Native ecological knowledge applied to a satellite map

Naidoo and Hill's 'Emergence of Indigenous Vegetation Classifications Through Integration of Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Remote Sensing Analyses' (2006) discusses the accuracy of native Paraguayan Ache landscape categories applied to Landsat imagery. I am not entirely sure how to interpret the results, 'traditional ecological knowledge' recorded "low end" accuracy but was still "reasonable". See for yourself; what I find fascinating is the exact way the Ache know and classify the forest. Also see this.

Forests, especially remote tropical forests, are often highly inaccessible over large scales to ecologists and other scientists who wish to study ecological patterns and processes in the field. A more typical form of study involves the establishment of a research station on a relatively small parcel of land, followed by intensive ecological investigation within a tight radius of the station along a trail and/or river network. In contrast, nomadic or seminomadic native groups that have lived for generations within the forest will likely have a broader familiarity with the forest at much larger scales, although their level of detailed understanding will likely be limited to those aspects of the forest that are relevant to their own subsistence needs. The potential for Western scientific methods and TEK to complement one another in this situation is quite clear. (Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) has been defined as ‘‘a cumulative body of knowledge, practice, and belief, evolving by adaptive processes and handed down through generations by cultural transmission, about the relationship of living beings (including humans) with one another and with their environment’’.TEK is often associated with indigenous groups that retain traditional resource use practices and/or cultural beliefs.)

Prior to contact with Western civilizations, the Ache were nomadic hunter-gatherers who permanently inhabited the forest and used a wide variety of forest resources for subsistence and cultural purposes. All groups of Ache have now been settled onto permanent reservations outside the Mbaracayu Forest Reserve (the last uncontacted group was resettled in 1978), but several groups continue to forage in the Reserve in a manner similar to their traditional use of the forest. Because of their dependence on the forest, the Ache have evolved into unparalleled trackers of wild game, and have also developed a detailed system of vegetation classification to describe the types of forest present within their hunting ranges. The Ache vegetation classification system revolves around a practical designation of various forest cover types into units that reflect characteristics such as ease of travel, game abundance, and distance from water. Because of their long and intimate association with the forest environment, vegetation classes are highly nuanced, spatially explicit categorizations that can change within a matter of meters. The Ache recognize 69 different classes of vegetation, based primarily on vegetation structure, dominant species, proximity to other habitat types or geographical features (e.g., rivers, meadows), topography, and moisture. Of these, 16 appear to be more appropriately described as geographical classes, rather than vegetation classes, because they are defined primarily, if not exclusively, by geographic location (e.g., ‘‘ykmambu’’: on hillside going up from water). 

In preliminary analyses, we attempted to classify all 53 vegetation classes that the Ache recognize, but it proved impossible to accurately classify this many categories. However, because many of the Ache vegetation classes appear similar, even to the Ache themselves, Hill and others lumped vegetation classes into seven broader categories: meadows, swamps, bamboo understory forests, thick undergrowth vine forests, low forests, high forests, and big bamboo forest.

Eskimo Psychogeography IV

Tom Lowenstein, anthropologist and poet, writes about the "Inupiaq grasp of encircling space" in his wonderful book "Ancient Land: Sacred Whale" (1993). The map is not all too good in the original source but click to enlarge and you can make out more of the detail. In combination with the quote below you will understand why this makes addition four to the Eskimo Psychogeography series.  

In 1892, a year after he arrived in Tikigaq, the missionary John Driggs made an influenntial convert. This was the shaman Anaqulutuq, a shaman, a great dancer and, that rare thing for Inuit, completely bald. Anaqulutuq was also a draughtsman, and for Dr Driggs, he drew the outline map shown here. Like all Tikigaq men the shaman was a hunter. To hunt is to travel; and to travel is to measure distance and calculate trajectories of motion over moving surfaces. Travel in the Arctic, where the ice, light and wind conditions are in constant change, depends on a super-sharp awareness of surrounding space and comprehension of the interplay of force and angle. Thus the faculty that could calculate the direction of harpoon strike from shifting ice at a seal moving against the current in twilight in a cross-wind could, with little mental hardship, construct for itself mental maps of varied and complex geographic features.  

SOURCE

Pacman forage psychogeography

Pacman (1980) is a game that deals with the challenges of foraging for food in a meaningless, inhospitable and often random world. 

Pacman designer Toru Iwatani: "Food is part of the basic concept. In my initial design I had put the player in the midst of food all over the screen. As I thought about it, I realized the player wouldn’t know exactly what to do; the purpose of the game would be obscure. So I created a maze and put the food in it. Then whoever played the game would have some structure by moving through the maze."

