Sodbusters and the 'native gaze' - Part III

Anthropology grounded: a double entendre I am using the idea of anthropology “grounded” in the sense of two distinct meanings: The first meaning is similar to the commonsense notion that a teenager gets “grounded” for breaking parental rules designed to maintain safety, well-being, and the collective interests of the family. Why would the anthropology of food get grounded in this sense? Anthropology might at least be admonished for marginal treatment of indigenous agroecological epistemologies and long silence on the violence of the Green Revolution and its protégé, the Agro-Genomics Revolution. It might even be grounded for lapses into postmodern arrogance and disinterest in the threats facing traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) and resilient local food systems in sovereign place-based communities. Where is the anthropology of food that can simultaneously demonstrate a useful interest and understanding of a given locality’s struggles for food sovereignty or agrarian reform? But let us go back first to the problem of the epistemological politics of “soil knowledge” and “soiled knowledge.” It was not until the 1980s, that anthropologists began to more openly acknowledge that the science of soil, edaphology (from the Greek, edaphos), was likely first developed by Mesoamerican ancestral civilizations. This occurred as early as the Classic Maya (250-900) and as recently as the Colhua Mexica at Chapultepec-Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco (1248-1521). The Mexica (Aztecs) classified soil into more than sixty varieties that they understood in terms of variations in the volume of organic material, depth of topsoil, recognition of strata, permeability, erosive properties, compaction ratios, and other principles that prefigure the methods of 20th century American soil conservation science (Peña 2005). Mexica ethnoedaphology (qua ethnopedology) is certainly striking because the scholar-farmers in the calmecacs (higher education institutions) appear to have classified soil types in a manner that anticipated by more than 400 years the science of soil conservation developed in Great Depression USA. Even more striking to me than deep antecedent status as a precursor science is that both Maya and Mexica edaphology provided that the measurement of the resilience of soils should always include reference to human actions that can provoke unintended consequences, i.e., chaos or uncertainty; stochastic effects in modern parlance. There is a deeper sense of respect for original instructions (a place-based epistemology) evident in the use of particular soils and these were codified in the manner of biophysical concepts like tepetate, a compacted clay strata that results from greedy over-tillage of the wrong soil profile and also refers to a naturally-occurring property of certain soil compositions characterized by dense clay lens in shallow topsoil. These codes were as much empirical observations of biophysical indicators as they were socio-cultural instructions that recognized and transmitted awareness of anthropogenic disturbance of soil quality. The Aztecs bridged C. P. Snow’s great divide between the natural and social sciences; too bad this has not happened in the American universities. Recognition of this accomplishment has not been readily forthcoming. It was well into the 1990s and even more recently, that anthropologists in Mexico and the USA were still among those peddling the myth that the Maya were victims of their own making, of an ecological catastrophe provoked by their rampant, reckless, and ignorant “slash-and-burn” agriculture that resulted in massive deforestation and demographic collapse (see Fedick 1996 and Peña 2005). Evidence to the contrary is ignored, including compelling work on the “Maya managed mosaic” (Fedick 1996). One recent, almost apologetic, study co-authored by a Mexican anthropologist notes how:

Soil knowledge in the pre-Colombian era was a noticeable attribute of indigenous people in Mexico. A Mayan soil classification for the Yucatan peninsula has been used by local people. The Aztecs and Toltecs in the Central Valleys classified soils by land use and textures. Some names still persist today. In spite of this, the “modern” era of soil science in Mexico started in 1926 when the Mexican National Commission of Irrigation (NCI) brought American soil scientists to train the first agronomists on soil surveys required for the implementation of irrigation of lands. In 1929, the first Mexican scientific meeting, known as “The First Agrological College,” was held in Meoqui, Chihuahua. This meeting is considered as the first formal activity in the field of soil science in Mexico…One of the major problems in the development of soil science in Mexico has been the lack of communication between the farmers and scientists. To alleviate this problem, some researchers have suggested that the ethnopedological knowledge should be incorporated into soil maps, since, in many cases, a map generated from ethnopedological knowledge is more precise and accurate than similar technical maps for management purposes…(Gonzalez, Ventura, and Castellanos 2006: 1)

