rocheleau dueling determinisms

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Introduction

After reading the article and reflecting at some length onmy mixed reaction, I came away with the sense of havingbeen on a roller coaster ride. It inspired a kind of virtual fear,followed by grateful relief that the fright would not carry overinto the real world. The fear comes from exaggeration of realexperience and reference to a long history of possible danger(falling, crashing, sickness) attached to similar sensations.We are alternately exhilarated, terrified, uncomfortable and

restored. We experience a heightened sensation of movementand acceleration (up, down and around), coupled with a con-fusion of the sense of direction. In this case the present dan-ger is real but may actually be obfuscated by the overstate-ment of virtual danger. We confront an overwhelming arrayof distopian determinisms, and biological, historical andnational destinies. We are presented with a brick wall at theend of an infinite ride. We are left in animated suspension(not a typo), to endlessly contemplate the immanent andseemingly unavoidable cataclysm that flows naturally fromwho we are and who they are (they being in charge ofwherewe are). We defy gravity only to be overcome by it again and

again. This ride gives us the fear and exhilaration of flightwithout the freedom and teaches us that leaving the ground isa fearsome and ultimately futile proposition. Looking ahead,resistance is futile, or alternatively, looking back, resistanceleads to the pre-feudal. We end, where we began, chastisedand a little dizzy from the journey.

There are real dangers on this ride. First, we may be sodizzy and confused by these theoretical and empirical upsand downs that we will not recognize the real social, eco-nomic and ecological dangers that face us outside. Secondly,we may be so paralyzed with pessimism as we contemplatethe brick wall mural at the end of the ride that we are unable

or unwilling to act, to seek change, to engage in cultural andsocial transformations to address real but not intractablesocial, economic and ecological problems.

There are, however, several alternatives to fear of flying.It is perhaps no accident that many feminist authors of spec-ulative fiction as well as social theory have grappled with thequestion of technology, gender, nature and power in the farfuture, in deep and distant space. For several novelists,among them Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piercy, and OctaviaButler, technology is only as good or bad as the nexus of

social relations in which it is embedded. While it is neverneutral in actual practice, it is not necessarily, intrinsically,good or bad. It does not exist as an abstraction, it exists onlyin practice, situated in space, place and social order. Thepoint is that technology is always embedded in systems ofsocial relations. Likewise, feminist social theorist DonnaHaraway (1991) suggests that we blur the boundaries that wehave drawn between animal, human and machine and that wecomplicate our notions of technological progress to confrontthe infinite array of possible recombinant relations between

humans, nature, social orders and technologies.As I read through the collection of examples, evidence

and arguments in Loughs article I find myself looking tothose novels, as well as formal philosophy (taught to me, Idare to say, by some very literate men and women, in personand in writing) and everyday ethics (taught to me by mothers,grandmothers and others), rather than to evidence from biol-ogy, ecology and the laws of thermodynamics. I will includea few comments on the technical points but will not dwell onthat. I also look to examples of encounters between contem-porary social movements and technocracies to test andrespond to Loughs analysis. After noting the key contribu-

tions in the article and discussing some of our differences, Isuggest an alternative theoretical grounding in non-essential-ist ecofeminism, feminist poststructuralism, feminist envi-ronmental activism and theories of complexity in ecology.

Challenges to Patriarchal Civilization(s)What is refreshing about Loughs analysis is the straight-

up challenge to civilization-as-we-know-it, the suggestionthat it is not necessarily a good thing. What is troubling isthe assertion that any civilization is necessarily, always andeverywhere, a bad thing. Lough judges production systemsby human centered biological criteria such as nutrition,

health, life span, and social yardsticks, including distributionof labor, food and political control. The article provides a richsource of references and useful data summaries on health andnutrition performance criteria for production technologiesand land use systems. Economic efficiency is rejected infavor of energy efficiency, equitable distribution and ade-quate nutrition. The reference to basic biological indicatorsof well-being is laudable and tells us much about the cost ofthe transit ion from foraging to sedentary agriculture. YetLough does not give equal weight to the fact that life

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Beyond Dueling Determinisms: Toward Complex,

Humane and Just Ecologies

Dianne RocheleauGeography and George Perkins Marsh Institute, Clark University, Worcester, MA 01610 USA1


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expectancy is far higher in urban and industrial societies, andin some agricultural and mixed farming systems. Statistics onthe current skewed distribution of these indicators might stillmake a compelling critique of the high cost of progress, butthey are not included in Loughs tally of the costs and bene-fits of various systems. He limits that particular argument tothe transition to agriculture. Overall the argument is not yetdeveloped enough to carry the weight of these very broadquestions and to integrate the very discrete (albeit illuminat-ing) data sets and examples that Lough invokes to support hiscase.

