Gladesmen Cultural Landscapes and Community Engagement: A Case Study
Laura A. Ogden
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL
In this paper, I introduce the idea of “cultural landscapes” as a conceptual tool for
facilitating constructive dialogue between resource managers and local
communities. In particular, I present a case study detailing the process by which
one local community, South Florida gladesmen, constructs the Everglades of
southern Florida into a cultural landscape. The focus of my research has been to
determine how gladesmen invest the Everglades landscape with historic,
economic, and community values. In other words, I am interested in finding out
what the Everglades actually “means” to this local community. In this paper, I
specifically discuss the relationship of gladesmen cultural landscapes to
contemporary ecological models of the Everglades. Research for this paper stems
from ethnographic interviews I conducted with gladesmen in several locations
throughout the southern Everglades, from 1998 to 2001, and was supported, in
part, by the U.S. EPA’s STAR Environmental Fellowship.
This research builds upon the emerging “landscape approach” within
anthropology, a theoretical orientation that treats geophysical environments as
culturally significant topographies. Feld and Basso (1996) suggest that variables
which inform the cultural significance of landscapes include: economic value
(subsistence and exchange values), historic use, stories associated with the
landscape, cosmology, as well as contestations of struggle (over fishing rights for
example). Furthermore, anthropologists have demonstrated in a variety of crosscultural case studies (Aboriginal “dreaming” being the most recognized example)
that local people tend to experience landscapes as locations which evoke
narratives of community identity (Selwyn 1995, Myers 1986, Fairhead and Leach
1996).
Gladesmen, white settlers who first moved into the region in the mid-1800s,
supported themselves through commercial and subsistence hunting and fishing,
particularly the alligator hide trade. Not surprisingly, their understandings of the
Everglades are shaped by their experiences in the backcountry while hunting. For
instance, gladesmen understand the Everglades as a landscape charged with use
and exchange values, and as topography whose geophysical features and place
names evoke shared community history. These features of the gladesmen’s
cultural landscape are certainly unique to their historic tradition and practices.
At the same time, gladesmen cultural landscapes exhibit several points of
intersection with contemporary ecological representations of the Everglades.
Here I will outline two of these commonalities. In the most obvious sense,
gladesmen “ecological thinking” compares with contemporary ecosystem
approaches. Both emphasize, at the macro level, the ecological distinctions of
and relationships between landscape components. Gladesmen narratives also
reveal keen appreciation of ecological complexity at smaller scales—with
gladesmen attributing ecological purpose to “habitats” such as alligator holes or
tree islands. Second, gladesmen “maps” of the landscape correspond with
contemporary ecological models of ecosystem process. For instance, gladesmen
skiff routes follow hydrologic courses (sloughs, etc.); camp locations punctuate
the landscape on the very tree hammocks and higher topographic ridges that are
considered “characteristic” of the greater Everglades ecosystem.
Part of the challenge managers face involves integrating social, cultural, and
economic concerns into the ecosystem model. While the ecosystem model offers
a comprehensive, holistic approach for conceptualizing the inter-relationships of
different ecological systems, variables that are difficult to systemize (such as
cultural values, environmental justice issues, etc.) are often left out of the
planning process. Instead, human systems often are characterized as static or
solely in terms of their “impacts” on natural systems (Moran 1990). For
anthropologists, “culture” is understood to include not only human behavior (such
as “impacts”), but also the way people make sense of the world (their knowledge,
beliefs, taxonomies, etc.). Though culture may be a difficult category to include
within the ecosystem framework, culture decidedly plays a role in the decisions
make about their local environments and their support for environmental
protection (or lack of support).
The literature on community engagement suggests that an active
acknowledgement and utilization of local knowledge can build the necessary selfconfidence of local people to participate in social action (White 1999, McCall
1987). In this paper, I argue that cultural landscape research can be used to shape
public engagement strategies. Recognizing the commonalities between ecological
and local landscape discourses represents a potential catalyst for creating dialogue
between natural resource managers and locals. Emphasizing the importance of
local environmental knowledge shifts the dynamic away from a top-down
approach to decision-making, a power dynamic particularly unsuccessful in
communities traditionally marginalized by past land management decisions.
Ogden, Laura A., University of Florida, Department of Anthropology, 326 SW 3rd
Ave., Gainesville, FL 32601, Phone: 352-379-0018, laogden@aol.com.