Revised 10 June 2010
Where is Anthropology When You Need It?
Real World Problems and Reflexivity
Robert Daniels
Department of Anthropology
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Nothing human is alien to anthropology. Indeed, of the many disciplines that
study our species, Homo sapiens, only anthropology seeks to understand the
whole panorama--in geographic space and evolutionary time--of human
existence.
American Anthropology Association webpage
http://www.aaanet.org/anthbroc.htm
Motivation
It is now being widely recognized that the human species is on the brink of massive changes as great as
those resulting from the rise of industrialization, and perhaps even as great as the changes brought about
by the development of food production. The interlocked problems of non-renewable resource depletion,
accumulating industrial waste, biosphere degradation, and climate change lead both expert and lay
observers to postulate drastic predictions about the foreseeable future. The events being predicted for the
coming decades and next couple centuries are, by almost all current standards, extremely negative: e.g.
the replacement of democratic civil society by authoritarian police states, the permanent collapse of
electric power grids resulting in the loss of all digitally encoded information, the collapse of industrialized
food production and a "die off" of human population, etc.
Five times over the past several years I have offered a seminar course entitled "Anthropological
Perspectives on the Energy Crisis." Anthropology (using the term in its inclusive American sense that
seeks to combine human evolution, bioanthropology, archaeology, culture history, linguistics, and much
more with social anthropology) is the social science that most fundamentally takes a global view, looks at
the human species over the long (indeed evolutionary) scale, and has investigated the collapse of past
civilizations with a comparative, multidisciplinary, cultural-ecological approach. The seminar examined the
validity of the dire predictions of an energy shortage and climatic crisis. We also looked at various studies
of the trajectories of past civilizations. And we searched for analyses in the social sciences, and
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particularly in anthropology, that might help us understand current processes and help us anticipate and
prepare for the future. Surely, we asked, anthropological theory and research has something to
contribute to these debates. In short, of what use is anthropology?
To date the results of this quest have been slight. Rather than being centrally concerned with these
issues, academic anthropology is largely silent, and seems about to be overwhelmed by the truly global
transformations occurring among its own subjects, and to be rendered irrelevant. This paper is my
attempt to explain why I think the discipline is not dealing with the real world (and a plea to colleagues to
save me from my ignorance if there are anthropologists who are addressing the crisis).
Some Real World Problems
In this section I mention facts and references which have influenced my thinking on these topics. I make
no attempt to present complete summaries; I assume readers are familiar with the basic issues discussed
here.
Oil
Learning the facts of peak oil has a tendency to refocus the mind on the
fundamental question of human use of resources; abstract ideas about society
seem less important. But if history teaches us anything, it is that ideas have
consequences. As one of the greatest changes in the human story is now afoot,
it would seem foolish in the extreme to leave intellectual rigor to the physical
scientists while allowing sloppy armchair anthropologists and historians [to] frame
the relevant cultural questions (Polycarpou 2005).
On a human time scale, the amount of fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas), both known and as yet
undiscovered, is finite. Meanwhile worldwide demand is accelerating rapidly. Over the past several years
a number of independent oil geologists have pushed awareness of the problems of fossil fuel depletion.
The first article addressed to the general American public (or at least the general intelligentsia of America)
appeared many years ago: "The End of Cheap Oil" by Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrère, in
Scientific American, (March 1998). Six years later the same title was used in a lead article in National
Geographic (Appenzeller 2004).
Campbell, a retired British petroleum geologist, went on to found ASPO, the Association for the Study of
Peak Oil & Gas (http://www.peakoil.net/). 'Peak Oil' 1 has become a major scientific focus, and
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propagation of public awareness about it has become a major social movement among a certain set of
concerned scientists and citizens in many countries as well as spawning countless local “power down”
organizations seeking practical applications for low energy lifestyles. (A Google search on "peak oil" will
produce over 4½ million hits.) The problem is not that sooner or later we will run out of fossil fuels. The
problem comes when we run short of oil. Global oil production cannot expand indefinitely and at some
point production will peak. The term draws our attention to the fact that the critical transition will not be
when oil reserves near exhaustion, but when worldwide production peaks and less and less oil can be
produced no matter what effort or expense is made. At that point whatever the level of demand may be,
the level of consumption worldwide will start to decline.2 Further, it is misleading to focus on the amount
of oil remaining in the ground. We cannot recover all of the oil from any field, and we will never recover
all of the 'recoverable' oil in the world since industrial society will have ground to a halt long before the last
100, or 1,000 or 10,000 barrels are pumped from the earth.
The title of Campbell and Laherrère's paper, "The End of Cheap Oil," also draws our attention to the fact
while "the first half of the age of oil" has involved extraction of roughly half of the ultimately recoverable
oil, the second half is qualitatively different, for the oil already extracted has been from the most
accessible and highest grade resources, that is those with the highest energy return on energy
investment (EROEI). The cost of recovery, and in many cases the ecological destruction necessary, can
only increase.3
The central message of these "pessimists" or "Cassandras" is that the “peak oil” transition is not in the
distant future but here now. A few years ago many people considered "peak oil" simply wrong-headed
and refused the basic premise of the analysis. But as Colin Campbell is fond of saying, this is something
every beer drinker knows: "the glass starts full and ends empty, and the quicker you drink it, the sooner it
is gone." In 1998 Campbell and Laherrère suggested 2010 as the rollover date. Others have moved this
prediction forward or back a few years.4
In the past decade many others have considered these predictions wildly wrong, but recent events are
producing new believers every day:
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At just under 86 million barrels per day, global oil production has, essentially,
stagnated since 2005, despite soaring demand, suggesting that production has
already reached its geological limits, or "peak oil".
Pessimists believe that production has passed its peak. Optimists say it may be
20 years or so away - which would give us some time to prepare - but [they] are
now muted. Last week [March 2008] the hitherto optimistic International Energy
Agency admitted that it may have overestimated future capacity. Chris
Skrebowski, editor of 'Petroleum Review' and once an optimist himself, believes
that the world is now in "the foothills of peak oil". Prices may ease a bit over the
next few years, but then the real crunch will come. The price then? "Pick a
number!" (David Strahan, quoted in Lean 2008).
And this from the oil tycoon T. Boone Pickins:
"Let me tell you some facts the way I see it. Global oil (production) is 84 million
barrels (a day). I don't believe you can get it any more than 84 million barrels. I
don't care what (Saudi Crown Prince) Abdullah, (Russian Premier Vladimir) Putin
or anybody else says about oil reserves or production. I think they are on decline
in the biggest oil fields in the world today and I know what's it like once you turn
the corner and start declining, it's a tread mill that you just can't keep up with (EV
World 2005).
The data do suggest that global production has reached a plateau:
Figure 1
Source: http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/6477#more
[The data are from two sources: the International Energy Agency and the Energy Information
Administration, US Department of Energy.]
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The problem of shortage arises, of course, from both diminishing reserves and increasing demands
worldwide. Increasing, following the pattern of the United States, oil producing countries are also
becoming major consumers. In some cases, as the following chart shows for Indonesia, they are already
transitioning from exporters to importers:
Figure 2
Source: http://mazamascience.com/OilExport/
Public admission of immanent problems
… you never heard me say, "Drill, baby, drill," because we can't drill our way out
of the problem. It may be part of the mix as a bridge to a transition to new
technologies and new energy sources, but we should be pretty modest in
understanding that the easily accessible oil has already been sucked up out
of the ground. And as we are moving forward, the technology gets more
complicated, the oil sources are more remote, and that means that there's
probably going to end up being more risk. [emphasis added].
Barack Obama, Presidential News Conference, May 27, 2010
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Michael Ruppert (2005) has been a leader among those who have argued that Peak Oil has long been an
unstated central concern of western governments (and the hidden premise for American geopolitical
policies) while publically the term was derided as a wrong-headed theory to be relegated to the margins
of public discourse. Very recently there have been three events which indicate the extent to which this
has changed.
First, The International Energy Agency, based in Paris, scoffed at the idea of peak oil as recently as 2005,
but “radically changed its assessment” between 2007 and 2008 (Monbiot 2008). In March 2010, the chief
economist of the IEA, Fatih Birol, declared that the "era of cheap energy is over" (Barkley 2010). Indeed
a decade earlier, in its World Energy Outlook of 1998, the IEA published figures which hinted at a peak in
world crude oil supply [i.e. production] around 2014, but, as David Fleming (2009) and Lionel Badal
(2010) have recently charged, the true nature of their projection was obscured by adding in a “balancing
item” of “unidentified unconventional oil” in order to produce a ‘business as usual’ scenario of future
economic growth. In the footnote to Table 7:12 on page 92 of the 464 page WEO 1998 report we read
that “Unidentified unconventional oil is from currently unknown or uncertain projects.” Fleming now sees
this needle hidden in the haystack as a “coded” message to the few . For Monbiot, the IEA’ s recent
change of heart “should scare the pants off anyone who understands the implications” (2008). 5
(Steven Chu, US Secretary of Energy) was my boss… He knows all about peak
oil, but he can’t talk about it. If the government announced that peak oil was
threatening our economy, Wall Street would crash. He just can’t say anything
about it.
