OAC Online Seminar from 14-31 March Sian Sullivan Banking Nature?

[Keith Hart]

For some time now it has seemed that an ecological or green approach to the world we live in offers the likeliest systematic alternative to the free market ideology that has driven globalization for the last three decades. Sian Sullivan offers, in her paper Banking nature? The financialization of environmental conservation, a sharp corrective to the assumption that ecology and market are inevitably antithetical, as well as to the notion that the crisis of 2008 has substantially impeded the progress of finance, world conquest by the bean-counters and fortune hunters. For she describes here an astonishing marriage of business and nature, the drive to make the logic and practice of money-making the principal means of coordinating environmental conservation.

Anthropology at its best has always shocked complacent audiences with hitherto unsuspected aspects of human behaviour. But our stock-in-trade used to be exploring the remoter niches of the planet, while ignoring the forces of contemporary world history. I defy any reader of Sian's paper not to rub their eyes with shock and dismay at what they find there. Yet she is describing the very frontiers of capital accumulation in our world. Although it is long and full of footnotes for the intrepid (plus nice pics!), the story she tells is a riveting read. In addition to offering a forward-looking model of anthropological inquiry at the global level, she links her revelations to Marxist and Foucauldian theory, making the financialization of nature another phase of primitive accumualtion and a new kind of neoliberal environmentality. How to stop the monetary machine and what to put in its place? Sian hints at an alternative in her conclusions. But first she wants to make sure that we understand the beast itself.

Sian is an anthropologist interested in shamanism, cultural landscapes, human-nonhuman relationships, and the politics of biodiversity conservation. She received her PhD from University College London in 1998 and currently teaches courses on Cultural Landscapes and Environment and Development at Birkbeck College (Dept. of Geography, Environment and Development Studies). She has conducted field research with Damara / ≠Nū Khoen people in northwest Namibia, and in social contexts associated with the global justice movement. Much of her published work can be found online at http://siansullivan.wordpress.com.

[Kathryn Papp]

I've passed along the paper to the Stockholm Resilience Center with a request to circulate to Carl Folke -- just heard it has been done.

It is a joint initiative between Stockholm University, the Stockholm Environment Instituteand the Beijer International Institute of Ecological Economics at The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The centre is funded by the Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research, Mistra.

Also passed it to the New America Foundation in Washington DC.

 

 

Keith Hart said:

Thank you, Kathryn and Phil, for adding these much needed commentaries to our discussion. I have learned a lot from your line of reasoning, Kathryn, and from your links, Phil. Your call for more active involvement in these questions by anthropologists echoes my own motive in inviting Sian to join us here (on the recommendation of Geoff Chesshire). The dynamics of this seminar have been a bit sticky for several possible reasons. But I am struck by the contrast with the speed and volume of commentary from our regular members on "thing theory", the last seminar topic. The inhibition you both refer to as gripping scientists seems to afflict us too. It's fine to debate the texts of obscure French philosophers, but not the financial takeover of the planet, it seems.

Like John, I feel there is more to this than the label "monetization" captures. Money is the God of capitalist society and this adds a measure of awe to discussing it. Most of the time people would rather not think too hard about the dominant power in their own lives. I am reminded of the Preface to the paperback edition to Gillian Tett's Fool's Gold, on the history of credit derivatives which brought down the world's financial system. She writes in conclusion:

"The story of the 2008 financial crisis is a story not only of hubris, greed and regulatory failure, but one of these deeply troubling problems of social silence and technical silos. If we do not use the crisis as an opportunity to tackle these problems seriously, then it is a crisis we may well be doomed to revisit, albeit in an innovative new form".

By social silence, she draws on Pierre Bourdieu for the notion that the important things are not spoken about at all and by technical silos she means that the world of knowledge is continuously broken up into compartments of special expertise that outsiders don't question, especially in the field of money. The new form of crisis she hints at may well be the one Sian has drawn to our attention here.

I am convinced that money's ability to connect the finite details of everyday life with our human potential for universal society has some socially redemptive features. But that doesn't stop me from wanting to get these bastards. This then is the basis for a possibly fruitful alliance between economic and ecological perspectives within anthropology and, more important, beyond it.

I hope that, having joined in order to post these comments, you will both stay to enrich our discussions further.

