I have to begin by thanking the panelists and discussants who participated in our AAA panel yesterday. Everyone delivered wonderful talks, that, to my infinite happiness, fit together into a cohesive theme about the study of later Pleistocene human evolution despite the different lines of evidence and approaches utilized by the speakers. This is the first of what will hopefully be several posts dissecting some of what I heard, saw and said at the AAAs.
One of the themes that came through not just our panel, but the few other panels I was able to attend, was the critical role that scale plays in anthropology and the critical potential of anthropology to address issues of scale.
I first started thinking about scale at these meetings during a session I attended Friday morning on climate change, policy and adaptation (here is the session information). Common throughout the session was discussion of the intersecting scales of analysis, discussion and practice that permeate climate issues. One of the talks that struck me was given by Derek Owen Newberry (Univ. of Pennsylvania) talking about biofuel certification practices and their on the ground impact in Brazil. For a brief background, groups in the EU have become concerned over the potential detrimental impacts (via deforestation) of biofuel production in Brazil. Basically, no one wants rainforest cut down in the name of environmental conservation. To deal with this, the EU has established a process by which certain biofuel producers are certified for sustainable production status, based on the agreement to maintain a portion of “conserved” lands. The problem is that the certification process does not have a corresponding enforcement apparatus to force, or even to really check in on, compliance. Likewise, the corporations responsible for biofuel production do not have the motivation, or at times possible the authority, to force local farmers to abide by certified sustainable practices. In other words, the scale of the solution (certification of biofuel producers) does not match the scale of the problem (deforestation at a local level). The result, according to Newberry, is that the certification process itself becomes not only ineffectual, but potentially damaging by giving the appearance of action when in reality it lacks the capabilities to act.
I know that anthropology does not have any unique prerogative on scale. Economics has micro and macro. Biology has microbiology, organismal biology, community ecology and numerous other layers that you could slice or implant into the mix. And so do many other disciplines. But I cannot help but feel that anthropology has a somewhat unique approach towards issues of scale, driven by the reality that many of the different scales of research in anthropology involve fundamentally different lines of evidence and theoretical perspectives. For example, in the context of understanding the impact of climate change on agricultural populations in the SE United States–part of the subject of Wendy-Lin Bartels (Univ. of Florida) in the session listed above–think of the different ways that anthropology is of relevance. Wendy’s own work was focused on aspects of knowledge generation and transfer, as she and her research group have helped organize symposia on climate change that bring together farmers, climate scientists and technical experts. Using material evidence, archaeologists working the Southeast could produce evidence of the reaction of past populations to shifting climatic patterns. Biological anthropologists might provide perspectives on the impact to human health of shifting distributions of tropical diseases or of the long-term health consequences of mass disaster events like Hurricane Andrew, which struck Florida durin the 1992 hurricane season. In other words, anthropologists look at issues not just across different scales but using widely varying lines of evidence and theoretical approaches. This might just seem like a confusing jumble, but done well, I think it provides an avenue for elucidating complexity. I am a visual person, so I made a somewhat clunky visual to try to illustrate this point.
The starting observation for this schematic is the series of dots in the upper left. Zooming in to a different scale (moving right), it can be seen that the dots (or at least one of them) is not simply a dot, but in fact a square. Zooming in a little further it can be seen that the surface of the square is actually characterized by a series of vertical lines. Viewing this arrangement across three different scales provided different evidence. Moving down from the initial observation, however, is my schematic of anthropology, where we are not only shifting scales but shifting perspectives. Now it can be seen that the square is not really a square at all, but actually a cube. Moving further down (lower left), it can be seen that the vertical lines are actually not just lines, but the product of small, narrow undulations across the cube’s surface. Again, this is a clumsy representation, but my point is that anthropologists not only work across scales, but across axes of variation.
Tomorrow I will follow this up with an examination of scale and its importance based on my session–multi-disciplinary perspectives on later human evolution–that featured paleoanthropologists, archaeologists, geneticists, a human behavioral ecologist, a cultural anthropologist and primatologists. Each provided unique perspectives reflecting different scales and different kinds of data.
