destroying the forest and only leaving patches left Posey
paints a picture of an indigenous people who have a close intimate relationship with their
environment
who create forest, they remove useful plants into places where they have use for them and
through painting such a picture he asked us to reconsider what is natural, it's not a
case where you had a natural all expanding forest destroyed by people, rather this is a managed
landscape and part of why this is misunderstood in the first place is the nature/society divide.
When you see patches of forest you naturally think
if you start out with a nature/society divide that the people in that landscape must have
destroyed the forest since the forest were there first, but this is not the case at all.
Rather he argues that this could be a model of deforestation if you look at the management
techniques of the Kayapó you could actually use that as a way to replace destroyed
forests.
he also looks at much criticised management technique that the indigenous people also engage in
namely slash-and-burn cultivation this is a form of cultivation where you burn down areas huge
tracts of forest and by doing so you release a nutrients in the ashes and extremely barren soil that
is there which you can't really grow anything in, by and off itself, NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 88% (HØY)
Is then useful for a season or two, but then you need to move on and burn a new area and so forth and
this is normally done in a kind of circulation, and it looks extremely destructive to outsiders so
when colonial officers and others saw these kind of practices which has been used by many people
throughout the world, they try to stop it and have people use fertilisers instead, but often
with dramatic negative consequences.It turns out that this is actually one of the best ways of
managing agriculture in a situation like the Amazon where all the nutrition is in the plants and
Not in the ground itself and again he shows this as a use for management technique
he goes on to explain that the way they managed to do this and
here it gets back to the importance of knowledge and indigenous knowledge, he maps out a quite
complex cognitive map which represent this indigenous knowledge where most plants and landscapes are
ordered as a continuum from one
ideal type the forest to another one that Savanna and the Apêtê is a link between this type
and is created by thinking about it as a link, so it shows that this kind duality or
A mixture of different sets is recreated throughout down the levels as well and used as a way
of managing the environment.
So rather than a natural forest destroyed by management techniques and scientific management
techniques Posey tells us that there is a knowledge as scientific knowledge but a different kind of
Science and Indigenous knowledge behind this
the landscape that is managed he says or plant species that are found in these managed areas has come from an
area as big as Europe, so it's a huge and complex system. In a later article he said that he stressed
this management perhaps a bit too much because he also wanted to make a political claim because if
the indigenous people have cultivated and made this landscape they obviously have
a very different kind of claim to it than if they just live there or destroyed it. He's also been
accused by some biologists of not getting the classifications right but the important bit for us
here is the argument he makes about understanding other forms or view of what is going on, that the
indigenous local view is a valid view and explains what is happening in this environment
and further that the mistake made by biologists and policy managers stems from a separation a
conceptual separation of nature and society in the first place, and as I said writing in the 1970s
what Posey really wanted to do here was to add a corrective to policy. He thought that if I just
apply this knowledge if I just show
Policy makers that the knowledge is wrong and that we need to learn from indigenous people you will find better
alternatives.
Fairhead and Leach talks about a very similar case but in the 1990s, and for that
reason their politics is different as well. We are moving now from Brazilian
Amazon to West Africa, but a case that shows many of the same
Problems as I said. The problem here is that nature in West Africa from colonial time has
Have suffered from de-forestation due to practices of indigenous people. At first one
thought that the reason why you had a lot of Savannah was because it did not have a lot of rainfall
and at the time one believed that rainfall
will follow the trees and it was natives that destroyed the trees that would lead to the dry
climate in the first place.
From the outside there was an assumption that it was indigenous peoples bad practices that was
The explanation for the climatic problems. Fairhead and Leach argues that you have to try to look at
the present situation and compare it to what they thought was a climax
situation, again when you saw patches of forest left in an almost barren landscape you thought that
well originally this must have been covered with forest and the indigenous unknowing people
through the practices had destroyed everything and only left a few forest patches
left, and if you just stop the destruction the bad farming
practices this original forest will then return.
The desertification one saw then and the spread of the Savannah as one explain soil
erosion due to bad farming practices, and the interesting thing they show is that this was 'known' even
before 'known' in inverted commas even before one actually looked at the empirical evidence, it was
just assumed that by the European conquerors that this must have been the case.
