Emergent technologies and methods are also applied to these questions, such as “advances in geometry, graph theory, topology, control theory for chaotic systems, and novel approaches for managing and modeling uncertainty.” Mathematics, they said, is considered the most fundamental language for an understanding of “biocomplex systems.” As Anna Tsing writes, “The common assumption is that everything can be quantified and located as an element of a system of feedback and flow.” One research program that successfully met the NSF’s biocomplexity funding criteria in 2000 was the Bahamas Biocomplexity Project , a large multi-year proposal that situated itself as a mediator between two institutional milieus. The first was that of the NSF’s biocomplexity research program, as just described, with its concerns with interdisciplinarity and the production of more socially robust and politically relevant knowledge. The second was the ongoing and highly political marine conservation scene in the Bahamas at that time, which I will describe. I hope to highlight one of the ways in which scientific research practices manipulated and produced their own social reality in order to create the commensurable information required by the BBP. In 2000, the Bahamian government announced its political intention to create a Marine Reserve Network , which would initially include five protected areas within the borders of the archipelagic nation. These areas, following the trends in international conservation science,gutter berries were to be designated as “no-take” reserves, areas in which the extraction of any form of marine resources is prohibited, and they were a response to the concern over perceived environmental degradation.
The announcement of the MRN project came after two years of planning meetings and negotiation sessions between the Bahamas Department of Fisheries, now Marine Resources, and environmental non-governmental organizations , including the Bahamas Reef Environmental Education Foundation and the Nature Conservancy of the Bahamas , who fear that sustained over-fishing is leading to the destruction of the Bahamian coral reef system, biodiversity loss, declines in fisheries productivity, and who predict that the Bahamas will go the way of the rest of the Caribbean and lose species diversity and valuable commercial fish stocks. The proposed reserves are located near the clusters called the Berry Islands, the Exuma Islands, the Bimini Islands, and the larger islands of Abaco and Eleuthera and were thought up largely as a response to the declining populations of Nassau Grouper, Caribbean Spiny Lobster, and Queen Conch, the primary commercial species in the region, described as the Bahamian “holy trinity.”The BBP, a loose entity made up of researchers from fields including anthropology, biology, oceanography, physics, economics, and mathematics, stepped into this scene to conduct long-term, multi-phase research on these proposed marine reserves, their feasibility, and subsequent systemic effects to produce policy recommendations for the Bahamian government as well as detailed and predictive models of coral reef functioning that could possibly be transferred for the management of other reef systems. The “Social Working Group,” lead by an environmental anthropologist and an environmental economist, was supposed to go about “assessing patterns of resource use and attitudes about resource conservation among stakeholders,” using survey technologies to compile comparable data sets from communities situated near proposed reserve areas or those identified as having an economic reliance on fishing.
Anthropology, as a discipline representing the behavioral sciences, was enlisted here in order to make sure that the knowledge produced for the modeling project reflected the cultural reality of the Bahamas. Anthropology was seen as the disciplinary voice of the local, as the discipline that would legitimate claims to social truths made by the BBP.The findings of the Social Working Group have been recently collated, summarized, and published separately from the other BBP working group results and projects in an article that stresses the necessity of socioeconomic assessment as an aspect of environmental management.The authors, Broad and Sanchirico, focus their analytic attentions on the quantification of what they describe as socioeconomic variables and environmental perceptions of individuals and communities that have been gleaned from the fieldwork. Variables, for these social scientists, are those traits that can be pinned to particular individual or community entities and then compared across a number of individuals or within communities. They assessed specific variables found within the completed fieldwork data, such as the “demographic variables” of individuals surveyed, i.e. their age, number of children, level of education, marriage status, gender, occupation as either in tourism, fishing, or other, household income, if the mother was from the specific settlement, if past generations of their family had been occupational resource users like fishermen or farmers, if they had heard of marine reserves or been to a reserve meeting, and how frequently they went to the sea to use marine resources. These variables were calculated for five particular communities, identified as small islands or specific settlements on larger islands, and in total across all 485 survey participants. Perceptions are also understood here as variables, but they are variables that pertain to participant’s responses to particular management oriented ideas around “environmental conditions” such as the state of local marine conditions, the level of threat to the marine environment, and the state of the enforcement of fishing regulations. These “perceptions” where then paired with variables such as the participant’s household income, fishing reliance, tourism reliance, and whether they thought there should be a local marine reserve put in place in the area.
