Beyond order, beyond the human

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook SymposiumBeyond order, beyond the human Unruly socionatures and contested politics Daston, Lorraine. 2019. Against nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Melissa LeachMelissa LeachInstitute of Development Studies, University of Sussex Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLorraine Daston’s short, eloquent book makes a compelling set of arguments. To summarize my reading, she contends that order in nature provides a model for order in human society; that across a diversity of cultural and historical settings, people have looked to nature as a source of norms for human behavior and moral reasoning. This happens through diverse mechanisms through which different aspects of nature—glossed as the specific, the local, and the universal—are called upon to justify or decry particular human behaviors. It also happens generically—order in nature providing the basis against which the very idea of normativity in human society is justified and calibrated. Disruptions and disorder in nature—especially if caused by instances of human immorality—invoke deep passion, whether wonder, horror, or terror. While particular disruptions, as nature “bites back” in revenge, are of concern in themselves, they also hint at a possible descent into generic disruption and disorderliness, a chaos in nature which presages a chaos in human society, as normativity is abandoned. Daston joins an array of philosophers in problematizing this pervasive tendency. She argues that appeals to natural order are contingent, not necessary; that they are a product of human cognition (put another way, they are socially constructed). Thus, she concludes, such appeals are fundamentally a matter of human reasoning, and we should recognize this: “human reason in human bodies is the only kind of reason we have.”This is an interesting and timely thesis, good to think with as we grapple with our histories, current predicaments, and future worlds. As a social anthropologist and interdisciplinary, engaged researcher long interested in how people understand, live with, and represent human relations with nonhuman natures across a diversity of places and issues, there is much that strikes home. Yet three issues bother me. First is an underplaying of politics—who precisely appeals to order in nature, what political work do these constructions do, and what alternatives are excluded? Second, is nature really so ordered—and if it is actually more unruly, where does this leave appeals to natural order as a means to calibrate human behavior? Third, is humanity really so separate from nonhuman nature—and if relations are more entangled and co-constructed, where does this leave the possibility of an exclusively human reasoning? Let me elaborate briefly on each of these concerns.The modeling of social norms on apparent natural orders has been everywhere in my work. In ethnographic engagements with Kissi people in Guinea, West Africa, “maa,” transgressing social norms such as having sex in the bush or burying a deceased pregnant woman without removing her fetus, is argued by elders to mix inappropriately parts of human, plant, and animal reproductive orders, disrupting both with devastating consequences—crop failure, societal infertility. In the same region, deforestation of once pristine landscapes, contributing to climate change and biodiversity loss, is portrayed by scientists, policymakers, and sometimes villagers themselves as a disruption to balanced equilibrium between forest societies and ecologies (Fairhead and Leach 1996). Turning to issues of human health, tropes of disrupted balance with nature also recur. So we find the origins of the West African Ebola epidemic attributed to the zoonotic spillover of a virus from a bat to so-called patient zero, a small boy playing near a tree in a Guinean village: a symptom of disruption to the balanced harmony that had kept human habitation and activity separate from pristine, bat-inhabited natural forest. The spillover in Wuhan, China perhaps at the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, too, has been represented as a revenge by nature for our unregulated “wet markets” and intensive, industrialized food systems.In these examples and others, it is particular people and groups who are making claims about disrupted balance, in narratives that attribute blame and shore up authority and interests. Thus, and to put it too briefly and instrumentally, claims about sex in the bush by wayward youth support Kissi elders in their attempts to exert authority over the young, and control over their labor. The young men and women so blamed find their freedoms constrained. Narratives about disrupted harmony in deforested landscapes support state and international projects to enclose “relic” forest islands from supposedly ecosystem-destroying small farmers. Such narratives occlude the knowledge and experience of farmers and villagers, for whom forest islands are anthropogenic, shaped and enriched by their own actions and practices, suggesting very different rights and claims. Narratives about human disruption to wildlife as a cause of zoonotic disease easily support the closing and closing-off of wildlife habitats and markets, undermining the livelihoods of land users and traders. COVID-19 has further spurred environmental and conservation agencies in their call for a “new deal” to address “the urgent need to fix our unbalanced relationship with nature”; deals that could support state and commercial interests in “green grabbing” wildlife habitats. Yet as they seek to counter these, in struggles for land and resource ownership, indigenous peoples and user rights activists themselves sometimes call on images of balance and their unique role in upholding it. They may also articulate quite different views of human-nature