Normal View Dyslexic View
Commentary
Loss and recovery of diversity in the Anthropocene
Thomas Hylland Eriksen†
, with a Foreword from Tim Ingold‡
Abstract
Owing to the accelerating forces of globalisation, there is a perceptible reduction in diversity both ecologically and culturally. The simplification of ecosystems through industrial agriculture and infrastructural developments weakens their resilience and drives species to extinction. The dual dominance of the modern state and capitalist market leads to comparable simplifications of cultural worlds, reducing the number of languages used, standardising education and kinship systems, and making us all reliant on a globalised, monetised economy for sustenance. These developments make the living world, including the human world, less flexible and more vulnerable. Humanity has painted itself into a corner and alternative ways of living and relating to other people and species are most called for, but flexibility is being reduced, options are shed, peeled away, forgotten, lost, often unwittingly.
In this lecture, a perspective from biosemiotics is proposed as a tool enabling the study of biological and cultural diversity and loss through a shared analytical lens. Rather than painting an unequivocally grim picture of the state of the world, the final part of the lecture explores extant forms of resistance, the emergence of alternatives to homogenisation (and their pitfalls) and suggests a solution. This article arises from a Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology delivered on 30 April 2024.
Keywords
globalisationecological diversitycultural diversitysimplification of ecosystemsextinctionAnthropocenebiosemioticsForeword
I was privileged to introduce Thomas Hylland Eriksen on the occasion of his presenting the Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology, at the University of Edinburgh, on 30 April 2024. To honour his memory, I would like to present a summary of what I said.
I first met Thomas in a bar in Reykjavík in 1990. He was then a young man of 28, and I was immediately struck by his confidence, bordering at the time, I thought, on arrogance. Here was someone not afraid to take anthropology by the horns and shake it up. He spoke fast, had a lot to say, and was brimming with ideas. The 34 years since that first encounter saw no let-up in intellectual momentum. Indeed, Thomas continued to speak and write so prolifically that the rest of us had to struggle to keep up.
As a student at the University of Oslo, Thomas had studied philosophy, sociology and social anthropology, graduating in 1984. By that time, he was already active in Oslo’s anarchist scene, and was one of the most prolific writers for the radical counter-cultural magazine Gateavisa. Proceeding directly to doctoral research, he carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Mauritius in 1986, and subsequently in Trinidad in 1989. A couple of years later, soon after our first meeting in Reykjavík, he defended his dissertation, Ethnicity and Two Nationalisms: Social Classification and the Power of Ideology in Trinidad and Mauritius.
With his doctorate complete, Thomas gained a position as Associate Professor at the University of Oslo, and set out to write and publish at a prodigious rate, both in his native Norwegian and in English. His themes were nationalism and identity in Trinidad and Mauritius, but he was equally interested in understanding the rise of cultural diversity in contemporary Norway. His publications are too numerous to list, but two stand out in particular. One, Ethnicity and Nationalism, first published in 1993, and subsequently in numerous editions and languages, probably remains his most cited work. But the other, Small Places, Large Issues, is undoubtedly the most widely read. Written as a general introduction to social and cultural anthropology, it first appeared in Norwegian in 1993, and in English in 1995. Since then, it has been revised and updated many times.
Endorsing the latest, 2023 edition of Small Places, Large Issues, I wrote: ‘This is not just another book in the library of anthropology; it is an entire anthropological library in one book’. With these words, I wanted to capture not only the extraordinary comprehensiveness of Thomas’s vision for anthropology, but also a side to his scholarship that, given his early flirtation with anarchism, is perhaps surprising. It is his respect for anthropology’s classical foundations. His aim, as he put it, was not to reinvent or revolutionise the subject, but to build on these foundations. But he had another aim, of equal if not greater importance. This was to bring anthropology to the forefront of public debate around the key environmental, economic and cultural crises of our times, by presenting it in a form that is accessible and engaging for as wide a readership as possible. At a time when anthropologists are often criticised for talking only among themselves, Thomas’s contribution in presenting anthropology to the world has been second to none.
Besides his Professorship at the University of Oslo, Thomas has been showered with honours and awards, including Honorary Degrees from the Universities of Stockholm and Copenhagen, and Charles University in Prague. But perhaps the culmination of his research career was an Advanced Grant Project, funded by the European Research Council, which ran for five years, from 2012 to 2017. The project, entitled Overheating, was nothing less than an attempt to write a collective, anthropological history of the early 21st century, with a focus on accelerated change and local responses to it. These accelerating forces of globalization, and their consequences for our habitation of the planet, were to be the subject of his lecture.
For the past several years, Thomas had been gravely ill. He knew he had not long to live. Yet his irrepressible energy, courage and zest for life, even as his illness remorselessly progressed, remained undiminished. Thomas died on 27 November 2024. With his passing, anthropology has lost one of its most inspirational public advocates. Let this text stand as a tribute to his memory.
Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen
Introduction
I would be the first to admit that it does sound incongruous that a lecture named for A.R. Radcliffe-Brown should advocate research with an empirical focus on ecology, the state, capitalism and large-scale historical processes, using tools from phenomenology and semiotics in a bid to move beyond the nature–culture boundary. Yet, perhaps the famous structural-functionalist and yours truly are closer kin than it might seem at a first glance, much in the same way that matrilateral relatives may have a key role in patrilineal societies, as Radcliffe-Brown showed in one of his best articles.