[Keith Hart]

Since the seminar was slow to get going and has started picking up lately, I have decided not to close it at the weekend. So keep them coming. I will give you notice when the discussion will be closed. But don't expect much in the way of hands on chairing from me since the terminal date was to allow me to give myself 100% to work in South Africa.

[Kathryn Papp]

oops ... forgot this was a seminar.  very accustomed to online  "Discussion Groups".  Hope it won't go away.

Keith Hart said:

Since the seminar was slow to get going and has started picking up lately, I have decided not to close it at the weekend. So keep them coming. I will give you notice when the discussion will be closed. But don't expect much in the way of hands on chairing from me since the terminal date was to allow me to give myself 100% to work in South Africa.

[Phil Henshaw]

So, it may not be a common discussion in anthropology, but what would anthropology say about a human culture that shows a heavy reliance on representing it's natural world as an arrangement of information in their minds, as "a theory", and being repeatedly misled by the independent physical behaviors of "the things" in the world around them, that keep doing something else?     Are there any cultures, or different areas of knowledge, in which people exhibit that to greater or lesser degrees?

[Sian Sullivan]

Hi Kathryn, and thanks a lot for your contributions here. I agree that nature’s monetization misses something about ‘the nature of nature’, and perhaps is thereby set to contribute further to environmental degradation at the same time as enhancing the inequities of which you speak. I share your concern that socio-ecological accounting practices, as in ecosystem service science or carbon metrics, are constructing nature conceptually such that it can be entwined and entrained further with monetary categories and measures ~ that do much to release more ‘value’ from nature, but little to respond to and transform the values tending towards problematic nature use and exploitation.

I also agree that open source and commons-building approaches can engender systemic change that is more equitable and perhaps more ecological too. On which, I have been inspired by a recent paper by Jack Kloppenburg which discusses open source possibilities for protecting community patrimony over both biological/genetic information (relating to seeds) and associated intellectual property ~ you might be interested in this. (Kloppenburg, J. 2010 Impeding Dispossession, Enabling Repossession: Biological Open Source and the Recovery of Seed Sovereignty. Journal of Agrarian Change 10(3): 367–388).

Thanks too for passing the paper on..

ps. Please do point me in the direction of where I can learn more about IRIS and GRI..

Kathryn Papp said:

Bringing together the linked and diverse systems and actors in this perception and usage of Nature demonstrates the gaping hole in humanity's evaluation of its own future.  Allowing the advance of monetization of the most fundamentally creative "asset" of the planet, i.e. biodiversity, without a wide ranging and highly inclusive consideration is unsound in the extreme.

It is my great hope, and one I will act on, to push this beyond the boundary of anthropolgy.  Pass it to "think tanks" - they are many, and this is what they do for a living!  The narrow confines of academia can work to great disadvantage at times like these; however, open source can act as an enzyme and create systemic change.

Specifically:

Paragraph:

In combination, this language creates non-human nature as a company that needs to be acknowledged for the service work that it does. Of course, any ensuing payments do not actually go to nature, but to the people who are able to capture them. What becomes significant then are questions of what nature work is able to become billable, and of who, via enforceable property rights signalling ownership, becomes able to capture the revenue arising from payments for this billable work.

Comment:

The Achilles heel: transfer of funds across multiple boundaries: private sector to government; global to local; financial metrics to mixed value metrics (sociocultural, economic-corruption, barter etc); plenteous and diverse legal systems; accountability and lack of enforcement mechanisms.  Trickle down is not now demonstrably successful – the enormous growth at the top of all institutions has arisen at the expense of the bottom, to create a new influence (power?) and service labor class that includes large international ngos.

Paragraph:

The possibility of using market exchanges to offset environmental damage in one location through investment in some measure of environmental conservation or restoration in another location, now is a feature of global environmental governance.

 

Comment:  The difficulty here  is the lack of any reliable, commensurable metrics for determining the carbon content of an offset, and especially when it is non-industrial, such as is biodiversity in developing countries.   This is in direct contrast to the underlying assumptions that are building this system, i.e. it is wholly quantifiable within the range of current economic measures. 

