In Cornell’s IGERT program on Food Systems and Poverty Reduction, we’ve been trying to bring budding scientists of various hues together with (a few) social scientists [IGERT stands for Integrative Graduate Education, Research and Training and such programs are funded by the US National Science Foundation]. Last week, our one Development Sociology PhD student, Holly Buck, made a convincing case for broadening our scope to include the humanities. She plans to look at the role of Western narratives in international development (with particular attention to issues like land grabs and climate change).
Her talk led me to re-visit this issue with anecdotes from my professional life. When I was in graduate school, I too was interested in the balance, within Anthropology, between art and science, feeling even then that both were needed. Yet I realize that my own work has not fully addressed the arts, partly because of the environments—-somewhat inhospitable to the social sciences, even more so to the arts—in which I’ve found myself. A few months back I was reminded of this issue while conducting a literature review on gender and forests. I nearly set aside without reading the book, Unearthing Gender: Folksongs of North India (S. T. Jassal, 2012, Durham, NC: Duke University), assuming it would be too ‘artsy’ for my needs. It proved to be a powerhouse of useful information on gender attitudes and practices. I remembered my enjoyment, further back in time, of Francis Putz and Michele Holbrook’s chapter, ‘Tropical Rainforest Images’ in Denslow and Padoch’s People of the Tropical Rainforest (1988, Berkeley: University of California Press/Smithsonian Institution). They examine literary and film images of the forest (often called ‘the jungle’) as alternately evil, dangerous, full of adventure, and alluring. I recalled my own short piece on ‘Tastes in Landscapes’ (in Impulse 2003), which compared the Javanese love of rows and order in the landscape to the Kenyah Dayak love for a luxuriant, chaotic ‘natural’ environment. These images we carry have important effects on how landscapes evolve—and the powerful have far louder voices as related decisions are being made.
Such thoughts reminded me of the vastly different cultural notions about pigs. I thought of ecologist, Doug Sheil’s work with the wild pigs of Borneo and his happy, partial self-classification as a ‘pig man’. He worked with Dayaks in East Kalimantan, and surely was influenced by their love of pigs: as a source of food and as part of their [oral] literary heritage. I remember, somewhat vaguely now, the tales I learned in 1980 in Long Segar about the wondrous Dayak culture hero, Balan Tempau (after whom I named my own son!). Balan Tempau was brave, handsome, and adventurous (and, incidentally, also of aristocratic lineage—a feature less compatible with my own American expectations about culture heroes). His beautiful bride to be (with a face ‘as round and lovely as the moon’) sometimes turned into a big, impressive and intelligent pig—with lovely beads strung around her neck—as she implemented her clever trickery, some of which served to save Balan Tempau when he was in danger from spirits or romantic [commoner] competitors.
This led to images from 1971, when I lived briefly in a Qashqa’I village in southern Iran. One day that summer I heard a great commotion; men’s voices were yelling loudly just outside the village. When I asked what was happening, I was told—with the women’s faces expressing their horror and dread—that a man had found a wild pig. He’d summoned the other men of the village and they were beating it to death, with what must have been wild abandon—judging by the angry sounds they were producing. The women expressed their gratitude and relief that this lone intruder was being appropriately addressed. These Qashqa’i saw the pig as dangerous, both literally (with its sharp tusks) and figuratively, as a personification of the devil [I’m guessing, probably also as an agricultural pest].
The Dayaks were unlikely to meet with people so rabidly antagonistic to pigs as the Qashqa’i, but Islam definitely portrays pigs in unflattering ways. The Javanese with whom I lived for three years in a Transmigration area in West Sumatra [‘transmigration’ of people, not souls] willingly, if somewhat sheepishly and clandestinely, ate pork from wild pigs when offered the opportunity. They knew the religious prohibition against such consumption, but they had few opportunities to ingest meat of any kind. The higher status Javanese likely to be found in policymaking positions in East Kalimantan were likely to hold more negative attitudes about pigs and their consumption, being both wealthier and more invested in the doctrines of Islam than were the poor Javanese transmigrants of Sumatra. Such diametrically opposed attitudes—of the Dayaks and the Javanese—reinforce the mutual antagonisms that have led in West and Central Kalimantan to conflicts over land and forests, and in some cases to massacres or warfare.
Another less dramatic event, from some years ago at CIFOR (the Center for International Forestry Research in Bogor, Indonesia), comes to mind. One of my colleagues gave an interesting presentation to all CIFOR staff on her work in North Sumatra on benzoin (Styrax benzoin), a non timber forest product of many uses (in medicine, incense, perfume). As an anthropologist, besides dealing with the conventional ecological concerns of our biophysical colleagues, she outlined the symbolic significance of these trees (which were being endangered by land use change). She quoted from origin myths of a young, poor and beautiful girl who turned into a benzoin tree. She told of the singing of ‘love songs to the tree when cleaning its bark, preparing it (by caressing and warming it) for a sexual act ( the tapping), which will “give birth” to resin, often described as [mother’s] milk.’ (quotation from Katz et al.’s chapter “Sumatra Benzoin” in Tapping the Green Market [edited by Guillen et al., 1988]). In her oral presentation, however, there was considerable eye-rolling underway, as members of the audience dismissed her findings as irrelevant cultural trappings, unimportant for their own serious scientific endeavours. Incensed at this reaction, I wrote a memo to the staff defending the importance of such cultural (and ‘artistic’) features—noting how such qualitative and value-laden elements give meaning to people’s lives. Many powerful forces in forests are connected with cultural notions that are difficult to identify, explore, explain, or count. I asked CIFOR’s researchers to consider their own responses if, in like fashion, Christmas trees were suddenly illegal; or goats were no longer available to be sacrificed on Islamic feast days. People tend to dismiss the importance of the cultural symbolism that others hold dear, while forgetting (or, rather, simply assuming the ubiquity of) their own symbolic systems!
But to return to the IGERT, with which I began this path down memory lane, Holly’s presentation reminded me of how little we have been able to facilitate the interdisciplinarity we sought. We have made progress encouraging teamwork, among biophysical sciences and with economists. But a crucial element of more effectively addressing conservation and development issues is understanding of, listening to, people in communities, including their ‘exotic’ cultural notions and values. To do that will require the involvement of social scientists who understand and know how to study values and social systems—unlike economists, whose work tends to be solidly shaped within western assumptions and values. The IGERT experience could have been far more powerful had we had a broader representation of the non-economic social sciences within each cohort. Strong voices are needed—partly in recognition of the prestige disadvantage in academia of qualitative and action-oriented social sciences vis-à-vis the biophysical sciences. Instead, we had one PhD student from development sociology each time; and we failed to include any of those most critical of dominant economic paradigms (of which Cornell has many).
Even more difficult, yet also even more powerful, would have been the effective integration of the arts that Holly proposed.