"Tradition" is a Moving Target

I've often fantasized having a bumper sticker on the back of my car with the words tradition is a moving target.  People often think of traditions, or traditional people as somehow frozen, a fixed form rigidly reproduced set by authority at some unspecified time in the distant past.  Essentialized and objectified.  Such readings of "tradition" figure largely in determinations of aboriginal rights, of allowed and disallowed techniques of harvesting and using fish and animals and berries, of relationships to landscape (which has relevance both in popular discourse and in treaty negotiations and court cases).  Such notions also figure in judgements of what is "authentic" or "inauthentic" in Aboriginal arts and crafts.  I recently viewed a video on German Indian re-enactment posted on the web by a Canadian First Nations woman.... the German participants used considerable rhetoric about how Indigenous North Americans, and their knowledges, were endangered and disappearing, and how these German admirers were preserving and carrying on the traditions....somehow failing to acknowledge living Indigenous North Americans, and their agency in moving their cultures, arts and identities into the present and future.  "Preserving the knowledge of the Elders"– something that has in fact occupied a good deal of my professional life– does not negate creativity, adaptation, resilience, or changing meanings and contexts.  And I have always striven to show that people I work with are contemporary Canadians, my teachers, friends, collaborators and sometimes neighbours.  Their knowledge is not fossil knowledge of the past, but knowledge that can be brought forward for now, and for the future.
Use of new materials, for example, does not render art less "authentic"; the authenticity resides in who creates it, in its meaning, in intent and purpose, in linkage with past in which it is rooted.  Silk screen prints, for example, were not a traditional way to depict Northwest Coast crests, which were displayed on wooden screens, in woven dance blankets (gwiis halaayt or Chilkat blankets)....in making this statement we run into two difficulties: one, what is the relevant time horizon for "traditional"? and two, in what way is the new hybrid form of silk screen prints made by Indigenous artists depicting Indigenous themes not traditional?  (Even the question of production of art or craft for sale is certainly now "traditional" if we can take practices from the 18th and 18th centuries as "traditional." Certainly in terms of cuisine, for example, no one would argue that boxty, made of potatoes that originated in Peru, is not traditional Irish fare, and certainly no one would contest the traditional nature of a Thanksgiving dinner featuring turkey, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce, all introduced to European and Euro-American cuisine in the 16th and 17th centuries.)  Museums and collectors all accept these art pieces as "traditional".

Another example of "tradition" that comes to mind is the beautiful appliqued art form usually known as "button blanket" (gwiis gan mala).  (The blanket shown here is a Haida example from a Totempole raising and Longhouse dedication in June of 1978.  It's iconic to me because of the contemporary context, and the presence of the little girl, now probably 40 years old). Abalone shell was a treasured embellishment on the Northwest Coast long before the advent of European trade goods.  Crest form chiefly blankets displaying prerogative and authority displaying appliqued House, Clan or moiety crests are widespread up and down the Northwest Coast, and are certainly taught in traditional form by older knowledgeable women teaching younger ones how to cut, applique and embellish the blankets, though fulled red, navy or black woolen cloth is certainly not Pre-Contact.  Social relations in who draws the pattern, and who stitches blankets for whom continue to display ancient patterns of clan or house reciprocity and gender roles as well. Now I have learned that people use computer applications to draft complex and precise patterns for the appliqued figures.  Hybridity, and evolving tradition both. So tradition is not a reified set of practices, or products, it is a process which creates linkage between past and future through the constantly shifting moment of the present.
Iain Davidson-Hunt and Michael O'Flaherty have described cultural landscape as emergent in a similar vein.  Contesting now entrenched notions of heritage conservation as the preservation of things, of forms, they contend that preservation of cultural landscapes must instead by approached from the perspective of the set of relationships between people and land, and the customary practices (themselves evolving) that have shaped, and continue to shape the land.  The relationships are what is required to create and maintain a cultural landscape.  Many traditional peoples are deeply in relationship with their homelands, conceiving of themselves as part of the land (for example, Catherine McClellan and Council of Yukon Indians book on Yukon First Nations in the last quarter of the 20th century is entitled part of the Land, Part of the Water).  I discussed these issues in an earlier blog on the Hortobagy Salt Steppe World Heritage Site in Hungary, and I've also written of these matters in Trail of Story, Traveller's Path, Reflections on Ethnoecology and Landscape (available through Creative Commons on the AUPress Website at http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120163).
The difference of perspective on what heritage conservation is speaks to conceptual separation or integration of humans the land, and the other entities that share it, that is, whether people are part of ecosystems, in webs of relationship with the biophysical environment and integral to the environments of which they form a part, or separate from them and potentially destructive of a pure and vulnerable "nature".   The crux of the matter, then, is are we part of "Nature", or separate from, and potentially destructive of it?  Are relationships with the land, with the natural world, so to speak, to be conceived of as relationships of mutually supporting entities, or will "Nature" be stripped of all of its richness, its rights, its agency to be objectified and commodified, to be bought and sold, reduced to monetary value and universal exchange? How will we deal with the rights and relationships of Indigenous peoples to homelands in our complicated pastiche of nation states, settlers, immigrants, migrants and globalization?

