CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND SOCIAL METABOLISM

The emergence of culture and cultural evolution is the result of an evolutionary process, evident also in non‐human species. What is specifically human is the dominance of cultural evolution. This does not mean that cultural evolution has replaced organic evolution, but rather that both have merged into one coevolutionary complex. Through niche construction, organic modern humans are the product of cultural evolution. This cannot be explained by adaptation to natural environment or by sexual selection. Cultural evolution with its coevolved organic traits did not so much enhance competence towards the natural environment as it did competence to develop and maintain cooperation. In the process, culture became a “system” with its own imperatives and integrating forces, differentiating into several autopoietic subsystems: the symbolic‐cognitive subsystem, the economic subsystem and the political subsystem. There are however social‐metabolic constraints that put limits on their evolutionary degrees of freedom. Culture's autopoietic reach has adaptive boundaries. The concept of social metabolism attempts to capture the unity of “persons” in a physical‐biological sense and “culture” in a symbolic sense, the decisive point being that culture must be understood as an autopoietic system sui generis. The social‐metabolic system of relations and interactions between nature, human population and culture is inherently coevolutionary. The history of social metabolism is the history of the coevolution of two autopoietic systems – an open and blind non‐orthogenetic evolutionary process.     

Occupying the Margins: Labour Integration and Social Exclusion in Artisanal Mining in Tanzania

This article examines the marginal position of artisanal miners in sub‐Saharan Africa, and considers how they are incorporated into mineral sector change in the context of institutional and legal integration. Taking the case of diamond and gold mining in Tanzania, the concept of social exclusion is used to explore the consequences of marginalization on people's access to mineral resources and ability to make a living from artisanal mining. Because existing inequalities and forms of discrimination are ignored by the Tanzanian state, the institutionalization of mineral titles conceals social and power relations that perpetuate highly unequal access to resources. The article highlights the complexity of these processes, and shows that while legal integration can benefit certain wealthier categories of people, who fit into the model of an ‘entrepreneurial small‐scale miner’, for others adverse incorporation contributes to socio‐economic dependence, exploitation and insecurity. For the issue of marginality to be addressed within integration processes, the existence of local forms of organization, institutions and relationships, which underpin inequalities and discrimination, need to be recognized.     

Regulating Meaning, Appropriating Nature: The Codification of California Organic Agriculture

In California, conventional agro-food firms are beginning to appropriate the most lucrative aspects of organic food provision and to abandon the agronomic and marketing practices associated with organic agriculture's oppositional origins. Echoing the uneasy and complex dialectic between nature and capital in the American West, organic farming is becoming more akin to farming off of nature's image, as the idiom of a "purer" nature is deployed to sell what is increasingly commodified nature. The direction of organic agriculture in California can be understood as reflecting global trends in agro-food provision and regulation, but it is also uniquely grounded in the context of California's regional history: on the one hand, a product of the counterculture, bolstered by a strong climate of environmental regulation; on the other hand, a legacy of California's exceptional agriculture, characterized in part by the dominance of growers' organizations and a focus on high-value specialty crops. This paper also discusses three ways in which the political construction of the meaning of "organic" and its institutionalization in regulatory agencies such as private certification organizations have facilitated both the proliferation of agribusiness entrants and their adoption of questionably sustainable practices: first, certification agencies have their own institutional logic and are most beholden to their client-growers; second, regulation requires the definition of enforceable standards out of complicated ecological, economic, and even sociocultural concerns; third, the certification process, by conferring a legal right to market food as organic, has created distinct incentives that shape participation in the sector.     