David Fridley, Energy Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (DOE)
(quoted by Badal 2010)
Second, in the United Kingdom, following the publication in October, 2009, of the UK Energy
Research Centre’s “Global Oil Depletion Report” and in February, 2010, of the UK Taskforce on Peak
Oil and Energy Security’s report entitled "The Oil Crunch: a Wake-up Call for the UK Economy", Britain's
Energy Minister summoned about 20 business leaders to a closed meeting to discuss “the government's
response to a decline in global oil production should it actually be imminent” (Whipple 2010), or as The
Guardian headline put it “to calm rising fears over peak oil” (Guardian 2010). Central to the conclusions
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reached was that “The exact date of peak oil is an academic extraction, what matters is its inevitability”
(Hopkins 2010).
Third, in the United States, a Joint Operating Environment report from the US Joint Forces Command
released in April, 2010, stated "By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear...”
(Macalister 2010). That same month the following chart, prepared in 2009 by Glen Sweetnam, director of
the International, Economic and Greenhouse Gas division of the Energy Information Administration at the
Department of Energy of the US Government, became public (Arguimbau 2010):
Figure 3
The US Government still refuses to use the term Peak Oil, speaking instead of an “undulating plateau”
pattern, which will start “once maximum world oil production is reached” (Azzanneau 2010). From Figure
2, above, that seems to have been in 2008, or perhaps 2005. I suspect “Unidentified Projects” in
Sweetnam’s chart is a euphemism for “Nonexistent Projects.”
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And, of course, oil is only one of many critical resources becoming scarce. 6
Alternate Hopes?
Many authors have analyzed the possibilities of alternate fuel sources (Heinberg 2005, Homer-Dixon
2008, Smil 2008, Bryce 2010, etc.). Some see a far greater role in the future for natural gas, though the
abundance, accessibility, and ecological downside of ‘shale gas’ in the US is hotly debated. Others see a
much greater reliance on nuclear power, which was originally, in the 1950s, and is once again touted as a
stop-gap or transitional solution. At this point the amount of capital and time required for a major shift to
nuclear generated electricity seems prohibitive. Then there is the question of “peak uranium” (see, for
example, Storm van Leeuwen 2006). Heinberg (2005:148) suggest the nuclear fuel problem can be
solved by building fast-breeder reactors, but “a smoothly-running breeding process on a commercial scale
has never yet been achieved” (Fleming 2007:23). And, of course, nuclear power plants of any type entail
enormous safety issues and create frightening new vulnerabilities. Further, one would think that those
anthropologists who take an evolutionary perspective would have something to say about bequeathing to
future generations toxic wastes with half-lives range from minutes to “about the same as the age of the
earth: 4.5 billion years” (Fleming 2007:2). 7
The most probably near future shift will be a great increase in the use of coal, directly or through
liquefaction. This path obviously leads to great increases in CO 2, and, inevitably, questions about for
“peak coal” (see DiPeso 2009). Goodell (2006) documents the environmental, social, and political impact
of the coal industry in the US – it is not a pretty picture. Whatever the mix of fossil fuels in the future,
sustainability seems impossible:
Every day, people are using the fossil fuel equivalent of all the plant matter that
grows on land and in the oceans over the course of a whole year.
(Jeffrey S. Dukes http://www.spacedaily.com/news/energy-tech-03zp.html)
And so we come to “renewable” energy sources: biofuel as a substitute for liquid petroleum fuels and
electricity generated through wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, tidal and wave power. The problems of
producing ethanol via industrial agriculture seem obvious to all but politicians:
Ethanol isn’t motor fuel. It’s religion. (Bryce 2008:145).
Ethanol production using corn grain required 29% more fossil energy than the
ethanol fuel produced (Pimentel and Patzak 2005:65).
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If all of the croplands in the US were used to produce ethanol from corn, it would
… displace less than half of 2008 US gasoline demand (Gorelick 2010:212).
The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol would feed one
person for a full year. (Brown 2006)
Simply put, producing biofuels on an industrial scale reduces available energy and reduces available
food. Even if an impossibly large amount of acreage were dedicated to biofuels, the result would not
come close to current needs, to say nothing of the ecological impact of such an effort, the corrosive
nature of the product, etc. The picture is not much brighter with the other possibilities:
There are five major reasons that the transition from fossil to nonfossil supply will
be much more difficult than is commonly realized: scale of the shift, lower energy
density of replacement fuels; substantially lower power density of renewable
energy extraction; intermittence of renewable flows; and uneven distribution of
renewable energy resources (Smil 2008:82).
Heinberg (2005) goes through each potential source in some detail, and Bryce analyzes wind power and
photovoltaic power generation in terms of power density, energy density, cost, and scale. Hydropower is
a major source in several countries (China, Canada, Brazil, US, etc.) but is only available in limited areas.
It does not appear that geothermal, tidal or wave power will ever meet a significant fraction of world
needs. The major hopes lie with the generation of electricity through active solar and wind power. But
these two turn out to be far more expensive and resource hungry than expected. At least with current
technology, both photovoltaic and wind generation on an industrial scale are not replacements for a
petroleum based technology as much as manifestations of it.
Can these technologies be detached from the fossil fuel platform supporting
them? …Denmark was getting 18 percent of its electricity from wind in
2003…This is possible because the world has been at or around the historic
peak of oil production, meaning the oil economy at the millennium was at its most
robust just when these wind farms were set up. Thanks to fossil fuels you could
produce the special alloy metals need to make the turbines, and you could run
the factories to mass-produce them and make the replacement parts …What
happens without the fantastic technological support of the oil economy in the
background? (Kunstler 2005:127-128).
PV [photovoltaic] cells can’t be made without high-tech manufacturing facilities
and energy-intensive materials, and according to some calculations, their net
energy is right around 1-to-1…The net energy of PV cells, like most other
renewable technologies, is radically asymmetric over time. Essentially all the
energy inputs go into PV cells at the beginning, when they are manufactured and
installed; the energy out put comes later on, and requires almost no further input.
In effect, then, a PV cell can be seen as a way of storing energy…(Greer
2008:165-166).
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None of which is to say that these technologies should not be pursued wherever they can produce a
positive energy return. They are all under active development, and improvements in efficient will no
doubt be realized. They may prove very handy in small scale application (mentioned below). But in the
realistically foreseeable future, no combination of them will be able to sustain industrialized society.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
As every anthropology undergraduate knows, when the outside world with its industrialized wonders burst
into peoples’ lives in New Guinea, the epistemological shock was enough to set a generation spinning off
into cargoist fantasies. It is no wonder then that in the developed world, where there has been a
relentless parade of such disjunctures within individual lifetimes (my mother was born 8 months after the
Wright brothers’ first powered flight and died in 2005), there is a common belief that we will be saved from
all our excesses by some new and wondrous technology. Current cargoist ideas include vision of
neighborhood nuclear plants (Bethge 2010), laboratory produced oil (Squatriglia 2010 – one wonders
what the net energy return is on that), and laser induced nuclear fusion power plants (Sutter 2010). For
those who want to play God (or perhaps don’t know that there is something beyond themselves), there is
“geoengineering” (O'Connell 2009, Madrigal 2010) which is just a magnification of the current IBM
advertising campaign to “build a smarter planet.”8 Geoengineering, unfortunately, is not the ultimate
conceit. The prize for that goes to “terraforming” Mars, the dream that we can infect Mars with terrestrial
life and turn it into a blue and green home to be colonized by homo sapiens (presumably before we
completely ‘marsiform’ Mother Earth). No doubt there will be technological wonders in the future, but we
still have to deal with the legacy of the petroleum age.
Climate Destabilization
I would sooner expect a goat to succeed as a gardener as expect humans to
become stewards of the Earth. James E. Lovelock (1994)
Throughout the 20th century anthropologists have conducted research within the context of the
expanding global economic system. We have documented its rapid spread into the far corners of the
world, and the frequently deleterious social and psychological results as communities found themselves
being monetized and commoditized. While the discipline has struggled since the 1930s to conceptualize
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these processes, without much theoretical success in my opinion, 9 we have mounted a telling critique of
neoclassical economic theory, telling at least within departments of anthropology. Our substantivist
objections to groundless models of human behavior have only influenced a few academic economists (I
will mention one, John Gowdy, below). Ayres and Warr’s recent book The Economic Growth Engine:
How Energy and Work Drive Material Prosperity (2009), attempts to integrate neoclassical economics
with thermodynamics and evolutionary perspectives; addressed to professional economists, it is certainly
a ray of hope. But outside the academy, in the business world, the neoclassical religion has never been
stronger. Everywhere, it seems, people are clamoring to become more deeply involved in an economic
system in which the goal of each component is to "grow" and the whole system of investment is premised
on endless expansion through increased industrialization. The concern is with throughput without
concern for the finiteness of the earth's ability to supply inputs or absorb outputs. We have reached the
point where we face not only resource depletion (peak oil) but also levels of accumulated industrial waste
which have pushed global climatic patterns past certain tipping points. While the public has become
aware of "global warming," it is perhaps more accurate to speak of climate destabilization since the
changes underway are complex and not fully understood. Several years ago the peak oil experts Anders
Sivertsson, Kjell Aleklett, and Colin Campbell presented an analysis (Coghlan 2003) that concluded that
global warming was not going to be a problem since industrial society would crash before then (cold
comfort, literally and figuratively). Now we know that we face the worst of both possibilities: the climatic
changes are already well underway and moving faster than even the experts thought just a few years
ago. We are no longer in the Holocene but a new geological era, the “Anthropocene,” to use Paul
Crutzen’s term10, in which human behavior, starting with James Watt's development of an effective, coalfired steam engine, has changed climatic patterns. In her three part essay ""The Climate of Man" (2005) 11
the science writer Elizabeth Kolbert quotes Robert Socolow, a professor of engineering:
Socolow had recently become co-director of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative, a
project funded by BP and Ford, but he still considered himself an outsider to the
field of climate science. Talking to insiders, he was struck by the degree of their
alarm. “I’ve been involved in a number of fields where there’s a lay opinion and a
scientific opinion,” ....“And, in most of the cases, it’s the lay community that is
more exercised, more anxious. If you take an extreme example, it would be
nuclear power, where most of the people who work in nuclear science are
relatively relaxed about very low levels of radiation. But, in the climate case, the
experts - the people who work with the climate models every day, the people who
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do ice cores - they are more concerned. They’re going out of their way to say,
‘Wake up! This is not a good thing to be doing.’”