Pacman displays all the patho-obsessive characteristics that are the special achievement of the first generation peasant. Pacman does not live, he survives. Pacman does not know the freedom and enjoyment of the drift; he is locked in a Malthusian trap without cheat codes, doomed to struggle ad infinitum to overcome his hunger in the knowledge that the next meal will be even harder to acquire. To eat more is to be chased with added vengeance. 

For the ghosts work does not exist, their quest to find Pacman and eat him is purely recreational. Failure is without consequence, the drift is theirs and their collective wandering strategies are an inspiration to every algorithmic psychogeographer. Their scatter-chase-repeat routine is a wonder in itself but their swagger in blue mode, when suddenly they are prey and may be eaten by their dinner, is the unchallenged masterpiece in the arsenal of experimental walking techniques. Again the ghosts do not encounter real harm when devoured, rebirth comes as a guarantee. The ghost in blue mode is in trickster mode, they are urging Pacman to eat the freaky corner fruits out of self-interest but also out of benevolence.  

Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde are not attacking Pacman, evil is not a useful concept in their carefree existence. They are the Magister Ludi's of crazy cookie land, enticing the pupil to work harder and to move further, to new level-environments. It is not necessary to eat, it is necessary to travel.

Toru Iwatani: "The way the ghosts were designed, it’s not something nasty.  It’s an enemy, but still somewhat amicable, lovable.  Even when you eat them, their eyeballs come back.  And also the action of eating itself, it’s not so much eating as destroying, but it’s more like the action of biting to make them go away.  And in fact they do come back.  So this kind of a non-violent character was very important."

Walking in Siberia, forage psychogeography with the old world Eskimo

"MAPPING EVENKI LAND: THE STUDY OF MOBILITY PATTERNS IN EASTERN SIBERIA" starts with a number of maps showing Evenki land use but the paper gets even more interesting when it posits that each culture walks different before discussing the specific walking knowledge of the Evenki. This is forage psychogeography at it's finest.  

On Evenki mapping:

Evenki wander between situations or events that provoke and intensify the circuits of companionship and experiences of autonomy, rather than geographical points. With this in mind, describing Evenki land with an ordinary map imposed with spots and symbols on the continuous space or landscape becomes a real challenge. But if we inverse the main premise of map making in accordance with the logic of Evenki social organization we construct a depiction of Evenki land which will also grasp important traits of the Evenki mind. The task is easier than it seems, because the streams of Evenki paths covering their land are analogous to the changes (experiences of autonomy) from one companionship to another. Mapping Evenki land with an Evenki social organization could help us to find other such analogies between places and social interactions.

Following and watching an old Evenki man:

Only after we repeatedly watched the video recording that we made quite casually with Orochon walking in front of us through the taiga during one of our trips together, did we begin to notice some features of the particular Evenki way of walking. Orochon went through an animal pathway as if he was moving in a tube with thorny bushes as walls. He was carrying a stick on which he leaned. He took this stick in his right arm, but changed hands when some branches of the bush prevented him from going further. Then he took his stick in his left hand, and used his right hand to break the branches. The sound of this cracking was rather rhythmical and synchronised with his footsteps, which we could not hear as they were rather light. There were two images that we caught after watching this tape. One is that he was marking the path with these half broken branches he left behind. We supposed that these marks will be useful in winter, when the snow will cover the path, and only such marks above the snow surface will show where the narrow path is. Orochon himself told us that it is very important to clear pathways, because this is the basis for future hunting luck. He only commented that animals also preferred to use clear pathways, and if there were any such available then there would be plenty of prey. The other point was the importance of keeping balance. Orochon was moving through the taiga in the same way as if he was floating on a boat with a stick that helped not only in pushing forwards but also in keeping his balance. When Orochon was crashing through the branches he was also balancing himself, as his leap was counterbalanced by the inertia of branches. At these moments he had four points of support as if he had not two but four legs.
... We should not forget that Orochon was already 70 years old, but his movements had not lost any of this lightness.

