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[Gil, V. 1999] Historicizing Rappaport's Pigs for the Ancestors
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8/2/13 Historicizing Rappaport's Pigs for the Ancestors
balance of nature" (Odum 1959: 25 in Geertz 4).For Rappaport, the place of ritual in the Tsembaga ecology has
been the focus of his study (1968/84: 224).How the Maring ritual cycles serve, among other things, to regulate
warfare between adjacent groups and prevent environmental degradation.The regulatory functions of ritual is
explained in the following quote:
"The Tsembaga ritual cycle has been regarded as a complex homeostatic mechanism, operating to maintain thevalues of a number of variables within 'goal ranges' (ranges of values that permit the perpetuation of a system, asconstituted, through indefinite periods of time)" (Rapapport 1968/84: 224).
These three ethnographies have some aspects in common[13].As almost contemporaries[14], they share a tradition
of research of environment in anthropology.All of them have the perception of an stable ecology with the adaptation
of society in the ecosystem as central ideas, concepts borrowed from animal ecology (analyzed with more detail in
the second part of the paper).For Rappaport the regulatory function of ritual among the Tsembaga and other
Maring helps to:
"... maintain an undergraded environment, limits fighting to frequencies that do not endanger the existence of theregional population, adjusts man-land ratios, facilitates trade, distributes local surpluses of pig in the form of porkthroughout the regional population, and assures people of high-quality protein when they most need it" (Rappaport1968/84: 224).
At the level of units of analysis Conklin and Rappaport basically agree and Geertz gets further to the concept of
local population.The Tsembaga is the "local population" in its defined ecosystem.Although, other components of the
external world affect the local group, as they participate in a set of trophic exchanges, within this larger field where
land is redistributed through warfare.These are the "supralocal relations" for Rappaport.Geertz pushed further the
concept of a more political and less biological concept and use of ecosystem, including political frameworks beyond
local communities, as understood in biological places.In the case of Conklin, the study is concentrated in the local
population with some external influences.The aspect shared by the three ethnographies attempts to achieve more
exact specification of the relations between selected human activities, biological transactions and physical processes
by including them within a single analytical system, an ecosystem.However, Rappaport's analysis is more centered
on the quantitative aspects of regulation as the pattern of interchange of energy among the various components of
the ecosystem[15].Conklin is more involved in the native descriptions and classifications of the nature systems,
although he also dealt with exchange of energy within the ecosystem.
Although the three ethnographies contain ideas of change in socioecological systems, Geertz presented and
developed them in a very explicit way, by contrasting two clearly differentiated historical periods in a specific
ecosystem.He searched for "the internal dynamics of such systems and the ways in which they develop and
change” (Geertz 1963/74: 3).Conklin, and Rappaport were dealing with change in terms of the parameters that
allow the ecosystem to continue as viable.Conklin after a detailed native description of terms and taxonomies, also
explained that under the outlined cultural and natural conditions, that system required a minimum amount of
hectares (two) of cultivable land per person to maintain its present average (12-year swidden cycle).
These parameters were made under the consideration that the present land-population ratio is favorable (about 4
ha./person) and gives every evidence (e.g. three or more coconut groves in the vicinity of most settlement sites) of
having remained relatively stable over the last 75 to 100 years.Conklin considered the study of farming practices
over extended periods of continuous and highly significant environmental change an important topic in research of
swidden agriculture.For Rappaport (1968/84: 241) his emphasis was on studying the regulation of systems (how
they maintain their structure) rather than adaptation (how systems change in response to environmental pressures).
It is relevant to consider that each author had a different perception of the style his own work, and a part of a
special tradition.Geertz (1963/74: 6) considered his research might be considered within "cultural ecology", and
definitely did not agree with what he regarded as "human ecology".Conklin viewed his own research and discussion
in terms of the "ethnoecological interpretations" ofalternative solutions to the various general problems which arise
at each stage in the ordered sequence of the swidden cycle (Conklin 1957/75: 154).As mentioned at the beginning
of the paper, for Rappaport PFA was a study which materialized the kind of work proposed in his article with
Vayda (1967: 23) and constituted a sort of "more unified ecological approach" based on concepts from
ecology.Geertz presented his ethnography closer to the type of cultural ecology which he claimed to be adopted
from Julian Steward, who formulated the term “cultural ecology” (1955).According to Geertz (1963/74: 6), the
distinctive feature of his approach is a:
"... strict confinement of the application of ecological principles and concepts to explicitly delimited aspects ofhuman social and cultural life for which they are particularly appropriate rather than extending them, broadly and
grandly, to the whole of it".