One of the strongest aspects of Loughs work is hisinclusion of gender at the national and international scales,acknowledging and applying several important insights in thework of Mies, Shiva, Merchant and Seager. Like them herelates patriarchy to political and production systems, bothhistorical and contemporary and he recognizes and makesmore visible the connections of gender ideologies to socialunits well beyond the household. He cites prevailing genderideologies as pathological influences on society (so far Imwith him) but he also posits these as logical outcomes of bio-logical differences and specific land use technologies. If,instead, we see those ideologies as socially constructed, thenwe can recognize their existence and their impact, yet we canimagine change and a myriad of alternatives. It is those alter-natives that feminist poststructuralists seek to imagine and torealize.

Loughs analysis also recognizes the political, techno-logical and ideological connections in the history of womensoppression, including the use of witch burnings to disciplinewomen and men to accept male domination and displacementof women from positions of power (as healers, religious lead-ers and landowners). Lough accepts however, the propositionthat political and economic domination is equal to annihila-tion, and laments the elimination of [womens] vernacularknowledge, skills and relationships. Several ecofeministauthors also suggest this, including Merchant (1980, 1989),although she notes that some people carry over previoustypes of consciousness into new eras marked by technologi-cal and ecological revolutions. However, Lough andMerchant both imply a historical progression and totality ofdomination that is belied by repeated outbreaks of social andecological consciousness that reassert knowledge and valuessupposedly displaced and erased by a given civilization. Thisperiodic resurgence of alternatives indicates a broader conti-nuity of multiple cultures, arts and sciences (whether amongwomen or ethnic, religious, race and class-based groups).

Biological and Technological DeterminismsOne of the troubling points in the text is the reliance on

necessity. Mechanistic connections are presented as almost

genetically determined, which undermines the possibilitiesfor creativity and a viable humanity with more than 8 million(human) persons on the planet. To identify literacy and civi-lization as inherently destructive of our habitat (from globalto local) feeds the misanthropic version of environmentalismand justifies the Draconian excesses of Malthusian popula-tion control advocates. At the same time this analysis justi-fies, from another position, the anti-environmental politics ofthose who claim that environmentalism is inherently commit-ted to the end of culture and/or civilization. Many of us mightnot shed a tear over civilization-as-we-know-it, but would notbe willing to condemn all organized social groupings greaterthan 250 people to the trash heap.

The whole argument against civilization is made on theback of necessity, while climbing a ladder of linear progres-sion from foraging to agriculture to industrial production.The ladder takes us from subsistence heaven to postindustri-al hell. It is this one-track journey that railroads the complexhistory of technology, society and politics into two gears,forward and reverse. What happened to the reference toStephen Jay Gould and the suggestion that nature has bush-es, not ladders? Im voting for the bushes, thorns and all, andsuggest that Lough restructure his analysis around thatmodel; he might break free of the necessity trap that now sitsready to strike anyone who moves up the intensification rail-road.

In one section Lough states that plants, animals and sub-sistence cultures (an uncomfortable and dangerous associa-tion, for me) have division of labor and organization but nothierarchies. Yet earlier he equated organization with hierar-chies. It is, I think, important to differentiate between thetwo. While some may suggest that all organization is andmust be hierarchical, meaning a very centralized and top-down power structure, there are others in biology as well associal science who have made compelling cases for self-orga-nization from below (Ahl et al. 1996).

To naturalize socially created differences also invites thepossibility that our work will be used to create alibis ofpower, as biological excuses for the necessity of socialoppression. The recent Commentary article ProfessionalDenial by Gretchen Schafft in the January 1999 issue ofAnthropology Newsletter provides a powerful example. Shedocuments the complicity of some schools of anthropologyand anthropologists in the holocaust, based on evidence ofdirect and active collaboration as well as the indirect contri-butions through essentialist racial categories and hierarchiesand theories of biological determinism of social behavior.While we may not abandon all possibilities of biological orgenetic influences, natural categories and biological deter-minism certainly warrant a great deal of caution, given thedemonstrated potential for abuse.

