An Actor-Network Approach to Landscapes

Does it suffice to understand diverse views of the landscape as merely different texts and narratives of an objective environment? Or does this approach quickly fall into the trap of relativism? Bruno Latour identifies four different types of relativisms that attempt to understand our contemporary relativist dilemma. The first, absolute relativism, separates the diversity of cultural views into completely separate realms, thereby denying the hierarchies and connections that exist between these views. The second, cultural relativism, views cultures as “so many more or less accurate views on that unique Nature (Latour 1993:104)”, which rests on the “solid absolutism of the natural sciences (Latour 2005:117)”, thus adhering to rather than recognizing a hierarchy of cultural views of nature. The third, particular universalism, provides one society with the privileged ability to define “the general framework of Nature with respect to which others (societies) are situated (Latour 1993:105)”. This type of universalism presupposes the superiority of one society over others because that society is seen has having access to a universal Nature that influences all other societies. Latour develops his own, fourth form of relativism that he calls symmetrical anthropology. In this relativism he shows all collectives as being made up of natures and cultures, the differences between collectives occur in the act of mobilizing different parts of their collectives, and at different scales,

“All natures-cultures are similar in that they simultaneously construct humans, divinities and non-humans. None of them inhabits a world of signs and symbols arbitrarily imposed on an external Nature known to us alone. None of them – and especially not our own – lives in a world of things. All of them sort out what will bear signs and what will not. If there is one thing we all do, it is surely that we construct both our human collectives and the nonhumans that surround them.

In constituting their collectives, some mobilize ancestors, lions, fixed stars, and the coagulated blood of sacrifice; in constructing ours, we mobilize genetics, zoology, cosmology and hematology (Latour 1993:106).”

In order to overcome the nature-culture dichotomy while attempting to understand other societies views of their landscapes, it is important not to view Nature as an objective background to which other cultures only attach their own meanings and signs; in fact these meanings and signs found in places throughout landscapes are evidence of the mobilizations used to construct nature-culture collectives.

Landscapes can be viewed from a variety of lenses, the most common of which was briefly discussed above as a modernistic lens, which subscribes to the first and second dichotomies, thereby seeking to socialize culture and society, while naturalizing

nature²⁰. This approach emphasizes scientifically defined ecological or social structures as the determinants of social behaviors; it fails to recognize the locally unique

interactions within, and conceptions of networks of agencies that construct these structures and behaviors. Although the post-moderns recognize that there are problems with modernistic ideology, they fail to bridge the nature-culture divide, and simply deconstruct reality into a series of narratives, discourses and texts (Ibid:59-62). As Latour describes, anthropological research has shown that the ‘premoderns’ often dwell on the connections between nature and culture and thereby recognize the social, cosmological or divine problems that could occur if either social or natural orders are modified²¹. The mistakes of modern and post-modern social scientists has been to view Nature and Society/Culture as separate objective influences on social behaviors, and to fail to recognize the interactions between and mobilizations of natural and social agents that maintain or disrupt nature-culture collectives.

Latour combines elements of so-called ‘pre-modern’, modern and postmodern traditions to develop what he calls the ‘non-modern’ approach. As discussed above nature-culture collectives and the local interactions that go on within them are made up of actors whose origins may lie in “other places, other times, and other agencies (Latour 2005:166)”. These collectives of human and non-human entities have been called

‘hybrids’, ‘quasi-objects’, and here ‘actor-networks’²². Nature-culture systems are made up of human and non-human actors that interact on levels that defy modern

understandings of local-global, past-present, and nature-culture dichotomies. Latour points out with his Actor-Network Theory (ANT) that the concepts of society, culture,

20Latour explains that after using the superiority of science to separate nature from culture, and the moderns from the ‘premoderns’, modernist scientists socialize and naturalize collectives by mobilizing their sciences “to turn the humans into so many puppets manipulated by objective forces which only the natural or social scientists happen to know (Ibid:53).” Thus, modernists mobilize natural and social sciences to determine the rules of society, which in turn shape cultural characteristics that can only be explained through science.