Steward maintained that rather than thinking that all aspects of culture are in some indeterminate way, functionally
interrelated, the degree and kind of interrelationship is not the same in all aspects of culture, but varies.The
delimited space for the application of ecological principles was called by Steward "culture core".This center
included certain aspects in which functional ties with the natural setting are more explicit, the interdependency
between cultural patterns and organism-environment relationship is most apparent and more crucial.The cultural
ecology Geertz liked at that time trained attention to the system as equilibrium and change, "rather than the point-to-
point relationships between paired variables of the "culture" and "nature" variety" (Geertz 1963/74: 10).The latter
one was clearly used by Rappaport in the analysis of the Tsembaga rituals and environment.In other words, for
Geertz, different from Rappaport, systems are bounded but do not include everything.The ecosystem is defined
through the parallel discrimination of cultural core and relevant environment, and the question is how it is organized.
What degree and type of stability does it have (Geertz 1963/74: 10).For Vayda (in Rappaport 1968/84) this inclusion
could be an advantage, if we consider how he recognized that the merit of the "human ecologists" (implicitly
recognizing Rappaport's PFA under this category) was on including certain non-cultural variables in the systems
analyzed, something rarely done by most social scientists.He was arguing against the tendency to define cultural
variables as belonging to separate systems and then to ask about the influence of the systems upon one
8/2/13 Historicizing Rappaport's Pigs for the Ancestors
question of to what extent control are deliberate or purposeful (Rappaport 1968/84: 320).Bennet (1976:62 in PFA:
320) claimed that "control... is not always, if ever, automatic; frequently, the system must be cognitively objectified
and arbitrarily modified".Rappaport admitted that must have been an error of interpretation in the way the book was
written or maybe read.He wrote:
"I probably did not emphasize sufficiently the role of conscious, pragmatic decision making in the affairs of theMaring.It did not occur to me that they would be noticed by readers in the course of the account even if theyremained, in part, implicit... [Moreover] nowhere in the text is there any suggestion that it is otherwise" (Rappaport
1968/84: 321).
In 1984's PFA Epilogue he states that the false dichotomy of native interpretation and explanation through science
is "unhappy".Rappaport (1968/84) manifested his consideration to the native rationality in rituals.
"... proximate causes [of rituals] are often to be found in the understanding of the actors.It seems to me, therefore,that in ecological studies of human groups we must take these understandings into account" (Rappaport 1968/84:237).
And the two models did not mean a pure supremacy of one over the other:"This is not to say that the cognized
model is merely less adequate representation of reality than the operational model" (Rappaport 1968/84:
238).Moreover, he recognized in the 1984 PFA epilogue that his bias to the operational model had high costs:
"After completing the analysis reported in PFA, I realized that it told me nothing about ritual per se or, for thatmatter, why regulatory functions I attributed to the Maring ritual cycle in particular were embedded in a ritual"(Rappaport 1968/84: 334).
The later works of Rappaport, as the case of his work "Ecology, Meaning and Religion" (1979), moved him closer
to the more interpretive and symbolic position that was the one promoted by Geertz (years later his ethnography in
Indonesia), and for which is more recognized.In 1994 he moved his vision in favor to meaning analysis.He wrote in
1994 that he could:
"... provide an account of the place of ritual in a particular ecological system, but did not know why those functionswere vested in ritual, nor anything about ritual itself.I subsequently became as interested in ritual and related matter(e.g. the concept of the sacred and religion in general) as in ecology and have remained so ever since" (Rappaport1994: 168).
