“Scale” as Cultural Attribution: Anthropological Contributions in Political Ecology Studies

Pangeran P. P. A. Nasution

doi:10.53696/27219283.437

Authors

Pangeran P. P. A. Nasution ⁽¹⁾ Universitas Malikussaleh

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.53696/27219283.437

Keywords:

Scale, Cultural Attribution, Anthropology, Political Ecology

Abstract

The environment is as place where people live while providing various possibilities to meet their needs. Humans are connected to nature through culture by a system of symbols, meanings, and values. The problematic relation between humans and the environment currently known as “hybrid complexity” involves another analytical tradition such as political economy, symbolic anthropology, and historical anthropology. Political ecology as a study with a transdisciplinary perspective try to gain an explanation about the relationship between humans and the environment not in a static and harmonious fabricate, but in chaotic (noisy and complicated) interconnections. The basic assumption of the study of political ecology is the issue of inequality: the existence of asymmetric forces that produce socio-economic inequality, and these problems are present in the relation between human life and the environment. Humans relate to the environment through a diverse network of interests at various levels and multi-capacities. The scale is one of the important concepts that deserve scrutiny in order to understand the workings of the political ecology approach. The scale is the “heuristic terminology” of culture. Humans are the main element of the scale that connects culture to its reality and as a feature of culture itself. Thus, the scale can be understood as a cultural attribution of the unit of explanation which includes the size, level, and relations of events and actions that mediate human relations and the environment of natural phenomena and socio-cultural phenomena.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Alland, A. J. (1975). Adaptation. Annual Review of Anthropology, 4, 59–73.

Attfield, R. (2010). Etika Lingkungan Global. Kreasi Wacana.

Benjaminsen, T. A., & Robbins, P. (2015). Nordic political ecologies. Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift, 69(4), 161–169. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/00291951.2015.1059879

Bhaskar, R. (1975). A Realist Theory of Science. Leeds Book.

Blaikie, P., & Brookfield, H. (1987). Land and Society. Methuen.

Brown, J. C., & Purcell, M. (2005). There’s Nothing Inherent About Scale: Political Ecology, the Local Trap, and the Politics of Development in the Brazilian Amazon.”. Geoforum, 36, 607–624.

Bryant, R. L. (1992). Political Ecology: An Emerging Research Agenda in Third-World Studies. Political Geography, 11(1), 12–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/0962-6298(92)90017-N

Cancela, M. V. (2019a). Environment and Latest Trends in Social Sciences. In J. L. Sarasola Sánchez-Serrano, F. Maturo, & Š. Hošková-Mayerová (Eds.), Qualitative and Quantitative Models in Socio-Economic Systems and Social Work (Studies in Systems, Decision and Control) (Vol. 208). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18593-0

Cancela, M. V. (2019b). Environment and Latest Trends in Social Sciences. In J. L. S. Sánchez-Serrano, F. Maturo, & Š. H.-M. (Eds.) (Eds.), Qualitative and Quantitative Models in Socio-Economic Systems and Social Work (Studies in Systems, Decision and Control). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18593-0

Dove, M. R., & Carpenter, C. (2008). "Major Historical Currents in Environmental Anthropology.” In Environmental Anthropology: A Historical Reader. Blackwell Publishing.

Escobar, A. (1999). After Nature Steps to an Antiessentialist Political Ecology. Current Anthropology, 40(1), 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1086/515799

Forsyth, T. (2003). Critical Political Ecology: The Politics of Environmental Science. Routledge.

Greenberg, J., & Park, T. (1994). Political Ecology. Journal of Political Ecology, 1(1), 1–12.

Haenn, N., & Wilk, R. (Eds.). (2006). The Environment in Anthropology: A Reader in Ecology, Culture, and Sustainable Living. New York University Press.

Heynen, N. C. (2003). The Scalar Production of Injustice within the Urban Forest. Antipode (Vol. 35, Issue 5, pp. 980–998). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2003.00367.x

Biersack, A. (1999). Introduction: From the “New Ecology” to the New Ecologies. American Anthropologist, 101(1), 5–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/683337

Jackson, C. (1997). Women in Critical Realist Environmentalism: Subaltern to the Species? Economy and Society, 26(1), 62–80.

Larsen, S. C. (2016). Regions of Care: A Political Ecology of Reciprocal Materialities. Journal of Political Ecology, 23(1), 159–166. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.2458/v23i1.20187

Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Social Production of Space. Blackwell Publishing.