Food
Between 1950 and 1984, as the Green Revolution transformed agriculture
around the globe, world grain production increased by 250%. That is a
tremendous increase in the amount of food energy available for human
consumption. This additional energy did not come from an increase in incipient
sunlight, nor did it result from introducing agriculture to new vistas of land. The
energy for the Green Revolution was provided by fossil fuels in the form of
fertilizers (natural gas), pesticides (oil), and hydrocarbon fueled irrigation.
The Green Revolution increased the energy flow to agriculture by an average of
50 times the energy input of traditional agriculture. In the most extreme cases,
energy consumption by agriculture has increased 100 fold or more. (Pfeiffer
2004)
"The ... Green Revolution ... was a one-time miracle, and it's over. Since the
beginning of the 1990s, crop yields have essentially stopped rising. [Meanwhile]
The global population more than doubled in that time...
...at some point not too far down the road we reach the point of absolute food
shortages, and rationing by price kicks in. In other words, grain prices soar,
and the poorest start to starve. (Dyer 2006) [emphasis added]
The global food crisis seems to have caught the US by surprise in 2008, suddenly appearing in
newspaper headlines and magazine cover stories. Of course there has been a long standing concern
over the unsustainability of agribusiness. "In the United States, 400 gallons of oil equivalents are
expended annually to feed each American" (Pfeiffer 2004). And that estimate is from 14 year old data.
But rather than recite the details of mechanized farming and transcontinental and international food
shipments, I will just focus on one dimension of the problem, one of the things they never told me about in
my liberal arts undergraduate education or in anthropology graduate school: the Haber-Bosch process to
produce fertilizer.
As geographer Vaclav Smil has argued ... the Haber-Bosch process probably
deserves to be considered the principal invention of the 20th century since
today ammonia synthesis provides more than 99 percent of all inorganic nitrogen
inputs to farms -- an amount that roughly equals the nitrogen tonnage that all of
green nature gains each year from natural sources... (Heinberg 2005:66)
[emphasis added]12
Here's the catch: the natural gas that fuels the process represents approximately 70% of the cost.
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As the Haber-Bosch process branched out in global use, it became the primary
procedure responsible for the production of fertilizer to feed the world's
population. Without it, billions of people might not exist. Today, the HaberBosch process is used to produce more than 500 million tons (453 billion
kilograms) of artificial fertilizer per year; roughly 1% of the world's energy is used
for it, and it sustains about 40% of our planetary population. (Anissimov n.d.)
[emphasis added]
Population Die Off
How many people will post-industrial agriculture be able to support? .... A safe
estimate would be this: as many people as were supported before agriculture
was industrialized ... somewhat fewer than 2 billion people. (Heinberg
2005:196) [emphasis in original]13
In 1960 Heinz Von Foerster and others published "the Doomsday paper" in which they fit a statistical
model to population history and projected that if world population continued to grow as it had for the last
2,000 years, it would reach infinity on Friday the Thirteenth, November, 2026 (Von Foerster et al. 1960).
The Doomsday paper gave us a 65-year lead time. Most published comments
failed to grasp its central point: the demographic behavior of 2 millennia will
change by 2026, willy-nilly. At a 51- year lead time (... 1975), and again at a 39year lead time (... 1987), the population was still ahead of the Doomsday
projection. We had done nothing. This is presumably the result of denial: ‘The
human population cannot decline.’ Malthus observed that the ‘first grand
objection’ ...to a limit was Genesis 1:28, the infamous ‘multiply-fill-subdue-master’
verse singled out by Lynn White, Jr. ... as the root of our ecological problems.
There is no reason to think that denial has decreased since Malthus wrote
(MacIntyre 2005:38).
In 2000 Graham Zabel's paper, "Population and Energy," argued that "Energy is an issue that has been
widely ignored when attempting to explain historical demography and it is widely ignored when attempting
to project future demographic scenarios." Zabel attempted to break down population growth from 1700 to
2000 in terms of the estimated number of people supported by biomass, "traditional renewables (wood,
dung, etc.) and animal power (with minor amounts of wind and hydropower)", by the use of coal, then the
development of oil, and finally natural gas. The massive population increase attributed to chemical
fertilizers seem to fall into his 'oil population' rather than his 'natural gas population', but the overall picture
is clear enough.
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Figure 4
When one considers peak oil, Zabel's analysis leads to an obvious and chilling conclusion:
If oil and gas production does exhibit a bell curve shaped profile ... then at some
point humanity will reach the peak. After that time oil and gas will become much
more ‘expensive’. A decline in production would mean a decline in energy inputs
into society - less thermodynamic energy - a decline in productivity and,
hypothetically, a decline in population. If population growth were in any way
related to oil production, Oil Population may decline more quickly than most
people anticipate. (2000:22) [emphasis added]
Ferren MacIntyre recently published another projection testing hypotheses that took economic factors into
account. One doesn't really need to master the details of his statistical analysis is understand the
message of his summary graph:
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Figure 5
As Heinberg and MacIntyre are aware, it is, of course, far too simple to assume that in large parts of the
world agricultural productivity can go back to pre-industrial levels, as if there had been no loss of arable
land to urbanization, no ecological degradation, no dislocation of agricultural populations, no loss of preindustrial infrastructure or knowledge of farming, etc. It seems even the 'pessimists' are soft-pedaling
their message.
Predictions: Amateur and Professional
The world development model presented as being 'sustainable' by New
Economics in fact has a 'useful lifetime' measured in less than two decades. Yet
it is presented as our only option. No alternative is feasible or imaginable. Debate
on any alternative is swept aside as 'idealistic' or mischievous. (McKillop 2003)
The last few years have seen a torrent of articles, books and videos in North America, mostly by people
outside academia, directly challenging the sustainable development model, and predicting the imminent
end of suburbia and the American Dream (Greene 2007), industrial societies (Heinberg 2005), or worse:
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We stand on the cusp of one of the bleakest periods in human history when the
bright lights of a civilization blink out and we will descend for decades, if not
centuries, into barbarity (Hughes 2010).
Kumi Naidoo, the new Greenpeace head, says that human existence is
"fundamentally under threat" (Jess 2009).
But as you will surmise, the real hotbed of this sort of thinking is the Internet.14
Perhaps the most provocatively named prediction is "The Olduvai Theory" found on the Web in a series of
papers by Richard C. Duncan (1996, 2005-2006). He comes to the subject with a background as an
electrical engineer. Duncan starts with assertion that "the life expectancy of industrial civilization is
approximately 100 years: circa 1930-2030" (2005-2006:1). His measure of industrialization is worldwide
energy production per capita or "e". Duncan argues the exponential growth of e ended in 1970, has
basically flat-lined through 2008, and is about to go into sharp decline, with world population falling to
about 2 billion by 2050 -- which would be a reduction of 4.6 billion people in the next 42 years. (For an
alarmist reflection on the implications of these ideas see Arnett 2007).
An excellent web site, launched in 2003 and kept current, is "The Wolf at the Door: The Beginner's Guide
to Peak Oil" (http://wolf.readinglitho.co.uk/ and http://www.wolfatthedoor.org.uk/) by Paul Thompson, a
graphic designer in Reading, England (once again the non-academics are far ahead of us in educating
the general public). Thompson pulls together a great deal of information; I wish here to draw attention
only to his prediction of the imminent future, which he groups into "the four stages of the breakdown":
Stage 1: Awareness: This is the stage we are at now.....
Stage 2: Transition: subdivided into two further phases:
2a: Ordered Transition
2b: Anarchic Transition
Stage 3: Scavengery
... just about all hydrocarbons are unavailable. National security has
disappeared, interdependence is unsustainable. We are forced to live in small
groups of village or tribal size, growing our own food, maintaining our own
buildings and providing our own security. Those who are not in village groups will
be forced to steal from others.
This period is called Scavengery because we will be forced to rely on the
remains of our present industrial society... Our societies will have to change
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dramatically with, for example, practices such as monogamy possibly giving
way to polygamy, and interdependence becoming multi-skilling.
Stage 4: Self-Sufficiency
... By now, everybody who is unable to convert to a sustainable, self-sufficient
lifestyle would have died off, leaving only those in organised, independent groups
to remain.…we might eventually 'progress' to something like a Medieval
level of civilisation...
