It is also high time for new energy to be involved with the newsletter, so I hereby announce my intention to pass the baton to a newly appointed editor. The new editor will need to be able to secure space on their local web server in order to edit and publish future editions of the newsletter to the world wide web. The new URL can automatically be relayed from the current one, and I can assist in the transition and transfer all digital files over to use as templates or to maintain back issues. Unfortunately I have not had the time to become fully proficient in web authoring so there exists unlimited potential for improving the style of your newsletter in this format. As I will be unable to join you in Boston, please let me know what goes down at the business meeting and which lucky person gets to do the newsletter next. I have decidedly enjoyed the social and professional interactions with all of you and look forward to my continuing participation in specialty group interests.
Wow, what an ample variety of Cultural Ecology sessions are slated for the Boston AAG meeting! (See the listing in this issue.) At the fin de siecle this umbrella of cultural ecology is covering a spread of promising and important ground. Our sub-field is deeply engaged with major concerns of the times about nature and culture, society and environment, and people and resources. I hope that we can continue to expand these efforts in the coming years.
On a more immediate note, thanks are due to the many persons who organized sessions with CESG sponsorship for the Boston meeting. Remember that by attaching this sponsorship you reduce the possibility of schedule conflicts.
The annual Business Meeting of the Cultural Ecology Specialty Group is set for 1:30 pm on Thursday, March 26. Elections are needed to choose the new officers of the group. The position of newsletter editor for the group also needs to be filled, since long-time ace Bob Kuhlken is stepping aside. Perhaps someone with interest and expertise in desktop and/or web publishing could help to build further on Bob's fine efforts. Many thanks are owed Bob.
Other agenda items for the meeting include discussion of the '99 Honolulu meeting and the announcement of this year's Netting Award. Also, you may remember that following last year's business meeting a special discussion on "Ethnographic techniques in field research" was led by Tad Mutersbaugh and me. The idea for this informal discussion came from graduate students in the group. It has been suggested that a similar style of discussion might be held this year.
I welcome your comments and invite your suggestions about agenda items. I'm looking forward to seeing you soon.
Harold Brookfield is a magnificent loner whose writings strike at the very heart of the discipline of geography. They are concerned with matters of common sense, of ordinary people and of reality. Their roots run deep. For those with a soft spot for geographical memorabilia, for the discipline's much cherished classics, his name first surfaces almost half a century ago in the Indian Geographical Society Silver Jubilee Souvenir and N. Subrahmanyam Memorial Volume, Madras 1952. It is this collection which contains W. Kirk's classic article on "Historical Geography and the Concept of the Behavioural Environment" which was compulsory reading for all geographers of a certain generation! Harold's article was not such a grand cru. It is about surburban growth in such distant European cities as Worthing, Amsterdam and Utrecht - and I have never known him make any reference to it! But even in this distant professional life Harold Brookfield had already made what was to become an unswerving intellectual commitment, to work on the borderlands between disciplines. In this initial, metropolitan phase of his personal and professional life, the borderlands stood between geography and sociology. But they were soon to swing to the no man's land between geography and anthropology, subsequently moving on to a broad but reasoned array of other disciplines: agronomy, ethnobotany, paleobotany and prehistory.
Like so many of his kindred spirits, Harold's professional and personal life is an itinerary where experience continually nourishes the intellect: his discovery of western Ireland in the early 1950s, followed by a brief stint teaching in South Africa and doing fieldwork in Mauritius. Then it was on to Australia and, in 1957, to a position at the Australian National University and an initial foray into the New Guinea Highlands. His destiny was sealed. He had arrived in Papua New Guinea at the dawn of a golden age, born, on the one hand, of the frequenting of a myriad of vibrant subsistence peoples and, on the other, of integration into a remarkably vigorous intellectual community that expressed little concern for defending the territories of individual academic disciplines.