Paragraph:

The recently released film Hotspots, made by the mega-ENGO Conservation International under the direction of celebrity conservation biologist Russell Mittermeir, brilliantly illustrates this production of conservation as spectacle.38

 

Comment: A key question here is: who owns these offsets and hotspots.  CI does NOT and in facilitating the shift in ownership to the global financial markets has in effect quickened the likelihood of loss.  In effect CI is relinquishing its own small pool of influence and control.  One might see this trend in the continuous powering up, not down, of its corporate interface staff positions.  

Paragraph:

They are ushering in an enormous systematic and competitive effort to measure, catalogue, dissect and ‘value’, i.e. price, nature’s ‘goods and services’, via an emerging ‘ecoinformatics’ that entrains mapping, measuring and monetisation techniques to produce combined ecosystems services catalogues, applicable from local to global scales. The table below provides examples of four such current and massive ecosystem services valuation initiatives.

 

Comment:  This is where the game can be shifted, if the global scientific body acts with purpose.  These metrics by and large do not include commensurable, non-economic measures.  Hence, a program designed for REDD or to conserve biodiversity will have no measures to show (not show) that is occurring --- biodiversity remains invisible, despite the monetary metric.

 

There are others … IRIS will be used by USAid and the World Bank.  GRI will be used globally.  The Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) movement, see Boston University, is also very active on this front.

 

[Sian Sullivan]

Dear Phil ~ thank you for bringing in this detail here. I am particularly glad because I must confess that your longer paper on SEA was a little too technical for me to follow fully. Your comments here are useful in conveying your arguments and concerns in the longer paper.

If I understand you correctly here, you have been highlighting that much of the real energy use of businesses goes uncounted due to underlying flaws in attempting to entrain real energy flows with the sorts of recorded information used to represent these. And that if anthropology might have better conceptual tools for seeing human cultures as pairings of physical and information systems, then anthropologists might usefully contribute to debate regarding ways in which to better embed economic ‘ecologies’ with biophysical ones; without making recourse to monetization since associated metrics are profoundly unecological as well as contributing to inequities (as noted by Kathryn Papp).

I think to some extent anthropology can support this possibility. I do think that a first step here is to unlearn the culture/nature divide that also seems reproduced in the dichotomy of which you speak: between environmental energy and business accounting practices. This conceptual divide seems to tend towards the disjunctures between economy (in your terms, a cultural information-based value system) and environmental value systems based on energy (also your terms), that arguably contribute to perceived environmental crisis, and accompanying economic concerns. It leads to the pathological thinking that maintains that an always growing economy is possible and even desirable in biophysical terms (as in ‘green growth’), whereas living systems at all scales exhibit cyclical dynamics and death that mitigate against continual growth trends.

In anthropology, and although it’s a while since I read this, a good place to start here might be Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind. This work profoundly entangles human and non-human actors to understand that existence is brought forth through relationship and engagement in ways that question analyses understanding the world to consist of discrete unlearning/unadaptive entities, unchanged by connectivity and communication. I also like Tim Ingold’s The Perception of the Environment, which is quite inspired by Bateson’s views. Bruno Latour’s recent work (e.g. Politics of Nature) is challenging to read. In my view, however, he does much to challenge the compositional tendencies associated with the culture/nature distinction, and to consider the different assemblages of human and non-human natures that might be composed if this divide is opened up and politicised, with a particular emphasis on equity and ecological health.

The paper by Bird-David that I engaged with earlier in this seminar also does much to illustrate the different moral economy-ecology that can be produced in different cultures guided by different cultural assumptions and value practices regarding what it means to be human in relationship with non-human natures. The equity and ecological outcomes of assuming a giving and animate environment, and a moral economy of sharing that is both human-with-human and human-with-nature, perhaps speak for themselves.

I will read your 'a decisive moment for sustainability' with interest..

Phil Henshaw said:

I learned of Sian's investigation of how far some business and academic interests have gone in planning to monetize nature from a discussion of her first paper on it by invited sustainability theorists on the Capital Institute's forum, Can Nature be Monetized.  My comment there was basically that the measurement science being used wouldn't work, though I also agreed with most of the other criticisms.   The idea presumes a basic misunderstanding of the difference between environmental value systems (using energy) and cultural value systems (using information), that maybe an anthropological view could help take apart.

I had come across how financial interests were trying to quantify and sell units of undisturbed ecosystems as licenses for disturbing others, and create financial instruments to trade, in reading my "Ecological Economics" journal and being asked to design web tools to give people instant measures of impact capacities they could sell, by a client.   He didn't like that I thought it wouldn't work as planned.    

