‘We are the true guardians of the environment’: human‐environment relations and debates about the future of the Chagos Archipelago

This article applies Ingold's conceptualization of environmental outlooks ranging from the ‘globe’ to the ‘sphere’ to explore human‐environment relations and debates about the future of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Chagossians and conservationists broadly represent the two extremes of the engaged lifeworld of the sphere and the detached worldview of the globe, respectively, but I argue that this does not necessarily determine their environmental outlooks for the future. It is not simply the case either that Chagossians uniformly advocate resettlement of Chagos or that conservationists uniformly oppose resettlement. Within each group two distinct environmental outlooks are identified: engagement versus withdrawal amongst Chagossians, and exclusion versus participation amongst conservationists. The article demonstrates, then, that environmental outlooks are influenced not only by understandings of human‐environment relations but also by pragmatic and ideological considerations.     

Purity and Prejudice: Deluding Ourselves About Biodiversity Conservation

Tropical conservationists can benefit from understanding human thought processes. We are often less rational than we might believe. Our judgmental biases may sometimes encourage us to overlook or act against major conservation opportunities. Better appreciation of the tricks of the human mind might make us more open-minded, humble, and ready to appreciate different viewpoints. We propose one inherent bias that we believe predisposes conservationists to neglect the value of modified habitats for biodiversity conservation. We call it the ‘tainted-nature delusion’. Recognizing such biases can increase our effectiveness in recognizing and achieving viable conservation outcomes.     

Hacking anthropology

This essay outlines how the ‘hack’ might offer a model for anthropological research in the face of the distributed relations evidenced by digital data. The argument builds on fieldwork with citizens and activists and looks at their attempts to understand and make use of the data produced by energy sensors and monitors. Drawing on their experiences, I suggest that ‘the hack’ emerges as an important form of practice that helps people navigate the place of data in social relations. Taking the hack not just as ethnographic observation but also as a methodological proposition, I use my ethnographic material on the practice of the hack to reconsider the anthropological challenge of doing ethnography of processes that are only perceptible through numerical or digital data. To explore the value of the hack for anthropology, I introduce an example of an attempt to do ethnography in the mode of the hack. The essay ends with reflections on how the hack might provide us with new ways of getting to grips with the anthropological implications of systemic and emergent relations that are both brought to light and remade through data.     

The reality of anthropology

The article concerns the continuity between anthropology and the reality it studies. Discovery and definition merge. This is substantiated by a discussion of ‘events’ and ‘worlds’. While the anthropologist becomes her own informant in the field, in the sense that her experience informs her ethnography, anthropology simultaneously shapes her discoveries. This simultaneity ultimately dissolves the distinction between subject and object, and from this point anthropology may recondition the conditions of science.     

Introduction: Towards an anthropology of data

The world is talking ‘data’. The early cross-disciplinary, business-orientated hype around the potential of ‘big’ data, with its promises of unprecedented insight into social life, has given way. Data now motivates a sweep of dystopian visions, from rampant commodification to the invasion of privacy, political manipulation, and shadowy data doubles. Yet anthropologists have been cautious in taking data itself as their object, even as the social life of data practices becomes manifest in our ethnographies. In this introduction, we argue for an anthropology of data that is ethnographically specific and theoretically ambitious, putting forward a case for why anthropological engagements with the data moment might be not only politically important but also conceptually generative.     

The Islam of anthropology

Research on ‘Muslim societies’ is a controversial topic in the present, particularly given the US army’s current employment of anthropological experts in war zones under military occupation. In 2006 the UK Foreign Office, too, sought to include anthropologists in its worldwide research project entitled ‘Combating Terrorism by Countering Radicalization’, with grants given outside the normal process of research funding and differently assessed. In this article, I immodestly argue for how the discipline of anthropology should apprehend and analyse Islam in the present political context. The paper claims that anthropological research provides an antidote to the Islamophobia of much talk about Islam in the Australian public sphere, an Islamophobia originating not only from the right but from some leftists and feminists as well.     