A matter of temperature

Minus 25C- gray and starting to snow. Minus 28C yesterday, bright, sunny and cold. Walking in the ravine, with the the scintillating ice crystals on the snow surface and the sharp clear cold was wonderful. They say it will be plus two by the weekend. The temperature oscillations this winter are beyond my experience….drastic changes over 24 hours, or within two or three days. It makes me wonder how plants, animals, people, can adapt. This face of climate change is emerging as a key pattern… unpredictability of weather, and drastic shifts, spatial heterogeneity in the pattern of temperature and precipitation. Such shifts are stressors: winter thaws followed by hard freezes make it hard for caribou to paw through the snow to uncover the “reindeer moss” lichens they eat below. Moose find it difficult to walk through snowpacks with several crusts buried within them. Warm days in fall followed by sudden hard freezes can interfere with dormancy mechanisms in plants….similarly in the spring, where if plants break dormancy too soon and open their leaves, they may then be hit by frost, or a late season fall of wet snow can break limbs and inflict serious damage on trees. Organisms that can tolerate unpredictable change, that have wide amplitude in their habitat parameters, will survive. Anything that requires exactness and predictability in timing of change will be hard hit. Resilience is key… A Gwich’in friend once said, “Our Elders tell us never to plan. Because you never know what’s going to happen.” She then went on to comment ruefully that it was difficult with jobs to be flexible, and take advantage of opportunities… something I feel myself in a small way when it’s a perfect day to ski, but I have a meeting on the calendar that keeps me inside in a windowless room staring at projected powerpoints glaring on the screen. For travelling on the land, responding to the right combination of snow conditions and temperature is more important. As our structures become ever more bureaucratized and removed from the natural world, I worry about our ability to perceive and respond to change. Inertia is strong. The weather may change quickly, but our institutions change slowly, and are not well coupled to changes outside the socio-economic system.

