The Anthropology of Infectious Disease: International Health Perspectives:The Anthropology of Infectious Disease: International Health Perspectives (original) (raw)
1999, American Anthropologist
Thiemping in northern Senegal (Magistro). One can't help wondering what these communities were doing before when certain machine technologies were not available, or certain geopolitical limits were not yet in place. The "Ecology of Practice" approach goes beyond the theoretical gains of historical materialism and current anxieties about "subjectivity" by directly relating analysis in a chronological discussion that necessarily draws on outward as well as internal linkages whether they be economic, socio-cultural or purely political. If there is a danger there, it may be the temptation to become overly deterministic in following material causes for human's decision making, thus reducing the scope of the analysis and returning to what is essentially a transactional interpretation. The other danger in this attractive theoretical frontier is the danger to succumb to the mystification of one's own writing or mystification of the reader through over use of agronomic terms and concepts. In fact, this is a challenge to the approach that is significant. It implies that anthropologists take to heart the great need for their participation in examining problems of ecology without duplicating or rediscovering principles and assumptions that are the grist of the agronomist's mill. This is far more difficult than one would initially expect. It remains a just challenge in that agronomists or other scientists in related fields (hydraulic specialists, plant breeders, horticulturalists) depend on the social sciences to facilitate their entry past the farm gate; and to understand what happens after harvest. It is important therefore, that anthropologists concerned with ecology work closely with those of relevant sciences, take advantage of their literature, and, doing what we do best; understand their culture. An example might be that the fact that a small farm produces less volume; that it requires less labor is not a discovery in the world of the agronomist. What the agronomist depends on us to discover is the how and why of human behavior in that set of parameters. This does not take us away from the Ecology of Practice but rather requires us to look more profoundly at the paradigm and work harder at its application. A "sociocentric approach to ecology" should bring us to better understandings of how "individual agency (practice, politics) links the exploitation of resources to technologies that are created and used for the realization of culturally important projects" (p. 2), as Nyerges points out in the introduction. This volume is in fact a valuable contribution to the important project of better analysis of humankind's relationship to nature and the problem of culture.
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