Henceforth Harold was to dedicate himself to the study of rural societies in the Third World and, more specifically, to the dynamic relationships between land and people, all considered through that singular window of local study. Only the geographical focus has changed through time. First it was the New Guinea Highlands, followed, in the mid-'60s, by a broadening of interests to all of Melanesia. In the 1970s he made a brief detour into the West Indies, only to return, in the middle of the decade, to Fiji. And this was followed by a more crucial shift, in 1984, to Southeast Asia and to the study of more complex rural societies subject to profound and rapid change. The commitment was now clearly to Development Studies.
The wealth of scholarship that this itinerary has generated is quite remarkable: Struggle for Land (with Paula Brown, 1963); Melanesia: A Geographical Interpretation of an Island World (with Doreen Hart, 1971); Colonialism, Development and Independence: The Case of the Melanesian Islands in the South Pacific (1972); The Pacific in Transition (edited collection, 1973); Interdependent Development (1975); Population, Resources and Development in the Eastern Islands of Fiji (with R.D. Bedford et al., 1977); Land Degradation and Society (with Piers Blaikie, 1987); Islands, Islanders and the World: the Colonial and Post-colonial Experience of Eastern Fiji (with T.P. Bayliss-Smith et al., 1988); The City in the Village: the in situ Urbanisation of Villages, Villagers and their Land around Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (with A. Samad Hadi et al., 1991); South-East Asiaís Environmental Future: the Search for Sustainability (edited collection with Y. Byron, 1993); Transformation with Industrialization in Peninsular Malaysia (edited collection, 1994); In Place of the Forest: Environmental and Social Transformation in Borneo and the eastern Malay Peninsula (with L. Potter et al., 1995), and so forth. And those are only some of the books!
Harold has always been a source of intellectual inspiration, to what are now at least two if not three generations of students and colleagues living on several continents. He was the architect of what Marvin Mikesell once called "the New Guinea syndrome", an unpretentious but remarkably solid intellectual tsunami whose effects where felt in a distant and inward-looking North American geography then largely obsessed with quantifying. Subsequently he was to propose a more grounded perspective on development studies, explore issues of land degradation and make a significant contribution to the debate on environmental change.
In his contribution to academic scholarship Harold Brookfield has successfully negotiated a number of "revolutions" and maintained a healthy distance with respect to them all. The only one which almost seduced him was the quantitative revolution which "led him away from the truth" and resulted in his writing what he now believes to be a largely nonsense contribution to his collection The Pacific in Transition.
What was it that has kept him on course and made his work so important to us all in cultural ecology and, indeed elsewhere in and beyond geography? Perhaps, in the final analysis, it is Harold's fundamental sanity, a sanity which is grounded in the real world that lies beyond academia. This is expressed in his commitment to fieldwork - and the sincere regret that the last time he was able to do any was in Malaysia back in 1986. Fieldwork, he affirms, keeps the scholar in contact with people who derive their daily sustenance from productive activities, in his case rural peasants. Fieldwork is also rooted in specific places. Such scholarship, put simply, is for Harold a "satisfactory way of doing things". It is more personally rewarding and it makes more sense. Further, in allying "local study with comparative method" (the title of one of his articles and, in his view, one of his best publications, from the Annals of the AAG, 1962) it is possible to "see the wood for the trees" and generate theoretical discussion out of practical work.
This is scholarship which is constructed out of the virtues of sanity and common sense.
Harold is now well past his 70th birthday but he is as busy as ever. His office is just down the corridor from the Department of Human Geography at the Australian National University where he worked for some 20 years. Now a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Anthropology he still doesn't feel the need to call himself anything - a geographer, a cultural ecologist, or whatever - but he still professes an unquestionable faith in a geography which is about environmental relations rather than spatial organization. And in this age when we are in the throes of being swept up in yet another disembodied intellectual revolution he unashamedly affirms that he is "an unrepentant premodern."
Harold Brookfield is a magnificent outsider and cultural ecology is much the richer for it.
