THIRD RESPONSE PAPER: Abram or Alcock

Due at the Final Exam, 12/16

At least three pages, typewritten

ABRAM RESPONSE PAPER

David Abram argues for a renewed sense of what it means to be a sensing, living being, to be an earthly creature who perceives the world and so participates in it. Using Abram’s account of perception as participation, as well as his notions of the “life world” and “intersubjectivity,” revisit Berry’s critique of reductionism in the thought of E.O. Wilson and in the sciences generally. How might Abram’s argument for “a recuperation of the sensuous” supplement what Berry already argues in regard to reductionism in the sciences?

In doing so, think of a particular animal, plant or place that you would like to address in your remarks. This could include an animal companion, the squirrel in your back yard, a bear you once saw in a zoo, or deer in the woods or otters frolicking on a gut. It could also be the garden you planted, a forest you like to walk through, or the blackberry bushes you pick every summer. Berry argues: “The uniqueness of an individual creature is inherent, not in its physical or behavioral anomalies, but in its life….Its life is all that happens to it in its place. Its wholeness is inherent in its life, not in its physiology or biology. This wholeness of creatures and places together is never going to be apparent to an intelligence coldly determined to be empirical or objective. It shows itself to affection and familiarity” (Life is a Miracle, p. 40). Reflect on the particular animal, plant or place you have chosen in a manner that you think fits with Berry’s analysis. Then consider how Abram’s account of perception as “animate” (i.e. alive) would add to your reflections. In doing so, consider what might be lost to or gained for your sensing and knowing of your animal, plant or place, if you were merely to read about it in a scientific journal or view a program about it on Animal Planet.

ALCOCK RESPONSE PAPER

Madhav Gadgil is a former student of E.O. Wilson’s who got his PhD in biology at Harvard. He now is employed at the Centre for Ecological Sciences in Bangalore India. In several different articles and book chapters he has made an argument for understanding the Indian caste system as an adaptative response to resource scarcity that evolved over the previous millennia in India. Following is a summary of his argument, based on pp. 91-112, “Caste and Conservation,” in his co-authored book (with Ram Guha), This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India. For your response paper to Alcock, please read this summary of Gadgil’s argument, then give your best attempt at determining what Alcock’s response to this argument would be. Would Alcock approve of this argument, or no? Is this, in Alcock’s terms, a proper use of adaptation to try to understand the evolution of a human cultural system? After you have determined Alcock’s response, you may give your own – what are the benefits, and/or dangers, of this analysis? (please do not quibble with Gadgil’s version of India’s history – although it is a smidge problematic with regard to dating the origins of caste, take that as a given, and focus upon the argument)

Gadgil was curious about why India developed the caste system. He decided that the answer was that castes emerged as a response to divide scarce natural resources. His argument is as follows:

Indian society “experienced a major resource crunch over the fourth to tenth centuries of the Christian era.” During this period of urban and trade decline, the caste system, as it is seen in modern India, solidified as Buddhism and Jainism (rival non-Hindu religious practices that did not emphasize caste) declined. Indian society in the fourth century consisted of tens of thousands of specific caste groups, who only bred among themselves (and who also had distinctive religious practices and rituals). Each village in India, “the basic unit of social organization,” included populations of several distinct caste groups. In these villages, “caste based village societies developed a variety of institutions to regulate the use of living resources … and developed an elaborate system of the diversified use of living resources that greatly reduced inter-caste competition, and very often ensured that a single caste group had a monopoly over the use of any specific resource from a given locale.” Each caste group in a village, then, would have specific portions of their environment that they could, and would, exploit. Thus, one caste might fish in rivers, another might farm grain, a third might maintain wood lots, a fourth might trap wild animals for food. Through their specialization, they would not be in direct competition, and each caste group would be motivated to preserve their own specific resource. In this way they could live in the same village, but use different portions of that village’s environment. Importantly, they would practice sustainable resource use – because each caste could only exploit their one resource, and if that resource ran out they would starve. “Violations of caste duty [such as harvesting a resource assigned to another caste] were punished by … social sanctions such as excommunication,” and ultimately banishment from the village (and thus, often, death, as the banished individual would not be taken in by any other village).

“The Caste groups of Indian society might with profit be compared to biological species. … Like biological species they have been largely, though not absolutely, isolated reproductively through cultural barriers. Like the species within a biological community, the different caste groups also have characteristic modes of subsistence and often tend to occupy distinct habitats. It is therefore appropriate to talk of the ecological niches of these various caste groups in terms of the habitats they occupy, the natural resources they utilize, and the relationship they bear to other caste groups with whom they interact. … [We thus] interpret the caste system as a form of ecological adaptation …” From this point, Gadgil goes on to claim that the caste system is ecologically sustainable in India, as opposed to modern systems of resource exploitation that have broken down traditional evolved divisions of resource use. The caste system is adaptive, and modern agriculture and land tenure practices in India are maladaptive.