Historiography and Christianity after Liberalism

In the December 1994 issue, we published a view by Meltzer, Adovasio & Dillehay of Pedra Furada, the large cave-shelter in northeast Brazil whose deposits may show a precocious human occupation of the New World. This further comment addresses natural and human agencies there, and how the research community can choose between several interpretations becoming available.

In this article I address the origins of America's national parks, particularly as they figure in the environmentalist discourse surrounding the institution of Yosemite Valley as a public park. Although technically speaking Yosemite did not become a national park until 1890, its cession to the State of California in 1864 provides an important cultural site for the emergence of environmentalism as part of a broader concern with the relations between aesthetic, social and natural agency. In mapping out these relations in Frederick Law Olmsted's 1865 report on the management of Yosemite, I claim that the preservation of Yosemite reproduces nature as a public park in which human agency can be simultaneously produced and elided by means of the aesthetic agency of nature. I read Olmsted's report as a discursive site on which we can trace the structural parallels between the preservation of Yosemite and several related cultural practices in which the origins of American environmentalism are embedded. I also read it as sketching out the configurations of human and natural agency within which these parallel practices are articulated. My study operates from the assumption that science and technology need to be understood not simply by explaining how they are socially or culturally constructed, but also by looking at how certain fundamental ideas of metaphors (like natural agency or the reproduction of nature) are worked out at the same historical moment in different discursive practices. In taking up the idea of America as it both defines and is defined by the network of relations among science, technology and culture, I outline certain myths of American environmentalist origins as played out across a number of diverse and heterogeneous discourses and technologies of representation and reproduction. I hope also to illuminate the way in which American cultural origins are simultaneously constructed and destabilized through the act of reproducing nature.

The relevance. Forgetting the problems of being, erasing the idea of being from the worldview of modern man, and focusing on individualistic and hedonistic practices leads to the narrowing of the personality‘s fullness, dehumanization of its moral and spiritual dimension, and alienation from one's essence. Philosophical reactualization of being and its metaphysical essential foundations will allow finding a reliable ontological foundation for a shaken by skepticism and nihilism moral culture, and for the human who lost his essence. Goal. The purpose of the article is to study the ontological foundations of moral culture. The tasks of the first part of the article are to investigate the ontological framework of moral culture, and the fundamental axes on which it is based; the tasks of the second part of the article are to analyze the moral concepts of freedom, conscience, dignity, and equality through the prism of the ontological framework. Methods. The article uses a historical-philosophical and comparative method, genealogy, and hermeneutic methods of interpretation. The results. Ethical relations unfold in the value-meaning space of moral culture between the Self and the Other. The transcendental condition for the possibility of moral culture is reality and its internal structure, the parameters of which are set by the ontological framework, namely by the poles of attraction of singular and multiple, sacred and profane, phenomenal (existential) and essential. It is shown that the Western metaphysical tradition managed to find a balance between the extremes of the single and multiple, while the Eastern tradition of Hinduism, on the one hand, and the anti-metaphysical trends of the 19th and 20th centuries, on the other hand, absolutized one or the other extreme. Conclusions. Moral culture cannot be built and substantiated in isolation from ontology, and therefore without addressing being as the sphere of the real. Both metaphysical and anti-metaphysical philosophical systems are based on ontological assumptions. Without being rooted in ontology, ethics risks losing reality and realness. The transcendental "yes" or "no" to being enables further forms of moral relations and principles that exist in culture.

