Foragers, Farmers and Fishers: Responses to Environmental Perturbation

The role of environmental perturbation in shaping human society and culture has received increasing attention of late, attention that reflects a growing sense that global environmental changes currently underway will have unpredictable and potentially disastrous consequences in local contexts (e.g. Beck 1992; Caplan 2000; Grove and Chappell 2000; Haberle and Chepstow Lusty 2000; Hester and Harrison 2002; Hoffman and Oliver-Smith 2002; Kirsch 2001; Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 1999; Rees 2003; Torrence and Grattan 2002). Here, we take the word ‘environment’ to refer to ‘that which surrounds’ and consider that, for analytical purposes, both ‘environments’ and ‘perturbations’ may embrace referents other than the physical and biological. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, drought, and global warming may all disrupt people’s relations with local environments but, so too, may the intrusion of external political and economic systems. The consequences of the latter perturbations have been the particular concern of political ecology which, in different ways, analyses articulations between nature, society and history to identify relations of power and practice and draw connections with the sustainability of either or both local life-ways and local environments (Biersack 1999; Brosius 1999; Escobar 1999; Peet and Watts 2004; Robbins 2004; Vayda and Walters 1999; Walker 2005). Recent studies have tended to focus on particular cases of perturbation and response, seeking evidence of resilience or vulnerability, of continuity or change in the affected society. Details of the perturbation itself, or the extent to which people may be either directly implicated in the events that befall them, or positioned by broad-scale political and economic factors to respond as they do, are often central to the discussion. In this article we take an explicitly anthropological approach to a study of human responses to environmental perturbation. We use a comparative model that recognizes and prioritizes the role of prevailing expressions of ethos and sociality in conditioning responses to perturbation and which, thus, takes variation in those expressions as focal to analysis. In doing so we are aligned with the humanistic and environmentalist agendas of political ecology while striving to develop a more generic understanding of processes that shape human action in, as well as on, the worlds that people experience. With reference to ethos and sociality, those processes, we assert, are likely to have similar conditioning or constraining effects irrespective of whether the source of perturbation is judged to arise from external physical or external politico-economic causes. To an important extent this is because the ways in which people respond to events that befall them are, in the first instance, shaped by their own understandings of the causes of those events and, hence, by ways in which they themselves assign or accept blame and responsibility. We seek to direct attention to the importance of these aspects of response to perturbation. Our analysis is predicated on recognition of the recursiveness of the relationship between people and environment. The ways people respond to perturbations are conditioned by the ways they understand and organize relationships with the environment and with other people, but perturbations may also challenge such understandings and stimulate changes in practice. First, then, we ask how sociality and ethos may influence short term responses to perturbation. Our data here come from two Papua New Guinean societies, Kubo and Bedamuni, and the perturbation was an extended drought during 1997 (Minnegal and Dwyer 2000a). Secondly, we ask how perturbation may, in the longer term, influence the emergence of new forms of sociality and ethos. Our data come from two communities of commercial fishers, seiners who target whiting and flathead and scallopers, at Lakes Entrance in Victoria, Australia (Dwyer et al. 2003; Minnegal et al. 2003), and the perturbations were past ‘collapses’ in those fisheries. Our analyses of these short and longer term responses are situated within a descriptive and comparative frame that concerns dimensions of social complexity. Finally, we ask how people’s understandings of the cause of perturbations may influence their responses. Here, we