Nevertheless, later on his career, Rappaport transformed his discussion of cognized model vs. operational model
into objective (biological) and subjective (interpretive) traditions in anthropology (Rappaport 1994).This discussion of
models was part of a larger debate in the sixties between cultural ecologists and symbolic anthropologists
considering each other having a useless approach (Ortner 1984).Cultural ecologists considered that more symbolic
ones were "fuzzy-headed mentalists involved in unscientific and unverifiable flights of subjective interpretation", on
the other hand, the symbolic anthropologists considered the cultural ecologists to be "involved with mindless and
sterile scientism, counting calories and measuring rainfall, and willfully ignoring the one truth that anthropology [at
8/2/13 Historicizing Rappaport's Pigs for the Ancestors
as analytical units, looking for the "trophic" (say energy) relations within the ecosystem which each population
occupy.Ecosystem provided a convenient frame or model for the analysis of trophic exchanges between
ecologically dissimilar populations occupying single localities that can accommodate only by the introduction of
analogy non-trophic material exchanges between ecologically similar populations occupying separate localities. The
Tsembaga has been taken to be an ecological population in an ecosystem bounded by the limits of what is
recognized as their territory.The concept of ecosystem as fundamentally applied for one trophic exchange between
populations occupying different ecological niches within a bounded area, accommodates, only awkwardly, non-
trophic material exchanges between populations in separate localities.To overcome this problem Rappaport in PFA
(1968/84: 226) suggested the concept of "regional population", which could resemble a geneticist's breed population
which may be coterminous with a social formation.The notion of clines may be useful in coping with the difficulty of
boundary demarcation in such groups.This meant that local populations of humans (as other species) participate in
regional systems or "regional populations".The Maring ritual is of great importance in articulating the local and
regional subsystems.In this model the Maring ritual operates as a "homeostat" (maintaining a number of variables
that comprise that total system within ranges of viability) but also as a "transducer" (a cybernetic term),
“translating” changes in the state of one subsystem into information and energy that can produce changes in the
second subsystem.In this scheme, the ritual transducer maintains coherence between subsystems at levels above or
below which the perpetuation of the total system might be endangered.This concept of “homeostasis” is based on
the concept of ultrastability in cybernetics.This means that you can change the parameters of the behavior of the
system, in the case that one or more variables can exceed the critical values.The subsystem that detects this
occurrence and make the corrections is called homeostate (William Ross Ashby 1965, 1970 in Earls 1986: 56) or
the binary aspect of rituals in their role of “transducers” (Rappaport 1968/84: 234).Then the best example of the
application of this concept is the thermostat.In the functional and cybernetic analysis of the ecological relations of
the Tsembaga quantitative values have been assigned to most variables, to see tolerable ranges of values that must
be specified.The mere occurrence of a ritual can be regarded as a signal, where binary mechanisms make suitable
regulators and transducers (Rappaport 1968/84: 233-236).The operation of the entire ritual cycle is "cybernetic"
(Ellen 1982: 225).Rappaport (1968/84: 234) ended comparing the rituals to the mechanism of a thermostat:
"Like thermostats, rituals have a binary aspect.As the thermostat switches on and off, affecting the amount of heatproduced by the furnace and the temperature of the medium, so the rituals of the Tsembaga are initiated andcompleted, affecting the size of the pig population, the amount of land under cultivation, the amount of laborexpended, the frequency of warfare, and other components of the system.The programs that should be undertaken
to correct the deviation of variables from their acceptable ranges are fixed".
This cybernetics means there are signals from the ecosystem that regulates it.For example, women begin to
complain that the pig population is getting too large to look after.This is an indicator for knowing that there are
sufficient beasts for the performance of sacrifices to spirits.These have a corrective effect on the ecosystem
through the reduction of the pig population: the immediate environment is not degrade.This process is understood as
a complex chain of interactions between the cognitive model, the ritual cycle, the regional system and the
ecosystem.If the interrelations are as Rappaport describe them this is system could be a "supremely adaptive
codification of reality" (Ellen 1982: 227).