Creating Knowledge with and from the Differences: The Required Dialogicality and Dialogical Competences

BackgroundStudies of the African savannas have used national parks to test ecological theories of natural ecosystems, including equilibrium, non-equilibrium, complex adaptive systems, and the role of top-down and bottom-up physical and biotic forces. Most such studies have excluded the impact of pastoralists in shaping grassland ecosystems and, over the last half century, the growing human impact on the world’s rangelands. The mounting human impact calls for selecting indicators and integrated monitoring methods able to track ecosystem changes and the role of natural and human agencies. Our study draws on five decades of monitoring the Amboseli landscape in southern Kenya to document the declining role of natural agencies in shaping plant ecology with rising human impact.ResultsWe show that plant diversity and productivity have declined, biomass turnover has increased in response to a downsizing of mean plant size, and that ecological resilience has declined with the rising probability of extreme shortfalls in pasture production. The signature of rainfall and physical agencies in driving ecosystem properties has decreased sharply with growing human impact.We compare the Amboseli findings to the long-term studies of Kruger and Serengeti national parks to show that the human influence, whether by design or default, is increasingly shaping the ecology of savanna ecosystems. We look at the findings in the larger perspective of human impact on African grasslands and the world rangelands, in general, and discuss the implications for ecosystem theory and conservation policy and management.ConclusionsThe Amboseli study shows the value of using long-term integrated ecological monitoring to track the spatial and temporal changes in the species composition, structure, and function of rangeland ecosystems and the role of natural and human agencies in the process of change. The study echoes the widespread changes underway across African savannas and world’s rangelands, concluding that some level of ecosystem management is needed to prevent land degradation and the erosion of ecological function, services, and resilience. Despite the weak application of ecological theory to conservation management, a plant trait-based approach is shown to be useful in explaining the macroecological changes underway.

Dramatic alterations to the natural environment due to human activity have produced a permanent rupture in the Earth system; the relative stable epoch of the Holocene has given way to a volatile Anthropocene. Acceptance of these claims means that we now live in this altered physical reality, inviting us to rethink how we conceptualise disasters. Yet, disaster scholars have been hesitant to apply the Anthropocene label and to acknowledge the profound changes that it can bring to the study of disasters. This paper queries whether this label is a necessary adage or unnecessary baggage for disaster studies by examining the possibilities and the challenges associated with engaging with the Anthropocene. An analysis of the concepts, causes, and consequences of disasters reveals how the Anthropocene provides, as the very least, a theoretical heuristic for challenging linear temporal assumptions, the epistemological status of uncertainty, and the location of agency in disaster studies.

This paper adds an algorithmic epistemology perspective to previous works that examine the datafication of subjective social and emotional characteristics, perceptions, and behaviours. The paper employs a comparative epistemological approach to explore two behavioural educational platforms: RedCritter Teacher and Panorama Education. We unpack these platforms’ epistemic arrays of data extraction, interfaces, justifications, and representations and the knowledge arrangements they aim to constitute in schools. Borrowing Knorr-Cetina’s notion of ‘epistemic machineries,’ which entails the material and discursive apparatuses of knowledge production in specific ‘epistemic cultures,’ we analyse the platforms’ empirical apparatuses, ontological assumptions, and referential constructions. This exploration unearths two different digital epistemes: a gamified, engagement-based recognition system; and a bureaucratic-scientific framework that aims to produce actionable data for educators and schools. We explore the ramifications of these different human-machine entanglements and question how these bring to bare on pertaining to school life, such as human agency, knowledge practices, and educational decision-making.

Copyright © 2016 Telles-Correia and Sampaio. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

How can one understand the increasing interest in “urban invasions”, or biological invasions in urban environments? We argue that interest in urban invasions echoes a broader evolution in how ecologists view “the city” in relation to “the natural”. Previously stark categorical distinctions between urban and natural, human and wild, city and ecology have floundered. Drawing on conceptual material and an analysis of key texts, we first show how the ecological sciences in general—and then invasion science in particular—previously had a blind spot for cities, despite a number of important historical and continental European exceptions. Then, we document the advent of an urban turn in ecology and, more recently, in invasion ecology, and how this has challenged fundamental concepts about “nativity”, “naturalness”, and human agency in nature. The urban turn necessitates more explicit and direct attention to human roles and judgements. Ecology has moved from contempt (or indifference) for cities, towards interest or even sympathy.

