Gellert, Paul K.

English

University of Tennessee, Knoxville: Trace

University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleTrace: Tennessee Research and CreativeExchangeSociology Publications and Other Works SociologyJanuary 2007Review of Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge,Colonial Encounters and Social Imagination byJulie CruikshankPaul K. GellertUniversity of Tennessee - Knoxville, pgellert@utk.eduFollow this and additional works at: http://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_socopubsPart of the Nature and Society Relations Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, andthe Social and Cultural Anthropology CommonsThis is brought to you for free and open access by the Sociology at Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusionin Sociology Publications and Other Works by an authorized administrator of Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For moreinformation, please contact trace@utk.edu.Recommended CitationGellert, Paul K., "Review of Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters and Social Imagination by Julie Cruikshank"(2007). Sociology Publications and Other Works.http://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_socopubs/68260–Population, Communities, and the Environmentspace of finite, inexpansible status. Thus, ad-vancing a new moral vocabulary inevitablyimplies working to delegitimize another. Ac-knowledging this zero-sum dynamic is help-ful for understanding why some cultural dif-ferences necessarily lead to conflict. This ideahas broad implications for thinking aboutcultural conflict. The book ends with a shortconclusion.Emerging Moral Vocabularies is a goodbook that could have been better. Its prima-ry fault is a lack of engagement with socio-logical literatures that speak precisely to theproblem that Lowe wants to address.Abbott’s work on professional ecologies (andJohn Evans’s extension of it to the bioethicsdebate) is formally very similar to Lowe’smodel. Boltanksi and Thévenot’s work on“repertoires of justification” and the neo-insti-tutionalists’ emphasis on legitimacy process-es (among others) seem like vital points ofreference for thinking about ideologicalecologies. Engaging these thinkers wouldhave added breadth to the book’s target au-dience, depth to its argument, and (presum-ably) generated new insights into the move-ments in question.Similarly, the author hints at the work ofLamont and Swidler on cultural repertoires insome tantalizing ways, but never really putsthese connections to good use. For instance,one idea that Lowe considers briefly, but thatI would like to have seen more fully ex-plored, is that the “moral toolkit” is a moreinternalized, more emotionally salient subsetof the “cultural toolkit.” After all, despite hischoice of words, Lowe makes clear thatmoral vocabularies are more than just wordswe use; in some cases, they have the powerto shape entire lives.In the end, however, these weaknessesmight have more to do with the fragmentedstructure of the field than with any failing onthe author’s part. For scholars who are inter-ested in bridging the field’s structural holes,this book has much value. Cultural sociolo-gists who want to understand better thestruggles that produce shared meaning andsocial movement scholars who want to thinkabout the broader cultural impact of themovements they study should take a look.POPULATION,COMMUNITIES, ANDTHE ENVIRONMENTDo Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge,Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagina-tion, by Julie Cruikshank. Vancouver, BC:UBC Press and Seattle, WA: University ofWashington Press, 2005. 312 pp. $25.00paper. ISBN: 0295985143.PAUL K. GELLERTUniversity of Tennesseepgellert@utk.eduThere is no doubt that a book that asks read-ers to conceive of glaciers as sentient beingstakes on a challenge. Nature’s agency?! Mostsociologists, as well as other social scientistssteeped in Western epistemologies and on-tologies, will reject this notion as out of hand.Yet, Julie Cruikshank’s Do Glaciers Listen?broaches nature’s agency—“a sentient land-scape that listens and responds to human in-discretion” (p. 142)—in order to examine thecomplex intersection of culture and nature,so long separated in Western scientific analy-ses by sociologists and others. Building onearly encounters between Western explorersand colonists with First Nation people in theSaint Elias Mountains of what is now theYukon Territory, she argues not only thatearlier, more equal transfers of knowledgehave been replaced by more unbalanced en-counters, but also that stories continue tomatter for contemporary debates about envi-ronmentalism and global warming, as well asbiodiversity and local knowledge.The book is divided into three interwovensections on Matters of Locality, Practices ofExploration, and Scientific Research in Sen-tient Places. The sections illuminate, respec-tively, questions of local culture and memo-ry; intersecting