debitage: part of the core tool and scraper tradition

debitage

9.9.05

Two Types Of Fatalism

Of the four ways of life described in the Cultural Theory of Risk, Fatalism has always been the odd one out. It was hardly mentioned in Douglas and Wildavsky's initial statement of the theory in Risk and Culture. It's the only part of the Cultural Theory typology that doesn't align with one of Alan Fiske's four models of social interaction*. Attempts to empirically validate Cultural Theory rarely turn up any Fatalists (which is perhaps unsurprising, since a Fatalist would be unlikely to see the point in filling out a survey).

The key difference between Fatalism and the other ways of life in Cultural Theory is that the other ways of life are active. Egalitarianism, Hierarchism, and Individualism are all inspiring visions that motivate people to reshape the world in accordance with them. Fatalists, on the other hand, are simply resigned to their viewpoint.

Fatalism is an important concept in any complete theory of culture, but I think Cultural Theory concieves it too narrowly. This is apparent when Cultural Theorists talk about the myths of nature that accompany the ways of life. Fatalists, we are told, see nature as basically random. The reason action is pointless to a Fatalist is because its effects are entirely unpredictable.

I think a distinction should be made between the kind of "chance Fatalism" that Cultural Theory proposes and another form of Fatalism (of which I am increasingly an adherent) that we could call "structural Fatalism." Structural Fatalists do see order in the world -- indeed, they may have a clear view of exactly how nature and society work. But unlike the other three ways of life, structural Fatalists are skeptical about humans' ability to alter this order -- so the content of that order is more or less irrelevant to them. Individualists are optimistic about humans' ability to exploit the world, Egalitarians live in fear of how easily human action can change the world, and Hierarchists are confident that knowledge will allow us to manage the world in detail. Structural Fatalists, on the other hand, see the world as clanking along and pulling humans with it, such that we can neither manage, destroy, nor even exploit, the forces that face us. Structural Fatalists are the despairing determinists of Cultural Theory.

*Fiske's fourth model -- Equality Matching -- was also the oddball in his typology, being the least common in real life, the least often recognized by the other theorists whose work he synthesizes, and the last model he observed in his fieldwork among the Moose people. However, it does bear an interesting resemblance to the "mutualist" way of life that van Heffen and Klok proposed in their attempt at an expanded grid/group typology.

Stentor Danielson, 15:32, ,

6.9.05

Resilience Validates Political Ecology

It occurs to me that my observation in the previous post is essentially a restatement (albeit in a more idealist rather than materialst mode) of what might be called the Second Law of Political Ecology*: "natural" disasters entrench the status quo. The early political ecologists pointed out that disasters always hit the have-nots hardest, knocking them further down the ladder. And disaster relief is structured in such a way that it perpetuates their vulnerability.

At first glance, this seems incompatible with the idea of resilience and the adaptive cycle, which I also find to be a compelling theory. After all, the central idea of the adaptive cycle is that any system will eventually build toward a collapse, and that after the collapse the system is indeterministic, open to being dramatically shaped by contingency. But that seeming incompatibility is because the Second Law of Political Ecology is multi-scalar, while the basic presentation of the adaptive cycle is only at one scale.

In Panarchy, Gunderson and Holling describe how adaptive cycles at different temporal and spatial scales interact. In a "revolution," an Ω (collapse) phase of a smaller-scale cycle provokes an Ω in a larger-scale cycle. For a revolution to occur requires either a very large Ω collapse in the smaller system, or a very rigid and non-resilient larger system (i.e. a very advanced K phase vulnerable to disturbance). On the other hand, "remembering" occurs when a larger-scale K phase stabilizes a smaller-scale α phase, sending the smaller-scale system back along the same track as its previous cycle.

The political ecology of a natural disaster has basically two scales -- the smaller scale of the local area directly affected by the disaster, and the larger national or global political economy. At the moment, the capitalist world political economy is still fairly resilient (indeed, one of the key elements of capitalism is its ability to renew itself on short timescales, thus avoiding -- at least for a time -- the kind of huge Ω that Karl Marx thought was just around the corner). Thus it would take a very big disaster -- much larger than Hurricane Katrina -- to provoke an Ω that would fundamentally alter the basic structure of the global political economy. Instead, the global system acts as a giant flywheel to stabilize and recreate the social, economic, and ecological relations at the smaller scale.

*The First Law of Political Ecology, which is in some sense just a more emphatic and critical restatement of the First Law of Risk/Hazards, is "there is no such thing as a 'natural' disaster."

Stentor Danielson, 09:31, ,

Polysemic Diasasters

One thing pretty much everyone seems to agree on is that major disasters are very informative events. They're so big, and so undeniable, that they tear away comfortable illusions about how the world works. During a disaster, reality comes and gives us a big slap in the face, delivering clear and irrefutable evidence about how things work. Even Cultural Theory, which holds that our viewpoint is always biased, sees disasters as an instance when nature can force us to shift from one bias to another.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, this idea has been widely invoked. But I've yet to encounter a single person who claims to have been the person converted to a different viewpoint by the disaster. Instead, we have a variety of people each claiming that their own pre-existing ideology has been validated and that only an act of willful ignorance will keep the rest of the country from seeing the light. So to Democrats, Katrina proves how uncaring and incompetent the Bush administration is, while Republicans see it as clear evidence of state and local Democrats' failures. Libertarians find evidence of government's incompetence while their critics see it as proof that big government is necessary. To the religious right, Katrina makes clear God's judgment against sexual deviants. Socialists see evidence of the fundamental injustice of modern capitalism while for cultural leftists the racist underbelly of America has been exposed. And for environmentalists, Katrina is clear evidence of the folly of trying to tame a major river and a consequence of climate change.

Not every ideology claims to have been validated by Katrina. For example, I haven't seen a distinct "feminist" explanation, since it's difficult -- absent the kind of divine intervention invoked by the religious right -- to blame the disaster on sex and gender issues. So feminists have tended to fall in with the Democrats and socialists and cultural leftists.

None of this is to say that the explanations on offer are all equally wrong or undecidable. I'm pretty convinced that the socialist, cultural leftist, and to some extent environmentalist viewpoints are basically right. What I am saying, though, is that we can't expect the bare fact of Katrina to prove our case. Rather than being hard and easily interpreted evidence, disasters are richly polysemic, offering support for a variety of interpretations.

Stentor Danielson, 08:47, ,

5.9.05

Fire Season

Here's some better news from the natural disasters front:

Millions Of Acres Burn, But Not In The Usual Way

The number of acres charred by wildfire across the West this year is almost double the 10-year average, but this summer's forest fires have neither been as big nor as devastating as those in past years.

Fire behavior experts say the apparent contradiction is because of unusual moisture patterns in the region earlier this year, which favored big grass fires on the open range. Timber in the mountains received more moisture than usual well into the summer, keeping forest fires small.

... "To get a big fire, you need high temperatures, low relative humidity, dry fuels and winds all aligned on the same day," said [Forest Service analyst Tom] Wordell. "We haven't seen that much this year, yet our overall acreage burned is much higher than in the past."

On the other hand, 2003 was a comparatively mild fire season despite seeing the huge fires in Southern California. (Those fires were in October, and since that region is still very vulnerable to fire, it may be a bit premature to declare this season free of any major fires.) So this is a note of caution about using acres burned as a measure of the severity of a fire season.

Stentor Danielson, 10:15, ,