This paper dwells on the debate on the question of what is/are responsible for African underdevelopment and, by extension, what will influence African development. The debate currently dwells on how much of development is human and how much is environmental, extraneous and beyond human control. Joseph Agbakoba thinks that development involves both nature and human agency, acknowledges the effect of nature, equally sees philosophy as a critique of worldview and ideology, and African philosophy as saddled with the critique of the African worldview and ideology, which he sees as malfunctioning in the context of the modern African civic society imported from Europe and needs certain adjustments. In other words, he sees development in Africa as not beyond human control. J. Obi Oguejiofor attempts to refute Agbakoba’s claim that worldview has anything to do with the African predicament, and concludes that the African predicament is as a result of geography, biogeography and history, but his advancement of these factors as being solely responsible for the African predicament completely ignores the human agency in development and lands him in determinism raising the question of the very relevance of African philosophy to African development. Conceptual analysis informs the dominant method of the paper.

In his creation of ethnomathematics, and in my own development of ethnocomputing, both D’Ambrosio and I placed a similar emphasis on human knowledge. We did so because that was what colonialism’s primitivist framing of Indigenous culture denied. If we had stressed the ways that human and natural agency were intertwined, it would have diminished the strength of this critique. But we are now at a turning point where ethnomath needs to solve new kinds of crises facing both humanity and our nonhuman allies in nature. The new framework of ethno-biomathematics allows us to incorporate Indigenous perspectives in which knowledge is co-produced by human and nonhuman agency. It extends ethnomodeling to biological structures, both those pre-existing humans and the “engineered landscapes” of Indigenous ecological interactions. The resulting synthesis has practical applications for both education and research in biomorphic design, environmental engineering, biocomputation, systems science, and beyond.

This essay sketches an expanded theoretical conception of the roles of nature and technology in history, one that is based on a social ontology that does not separate nature and society.History has long been viewed as the realm of past human action. On this conception, nature is treated largely as an Other of history, and technology is construed chiefly as a means for human fulfillment. There is no history of nature, and the history of technology becomes the history of useful products.The essay discusses the changes wrought in these understandings by a social ontology that depicts social existence as inherently transpiring in nexuses of practices and material arrangements. The first implication is that the domain of history should be expanded from the realm and course of past human activity to the realm and course of past practice‐arrangement nexuses. In turn, this wider conception transforms the significance of nature and technology in history.Until recently, most accounts of the relationship between society/history and nature have presumed that society and history are separate from nature. On my account, by contrast, nature is part of society: a component of the practice—arrangement nexuses through which social life progresses. Human history, consequently, is a social—natural history that encompasses the varying presence and roles of nature in human coexistence. Technology, meanwhile, is not just useful products, and not just a mediator of society/history and nature. It also is (1) something through which humans manage social life and the nature that is part of it, largely by drawing nature into this site and thereby conjointly transforming society, technology, and nature in history; and (2) something that, over time, plays an increasingly central role in the nexuses where social life transpires. Through technology, in short, social—natural history takes form and advances.