Mid-20th-century social anthropology raised large questions by studying small places, networks, or communities with the ahistorical ethnographic present as an epistemological entry-point. Although he could hardly be accused of being a world-class ethnographer, Radcliffe-Brown never repudiated ethnography as the most reliable source of empirical knowledge about the human condition, but insisted that the purpose of those nuggets of gold was for the anthropologist to polish them through comparison and theoretical generalisation. An unrepentant positivist, Radcliffe-Brown’s last (1975), posthumously published book, de facto written by his students based on lecture notes in Chicago, was titled A Natural Science of Society. There is a pattern resemblance between his view of social structure and ecological thinking about biotopes and ecosystems, but on the whole, Radcliffe-Brown used non-human nature and organic metaphors mainly as template and analogy for thinking about humanity. His erstwhile student and supporter E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1940) devotes considerable attention to cattle in the first two chapters of The Nuer and, although he has much to say about the significance of cattle to Nuer society and culture, he makes no attempt to interpret bovine ways of being in the world. The book is emphatically about people, not cows.
In order to make sense of humanity in the present, an enlarged toolbox is nevertheless needed, and it must contain tools enabling an understanding of humans as ecological beings. In itself, ethnography can tell us much about human being in the world, but much less about the world as such. Expanding the toolbox is a pressing need since human communities everywhere are affected by unintentional consequences of global modernity, what we could speak of, broadly, as Anthropocene effects. Especially since the turn of the millennium, the boundary between culture and nature has repeatedly been interrogated critically, following accelerated destruction of nature and threats to livelihoods now witnessed across the planet. In addition to knowledge about biology, including ecology and evolution, serious historical knowledge must supplement, contextualise and correct the snapshot presentism implied in Radcliffe-Brown’s dismissal of ‘conjectural history’, and multiscalar analysis is necessary to make sense of the community as well as the large-scale system of which every locality forms part.
It must seem as though what I propose to do is exactly the opposite of structural-functionalism. And in a sense it is. I will indicate one way in which social anthropology has moved on and enlarged its scope, largely in response to events in the outside world. I do not believe in total originality in thought, so much of what I have to say has been said before, but hopefully not everything, and certainly not in exactly this way.
In an earlier lecture in this series, Tim Ingold (2008) reminded us of a possible difference between anthropology and ethnography, the former being a nomothetic enterprise aiming at generalisation, the latter being mainly idiographic and descriptive. For this view he finds support in Radcliffe-Brown. I propose to extend the ideographic canvas in order to begin to outline a nomothetic account of the contemporary world of overheated global capitalism, massive environmental destruction and, ultimately, catastrophic climate change.
Radcliffe-Brown’s proposal for a natural science of society was immediately dismissed by most of his colleagues. His view of social anthropology as a kind of comparative micro-sociology, a definition repeated by Edmund Leach (1982) four decades later, withstood the test of time longer. Another four decades have passed, and few would wholeheartedly endorse that view today. One kind of anthropology which has flourished in the last decades slides up, down and sideways rather than confining itself to the small scale. It is semiotically entangled with other knowledges, engaging seriously with history and ecology in attempting to contribute to an ecology of mind reaching for the long now and the big here, where the collective, relational nature of knowledge is taken for granted.
Research foci and priorities in anthropology are shaped by its ongoing dialogue, or semiosis, with events and current concerns in society; sometimes subtly, sometimes in very visible ways. The interest in ethnicity and nationalism towards the end of the last century was inspired by the perceptible shift from class politics to identity politics across the world; and political dramas such as the marginalisation of indigenous groups and the aftermath of the Second World War, including decolonisation, the civil rights movement and the rise of feminism, inspired researchers concerned to understand not only what it is to be human, but also the contemporary world, perhaps motivated by a desire to use knowledge to make the world safe for human difference, to quote Ruth Benedict.
Since the 1990s, the towering concerns are to do with the acceleration of acceleration, what I call overheating (Eriksen 2016), global neoliberalism and the contradiction between growth and sustainability. The concept of the Anthropocene—the era of the human—is loose in the streets, although the proposal for an Anthropocene Epoch as a formal unit of the Geological Time Scale was recently rejected by the International Commission on Stratigraphy.1 The popularity of the concept does not merely signal an increased engagement with climate and the environment, but also an incipient understanding of human life as being ultimately planetary in its entanglements and seamlessly integrated with that of other species through a web, or maze, or meshwork, of living systems. In this shift lies a radical potential for rethinking what we do as anthropologists, whether we mainly try to understand the world or what it is to be human. Many of us, whether or not we approve of the term Anthropocene, grapple with this shift, trying to reshape anthropology to come to terms with what some have labelled a more-than-human world inhabited mainly by non-humans.
At the same time, humans are in a privileged position. There are good reasons for speaking of this era as the Anthropocene and not, say, the Dendrocene (the era of trees) or the Fungicene (the era of mushrooms). There are equally good reasons to ask whether the anthropos in anthropology is now an asset or a handicap, and similarly, whether the humanities remains an appropriate label for a sprawling family of disciplines which until recently focused exclusively on humanity’s achievements.
The alternative I propose takes much of its inspiration from biosemiotics.