These authors repeat the obvious slip of Eurocentric historical periodization, “pre-Columbian.” The notion that Maya soil knowledge was just a “noticeable attribute” is more insidious because it trivializes the extent to which it is now recognized that these ancestral civilizations invested major institutional efforts, intellectual resources, and communal labor toward matters of soil conservation and watershed protection. This was serious enough to involve the mobilization of many hundreds of farmers, mathematicians, “diviners” [sic], and other specialists in the collective work (tequio) required to design, construct, repair, and maintain structures like terraces, check dams, dikes, canals, ponds, viaducts, rejolladas, bajadas, xinampas, and agroforestry mosaics on a rather large spatial scale (Beach et al 2006; Fedick 1996; Peña 2005). It would seem difficult to engage in communication over soil matters when the exclusion or inadvertent belittling of local knowledge of soils is lamented as the mere “lack of communication between farmers and scientists,” as if these two could readily understand and respect one another in such an environment of presumed intellectual and managerial superiority on the part of the academics or the neoliberals that hunger for the Native commonwealth. Absent in this seemingly more embracing and celebratory account of “folk soil taxonomy” is the bedrock Mexica ontological presupposition that soil is a dynamic and living organism in itself. While directly unaware of microbes, nematodes, and other micro flora, the Mexica clearly understood the importance of human respect for the health of soils. The Mexica, like other Mesoamerican peoples, practiced regenerative agriculture – their cultural practices regenerated the natural conditions of the soil organism that defined the capacities and limits of the agroecosystem. Recycling human, animal, and plant wastes and debris, and fiercely dedicated to protecting drinking and irrigation water quality, the Mexica produced an essentially urban-based agroecological revolution by redeploying ancient Maya xinampa agricultural techniques and recasting them within the massive hydraulic system of the Lake Texcoco District. The productivity in corn, bean, and squash accomplished by the “floating gardens” of Lakes Chalco and Xochimilco would not be exceeded until many decades after the 1910 Revolution (Simon 1997; Peña 2005). Of course, the real tragedy in all this is that Mexico has not been self-sufficient in corn production since the early 1970s, a history charting the loss of “food sovereignty” that remains beyond the scope of this paper. I believe all this indicates that much of the anthropology that has been practiced in or about Mexico and Mesoamerican civilizations around the issue of soil classification and conservation should be “grounded.” It perpetuates epistemological violence, especially perhaps by subjecting the ethnopoetic “cognitive mapping” of local place-makers to scrutiny and comparison and integration into a top-down, managerially-driven GIS remote sensing technological apparatus that may very well in the end not serve local communities’ well-being and autonomy. Anthropology of this sort needs to get confined to its own ivory tower playroom, so it can quiet down a bit, cool its heels out, get past reflexivity and all that self-serving nonsense, and perhaps gain a more respectful understanding and attitude toward Others. This is already being decided for the sodbuster anthropologists. In an increasing number of Native communities, which are the typical subjects of anthropological studies, the tribal and other communal authorities are more likely to refuse ethnographers and other researchers easy unrestricted access to their localities. This is the response dealt anthropologists when they violate the trust and respect we have come to expect of each other in our own origin communities. Whether it violates that trust by mismanaging sacred information or using deep knowledge of a peoples’ sense of place and history to betray community objectives or to justify attacks on indigenous epistemologies does not matter. If it simply remains silent, or worse pretends that deconstructing the meaning, the floating signification, of the global bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwich so that we can critique the ecological footprint of the average American is somehow a more important task than agrarian reform and indigenous sovereignty, then it too will be dismissed and grounded. Honestly? We are dying from hunger and malnutrition while a new generation of postmodern intellectuals helps Americans “deconstruct” their Big Macs and Happy Meals to reduce their “ecological footprints” and develop more individually responsible and healthy lifestyles. The second meaning of the phrase, “anthropology grounded,” involves a methodology of recognition and collaborative iteration with alterNative epistemologies of place. This is not the same as sociological “grounded theory.” Grounded theory is an inductive technique developed by Glaser and Strauss (1967); their use of the term means that the theory develops out of the field research process and is “grounded in the data” from which it is derived. At a meta-theoretical level, what I am proposing is not the same because I do not embrace any kind of correspondence theory of objective observable reality as something we can safely assume constitutes neutral and unmediated data. I am inclined to state that there is a difference between data as corresponding to unmediated objective and observable reality and place-based experience attached to sets of socio-cultural “original instructions.” These constitute very different epistemological practices. One is observed, categorized, memorandum-ized, and theorized; the other is lived, shared, experienced, and “storied.” This means in part that one of the only ways I can envision myself practicing an alterNative anthropology of food systems is to address questions extant in my own place, in this case on the lands of my family’s acequia farm in Colorado. I turn to this next and hope it will indicate some possibilities for grounding the alterNative anthropology of food systems in a framework emerging from a place-based epistemology. This is Part 3 of 8 of an original as yet unpubished essay prepared by invitation for the Department of Anthropology, Spring 2008 Colloquium, “Epistemologies of Anthropological Research,” University of Washington, May 23, 2008. It is presented here free of the footnotes in the original. Sources cited in the text will be posted at the end of the series of 8. This is a work in progress; please do not quote, cite, or circulate without the author’s permission. Send inquiries to: dpena@u.washington.edu. The author thanks Elaine H. Peña and Mario Montaño for comments on earlier drafts.