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February 2000
Ed Liebow, Contributing Editor
This month's column features a look at
the genesis of a fascinating project underway on the Eastern Shore of the
Chesapeake Bay. It represents a productive approach to real-world
environmental management problems, testing and applying concepts from the
anthropologist's tool-kit with collaborators in the ecological and decision
sciences.
Also two important reminders:
Call For Papers: Please contact
Krista Harper (kharper@anthro.umass.edu or 413/545-0696) about submitting
proposals for invited sessions, panels, or workshops for the 2000 Annual
Meeting. Events that bring together participants from academic, policy,
and activist settings are especially encouraged.
Student Paper Competition: May
1 is the deadline for submissions to the Rappaport Prize ($500) for student
papers. Students interested in submitting manuscripts for this year's competition
should follow the style guidelines of Human Ecology and send three copies
to Section President Pete Brosius (Georgia).
Cultural Models of Environment and Pollution: Looking Ahead Michael
Paolisso, R. Shawn Maloney and Erve Chambers (U Maryland)
In the summer of 1997, you may recall,
a toxic algae bloom killed fish, caused a public health scare, and, eventually,
prompted wholesale legislative changes aimed at reducing agricultural runoff
and protecting the Chesapeake Bay. A striking feature of the scientific
discourse about Pfiesteria, as the algae are commonly known, was a certain
"blaming the victim" undertone to the way the problem was framed.
That is, the environmental degradation was seen by many authorities as
the result of individual choices by the region's
agricultural producers, while little attention was directed to community-level
consequences or to the role of culture as mediating environmental interpretation
and response.
We think the paradigm of "cultural models,"
while certainly not new to anthropology, has a great deal of value in re-framing
and resolving contemporary environmental problems, and our on-going research
focuses on aspects of water quality management in the Chesapeake system.
This project provides the immediate context
within which to outline the more general merits and challenges of environmental
cultural model work.
What are Cultural Models, Briefly?
We start with the work of Dorothy Holland
and Naomi Quinn, Cultural Models in Language and Thought, who argue that
cultural models frame experience, supply interpretations of that experience
and provide goals for action. In principle, most social scientists seem
to feel comfortable with the notion of cultural models. In practice,
however, the term refers to at least two divergent theoretical orientations
? models of consensus, based on analysis of intracultural variation, and
models of cognitive processes of schema
formation.
The "consensus" model's core assumption
is that agreement among respondents is a function of the extent to which
each knows a culturally defined "truth." The model estimates the
degree to which each informant represents a shared cultural understanding
within the given domain. These estimates are then used to determine
the "correct" response and their associated level of confidence.
Patterns of agreement and disagreement in a given cultural domain are key
data for studies of intracultural variation in knowledge. By
investigating this variation, we can begin to understand how individuals
learn and transmit information.
When viewed from a cognitive perspective,
cultural models are seen as formal representations of a group's shared
explicit and implicit knowledge, interests, beliefs and values. Individuals
draw on cultural
models to help process, understand and give value to things they encounter
in everyday life. Cultural models typically consist of a number of
interconnected "schemas" (or "scripts"). A schema is the organization
of cognitive elements into an abstract mental object with default values
or open slots that can be variously filled in with appropriate specifics
(e.g., D'Andrade). A robin or eagle fills in the default values/slots
of the "bird" schema, while hamburgers or salads fill in the "lunch" schema.
Schemas are key to information processing,
and by definition reside in an person's short-term memory. Along
with models, schemas allow individuals to make sense of all the detailed
and new information presented to the mind for processing. It should
be noted that people don’t always act in accordance with their cultural
models, and may have good reasons not to.
Recent research has demonstrated the use of a "cultural
models" approach to addressing environmental concerns such as natural resource
degradation, pollution and the conservation of biodiversity. For
example, Kempton, Boster and Hartley found that people actively fit new
information on global warming into existing cultural models of pollution,
ozone depletion and photosynthesis and respiration. Of interest is that
divergent views about emissions and their air quality impacts are not entirely
correct or incorrect, but in fact represent a partial view of a complex
situation, which is constructed by an interplay of knowledge, beliefs and
values.
In another case, Einarsson’s research on Icelandic whaling shows how environmentalists
and whalers draw on their own experiences, beliefs and values to construct
different cultural models of whales. For environmentalists, whales
have rights similar to humans, owing to a combination of the whales’ intelligence,
communicative abilities, social characteristics. The Icelandic
whalers, by contrast, have a utilitarian view of whales as natural resources,
to be exploited in support of human livelihood. In this view, there
is no communing with whales. Whales are seen instead as dangerous because
they can sink boats, destroy nets and compete
for fish.
Pfiesteria, Pollution and Environment
Our research is sponsored by the NSF Anthropology Program and a joint NSF-EPA
program (“Decision-Making and Valuation for Environmental Policy”). We
apply both consensus and cognition models to investigate how individuals
use their knowledge, ideas and beliefs about the world around them to construct
cultural models of environment and pollution and how these models differ
among various Chesapeake Bay stakeholder groups. As noted earlier, our
research interests were motivated at least in part by how little attention
was directed in the scientific response to Pfiesteria to community-level
consequences or to the role of culture as mediating environmental interpretation
and response.
Cognitive and consensus-based approaches
are combined to 1) identify intra- and intercultural variation in the knowledge
and values held by farmers, watermen, environmental scientists regarding
environment and pollution, and 2) construct cultural models of environment
and pollution for these stakeholder groups. Integrating
the two approaches will produce complementary analyses that emphasize
breadth and distribution of beliefs and values around key environmental
issues, and an understanding of how environmental issues are interpreted
and given meaning. Consensus analysis will provide important information
on the degree of sharing (and lack
of sharing) of key environmental beliefs and values, within and between
groups.
In turn, a cognitive cultural model
will help us assess the overall pattern of agreement and disagreement within
and between stakeholder groups. The cultural model information will help
frame how stakeholders made such quick sense of Pfiesteria (although interpretations
of the causes and consequences vary), and how the
cultural modeling of Pfiesteria and other environmental issues is flexible
and generative in order to account for and explain new developments.
Focusing on these latter characteristics, cultural models will allow us
to capture some of the dynamic and adaptive qualities of culture.
Finally, the cultural model research will allow us to integrate a much
broader range of cultural information, extending our research beyond topics
directly associated with environment and pollution.
Challenges Ahead
Much remains to be learned about the
utility of cultural models applied to environmental problems. Fortunately,
a number of environmental and ecological anthropologists are concurrently
exploring the use of cultural models of environmental issues. Equally
fortunate is the openness and willingness to share experiences and lessons-learned.
Collectively, we can begin to address conceptual and methodological questions
such as: What is the required balance of quantitative, qualitative and
reflexive data? How and where are these various types of data linked?
What are the behavioral outcomes of cultural models? How can we preserve
the construct of cultural models while providing scope for orientations
that range from the positivistic to the postmodern and beyond? What
are the interdisciplinary benefits of cultural models? Can we fit
the construct of cultural models to an environmental anthropology discourse
and practice? The next few years promise to be exciting as findings
from a number of projects are applied to these and other questions
regarding cultural models of environment and pollution.
For more information about the NSF/EPA project, or for specific "cultural
models" references cited here, please contact Michael Paolisso (mpaolisso@anth.umd.edu,
or 301/405-1433)
------------------------------------
Send your Section news items to Ed Liebow (liebow@policycenter.com,
206/675-1002; fax: 206/675-1005).
And check the award-winning Anthropology/Environment web site regularly:
http://travel.to/anthenv