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In Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Val Plumwood(1991) examines the difficult impasse encountered whenecofeminists have adhered to biological explanations of gen-dered relations to nature and culture and have affirmed essen-tial gender identities. One group of feminists solves thisproblem by rejecting the link of women to nature, while stillaccepting the nature/culture duality, with culture superior.Lough would no doubt place them among the femaleclones mentioned in his discussion of patriarchy. Manyecofeminists embrace an essential and necessary dichotomybetween women and men and between nature and culture.Women are connected to nature and men to culture; womenare enjoined to reject culture and rejoice in their exclusionfrom it and to claim privileged connections to nature. Menare then left to inhabit the powerful but desecrated domain ofculture, or to cross over to the feminine, good side. Womenclaim subsistence and men commerce and so on. Why wouldwomen embrace the down side of this nature/culture dualitythat has been turned on its side and converted into a hierar-chy, with culture above and nature below? One ecofeministresponse has been to propose the reversal of gender-polarizedpower relations, putting women and nature on top. Anotherresponse is a variant of separate but equal, accepting the dual-ity of women and men and also of nature and culture, but notthe hierarchy. There is, however, more choice than up, downor a precarious neutral in the duality sweepstakes. We canreject the simple dichotomies and necessaryassociations/identifications based on gender, or for that mat-ter ethnicity or nations. One can claim womens place inculture, and also embrace nature and many womens actu-al, but not necessary connection, yet reject the rigid dualitiesof culture/nature and woman/man. It is this latter option (wellpresented in the works of Donna Haraway (1991), SandraHarding (1998) and Val Plumwood (1993)) that is missing inLoughs analysis.

Perhaps the option to join an ecocidal and misogynistculture isnt much of a choice, but surely its worth exploringthe possibility of creating another kind of culture and civi-lization, one that is not destined to reach such ends, a differ-ent branch as it were. The ladder of land use and labor inten-sification may be a dead end, literally, but the tree of life (orS. J. Goulds lowly shrub) offers infinite possibilities forrooting ourselves in earth, yet reaching in every direction forsun and sky. Rather than positing culture and civilization aspolar opposites, or divergent binary branches of a singletrunk, perhaps we need to rethink the culture/nature (andLoughs culture/civilization) dichotomy.

Lough also separates pre-and post-agricultural culturesinto polar opposites with a newly reversed status. He placesforaging and subsistence agriculture in pre-agriculture andeverything else as sedentary agriculture and beyond. This

binary logic places intensive multi-story gardening systemsin the same category as an economy based on the manufac-ture of weapons with massive production of toxic wastes. Inhis analysis the one leads inexorably, necessarily, to the next.

Yet, intensive agriculture and industrial wage labor haveno exclusive on oppression. Henrietta Moores description ofgendered space and power among the Marakwet (in Kenya,during the 1970s and 80s) suggests a powerful patriarchalideology at work in a society that still depended heavily onforaging and subsistence agriculture. The accounts of theYanomami in Brazil, though now subject to highly contestedexplanation, also suggests that male domination can occuramong foragers and subsistence cultivators. What do wemake of this? We could embrace the necessity of this con-nection and postulate a kind of patriarchal original sin ordivine right, depending on who we are and how we think. Wecould also however, accept that such structures and behaviorscan and do but need not occur across many kinds ofsocieties, technologies and land use systems. We could thenlook at patriarchy as one well-trodden and too often chosenpath to be avoided, or once embarked upon, to be abandoned.If we are branching on trees instead of climbing ladders thenthere is always somewhere else to go, and it doesnt have tobe the Neolithic past.

Nations, States and Actually Existing CommunitiesI would suggest that actually existing communities come

in many packages. Lineages, nations (in Loughs sense), andstates can all represent clear and present danger as well assafe haven and refuge to women and men or to the multiplespecies that shape and co-habit the complex ecologies thatsustain life. Confronted with absolutist arguments about thegoodness or evil of various types and levels of social units Ihave resorted to role playing. If I cast myself as an AfricanAmerican woman in the rural southern U.S. of the 1960s,then one nation (African American) is a refuge and safehaven, and the other (dominant white culture/Caucasia) islargely hostile. The local state might be a fierce enemy, whilethe national state is more friend than foe, for the moment.Lineages vary from brutal and oppressive to nurturing andprotective, sometimes combining both. Likewise a wholeconstellation of formally patriarchal churches actively createssafe space while another cluster of churches indirectlyfoments violence against me and yet another simply looks theother way as struggles of historic proportions envelop me. Iwould be loathe to write off all of the positive instances ofstate and church intervention as minor aberrations of civi-lization. The federal state seems to me to have played a majorrole in invoking the rule of civil society for a more even dis-tribution of rights, even if assets were not re-distributed.Local states often acted to maintain segregation and white

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privilege. Churches varied, with major differences within andamong particular denominations.