narratives and the unequalpower relations surrounding them in variousencounters between outsiders and indige-nous peoples; and the application of science,mapping, and new scientific fields such as In-digenous Knowledge (IK). One could readeach section separately, but the cumulativeeffect is worth the effort. Cruikshank buildsContemporary Sociology 36, 3Delivered by Ingenta to  :University of TennesseeMon, 26 Oct 2009 18:07:04Population, Communities, and the Environment–261from local indigenous viewpoints to the nine-teenth century colonial projects in “Russian”America and “British” North America to twen-tieth and twenty-first century global projectsof environmental sustainability representedby the designation of much of this area as aUNESCO World Heritage Site. Cruikshank’sown project is sociologically complex andhistorically satisfying for she concretelydemonstrates how the local and global arenot two “locations,” but different aspects ormoments of on-going processes of conquestand resistance. Moreover, the processes mayseem pre-determined in retrospect, but asCruikshank reconstructs the past encountersand the selectivity of scientific reporting, oneincreasingly appreciates the historical inter-mingling of ideas and practices and her in-sistence that we listen to other voices—in-cluding even the glaciers that are listening tous.Cruikshank, professor emerita of anthro-pology at the University of British Columbia,has spent decades in the region, studying a“place” that moves from the time of the LittleIce Age (1550–1900) and the many local peo-ple and outsiders who have moved aroundthis liminal location. The main text beginswith thirteen oral histories shared with Cruik-shank by three elderly Tlingit women in the1970s. Tlingit stories portray glaciers as con-scious and responsive; they are deeply of-fended by the smell of cooking with greaseand open up, posing great danger to hu-mans—especially those with the hubris to ig-nore their desires. Cruikshank’s aim is notjust to offer alternative voices, but to prob-lematize our own “normalized understand-ings of what ‘nature’ means” so that we mightend our complicity in smothering indigenousnarratives as “irrelevant to the modern world”(p. 258).To do so, she turns to the historicalrecords and oral accounts of travels by theFrench Jean-Francois de La Pérouse, Ameri-can John Muir and British Edward Glave inthree fascinating chapters on the more bal-anced eighteenth and nineteenth century en-counters between European explorers andindigenous groups. French and Tlingit furtraders meet inside Lituya Bay on new landemerging at the end of the Little Ice Age. Theencounter is largely ignored in Tlingit ac-counts emphasizing the losses of life fromecological disaster but serves to sediment En-lightenment notions of nature/culture separa-tion for the French. A century later, when theU.S. military preferred to maintain order byforce, Muir brought transcendental notions ofspirit to a people who rejected any idea of adesocialized spirit. Over numerous visits,they shared stories about nature, glacial re-treat and religion, seeking common groundon philosophical questions such as whetherwolves have souls or glaciers respond to hu-mans. Ironically, Muir’s New York editor atThe Century Magazine excised thoughtfulobservations about Tlingit views of nature“lest they shake up categories already shap-ing the American environmental movement”(p. 244). Thus, the encounters were shapedby their interpreters and audiences back inthe metropole. The Tlingit audience, mean-while, dismissed Muir as witchlike for hislengthy excursions by himself onto the glaci-ers. Lastly, Cruikshank pairs Glave’s narra-tives of Alaska and of the Congo, effectivelydemonstrating how initial receptiveness mor-phed into Congo-based hostility towards un-friendly glaciers and equally unfriendly hu-mans and speculating that what he learned inthe Arctic may have influenced his anti-slav-ery activism in the Congo.As greater globalizing forces impinge onthe region, beginning with the gold rush thatbrought forty thousand goldseekers to theYukon, Cruikshank briefly examines ques-tions of science and power. The mappingover of indigenous territories by Russian,U.S., and Canadian authorities, as James Scotthas pointed out, is typical of the ways inwhich Western states “see” by emphasizingboundary lines and ignoring humans and so-cial activity in the landscape. Finally, Cruik-shank notes the simultaneous exaltation ofIndigenous Knowledge and abuses of tradi-tional knowledge as it is re-“discovered” byscientists and conservationists. Global envi-ronmental narratives, she argues, are de-ployed to place pristine, primordial wilder-ness under human protection.Sociologists of culture, environmental so-ciologists, and sociologists of science, knowl-edge, and technology should be interested inthis volume. It could be usefully assigned inadvanced undergraduate and graduate cours-es to explore a wide array of themes. Forcourses on