It is interesting that they say that the same kind of colonial discourse happens
today as well with people who wants to help, so this narrative
rather than discourse forms a narrative of crisis.
Blame is placed on shifting cultivators and pastoralist who do not know what the best practices are
this is not investigated empirically, it has formed the basis for policy from the colonial time to
the present and the only solution then is to create forest reserves and have people viewed out
of the landscape i.e. impose a nature/society distinction. The point
Of that even if this narrative has formed the basis both for Colonial authorities and development
work the justification given has been different, whereas colonial authorities tended to stress ignorance,
the development workers tended to stress external factors and breakdown of traditional societies and
more benign
explanations like that for instance. They then go through two examples of this empirically. One is the
forest region of Guinea were from colonial policy to the present has argued that the remains the
islands of forest that you now see surrounding the villages are the remains of a large forest climax
that used to be surrounding the whole landscape and it's now
disappearing rapidly because of human destruction, and the reason for this is farming practices such
as slash and burn farming as I just explained as well as population increase interestingly here
that is used as an explanation as well, as well as social breakdown because of modern
developments that break down what was
perhaps older forms of control and management of a common resource, so this is just assumed through
all the reports from colonial times to the present they argue. It contrasts widely with what happens
if you as an anthropologist speak to people, because people living in the area will tell you that
rather than a massive forest disappearing the forest is increasing and what used to be a
savannah
is now emerging as forest islands and further this is collaborated by photographs.
So what is going on here
what they argue is going on is that this forest has been planted by people what they see as forest
islands by people and not then are the last remains of human settlements or what used to be
there before human settlements, second example is really similar it's from what is now a UNESCO
biosphere reserve and a world Bank conservation
project
again patches of forest are seen as remains of what used to be the upper Guinean forest
Block and again it is people's destructive practices that are used as an explanation for why there
is hardly any forest left again, the local understanding of what is going on is that what used to
be Savannah then was depopulated by forced removals of people and then
forest emerged in what used to be the natural landscape there namely a savannah, so the forest that
You see bits of now is actually increasing it's not what used to be there and it's also a
system or a symbol of dispossession. This is very similar to what I found in my case study I did in
South Africa at the UNESCO world heritage site where
conservation is try to look after or protect what they see as a last remains of a coastal Forest
again looking at photographs you see that this forest emerged in the apartheid years when people were
forcefully removed from the grazing grounds, so what was center had been grazing grounds had
forest encroached on them as people were forcibly removed by apartheid. So again the same
mistake
goes on in all these cases is that when you see bits of forest and man used landscapes you assume
that there must have been a total coverage of forest and that the man use management of landscape is
destroying what used to be a pristine forest, and again that builds on a distinction between nature
and society. So for the whole region then argues Fairhead and Leach we see
Increasing evidence that forest is growing into eating into encroaching on the Savannah not the other
way around and that actually farming assist this because in the first case what you saw as Forest
is managed forest around homesteads, for the nature conservation area you also see that forest is
increasing and not decreasing as people have moved out
but because the narrative they say this doesn't really register at all, then all reports written all
policy made assumed that this must have been a forest that is now being destroyed by people and therefore
we need to stop people from using this environment to save the forest, and again this
comes from drawing a sharp distinction between nature and society in the first place.
So to the overall theme then, both would agree that knowledge is not neutral here. Posey argues
that knowledge has negative consequences because it is wrong and he wants to correct it, so he
wants to make sure that the right kind of knowledge reach policy makers so that you can help and
promote and create better alternatives and he even as you saw think that
he has found a way that modern management techniques can use traditional knowledge to make sure that
you have a deforestation, Fairhead and Leach writes another the tradition a very 1990s tradition where
knowledge is seen as power and anthropology is used to be skeptical of scientific knowledge the kind
of science that they described here which is also science
but also policy interventions in form of development projects is so much based on an
assumption about the distinction between nature and society that all local practices are seen as
destructive in the first place and it is because of the way that scientific knowledge is structured
in this way that is really hard to get past it so what we can do is stand at the outside and
criticize it.
Now think about that in relationship with what Anna Tsing is writing a decade or so later, she
writes sort of with this kind of tradition as a background and therefore all wants to open an
Invitation again for just not criticizing science but also finding ways of knowing and working together
with it just to make a link back to what we talked about last week
okay that was all for now see you all on Thursday.