Colonization and the Commodification of Nature (original) (raw)
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The Social Production of Nature between Coloniality and Capitalism (Introduction
Antoine Acker, Olaf Kaltmeier, Anne Tittor: “Introduction: The Social Production of Nature Between Coloniality and Capitalism.” forum for inter-american research 9.2 (Sep. 2016): 5-24. Available at <www.interamerica.de> Written from an environmental history background and a political ecology perspective with an emphasis on developments in Latin America, this introduction to the fiar issue Negotiating Nature: Imaginaries, Interventions and Resistance provides a conceptual reflection upon the problematic interrelations between coloniality, capitalism, and nature. First, the concept of Nature itself is questioned in regard to its colonial implications. Second, the material exchange and biotic flows towards and within the Americas are explored. Third, the social production of nature in the Americas is addressed. And fourth, the entanglements between colonial and capitalist nature(s) are discussed. Conflictive negotiations of nature and resistance are the topic of the fifth part. This introduction ends with the plea for a decolonization of nature that implies the need to re-conceptualize the relations between human society and its non-human environment.
Decolonizing Anthropocene Origins: Empire, Environment, and the "Invention of Nature"
2022
This seminar explores Environmental History in the Age of Empire from a global perspective. Industrialization, imperialism, and the accelerating global integrations they effected are today seen as central to the emergence of what has been termed the “Anthropocene” (Crutzen and Stoermer), the “Capitalocene” (Moore), the “Plantationocene” (Haraway, Tsing, et al.), and by a variety of other names – marking the beginning of the era in which humans became a “major environmental force” impacting the earth’s bio-, atmo-, and hydrospheric systems. Such rapidly growing human intervention into the natural world did not go unnoticed. Its observance, description, and problematization went hand in hand with the reconfiguration of the concept of “nature” in dominant imperial science. Relations between metropoles and colonies were at the heart of this process, organizing the interlocking practices of exploration, classification, and extraction. But despite imperial monopolies of power, the growing environmental knowledge of empire depended on, exploited, and ultimately sought to replace a plethora of local vernacular knowledges. The origins of the Anthropocene teem with multiplicity, and our view of them needs decolonizing. This is why a multi-scalar global history approach to this crucial period in environmental history is called for. The seminar is designed to introduce students with no or little prior expertise to the field of environmental history in the long nineteenth century, with particular focus on the British Empire. In this history, it will explore how “nature” emerged as a designated domain of colonial policy and knowledge production. Crucially, however, the seminar will contrast this imperial archive with other, vernacular sources that may contradict, expand, or resonate with what have come to be dominant scientific concepts and understandings.
Archives of Natural History, 1997
This substantial and generously illustrated collection of 26 essays by different authors is described as the "first systematic general work to do justice to the fruits of recent scholarship in the history of natural history". Nicholas Jardine and Emma Spary effectively strike the initial chords whose resonances inform most of the other essays. "Cultural history", they say, "has to deal with culture in the sense of social habits, the totality of the skills, practices, strategies and conventions by which people constitute and maintain their social existence". The idea that individuals may by themselves be responsible for intellectual advances is resisted. Rather "we wish to portray natural history as the product of conglomerates of people, natural objects, institutions, collections, finances, all linked by a range of practices of different kinds and in different places". The word "practice" as used in the extremely useful first chapter by Jardine and Spary is perhaps a little slippery, social practices being transposed too easily into the "full range of disciplinary practices", of which more later. Obviously relevant to any discussion of cultural history are definitions and interpretations of evidence and in Harold Cook's contribution, "Physicians and Natural History", there is a neat exposition of some of the developments in the treatment of "fact" over the years, notably in the section entitled "Intellectual Commitments" (pp 98ff). Of course many of the contributors to the volume address the problems that arise when any attempt is made to give "an accurate depiction and description of the natural world" (Paula Findlen, p.58). A large part of the pleasure the reader of this volume is offered is the experience of joining excellently conceived guided tours of those subjects within natural history where the most fruitful work is currently being done. While almost all of the essays in Cultures of natural history have been written in a safe-house where late twentieth-century ideas about the social production of knowledge are assured a hospitable reception, the importance of the book derives from its wide-ranging subject matter and from the sure handling of detail from an expert point of view. Even when an individual reader might very well disagree with the premises, arguments and conclusions of