The demographic variables are described as concrete “material aspects of life” while the perception variables are described as individual and community “perspectives.” When statistically linked, the material aspects of life can be shown to have more or less influence on a certain perspective in a certain place, and this data,strawberry gutter system when collated for specific communities, can become a management tool.The BBP is a prime example of ways in which “the social” becomes implicated in contemporary conservation science projects in the living laboratory of The Bahamas and elsewhere. It is my contention that in order for an increasingly necessary sociality to become scientifically implicated in the production of such peculiar politics, it must first be assessed and formalized, which implies that it must be conceptually formed and designed- that is, made assessable in the first place. The development and deployment of the BBP’s social science survey and the results gleaned from the data demonstrates the potential possibilities and pitfalls of this work. Based largely on my strange experiences with the project, I have come to see the socioeconomic survey as a powerful example of the way in which biocomplexity research activated certain instrumental notions of individuality and community as sociality bolstered by a certain notion of anthropology.The survey itself was concerned with statistically elucidating the connection between prevailing local economic conditions in an area and the variety and intensity of marine resource extraction conducted by individuals within that area as well as what they thought about the appropriateness of such extraction- all part of what the project refers to as “human and environmental interaction,” mentioned above. One of the defining features of the survey’s demographic variables is the categorization of each person interviewed by their current occupation, with a focus on either tourism or fishing, and the occupational history of their parents and grandparents,with a focus on “resource use.” Following Julia Paley, this can be thought of as an articulation of subjectivity, activated in spatial and temporal frames, wherein occupation is tied to particular extractive activities, appearing later in the survey, involving notions of self-interest centered around livelihood.These interested notions are productive of idioms of person hood based on an assumption that individuals have rights and claims to extract value from the material environment, and that the form these claims to value take represents what distinguishes one person from the next and one settlement from the next in terms of perspective and perception.
In the language of conservation and development, people making similar claims- having similar perceptions linked to specific variables- can then be lumped into stakeholder groups, and these groups then become instrumentalized actors- or, in the case of the BBP, groups based on occupational interest create the category “commercial fisher” or “tourist employee,” and groups based on location become “communities” which have their own distinctive traits depending on the stakeholder groups within them. These groups are made distinctive and therefore amenable to targeted management. Following Hayden, I would like to point out that it is not the identification of interests which explain social processes- i.e. the explanation that fishermen have particular interests in marine resources- rather, it is the analytic assembly of interests, values, and interested persons that is itself processual and worthy of study.Thinking in this manner allows the analytical focus to come off of assessing the extractive traits of those who fall within a given occupational category or who manifest a predetermined variable, and shifts it to the consideration of the work such notions do for those who would deploy them, such as the social scientists of the BBP. Interest, value, and variables then become ethnographic objects. Such a focus helps demonstrate that “there can be no production of value without processes of subject formation,” and the persons and communities defined by occupation produced by the BBP demonstrate the instrumental creation of a realm of inclusion and exclusion dictating the ways in which people are recognized and assessed within a particular paradigm, in this case nascent biocomplexity research.The socioeconomic surveys employed by the BBP, rooted as they are within a particular logic, instrumentalize and activate particular figures of the local, rural, and of the Out Islands, usually in occupationally evaluative terms and variables that come to stand for a sort of person hood. Fisherman becomes an occupational category that signifies particular extractive activities for self-interested gain and claims to tradition, lineage, and subsistence, all accumulations of value, which are different from activities connected to the category of tourism employee. Tourism and fishing have become construed here as existing in an inverted relationship, with fishermen hypothesized to be less likely to support marine reserve creation and tourism employees more likely, based on what are described as different forms of interaction with the marine environment which are linked to diametrically opposed perceptions of that environment and what to do with it. Further, when and if the individual survey results are statistically aggregated and linked to the other forms of BBP research, community and locality may become reactivated as sites which also have a self-interested nature and attendant claims and rights to accumulate value. To evoke Julia Paley again, statistics becomes a tool for social diagnosis, wherein research subjects become the object of study and are prevented from acting as authors- their participation becomes drastically proscribed. Interviewers, such as myself, who struggle to fit the given answers to survey questions into the format of the survey mode of information in order to create variables, also become produced as objects of the survey, standing in as representatives of the double legitimacy of anthropological social research and the transparency of the survey method itself. The Social Working Group and its publications are part of the orchestration of socially robust knowledge that comes with contemporary environmental management practices.The sociality of the research must be demonstrated, as Strathern would say, and it must be stabilized. What has been produced here by the BBP is a socioeconomic assessment which does this work of stabilization and demonstration in order to make Bahamian social forms which are manageable and an environmental management apparatus which has socially responsible options. As a participant myself in this social scientific design project, I wonder about the possibilities for targeted management mentioned by Broad and Sanchirico. It is one thing to show that there are a diversity of perspectives held by rural Bahamians about the marine environment and that management should recognize this diversity, as these authors argue, but it is quite another to make this diversity demonstrable, numerical, and localized- to operationalize constructed variables and orchestrate this data into a tool for targeting specific groups and communities for conservation education, economic development based in ecotourism, and various other forms of environmental management.simultaneously abstract and material, that ecological, biological, and conservation scientists and managers variously do. This work influences the way that the world is perceived, how new kinds of relations are formed, how futures are imagined, and what should be done about it all.