Anthropocene anthropology: reconceptualizing contemporary global change

The Anthropocene is the scientific label given by earth scientists to the current epoch of unprecedented anthropogenic planetary change. The Anthropocene is also a political label designed to call attention to this change and evolving notions of agency and responsibility in contemporary life. This article critically explores what I call ‘the Anthropocene idea’ and the condition of ‘Anthropocene spaces’ through selected anthropological writing about recent planetary change and through analysis of current events in a specific ‘vulnerable’ location. By considering recent events in The Bahamas, I arrive at an orientation that I call simply Anthropocene anthropology. Rather than advocating for the creation of a new subfield of research, this mode of engagement offers an open‐ended conceptual framework for the critical examination of the Anthropocene idea as it influences the symbolic and material realities of contemporary Anthropocene spaces.     

A failing anthropology of colonial failure: following a driver's uniform found at Amani research station,Tanzania

The remains of Amani, a century-old scientific laboratory in Tanzania, are quintessential modern relics. When anthropologists turn to such infrastructures of, originally colonial, knowledge-making, their own implication with the object of their study – and with its epistemological and political-economic origins and order – becomes part of the ethnographic pursuit. This entanglement between researcher and research material should challenge familiar realist modes of ethnographic writing ‘about’ such places that elude the anthropologists’ own, compromised position within them. Matters are complicated further when the studied knowledge-making sites already are broken, having failed their purpose – as in the case of the vestiges of an abandoned colonial institution. In this essay, I wonder how such ruins of knowledge-making might transform the knowledge made by anthropologists working within them. Instead of just adding ‘reflexive’ confessions to realist accounts, could writing take part in the defeat that the scientific station's remains seem to embody – writing not ‘after/beyond’ but ‘going along with’ failure? Drawing on non-representational ethnography, and poet-anthropologist Hubert Fichte's embrace of epistemic defeat as anticolonial method, I trace my engagements with just one fragment of the scientific station – a driver's uniform. In doing so, I experiment with an object ethnography that ‘fails’ to detach author and object, or settle the question of failure, and instead foregrounds performativity, ambiguity, and mirth as starting points for an ethnography of, and in, our modern ruins.     

Epistemic artefacts: on the uses of complexity in anthropology

Distinctions between the ‘simple’ and the ‘complex’ have enjoyed a long and varied career in anthropology. Simplicity was once part of a collective fantasy about what life was like elsewhere, tingeing studies of tribal life with human longing for simpler ways of being. With the reflexive turn and the rise of cultural critique, simplicity has been all but excommunicated in favour of widespread diagnoses of complexity. In this article, I tease out some transformations in the uses of complexity in anthropology, and weave in some critical responses to these uses, spanning many decades, from within the discipline. I pay special attention to recent critiques by anthropologists who are beginning to grow weary of complexity as both an end‐in‐itself for scholarship and an empirical diagnosis. For these critics, complexity is deeply entwined with anthropological methods and knowledge practices. Drawing on these critical views, I suggest that complexity may be an epistemological artefact, rather than something that can be diagnosed ‘out there’, and offer a way of reframing complexity as a ‘dominant problematic’ in anthropology and beyond.     

A sensory approach for multispecies anthropology

This special issue suggests that the need to examine the entangled lives of species, selves and other beings through a multisensory perspective is crucial and timely. Developing on a sensory analysis, one that emerges through what Anna Tsing refers to as the ‘arts of noticing’ (2015), this introductory paper explores how both nonhuman and human lives are intertwined, and how their close examination can guide anthropologists in their ability to capture the subtleties of more‐than‐human engagement, connection and relatedness. Through articles within this issue from Australian anthropology and beyond, we ask how becoming‐with more‐than‐humans helps us to construct a post‐humanist analysis in the combination of sensory anthropology and multispecies anthropology. Through a combination of these two fields, the paper suggests, anthropology can take up the opportunity to think about animals as subjects, through our ability to communicate beyond language and to engage in a more meaningful way through interspecies knowledge‐making.     

Key informants on the history of anthropology: an itinerary

The history of anthropology is a growing field of study within the discipline itself. Our series ‘Key Informants on the History of Anthropology’ contributes to the discussion of how anthropology, as it is understood and practised today, evolved and took shape. In the following invited contribution Marc Augé, Professor of Anthropology at École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, reflects back on his work in Africa, in light of his more recent explorations of contemporary global issues. He observes how history intervenes also with previous research ‘as if the facts which I observed in former times were only taking on their full meaning today’. This relationship between past and present research reinforces his faith in social anthropology as a discipline that is particularly well suited to address contemporary issues of globalisation.     