Biosemiotics
The Estonian–German biologist Jakob von Uexcüll (1864–1944), a founder of biosemiotics, is remembered for his theory of dieUmwelt or surrounding world, although most of his published work has long been out of print. In his 1934 book A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, he argues against a mechanistic view of animals, instead seeing them as subjects with agency (von Uexcüll 2010). Die Umwelt refers to the world around us as it is perceived subjectively, not as it is described from the outside and from above, for example by scientists. My Umwelt is not identical to yours and is qualitatively different from a dog’s. Incidentally, Umwelt theory bears some resemblance to the recently influential perspectivism as developed by Viveiros de Castro (2014) and others, often with reference to the life-worlds of people in the Amazon, but it is anchored in Kantian epistemology and early phenomenology.
Perceptions of the environment, or structures of relevance, are enabled and constrained by the organism’s immediate interests, usually food and sex, and its sensory apparatus. Umwelt theory differs from Darwinian biology through its insistence on communication and signification as fundamental in nature. Uexcüll recommended an interpretive, almost ethnographic approach to animals, aiming to describe their activities, perceptions and mindset on their own terms.2 Inspired by Uexcüll, Konrad Lorenz and others would soon develop the subdiscipline of ethology.
A more recent, and arguably more sophisticated, development of biosemiotics can be found in Jesper Hoffmeyer’s work.3 Hoffmeyer (1942–2019) trained as a chemist, worked as a biologist and collaborated with philosophers, literary scholars and social scientists. Biosemiotics proposes to read the dynamics of living systems as the exchange and interpretation of signs, much as Umberto Eco showed that a pair of blue jeans virtually bursts with signs. After reading Eco’s (1986) short and pithy description of the semiosis between jeans, trapped belly fat and squashed family jewels, I was incapable of wearing such garments for years. Contemporary biosemiotics has no quarrel with the theory of evolution, but unlike many (most?) evolutionary biologists, biosemiotics looks for communication and context rather than competition and struggle. When a fox is scented by a hare, the chase is part of a semiotic chain that includes the hare’s reaction and flight.
Reading relationships and processes in nature as signs and communicative networks can provide a recipe for qualitative, interpretive ecological research. Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of semiotics, was a philosopher and logician, and his theory of signs influenced biologists like Hoffmeyer, whose insights into the differences that make a difference in nonhuman nature may now return to the study of human communication, but with an important twist, namely a seamless integration with other living organisms through the lens of semiosis, where difference is a matter of degree rather than one of kind.
Whereas natural scientists like Uexcüll and Hoffmeyer tend to find their examples in the non-human world, others have emphasised that there is no natural boundary between nature and culture, and that all sign processes can be studied with the same methodology. As Donald Favareau (2015) says:
Sign relations make possible not only such higher-order human abilities as spoken language and written texts, but also such communicative animal behavior as the calls and songs of birds and cetaceans; the pheromone trails of insect colony organization and interaction; the mating, territorial, and hierarchical display behavior in mammals; as well as the deceptive scents, textures, movements and coloration of a wide variety of symbiotically interacting insects, animals and plants.
Hoffmeyer proposes the concept of semiotic scaffolding to describe how the environment, as perceived by an organism, provides opportunities and limitations. The semiotic scaffold consists of the signs offered in the Umwelt, enabling organisms to act and communicate in particular ways. We humans have equipped ourselves with crutches for thinking, enabling us to access knowledge that would otherwise be forgotten or inaccessible. Writing is an obvious example. As I type this text, I am constantly retrieving thoughts and factoids from dark attics, dusty corners, cupboards and drawers lodged in my mind. The vast majority are stored via the semiotic scaffold of script, only a small number with personal experience as a source.
In other species, a semiotic scaffold can be, for example, a physical lookout point or ecological circumstances that stimulate and encourage certain actions at the expense of others. A lion must behave differently in a semi-desert than on a savannah, and it has sufficient semiotic freedom to do so.
In the same way that unexpected signs entering our minds cause us to think in new ways, an organism—be it a slug or a chimpanzee—can flourish or wither depending on the opportunities the environment provides for semiosis facilitating survival and reproduction.
Gregory Bateson (1979) makes a similar point with his concept of mind. Mind does not end at the skin, but is a property of the living systems of which you and I form part. Medical scholars may point to our reliance on the human microbiota, the millions of bacteria existing in a symbiotic relationship to the human organism and each other, while cognitive scientists have shown that most of what people think they know is in fact collective knowledge (Sloman & Fernbach 2017). No individual has knowledge of the 30,000 parts that make up a Toyota car, yet flawless cars leave the assembly lines in Toyota City every day. Knowledge, in other words, is distributed, relational and not the property of an individual person or organism.
Knowledge is not only distributed and relational, it is also embodied. Knowing the square root of 16 is cognitive and different from practical, nonverbal knowledge, such as knowing how to fix a broken chair. You can know facts without knowing how to run. Reading semiosis in living systems, biosemiotics uses the same tools to understand the hare–fox relationship as the formal lecture, making the two processes comparable but not identical.
Semiotic freedom
Hoffmeyer was clear about the direction of evolution, and said, in one of his most authoritative statements:
Semiotic freedom may in fact be singled out as the only parameter that beyond any doubt has exhibited an increasing tendency throughout the evolutionary process. There is more semiosis, more communication, more complexity in the natural world than ever, notwithstanding its temporary reduction owing to mass extinctions in the past (Hoffmeyer 2010: 36).
What could he have meant by that?