Evenki go looking around for fun:

Evenki people learn from their earliest years not to be frightened and to be interested in and not exclude the new possibilities of hazardous situations – for the Evenki exploring new territories is a pleasant experience. The Evenki will prefer to go and have a look just for fun, even when there is absolutely no need to go anywhere. Looking for new places is a wonderful opportunity for experiencing companionship, and as a result it is a widely accepted thing to go somewhere with the intention just to look around. In company or alone, a trip to an unknown territory is also a fine experience of manakan (which signifies ‘independence’ and ‘solitude’ in the Evenki language), because even when together with somebody else, you perceive the place in your own unique way and take your own path. Once we participated in a ritual, in which the Evenki visited secret places in the forest. There was no obvious organization of movement from one secret place to another. Everybody was walking separately and they finally united in one place, the way hunters meet with their dogs at some moments, only to separate again without a shout or an order being given. The Evenki made their routes ever more difficult and complex. By walking in circles and making different loops they walked with the intention of looking around, thus raising their chances to come across somebody or something. The way the Evenki navigate explicitly shows their social organization, in which individuals each float freely, but are nevertheless eager for encounters and contacts with each other, uniting for a brief moment and then splitting up again to continue their individual free movement.

The emotions experienced are determined by the absence or existence of a concrete purpose for the trip. We have not only once witnessed how excited and happy the Evenki were when they were travelling without a specific purpose and also with risks (i.e. to new places) that could challenge the initial purpose. A broken wheel immediately transforms the situation during a trip, because you have to change your aims and figure out new ones, for example you need to go to your neighbours to borrow a new wheel and nobody really knows what will emerge from the new situation. Breakdowns, river crossings, drunken encounters and other occurrences, all of these incidents liberate you from the hegemony of the initial purpose, you receive the right to spontaneously change your route and combine different tasks and possible resolutions. All these conditions fill the situation with excitement and joy. In contrast to the predetermined purpose, for example the need to come back from the village to the camp to perform your household duties, this spoils the pleasure of the road and prevents total involvement in the travelling itself. Whenever possible the Evenki try to avoid moving under such conditions. For example, they find new reasons to stay in the village, even if they have no real place there and no money to spend. If they finally start on their way, the first coincidental encounter with someone will stop their movement and they will come back to the village accompanying the people they met. If there is no chance to escape from a trip with a predetermined aim, the Evenki look gloomy and keep silent, as if the existence of this concrete purpose prevents them from feeling free and getting pleasure from the trip.

Foragers land use, with maps

Characterization of a foraging subsistence-settlement system (San).

Characterization of a collector subsistence-settlement system (eskimo).

An old Eskimo man was asked how he would summarize his life; he thought for a moment and said, "Willow smoke and dogs' tails: when we camp it's all willow smoke, and when we move all you see is dogs' tails wagging in front of you. Eskimo life is half of each."

The forage psychogeographer takes away two things from Lewis Binford's 'Willow Smoke and Dogs' Tails: Hunter-Archaeological Site Formation' (1980). Namely: a differentiation of  lifestyles between foragers (for example: the San) and collectors (for example: Eskimo) and the different land-uses associated with them.

In contrast to foragers, collectors are characterized by (1) the storage of food for at least part of the year and (2) logistically organized food-procurement parties. The latter situation has direct "site" implications in that special task groups may leave a residential location and establish a field camp or a station from which food-procurement operations may be planned and executed.

For foragers, I recognized two types of site, the residential base and the location. Collectors generate at least three additional types of sites by virtue of the logistical character of their procurement strategies. These I have designated the field camp, the station, and the cache. A field camp is a temporary operational center for a task group. It is where a task group sleeps, eats, and otherwise maintains itself while away from the residential base. Field camps may be expected to be further differentiated according to the nature of the target resources, so we may expect sheep hunting field camps, caribou-hunting field camps, fishing field camps, etc.

Eskimo Psychogeography III

From Authentic Alaska come these three fragments of Eskimo forage psychogeography (earlier, earlier + Eskimo cookbook). They clearly create a connection between the necessities of subsistence and the joys of exploration.

Berry picking: "My dad give us a choice: pick berries or stay home, clean up and have dinner made by the time the berry pickers got home. I always opted to go out for the day and pick berries... Of course we would never go berry picking if it was raining or if no breeze was keeping the bugs away."

Searching for mouse caches: "While the idea behind looking for nivi is to gather food, searching for them also is relaxing for the mind, body, and soul. It gets you away from home for a while to enjoy the last days of fall before winter comes."

Searching for sourdock: "But before you think you can cut sourdocks and cook them make sure to look for them on a nice, windy day while the sky is bright. While you enjoy the fresh air, walk slowly and gaze at the tundra. Observe if there are any six-inch to four-foot-high, red, cone- shaped flowers, indicating sourdock."