Equality without equivalence: an anthropology of the common★

This article elaborates an Amazonian conception of the common and the challenge it poses to Western thinking about individualism and equality. It is suggested that a number of distinctive features of Amazonian Urarina sociality may have their basis in a shared refusal of factors that give rise to relations of equivalence between people. This kind of singularism, or ‘individualism without individuals’, results from an orientation to the common as a collective resource that is antithetical to property, in which subjectivity is shaped in relation to wider ecological and affective resources that are continuously and collectively produced. This embraces not only shared economic resources, such as land or game animals, but also ways of organizing and producing affective, cognitive, and linguistic relations, ‘commonalities’ of various kinds which never reduce differences to an abstract subject, such as the individual of liberalism or the collective of socialism.     

What Is Secondary about Secondary Tropical Forest? Rethinking Forest Landscapes

Forests have long been locations of contestation between people and state bureaucracies, and among the knowledge frameworks of local users, foresters, ecologists, and conservationists. An essential framing of the debate has been between the categories of primary and secondary forest. In this introduction to a collection of papers that address the questions of what basis, in what sense, and for whom primary forest is ‘primary’ and secondary forest is ‘secondary,’ and whether these are useful distinctions, we outline this debate and propose a new conceptual model that departs from the simple binary of primary and secondary forests. Rather, we propose that attention should be given to the nature of the disturbance that may alter forest ecology, the forms of regeneration that follow, and the governance context within which this takes place.

     

Conflict and contestation in the cross-border community: hometown associations reassessed

Drawing on a broad variety of field research projects among Salvadoran immigrant hometown associations in Los Angeles, conducted over a ten-year period, this paper seeks to contribute to the emerging literature on hometown associations by shifting the focus to the political processes underlying associational politics and the characteristics of the organizational field that structures their activities. We argue that conflict, both among migrants in the ‘hostland’ and between migrants in the hostland and stay-behinds in the ‘homeland’, is an inherent aspect of hometown association activities and their efforts to create sociability ‘here’ and development ‘there’. We demonstrate that the hometowners abroad have difficulty deciding what they share in common; those who do engage in organized efforts to span here and there represent a select few. Moreover, the issue of how the migrants and their associations relate to the people and institutions left behind is often a dilemma, resolved in any number of ways, not all of which render satisfaction at either ends of the chain.     

Resource conflicts and the anthropology of the dark and the good in highlands Papua New Guinea

In this article I consider why individuals sacrifice their lives for the collective. In the Porgera Valley of highlands Papua New Guinea, young men who are called ‘Rambos’ engage in sustained tribal conflicts due to increasing social inequalities in an area that is supposedly benefiting from socioeconomic development. The opening of the Porgera Gold Mine in 1990 ushered in an era of anticipated benefits that were hoped to transform the lives of the region's subsistence horticulturalists. Yet, anticipated flows of mining money and social benefits have largely failed to materialise. The abjection experienced by young men eventuated into a series of tribal fights, resulting in deaths, displacements, and the destruction of most infrastructure. I examine the fighting and its aftermath in relation to anthropologies of the dark and the good and argue that these polar opposites can hinder more subtle understandings of value plurality among Porgerans.     

Key informants on the history of anthropology

The history of anthropology is a growing field of study within the discipline itself. Our series ‘Key Informants on the History of Anthropology’ is offered as a contribution to the discussion of how anthropology, as it is understood and practised today, evolved and took shape. In this invited contribution, T. O. Beidelman reflects on the formative, enlightening and sometimes dramatic encounters and experiences that have shaped his engagement with anthropology, and have influenced his many and lasting contributions to the discipline.     