The Contested Landscapes of World Heritage on a Tourist Island: the case of Garajonay National Park,La Gomera

This paper considers the World Heritage Site of Garajonay National Park on the island of La Gomera (Canary Islands). It is based on a research project carried out during 1999-2000 that explored the circumstances surrounding its declaration as a National Park and inclusion into the World Heritage List, in conjunction with the consequences for local communities which ensued. The proximity of Garajonay National Park to a large concentration of mass coastal tourism constitutes a further source of potential conflict which may have a wider relevance to other sites of a similar and indeed diverse nature. This paper, therefore, examines the configurations of space and social relations occasioned by the processes of social change, conservation and tourism development in and adjacent to this protected forest. In doing so it elucidates the manner in which these processes are locally mediated in and through contested values over the meaning and purpose of nature conservation in this 'world heritage space'. It argues that a sense of the forest as a place of cultural belonging has been marginalised in favour of its intrinsic ecological value.     

The Matter of Carbon: Understanding the Materiality of tCO2e in Carbon Offsets

Abstract: This paper examines the socio‐natural relations inherent in the commodification of carbon reductions as they are generated in energy‐based carbon offset project activities, and abstracted to wider market systems. The ability to commodify carbon reductions takes place through a socionatural–technical complex that is defined by the material nature of technology's interaction with the atmosphere, local social processes and the evolving governing systems of carbon markets. Carbon is not unproblematically commodified: some projects and technologies allow a more cooperative commodification than others. The examples of a hydroelectricity plant and an improved cookstove project in Honduras are used as empirical case studies to illustrate the difficulties and opportunities associated with the relational aspects of carbon commodification. Drawing upon select literatures from post‐structural thought to complement the principal lens of a more structural, materiality of nature analysis, the paper also outlines the reasons why carbon offset reform is needed if offsets are to more progressively engage debates about climate mitigation and North–South development.     

Governing Post Apartheid Spatiality: Implementing City Improvement Districts in Cape Town

Abstract: To achieve a world‐class city capable of attracting business in a competitive global market, the municipal government of Cape Town, South Africa, like many cities of the global North, has adopted a model of urban revitalization popularized by New York City: business or city improvement districts (BIDs or CIDs). By examining CIDs in city center Cape Town, the paper casts light on the socio‐spatial relationship facilitating the neoliberal post‐apartheid regime and its governance. Analyzing discursive and spatial practices of Cape Town Partnership, the managing body of downtown CIDs, from 2000 to 2006, the paper reveals its difficulties in stabilizing the socio‐spatial relations of a transnationalizing urban revitalization strategy and rejects the view of CIDS as simply a global roll‐out of neoliberal urban policies. It highlights how CIDs are challenged from both within and outside of their managing structures by contentious local issues, and in particular by vast social inequalities and citizens' historical struggle for inclusive citizenship and the right to the city. Whether and how CIDs' inherent limitations can be overcome to address socio‐spatial inequalities is an open question.     

Rethinking Justice: Struggles For Environmental Commons and the Notion of Socio‐Ecological Justice

This article introduces a notion of socio‐ecological justice based on theoretically informed empirical research on community struggles against run‐of‐river hydropower plants in Turkey. Framing this particular case as representative of a broader movement for environmental commons, and adopting an action‐theoretical perspective, it translates the emergent justice claims produced by grassroots environmental movements to the conceptual vocabulary of the theory of justice. Using Fraser's tripartite model as a starting point, it explores possibilities of expanding the borders of justice as a concept. Maintaining the intrinsic relationship between social and ecological phenomena, it calls for rethinking “sociality” and “social justice” in the light of a relational ontology of human and non‐human worlds. The notion of socio‐ecological justice, thus, extends the community of justice, framing the relational existence of human and non‐human ecologies as a matter of justice.     