-- Eric Waddell 9 December 1997
Information on Professor Brookfield's current project
From a pool of ten excellent submissions, the 1997 Student
Paper Award of $100 went to
Douglas E. Deur (Louisiana State University).
From a pool of nine excellent applications, there were two field study awards of $400 given this year, each with the intent to help defray field research expenses:
1. Kathryn Pearson (University of Arizona).
Kate Pearson, an M.A. student in the Department of Geography and Regional Development at the University of Arizona, received an award for Master's thesis fieldwork conducted during the summer of 1997. Kathryn's thesis research examines the socioeconomic and political constraints to women's participation in initiatives promoted by the Mexican government and NGOs to encourage economically viable and ecologically sustainable marine resource use in the community of Puerto San Carlos, Baja California Sur, Mexico. Her research will help to broaden our understanding of how to more effectively incorporate women's concerns and priorities into local development and conservation planning in coastal marine areas.
2. Michael K. Steinberg (Louisiana State University - now University of Southern Maine).
The following sessions at the upcoming AAG meetings in Boston have been organized or sponsored by the Cultural Ecology Specialty Group.
Thursday 7:30 AM
Access to Resources and Environmental Histories in
Latin America and Africa I: Resource Control and Environmental
Histories.
Organizers: A. Bebbington and S. Batterbury; Chair: A.
Bebbington.
A. Sluyter: Insights into Cultural-Ecological Imperialism from
the Sixteenth Century Livestock Invasion of Veracruz Mexico;
G. Endfield and S. O'Hara: An Archival Investigation of Colonial
Impacts in Michoacan, West Central Mexico; S. Batterbury, N.
Taylor, M. Weigl: Zarma Livelihoods: Social and Environmental
Change in the 20th Century in South-West Niger;
L. Naughton: Whose Animals? Indigenous Versus Colonial Wildlife
Ownership in Western Uganda;
Discussant: B. L. Turner, II.
Thursday 9:30 AM
Access to Resources and Environmental Histories in
Latin America and Africa II: Resource Access and Local
Environments.
Organizers: A. Bebbington and S. Batterbury; Chair: S.
Batterbury.
E. Young: A Feminist Political Ecology of Marine Resource
Conservation in Baja California Sur, Mexico;
D. Klooster: A Mexican Experience with Community Forestry:
Natural Resource Alienation Despite Community Management;
C. Lund: A Question of Honor - Protection of Property and
Institutional Competition in Land Struggles in Northern Burkina
Faso;
A. Bebbington: Rethinking Resource Control in Andean
Environments: Social Capital, State, and Market.
Discussants: B. L. Turner, II and J. Carney.
Thursday 9:30 AM
Environmental and Social Change in Africa.
Organizer and Chair: T. Bassett. P. Walker: Environment and
Political Change in Southern Africa;
L. Gray: Creating Tenure Security: Land Rights and Investment in
Soil Quality in Southwestern Burkina Faso;
T. Bassett and Zueli Koli Bi: Rereading the Ivorian Savanna,
1950-1990;
M. Turner: Historic Changes in the Organization of Agropastoral
Production in the Vicinity of Parc W in Niger (1940-Present);
Discussant: J. McCann.
Thursday PM
Poster Session III: Agriculture, Cultural Ecology, and
Environmental Management.
Thursday 1:30 PM
Cultural Ecology Specialty Group
Business Meeting
Thursday 4:45 PM
Indigenous People and Protected Areas: Global
Perspectives.
Organizer: M. Steinberg; Chair: K. Mathewson.
S. Stevens: Indigenous Peoples, Conservation, and Protected Areas
in Nepal: Lessons from Sagarmatha (Mount Everest) National Park
and Anapurna Conservation Area;
M. Steinberg: Conflict of Interest: Indigenous Exploitation
Patterns, State Control, and Wildlands in Southern Belize;
J. Hobbs: The Bedouin Support Program in Egypt's St. Katherine
Natural Protectorate.
Friday 7:30 AM
Water, Environment, and Settlement in Late Prehistoric
and Colonial Northern Mexico.