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Barfield, Thomas, ed.1997.The Dictionary of Anthropology.Blackwell Publishers:Oxford/Malden.Bateson, Gregory.1958.Naven.Stanford University Press: Stanford.Buttel, Frederick.1992.Environmentalization: Origins, Processes, and Implications for Rural Social Change. RuralSociology 57(1): 1-27. Conklin C., Harold.1957/75.Hanunóo Agriculture: A report on an integral system of shifting cultivation in thePhilippines.Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).Reprinted by Elliot’s Books: NewHaven.Cohen, I. Bernard.1994.Interactions: Some Contacts Between the Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences.TheMIT Press: Cambridge (Mass.).Childe, Gordon.1942.What Happened in History.Penguin: New York.Dove, Michael R.1996.Prophets in a Foreign Land? The Use of Scientific analogy in EnvironmentalAnthropology.Prepared for invited session, "Human Dimensions of Environmental Change: Anthropology Engagesthe Issues", organized by C.L. Crumley, 95th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, SanFrancisco, 20-24, November 1996Durkheim, Emile.1938/82.The rules of sociological method, 8th ed., translated by Sarah A. Solovay and John H.Mueller, and edited by George E. G. Catlin.The University of Chicago press: Chicago.Durkheim, Emile.1933/64.The Division of Labor in Society.George Simpson translation.The Free Press: New York.Ellen, Roy.1982.Environment, Subsistence and System: The ecology of small-scale social formations.New York :Cambridge University Press, 1982.Ellen, Roy and Katsuyoshi Fukui, eds.1996.Redefining Nature: ecology, culture and domestication.Berg: Oxford.Earls, John.1989.Planificación Agrícola Andina: Bases para un manejo cibernético de sistemas de andenes.Cofide:Lima.Friedman, J. 1974.Marxism, Structuralism and Vulgar Materialism.Man (N.S.) 9 (3), 444-69.Geertz, Clifford.1963/74.Agricultural Involution: The process of ecological change in Indonesia.University ofCalifornia Press: Berkeley, Los Angeles and London.Handler, Richard.1991.“An Interview with Clifford Geertz”, Current Anthropology 32(5): 603-613.Harris, Marvin.1966.“The Cultural Ecology of India’s Sacred Cattle”.Current Anthropology, 7:1, 51-64.Harris, Marvin.1968.The Rise of Anthropological Theory.Crowell: New York.Kelly, William.1999.Class notes for the Seminar in Socio-Cultural Anthropology (Part 2): Historicizing the disciplineand theorizing its history.Kroeber, A. L. 1917.The Superorganic.American Anthropologist 19, 163-213.Odum, Eugene.1959.Fundamental of Ecology, Saunders: Philadelphia and London.Orlove, Benjamin.1980.Ecological Anthropology.Annual Review of Anthropology, 9:235-73Ortner, Sherry B.1984. “Theory in anthropology Since the Sixties”, Comparative Studies in Society andHistory.26:126Park, Robert. 1934.Human Ecology.American Journal of Sociology, 42: 1-15.Piddocke, Stuart.1969.“The Potlatch System of the Southern Kwakiutl: A new perspective”.In Environment andCultural Behavior, A. P. Vayda, ed. University of Texas Press: AustinRadcliffe-Brown, A.R.1922/48.“Preface” to the 1932 edition ofThe Andaman Islanders, pp. vii-x.Free Press.Rappaport, Roy.1968/84Pigs of the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People.Enlarged edition.NewHaven: Yale University Press.Rappaport, Roy.1971.Nature, Culture and Ecological Anthropology.In: Man, culture and society, H. Shapiro (ed.).Oxford University Press: London. Rappaport, Roy.1979.Ecology, Meaning and Religion.North Atlantic Book: Berkeley, Nashville. New York Rappaport, Roy.1994. “Humanity’s Evolution and Anthropology Future”.In: Assessing cultural anthropology, editedby Robert Borofsky. : McGraw-Hill, c1994.Steward, Julian.1955.The Theory of Culture Change.University of Illinois Press: Urbana.Vayda, A. P. and Roy Rappaport. 1967.Ecology, cultural and non-cultural, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology.J.Clifton, ed. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin
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[1]Examples of this kind of research goes from energy flow and stability through adaptation applied in PeruvianAndes (mainly by Brook Thomas and Bruce Winterhalder) and in the Amazon basin (Robert Carneiro; DonaldLathrap and Betty Meggers ).The ones with the most important impact has been the studies about managementand verticality in the Andean topography, which attempted to understand the relationships between the
population and this diverse and difficult environment.Basically, the studies of John Murra were the first ones in atradition of these investigations of this vertical strategy, continued by Jurgen Golte about time cycles and EnriqueMayer more focused on the conflict and cooperation among sociopolitical units as families, extended families andcommunities.The most recent studies of Andean verticality represented by more focalized studies, and mostimportant example are the researches directed by Bruce Winterhalder with a team of professors and students
