Habitats of authenticity: the ecological crisis, world-ecological praxeology and the capital structure of ‘uncapitalized’ spaces

ABSTRACT

The ecological crisis is a social crisis that undermines not just the relation between humans and the environment but the whole of human relations to themselves, to other humans, and to nonhumans. Addressing the paradox of unabated crisis escalation despite increasing widespread awareness and reflexivity, we argue that the crisis is in its core a crisis of capital(s) as metabolic relation(s). Its unfolding spurs the desire of particular social milieus to create ‘habitats of authenticity,’ that is, spaces untouched by capital. However, such counter-practices are embedded in cultural class struggles (e.g. distinctive lifestyles), which tends to reproduce the dominative nature relations they claim to overcome. Centering on the concept of capital as practice, we develop a theoretical framework based on an integration of Moore’s world-ecology, Bourdieu’s praxeology, and Critical Theory to conceptually address this paradox. We apply this ‘world-ecological praxeology’ in two case studies – –one from the Global South (Nam Ha National Protected Area in Laos) and one from the Global North (Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin, Germany). The article shows that despite unintended and paradoxical effects, such practices still carry a critical and progressive potential.

KEYWORDS:

• Habitus
• capital
• critical theory
• ecological crisis
• ecotourism
• Laos
• Berlin

Acknowledgement

We thank Boris Vormann, Alexander Lenger and three anonymous reviewers for excellent comments on earlier versions of this article. Any mistakes remain, of course, our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We are aware of the recent debate within eco-Marxist thinking between J.B Foster’s ‘metabolic rift’ school and J.W. Moore’s ‘world-ecology’ (e.g. Foster 2016; Moore 2011). Suffice it here for us to state that we take Moore’s (2011) objective seriously to ‘amplify and elaborate the essential core of metabolic rift theory’ by attending closely to the ‘laws’ of capital as ecological relations.

2. This notion of practice aligns with previous accounts of how ‘to understand the complex mediation of the sociomaterial structures through which our activities impact the natural and built environments’ and the ways in which everyday activities are part of a logic of ‘cumulative sociomaterial change’ (Ollinaho 2015). In this vein, it also seems worthwhile to see practices as structured aggregates or nexuses of empirical actions or activities (Schatzki 1997).

3. Negative value is a value-theoretical expression of the issue of ‘nonidentity’ (see Section 2.2); it refers to the fact that current attempts at maintaining capital accumulation on a global level increasingly come with systematically produced unintended consequences that tend to significantly reduce profitability, such as ‘super weeds.’ Increasing rates of human exhaustion like ‘burnout’ and depression among the workforce might be seen as belonging to this category as well.

4. This aspect of nonidentity is also well expressed in Mead’s classical distinction between ‘me’ (the social self or selves) and ‘I’ as ‘the response of the organism’ to the ‘me’s,’ and as a source for ‘a sense of freedom, of initiative’ and spontaneity in the individual self (Mead 1972 [1934], 175 and 177).

5. The historicization of ‘nature’ is arguably key to Marx’s historical materialism, as evident, for example, in the sixth thesis on Feuerbach, as well as in the famous definition in Capital Vol.1 of labor as metabolism where man ‘acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way, he simultaneously changes his own nature’ (Marx (1982 [1867]), 283). For Adorno, see his ‘Theses on Need’ (Shuster and Macdonald 2017), or his critique of the discourse on ‘self-alienation’ in Negative Dialectics, e.g. the claim that ‘[w]ithout exception, men have yet to become themselves’ (Adorno (1973 [1966]), 278). See Bourdieu (2001 [1998]), 23) on ‘masculine sociodicy,’ which ‘legitimates a relationship of domination by embedding it in a biological nature that is itself a naturalized social construction’ (emphasis original).

6. It is therefore less important for our examination whether environmentally conscious milieus can be found in the Global South (for the case study of Laos, see Rehbein 2007, 2017).

7. After international tourism had taken off, the government approached UNESCO in 1996 in order to establish a test-community-based ecotourism (CBET) project that would help to better manage the tourism influx in ways beneficial for poverty alleviation as well as forest conservation, and that would avoid or reverse socially harmful effects of unregulated tourism (prostitution, drug tourism, etc.) (Schipani 2008; Lyttleton and Allcock 2002). Its goals included counteracting slash-and-burn agriculture as well as illegal hunting and opium cultivation (Harrison and Schipani 2007, 212).

8. This is indicated by the fact that former upland rice fields are often found right within core zones of NPAs.

9. For further accounts of how ecotourism and resource extraction are ‘uncomfortable bedfellows,’ i.e. in productive yet uneasy relation, see Büscher and Davidov (2014).

10. In regard to one of the most common misconceptions of habitus that identifies structure with determinism, we would like to stress that our overall approach presupposes the activity of concrete individuals: the structures analyzed here are real only as enacted; in ecotourism specifically ‘agency’ is key to its ‘community-based’ approach. If locals, for example, derive income from ecotourism as well as from activities contravening NPA regulations (e.g. wildlife hunting, swidden fields), it seems of greater analytical value in this context to examine how these dynamics are again enacted structural effects, rather than interpret them, for example, as ‘everyday resistance’ in Scott’s (1985).

11. The question of whether ‘capital’ applies to the social context of capitalist ‘frontiers’ in the Global South seems to be based on a false opposition of subsistence and capitalist economy where subsistence livelihoods are actively produced by processes of capitalization, such as in Laos (see Cole and Rigg 2019; Moore 2011).

12. This is not to imply that there would not be any touristic ‘travel for travel’s sake’ without capitalism, only that the share of everyday (self-)appropriation and exploitation in explaining the practice would be different.

13. Martinez-Alier’s (2014) thesis of the ‘environmentalism of the poor’ observes ‘that in the many resource extraction and waste disposal conflicts in history and today, the poor are often on the side of the preservation of nature against business firms and the states.’ (ibid., 240). For a skeptical view regarding this concept, see Butcher (2007, 124).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Kleinod

Michael Kleinod is a sociologist at the Southeast Asian Studies of Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Germany. He teaches and works on political ecology, environmental sociology, social inequality and social theory with a focus on Laos and Southeast Asia.

Christian Schneickert

Christian Schneickert is a sociologist and political scientist at Otto–von–Guericke University Magdeburg. His teaching and research centers on inequality, stratification, globalization, and the sociology of education and science.