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Scale and Agency in Forest Anthropology

A Tanzanian farmer once expressed his frustration with an afforestation project that was ignoring both the institutional and spiritual dimensions of trees by telling me, “The project sees only the number of trees planted and doesn’t care what the trees mean.” This book tries to overcome this sort of reductionist myopia by synthesizing natural science and social science perspectives to elucidate why some tropical and temperate zone forests grow while others fall. Nearly all of the book’s 23 contributors are affiliates of Indiana University’s Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change (CIPEC), which is codirected by its editors. The CIPEC researchers insist upon rigorous empiricism and integrated multidisciplinary analysis, from satellite photography to boots-in-the-mud social and ecological fieldwork, and the volume is therefore remarkably consistent methodologically and conceptually. It begins with meta-theoretical reviews of land-use change, forest ecology, and the linkages between spatial and institutional analysis. Methodological chapters offer detailed technical primers on remote sensing, geographic information systems (GIS), and models of landuse change. The final section consists of five chapters applying the CIPEC approach to regional and comparative case studies. By the end of the book, readers will be rightfully cautioned that population pressure does not inexorably lead to deforestation and will have learned much about the challenges and potentials of polydisciplinary research, but many will wonder if the CIPEC view of forests brings their social-ecological dynamics into sufficient focus. One of the key themes of this book is the importance of scale. Many of the contributors insist that analytical units, data sets, and theories must be explicitly comparable to reveal the nested patterns and processes that make up global landuse and land-cover change. True enough. Scale is a concept that allows individual actors, social institutions, ecological dynamics, and regional political processes to be bolted together into a single analytical framework. CIPEC calls this a “multiscalar” (p. 47), actor-oriented approach to land-use decision making and the social and ecological consequences of that micropolitical process. Perhaps because one-third of the book’s contributing authors are geographers, much of this attention to scale is spatial and organized around issues of spatial resolution in remote sensing. Temporal scale, in comparison, receives far less attention. Time appears as an ecological factor but rarely as a way of integrating social and environmental histories into land-use analysis. A third aspect of scale, and one of interest to anthropologists, is the editors’ notion of social scale. CIPEC’s work has thus far focused on the effects on forest ecology of decision making at individual, household, community, and regional levels. They suggest that because the land-use decisions of individuals are structured by larger institutional, cultural, and socioeconomic constraints, developing robust multidisciplinary explanations of forest gain, loss, or maintenance requires attention to how such social “levels of aggregation” (p. 47) interact with biophysical processes that can be plotted on temporal and spatial scales. The intended result of such a synthetic approach is a three-dimensional heuristic framework, with scaled axes of space, time, and “human decision making” (p. 65). This sort of synthesis is to be applauded and in widespread practice would allow anthropologists to contribute more to the fledging field of planet management. The CIPEC approach to social scale and decision making is, however, based on rule-based econometric models, not holistic sociocultural contexts. Instead of the culture concept, here we have “agent-based models” of how “norm entrepreneurs” contribute to rule formation (p. 202). The CIPEC view of human behavior is therefore ethnographically “thin” enough that, when its analytical reach extends to continental comparisons (Africa versus Asia), the major conclusion is that forces vary because of “differences in history and in socio-economic, political, and biophysical contexts” (p. 324). And surely we already knew that. The second major theme of the book is agency. CIPEC’s focus on decision making at multiple biophysical and institutional levels leads its researchers to specify how “rules-inuse” shape social actors’ ability to act upon forests. This approach to forests as socio-natural processes allows the book’s contributors to assert that factors such as population pressure and tenurial regime (private, state, and common-property) do not correlate consistently with forest growth or decline. The CIPEC way of “seeing the forests and the trees” does not, however, examine the structuring of human agency and the fact that socioeconomic and cognitive structures have agency of their own. The chapter on theoretical approaches to human-environmental interactions, for example, criticizes the mechanistic and reductive tendencies of demographic approaches (such as Malthus, Boserup, and von Thunen’s insights) and structuralist approaches (such as Chayanov’s household life-cycle dynamics and Wallerstein’s world-systems theory) before articulating the actor-oriented multiscalar approach outlined above. By identifying the interplay of actors, rules, and institutions as the domain of agency for understanding land-use and land-cover change, this book deftly