Yesterday I was asked to comment on a more serious effort, to help define performance standards for bonding the CO2 reduction efficacy of investments, and I offered my Systems Energy Assessment (SEA) method as an improvement on the current standard. The  finding of that paper is that a very large amount of the real energy uses businesses cause are going uncounted, because the majority of energy uses that business revenues go to purchasing don't provide traceable receipts, and the present accounting method relies on tracing recorded receipts... So, a very fundamental conceptual error, also stemming from not distinguishing between physical environmental systems and business information systems. 

Last week there was relatively little discussion of it at a conference sponsored by the Financial Times, "Investing in a sustainable future" .  I wrote a report on it as marking A decisive moment for sustainability,  The emerging sustainability investment profession is formalizing its methods and now being "invited into the board room" by big business, finance and government, to face an emerging crescendo of hidden liabilities of our past ways of doing things.  I see it as both very welcome, but also displaying both courage and desperation.  I describe what I see as causing the present crescendo of impacts, making the establishment panicky and start hiring people to help.  

It's not just climate change, but also, it looks to me, that persistently growing resource demand crossed a line and now seems to have permanently exceeded the earth’s capacity for supply, with rather drastic economic consequences.   I'd sure appreciate some feedback on "the thesis" and suggestions for how else to explain the evidence that the natural processes of the economy as an ecology itself, differ so much from our cultural images of them.   

An anthropological view could help, as the only science that crosses that divide it seems to me, seeing human cultures as both ecological systems and social organisms, a pairing of physical and information systems of some complexity.    I need to better understand how to discuss that, as mis-matches between the two seem to be at root in why so many of our solutions make things worse...    

 

[Sian Sullivan]

Dear John ~ thank you for these comments. I am struck by your assertion that ‘the fact that the effort is being made indicates that those making the effort have, at last, recognized the value of nature, which was formerly ignored in their calculations’ (my emphasis). I am concerned that in a lot of this discourse the term ‘value’ is unproblematized. Pricing something is a very particular value practice, and is one that may crowd out other forms and sources of value that might engender behaviour more suited to producing the outcomes sought after. David Graeber’s An anthropological theory of value is axiomatic in this regard, and Tom Crompton has also written well on the sorts of value practices he sees critical in countering ecological crisis and its inequitable causes and consequences. http://assets.wwf.org.uk/downloads/common_cause_report.pdf.

John McCreery said:

Phil, I wonder if the monetization of nature could be seen in another, perhaps more positive, light. That is, even if the effort to monetize nature is ultimately flawed, the fact that the effort is being made indicates that those making the effort have, at last, recognized the value of nature, which was formerly ignored in their calculations. An opening has thus been created for further engagement with powers that be, which otherwise would be totally unimpressed by environmentalist arguments. 

I think, to offer another example, of the history of women's rights in Japan. During WWII, the Japanese government introduced the idea that women should be ryosaikenbo, "good wives and wise mothers." This was an effort to mobilize women to be actively involved on the home front in support of the war. But it was also a recognition that, with husbands and sons conscripted and off to war, women would be left in charge of the households they left behind and paved the way for the postwar division of labor in which women continued to manage their households while their husbands went off to work in factories and offices. This result came to be seen from a feminist perspective as a trap in which women remained confined to the domestic sphere and excluded from the workforce and other aspects of public life. It was, nonetheless, a dramatic step forward from the view of women as perpetual minors enshrined enshrined in the Japanese version of Neo-Confucianism and opened the way for further progress.

 

I am also reminded of Marx, who saw the bourgeoisie has a positive force in human history, albeit one that would be superseded by the proletariat come the revolution, and what has been called the salami-slicing approach to political negotiations. Could it be that the critique you offer is yet another version of making an idealized good the enemy of a realizable better? Could be worth thinking about.

[Sian Sullivan]

Dear David ~ thanks indeed for your engagement. I am fascinated by the comment from your EIB contact (would it be possible to see the full response?), and also by the examples of EIB engagement you highlight here. I am familiar with Chipko and similar movements and thanks for mentioning these here. I understand these as movements articulating a range of concerns around livelihoods, self-determination, resource and land rights, identity etc. that coalesce around desires for retaining the land-entwined economies that support all of these dimensions of being human.