[emphasis added]
There have been any number of post-apocalyptic novels and movies, and Duncan’s scheme can be seen
as another intelligent, but amateur attempt to imagine the future. While anthropologists may find a list of
these stages reminiscent of 19th century unilineal evolutionary schemes, Duncan does not, apparently,
have an underlying social theory, or much background in non-European kinship systems (though,
thankfully, he and others outside academia have not taken refuge in the just-so stories of evolutionary
psychology).
Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at UCLA, takes a far more sophisticated and
deeply researched look at the world crisis in his recent book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or
Succeed (2005). While not specifically focused on prediction, the work, which has become a bestseller,
reviews several specific cases of past and recent societal failures, and a few success stories, and seeks
to identify the factors responsible for their various fates. Diamond has written a number of books and
essays that speak directly to anthropological issues and are widely used in the US in anthropology
courses. In the last section of the book, he tries to draw lessons from these cases, and ends, in sharp
contrast to Duncan and Thompson, on a note of "cautious optimism." It received some initial rave
reviews, for example:
... the fact that one of the world’s most original thinkers has chosen to pen this
mammoth work when his career is at its apogee is itself a persuasive argument
that Collapse must be taken seriously. It is probably the most important book
you will ever read. (Flannery 2005) [emphasis added]
My own opinion of the book is not nearly so positive. Diamond is to be commended for bringing
awareness of the looming crisis to the general public. He takes the sort of broad comparative perspective
that too few anthropologists are willing to attempt. But although the specific examples are recounted in
very engaging ways, they involve interpretations of complex and controversial cases (e.g. the root causes
of the Rwandan genocide) that were bound to raise objections. Smil (2008:2) dismissed it as “derivative,
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unpersuasive, and simplistically deterministic.” Within anthropology, My colleague Patricia McAnany was
co-convener of a conference of archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, and historians who produced a
volume taking issue not only with the factual details of many of the case studies Diamond cites but also
with his 'methodological individualism' 15 and the very concept of "collapse" as a model for the decline of
state formations (Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of
Empire, McAnany and Yoffee 2009). While the conference was considered significant enough to be
reported in the New York Times (Johnson 2007), there is no doubt that Diamond's book will reach a much
larger audience. Unfortunately I find Diamond’s closing arguments for optimism unconvincing, primarily
because his overall analytical framework is seriously underdeveloped. Perhaps a sophisticated theory of
social dynamics is too much to ask for from a non-anthropologist. Perhaps it is also too much to ask from
an anthropologist as well, though there are others in academia willing to try.
One of the most popular scenarios in the face of these problems is the idea of sustainable
development: “development which serves the needs of the present population without disadvantaging
future populations” (Daily Tar Heel, 2010). While this may be realizable in a few small isolated areas,
until we stop pumping oil, mining coal, cutting down forests, paving roads, and generating radioactive
waste, the concept strikes me as a dangerously delusional fantasy.
Another whole dimension of the ‘sustainability problem’ that has recently come to wide public attention is
our credit-based financial system. Our very currencies are premised on eternal expansion. 16
The real ferment in modeling the future seems to be among those who see the standard indicators as
headed downward. At issue is the abruptness of coming changes. In 2008 “The First International
Conference On Socially Sustainable Economic Degrowth For Ecological Sustainability And Social
Equity”17 was held in Paris. “Degrowth” is an admittedly awkward translation of the French term
décroissance.18 The analysis of the global situation is familiar:
By using more than their legitimate share of global environmental resources, the
wealthiest nations are effectively reducing the environmental space available to
poorer nations, and imposing adverse environmental impacts on them.
If we do not respond to this situation by bringing global economic activity into line
with the capacity of our ecosystems, and redistributing wealth and income
globally so that they meet our societal needs, the result will be a process of
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involuntary and uncontrolled economic decline or collapse, with potentially
serious social impacts, especially for the most disadvantaged.
The alternative goal bring proposed is sustainable degrowth, “reducing the ecological impact of the
global economy to a sustainable level, equitably distributed between nations”. I think the conference
participants are quite right in recognizing that this “will not be achieved by involuntary economic
contraction”. But the paradigm shift they call for, “from the general and unlimited pursuit of economic
growth to a concept of ‘right-sizing’ the global and national economies”, however laudable, strikes me as
even more utopian than visions of sustained development, and quite beyond any precedent in
ethnography, history, or religious studies.
In contrast, John Michael Greer, in his book The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the
Industrial Age, (2008) presents the model of catabolic collapse (a term borrowed from biology referring
to the breakdown of complex structures into constituent subunits). Rather than a sudden, total collapse,
Greer predicts a prolonged series of step-downs specific to local and regional circumstances. This is
quite similar to the future envisioned by Thomas Homer-Dixon in The Upside of Down: Catastrophe,
Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (2008). Both authors stress that the breakdown of existing
structures also means the generation of new opportunities and creative possibilities.
Representative of the most alarming scenarios is the recent paper “Tipping Point: Near-Term Systemic
Implications of a Peak in Global Oil Production -- An Outline Review” by David Korowicz (2010). The
theoretical approach is that of complex dynamics systems theory (most directly from Scheffer 2009).
Although I can only claim a beginner’s knowledge of the theory behind his analysis, Korowicz’s “outline”
of over 20,000 words is also the best grounded and most persuasive assessment I have come across
(Korowicz is a physicist by training). A few passages will suffice:
We have passed or are close to passing the peak of global oil production. Our
civilisation is structurally unstable to an energy withdrawal. There is a high
probability that our integrated and globalised civilisation is on the cusp of a fast
and near-term collapse. (p. 2)
We are embedded within economic and social systems whose operation we
require for our immediate welfare. But those systems are too interconnected and
too complex to comprehend, control and manage in any systemic way that would
allow a controlled contraction while still maintaining our welfare. There is no
possible path to sustainability or planned de-growth. (7)
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The challenge is not about how we introduce energy infrastructure to maintain
the viability of the systems we depend upon, rather it is how we deal with the
consequences of not having the energy and other resources to maintain those
same systems. Appeals towards localism, transition initiatives, organic food and
renewable energy production, however laudable and necessary, are totally out
of scale to what is approaching. (4) [emphasis added]
The Relevance to Anthropology
Surely nothing could be of more central concern to anthropology than this global crisis. I do not know any
anthropologist who is not deeply concerned; many are alarmed. ‘Global Warming’ is now widely
recognized by the UN and national governments, the oil crisis is increasingly acknowledged, and the
global food crisis is widely discussed, albeit as a short term problem. The full implications of the energy
crisis for the long term food supply and world population levels have still not penetrated the mainstream
media or general public discourse. There are some attempts to get the natural scientists who are
modeling global patterns to involve social science findings in their projections; my colleague Carole
Crumley has spent many years fighting this good fight, urging the necessity of including the human
dimension in their analyses, with limited success (e.g. Hornborg and Crumley, 2006)19. Needless to say,
most natural scientists do not know how to make use of anthropological studies that lack quantified data.
And so the vast majority of those discussing the possible futures of humanity are natural scientists, or
independent authors, or journalists, discussed above.
Specifically Anthropological Writings
Any discussion of anthropological theorizing about energy and human societies must start, I suppose,
with Leslie White and his famous dictum:
Other factors remaining constant, culture evolves as the amount of energy
harnessed per capita per year is increased, or as the efficiency of the
instrumental means of putting the energy to work is increased. … We may now
sketch the history of cultural development from this standpoint (1949).
No doubt most social anthropologists take offense at White's 'superorganic' view of culture since it
violates our sense of the importance of individual free will. Nor does his monolithic view of culture sit well
with the traditional anthropological concern with diversity and specificity of cultural patterns. Most of us,
having been profoundly effected by the personal relationships we formed during fieldwork, resist the idea
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that our findings are just another data point on a dimension of energy use. My own reaction to reading
White is to wonder how anyone could have been so right and so wrong at the same time. White's
scheme is extremely effective for organizing the long sweep of human history and energy levels are
critical to social forms (so too are ecological factors influencing population densities, modes of
communication, cultural traditions, etc.). Among those of us willing to speak in terms of cultural evolution
(and I recognize that many are not), I think most of us would object strongly to his definition of cultural
evolution in terms of per capita energy use.
White, of course, was writing at a time when the finite nature of world supplies was not pressing. For
contemporary readers this leads to uneasiness with the expansionist or triumphalist undertones of his
scheme. When per capita energy use starts declining, as the following chart suggests it already has, are
those societies which have been using energy at a higher rate still going to appear to have been "more
advanced in an evolutionary sense" and will they still find themselves at "an advantage over other
societies"?
Figure 6
World Average Energy-Use Per Person Comparison of Four Sets of Historic Data ("BOE" means
Barrels of Oil Equivalent) [Duncan (1996)]
A much more pointed essay, "Energy and Human Evolution," by the anthropologist David Price 20 was
published in 1995. On the Internet, at least, it has achieved the status of a classic, widely cited and
echoed on many web sites. The argument is both theoretically eloquent and extremely pessimistic.
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Price starts with the Second Law of Thermodynamics:
... energy flows from areas of greater concentration to areas of lesser
concentration, and local processes run down. Living organisms may accumulate
energy temporarily but in the fullness of time entropy prevails.