Urban forage psychogeography

Oliver Rowe's attempt to open a restaurant feeding its clients with London produce only made for a vaguely amusing BBC series. My favourite bit is when Rowe teams up with Fergus the Forager and finds himself unable to keep up with the foragers antics of moving silently through the underbrush. As said before: foraging = psychogeography.

...after a long wait, the forager finally arrives: in a battered old Volvo!

One of North London's many woods...

"Fergus!?"

"I think I lost Fergus..."

"Fergus... Fergus!" 

"Oh, is that a squirrel or is that Fergus? No that's a dog"

Gary Snyder's motto for the children

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

There are italicised recommendations Gary Snyder makes at the end of his poem For the Children. Scot Slovic in The Etiquette of Freedom explains them as such:

Stay Together: "Pay attention to the importance of community. Work with each other. Even if you have opposing perspectives, even if you come from different cultural traditions, find a way to work together to stay together."

Learn the Flowers: "Notice you surroundings and learn about them. To me 'learn' implies actively studying something -  not just learning what it looks like on a superficial level, but actually engaging in an energetic and deliberate effort of study."

Go Light: "Pay attention to you actual lifestyle, to the practical aspects of life. Try to have a light impact on the planet and on the cultural communities that you are intersecting with.'Go Light' means ' live carefully'".

Forest forage psychogeography with the Huaorani

The following quote from Laura Rival ('Blowpipes and spears, The social significance of Huaorani technological choices') on Huaorani knowledge production and dissemination comes from 'Nature and Society' (1996, available on Scribd) and it is just the best thing ever. First it explains how foraging and hunting begins with a specific kind of walk that turns the walker into a dweller and it goes on to explain how the resulting knowledge is not generalized but used to create ever larger repositories to gauge what a specific animal might or might not do. Compare this with an earlier quote from Barry Lopez. The picture shows a Huaorani with tree. 

Both men and women have a great knowledge of the habits, habitats and feeding cycles of most arboreal species. Inferring from fruiting cycles, weather conditions, and many other signs, they can predict animal behaviour and locate animals they cannot see. With developed sensorial abilities - especially hearing and smell - they feel the presence of animals and anticipate their next move.

Children acquire this knowledge largely among themselves, as they explore the forest (never beyond an approximate four kilometre radius around the longhouse) with older children. 

Men, women and children spend hours slowly exploring the forest along their trails. They do not merely hunt and gather (two activities which are relatively undifferentiated in practice), but walk, observing with evident pleasure and interest the movements of animals, the progress of fruit maturation, or simply the growth of vegetation. When walking in this fashion (a style of displacement markedly different from the one used when going on a visit or when transporting food from one place to another), one does not get tired, or lost. One’s body takes the smell of the forest and ceases to be extraneous to the forest world. One learns to perceive the environment as other animals do. One becomes a ‘dweller’ deeply involved in a silent conversation with surrounding plants and animals (Ingold 1993b). Walking in the forest day after day with Huaorani informants, I began to appreciate that, by interpreting the environment from an animal’s perspective, they were recognising the animal’s capacity for will and purpose.
 
Birds and monkeys, in particular, show intention and purpose in their quest for food. Documenting this practical knowledge is far from easy. Informants answer questions about animal behaviour with reluctance, as if their knowledge was not verbalisable. Animal behaviour cannot be explained or taught; it must be observed and experienced practically.

Formal interviews, therefore, did not yield any substantial data on animal behaviour, but they made me see some of the principles organising Huaorani practical knowledge. For instance, informants clearly separated observed data from hearsay. When unsure, they openly admitted ignorance. If an informant rewarded my insistence with some (unfounded) generalisation, there was always someone to dismiss it with a counter-example. Finally, animal behaviour was invariably described by means of anthropomorphic expressions (this, according to Kennedy 1992, seems to be a common occurrence among western ethologists too). It was by participating in forest expeditions that I learnt the little I know about animal behaviour and Huaorani perceptions of animal behaviour. Informal conversations, which proceeded at a good pace both during and after a hunt, were also far more instructive than interviews. 

Hunting stories are shared with those who stayed behind. Hunters must answer numerous questions, and state precisely which trail they took, how far they went, what the hunted animal was eating, where it was hit, and so forth. Interpretations of animal behaviour are constantly put to the test, and assertions disputed. When telling about a failed approach, hunters are criticised for not having adopted better tactics. A lively discussion ensues, as hunters try to justify their actions on the basis of previous, successful hunts. Women, who accompany hunters and often hunt themselves, fully participate in these conversations. Children listen carefully to these accounts of freshly experienced, observed and remembered interactions between hunters and game. Like their adult kin, they immerse themselves in shared practical knowledge with great delight.