I am glad that you liked the Resurgence piece ~ in case other readers are interested, the pre-edit version is available here.

Re: your 7^th May invitation ~ thank you very much for this. Unfortunately I will not be able to take you up on this because I will be out of London on study leave. I wish you a very productive sharing at this meeting.

David Marsden said:

Sian, thanks for sharing this very rich and thought-provoking contribution with us. I had to do a little background reading before responding, and, thanks to Wikipedia, I am now a little more familiar with such terms as ‘onto-epistemological’ than I was, and I think I appreciate the use of the term ‘non-human nature’ a little better – my take is that it is a way of moving beyond the nature/culture divide. My take on ‘speaking truth to power’ (in your first extensive response) is the need to widen ‘gaps’; to open up rather than close down – something that I have always thought anthropology was good at doing. In that respect, I thought your article in Resurgence was clearer in making your points to a wider audience. Forgive me if I have misread your argument.

 

I emailed a copy of your paper to the Chief Environmentalist and Head of the Environment, Climate and Social Office at the European Investment Bank – my former employer – with a request for comments. (The EIB is a key player in developing Carbon Finance). This is what came back. “Anything can be marketised, given the right regulation !”  What am I to make of that? He didn’t have time to think through a suitable response? Coming from this particular anthropologist, he did not think it worth engaging? The language used was unfamiliar to him? As a neo-liberal economist it can be assumed that ‘of course!’ anything can be commoditised? How do we open up the ‘gaps’ so that we might engage with different perspectives more effectively? What compromises need to be made to effectively negotiate a shift?  

 

The EIB has a large (and expanding) interest in forests. A brief introduction can be found here. While working with them I was involved with an appraisal team looking at a potential project in Uganda. Forest Land is technically owned by the State. It is in forest land that this private entrepreneur is investing. Forest land is administered by the forest department – a legacy of British imperialism in Uganda as in India and elsewhere. With population expansion and a lack of resources in the Forest Department, much ‘forest land’ has become scrubland, pastureland, and sites for impromptu village developments since independence – no trees surviving! Leasing to private companies has become a source of additional revenue for the state. Legally all settlers are squatters. As in India there have been continual disputes between the state and ‘illegal residents’ (see here).  These private investments have been seen as progressive ways of engaging with local residents as well as expanding biodiversity. The Co-op has been a leader here, although not without controversy. From within the EIB we were able to ensure that the company talked with campaigning NGOs, worked in partnership with local developmental NGOs, built in training and employment opportunities for local residents. While this is very little in shifting perspectives it is one of a number of ways in which positions can be challenged.  The Complaints Mechanism within the EIB is emerging as an important vehicle for thinking through engagements. The Operations Evaluation Department and the Independent Inspection Panel at the World Bank serve to challenge monopolies over explanation and direction.

 

Over the last decades there have been considerable efforts to counter the monopoly that the State has over forest land. In India the Chipko movement (‘hug a tree’) was significant in building a constituency for joint- and participatory forest management. Similar movements in Latin America have challenged governments and multi-nationals. While they are beset with inevitable contradictions and problems they do provide opportunities for sharing ‘common’ forest resources and challenging assumptions. See here for a history of forests in India. It is such efforts and others described in The Human Economy (edited by Keith Hart, Jean-Louis Laville and Antonio David Cattani), and building on the work of the World Social Forum, that provide the ‘gaps’ for challenging monopolies over explanation and opportunities for building new pathways.  Paul Ekins’ (Ed.) The Living Economy, published in 1986, and building on the legacy of Schumacher, also offered interesting pathways for an earlier generation.

 

You might be aware of the recently created London Anthropology Forum. One of whose aims is to provide a ‘face-to-face’ opportunity to discuss significant contemporary issues. As you are based in London I would like to invite you to speak to the issues raised in your paper at the next meeting of the Forum, planned for Saturday May 7^th to be held at the London School of Oriental & African Studies. This might provide an opportunity to identify additional ‘gaps’ that we can open and through which we can more effectively ‘speak truth to power’.