Humans have increasingly been tapping into the energy stored up in the earth. This leads Price to a
striking metaphor that has been widely quoted:
Today, the extrasomatic energy used by people around the world is equal to the
work of some 280 billion men. It is as if every man, woman, and child in the world
had 50 slaves. In a technological society such as the United States, every person
has more than 200 such "ghost slaves.” 21
To Price, the human ability to cash in the world's energy stores has, in effect, made us an introduced
species on our own planet:
By using extrasomatic energy to modify more and more of its environment to suit
human needs, the human population effectively expanded its resource base so
that for long periods it has exceeded contemporary requirements. This allowed
an expansion of population similar to that of species introduced into extremely,
propitious new habitats such as rabbits in Australia or Japanese beetles in the
United States.
And like introduced species, we are destined for runaway population growth, resource depletion, and
population crash, in a word a classic overshoot (Catton 1982). Price continues,
But the exhaustion of fossil fuels, which supply three quarters of this energy, is
not far off ... A collapse of the earth's human population cannot be more
than a few years away. If there are survivors, they will not be able to carry on
the cultural traditions of civilization, which require abundant, cheap energy. It is
unlikely, however, that the species itself can long persist without the energy
whose exploitation is so much a part of its modus vivendi. [emphasis added]
The human species may be seen as having evolved in the service of entropy,
and it cannot be expected to outlast the dense accumulations of energy that have
helped define its niche. Human beings like to believe they are in control of their
destiny, but when the history of life on Earth is seen in perspective, the evolution
of Homo sapiens is merely a transient episode that acts to redress the planet's
energy balance.
A more recent paper coming to a perhaps more optimistic interpretation of the impending collapse is
"Production Theory and Peak Oil: Collapse or Sustainability?" by John Gowdy 22 (2006).
Just as the massive injection of energy brought forth a frenzy of production and
an ideology to support extravagant consumption, it seems likely that an opposite
reaction will happen as per capita energy use declines. .... and total energy use
falls. Other social and belief systems will eventually evolve in the context of the
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new limits on human exploitation of the planet. This has happened many times
before in human history ([here Gowdy references] Diamond, 2005).
One of Diamond's main points in Collapse is that communities who failed (e.g. the Norse in Greenland,
Easter Island) had clung to dysfunctional cultural patterns rather than change them adaptively. Whether
or not this is a valid analysis of what happened in either case is hotly contested, but the most general goal
of systems is to persist, and a common reason for failure is inflexibility or lack of resilience. Gowdy
addresses the question of existing institutions in the industrialized world and predicts an organizational
refusal to adapt, writ large:
Given the power of the fossil fuel cabal, the multinational corporations with their
ideology of expansion and exploitation, their military power, and control of the
media, it is likely that the West will follow the path of Easter Island. Those in
power will do anything they can to keep the energy flowing including using all the
remaining coal, massively subsidizing nuclear power and ethanol, and
undertaking more military adventures to secure the remaining stocks of
petroleum.
Gowdy's conclusion is only comfort for those who can take a very long view, and look past what must
happen between now and then:
The modern drift toward religious fanaticism, new age mysticism, and post
modern dismissal of reason and logic is not encouraging. But if there is a ray of
optimism regarding the future human prospect, it is that the current system of
social and environmental exploitation, based on a frenzy of growth of production
and consumption, will come to an end.
Finally, I would like to conclude this review of the literature with a recent challenge to anthropologists to
address the energy crisis directly. Thomas Love, Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Studies
at Linfield College, Oregon, made the case in a guest editorial, "Anthropology and the fossil fuel era" in
the April issue of Anthropology Today (Love 2008) Love contends that "we are in the last days of cheap
oil" and, following Price, asserts that "[h]umanity is already in ecological overshoot." Rather than lament
the species' long term prospects, Love clearly feels that anthropology can contribute useful information,
and that such information will be used, in ameliorating the effects of the energy crisis:
We need cross-cultural perspectives and commitment to ethnography to
understand how such large-scale forces play out on the ground in the everyday
lives of ordinary people. Detailed grasp of the non-fossil-fuelled ways of living of
pre- and non-industrial peoples will convey to interested publics and policymakers alternative ways of organizing human society. We can help understand
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how humans might manage to power down without precipitating collapse.
Love call on us to focus our research on the current crisis:
The complexity of the interwoven problems sketched above calls for a holistic
examination to which anthropologists can contribute by documenting and
understanding how people make sense of these issues and frame their
responses. How does this crisis resemble previous ones? What metaphors and
symbols do people use to make sense of it all? To what discursive structures will
people turn to make sense of the potential unravelling of their worlds? How has
the fossil-fuelled growth system already affected the lives of people in producing
areas?
Shortcomings of anthropology
I agree wholeheartedly with the concluding sentence of Thomas Love's editorial: "Let us examine the real
crises upon us." But why is it even necessary for someone to say that? Why don't we have at least half
the energy of most of the departments of anthropology in the world debating the validity of these warnings
and what courses of action to pursue? Why are there literally only a handful of articles by anthropologists
that address these problems?
An answer that has been suggested by many is that the idea of industrial collapse or a population die off
is too dire to think about in a concerted way. While there may be some truth to that (as an American I
cannot deny the existence of widespread denial), I think there are more specific aspects of current
anthropology that explain the discipline's near silence.
Relevance
The question of relevance has been a chronic concern for anthropology. Here is just one example from
hundreds: "Do anthropologists have anything useful or relevant to say about human rights? Six
Perspectives" (Anthropology News, April 2006). And the American Anthropological Association’s web
page carries an announcement for a "Pulse of the Planet" Op-Ed series
(http://www.aaanet.org/meetings/Pulse-of-the-Planet.cfm).
In a new media collaboration, anthropologists from the AAA 2008 annual meeting
double-session, “Pulse of the Planet-Human Rights, Environment and Social
Justice in the 21st Century” have teamed up with CounterPunch, the online news
magazine, to launch an op-ed column that aims to reshape public debates on
some of the biggest issues facing the US and the world today.
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From global climate change and the human rights disasters that accompany
violent storms and droughts to the increasing assaults on biodiversity and cultural
diversity in the name of economic, energy, food, and national “security,” the
“Pulse of the Planet” op-ed series takes a probing look at the ulcerating
conditions that may be driving up the planetary pulse and asks the question:
Where are we going, and at what price? Collectively, these anthropologists urge
our leaders to rethink the meaning of security and the role of government in
achieving a sustainable and healthy way of life.
Most of the time we are thus urging leaders to listen to us. But sometimes we are embarrassed by the
fact that some parts of the power structure, in particular the military and intelligence community find
anthropology's local knowledge and intensive field methods very relevant. How many of us, upon
returning from foreign fieldwork, have received that phone call or inquiry from some innocuous
government agency wanting to “exchange information”?
A few anthropologists (the leading figure is discussed below) are now "embedded" in Afghanistan and
Iraq, and there has been much heated discussion of this situation. Many fear their local knowledge will
be co-opted and misused. The American Anthropological Association appointed a commission on the
"Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence Communities." The final report
sought a rather lonely apolitical middle ground:
We have found no single model of “engagement,” so issuing a blanket
condemnation or affirmation of anthropologists working in national security
makes little sense. Moreover, this very formulation - engagement vs. nonengagement - is itself problematic because it suggests that there is only one
choice to be made in a monolithic military, intelligence, and security environment.
(24)
The Commission recognizes both opportunities and risks to those
anthropologists choosing to engage with the work of the military, security and
intelligence arenas. We do not recommend non-engagement, but instead
emphasize differences in kinds of engagement and accompanying ethical
considerations. We advise careful analysis of specific roles, activities, and
institutional contexts of engagement in order to ascertain ethical
consequences.... (Peacock et al. 2007:4).
At least one anthropology department, California State University – Long Beach, has formally debated the
ethical implications of anthropologists' engagement with military and intelligence agencies (Loewe and
Kelly 2008).
While the anthropological understanding of self and other, culture and society, seem profound on the
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individual level to us (and we hope, to our students), the utility of this empirical knowledge on a social
level has probably been much less than claimed. I think the bitter truth in the characterization of earlier
anthropology as 'the handmaiden of colonialism' is that the role was that of a servant, not a full
participant. Anthropology may or may not have been a particularly handy handmaiden, but it was not a
significant policymaker. While we have been worrying about relevance, with its implications of
understanding and policy making, the real policy makers considered (and still consider) the utility of
anthropological information in carrying out their plans. This, of course, rankles.
Reflective and Reflexive Knowledge
From its emergence, ethnography has prided itself in, and promoted itself to the general public on the
basis of, the reflective value of the knowledge we have gathered about human communities around the
world; what the study of ‘others’ tells us about ‘ourselves.’
The quality of our information about the variety of human societies and the conceptual foundations of the
discipline coevolved with a methodology based on highly localized, in-depth long-term research. The
central concept that developed was culture as socially learned, largely symbolically transmitted systems
of action, meaning and value. Social anthropology is thus ultimately rooted, not in objective knowledge,
but the appreciation of shared understandings, not just in external reality but in collusions about the
meaning of aspects of external reality. . Within the discipline the result is very understandably a concern
with the reflexive nature of our knowledge, an appreciation that what we have learned is inseparable from
how we have learned it, and that our knowledge, in its formation and dissemination, is not independent
from those who are its immediate subjects. But there is a difference between self-awareness and selfabsorption. Feeling, somehow, that we possess an exquisitely sensitive understanding of cultural
meanings and their variations (why else did I suffer through fieldwork?) we doubt if non-anthropologists
really 'get it.' The simple answer, I think, is that they don't worry about it.