from the University of North Carolina.[2]The application of the term "ecological anthropology" will be problematized with more detail in the paper, Ibegin by using this label and not the possible others, such as "human ecology" or "cultural ecology" because I
think it is the one that corresponds to the general context of the study of PFA.[3]The central hypothesis of his research is that the place, constructed with terraces, can replicate the climatevariety of the Andean region and then thus allow the Inca administration to test which seeds might work indifferent environments.[4]This video was presented in the 20th Anniversary of the Margaret Mead Film Festival, in New York, 1996.[5]Clifford Geertz (1963/74) mentioned this idea, arguing that the holistic approach was the only capable way ofunderstandingthe “recently” named “Third World".Later, in 1991(see Handler 1991) he reaffirmed this position
adding the idea of the multiple divisions and paradigms in anthropology is a reflect of the complexity of culture,and the only way to understand that phenomena.[6]It is interesting to note that in the intellectual evolution process of Rappaport, there is a particular relationshipwith Andrew Vayda, his dissertation chairman and mentor, with whom co-authored two articles.In the 1984's
PFA Epilogue Rappaport manifested important differences with his former master.In an account of his"intellectual roots", ten years after revised version of PFA (Rappaport 1994) he did not admit his relationshipwith Vayda as influential as I would have expected.On the contrary, it was surprising for me to find a manifestedrecognition of Gregory Bateson as an intellectual inspiration, which is not directly reflected in Rappaport'sbooks.Rappaport met Bateson in Hawaii in 1968, and the 1984's epilogue of PFA shows some influence of
Bateson's view of evolution and adaptation as informational processes.Referring Bateson, Rappaport wrote thathe was "the most profound of influences upon me" (Rappaport 1994: 167).This influence is reflected more in thelater works of Rappaport, where he developed more interest in meaning in anthropology.[7]In functionalist anthropology, in general, seems to be that the option of not going through history has been achoice taken from functionalists with different degrees of consciousness preference on their work.This case canbe considered from Malinowski's Argonauts as a major marker of dehistoricizacer of anthropology (Stocking1992: 274 in W. Kelly, 1999) and Radcliffe Brown's preface of his ethnography "The Andaman Islanders"
(1948).Both admitted that history was consciously not taken for several reasons.The "ethnographic present"
(Chapple and Coon 1942, in Kelly 1999) was one of the important consequences of this kind of illusory freezingeffect of the ethnographertoRappaport's ethnography which doesn't consider history in its parameters.[8]Here Vayda compares this process with the biologists, but I am more tempted to think that a more relevantupdated comparison, might be with the approach to reality used in economics through models which attempt to
test their principles of the selfish agent and individual choice. [9]"Statements of ‘what it does’ and 'how it does it' may well be among the most informative, important andinteresting that can be made concerning an organ, an institution or a convention” (Rappaport 1968/84: 347).Forhim this is one of the main purposes of ethnography and in this way we can see how systems work and how
rituals regulate social life.When he is talking about the “systemic role of ritual in the ecology of the Tsembaga”(Rappaport 1968/84: 230), he took further the functionalist idea of Durkheim’s "mechanic solidarity" as ametaphor for all living species in a local territory, including humans.All equal parts in the environment.This wasopposed to the "organic solidarity" where the the unity of the organism is as great as the individuation of the partsis more marked, andbecause of this analogy, the proposition is to call the solidarity which is due to the division of
labor, organic (Durkheim 1933/64: 130-131).[10]This rapid abandonment of older theories for new ones, instead of trying to fix some aspects of the older onescan also be understood through the dynamics of academic careers within disciplines.There seems to be a