The Natural and Unnatural Histories of Patricio Guzmán Graig Uhlin (bio) The opening moments of The Pearl Button, the 2015 film from Chilean documentary filmmaker Patricio Guzmán, frame a small block of quartz in close-up. The director's voice-over draws attention to a droplet of water encased inside the mineral unearthed in the Atacama Desert. The trapped water is an estimated three thousand years old. Guzmán offers no commentary beyond these factual observations before the opening credits appear, but this brief prologue introduces the film's extended attention to traces of the past as they are preserved by nonhuman nature. The difficulty and necessity of engaging with the past is a longstanding concern of Guzmán's exilic documentary filmmaking. In films such as Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997), The Pinochet Case (2001), and Salvador Allende (2004), Guzmán returns to the democratic election of the socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1970 and his subsequent overthrow in a United States–financed coup d'état in 1973, which installed the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. These historical events also provide the basis for the director's three-part The Battle of Chile (1975–79), a documentation of Allende's nationalization agenda and the internal strife resulting from it. Guzmán's postdictatorship documentaries confront the national trauma of the Pinochet regime, and they emphasize the importance of sustaining collective memory in the face of its erasure. Accordingly, Guzmán draws on various strategies of remembrance, including personal testimony from survivors and historical records via photography and film. The Pearl Button and the film that preceded it, Nostalgia for the Light (2011), extend Guzmán's cinematic engagement with the fragments of memory to the historical traces preserved by natural elements. These elements—for Guzmán, [End Page 40] primarily earth and water—function as historical agents, and his films consider how nonhuman nature shapes the legibility of the past. In this regard, Guzmán's block of quartz is a media object—that is, an act of mediation that encloses, and thereby transmits, a trace of the past. Mediation is not an operation unique to technological media, as the natural elements, in their ceaseless interactions, continually mediate (act as a medium) for each other. As Sean Cubitt Notes, while human communication marks out meaningful distinctions within this "background hum," mediation itself "precedes the separation of the human and the environmental," which is to say, "precedes all separations, all distinctions, all thingliness, objects, and objectivity."1 Guzmán's block of quartz is itself an inscription of the past, an impression formed by the interaction of natural elements, and the political project of his recent documentaries is rooted in their attentiveness to and exploration of these nonhuman modes of mediation. Dipesh Chakrabarty has observed that from the vantage point of the climate crisis, the separation between human history and natural history is an untenable divide.2 The recognition that humanity acts as a geological force dispels the assumption that the environment is too large in scale and changes at a pace too slowly for human actions to affect it. Natural history is not the stable backdrop to human events. The entanglement of natural history and human history, rather, bridges the gap between temporal scales, placing, as Chakrabarty writes, "the geological now of the Anthropocene," designating a new geological epoch that acknowledges humanity's climatic influences, in contact "with the now of human history."3 Nostalgia for the Light and The Pearl Button confront the problem of scale in narrating history. Of the former film, Nilo Couret argues that it understands nostalgia as a movement across time scales. "Toggling between the human, the geologic, and the cosmic," Nostalgia for the Light mediates historical events by emplotting them along spatiotemporal coordinates that traverse these scales.4 Couret writes, "Guzmán alternates between the small detail that unfolds in time and the unfathomable vastness enfolding in time, carrying an event forward and backward in a string of possible and impossible connections across space and time."5 Like Nostalgia for the Light, The Pearl Button places the national history of Chile in relation to nonhuman temporal and spatial dimensions. The Pinochet...

There is no doubt that heritage resource loss in Tanzania is proceeding at an alarming rate. Natural and human agencies, adverse storage infrastructures and techniques, and lack of trained conservators and curators and of a proper protection program are the major threats that endanger the heritage resources of Tanzania. As our natural and cultural environments bring irreparable damage to the resources that document our human history, we need to preserve and protect them before they vanish. A preservation and protection program for Tanzania should include public education, the establishment of heritage preservation laws, more progress in the inventory and protection of in situ heritage resources, research into preservation and conservation methods, training of staff, and improvements in the curation of collected heritage resources and records. Preservation and protection of heritage resources are collaborative exercises. The scientific and world community need to support and engage in this proposed program both technically and financially, if the preservation and protection of heritage resources in Tanzania are to succeed.

This essay examines the ontological perspectives that have been developed for the study and management of the common goods, which complement the epistemological perspectives that initially characterized approaches to this phenomenon.First, we present the perspectives based on the ontological frameworks of collective action associated with the management of the common goods, and on the constitutive condition of the common goods.Subsequently, the conceptual and methodological developments of these perspectives are compared with those of other ontological assumptions within the field of science and technology studies.Finally, we discuss the possibility of a dialogue between the different approaches based on the ontological assumption, starting from their meeting points, and their usefulness for the study of the common goods in sociomaterial environments.