relations, associated with different social and political relationships—as I indicate later.In our current era, the tropes of balance and harmony in nature have gone multiscalar, extending to the global. Their use here is also profoundly political, as imagery of natural orders disrupted is deployed by governments, international agencies, and activists to support diverse purposes and claims. In the so-called Anthropocene humans are seen as the main drivers of earth system processes at the planetary scale, as manifested in discussions of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pandemics. Scientific and policy discourses around “planetary boundaries” and “planetary health” argue for a resteering of societal change within acceptable natural limits to avoid future turbulence and disruption. They support aspirations for control—to redress the balance and avoid dangerous tipping points—and the power of the aspirant controllers, be they earth system scientists, planners and managers, technology companies, or the alliances between them.Across all these issues and scales, then, appeals to nature’s order—and the panic and responses when that order is disrupted—are part of political struggle, involving contestations over both material power and resources, and over whose claims and knowledge counts. Assuming appeals to nature’s order to be a generic human proclivity, and discussing this primarily as a matter of moral philosophy, glosses over these often visceral, high-stakes politics. It also detracts attention from the deeper, structural political-economic drivers of the actions seen to disrupt nature—in industrialized commercialized systems and values around production, consumption, and mobility. For example, while the likelihoods of zoonotic disease spillover may indeed be increased in farmers’ markets with multiple wild animals in close proximity and unsanitary conditions (the Wuhan story), we must ask how such conditions emerge: what are the politics of regulation in such places; who makes use of such markets; how are animals hunted, captured, and farmed, for whom, and so on? Wild resources have long been harvested and been central to diets across the world. Treating “wet markets” as a smoking gun for zoonotic spillover obscures the real drivers and leaves them unaddressed. So like Daston I would problematize appeals to nature’s order as particular, selective representations, but would wish to extend her argument to address more fully the contested politics and politics of knowledge in play.The idea of “natural order” is also problematic. Nature is never just nature. What we might think of as nature is always and already shaped by entanglements of processes that involve human action. This applies to landscapes—as the so-called wilderness of a park or a forest turns out to be an anthropogenic landscape shaped through histories of farming and settlement. It applies to species—as novelist and art critic Huysmans explored in an 1884 book also titled Against nature, the flowers chosen for depiction by painters frequently select the aesthetic of a highly bred bloom, a rose shaped by human action for size and color. It extends to the planet, where the implication of Anthropocene thinking is that earth system and atmospheric processes are co-constructed with human action. Put another way, natures are socionatures, constructed through pathways that intertwine human, animal, plant (and technological) practices in diverse assemblages. Moreover, such (socio) natures are highly dynamic. Their pathways of change are rarely linear, but as diverse perspectives in the sciences of complexity confirm, more often involve state shifts, contingent effects, and nonequilibria which render them disorderly. Daston’s claim that “natural orders are, in effect, more orderly than human orders, which may offer a clue as to why natural orders are invoked to buttress human orders and not vice versa” thus seems doubtful. She admits that “in an age of genetic engineering and anthropogenic climate change this imbalance of power may be shifting in the opposite direction” (p. 69). Yet disorderliness in (socio) natures is not new; nonequilibria, unruliness, and uncertainties have long been appreciated, whether by climate historians and paleoecologists documenting abrupt shifts in past lake levels and forest extents, or pastoralists living with and adapting to nonequilibrial rangeland ecologies. In such circumstances, aspirations to control nature to maintain or restore balance may be illusory at best. And if natures are socionatures and unruliness rules, where does this leave “natural orders” as a baseline for human normativity? Perhaps—to follow Daston—just in the realm of representation; certainly it sharpens their represented quality. But to leave it there obscures critical aspects of experience, practice, and politics in living with unruly socionatures, and may close off alternatives that we need to thrive in current and future worlds.If nature is never just nature, is the human always just human? Is human reasoning always and only practiced in human bodies as Daston suggests? “Maa” for the Kissi is not a social disturbance of a natural order, but a socionatural disturbance to socionatural orders in which human, plant, and animal vitality are inextricably intertwined. As explored in the growing fields of multispecies ethnography (e.g., Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Locke and Muenster 2015; Lock 2018) and “more than human” geography (Dowling, Lloyds, and Suchet-Pearson 2017), human lives are intimately entangled with all living things, their dynamism and agency, whether in bodies, homes, communities, ecologies, or planetary and cosmological worlds. These interrelationships are often intimate, affective, emotional, and embodied. They are important to people’s individual and collective senses of themselves, their identities, and