colonialism and globalization itmight be paired with a work that recountsthe material processes of conquest that areContemporary Sociology 36, 3Delivered by Ing nta to  :Univ rs ty of TennesseeMon, 26 Oct 2009 18:07:04262–Population, Communities, and the Environmenttoo briefly mentioned in this work. Finally, Iwould make a broader case that this bookshould be read more widely in sociology toremind us all that the taken-for-granted sep-aration of categories of nature and culture (orsociety) were produced during particular pe-riods of empire and colonial expansion.Cruikshank’s beautifully crafted volume is acall to consider more carefully what it meansto be modern and what our role as modernsocial analysts might be.Ethnic Origins: The Adaptation of Cambodianand Hmong Refugees in Four American Cities,by Jeremy Hein. New York, NY: Russell SageFoundation, 2006. 304 pp. $37.50 cloth. ISBN:0871543362.STEVEN J. GOLDMichigan State UniversitySince the 1960s, the most visible studies toanalyze the role of a group’s culture in de-termining its place in American society haveendorsed the culture of poverty thesis. Assuch, they contend that impoverished groupsremain poor not because of structural factorslike class inequality, economic restructuring,and racism, but rather because of intergener-ationally transferred values that preclude up-ward mobility.By claiming that poverty is due to dys-functional culture rather than unjust socialarrangements, such studies conclude that so-cial and economic reforms intended to fosteradvancement among the poor are bound tofail since impoverished groups lack the val-ues required to take advantage of them. Thisallows right-wing ideologues who opposeeconomic redistribution to assert that theirposition is not rooted in greed, but rather isjustified by scientific research that predictsthe failure of such policies.Because sociologists are convinced thatstructure affects mobility, most shy awayfrom placing cultural matters at the center oftheir studies of immigrant and ethnic groupsin American society. In Ethnic Origins: theAdaptation of Cambodian and HmongRefugees in Four Americans Cities, JeremyHein argues for the reversal of this trend. Heurges social scientists to examine groups’ his-torical backgrounds and cultural outlooks.Without doing so, he insists, they cannot ful-ly understand migrants’ fate. Hein calls thisperspective the ethnic origins hypothesis.To prove his point, Hein compares the ex-perience of two Southeast Asian refugeegroups—the Hmong and Cambodians—marked by similar regional origins, resettle-ment contexts, levels of English competence,skill and education, yet distinct patterns ofadaptation, community formation, identity,and political outlook in the U.S. Given thatthe groups are marked by contextual similar-ities yet exhibit differing patterns of adapta-tion, the author concludes that culture andhistory offer the best explanation for thesedifferences.He shows the distinct ethnic origins ofHmong and Cambodians. Cambodians are in-dividualistic in outlook, Theravada Buddhistin religion, and bilateral in family orientation.As a result, they display a weak collectiveidentity in the U.S., react in a relatively pas-sive manner to racism and anti-immigrantwelfare reform policies, and are open to Pan-Asian identities.In contrast, the Hmong are highly collec-tive in outlook, patrilineal and clan-based infamily orientation, and animist in religion.Having originated in China prior to their dis-persal into the Laotian highlands, they pos-sess a strong sense of group consciousnessupon arrival in the U.S. Accordingly, theytend to preserve group solidarity, activelychallenge racialization and welfare reform,discourage intermarriage, and feel little con-nection to Pan-Asian identity.Having established the utility of this per-spective, Hein goes on to show how ethnicorigins can be incorporated into prominentmodels of immigrant adaptation—includingassimilation, segmented assimilation, groupposition theory, and ethnic competition theo-ry. Hein strongly argues for disaggregatingthe racial-ethnic categories normally used ingovernmental reports and social science re-search on migrant populations (black, white,Asian, and Hispanic), since this system ofclassification impedes researchers’ ability tolearn about specific groups’ histories, out-looks, and identities.In addition to offering a well-researchedand systematically argued statement aboutthe importance of group culture in shapingmigrants’ adaptation to the United States, Eth-nic Origins also offers a wealth of informa-Contemporary Sociology 36, 3Delivered by Ingenta to  :University of TennesseeMon, 26 Oct 2009 18:07:04

Review of Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters and Social Imagination by Julie Cruikshank

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Review of Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters and Social Imagination by Julie Cruikshank

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