Why conservationists should be concerned about natural resource legislation affecting indigenous peoples’ rights: lessons from Peninsular Malaysia

For conservation to be effective in forests with indigenous peoples, there needs to be greater recognition of indigenous customary rights, particularly with regards to their use of natural resources. Ideally, legislation regulating the use of natural resources should include provisions for the needs of both indigenous peoples and biodiversity. In reality, however, legislative weaknesses often exist and these can result in negative impacts, either on indigenous peoples’ livelihoods, their surrounding biodiversity, or both. Here, our case study demonstrates why conservationists need to pay greater attention to natural resource legislation affecting indigenous peoples’ rights. Apart from examining relevant laws for ambiguities that may negatively affect biodiversity and livelihoods of indigenous people in Peninsular Malaysia (known as the Orang Asli), we also provide supporting information on actual resource use based on questionnaire surveys. In order to address these ambiguities, we propose possible legislative reconciliation to encourage policy reform. Although there are positive examples of conservationists elsewhere adopting a more inclusive and participatory approach by considering the needs of indigenous peoples, greater recognition must be afforded to land and indigenous rights within natural resource laws for the benefit of indigenous peoples and biodiversity.     

Troubled landscapes,troubling anthropology: co‐presence,necessity, and the making of ethnographic knowledge

If ‘co‐presence is a condition of [anthropological] inquiry’ (Fabian), what sort of knowledge does it produce? I explore this question through an ethnography of a ‘troubled landscape’ in Malaysian Borneo: a lush, hilly region that has been the site of a dam construction and resettlement project since the late 2000s. My article uses the notion of co‐presence as both a lens through which to explore the predicaments of the four small communities affected by the scheme and a reflexive device that underscores the embeddedness of the ethnographic encounter in a larger relational field – one characterized as much by chance and necessity as it is by anthropologists’ intellectual agendas. In the process, I seek to trouble some of the methodological and ethical issues posed by anthropology's recent ‘ontological turn’, notably the long‐standing questions of what it means to ‘take seriously’ and how ethnography and the ethnographer are implicated in this project.     

The Age of Angels: spiritualism and evolutionary progressionism in a nineteenth-century geologic time chart

The term ‘Anthropocene’ often carries apocalyptic overtones of environmental devastation, but many nineteenth-century iterations of the ‘Age of Humans’ idea were explicitly optimistic. The current time period was framed as a ‘Psychozoic Era’ or ‘Age of Mind’ in which human beings took their predetermined place at the pinnacle of ‘creation’. Hiram Alvin Reid, an amateur scientist in the midwestern United States, took this line of thinking a step further. He drafted a geologic time chart in which the current ‘Age of Man’ was succeeded by a future ‘Age of Angels’, wherein humans will become higher beings. Reid was a Christian spiritualist who thought that evolution drove both physical and spiritual advancement, including the recent development of a ‘sixth sense’ that allowed humans to perceive ghosts and angels. Reid’s views, while idiosyncratic and coloured by his metaphysical beliefs, drew heavily on mainstream concepts in biology and geology. Prominent geologists like James Dana and Joseph Le Conte argued for an Age of Mind in terms that mixed scientific rigor with religious and progressionist ideas. The Psychozoic was also embraced by many progressive-minded individuals outside the natural sciences, paralleling widespread modern interest in the Anthropocene.     

Good anthropology in dark times: Critical appraisal and ethnographic application

‘Dark Anthropology’ and its complementary ‘Anthropology of the Good’ have become influential and debated notions in anthropology in recent years. I here parse distinctive features of these emphases, address their relation to theory and to ethnography, and consider the stakes involved in concretely applying their conceptual designations. I discuss the general shift in anthropology from grand theory to key concept, and the topical delimitation of theory that results. In larger purview, Dark Anthropology and the Anthropology of the Good both have long theoretical genealogies as well as practical contexts of political and social understanding, including vis‐à‐vis recent events in the U.S. and elsewhere. I suggest that considering the relationship between politico‐economically structured inequality and attempts to assert positive meaning and purpose is the most productive way to ethnographically apply their alternative conceptualisations. This brings to greater focus the thorny question of whose understanding of inequality or suffering, or of moral value and positive wellbeing, is being articulated—the sentiments of the people studied, or the concepts of the analyst? It seems vital to examine both analytic and indigenous views of dark times, and of the good, to refine our understanding of both, that is, in order to consider our complementary conceptualisations in relation to both sides of the emic/etic coin. This refines our understanding of local sensibilities and also of the appropriate limit points of our own conceptual associations.