Questioning Nineteenth-Century Assumptions about Knowledge, III by Richard E. Lee

Author:Richard E. Lee [Lee, Richard E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438434094
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2010-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

DISCUSSION

IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN: We are into a different kind of dualism, not the mind/body but the natural versus the social or the modern and the nonmodern or persons and objects. I might add this is really also the dualism of the two cultures, of philosophy versus science and the concept that there are two cultures.

ANDREW PICKERING: Right, except that the two cultures are both within modernity.

IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN: Exactly, I agree entirely.

JONATHAN FRIEDMAN: In this universe of modernity that you describe there are plenty of advocates of the nonmodern. In fact, in some periods they play a very dominant role, especially in crisis periods like the one we are coming into today. I think there is a very good historical reason for it. As I understand the nonmodern, they mean it is still a vision of primitive society and holism, and it is a product of the exact same modernity as the dualistic model you describe. So you are creating a dualism of the modern dualists versus the nonmodern, call it holism. In other words, I am not sure it would not be possible unless those ideas were in the air. You did not even invent all of them. They have been around for a long time. So my first question is, to what extent are you describing in fact a dualist organization, actually I would not call it dualist but certainly an opposition that exists within the modern universe, and not something else? The second question is linked to that. What the whole ecological school foundered upon in anthropology and in human ecology was the fact that these ideal type holistic societies in practice have never existed. They do not exist in the archaeological record. They do not exist except in cases of very marginalized societies who were not always like that, who changed—like the Bushmen and the pygmies—and who five hundred years ago were expansive and destructive of their environments and did all of the things that could be called enframing, but it is a different ideology, you could say, a different way of representing it. Each has exactly a holistic ideology and has totally wrecked their worlds. The best example is China. The most destroyed ecosystem that I know of is China. And they have been doing it since the very beginning. But not only them. If you fly over the center of Papua New Guinea you see societies that are entirely holistic in their organization and that destroy their local ecosystems. But they cannot do a really good job of it because they do not have enough technology. This means there is something basically wrong with our species and this opposition, which I think exists universally, is part of something much larger than simply modernity. So this is my double question. The second one is the important one in terms of the normative aspect of this paper. You are saying there is another solution which is basically adaptation and I do not believe it. The human species is probably a much more destructive species than other species.

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