New god on the block

I believe I've heard enough, for now, about what deserves protection.

Typical Vietnamese roadside view: a partially-digested mountain.

This is the second of four posts trying to look at the ideas which have had me caught since about 2008. I’m calling them a trap. The point of writing this down is not supposed to be to convince you and show that I’m right. The point is supposed to be that I can understand how this trap works, understand why some ways of getting out of it haven’t worked and think what might work as an actual way out of it. However I do have to suspect my own motivations in constructing such a trap. Maybe I’m trying to get out of going anywhere but seeking company at the same time.

So that’s my attempt at a waiver. Here is the second proposition of the four that I am questioning:

“There is something in ‘traditional’ or indigenous cultures that provides some hope or model for where we ought to be going for a better, saner future.”

Now to be quite clear I don’t think that’s wrong. It’s just that, as with the last proposition, it seems to me that when people are saying that, there’s another thing they aren’t talking about.

Now I’m not sure how much that’s still true. Of my four propositions, I think this is the one on which the most advances have been made since 2008 and I am only just getting to grips with some of these. As it happens, I am getting to grips with them through things that anthropologists say and it would be a fair argument that I ought instead to be reading works by indigenous writers. Apart from anything else, that would probably be quicker; in anthropology I have to deal with sentences like this:

“Engaging our ethnographic setting, Stengers suggests that tolerance may protect what she calls "those that know" (for example "that other-than-humans are beliefs about nature") from a frightening prospect: that of having to consider that those practices and entities they deem unreal (and destined for extinction) could present themselves with the power to create a situation where ontological clashes would have to be anticipated everywhere without offering guarantees for the preservation of that which makes "those that know" who they are.”¹

I think I have an idea what it is saying; I think it is something like this: People living well within modernity - like us - are frightened by the idea of actually listening to animist views, rather than merely ‘respecting’ them from a safe distance. That is because, if we think animist views might be in any way valid it might puncture our smugness and knock us off our pedestal. Therefore we have to keep thinking of them as a primitive survival that is not long for this world. And yes I suppose that could be frightening, or at least disturbing. You know what’s more frightening, though? Frigging vampires.

It’s easy to be snarky at this academic language. Ecologists are caught in a different kind of jargon and I pity any anthropologist who has pick their way through our painfully pruned-down descriptors of statistical methods. Word limits are the bane of my life, which I’m sure comes as no surprise.

Although you know what’s worse than word limits? Frigging vampires.

OK I’m being silly, but I can only joke about them now because I imagine that either they don’t exist or that I am protected. It will, realistically, take a lot for me to consider giving up that protection. If you are a westerner trying to open yourself to how indigenous people might see the world. Or even trying to (really) open yourself to the possibility that they might see the world in a way that is different from yours and yet equally valid (perhaps because they are seeing a different world). Or even if you’re trying to open yourself to the views of other westerners who are trying to explain why that’s a good idea… then there’s a cost, and it’s not just a pricked ego and it’s not just sunk time.

I want, here to be very clear about what I think the cost is of moving into an animist world: Frigging vampires.

Different things disturb different people, though. Here’s another statement about fear from another pair of critical social scientists with very different views:

“And, while animals indeed have agency, there is something disturbing about removing a unique form of political agency from humans, as this ‘evacuates the world of recklessness, improvidence, liability, responsibility and a whole range of other moral parameters.’"²

The authors like italicising ‘political’ just as much as I like italicising ‘frigging vampires’ and it’s just as annoying. But what they find disturbing is the exact opposite of what disturbs me. They argue that, unless politics is considered to be limited to human beings, we won’t be able to assign responsibility for environmental destruction. Well OK but where there’s responsibility there’s generally something else, as Spiderman will tell you. It disturbs me that that all the political power belongs to humans. Nonetheless it appears that it does.

I’m pushing into this alien theory: on animism, on perspectivism, on multi-species studies, because I want to challenge that apparent fact. I’m looking for stories about power. What I find instead, once I’ve got my head around the language, are mostly stories about validity, value, the rights of things to exist. And, to be brutal, I get enough of that at home.

Yes I do know how that sounds, I’ve been on the other end of it. Well, kind of; the saola has.

I learned to stop using ideas about ‘primitive’, ‘outdated’, ‘doomed to extinction’ when studying evolutionary biology at Oxford. Evolution has nothing at all to do with ‘progress’ and it doesn’t give any comfort except the comfort of the familiar which even the worst ideas can give. I do fear that indigenous ways of living, like the saola, face extinction. That is not because I believe they somehow don’t belong in the future; it is because I can see them being destroyed and I can’t see how to stop that.

So, one evening in July, 2008, in the pastel-painted concrete guesthouse in Nam Đông, Nikolas suggested that maybe, rather than working primarily with government agencies, we could be working with the Katu people, or some of them anyway. Instead of trying to define, establish and enforce regulations, we could be attempting to support traditional ways of relating to the forest. However that morning, we had been told that the saola, like the spirits, had been driven back to the stream sources.

Now Nikolas had few illusions about the chances of such anthropologically-friendly conservation maintaining something as ephemeral as a saola population. He wasn’t naively offering a magic bullet but, well what we were doing now wasn’t working very well either. It was, at least an option.