Engendering the New Enclosures: Development,Involuntary Resettlement and the Struggles for Social Reproduction in Coastal Tanzania

This article engages with the feminist concept of ‘social reproduction’ to arrive at a richer understanding of the gendered processes and outcomes of contemporary large‐scale land acquisitions, or the ‘new enclosures’. It focuses on the case of a recent land deal for industrial sugarcane production in the Coast Region of Tanzania and the resultant process of involuntary resettlement. It critically analyses people's struggles for land in the face of imminent displacement, and the gendered ways they experience the erosion of their pre‐existing modes of social reproduction. It argues that enclosure of rural landscapes does more than immediately strip peasants and pastoralists of their means of production and turn them into wage labourers. It gradually uproots them from their socio‐ecological knowledges, cultural practices and historical memories, which are rooted on the land and articulated through gender. The highly uncertain processes of enclosure and displacement also force rural women and men to renegotiate their livelihood strategies and intra‐household gender relations.     

Thinking State/Space Incompossibly

Abstract: This paper develops multi‐dimensional analyses of socio‐spatial relations. Building on previous research, we identify some tensions associated with different dimensions of socio‐spatiality and introduce the theme of compossible and, more importantly, incompossible socio‐spatial configurations. Two short studies are deployed to highlight the socio‐spatial implications of the principle that not everything that is possible is compossible. The first shows the power of thinking varieties of capitalism compossibly (via the concept of variegated capitalism) and then examines the successive strategies adopted by the European Communities and European Union to address the significance of changing patterns of variegation for approaches to European integration, spatial strategies, and economic and social policies. The second case discusses some related problems for state spatial projects, starting in the 1980s with spatial planning, promotion of a Europe of the Regions and/or of Europe and the regions, and then turns to examine city‐regional development strategies.     

Urban Agriculture in the Food‐Disabling City: (Re)defining Urban Food Justice,Reimagining a Politics of Empowerment

Recent literature has pointed to the role of urban agriculture in self‐empowerment and learning, and in constituting ways to achieve food justice. Building on this work the paper looks at the potential and constraints for overcoming the residual and contingent status of urban agriculture. The first part of the paper aims to expand traditional class/race/ethnicity discussions and to reflect on global, cultural, procedural, capability, distributional and socio‐environmental forms of injustice that unfold in the different stages of urban food production. The second part reflects on how to bring forward food justice and build a politics of engagement, capability and empowerment. Three interlinked strategies for action are presented: (1) enhancing the reflexivity and cohesion of the urban food movement by articulating a challenge to neoliberal urbanism; (2) converging urban and agrarian food justice struggles by shaping urban agroecology; and (3) regaining control over social reproduction by engaging with food commoning.     

The (Mis)Use of Disaster as Opportunity: Coerced Relocation from Celaque National Park,Honduras

Abstract: “Disaster capitalism” refers to political economic processes that take advantage of mass trauma to impose neoliberal capitalist economic policies, facilitating the redistribution of wealth and exacerbating socio‐economic divisions. Here the basic tenets of disaster capitalism are applied in another context: how natural disasters can be used to impose exclusionary protected area conservation principles with similar socio‐economic consequences and ecological ramifications. The post‐Hurricane Mitch relocation of resident populations from Celaque National Park, Honduras serves as a case study whereby a natural disaster, combined with the effects of neoliberal structural adjustment policies, created the opportunity to implement a universal model of exclusionary nature protection. The resultant displacement and increased semi‐proletarianization of the affected population effectively served the capitalist interests of international conservation and the agro‐export coffee industry and, contradictorily, worked against the proclaimed goals of nature preservation through exclusionary national park policies.     

From the Panama Canal to Post‐Fordism: Producing Temporary Labor Migrants Within and Beyond Agriculture in the United States (1904–2013)

In the historical study of modern American capitalism, labor unfreedom in agriculture has been conceptualized as an exception to liberal labor relations in the post‐slavery polity, from debt peonage to the threat of deportation from workplaces populated by non‐citizen migrants. At the same time, state‐enforced labor compulsions and restrictions are increasingly part and parcel of what scholars call neoliberal exceptionalism. This article argues that agricultural and neoliberal exceptionalisms are related, by tracing the historical genealogy and juridical production of a restrictive work status, the deportable temporary labor migrant, across political economies in the modern United States, from imperial construction in the Panama Canal Zone, to agriculture, to the knowledge economy. Contrary to existing notions of temporary work visas as a new form of unfreedom in neoliberalized advanced capitalist states, I show how the threat of deportation is older and rooted in the rise of the liberal regulatory state in a post‐slavery, yet persistently racial capitalist political economy. The import of understanding this history of government intervention increases as the liberal regulatory state's coercive logics and practices intensify and circulate in agriculture and under a post‐Fordist regime of accumulation, reproducing racial capitalism in the labor process.     