particular contributions, the high quality of treatment that prevails throughout is reassuring. The reader can enjoy the feast of urbane and informed conversation without the feeling of being wined and dined for an ulterior motive. To put this in another way, the authors have so succeeded in creating a book which has all the benefits of a shared approach by like-minded authors that it would be difficult to extract this or that essay as being a contribution to an academic discipline independent of the context that has here been established for it. Cultures of natural history is not a collection of disparate, independent essays but a set of essays produced, as it were, by a collective, a collective fully aware of its own strengths which are indeed real ones. Because the contributors (like groups of fellwalkers traversing a mountain's slopes along a variety of paths to a single summit) are mostly in sight of each other, inter-textual subtleties arise as the reader learns to appreciate the benefits of the strategy chosen by the book's makers. A few of the contributions are perhaps less integrated than the majority-Jardine's "Naturphilosophie and the Kingdom of Nature", perhaps; and maybe also Koemer's "Carl Linnaeus in his Place and Time"-but the overall effect is almost symphonic in the internal relationships of its many questions and answers. How should the study of natural history be conducted these days? The book provides a coherent set of answers in the form of important examples. This workshop strategy sets it apart from books like Edward Wilson's In search of nature. Because methodological questions are assumed to have been faced and mastered in the past, Wilson is free to deploy his experience around some of the larger problems affecting humanity as a whole not just a particular society defined by its locally generated culture. His socio-biological view of culture is global and multicultural not anthropocentric and European, which means that for anyone teasing out the meanings of the word the two books complement each other nicely. As already indicated, the contributors to Cultures of natural history are quite legitimately-it is their book after all-more concerned with natural history as a set of university disciplines that have had various shapes over the years than with the immediate knowledge of the natural world, the desire for which is of course not the prerogative of the academy. They are distinguished historians and historiographers, not explorers, observers or enumerators. The writer of the concluding section of the book seems to forget that there are and always have been thousands and thousands of active naturalists who have never aspired to academic appointments. Some of them are members of field clubs and natural history societies. They go on field trips, attend courses, visit museums, travel to foreign parts to extend their knowledge, read many of the same books and journals as university lecturers read, and indeed sometimes contribute to
International encyclopaedia of the social and behavioural sciences, 2015
This article looks at the environmental history of the empire by looking at histories of environmental change in the tropics by pioneering colonial scientists and by contemporary historians who are carving out the domain of colonial environmental history. The article argues that the development of an environmental sensibility can be traced to the encounter of seventeenth and eighteenth century Western Europeans especially naturalists, medical officers and administrators with the startlingly unfamiliar environments of the tropics and with the damage done to these environments.
Prelim Bibliography: Environmental History
2014
This minor field of study investigates how the relationships between nature and culture, rural and urban areas are illustrated in environmental history. Based on the constructionist perspective, this minor assumes that larger social, cultural, economic, and political systems are embedded in how the environment is treated. From this standpoint, it seeks to find an insight to demonstrate the connections between small-scale performance and practice and larger systems by studying the methodology of environmental history. This field of study also explores the roles of human bodies in the environmental history in order to explore how embodiment can be treated on larger spatial and temporal scales.
Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2018
This paper seeks to build on scholarship that historicises the commodification of water in Africa. It foregrounds this phenomenon as part of broader processes of colonial remaking of society-nature relations. An empirical analysis is developed that illustrates how the British colonists' condescending attitudes to indigenous social-ecologies, as well as the attendant exclusionary practises relating to colonisers versus colonised body-space interactions, not only formed the moral and material justification for subjugating the "inferior other" but also provided legitimating narratives for entrenching a racially differentiated urbanism, imposing western sanitation attitudes and introducing modernist ways of capturing and domesticating water at Blantyre. These marked a watershed moment in reconfiguring water-society interactions from being quotidian activities performed by the indigenes to produce water as a usevalue/basic need, to that mediated by the circulation of money, modernist public health concerns and water technologies primarily intended to serve the interests of the minority white settlers; thus setting in stone the production of Blantyre town in Malawi as an alienated and commodified waterscape.