The Epistemology of Sustainable Resource Use: Managing Forest Products, Swiddens, and High-Yielding Variety Crops
Human Organization 56(1): 91-101, 1997
11 Pages Posted: 30 Jan 2014
Date Written: 1997
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to examine the “moral ecology” of resource use, through a comparison of the ideological bases of three systems of resource use in Southeast Asia: gathering forest products (viz., forest fruit), swidden agriculture, and the cultivation of high-yielding variety, “green revolution” crops. A trade-off between the magnitude of return and the frequency of return is accepted in the first two systems, but this is denied in the third system in which there is instead insistence on the possibility of continuous, high-magnitude returns. In the fruit-gathering and swidden cultivation systems, there is recognition of linkages to the wider temporal and spatial processes in which they are embedded, but in the green revolution system there is only a very narrow view of these linkages; and whereas the necessity of reciprocal exchange with their wider social and natural environments is accepted in the first two systems, such exchanges are minimized in the green revolution system. This study contributes to current debates about sustainable resource use, the conception of nature and culture, and the epistemology of science and the contemporary role of anthropology.
Keywords: Sustainable Resource Use, Swidden Agriculture, HYV/Green Revolution Agriculture, Abundance and Scarcity, Exchange, Nature and Culture, Epistemology
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