THE PROBABILITY OF THE IMPROBABLE: SOCIETY–NATURE COEVOLUTION

This article aims to show how evolutionary theory, social‐metabolism and sociological systems theory can be utilized to develop a concept of society–nature coevolution. The article begins with a conception of industrialization as a socio‐metabolic transition, that is, a major transformation in the energetic and consequently material basis of society. This transition to industrial metabolism was essential for the emergence and maintenance of industrial societies and is at the same time the main cause of global environmental change. The article proceeds by asking what the notion of society–nature coevolution can potentially contribute to understanding environmental sustainability problems. An elaborated concept of coevolution hinges on (1) a more precise and sociologically more meaningful concept of cultural evolution and (2) understanding how cultural evolution is linked to the environment. Next I briefly outline major lines of thought and controversies surrounding the idea of cultural evolution. The direction proposed here commences with an abstract version of Darwinian evolution, which is then re‐specified for social systems, understood as communication systems, as developed by Luhmann. The re‐specification implies three important changes in the theoretical outline of cultural evolution: first, shifting from the human population to the communication system as the unit of cultural evolution and to single communications as the unit of cultural variation; second, shifting from transmission or inheritance to reproduction as necessary condition for evolution; and third, shifting from purely internal (communicative) forces of selection towards including also environmental selection. Adopting elements from the work of Hägerstrand and Boserup, the primary environmental selective force in cultural evolution is conceptualized as the historically variable constraints in human time–space occupation. In the conclusions I tie the argument back to its beginning, by arguing that the most radical changes in human time–space occupation have been enabled by major socio‐metabolic transitions in the energy system.     

Food and complex societies

In complex societies individuals from distinct social, economic, gender, or age groups often consume different foods because of various economic, political, and ideological factors. The food system not only involves what is consumed but includes the labor and technology that goes into the production and preparation of food as well as how certain foods are distributed and eventually discarded. Food systems within and among complex societies are thus tightly intertwined with social differentiation and the political economy and participate in defining and maintaining differential social relations.     

The Amenity Complex: Towards a Framework for Analysing and Predicting the Emergence of a Multifunctional Countryside in Australia

There is growing consensus among academics, regional development organisations and rural communities that the future growth and development of rural regions is increasingly dependent upon their ability to convey, to both established and prospective residents, the ‘amenity’ of their local physical, social and economic environments. However, little research to date has sought to identify exactly what comprises ‘amenity’ in the rural context, or has examined how this conceptually slippery quality is distributed across rural Australia, or how it influences local demographic, socio‐economic and land use change. This paper attempts a broad scale investigation of rural amenity in the south‐east Australian ecumene, identifying its core components in this context, mapping its distribution and assessing the nature of its influence over in‐migration rates over the past three decades. The paper finds that, at a macro‐scale, amenity tends to follow a general gradient from high to low according to distance from the coast, and that its relationship with in‐migration rates has increased substantially between 1976–1981 and 1996–2001.     