appropriate behavior. For Guinean villagers bats are part of intimate home life; forest islands embed connections with ancestors and the continuity of settled sociality; and the kola trees planted within them over the buried umbilical cords of children embody something of their personalities and identities. Intersecting with advances in ecological and animal science that recognize modes of intelligence and communication among plants and animals, with each other and with humans, these perspectives in effect redefine humanity as part of nature, or at least as part of interconnected socionatural networks or assemblages (Haraway 2016) that question the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman—or at least render those boundaries contingent and negotiable.It is critical to avoid “othering” such perspectives into so-called indigenous societies and cultures. While understandings of human-nonhuman natures as deeply, intimately interconnected, and the importance of these to human thriving and identity are sometimes most obviously found among people living further from centers of global power whether in West Africa, the Amazon, the Asia-Pacific region, and beyond, they are by no means confined to them. Among Maori people today, for instance, the dynamic agency that entwines human and nonhuman action extends to views of morality and rights, and court cases involving trees and rivers as claimants and rights-holders are commonplace. But there are plenty of similar cases in European history (the celebrated trial of a pig for murder in fifteenth-century Britain is a well-documented example: see Cohen 1986; Sullivan 2013). And were we to think that these are outdated notions of the past, look at the ways people in so-called modern industrial societies relate to their pets (Haraway 2003), accuse particular dogs of viciousness or attacks, engage with the plants in their gardens or the animal life in cities, or seek to protect particular individual trees from road developments. In such examples, elements of nonhuman nature prove to have personalities and communicative capacities, and people develop intimate connections with them that are important to their humanity. It may also be arrogant to suggest that only human beings reason, represent, and communicate, and other species do not. From Lewis Henry Morgan’s early studies of beavers’ reasoning, to an array of contemporary works on animal communication, this is a frontier area of study in anthropology which at the same time displaces its “anthro” centrism. “Human” reasoning, it follows, may actually be practiced not just in human bodies but in reciprocally constituted human and nonhuman natures.In our current era, disconnection and rupture of such intimate relations between human and nonhuman natures has become a pervasive problem. Such disconnections emerge when modern Cartesian scientific and industrial cultures divide the human and the nonhuman. We see this in many realms, including—to follow my themes here—when mainstream economics and environmental policy redefine nature as generalized “environment,” “biodiversity,” or “natural capital,” separate from humans and thus able to be commoditized, priced, or exploited. In this vein, more intertwined perspectives on human-nonhuman natures bring an important critique and counter to current views of nature as a provider of “ecosystem services,” as well as of current market logics in environmental governance for conservation and sustainability, which tend to disaggregate nonhuman natures into discrete units to which monetary value can attach (Sullivan 2013). There is a politics and political economy to such separations and, again, some gain while others lose. We must ask whether current predicaments—whether around environment, health, or in other domains—are well served by these disconnections, or whether they might be better served by reweaving our intimate, caring connections with nonhuman natures in all their characters and capabilities.Greater attention to the socionatural shaping and mutuality that characterize relations between human and nonhuman natures, to the unruliness and disorder that often pervade these, and to the power-laden processes through which certain versions of these complex assemblages are selected and deployed, are more extensions and elaborations of Daston’s thesis than fundamental contradictions of it. However they do shift the balance, asking us to interrogate more fully the power and implications of dominant representations that call on natural order, and to address more fully whom and what they exclude. This in turn offers the prospect of enriching this philosophical anthropology through dialogue with emerging perspectives in other fields, from political and cultural anthropology to political economy and ecology. And it takes us to a scholarly position which is less “against nature,” than continuing to engage, actively and robustly, with the plurality of ways our multispecies, more-than-human relations are constructed, represented, and lived.ReferencesCohen, Esther. 1986. “Law, folklore and animal lore.” Past and Present 110 (1): 6–37.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarDowling, Robyn, Kate Lloyds, and Sandra Suchet-Pearson. 2017. “Qualitative methods II: ‘More-than-human’ methodologies and/in praxis.” Progress in Human Geography 41 (6): 823–31.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarFairhead, James, and Melissa Leach. 1996. Misreading the African landscape: Society and ecology in a forest-savanna mosaic. 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She is currently leading a Collaborative Award on Pandemic Preparedness funded by Wellcome Trust.Melissa Leach[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 11, Number 2Autumn 2021 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/716593 © 2021 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.