All organisms have a degree of semiotic freedom, that is to say an ability to do something differently. The TINA doctrine—There Is No Alternative—is empirically wrong. A plant can reach for the sunlight or move its roots to where the soil is most nutritious. A dog can play-fight with its owner and pretend to bite them; it is capable of metacommunication because it puts its action in quotation marks by making it clear that this is play. The relationship between man and dog triggers greater semiotic freedom for both parties—more options, more flexibility, more depth of meaning—than the relationship between a spruce and the blueberry shrubbery on the ground, even though there is an exchange of signs in the latter case as well, including microorganisms, soil and other elements.
Hoffmeyer describes an evolutionary process moving towards ever-greater complexity: more communication, more complex interpretations, more relationships, an ever denser forest of signs that communicate richer, broader and deeper meanings. This development is linked to specialisation, which in turn is scaffolded by a systemic incitement to fill vacant niches in increasingly crowded ecosystems. As I have suggested, biosemiotics makes it possible to move beyond unproductive distinctions between mind and matter, human and animal, culture and nature, without lapsing into obscurantism. What matters is largely what happens between entities. Whether we look at communication within an organism or between organisms, we should look for processes rather than structures. The nodes are switchboards for the threads that connect.
Perhaps it could be said, expanding on Bateson’s famous definition of information, that all that exists in the world are differences that make a difference.
Somewhat disappointingly, biosemiotics tends to fall into the same trap of ahistorical abstraction as Radcliffe-Brown’s structural-functionalist school. It could nevertheless be mobilised as a tool of critique and analysis of the destabilisation caused by contemporary runaway globalisation and Anthropocene effects more widely.4
A reading of biosemiotics against the homogenising effects of globalisation makes it possible to conclude that the trend described by Hoffmeyer has been reversed. Until the present, he has been right, but from now on we will have to resign ourselves to living in a world with decreasing semiotic freedom, both biological and cultural. If what I am saying is true, the dominance of global capitalism is such that it does not only alter the geology of the planet, but shifts the evolutionary process.
A normative challenge today is to halt the movement away from a world of many differences to a world of just a few, and in the realm of theoretical analysis, it must be demonstrated why and how the defence of biodiversity and cultural autonomy are two sides of the same coin. So far, critics of globalisation have usually concentrated on either social inequality, climate change, neo-imperialism, ecological destruction, the marginalisation of vulnerable groups such as refugees, or Indigenous peoples. It is high time to make proper use of extant analytical tools capable of focusing on all these trends at the same time. The reason is, in all cases, a bulldozer on speed.
Consider the following. In (2020), the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) published a much-publicised report on the state of the global ecosphere. It showed an average decline of 68 per cent in the populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish between 1970 and 2016. However, some species are doing well and increasing in numbers. For some animal groups, however, the decline is steeper than feared. Populations of animals, including fish, in freshwater had fallen by so much that I had to double-check the figure, which was 84 per cent. Strictly speaking, this should not be surprising, as their habitats—rivers, wetlands and lakes—are being diverted, polluted, drained and desiccated. Only 4 per cent of mammal biomass (total weight) now belongs to wild animals. 70 per cent of the world’s birds are poultry, i.e. birds that are owned and eventually eaten by humans. 36 per cent of land mammals are humans, and 60 per cent are animals owned by people, mostly pigs and cattle.
In total, the world’s biomass is shrinking, not least due to expanding human infrastructure, and the diversity is also decreasing.5
The argument is that semiotic freedom is being reduced owing to environmental destruction or transformation, standardisation and the massive simplification of ecosystems. A related, but more complicated argument, holds that we can see this reduction in semiotic freedom taking place on the much shorter timescale of cultural diversity as well. Thus, biosemiotics can be a tool for critiquing the homogenising effects of global capitalism and state power; the transition from the messy rainforest to the ordered plantation, from thousands of forms of social organisation to just a few, framed by state power and general-purpose money, making everything comparable to everything else and measured on a common scale.
This is not a new insight. Back in 2007, the UNEP (n.d.) flagship report, Global Environment Outlook, described biodiversity as encompassing ‘human cultural diversity, which can be affected by the same drivers as biodiversity, and which has impacts on the diversity of genes, other species, and ecosystems.’ But if we retain the distinction between the idiographic and the nomothetic, there is more to be said in the latter department, moving beyond the merely descriptive to a theoretical position.
The reduction in semiotic freedom confirms the relevance of the term Anthropocene, since humans have far greater semiotic freedom, at least in some key domains, than any other species, which gives us greater responsibility for the future of the planet as we know it.
Homogenisation and the Columbian exchange
Connections entail contact, and contact leads to mutual influence. Paths have always existed between places and groups of people, even if many of them have been overgrown at times. Long before the Roman expansion, food grains found their way from Turkey to the Iberian Peninsula, grapes from the Caucasus to France. However, the speed and scale of this exchange have accelerated dramatically since the beginning of the Columbian Exchange, which began with the expansion of the global highways after 1492 (Crosby 1972).
Already on his second voyage, which started in 1493, Columbus brought livestock with him. From then on, horses, chickens, pigs and cattle became American animals. The relationship between European settlers and the indigenous populations was in many ways affected by the foreign animals. Domestic animals also contributed to major ecological changes, such as when the bison herds in the Midwest were slaughtered to make room for grazing cattle, maize and wheat, making it easier to get rid of troublesome Indigenous people.