[Phil Henshaw]

Sian,      I guess a large part of the intent in using SEA and demonstrating just how much of the energy demand of businesses goes unaccounted, was to highlight a major case in point of the culture/nature divide.   When considered as whole systems of working parts, like an ecology, if our cultural accounting method typically misses 80% of the energy uses needed for businesses to work, that's going to lead to enormous misunderstandings about the energy choices available.    

That it comes from accounting only for the energy needs of the inanimate parts of business, and omitting the needs of the animate parts, further accentuates the particular error in relying on information to construct models of nature, and our roles in it.   When ecologists account for the energy use of ecologies they don't generally omit the energy needs of the organisms, for example... but economic energy models leave the organisms out of economies.

I agree the method I used was made too complex by all the exhaustive analysis I felt I had to keep adding to in the review process.  The end result is also to tremendously simplify the estimation procedure.  Total business energy is better estimated at the average world energy use per dollar of costs, a "1 minuet analysis",  than by spending hours and hours trace individual energy uses.    Even after going through a complex method of improving on it, the default assumption that the wind farm would have around average energy cost per dollar of costs was only 15% off the refined estimate, instead of being off 80% off.  

So the simple implication is in most cases money is a much more accurate and direct measure of total energy demand (as equal shares of the global totals) than going to the laborious effort to trace energy uses individually.  The reason is that relying on tracing individual energy uses means you're counting only the energy demands of the inanimate parts of the supply chain.   That overlooks most of the working parts of businesses considered as ecological systems.   

So I'm glad you see its very relevant to ask how anthropology might address other differences between human cultures that represent nature as our information (flying by instruments in effect) and those that recognize both information the complex relationships of nature.    Sometimes it seems to differ with scale.   In family decision making every choice is made in relation to its whole effect on all the relationships that are affected.  In business relationships with the world, it's more often just the difference between two numbers, with little awareness of any other effect.     Phil

Sian Sullivan said:

Dear Phil ~ thank you for bringing in this detail here. I am particularly glad because I must confess that your longer paper on SEA was a little too technical for me to follow fully. Your comments here are useful in conveying your arguments and concerns in the longer paper.

If I understand you correctly here, you have been highlighting that much of the real energy use of businesses goes uncounted due to underlying flaws in attempting to entrain real energy flows with the sorts of recorded information used to represent these. And that if anthropology might have better conceptual tools 

...clip

An anthropological view could help, as the only science that crosses that divide it seems to me, seeing human cultures as both ecological systems and social organisms, a pairing of physical and information systems of some complexity.    I need to better understand how to discuss that, as mis-matches between the two seem to be at root in why so many of our solutions make things worse...    

 

[Keith Hart]

David and Phil have brought up the issue of exchange across the borders of what Gillan Tett calls technical silos (I prefer bunkers) and Geoff calls comfort zones. This is partly an issue of translation and partly about the conditions of genuine conversation or dialectic, if you want to be fancy. David and I have enough in common for the conversation to pose few difficulties and I definitely want to be in a conversation with Phil because the ideas he expresses are challenging, but also foreign. I have discovered that, when an outsider asks a direct question of my alleged area of expertise, I can rarely come up with a relevant answer immediately. But if I push the dialogue a bit further by asking "Why do you want know the name of the opposition party in Rwanda?" or "Can we arrrive at a mutually intelligible concept of time?", the ensuing exchange sometimes gives me an idea of something useful to contribute.

The question you pose, Phil, about mind and nature really turns me on, but how do we have a conversation about it? My first impulse is to go back to square one, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, but that is no good if you are not a Kantian. Or I could dust off my pathetic excursions into information theory which I actually had the nerve to use in a book on money. Or I might refer you to Amazonian "perspectivism" which is all the rage these days: the idea that whereas "we" think of culture as plural and nature as singular, they think of them the other way round. But I don't really believe that stuff, so I could hardly point you to it. And asking what "anthropology" thinks about anything is going to get us nowhere, since anthropologists are an undisciplined bunch. Unfortunately they only hand out brains one at a time and I can only use what is between my own ears to provide an answer to your question.

I have decided that the best line for me now in this context would be to take up David's example of non-communication between anthropology and economics, since it is at one level the subject of Sian's paper. (By the way, Sian, I am sure that David communicated the whole message, not just an excerpt. They are like that.) I was once interviewed by an economic sociologists' magazine about my approach to economic anthropology and specifically about my practice in dealing with economists. This is what I said then:

 

When I completed my anthropology doctorate, I joined a group consisting mainly of development economists. This required me to talk to them. Our exchanges would go something like this:

Economist: Is the marginal productivity of agricultural labour zero in Northern Ghana?