THE SPATIALITIES OF ACTUALLY EXISTING NEOLIBERALISM IN GLASGOW, 1977 TO PRESENT

Resisting the temptation to view the neoliberalization of urban policy as unidirectional, pure and hegemonic, this article sets out to make sense of the biography of the process in one city in particular, Glasgow. It attempts to organize, marshall and discipline existing literature on the city's local economic, planning and welfare policies, so as to offer a longitudinal reading of Glasgow's encounter with neoliberal reform across the period 1977 to the present. The article questions whether Glasgow's new political‐economic dispensation is capable of stabilizing local capitalist social relations and securing a new local growth trajectory. Space emerges as a critical part of the story. Neoliberalism has interlaced with historical structures, ideologies and policies to produce a range of new hybrid and mutant socio‐spatial formations and because it does not amount to a pure and coordinated project these socio‐spatial formations contradict and collide as often as they reinforce. Precisely because of the contingent and complicated spatialities it deposits, neoliberalism will continue to struggle to secure a regulatory framework capable of stabilizing local accumulation indefinitely.     

Beyond Alternative: Exploring the Potential for Autonomous Food Spaces

Abstract: Much attention has been given in recent years to the rise of alternative food networks However, the very concept of “alternative” has come under increasing scrutiny, as theorists grapple with what is meant by alternative and whether the concept adequately captures the key components of such a diverse range of networks and communities. Drawing on poststructuralist political economy, I propose the concept of autonomous food spaces as one possible lens for approaches food‐provisioning activities that situate food within the broader context of non‐capitalist communities seeking to build relationships of mutual aid and non‐market exchanges. I use the examples of a radical collective kitchen, Food Not Bombs, and a community‐supported agriculture operation, Vegetables Unplugged, to explore the potential for autonomous food spaces as part of a broader “politics of possibilities” beyond capitalism.     

It's safe: food as a way of expression for children in Warsaw

ABSTRACT

The role of food in family relations is often discussed with a focus on discipline and control. This paper shows how food can also be used to create children’s safe spaces, defined as the social conditions that allow relatively independent expression of opinions, emotions and practices. Based on ethnographic research conducted with families in Warsaw in 2012–2013, I discuss different ways in which food is used to create and express such safe spaces. Firstly, I look at how children use food to create their own, personal and hidden safe space, in opposition to parental rule. Secondly, I analyse how food is used to build a safe space between adults and children. I argue that within often antagonistic family food relations there is in fact a space for children’s expression. Thirdly, I discuss the role of food in creating safe spaces for children during the research process. This paper takes a relational approach to the concept of safe space, and considers what kind of social relations and processes enable children’s autonomous expression with the means of food.     

Re‐Politicising the Analysis of “New State Spaces” in Hungary and Beyond: Towards an Effective Engagement with “Actually Existing Neoliberalism”

Abstract: Recent scholarship grounded in strategic‐relational state theory has offered a compelling approach to state spatial restructuring under neoliberal capitalism. By drawing on Hungary's post‐1990 state spatial reforms, this paper discusses a major limitation of state theoretical frameworks. In particular, the paper seeks to challenge state theorists’ generally subtle but persistent bias to capitalist economic structures, and argues that the above bias impedes an adequate and effectively critical account of state spatial regulation. Finally, it makes a case for a perspective on new state spaces that acknowledges the wider socio‐historical embeddedness of state space production, as well as its inherently political nature.     

Of Winds,Worms and Mana: the Traditional Calendar of the Torres Islands,Vanuatu

This paper explores how the expression of ‘capacity’ (mena, more commonly known as mana in other Oceanic settings) and the evocation of abundance are played out in relation to seasonal change and human‐environmental relations, as observed in the Torres Islands, Vanuatu. It considers the importance for communities of North and Central Vanuatu of the appearance of a ubiquitous sea worm known as the Palolo, in combination with the regular motions of the sun and the moon, the prevaling winds and various other ecological patterns. While human‐environmental relations are often mediated by the idea of mena, this also constitutes a basic social value that informs local senses of place and belonging. The study of temporality and environmental knowledge can help to de‐centre territorial notions of ‘place’ by situating this concept within the broader context in which people experience it. Finally, because these data bear on macro comparisons that span the Western Pacific, this article is aimed in part at putting the interpretation of time and calendrics within the Indo‐Pacific frame of reference that they should begin to take.