As noted, the movement of people, animals and plants across continents began long before Columbus. Otherwise, medieval villagers in northern Europe would never have been able to grow barley, ride horses or milk cows. Whether intentional (for example, pigs and apple trees) or unintentional (for example, rats and viruses), animals, plants and microorganisms have been traded for millennia. Some of the most important routes were the Silk Road from China to Europe, caravans across the Sahara, Indian and Arab seafarers trading along the east coast of Africa, and the Phoenicians’ impressive Mediterranean trade network in antiquity. What is unique about the half millennium since Columbus is the global scale and increasing speed. The big here has shrunk, and the long now is compressed into a few frantic moments.
The initial goal of European conquests was to obtain gold, but they also needed food. Aztecs and Incas were defeated, livestock and seeds were transported from Europe, and by the early 1500s the ecological colonisation of the Americas was already underway. In the coming centuries, it would accelerate, especially after the dream of the gilded city of El Dorado began to fade. From Europe came horses, wheat and cattle, sheep, chickens and pigs, and in the opposite direction flowed potatoes, maize, tobacco, cocoa, tomatoes and peppers. Soon, the succulent and irresistible sugar cane, originating in New Guinea, would change the ecology of islands like Barbados and Mauritius beyond recognition.
People and ideas also flowed back and forth, but mostly from east to west: millions of slaves were brought from West Africa as cheap labour, and millions of Europeans left more or less of their own accord to form overseas colonies.
Eventually, what started as movements of plants, animals, people and ideas across the Atlantic would become global. A South African town known for its university, wine farms and for having been the cradle of apartheid, namely Stellenbosch, is colloquially known as Eikestad, Oak Town. In 1679, the founder Simon van der Stel arranged for a large number of acorns to be sown in the fertile valley. Mighty oak trees still provide shade along the Eerste River and the beautiful avenue that intersects the university campus. Van der Stel also helped develop the Cape Colony’s economically important wine production, contributing to a reduction of biodiversity in one of the most biologically diverse regions in the world.
The repercussions of the Columbian exchange are so extensive that they are taken for granted. Norwegian homebodies with limited imaginations and small social worlds are sometimes described, sarcastically, by the urban chattering classes, as Ola Potato (Ola Pottitt). In that country, this nutritious and hardy Andean tuber made its breakthrough, having long been resisted by sceptical farmers, only in the early 19th century.
During his voyage to Italy in 1780, Goethe was astonished to discover that polenta was a staple in the northern Italian peasant’s diet. Similarly, the maize porridge ugali is as ubiquitous on the East African coast as mealie meal in southern Africa. In fact, tomatoes were believed to be poisonous in Italy until after the French Revolution. Similarly, the most widely eaten fruit in the world, the banana, originates in South-East Asia and arrived in the USA, via Central America, only in 1870.
The proliferation of imported food, which has greatly benefitted humanity both economically and demographically, has come at a price, and the legacy of the Columbian exchange is easy to observe. Large-scale industrial food production reduces semiotic freedom on a massive scale: land is appropriated and fed with chemical fertiliser (the cocaine of agriculture), replacing diverse, distinctly localised ecosystems with homogeneous food factories; and the cereals, legumes and animals produced are selected to increase productivity. This form of globalised food production is fairly new, but its logic goes back centuries to the first European plantations in tropical and subtropical locations, which, as pointed out by Sidney Mintz (1985), could be considered the first factories.
It was not until the late 19th century that maize seriously began to replace local cereals such as sorghum in Africa, but by now the American grain is totally dominant from Kenya to South Africa. An Argentina without cattle herds would seem as odd as Indigenous peoples without horses in Western films. There is a historical irony in the fact that the largest producers of the American cocoa bean are Ghana and the Ivory Coast, while the largest producers of the African coffee berry are Brazil, Colombia and Vietnam. Most of the ten million turkeys eaten by Britons on Christmas Day are home-bred, and the alpaca does well in the harsh Norwegian climate.
Loss of flexibility
The most serious loss is reduced flexibility. Flexibility, defined by Bateson as uncommitted potential for change, refers to alternatives and elbow room, and it is a close relative to semiotic freedom. If one potato variety is attacked by a deadly fungus, such as that which led to the catastrophic Irish famine in 1845, you should have three or four other varieties to grow. In our scaled-up, overheated times, variety is reduced due to increasing human needs and the demand for growth and profit following the logic of economies of scale. If you put all your investments into two highly productive potato varieties, you will get a larger crop, but they will be similar, and you shall have nothing to fall back on if the crop fails. Concerns about homogenisation are not a nostalgic Romantic affliction, but have become relevant for human survival.
Consider the forest and the plantation. Many of the coniferous forests which cover much of the Norwegian lowlands are not really forests, biologists can tell us; they are so-called production forests, that is, spruce farms. Comparing one of them to a forest that has not been exploited, planted and transformed from being valuable to producing value (i.e. money), the biologist Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson (2023) explains that the forest consists of much more than the trees that meet the eye. That modest and terribly messy forest contains around 25,000 species. Few things are more alive than dead trees. Several thousand species live in dead trees. They eat, are being eaten, and engage in extremely complex semiotic webs with other species. Few are aware that just 1.7 per cent of Norwegian forests are now virgin forest, and the proportion has fallen dramatically since industrial logging began in the second half of the last century. Entropy is increasing: the spruce field has less semiotic complexity than the primeval forest, less richness of signs, fewer species, fewer differences that make a difference.
The same logic applies to other areas such as language. If everyone learns English as a foreign language, with or without the help of artificial intelligence, we can talk to each other all over the world, but often in a detached and disembedded mode. We may utter as many sentences as before in simplified English, but the semiosis can be compared to that of the spruce farm as opposed to the messy natural forest.