Changing contexts for Ethnobiology

Permafrost slumps such at this one in the Richardson Mountains will be come more frequent with climate change.
Contexts for traditional and local knowledges are changing rapidly at the present time. Ethnobiology looks at “traditional” “cultural,” “knowledge”’ of the living world and of the human environment. What any of those terms might mean seems to be a moving target. Global changes in environment, society, economy and the political map are all moving at a dizzying rate. Global appetites for commodities create dramatic shifts in the relationships of Indigenous peoples to their homelands, as their territories suddenly are converted into “empty land” which their enclosing states give away for a variety of resource concessions to multinationals (see the opening chapters of Anna Tsing’s 2005 book Friction, an Ethnography of Global Connection for a graphic description of the impact of timber concessions and oil palm plantations in Kalimantan).
Climate change is an obvious change in the world external to ourselves that calls into question the usefulness of the rich detailed knowledge of rhythms of life in locale. In rapidly and drastically changing conditions, the insights gathered from observations of past patterns of timing and relationship may no longer provide guidance for the future. As a case in point, Joe Linklater, Chief of the Vuntut Gwitchin Nation of Old Crow in the northern Yukon commented on the impacts of climate change for his people and their environment at the Northern Truths Symposium held in Edmonton in January of 2008. ‘The Vuntut Gwitchin are ‘people of the lakes’, he said. ‘There are 2000 lakes in Old Crow Flats and lakes are now draining. Land is being degraded increasingly rapidly. There is uncertainty around the traditional way of life,’ he went on. ‘So what good is traditional knowledge if people are uncertain about future? Technology is changing, and adaptation creates stress in the community. How do we adapt and use our traditional knowledge?’ he queried. Theorists such as Fikret Berkes, Lance Gunderson and CS Holling explore “resilience”, the capacity to productively and effectively respond to change, in their consideration of sustainable life ways and increasingly highlight “adaptation.” (see Navigating Social-Ecological Systems, Building Resilience for Complexity and Change F. Berkes, J Colding and C Folke, eds, 2003, and Panarchy, Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, L. H. Gunderson and C.S. Holling, eds., 2002). The wave of the future....
A new and quite different change in the context for ethnobiological knowledge entered my awareness this past week: synthetic biology. Synthetic biology is a marriage of genetics and engineering to create life forms from basic DNA building blocks that will be little factories to churn out compounds that interest us. Generally this is accomplished by taking a generic bacterium, say an “E. coli”, and then putting the genes one wants into the bacterial genome, and culturing the resultant tailored strain. Some experiments, according to the New Yorker article in the September 28 issue that introduced me to the term (New Yorker, Annals of Science “A Life of its Own- Where will synthetic biology lead us?" http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/28/090928fa_fact_specter), hope to create wholly synthetic organisms—the stuff of brave new worlds, and of nightmarish sci-fi scenarios. As we read on, my attention was suddenly caught by the word “artemisinin”. Artemisinin is the latest best hope in the arsenal of antimalarial drugs, acting by a wholly different mechanism than quinine and its synthetic derivatives, so still effective against those virulent strains that have become resistant to quinine type compounds. Artemisinin is a component of the common weedy wormwood Artemesia annua and was the basis of activity of Chinese traditional herbal medicines made from A. annua. It has recently been gaining prominence in efforts to combat malaria worldwide, and cultivation of Artemesia annua on a large scale has been initiated in Asia to provide a supply of raw material for drug production. By chance, it seems, one of the early proponents of synthetic biology, Jay Keasling of the University of California at Berkeley, decided to focus on a potentially useful class of organic compounds called isoprenoids for his initial efforts in demonstrating biosynthesis in enngineered organisms. These compounds apparently are present in many economic plants and produce both flavour essences in ginger and cinnamon, and the pigments in sunflowers and tomatos. One day a graduate student called Keasling’s attention to a compound in this class called amorphadiene –which happens to be the precursor to artemisinin. Keasling initially was completely unfamiliar with artemisinin, but quickly saw the potential to create industrial level synthesis of the precursor for drug production through his bacterial process. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a world leader in the fight against malaria, provided backing. A consortium is now anticipating having their synthetically produced artemisinin drug on the marked by 2012. Other medicinal compounds are likely to follow.
The ethical and philosophical implications of this development are enormous. The New Yorker article byline says “If the science truly succeeds, it will make it possible to supplant the world created by Darwinian evolution with one created by us.” This is a far cry from the holistic community of beings of many indigenous cosmologies, where social relations and reciprocity characterize relations between hunter and prey, where other beings have agency and rights inherent in their being. Hubris, too, to imagine that humans can get the balancing act right. Unsurprisingly, bioethicists are also concerned by the implications of such perspectives. The August 2009 issue of The American Scholar (page 14), contains a short piece entitled “Synthetic Biology’s New Bugs” by Professor Arthur Kaplan of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics. Among the questions he poses are several that bear on relations of humans with the living world. He queries: “What is the risk that new life forms created by synthetic biologists will escape into the general environment and cause havoc with natural microbes or other living beings?” and “Is it ethical to patent a new life form? The law seems to permit it, but is this in the best interest of science in the long term? Should all forms of life be outside the realm of patents?” . He also questions “Is life reducible to genetic messages? If a scientists creates a new life form, even a microbe, does that challenge religious views that say only God can create life?” Indigenous peoples, as well as devout members of many of the world’s religions may have perspectives on the inherently sacred nature of life and the rightness of the natural order, and that it is inappropriate, even an act of hubris, to attempt to create living beings. Another question that Kaplan raises deals with global equity: “If synthetic biology brings significant benefits to humankind, how can it be assured that the rich and poor benefit equally?”
We might query, what are the implications of such a fundamental shift in relations of humans to other living beings and the living world brought about by creating novel organisms, however good [or ill] the intent? Do we truly know enough to be sure that no harm can come from these organisms entering the environment, or perhaps causing human illness? Will we respect the miracle of life and the inherent rights of other organisms if we can make life the way we make a chair or an mp3 player? Can we be sure that, if we have the means, we will not choose to make terrible novel biological weapons, or modify multicellular animals nearer to ourselves, or even humans? How shall we value the possibility of an affordable and plentiful antimalarial therapy, or perhaps a fuel source not dependent on fossil fuels against these other possibilities?