21 “By saturating the mixes of divine, human and natural elements with concepts, the premoderns limit the practical expansion of these mixes. It is the impossibility of changing the social order without modifying the natural order – and vice versa – that has obliged the premoderns to exercise the greatest prudence.

Every monster becomes visible and thinkable and explicitly poses serious problems for the social order, the cosmos, or divine laws (Latour 1993:42).”

22As Latour puts they, “…are much more social, much more fabricated, much more collective than the

‘hard’ parts of nature, but they are in no way arbitrary receptacles of a full-fledged society. On the other hand they are much more real, nonhuman and objective than those shapeless screens on which society – for unknown reasons – needed to be projected (Latour 1993:55).”

power, social structures, etc. that have been used by social scientists to describe the nature of associations between groups or things are in fact the results rather than causes of these associations (Latour 2005:238) That is, society, or culture, is a weak result²³ of diverse locally interacting actors that are connected in networks, which span space, time, and form. Therefore the focus should be on the associations that form actor-networks, which in turn determine the nature of the societies and cultures that they envelope.

Furthermore, the actors themselves, living the every-day realities of the actor-networks that they inhabit, best describe these associations.

In order to use an ANT approach to paint a picture of a landscape, actors must be allowed to define, order and explain themselves, how they act, and in what directions they are going. The human groups that make up the landscape should be expected to be neither stable nor homogenous (Latour 2005:27-42), and we should be open to the non-human entities that may actively participate in collective courses of action (Ibid:63-86).

A focus should be on the ways that these actors are connected (Ibid:241), and how the scale of their connections may shift freely between local and global dimensions

(Ibid:185). The active agencies that make up actor-networks provide clues as to how the network builds and maintains socio-cultural attributes. These clues come from the actors themselves and the ways that they describe and explain other actors and actions, as well as the controversies that arise out of these associations (Ibid:43-62). By paying attention to local descriptions and explanations of agencies and collective actions, society, culture, power, and institutions can be understood as consequences of associations rather than mystical causes (Latour 1986:276-277). This non-modern approach of viewing

landscapes and places as the actor-network frameworks that constitute and are constituted by associated and sometimes conflicting active agencies, will show more clearly the role that they play in constructing socio-cultural attributes such as social structures, powers, and institutions²⁴.

23Latour compares traditional social theory and his non-modern approach to society as “In the traditional version of social theory, society is strong and nothing can destroy it since it is sui generis; in the other, it is so weak that it has to be built, repaired, fixed and, above all, taken care of (Latour 2005:203-204).”

24It should be pointed out here that the actor-network theoretical model is simply a tool for attempting to describe a collective where a variety human, divine, and non-human entities are being mobilized by a spectrum of agencies that range from local to global, and past to present. This actor-network model is

The landscape of Taromak, explored in this research is particularly suited for the application of this type of approach because its contemporary connection to a wide variety of international, national and local conservationist, economic and political

agendas make it difficult to locate the community in a local-global spectrum. In addition the disparity between past and present social attributes of the Taromak community are difficult to understand with out taking into account these relationships that intertwine the entire nature-culture collective. Thus, the landscape and place concepts discussed above frame the topic of this inquiry and connect it to previous anthropological research, while the ANT model provides a method of entering the collective, seeing its constituents, and watching it move. The end result is one ‘landscape map’ that outlines what the Taromak traditional territory is, how it acts, why it is important and where it is going. It attempts to break down the nature-culture dichotomy and relativist dilemmas that have provide limited views of landscapes and places in the past. The landscape described below is not just a local interpretation, a set of signs and symbols, or a text. It is not made up of a homogenous and stable human group driven by mysterious socio-cultural structures. Nor is it separate from global, national and local forces or historical events. It is a collective drama of the human, divine and non-human. It is actively gathering, constructing and being constructed by contending agencies and meanings. It is the territory of the Taromak Rukai tribe, and it is much more than that.

III. TAROMAK RUKAI