Those who teach English as a Foreign Language (EFL) are warned not to use semantic complexity, ambiguities, wordplay, assumed shared references and—god forbid—irony. Language is platformised, standardised, simplified and appified when everyone needs to be able to understand each other.
The trend can clearly be summarised as a loss of semiotic freedom in many domains, resulting in all or nearly all cases from the dual impact of expanding market economies based on economies of scale and state power. Umwelten are becoming standardised and homogenised, from the smartphone to the spruce farm. The tendency can be observed across the semiosphere, both in ecosystems and in human culture.
Is cultural diversity diminishing?
The claim that cultural diversity in the world is being reduced requires a closer examination. For is it not a fact that precisely this moment of accelerated globalisation produces a plethora of new cultural forms owing to transnational communication and migration?
The concept of super-diversity has been suggested, by Steven Vertovec (2007), in order to describe the diversification of diversity, especially as it can be observed in cities, the cultural crossroads par excellence. His observation is valid, and it is true that new identities are continuously being produced—religious, ethnic or post-ethnic, pertaining to gender, etc.—but they tend to conform to a uniform, global grammar. Across the world, there are people who emphasise their uniqueness, but they usually do so in the same ways, conforming to individualism, consumerism and choosing among the alternatives on offer in the supermarket of individual choice.
Ethnicity does not result from cultural differences, but consists in making cultural differences comparable; it is the general-purpose money of intercultural relationships. The great leveller of modernity, producing what Ernest Gellner (1983). spoke of as cultural entropy, enables communication and comparison. Formerly, the other could come across like Wittgenstein’s lion: if it could talk, we would not understand what it said.
The reduction of diversity is not without its benefits. While it did reduce crop diversity, the Green Revolution saved millions of lives by concentrating on a few, highly productive cereals. The advantages of using English as an international language are similarly obvious, and arguably it enables many to expand rather than limit their cultural repertoire. The new forms of diversity once led Ulf Hannerz (1996) to argue, in a rejoinder to Gellner, that the new, diverse cultural settings were an antidote to entropy. Similarly, foreign or so-called invasive species have sometimes found vacant niches and led to increased diversity in local ecosystems (Thompson 2014; Vimercati et al. 2020).
At the same time, the main tendency is that the underlying grammar is simplified and standardised. As Clifford Geertz (1986) famously quipped: ‘[C]ultural difference will doubtless remain—the French will never eat salted butter. But the good old days of widow burning and cannibalism are gone forever.’
UNESCO (1996) did not see this distinction when they produced the report Our Creative Diversity. The authors celebrated cultural diversity while at the same time promoting a global ethics. Everybody should, in other words, be encouraged to be different and unique, but only insofar as they followed the established rules. They had to become similar in order for their difference to be legitimate. Handicrafts, yes. Headhunting, no.
Loss of diversity
Among the most tangible and dramatic Anthropocene effects is extinction. It is commonly agreed that the main drivers of extinction in ecosystems are species invasion, habitat loss or fragmentation, overexploitation of natural resources and natural disasters, but the most important cause, related to some of the others, is Anthropogenic ecological destabilisation, chiefly activities leading to climate change (UNEP 2023).
Parallels can be drawn between biodiversity loss and processes reducing options for people. The regions which display the greatest biodiversity today overlap considerably with the linguistically most diverse regions (UNESCO 2003). These are areas, such as the Zomia in South-East Asia, where neither capitalism nor the state have established a strong foothold (Scott 2009).
Habitat loss resembles the effects of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2005), whereby people lose their homes and livelihood owing to large-scale infrastructural developments, becoming urbanised or proletarianised because there is no other option available. Overexploitation of resources also deprives Indigenous people of their livelihood, and species invasion may have a parallel in the homogenising effects of states and markets. Climate change, needless to say, affects people as well as the rest of nature.
Culture has different internal dynamics than biology, but this should not detract attention from the pattern resemblances and shared characteristics that we can observe. Benevolent state policies on Indigenous matters resemble the thinking behind national parks. State control and the relentless desire to translate everything to measurable and profitable ‘resources’ in the corporate world contribute to upscaling and homogenisation in both realms. The benefits of homogenisation are gauged with the universal standards of modernity: economic growth, improved access to education, reduced child mortality, improved sanitation and so on. Not everybody benefits. Some are faced with the bill without having had the chance to reap the benefits. Ultimately, everybody loses because future options are narrowed and we are collectively painting ourselves into a corner. I have argued that the greatest loss, seen from a long-term global perspective, is the loss of semiotic freedom. The insistence on a single economic system presupposing eternal growth, a few highly productive food crops and, not least, the destructive and potentially catastrophic reliance on fossil fuels, leads to a game with high stakes, one that cannot be won in the long term (Hornborg 2011).
Considerable biodiversity will continue to exist, for example in zoos and seed banks. But outside the reserves, the trend is clear. In the realm of culture, diversity will similarly continue to exist, but in pockets, or elsewhere in a simplified and reduced form, if current trends continue. Many anthropological studies are now equipped with prefaces explaining that they are really writing about the past since the situation has changed dramatically in recent years, thanks to mining, plantations, new infrastructure, streamlined state control, monetary economy and so on.