Organizers: K. Butzer and C. Frederick; Chair: K. Butzer.
P. Lehman, C. Frederick, B. Albert: Aridification of Late
Holocene Riparian Environments, Saltillo, Mexico;
C. Frederick, M. Batemanm, B. Winsborough: Late Holocene Eolian
and Lacustrine Sedimentation: Laguna Mayran, Coahuila, Mexico;
E. Butzer: Water, Indians, and Settlers: Colonial Competition for
Resources, Northern Mexico;
K. Butzer: Towards an Ecological History of Northern Mexico:
Insights and Implications.
Friday 11:30 AM
Historical Approaches in Political Ecology.
Organizer: K. Zimmerer; Chair: T. Bassett.
J. Carney: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the
Americas;
K. Zimmerer: Sustainability Interventions and Discourses in
Andean South America;
N. Peluso: Legal Precedent and Property Rights in Forests of
Southeast Asia;
S. Hecht: Sacred Groves and Sacrifice Zones: Ideation and
Idelolgy in Amazonian Deforestation.
Discussant: T. Bassett.
Friday 2:45 PM
Food, Energy, and the Environment.
Organizers: D. Napton, B. Baltensperger. Chair: G. Berardi.
Presenter: D. Pimentel.
Disscussants: D. Paulson, C. Lant, K. Zimmerer, M. Troughton;
Summarizer: D. Pimentel.
Friday 4:45 PM
International Biopolitics: Nature as a New, "Global"
Currency.
Organizer and Chair: K. McAfee.
D. Rocheleau and N. Kubo: International Green Discourse and Local
Degradation in Two Forests;
R. Schroeder: Environmental Quid Pro Quo: Power, Politics, and
African Debt Swaps;
K. McAfee: Selling Nature to Save it: Biodiversity as a
Transnational Commodity;
M. Sioh: Nature or Nation: Territorializing the Frontier in the
Malaysian Rainforest;
Discussant: D. Demeritt.
Saturday 7:30 AM
Human Diversity and Global Sustainability.
Organizers: D. Berman-Santana and W. Lynn. Chair: D.
Berman-Santana.
Panelists: D. Berman-Santana, W. Lynn, D. Rocheleau, L. Malaret,
A. Escobar.
Saturday 7:30 AM
Critical Geographies in South Asia I: State and
Community; Cohesion and Contradiction.
C. Jeffrey: Money Grows on Family Trees: Farmer Capitalists
and Associational Politics in Uttar Pradesh;
G. Williams: Rethinking political spaces: "State" and
"community" in West Bengal;
D. Faust: Reconceptualizing State, Community and the Politics of
Resource Use: The Case of India;
P. Basu: Gendered Absences: Implications of Privileging Local
Communities in Narmada Valley.
Discussant: S. Corbridge.
Saturday 9:30 AM
Critical Geographies of South Asia II: Negotiating
Community and Environment.
Organizer: P. Robbins; Chairs: P. Robbins and J. Wescoat, Jr.
E. Mawdsley: After Chipko: From Environment to Region in the
Uttarakhand;
P. Tobbins: Paper Forests: Imagining and Deploying Exogenous
Ecologies in Arid India;
K. O'Reilly: Tracking Community: An Investigation Into Social
Environmental Institutions.
Discussant: J. Wescoat, Jr.
Saturday 1:15 PM
Seeing the America Anew: Papers in Honor of James J.
Parsons.
Organizers: K. Mathewson and D. Deur. Chair: K. Mathewson.
K. Offen: Miskitu Ethnogenesis and Indirect English Colonialism
in the Western Caribbean, 1700-1786;
C. Brannstrom: Recent Sediment Deposits as Indicators of
Twentieth-Century Environmental Change in Southeastern Brazil;
B. Gartner: An Atlas of Pre-Columbian Raised Fields in the Upper
Midwest;
D. Deur: Estuarine Rhizome Cultivation on the Northwest Coast: A
Critical Assessment;
Discussant: K. Zimmerer.