In contrast, if I try to imagine the experience of a youngDominican man (age 18, living in 1998 in the inner city of arusting post-industrial region) then the local state, the nation-al state and the local (white) homeowners association mayall be hostile. Fractal nations might well be expressed as gangturf in neighborhoods and identity politics at city level, bothof which might pit him against others who share much of hisexperience. The patriarchal, extended family and communitylevel rainbow coalitions might represent the safest havens, oralternatively, elite (and usually private, white and patriarchal)schools might best shelter the high achievers among hispeers. Shelter, survival and life-affirming values may berooted in communities of political solidarity as well as in bio-logically related male lineages. The state and the gang mightwell conspire (unwittingly in concert) to send him to prison,where fractal nations re-assert themselves in even starker andmore brutal terms. His mother might find her sons to be moreat risk from state and gang violence and her daughters fromdomestic violence. Yet the daughters might also be prose-cuted and imprisoned by a hostile state for domestic relation-ships with outlaw men. They might in turn be sustained andsupported by extended families and women held togetherwithin patriarchal lineages.

A contemporary international example of the changingand complex roles of social organizations and institutions isthat of U.S. sponsored land tenure reform in the transitioneconomies of Eastern Europe. In Albania, the liberal landtenure reform in the 1990s has taken land back from the state(and actually existing communities which had sprung up onthe state land over several decades). The land is then re-dis-tributed to the original and rightful owners according to thenational culture and local lineages, that is, to the patri-archs. They refer to themselves by that term and are sonamed in formal reports to USAID. Immigrants and othernon-lineage residents and women then ceased to have anystanding as legal occupants and users of the land. Here wehave a mix of multi-national corporations, intergovernmentalagencies and national bureaucracies acting to dismantle statepower over land and people and to restore nationalist andexplicitly patriarchal power over women and land. Actuallyexisting communities of people who are from the place butnot lineage members are simply disenfranchised. Their mate-rial dependence on the land and daily practice of social andecological relations over decades is erased, trumped bynation versus state arguments.

The recent protests over privatization of state forestlands in Nairobi, Kenya led by womens groups and stu-dents provide a very dramatic and positive example ofmultiple subjectivities at work in actually existing ecofemi-

nist activism. Wangari Matthai (like Vandana Shiva, DonnaHaraway, and a raft of other feminist activists) is trained inthe natural sciences (veterinary, range, and animal sciencesto be exact). She has leveraged her way between party poli-tics in the Kenyan Parliament and presidential races, and abroad range of separate and overlapping campaigns of Green,Human Rights and Womens activism. In her most recentcampaign she led a tree-planting expedition to the KaruraForest in the Nairobi suburbs to protest government transfersof public forest land to land developers. Matthai, withwomens, environmental and student groups faced violentbeatings at the hands of hired thugs, and later soldiers andpolice. Matthai was hospitalized with a serious head woundand hundreds of students clashed with police resulting innumerous arrests and beatings. An international outcry,including an Amnesty International Urgent Appeal, urged anend to the violence by government forces and several groupscalled for the state to respect the national forest. Matthai hastwice confronted the Kenyan state on environmental grounds(literally and figuratively) on public park and forest lands inor near Nairobi. She is not protecting shifting cultivators or alarge pristine forest of indigenous trees and rare and endan-gered animals. The Karura forest is full of the much reviledEucalyptus and Cypress species as well as indigenous trees.She is protecting public places that are green spaces andembody social as well as ecological relations. On other occa-sions Matthai has confronted the state on church grounds,over human rights issues during periods of ethnic clashesfomented by state policies and actions. Matthai has repre-sented forest preservation and womens interests as well asbroader democratic and human rights concerns through hold-ing apparent opposites (environmental preservation andsocial justice; politics and science) in creative tension, not bychoosing sides in false dichotomies. She is clearly coura-geous and no stranger to conflict and danger, yet sheembraces complexity and reconciles apparent opposites inpolitical action.

The historical absolutism of Loughs argument is nothelpful in making sense of these examples. The categoriza-tion of particular types and lower levels of social organizationas inherently more benign to women and ecologies than larg-er social units does not hold up. Absolutism, essentialism andthe relentless progress of a distopian history all obscurerather than clarify the reasons for oppression and the alterna-tive social and ecological possibilities.