Purity and mixing
I will not conclude by delving even more deeply into the argument about a world of many small but significant differences being flattened and replaced by a few big but standardised ones. Anthropologists study human diversity, and we have a professional responsibility to explore the options. As a start, we might contrast Margaret Thatcher’s TINA doctrine with the TAMA alternative: there Are Many Alternatives. So what do they look like? Would it be desirable, and realistic, to fence off large parts of the planet declaring them off limits to humans, as has been proposed by the E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation’s Half-Earth Project6 and others? Maybe, but the proposal presents serious problems. Notably, it ignores the documented ability of humans to live in their Umwelt without transforming it in destructive ways. Instead, I propose a solution which celebrates impurities and mixing.
In the absence of isolation, which is rarely an option, we need to take account of social and cultural diversity. The linguist Patience Epps (2020) has compared different Amazonian peoples in regions known for their great linguistic diversity. She shows that the preservation of linguistic pluralism reflects ‘the absence of profound differences in socioeconomic dominance between communities, so that groups were not normally drawn into social structures that other groups imposed on them from the top down’. In other words, in an asymmetrical situation, such as an empire or powerful state, diversity would not be maintained.
In this case, it is egalitarian contact that ensures linguistic pluralism. There is no evidence that these peoples actively protect themselves from outside influence, yet linguistic boundaries remain intact.
When foreign species enter an ecosystem, the result can be both greater and less diversity. If they do not threaten or outcompete local species, the overall biodiversity increases once the newcomers have established a viable niche. The new situation can also stimulate selection for new traits as the organisms’ Umwelt changes. The same principles apply here as in the case of linguistic diversity. A third option, to be examined presently, is creolisation both in culture and nature.
Knowledge of how new species arise is incomplete, and what counts as a species is contested in biology. Scientists have not come up with an exact figure as to how many species of plants, animals and fungi exist, and many of them currently go extinct before they can be scientifically described. Estimates vary between five and ten million, of which just over two million are known to science (Ritchie 2022).
The famous breakthrough for Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution took place after his return with The Beagle in 1836, when he re-examined the finches he had sent home from Galápagos. It was the ornithologist John Gould who put Darwin on the trail. Gould discovered that finches that were closely related but lived on different islands had developed different beak shapes. This was because different types of food were abundant on the different islands—berries in one place, nuts in another, seeds in a third and so on. Through relentless natural selection, evolution’s blind watchmaker had effectively weeded out the birds with impractical beak shapes and encouraged those with slightly more practical beaks.
In the course of just a million years, no fewer than eighteen species of finch evolved on the Galápagos archipelago, all of them almost certainly descendants of one or a few pairs of the same species. This perspective on diversity thus creates the impression that isolation is what is needed to avoid everything mixing into a homogeneous porridge. Later evolutionary researchers have not broken with this insight. In a book on biodiversity, E.O. Wilson writes:
Through natural selection over countless generations, small genetic differences are gradually amplified until they become insurmountable. The two populations have then become different species because they are reproductively isolated where they meet under natural conditions (Wilson 1993).
It is isolation and not contact that contributes to speciation, according to Wilson, although he discusses hybridity and speciation at length. However, an ecological and systemic view, which takes into account the entire semiosphere and not just that relating to a single or a few species, may lead to a different conclusion. New forms of diversity can develop as the semiotic system changes, stimulating niche formation or hybridisation, and research on epigenesis is still in its infancy. There are pure forms of diversity production, where the boundaries are clear and diversification is complete when two populations are no longer of producing fertile offspring. A question asked by biosemioticians and some ecologists is nevertheless to what extent impurity, contact and mixing can also produce diversity.
Foreign species, usually considered a leveller and a threat to diversity, enter local semiotic systems under different circumstances. The question is when new species contribute to enrichment and when they only lead to flattening or, put differently, under what conditions it is boundaries and mixing, respectively, that create something new.
In the human world, isolation is not a recipe for diversity, as Epps’ research from the Amazon shows. Change and impurity are the air we breathe. The path back to a pristine, innocent state of nature was already overgrown in Rousseau’s time, and now it is nowhere to be seen.
Purity is not a solution that suits everyone, or even most people or animals. While Indigenous peoples may fight for their right to autonomy, they are rarely hostile to outside influences. Besides, the vast majority of the world’s population is affected by modernity. We use money to acquire goods and services, we buy more than we produce of the necessities of life and we accept citizenship. Cities are crossroads and meeting places where new cultural forms emerge precisely thanks to mobility and the associated frictions and inspirations. Because when you look, what doesn’t come from somewhere else? The fact that something is native to a place is problematic. How long does something have to have been somewhere to be endemic? The question is along the lines of ‘How long is a length of string?’ Nothing has been anywhere forever. Always is a very long time. No one has always been here, not people, not animals, not plants.
Miracles of creolisation
In the Caribbean basin and the Indian Ocean, some (or all) of the groups that contributed to the post-Columbian economy during slavery were eventually described as creoles (Eriksen 2007).
The creole social identity is typically flexible. In colonial Mauritius, the fuzzy and somewhat absurd category of ‘General Population’ was introduced as a census category in the last century, and was defined as any person who, based on their way of life, was neither Hindu, Muslim nor Chinese. Apart from the small Franco-Mauritian elite, members of the ‘General Population’ are considered creoles. While anyone who does not identify as Indian in Trinidad may be considered a creole, Mauritians of African or mixed origin may consider themselves creoles.
Creole identity directly opposes ideas of boundaries and purity. It is an open identity, a residual category that is difficult to squeeze into models of multicultural societies, although both governments and scholars have tried with limited success.