Reflexivity as a Sidetrack
Twenty years ago, Philip Salzman wrote a brief, rather cutting, reflection on the state of anthropological
theory in North America, entitled "Fads and Fashions in Anthropology" for the AAA Anthropology
Newsletter (Salzman 1988). When he completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1968:
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current wisdom had it that a new dawn had broken in anthropology, shedding light through
processual analysis upon the generation and change of social forms, phenomena that had been
hidden in the darkness of synchronic, norm-ridden, structural-functionalism (herein considered
prehistory). Firth, Barth, Swartz, Turner and Tuden were the inspirations, and network analysis,
extended case study analysis, decision theory and transactional analysis were the means.
As it happened, Phil and I overlapped in graduate school, and I find great resonance in what he says,
including his self-deprecating comment about our naïve dismissal of structural-functionalism.23 To
Salzman's surprise a few years later "the processualism of the earlier false dawn was characterized as
the bad old anthropology, worth nothing and destined for the trash heap of false doctrines" (32)
Reviewing the twenty years since his Ph.D., Salzman finds that North American anthropology has
followed a five year pattern of dismissing the past and adopting new intellectual fashions (largely, I might
add from the fringes of the discipline, or beyond). Thus processual anthropology was eclipsed by
structuralism (a turn that mystified me when I returned from two and a half years in the field in Kenya).
Structuralism, then gave way to Marxist anthropology (having never been a structuralist, I did not feel that
I could move downstream to 'post-structuralism'). Then "symbolic/semiotic/interpretive anthropology" held
sway "taking 'text' to be any social/cultural phenomenon."
Salzman's article stops short of the post-modern wave, deconstructionism, and the rest. I presume my
readers are familiar enough with the last couple decades. The bitter truth, I have long lamented, is that far
from the development of cumulative knowledge or an appreciation of foundational works within the
discipline, anthropology is, indeed, ruled by fashion.
What we seem to have in anthropology , is not so much progress, or even much
in the way of discipline, but rather a cyclical kaleidoscope of the intellectual
imagination, lively certainly, insightful occasionally, well-meaning sometimes.
But can we have any confidence that it is adding up to much of anything or going
anywhere particularly noteworthy? (Salzman 1988:33)
Confirmation From the Dark Side
Another voice decrying anthropology's turn to reflexivity comes from an unexpected quarter. Montgomery
McFate24, the leading anthropological advisor to the Defense Department, traces the history of
anthropology's associations with, and animosity toward, imperial power 25 in "Anthropology and
Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of their Curious Relationship" (McFate 2005). McFate sketches
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the history of anthropology, particularly American anthropology in the 20th century, and laments "[t]he
curious and conspicuous lack of anthropology in the national-security arena" and the "grave
consequences" that have resulted.
Anthropology actually evolved as an intellectual tool to consolidate imperial
power at the margins of empire.
In Britain the development and growth of anthropology was deeply connected to
colonial administration. (28)
Once called “the handmaiden of colonialism,” anthropology has had a long,
fruitful relationship with various elements of national power, which ended
suddenly following the Vietnam War. The strange story of anthropology’s birth as
a warfighting discipline, and its sudden plunge into the abyss of
postmodernism, is intertwined with the US failure in Vietnam..(24) [emphasis
added]
Part of the reason for this turn away from reality to seek a new intellectual fashion, as McFate sees it (and
I suppose Salzman would agree on this particular point) is that "anthropology is primarily an academic
discipline." But the real reason that anthropology, despite the value of our local knowledge gained
through long-term in-depth fieldwork in "foreign cultures and societies ... is a marginal contributor to U.S.
national-security policy" (28) is the profession’s reaction to the use of anthropologists in Viet Nam by the
RAND Corporation, Project Camelot26 and the revelation that anthropologists were involved in U.S.
counterinsurgency programs in Thailand.
The retreat to the Ivory Tower is also a product of the deep isolationist
tendencies within the discipline. Following the Vietnam War, it was fashionable
among anthropologists to reject the discipline’s historic ties to colonialism.
Anthropologists began to reinvent their discipline, as demonstrated by Kathleen
Gough’s 1968 article, Anthropology: Child of Imperialism, followed by Dell
Hymes’ 1972 anthology, Reinventing Anthropology, and culminating in editor
Talal Asad’s Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. (17)
Rather than face the real issues and contribute to them (as we should in McFate's opinion), Anthropology
sought other muses:
... anthropologists refused to “collaborate” with the powerful, instead vying to
represent the interests of indigenous peoples engaged in neocolonial
struggles....Thus began a systematic interrogation of the contemporary state of
the discipline as well as of the colonial circumstances from which it emerged.(18)
The turn toward postmodernism within anthropology exacerbated the tendency
toward self-flagellation, with the central goal being “the deconstruction of the
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centralized, logocentric master narratives of European culture.” This movement
away from descriptive ethnography has produced some of the worst writing
imaginable. (28)
DOD [the U.S. Department of Defense] yearns for cultural knowledge, but
anthropologists en masse, bound by their own ethical code and sunk in a mire
of postmodernism, are unlikely to contribute much of value to reshaping
national security policy or practice.(37) [emphasis added]
Paradigm Envy
The general conclusion I draw from such disparate critiques as Salzman’s and McFate’s is that, in
Thomas Kuhn's terms, anthropology is in a "preparadigmatic state" that is we lack a generally agreed
upon framework, a method of generating hypotheses, and definitions of what constitutes evidence, on
which to start a predictive theory. We are still doing alchemy, not chemistry, or as Gregory Bateson
characterized the behavioral sciences in 1971:
About fifty years of work in which thousands of clever men have had their share
have, in fact, produced a rich crop of several hundred heuristic concepts, but,
alas, scarcely a single principle worthy of a place in the list of fundamentals.
(Bateson 1972)
Anthropology’s Mistaken Image of Itself
Just what role should anthropologists take? David Shankland, reflecting on the 2000 conference of the
Association of Social Anthropologists in Britain, expressed his discomfort with the
a dominant interpretation of the anthropologists’ role [that] emerged at the
conference. This vision seemed to regard the anthropologist as a broker or
facilitator between the forces of development and ‘other ways’ of looking at the
world. (2000:21)
This is certainly a standard and long-standing self-image, one that is the justification for a large proportion
of non-academic jobs held by anthropologists (and an echo of undergraduate teaching). But Shankland
reminds us that
... the assumption of ‘cultural brokering’ comes with a great deal of baggage ... It
assumes that there are a multiplicity of communities in the world, and that to all
intents and purposes these communities are mutually unintelligible. This is the
justification of the anthropologist’s task as a ‘translator’ ... The consequence,
however, is that the discipline tends to become the juxtaposition of a series of
micro-studies...
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The vast proportion of development is about universals in the human condition.
In order to study this, we surely need to take into account the comparative
dimension much more scrupulously and explicitly.
Shankland's call for a refocus on universals may seem desperately out-of-date to many, but the emphasis
on the comparative approach, which we tout in our introductory texts, needs to be rethought, and not
abandoned to those who do so quantitatively (they, at least, have explicitly wrestled with the fundamental
issues of comparison, whatever you think of their results). Here, again, we hear the need to more fully
actualize the realization that anthropology has long come to, that despite the location of classic case
studies (the island of Kiriwina and Tikopia, the isolation of the Nuer in the Southern Sudan), and despite
the premises of structural-functionalism, societies are not cleanly bounded units. Ironically Malinowski's
first book was about inter-ethnic trade and its effects, not just intra-island social dynamics, and to read
The Nuer and assume they dealt only with the culturally very similar Dinka misses the raison d'être of the
book. There is a vast body of fascinating studies on ethnic boundaries and inter-ethnic cooperation and
conflict that we need not forget.
Shankland deflates the idea that an anthropological understanding of cultural differences is necessary for
"development" in its material form:
the astonishing thing about development is how successful it has been in
becoming the usual state of human-kind. There is no major society, culture, or
group that remains aloof from the globalization of affluence, technology and
communications that has emanated from what is sometimes known as the ‘first
world’. This is a simple fact. It has, also whether like it or not, taken place without
the help of anthropology (21-22).
The example he chooses is probably the sort of thing that Montgomery McFate would want us to study
(and report on):
As an instant but perhaps crude example, on the surface at least, it would seem
that instruments of coercion (that is, weapons and armaments and the like) move
more successfully across cultures than instruments of health or education:
certainly it would appear quite unnecessary for anthropologists to be present as
‘culture brokers’ in arms sales. This is a slight instance, perhaps, but it does
serve to illustrate just how much we miss if we concentrate only on the local, and
only on those areas where development appears to have stumbled, rather than
where it is a triumphant, albeit perhaps ultimately a tragic, success ( 22).
Daniels – Where is Anthropology?