necessity to confront something that is in appearance new to enter in an a respected academic circle and accessto academic positions.For me, it is meaningful the many times I heard this comment from professors andstudents, more when referring the case of the paradigm called "postmodernism critique" and its dynamics withinthe people in academia.[11]This comparison was basically proposed by Professor W. Kelly and is remarked on secondary bibliography.[12]Is interesting to notice that he titled the book as "agricultural involution" (term borrowed from Goldenweiser1936 in Geertz 1963/74: 80-81) to describe and emphasize the changing character of the systems.In his words:"those culture patterns which, after having reached what would seem to be a definitive form, nonetheless fail
either to stabilize or transform themselves into a new pattern but rather continue to develop by becominginternally more complicated" (Geertz 1963/74: 81).[13]In this part our account is only of theoretical similarities but we are tempted also to mention that the three hadpresent the idea of interdisciplinary work in fieldwork.This could be interpreted as a practical reflect of their
holistic approach as a necessity in accordance to the complexity of the task and the breaking of the boundariesof the culture corporate space of understanding.Geertz (1963/74: xviii) mentioned that "the understanding of thenew countries of the 'third world demands that one pursue scientific quarry across any fence-off academic fieldsinto which it may happen to wander".About three weeks ago I attended a conference in the Forestry School at
Yale, by an anthropologist as candidate for a "junior social ecology position".He stated that the interdisciplinarycollaboration was a necessity in his fieldwork, basically, for framing the "good questions" to the populationstudied, directly related to the contrast of the "western science" tradition.[14]Is not casualness that Harold Conklin is thanked in the acknowledgments of both Rappaport's and Geertz's
ethnographies, for providing comments and criticism (Rappaport 1968/84: xiv, Geertz 1957/74: xviii).Also,Rappaport took classes of ethnoscience and ecology with Conklin which and admitted were “very useful”(Rappaport 1994: 166).This recognition could be interpreted as the recognition of Conklin's status as one of theinitiators of the ethnographic research with ecological topics.[15]In this sense, PFA is considered a pioneer work on the preoccupation of energy expenditure in the sense oftotal energy yields (Ellen 1982: 183).Also PFA was criticized because the data required to support analyses insystems terms were considered in too small scale to understand ecological process, a not sufficiently
sophisticated sue of quantitative data, and an incomplete use of systems theory.[16]This characteristic is following a tradition that I consider could be located under durkhemian heritage, where
social facts can only be explained by other social facts (Durkheim 1938/82) and "superorganic" concept ofKroeber (1917).For Kroeber culture was a thing sui generis (the superorganic) while biology (the organic) wasconstant.Causes of cultural phenomena might be primarily other cultural phenomena.[17]Although, in the introduction of his ethnography we can read "...this book is an attempt to apply to the
interpretation of --in this case, economic-- history some concepts and finding of social anthropology" usinginsights from micro-sociology to understand macro-sociological problems, and to "establish a fruitful interactionbetween the biological, social and historical sciences" (Geertz 1963/74: xviii).[18]The determinism was marked by causal correlation.The possibilism based on limiting factors of environmentfor culture, as a negative formulation of geographical determinism.This was best represented by Wissler.Themost recognized objections of environmental determinism within anthropology came more from "cultural orhistorical particularism" (Boas, Kroeber, Lowie) in US.[19]The labels of environmentalism, possibilism and cultural ecology have been inspired in biological parallels, butthe Aristotelian assertion of the uniqueness of human culture was not reflected to an explicitly ecologicalapproach to ethnographic analysis.From the eighteenth century onwards 'normal' natural science had becomeincreasingly non-Aristotelian in its organic view of the relationships between entities.This was dramaticallyreaffirmed in the struggle for survival through Darwinism.The former became the basic meta-concept of a science
of ecology, which included a new definition of environment which included all factors external to the organismand adaptation. Haeckel (1911/1868:793-4, in Ellen 1982: 66) saw this as the universal life triad of environment,function and organism.He was the first to use the term "ecology" (Okologie).Much of the early work was basedon broad natural historical and evolutionary notions and ignorant of the rapidly developing disciplines of animal