Saturday 3:15 PM
Local People, Environment, and Development in Mexico.
Organizer and Chair: E. Young.
E. Olenberger: Gendered Local Knowledge and Resource Mapping of
Magdalena Bay;
K. Pearson: Involving Women in Conservation with Development in
Magdalena Bay, Mexico: The Role of the State and Non-Governmental
Organizations;
H. Eakin: Vulernability and Adaptation of Small-Scale Farmers to
Climatic Variability in Tlaxcala, Mexico;
L. Paulson: The Political Ecology of Tingambato, Mexico;
D. Moore: The Influence of Management Policies on Forest Health:
Fire and Suppression.
Sunday 7:30 AM
Environment, Development, and Conservation in Latin America I.
Organixers: M. Steinberg and M. Castellon; Chair: M.
Steinberg.
E. Keys and J. Maxwell: Town and Country in the Kaqchikel Region
of Guatemala;
J. Tuomey: Seventy Five Years of Change: Adaptation and
Continuity of Indigenous Culture in Santa Catarina Palope,
Guatemala;
S. Rainey: Folk Soil Management Strategies in Two Highland
Guatemalan Municipios;
P. Claggett: Where Farmers Make Their Fields and Why: A
Comparative Study in the Peruvian Amazon.
Discussant: M. Castellon.
Sunday 9:30 AM
Environment, Development, and Conservation in Latin America II.
Organizers: M. Castellon and M. Steinberg; Chair: M. Castellon.
J. Sundberg: Disneyfication and Landscape Change in Nature
Protection: Examples from the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Guatemala;
D. Carr: Population and Land Cover Change in the Sierra del
Lacandon National Park, Peten, Guatemala;
M. Castellon: Subsistence, Conservation and Conflict in
Guatemala's Sierra de las Minas Biosphere Reserve;
W. Mace: Alternative Trade and Small-Scale Coffee Production in
Oaxaca, Mexico.
Dear All (Cultural Ecologists, Political Ecologists, Human Ecologists, Etc.):
Please consider nominating one or more of our colleagues for the AAG Committees.
Feel free to forward this request to others. Thanks.
- Karl Zimmerer
The AAG Committee on Committees solicits nominations for AAG standing committees. In April, 1998, the AAG Council will make appointments to these standing committees (the number of openings is in parentheses): Affirmative Action and Minority Status (2) Archives and Association History (3) Commission on College Geography II (4) Constitution and Bylaws (1) Employment Opportunities and Career Development (2) George and Viola Hoffman Fund (1) International Research and Scholarly Exchange (3) Publications (3) Research Grants (1) Scientific Freedom and Responsibility (2) Standards for Geographic Data (2) Status of Women in Geography (1)
The Council will also select nominees for the Honors Committee and the Nominating Committee and will develop a roster of potential members of the Nystrom Dissertation Awards Committee.
Please consider nominating yourself as well as colleagues. Your specialty group is underrepresented on current AAG committees. Perhaps you will want to forward this message to other members of your specialty group. Descriptions of the duties of these committees plus current members are found on pages 512-516 of the 1997-98 "Guide to Programs in Geography in the United States and Canada."
Send nominations to one of the following members of the
Committee on Committees:
Richard A. Marston: marston@uwyo.edu
Jospeh S. Wood: jwood@gmu.edu
Lizbeth A. Pyle: lpyle@wvu.edu
Nominations are needed by 31 January 1998. Thanks for your help in identifying nominees.
Dr. Richard A. Marston, Professor
Department of Geography & Recreation
University of Wyoming
Laramie, WY 82071-3371
DIRECT PHONE: 307-766-6386
DEPARTMENT PHONE: 307-766-3311
FAX: 307-766-3294
http://www.uwyo.edu/A&S/geog/default.html
All CESG members are invited to submit reviews of books that would be of interest to our specialty group.