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With the death toll from the latest decades of ecological theft of the Congo estimated in the millions, the
international arms trade is, indeed, serious and should not be underestimated. But if one takes a broad
definition of the "instruments of health", then perhaps a far greater "triumphant, albeit perhaps ultimately
tragic" aspect of rampant cross-cultural technology transfer has been death control. Certainly no one who
was involved in the spread of new food crops from the new world (potatoes, corn), or the spread of soap,
machine-made cotton clothing, basic biomedical care, etc, was intending to cause the explosion of world
population which is now one of the fundamental drivers of the global crisis and the clearest manifestation
of our overshoot. While there is much good work to be done by anthropologists translating concepts in
order to facilitate the delivery of health care across cultural and linguistic boundaries, in my experience
people in the 'developing world' do not need to be convinced of the power of biomedicine. The hospitals
and clinics I am familiar with in Africa are overwhelmed with patients (and desperately short of personnel
and supplies) because of the demographic "success" of the species. And to bring it all back home, Zabel
reminds us
The majority of schools, hospitals and health clinics in Africa are built with first
world capital, and with first world energy. Money does not build the schools and
clinics; machines and tools, designed and built in the developed world, produced
using fossil fuels, do. A tractor, for example, is made of metal, rubber and
plastic. Plastic is a direct by-product of oil. Metal is mined and forged using
immense quantities of heat and energy. The designer of the tractor uses a
computer, office space, lights and heating, drives to and from work in a gasolineburning car. The tractor is built in highly sophisticated factory that in turn must be
designed and built with metals and plastics, and required large amounts of
energy. The chain of events always has another link, but the ultimate first cause
is always inputs of energy (Zabel 2000).
In 2000 Eugene Mendonsa wrote “What does anthropology have to offer in the solution of the world’s
problems – Are we kidding ourselves? ” Mendonsa noted that
“...as academics, we overthink and overstate our impact on the course of history”
and “…global capitalism is likely to move ahead at accelerating speed until
something derails it, like a lack of cheap fossil fuels to ship all that stuff all over
the planet.“27
While Mendonsa cannot accept rosy visions of future progress, and hopes for a just a bumpy
transition toward a more ecologically sound economy -- rather than the collapse others predict -- he sees
Daniels – Where is Anthropology?
32 / 47
enduring strength in anthropology’s emphasis on ethnography, ecology, adaptation in an evolutionary
perspective and, especially in these times, a focus on political economy.
What can anthropology contribute?
Of course it is ludicrous for me to suggest what my fellow anthropologists can or should do. But here
goes:
Let's start by dismissing the obvious temptation to study the peak oil movement and 'power down' groups
as revitalization movements. It's been done, and by objectifying their social processes we will miss the
content of their concerns and the effects of their actions.
Let's not try to do "social science" as if it were a version of natural science; it isn't and the natural
scientists know it. If we are cultural brokers, then we need to assist the natural scientists in their efforts to
inform the general public. To do so, we need to forget disciplinary boundaries and educate ourselves and
our students as best we can in a number of fields beyond anthropology.
While we are at it, let's stop worrying about the reflexive nature of our knowledge. No one else worries
about it, and it misleads us into involuted particularisms.
As discussed above, we need to return to a wider, comparative scale of analysis, and focus on the
interrelationships between regions, classes, and other social divisions, particularly the role of energy and
other resources in those exchanges. With apologies to Evans-Pritchard: Cherchez le hydrocarbure.
We need to be guided by a keen analysis of political economy, power structures and inequalities, one that
is neither distracted by our own social myths (e.g. triumphant democracy) nor dismissive of the role of
myth in action (my own preference for approaching how political power works in modern society is Peter
Dale Scott's concept of "deep politics” [1996]).
It is easy to lose hope if we find ourselves working on the wrong scale. Korowicz is probably correct in
saying that “Appeals towards localism, transition initiatives, organic food and renewable energy
production, however laudable and necessary, are totally out of scale to what is approaching.” But there
appear to be no central solutions on a global scale – we are all in for the ride. I have no illusion that a few
Daniels – Where is Anthropology?
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enlightened anthropologists will alter the course of the petroleum empire. No doubt the closer one gets to
centralized power the more the feedforward of massive institutions restrict choice. But there will always
be choices on the human scale -- indeed as old structures fail choices increase.
Because of the current economic recession, millions upon millions of people in the industrialized world
have already started reducing their energy consumption. Are they losers or pioneers? Those who do not
see peak oil as a global crisis speak of recovery. Those who see super-historic changes on the way have
no doubt that the collapse has already begun (e.g. Chossudovsky and Marshall 2010). Many are taking
steps to adapt, and to preadapt to anticipated changes. Green politics are no longer marginal in many
countries. All over the US "powerdown" groups have sprung up. Students are traveling around the globe
to learn methods of organic and alternate farming. Greer (2008:160) points out that thanks to the age of
the automobile there are half a billion alternators in the US that could be used for homemade electricity.
Indeed, William Kamkbwanba of Malawi is currently the poster child for such efforts, having rigged up a
handmade windmill and alternator and electrified his house at the age of 14
(http://www.ted.com/talks/william_kamkwamba_how_i_harnessed_the_wind.html).
Mike Ruppert is setting up CollapseNet (http://www.collapsenet.com/) "to promote the rapid and focused
sharing of information between millions around the world who are preparing for the collapse of human
industrial civilization". ‘Do it yourself’ takes on a whole new depth of meaning if larger networks fail.
Is this wisdom or foolishness? There is so much uncertainty in our future that I do not think one can tell -it is all an open question (and hopefully "open" is the operative word here). From an evolutionary
perspective the rule is 'when in doubt, diversify." I firmly believe in the value of knowledge and insights,
including those gained through the ethnographic encounter and anthropological reflections. I also firmly
believe that any such knowledge is partial, and embedded in the particular.
But however ambiguous the methods by which it is derived, anthropological knowledge, far from being
arcane, is directly relevant. Anthropologists know that the majority of our species lives fulfilling lives
without constantly seeking new material acquisitions. Anthropologists know that mass media are not
needed to fill one's experience with art and creativity. While the EuroAmerican perspective worshiped
individualism and believed 'the social contract" was holding down our inherent savagery, Fortes and
Daniels – Where is Anthropology?
34 / 47
Colson and Evans-Pritchard and many others explained ways in which uncentralized societies maintained
law and order (at far lower cost to life and limb than our own). Granted millions will not suddenly take up
reading Fortes, but we should not abandon the public to "Mad Max" and the absolute slew of hyperviolent
dystopian futures of current Hollywood fantasy. We know better, and that knowledge is a tool that needs
to be shared.
It is on the ethnographic, individual, family, community network level that we can grasp both the beliefs
that mold and drive our actions and also our imperfections. It is on this level that we can talk about the
generation of morality, a dimension of life which so many of those who are looking at the global problems
see lacking in current attempts to keep industrialization expanding.
We need not to lose heart from visions, such as Price's, that question the survivability of the entire
species. His analysis, while chillingly convincing in the overall argument, does not take into account the
most striking aspect of the human species, the diversity of our adaptations. Cultural ecology is not
simply biological ecology. Unlike his examples of species which have overshot their resource base (yeast
in grape juice and reindeer introduced on an island), we are not homogeneous. However and whenever
the world population experiences the ‘down slope’ it will be experienced diversely. The age of oil has
been brief, within living memory in many parts of the world, while the traditional focus of ethnography has
been on hard-won, deeply rooted ideas of how to live (many years ago I gave an undergraduate seminar
on “Ecological Awareness in Non-Western Societies” and managed to get most of the class to understand
what I was driving at by the end of the semester). In taking a wider comparative view, we need to resist
the seduction of unitary global models from the world of numbers.
Finally, let’s remember that not all humans, as yet, are dependent on fossil fuel for their subsistence.
The relatively remote populations in Africa or New Guinea might well survive even a cataclysmic collapse
of urban civilization, industrial production, and agribusiness. Perhaps all those obscure anthropological
field trips will pay off. While James Lovelock suggests, in The Revenge of Gaia (2006), that we start
stockpiling the arctic, the last green place in our future, with how-to-do-it books on acid free paper, we
anthropologists have been collecting indigenous information in the form of Australian songlines
describing the details of their environments,, the chant the Trobriand wood carver makes as he forms the
Daniels – Where is Anthropology?
35 / 47
prow board of a deep water canoe, and thousands of pieces of African social wisdom. And as we all
know, these are ways to be human that are as valuable as those that will necessarily disappear.
If faut cultiver nôtre jardin.
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1
I find the term 'peak oil' rather unfortunate; it would have made much more sense to use the less
melodious term 'oil peak.'
2
Many of the subsequent papers on peak oil use charts to show past and projected oil consumption
as a symmetrical bell curve, following the analysis used in 1956 by M. King Hubbert, the intellectual apical
ancestor and first prophet of the movement. The visual image of going over the top of the hill, the peak, is
compelling, but there is no reason to assume that the down slope will be a smooth "managed collapse" or
"soft landing" rather than an overshoot and collapse.
3
See, for example "Unconventional Crude" (Kolbert 2007) and "Canada's Tar Sands: The
Most Destructive Project on Earth" (Environmental Defense 2008).
Daniels – Where is Anthropology?
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4
Authority
Date of Statement
Estimated Date of Peak
Production
Source
Kenneth S. Deffeyes
11 February 2006*
16 December 2005
1
Tony Erikson
17 March 2009
2008
2
Matthew Simmons
10 November 2009
2005
3
J. S. Gabrielli
December 2009
2010
4
“A senior industry
representative”
22 March 2010
2004
5
Colin Campbell
6 April 2010
2005
6
* Having declared that the peak occurred on December 16, 2005, Deffeyes added "That's it. I can
now refer to the world oil peak in the past tense. My career as a prophet is over. I'm now an historian."