Shouldn’t I, concerned with a wild beast in an old forest, take sides with the anthropologist? Both of us white, European, perhaps overly romantic, concerned with that which was unconstructed and ancient; meta-hunters, goddess chasers and both with the same name. On one level, at least, it was easy for us to understand each other. Through him, I might eventually be siding, not with the Katu people themselves, but with ‘indigenous people’ or ‘indigeneity’ as a concept (because the first allegiance of the Katu themselves was to the state, after all). Still, I’d be trying to take sides with something they could see and I could not, however they might feel about that thing. Perhaps a better way of putting it would be that I could seek an alliance, not with them, but with the spirits. Maybe through that I would have found myself eventually in conversation with indigenous people from elsewhere in the world who had maintained such old alliances. The enemy, after all, was the modern world: Capitalism or materialism or colonialism, something like that. That was what was threatening the saola and the Katu traditions together. To side with that would be insane, would it not?

What I maybe hadn’t made plain to Nikolas was just how much WWF’s original work in the area had been inspired by a vision of restoring local people’s rights to their land. However WWF was only able to operate in the country at all in a strongly regulated partnership with the state Forest Protection Department. Donor-friendly narratives about community use rights were translated on the ground into state-friendly narratives about educating and regulating backwards communities. It was not clear any human beings even knew they were doing this; it was just necessary to keep things moving in any way at all, to get the money spent. All this was bothering, confusing and occupying me and it seemed now that I was offered a solution: it didn’t matter what the best model was, it mattered who had power. Now, even leaving aside the regular bloody ritual child murders reported before the Revolution came, the state was deeply opposed to swidden cultivation. Maybe the Katu ‘system’ would work without the murders but there was no way it would work without swidden. And the state was committed to eliminating swidden.

Now you could say: well there’s exactly the problem, the state is wrong. You have to either work to change it or, if that’s not possible, get out of Vietnam and work on some state you could change, maybe your own. At the time, I’d probably have said that that was way too much of a long game to give the saola any chance. I’m pretty sure I’d have been correct but, again, the tactics I did choose weren’t so effective either, and so that’s not much of an argument.

Now I think I’d say something else. I’d suggest looking at the allegiance of the Katu people themselves. They recognised the power and superiority of the state. Perhaps there had been some, under the Agent Orange and the napalm, who had denied that authority and rejected that alliance but, if so, nobody was prepared to tell us what had happened to them. The very fact that the state could give people back the rights to their land meant that it was powerful enough to have taken them in the first place. Even if it could be persuaded to devolve them, it could always take them back again.

The same day I was told that the spirits were driven back to the stream sources and that the saola had been driven back to the same place. The Katu spirits were in the exact same position as the saola. The Katu themselves were not, because they were recognised as human and hence intrinsically powerful and important. They were not recognized as ‘indigenous’ because the Vietnamese term is ‘ethnic minority’, but what would it have mattered if they were? Whatever aspect of their existence was deemed worth saving, it would be saved, like the saola, by the state and as an ornament to the state.

It made emotional sense to accept Nikolas’ proposition that we should align with the old world of the Katu. It made emotional sense to me, reading Moby Dick, to take the side of the Whale. And that is despite the deadly and sometimes apparently malevolent nature of both. In 2008, by a stream in Nam Đông, under a haunted mountain, I wrote in my diary that I took Moby Dick’s side although he would not care. His not caring seemed the best thing about him. Refreshingly inhuman.

Yet I also read Melville’s declaration of faith in the ‘eternal whale’, spouting defiance against humanity’s paltry rapacity in the vastness of the sea and, while being moved by it, I knew it was nonsense. Being a literary great doesn’t make you a prophetic ecologist. And I’m afraid it does matter; I’m not going to believe in a literature insulated from subsequent history. The meaning of Moby Dick is different because of what’s happened since. That some can think otherwise is precisely because they can believe in an eternal human condition apart from the non-human world. Which they can believe in precisely because of the work of the whalers who helped build that condition. Moby Dick might not care who takes his side but we do not care whether he cares. He will live or die based on the whim of human powers. As will the saola. As will the spirit traditions of the Katu. As, apparently, will the spirits themselves - or at least they will retreat or advance on that basis.

Let me put it more simply; summarize the summary. The Katu viewed the world as a hierarchy of powers, with whom it was necessary to make alliances. Alliances and friendships, or alliances and kinship are not mutually exclusive things. But, as others may concentrate on the friendship and the kinship, I concentrate nastily on the alliance. Alliances are not necessarily stable. If a more powerful ally comes along loyalty may bind some to their old allegiances. But, if the new ally is really more powerful, the loyalists won’t hold out long. How long depends on how fierce the fight is and in the Katu lands it was very fierce.

So, indigenous and traditional cultures can offer something. But unless they can offer victory, that something is incomplete. And is victory likely? Have you seen this thing?

The depths stand naked in sunder behind it, the storms flee away;

In the hollow before it the thunder is taken and snared as a prey.³

I mean, it’s pretty bloody impressive, to be honest. Loth though I am to admit.

I’d be really interested to hear what I’ve missed here.

1. Blaser, M., De la Cadena, M., 2018. Pluriverse: proposals for a world of many worlds., in: De la Cadena, M., Blaser, M. (Eds.), A World of Many Worlds. Duke University Press, pp. 1–22.

2. Büscher, B., Fletcher, R., 2020. The conservation revolution: radical ideas for saving nature beyond the Anthropocene. Verso Books, London.

3. This is from Swinburne’s ‘Hymn to Proserpina.’ Which… actually is somebody talking about how a new development in the world stage which he doesn’t like (Christianity) is going to be swept away by the ‘wave of the world.’ So maybe that’s kind of ironic seeing as I’m going to express suspicion of that kind of argument next week.