KH: What does that mean?

E: I am thinking of Lewis’s dualistic theory of labour migration between traditional and modern sectors. It is assumed that people could leave the former without reducing total output there.

K: Does it make any difference what income they get from working in agriculture?

E: What do you mean?

K: Well, most of the farm work is done by young men, but their elders control the distribution of the product. So, if they leave to work in the towns, whatever they get there is their own and more than what they have at home.

E: What do you call that kind of organization?

K: Patrilineages or unilineal descent groups. A French Marxist, Pierre-Philippe Rey, has written about the ‘lineage mode of production’ in West Africa.

E: And you say economists like jargon too much! There is a new version of the Lewis model by Harris and Todaro that hinges on relative rural-urban income expectations.

K: Maybe we should collaborate on an article, ‘The lineage mode of distribution: a reflection on the Lewis model’…

In this and other ways, I learned that I could make a satisfactory academic living by acting as a broker from anthropology to economics and back again. But I wanted to change both disciplines by synthesizing them. I realised that I would have to learn to communicate in the economists’ language, since they were professionally dominant in the field of development. So for three years I moonlighted as a journalist for The Economist, producing reports on West Africa. Through this work, I learned ‘economese’ – how to sound like an economist without any formal training in the discipline. This served me well when I launched the concept of the informal economy. My original paper had two parts: the first was a vividly written ethnographic account of life in an Accra slum (I have been there and you haven’t); the second drew on my conversations with economist colleagues to present my argument in terms they could understand.

 

The moral of this story, since no-one would think it worth learning the anthropologists' language, is that we had better learn yours. Sian already has. That's why she teaches in a department of geography and the environment. If only we could get beyond discursive practice. But it takes extended conversation for that and my French teacher once told me that there is no point in learning someone else's language unless you are desperate to get your message across to them and that is the only way to do it.

[John McCreery]

Sian, Phil, as I read your last exchange it occurs to me that what I am seeing is a classic example of the difference between conceptualization and measurement. Conceptualization begins with the question, "How do we define that?", and the relevant operations remain entirely at the verbal/informational level. Measurement begins with the question, "How can we measure that?" and requires precise specification of physical interactions with non-verbal realities.

In either case, the thinking involved can be complex; Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica or Kant's Critique of Pure Reason are, in their own ways, as difficult to get one's head around as quantum mechanics or the special theory of relativity. The difference lies in the possibility of specifying measurements that bear on the latter examples'  accuracy or validity. 

Thus, apologies to Sian, it is one thing to say, "Anthropology should be able to ...." and quite another to answer the question, "And how precisely will we do that?" Our conceptualizations of relationships may contribute to understanding important issues (and none may be more important than humanity's relationship to nature); but until we can say how to measure the  accuracy and validity of the concepts we come up with, we are stuck at the bar conversation or talking shop level and not likely to win much respect from world shakers and policy makers.

 

Or am I missing something here?

[Geoff Chesshire]

As I follow what everyone has been saying, what comes to mind for me is the trouble that we humans bring upon ourselves by dividing everything into territories (concepts, silos, bunkers, zones, etc.) with maps (measurements, boundaries, etc.). Important connections and relationships are so often lost in the analysis and forgotten in the synthesis. What begins as meaningful map to one becomes mere property to another. The finance industry is more than willing to translate concepts (e.g., nature as land, people as labour, leadership as capital) into private property for sale or rent, and translate measurements into contracts, money and various more abstract maps. These maps then become recycled into territory when profits are translated into new financial capital and contracts are packaged and traded as derivative investment vehicles. What concerns me is that, no matter how carefully, clearly and responsibly we describe the world using all kinds of (traditional and/or innovative, social and/or natural, etc.) systems of measurable concepts, in the end we only provide the finance industry with more opportunities for exploitation. David's interaction with the fellow at EIB illustrates this, and it reminds me of a similarly terse recent conversation between a friend of Phil's and mine with the environmental chief at Deutsche Bank. To me the real question is not how well we learn to understand and describe the world, but which forces we empower, which kinds of values, relationships and stories we reinforce with this knowledge.