and plant ecology (Ellen 1982: 66).PFA can be considered as was one of the first applications of environmentand its influence in ethnographies.[20]According to Ellen (1982: 132), many of the 50's evolutionists "for understandable political reasons" (we caninterpret he was referring to the "cold war"), were not encouraged to emphasize the Marxist connection, with the
exception of White and Childe.In Ellen's account (1982: 15), for Marx the Homo Sapiens is both parts onnature: appropriating it and capable of transforming it; in what could be considered a primigeny act of thepostmodern discussion of the observed and observer.Pushing further the interpretation ofDove (1996) forecological anthropology in the nineties, postmodern critique could be perfectly be seen as compatible withneoliberalism, chaos theory engages perfectly with a sort of anarchism of free market.[21]As a student of anthropology in Columbia, Rappaport (1994) was immersed in a dominant paradigm by LeslieWhite.Although he sustained that he "quickly rejected the Whitian perspective, he admitted was influenced by "thevision of a lawful and unified order underlying the multiplicity of structures", reflected also in PFA.[22]This term comes from William Sturtevant (1964 in Ellen 1982) when he referred to “ethnoscience”, as theknowledge of a certain population about a topic.The first step in this approach is through the methodology of the
construction of taxonomies of the native terms, based on phonemes.Vayda and Rappaport (1967) distinguishedbetween two approaches: “ethno-semantic” or “ethno-taxonomy” and “ethno-ecology”.Ethnosemantic impliesthe discovering of the terms for classification and concepts for a population.But Conklin goes further andindicates that the Hanunóo knows (or say they know) the relationship between the environmental phenomenasand over them as a society.For example, the effects of erosion and the agricultural activities.[23]Sahlins (1976: 298 in PFA: 331) criticized this kind of"empiricism" claimed by PFA as a type of "ecologyfetishism", because it practice "the idea that nothing is in fact what it appears, i.e. culturally, but is translatedinstead into natural coordinates or consequences".Sahlins proposed with irony that then corn, beans and squash
become an unbalanced diet, the ritual pig slaughter and distribution a mode of remaining within "the limits of
carrying capacity", the social order "a population of organisms".But Rappaport responded that any ethnographicaccount is composed of a report, description or interpretation of the meanings, the absence of the latter isinadequate (Rappaport 1968/84: 332).[24]Kenneth Pike (1954 in Barfield 1997) coined the terms emic and etic, by analogy with the conceptsphonemics and phonetics. [25]Although Ortner (1984) and Ellen (1982: 138) did not go further on these statements, since they assumedthat is a common knowledge, we can hypothesize very broadly elements of two periods: the beginning and the
criticism of the cold war, with Vietnam and some repercussions for the youth people in antiwar movements.[26]According to Levi-Strauss, by posing the relationship between the two and using it to legitimate democracy,Rousseau had invented the subject of nature and culture (Ellen 1996:17).Aristotle is recognized by Ellen(1996:4) as the one of the oldest origins for polarizing "environment" versus "culture".Moreover, Ellen (1996: 17)sustains that “the history of anthropology is --in one way or another-- the history of the categories nature andculture”.I agree with the idea that we can understand the anthropology history, or at least part of it, through thehistory of the use and discussion of these important concepts.This was one of the ideas of historicizing PFA as anentrance to the meanings of the larger history of the sub-discipline of ecological anthropology and the discipline. [27] A single scientific theory of assimilating human beings into nature attracted the interest of anthropological andsocial theorists.The vision of "human ecology" as an extension of general ecology was first reworked in sociology
as a tool for empirical analysis by the Chicago school of urbanism.In fact, Park and Burgess (1924:559 in Ellen1982: 67) invented the label "human ecology".The epistemological foundations are due to Alihan (1938 in Ellen1982: 68).The social or human ecology of the Chicago school was essentially spatial sociology employingorganic analogies (Bennet 1976: 71-72 in Ellen 1982).
Photograph: "A medium-sized pig is sacrificed to the Red Spirits. Photo taken by Mrs. Cherry Vayda among the Fungai-Korama, a Maring group living east of theTsembaga in the Simbai Valley". Both, the photograph and the text appeared in the photographic section of Pigs for the Ancestors.