Forage Psychogeography is Here

Everybody who writes knows the sensation of being lost in your own words, of having said already a great deal but knowing that there is great deal left unsaid. In the struggle to get the unsaid into words many texts are abandoned or silenced before seeing the light of day. A writer like Coleridge could never cope with the fact that all writing is incomplete and never wrote a proper book as a result. This is why I use the strategy of publishing drafts: it allows for feedback, it brings the focus of an immediate audience but is also provides the space to push doubt, uncertainty and better arguments into the future for later remission.

My 'What is forage psychogeography?' attempts to tell in full the implicit story that this blog develops as links, quotes and half-assed observations accumulate. This is the fifth draft and it marks an substantial advance on the previous four. I found myself writing down things that I first tried to formulate when I started my 'career' in psychogeography ten years ago. It is not finished but it is there. I am not saying it is any good,  just that I worked very hard on it.

First hand knowledge is a way of life

Barrly Lopez photograph by Robert Miller.

On the website of Orion Magazine, a splendid resource for high quality nature writing, I found a short 2001 essay by Barry Lopez (earlier) called The Naturalist. Speaking about field biology and native people he makes a number of assertions on the art and power of observation that are not just epistemological but ethical and well worth quoting in the context of forage psychogeography:

my experience with field biologists, those fresh to a task—say, caracara research—are the ones most likely to give themselves a deadline—ten years, say—against which they will challenge themselves to know all there is to know about that falcon. It never works. More seasoned field biologists, not as driven by a need to prove themselves, are content to concentrate on smaller arenas of knowledge. Instead of speaking definitively of coyote, armadillo, or wigeon, they tend to say, “This one animal, that one time, did this in that place.” It’s the approach to nature many hunting and gathering peoples take, to this day. The view suggests a horizon rather than a boundary for knowing, toward which we are always walking.

A modern naturalist, then, is no longer someone who goes no further than a stamp collector, mastering nomenclature and field marks. She or he knows a local flora and fauna as pieces of an inscrutable mystery, increasingly deep, a unity of organisms Western culture has been trying to elevate itself above since at least Mesopotamian times. The modern naturalist, in fact, has now become a kind of emissary in this, working to reestablish good relations with all the biological components humanity has excluded from its moral universe.  

One of the reasons native people still living in some sort of close, daily association with their ancestral lands are so fascinating to those who arrive from the rural, urban, and suburban districts of civilization is because they are so possessed of authority. They radiate the authority of firsthand encounters. They are storehouses of it. They have not read about it, they have not compiled notebooks and assembled documentary photographs. It is so important that they remember it. When you ask them for specifics, the depth of what they can offer is scary. It’s scary because it’s not tidy, it doesn’t lend itself to summation. By the very way that they say that they know, they suggest they are still learning something that cannot, in the end, be known.

Firsthand knowledge is enormously time consuming to acquire; with its dallying and lack of end points, it is also out of phase with the short-term demands of modern life. It teaches humility and fallibility, and so represents an antithesis to progress. It makes a stance of awe in the witness of natural process seem appropriate, and attempts at summary knowledge naïve. Historically, tyrants have sought selectively to eliminate firsthand knowledge when its sources lay outside their control. By silencing those with problematic firsthand experiences, they reduced the number of potential contradictions in their political or social designs, and so they felt safer. 

As an example of the power of firsthand knowledge the following qoute from Jared Diamond comes to mind. I found it through a recommended essay by US forager Samuel Thayer on the irrarional Western fear for using/eating wild plants (also see).

One day, when my companions of the Foré tribe and I were starving in the jungle because another tribe was blocking our return to the supply base, a Foré man returned to camp with a large rucksack full of mushrooms he had found, and started to roast them. Dinner at last! But then I had an unsettling thought: what if the mushrooms were poisonous?

I patiently explained to me Foré companions that I had read about some mushrooms’ being poisonous, that I had heard of even expert American mushroom collectors’ dying because of our difficulty in distinguishing safe from dangerous mushrooms, and that although we were all hungry, it just wasn’t worth the risk. At that point one of my companions got angry and told me to shut up and listen while they explained some things to me. After I had been quizzing them for years about names of hundreds of trees and birds, how could I insult them by assuming they didn’t have names for different mushrooms? Only Americans could be so stupid as to confuse poisonous mushrooms with safe ones. They went on to lecture me about 29 types of mushroom species, each species in the Foré language, and where in the forest one should look for it. This one, the tánti, grew on trees, and it was delicious and perfectly edible.