The philosophical variant of necessity may be the sourceof some very oppressive social, economic, political and evenmilitary interventions. Lough accepts and promotes thenotion of a necessary connection between particular kinds oftechnologies, economies, cultures and polities. He alsoaccepts a connection between literacy and civilization and

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then links civilization to patriarchy, misogyny and ecocide.We are left with a necessary link between literacy (and all lit-erate humans), misogyny and ecocide.

We need to look at proximate structures of control anddependency that selectively damage people (by gender, eth-nicity, nationality, religion, class) and ecologies, and we alsoneed to examine the larger (and less selective) webs of con-trol and dependency. And we ought to observe the leakagesand linkages between systems, a subject treated in depth byDonna Haraway. The frequent references to discourse inglobal struggles and to the linguistic tricks used to demonizeor dismiss resistance would find resonance and clarificationin the work of Escobar (1994, 1996), among others.

Overall the necessity arguments block any possibility formapping our way out of the mazes that contain and constrainus. If we can see the complexity of those mazes, with all theirbranches and turns, we are more likely to see a multitude ofpossibilities for ways out, through and around the structuresthat both support and distort our lives. In a word, the neces-sity in Loughs argument is entirely unnecessary.

Families, Values and ValuationThe article ends on a troubling note, with an appeal to

reconsider our values and re-think our social, ecological andeconomic politics. Lough asks What is your life supportsystem worth? And that of your children and loved ones?What else is at the root of patriarchy but seeing the world asthe life support system of ourselves and our progeny? Isntthat what gave rise to so many of the very real problems hesraised? Isnt part of the problem the fact that powerful peopleso often try to make ecologies into subsidiaries of private lin-eages, economies and other members only institutions.

What else would improve our ability to tackle thesequestions? On the ecological side I would return to the workof Howard Odum and other systems ecologists, as well asRappaport and the cultural ecologists. The discussions ofefficiency would be better grounded in the work of Odum andseveral of his colleagues and students, who include solarenergy as an input, which incorporates land area, and sub-stantially changes calculations of efficiency. Loughs energyanalysis, as far as I can determine, is based on human energyinput as if the sun didnt matter. Gerald Leach (1976) con-ducted an illuminating analysis of energy returns to labor,land and other inputs under a wide variety of agricultural sys-tems, from foraging and shifting cultivation to highly indus-trialized monocrop production. The winner of the optimalland/labor/energy efficiency contest in his analysis wasChinese peasant agriculture of the 1930s. Other subsequent

analyses have found the Quaker farms in Pennsylvania tooptimize returns to land and labor in energy terms with sub-stantial use of unpaid family labor. The contrasts and com-mon features of these two systems present a soberingprospect for linear models of literacy, labor, politics and ener-getic efficiency. Each case offers a very instructive exampleof the complex relationships between social systems andtechnologies, without assuming that the connections are nec-essary.

Perhaps the really important question is Where do wefind the roots of a common sense of social and ecologicalproportion, connection, and responsibility? Where dorespect for human rights and reverence for life reside? Howis it expressed and mobilized? Why is it situated in particularsocial relations? How does it relate to other social and bio-logical categories? How does this impulse toward affinityarticulate with relations among groups of people and betweenhumans and other beings? Is this sense of social and ecolog-ical responsibility widespread? Is it identified with a partic-ular level of social organization or is it an opposition forceexisting within and across many levels of organization and innetworks across many places? How can we foster it?

While Lough largely historicizes and institutionalizesdifference I would prefer to socialize it and to recognize thedifferences within and across cultures as well as historicalperiods. In fact, Id like to get beyond social location in theinstitutional sense and complicate our situation. To embracecomplexity is to accept the possibility of desired changes aswell as surprises.

Nothing is what it seems at the moment or what it was atits inception, least of all the partially patriarchal institutionswhich now do govern so much of our lives and Life-on-Earth.Just as a capitalist society can produce contradictory process-es, people and eventually revolutions, so can patriarchal soci-eties (agrarian, industrial, post-industrial) produce complicat-ed encounters and surprising offspring. The apparently inex-orable march of progress carries with it the possibility of astreet dance or a country carnival. Even as we acknowledgeand confront social injustice and ecocidal behavior we canalso recognize, and take courage from, the partiality of patri-archy, the complexity of states, nations, lineages and house-holds, and the recombinant possibilities of future cultures andecologies.

Endnote

1. Footnotes and references can be found at:

members.aol.com/tdietzvt/HER_lough.html

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