Final bits from Scott Atran’s and Douglas Medin’s The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature

Our data show that expertise cannot be separated from cultural milieu, even when people engage in more or less the same activities. The parallels between the Itza’ and the Menominee are striking, especially when one notes that both groups also have sustainable forestry practices. As with Itza’ and Lacandon, some Menominee men express the belief that if a person treats nature in a greedy or wasteful manner then spirits will punish them and offer tobacco as a prayer of thanks. Cultural paths (in the sense of reliable distributions of conceptual representations in a population of minds) appear to provide something of a framework theory for organizing experience. This is seen, for example, in the Itza’ Maya tendency to see reciprocal relations (animals helping plants as well as being helped by them) and in Menominee fishermen’s ecological orientation.

This is a great paragraph but give me a moment to speak some of the sub-text. The non-Itza’ and non-Menominee in the study (i.e. the “culturally dominant” folk) also cannot separate out their expertise from their cultural milieu. They also have their cultural paths and “reliable distributions of conceptual representations” that organize their experience (i.e. constrain what they perceive into belief categories). In this case it is the tendency not to see reciprocal relations, whether they be between plants and animals or between groups of humans .

Let me clear about that last statement, there is the abstract knowledge of interrelationships and reciprocal relations, but the cultural conceptual relations extant in the “dominant cultures” divert individuals from experiencing specific instances of those relations. What that does is impoverish conceptually – see next paragraph for explanation of “impoverish”…

One of the things Atran and Medin showed was that the primary study group for conceptions of biology (undergraduates at the universities where the research is being pursued) have impoverished conceptions of biology because for the most part they don’t have much exposure to the individuated world of (for example) live oak, pin oak, northern red oak, white oak and sawtooth oak – they just know “tree” or at best “a kind of oak?” That would be like not being able to tell the difference between a Bengal tiger and a Siamese house cat. If you can imagine not being able to make the differentiation and only being able to perceive the two as “cat,” then you get the idea.

What they say about this impoverishment as the basis of studies: “It should not be surprising to find that theories of categorization and reasoning developed from research with undergraduates are limited in scope and applicability.”

Our studies in Wisconsin also suggest that abstract game-theoretic analyses must be informed by an understanding of intergroup difference in mental models of resources, differences that may lead to misperception and misunderstanding of the behaviours of different players (cultural groups). A fishing practice that is coherent and well grounded in sustainability from a Menominee perspective may be transparently harmful when viewed through the lens of a European-American sportsman’s model of sustainability.

This is, in part, because each model has a different goal orienting its knowledge. And of course, these perceptions we make about each other are based on the limitations of our models and not on the actual data about whether or not a practice has a postive effect on the fish or trees. Remember from an earlier post the authors’ word “ground-truthing?” This is applicable here.

Finally, on policy:

Policy implications for environmental decision making take various forms. At the most obvious level, the finding that Q’eqchi’ Maya in Peten engage in quite destructive agro-forestry practices undermines what had been the assumption of Guatemala’s government, various Washington-based NGOs and the World Bank that all Maya farmers will tend to treat the environment alike. Our results also reinforce the current trend of trying to bring all the relevant stakeholders to the table in developing environmental policy. A few years ago we attended a conference on the future of Peten, where, contrary to what we had been told would be the case, local farmer-sylviculturalists (milperos) were not invited. Many of the speakers represent the national government or NGOs. One of the speakers argues that the key to the economic development of Peten was to get the local milperos to plant the abono (or velvet) bean, because of its rapid growth and nitrogen-fixing properties. Any local milpero could have told the audience that plots where the abono bean are grown require constant supervision, which interferes with other activities such as hunting and gathering chicle, and abono plots are also haven for snakes, many of which are poisonous.

More broadly speaking a significant challenge is how to encourage populations that no longer see themselves as a sufficiently integral part of nature to care for it. Almost everyone is an environmentalist, but this support tends to be a mile wide and an inch deep—when environmental values are put in conflict with economic values, the latter often win.

“that no longer see themselves as a sufficiently integral part of nature” –  and of course that sense of integration has nothing whatsoever to do with skin color or even ethnicity. Indian people can be just as environmentally unfriendly as anyone else without the cultural and conceptual learned predispositions to experience the world as something we are fully integrated within. Essentially, the ecological mind-set the authors have been speaking about constitutes a learned and culturally supported sense that we are both morally obliged to do no harm to the forest (or fish, or whatever) and foolish in the extreme to destroy it. How that is actually spoken about is usually more personal: “the forest will get us back if we treat it with disrespect.” So they treat it with respect, even in the face of enducements to do othewise. But destroy this moral base, these learned and culturally supported moral positions with respect to the interrealatedness of humans, trees, fish, etc and all bets are off.