Sources:
1
http://www.princeton.edu/hubbert/current-events-06-02.html
2
http://www.inteldaily.com/news/154/ARTICLE/10096/2009-03-18.html
3
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/50660
4
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/51447
5
http://www.aspousa.org/index.php/2010/03/review-march-29-2010/
6
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63539420100406
For a similar chart see
Table 1: Projections of the Peaking of World Oil Production (Hirsch 2005:9)
http://www.acus.org/docs/051007-Hirsch_World_Oil_Production.pdf
Daniels – Where is Anthropology?
5
43 / 47
Obfuscation of projected shortages to preserve the economic and political status quo for the short
term is particularly troubling in light of the Hirsch Report (Hirsh et al. 2005), created at the request of the
U.S. Department of Energy, which concluded that “Initiating a mitigation crash program 20 years before
peaking appears to offer the possibility of avoiding a world liquid fuels shortfall” (Hirsch et al. 2005:59,
emphasis added). A ten page summary was published under the title The Inevitable Peaking of World Oil
Production (Hirsch 2005).
6
Chris Clugston has circulated a draft of his paper (2010) analyzing nonrenewable natural
resources. His analysis indicates 50 of 57 resources are already moderately to extremely scarce. Curvefitting analysis of production (i.e. extraction) data for 26 key resources suggests that 23 will have passed
their peak, i.e. “experience a permanent global supply shortfall” by 2030.
7
It has long been argued by some that the total energy cost of a nuclear power station, from design,
construction, and fueling to proper decommissioning and sequestration of wastes, would exceed the
energy gained through its operation. At present we have very little experience with those “back-end” costs
while now faced with a large number of aging nuclear stations. Fleming (2007) raises the truly frightening
possibility that the global nuclear power industry is at or near ‘energy-bankruptcy’: “
…the nuclear industry will never, from its own resources, be able to generate the
energy it needs to clear up its own backlog of waste..Shortages of uranium …
can be expected to start in the middle years of the decade 2010-2019 … The
task of disposing finally of the waste could not, therefore, now be completed
using only the energy generated by the nuclear industry, even if the whole of the
industry’s output were to be devoted to it. In order to deal with its waste, the
industry will need to be a major net user of energy, almost all of it from fossil
fuels. (In Brief summary). And yet, in an energy-strapped society, the nonnuclear energy needed to dispose of the nuclear industry’s legacy will be hard to
find. The prospect is opening up of massive stocks of unstable wastes which –
since the energy is lacking – are impossible to clear up (p. 19).
8
The assumptions behind this approach are staggering: that the built environment constitutes the
planet, that there are no limits to human capabilities or moral restraints on our actions toward
nonhumans, that there is no intelligence beyond human consciousness, or at least none that we need to
terms with, etc.
Daniels – Where is Anthropology?
9
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For what it is worth, my own attempt to theorize the process appeared in an obscure
publication a generation ago (Daniels 1980).
10
Crutzen first proposed the tern “Anthropocene” in 2000. It quickly gained some currency
among scientists and is being considered for formal recognition (Zalasiewicz et al. 2010). The
use of the term signifies the recognition of significant global changes beyond temperature in
geological (sedimentation patterns, sea levels) and ecological (extinctions, loss of diversity,
changes in species ranges, etc.).
11
“The Climate of Man” was first serialized in The New Yorker magazine (Kolbert 2005)
and then published as a book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe (Kolbert 2006),
12
Elizabeth Kolbert (2010) contends that “more nitrogen today is fixed synthetically than is
fixed by all the world’s plants, on land and in the ocean.”
13
L. David Roper (2007), having projected fossil fuel resources as part of a larger study modeling
mineral depletion, then assumed “world population is proportional to the amount of fossil-fuel energy that
is available.” The mathematical calculation resulted in a population peak around 2025 and then a rapid
decline over the next two centuries approaching “an asymptote of about 1.35x109 people.” Roper
comments laconically: “When fossil fuels deplete, it is very likely that people will also deplete.”
14
Three of the more interesting voices of warning on the Internet are John Cairns, Jr., University
Distinguished Professor of Environmental Biology Emeritus, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University: http://www.johncairns.net/ ; Albert Bartlett, Professor Emeritus of Physics, Colorado University
at Boulder: http://www.albartlett.org/ ; and Guy R. McPherson, Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources
and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona: http://guymcpherson.com/about/. The fact
that they are all retired is perhaps not coincidental.
15
I am still looking for the right term for this sort of monism that considers societies as
bounded units that act as individuals (it is all too easy to go from The Nuer to "The Nuer believe
that ..."}. The temptation to think in these shorthand terms is strong: Elizabeth Kolbert
Daniels – Where is Anthropology?
45 / 47
concludes her three part essay on "The Climate of Man" with the observation "It may seem
impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to
destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing" (2005:52) If it were really
analytically useful, and not misleading, to say that "societies choose" then there would be no
need for any social science beyond psychology.
16
See, for example, Sorrell (2010), who offers the following propositions:
1. The rebound effects from energy efficiency improvements are significant and limit the
potential for decoupling energy consumption from economic growth.
2. The contribution of energy to productivity improvements and economic growth has been
greatly underestimated.
3. The pursuit of improved efficiency needs to be complemented by an ethic of ‘sufficiency’.
4. Sustainability is incompatible with continued economic growth in rich countries.
5. A zero-growth economy is incompatible with a debt-based monetary system.
For an excellent summary of how the problems of economy, energy, and environment are
interrelated, see “The Crash Course” by Chris Martensen (2010).
17
The conference was held April 18–19 2008, in Paris; the proceedings were published in
the Journal of Cleaner Production, Volume 18, Issue 6 “Growth, Recession or Degrowth for
Sustainability and Equity?” (April 2010).
18
As Serge Latouche observes “The translation of “décroissance” is not only problematic but
symbolic of a deep paradigmatic divide” between the different epistemologies embedded in Romance
languages and Germanic languages (Latouche 2010:519).
19
Currently Crumley is a member of the board of the Stockholm Resilience Centre
(http://www.stockholmresilience.org) and codirector of IHOPE (Integrated History and future Of
People and the Environment) program based at the SRC. “IHOPE will draw on insights from
past human societies and their relations with the environment to project a desirable future for
humans and the planet” (IHOPE homepage).
Daniels – Where is Anthropology?
20
46 / 47
David Price b. 1940, d. 1999, Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago,
anthropologist, linguist and research associate with Cornell's Population & Development
Program. Not to be confused with David H. Price b 1960, Ph.D. in anthropology from the
University of Florida, currently Chair of the Department of Cultural Anthropology & Sociology at
St. Martin's College, Lacey, Washington, and author of Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism
and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (2004)
21
This odd image has led me to the realization that Watt's self-governing steam engine,
which was the start of the industrial revolution and thus the Anthropocene, and also (as the first
practical use of negative feedback) the start of the Information Age, was also the beginning of
the end of commercial slavery. As for the inequalities of distribution of the 'petro-slaves', Price
severely understates the case: quite aside from a house full of 'labor-saving' devices and
industrially produced stuff, I have 175 horses waiting in my driveway (and they are thirsty).
22
Although Gowdy is the Rittenhouse Teaching Professor of Humanities and Social
Science Department of Economics Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he holds a B.A. in
Anthropology from American University and clearly takes an anthropological perspective on
economic theory, starting with an excellent critique of standard economic theory, following
Sahlins and others.
23
Years later a colleague, who had been through graduate school 15 years after me,
complained bitterly about my choice of Sorcerers of Dobu, a pre-functionalist ethnographic
classic, as required reading for a graduate core course we were team teaching. Having read the
book as an undergraduate, quickly and with little understanding, I found rereading it slowly to be
a series of almost guilty delights, like secretly eating a whole box of chocolates. Such are the
differences in mindsets that we must deal with in anthropology.
24
McFate holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Yale and a J.D. from Harvard. For more than
you ever wanted to know about McFate, see "Montgomery McFate's Mission: Can one
Daniels – Where is Anthropology?
47 / 47
anthropologist possibly steer the course in Iraq?" (Stannard 2007) and "Do Pentagon Studs
Make You Want to Bite Your Fist?" (Weinberger 2008).
25
While McFate speaks of "imperial power" in the colonial era (2005:28), she describes the
current situation with terms such as "the national security arena", "successful
counterinsurgency" and "defeat[ing] the insurgency in Iraq" (2005:37).
26
"According to a letter from the Office of the Director of the Special Operations Research
Office, Project Camelot was 'a study whose objective [was] to determine the feasibility of
developing a general social systems model which would make it possible to predict and
influence politically significant aspects of social change in the developing nations of the world.'
The project’s objectives were 'to devise procedures for assessing the potential for internal war
within national societies; to identify with increased degrees of confidence those actions which a
government might take to relieve conditions which are assessed as giving rise to a potential for
internal war; [and] to assess the feasibility of prescribing the characteristics of a system for
obtaining and using the essential information needed for doing the above two things' ... Chile
was to be the first case study for Project Camelot" (McFate 2005:35-36).
27
This latter point is the central thesis of a recent book by Jeff Rubin (2009).