Manson, S. M. (2008). Does Scale Exist? An Epistemological Scale Continuum for Complex Human-Environment Systems. Geoforum, 39(2), 776–788. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2006.09.010

Marston, S. A. (2017). The Social Construction of Scale. In Politics: Critical Essays in Human Geography (Vol. 24, pp. 297–320). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315246512-17

McCarthy, J. (2005). Scale, Sovereignty, and Strategy in Environmental Governance. Antipode (Vol. 37, Issue 4, pp. 731–753). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0066-4812.2005.00523.x

McKinnon, I., & Hiner, C. C. (2016). Does the Region Still have Relevance? (Re)considering “regional” Political ecology. Journal of Political Ecology, 23(1), 115–122. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.2458/v23i1.20182

Miller, F. P., & McGregor, A. (2019). Rescaling political ecology? World regional approaches to climate change in the Asia Pacific. Progress in Human Geography, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132519849292

Molle, F. (2007). Scales and Power in River Basin Management: The Chao Phraya River in Thailand. Geographical Journal, 173(4), 358–373. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4959.2007.00255.x

Natter, W., & Zierhofer, W. (2002). Political Ecology, Territoriality and Scale. GeoJournal (Vol. 58, Issue 4, pp. 225–231). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:GEJO.0000017953.56964.d1

Neumann, R. (2005). Making Political Ecology. Hodder Arnold.

Nzeadibe, A. C., Uchem, R. N., & Nzeadibe, T. C. (2018). Beyond “Traditional Geographies”: Integrating Urban Political Ecology and Cultural Sustainability into Undergraduate Geographical Education in Nigeria. Journal of Environmental Education, 49(3), 228–241. https://doi.org/10.1080/00958964.2017.1391162

Peet, R., & Watts, M. (Eds.). (2004). Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Peluso, N. L. (1993). "Traditions" of Forest Control in Java: Implications for Social Forestry and Sustainability.” Global Ecology & Biogeography Letters, 3(4–6), 183–157. https://doi.org/10.2307/2997766

Peluso, N. L. (2017). Whigs and hunters: the origins of the Black Act, by E.P. Thompson. Journal of Peasant Studies, 44(1), 309–321. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1264581

Poerwanto, H. (2008). Kebudayaan dan Lingkungan dalam Perspektif Antropologi. Pustaka Pelajar.

Robbins, P. (2020). Is less more … or is more less? Scaling the Political Ecologies of the Future. Political Geography, 76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.04.010

Rocheleau, D. E. (2008). Political Ecology in the Key of Policy: From Chains of Explanation to Webs of Relation. Geoforum, 39(2), 716–727. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2007.02.005

Roseberry, W. (1998). Political Economy. Annual Review of Anthropology, 17(1988), 161–185. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2155910

Sayre, N. F. (2005). Ecological and Geographical Scale: Parallels and Potential for Integration. Progress in Human Geography, 29(3), 276–290. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132505ph546oa

Snyder, H. (2019). Literature Review as A Research Methodology: An Overview and Guidelines. Journal of Business Research, 104(August), 333–339. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2019.07.039

Sundberg, J. (2015). Ethics, Entanglement and Political Ecology. The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology, August, 117–126. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315759289.ch8

Sutton, M. Q., & Anderson, E. (2004). Introduction to Cultural Ecology. AltaMira Press.

Swyngedouw, E. (1997). Neither Global nor Local: “Glocalization” and The Politics of Scale. In K. Cox (Ed.), Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of The Local (pp. 137–166). Guilford Press.

Swyngedouw, E. (2004). Scaled Geographies: Nature, Place and the Politics of Scale.” Dalam Sheppard, E. dan McMaster, R.B. (eds.). In Scale and Geographic Inquiry. Blackwell Publishing.

Swyngedouw, E., & Heynen, N. C. (2003). Urban Political Ecology, Justice and The Politics of Scale. Antipode, 35(5), 898–918. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2003.00364.x

Torraco, R. J. (2005). Writing Integrative Literature Reviews: Guidelines and Examples. Human Resource Development Review, 4(3), 356–367. https://doi.org/10.1177/1534484305278283

Wolf, E. R. (2010). Europe and the People without History. University of California Press.

Wong, G., Greenhalgh, T., Westhorp, G., Buckingham, J., & Pawson, R. (2013). RAMESES publication standards: Meta-narrative reviews. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 69(5), 987–1004. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.12092

Zimmerer, K.S. (2000). Rescaling Irrigation in Latin America: The Cultural Images and Political Ecology of Water Resources. Ecumene, 7(2), 150–175. https://doi.org/10.1191/096746000701556680

Zimmerer, K.S., & Bassett, T.J. (2003). Approaching Political Ecology: Society, Nature, and Scale in Human–Environment Studies. Political Ecology: An Integrative Approach to Geography and Environment-Development Studies, 1–25. New York: Guilford Press.