Despite differences, there are some important similarities between the various local understandings of the term creole, which fully or partly correspond to the theoretical concept of creolisation: creoles are historically uprooted, they belong to a New World, they are the products of some kind of mixing and they are fundamentally modern in contrast with anything that is old, deep and rooted. They had lost their original kinship system and their village organisation, they had to grow foreign plants for strange people with guns and whips, and their languages morphed into creole languages with mainly European vocabularies but important elements from African and other languages. They had to re-create their life-worlds and semiospheres from scratch. Typically, there are no strong rules of endogamy, loose and pragmatic kinship organisations and many possible entry-points into the category.
In short, those who were thrown into new worlds had to create their lives anew. The starting point was not the best. They had no property of their own, but were themselves property on a par with horses and cattle. Girls just out of puberty might became pregnant after being raped by the plantation owners or their sons, and stable family life was problematic. Creole societies were often matrifocal.
The miracle of creolisation, to use the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s (1998) expression, is twofold. The generous openness to cultural impulses and other people is more than a cliché. It can be experienced in most creole milieus.
Secondly, it is almost incomprehensible that people with so many scars and open wounds from centuries of humiliation and oppression should have been able to create so much beauty in the realms of art and music, morality by developing supple forms of conviviality, and truth by resisting the powers that be.
The miracle of creolisation is most visibly expressed in this extraordinary cultural creativity, from music and language to religion and food. Notwithstanding its historical origins, creolisation takes place everywhere and is easy to spot with the right lens, as Ulf Hannerz (2005) has argued convincingly for many years. However, just a few societies have been visibly and perceptibly creolised, both ecologically and culturally, since they were first settled by humans. Seychelles is one such place.
The Seychelles, an archipelago of fewer than 100,000 inhabitants and about a hundred islands, has a tropical climate and is well-watered, but in the age of accelerated globalisation, it is now barely feasible to produce food there. Economies of scale in other countries and the reduced cost of transport have made it difficult for local farmers to compete, and even the mangoes in the Spar supermarket come from Tanzania.
During the pandemic, supply lines failed. The Seychelles economy officially stands on two feet, one small and one large. The small one is fishing, and one of the archipelago’s few factories produces canned tuna. The big one is tourism, and from one day to the next, thousands of men and women were told to go home. That happened in March 2020. Thus, they lost income, but in return they gained a lot of slow time, and interest in local self-sufficiency emerged as a result. A pilot project titled ‘The Creole Garden’ (Zardin kreol) was initiated at the interface between UNESCO, a handful of enthusiasts from academia and the community, and Seychellois women who had the knowledge and skills (University of The Seychelles 2021). The aim of the Creole Garden is to recover partly forgotten knowledge about horticulture and crafts during and after slavery, from the time before the container ship and the airport. In the Creole Garden, Seychellois grew breadfruit, cassava, sweet potatoes and beans. They kept chickens and pigs, they knew which plants went well together and how to improve the soil organically. They grew fragrant flowers in every colour of the rainbow, herbs that could heal stomach aches and infections, hot chili and mild coriander. Handicrafts are also part of the project, and like the animals raised and plants grown, they are creole crafts reflecting a history of uprootedness and encounters.
By a historical irony, the Creole Garden emerged as a result of the plantation drive and the Columbian exchange, a paradoxical product of the Homogenocene, an unintended side effect of globalisation. The slaves’ gardens were economically uninteresting to the landowners and were therefore allowed to live their own diverse lives before the monetary economy and encroachment by global commodity flows led to their disappearance.
The Creole Garden project has succeeded in replacing some of the Malaysian tins and South African apples with local produce. If successful, the Creole Garden could prove to be an exemplary model for resistance to the Homogenocene, rejecting ideals of purity and boundaries; instead searching for something unique, creating and recreating semiotic flows connecting plants, people, animals as well as natural features such as mountains and beaches without being bounded, yet at the same time being locally anchored in ways that safeguard and strengthen biological and cultural diversity.
The Creole Garden project brings many strands of the preceding argument together.
(1)
It came about—ironically—as an unintentional result of plantation slavery and the beginnings of the Homogenocene.
(2)
It rejects quests for purity, instead focusing on what works in the local ecology regardless of its origins.
(3)
It is small scale, operating at the household level.
(4)
The Creole Garden combines a concern with biodiversity with the objective of saving human cultural worlds from oblivion in the era of Netflix and the smartphone.
(5)
The project is critical of the homogenising tendencies of large-scale production and distribution; in effect, it seeks to replace tinned food, imported mangoes and carrots with locally grown produce. This kind of initiative, if allowed to flourish and grow, may well turn out to be an exemplar for a new politics of diversity. At a theoretical level, diversity resulting from creolisation is neither the outcome of competition nor of collaboration, but continuous adaptation and mutual adjustment. This insight can also be found in Darwin’s Origin of Species (2003: 574) and is to my mind perhaps its most important contribution to knowledge about the ecosphere, or semiosphere, of which all living organisms are part. Herbert Spencer’s concept of the survival of the fittest, eventually adopted by Darwin himself, should be understood as not being about ‘nature red in tooth and claw’, but a celebration of relational thinking. Fitness is never absolute, always relational and context-dependent. As we typically tell our first-year students, the smallest unit we study in social anthropology is not the bounded entity, but the relationship between two. Radcliffe-Brown would have nodded his approval.
Conclusion: Radcliffe-Brown revisited
What could be the substantial commonalities between the kind of endeavour I have outlined and Radcliffe-Brown’s brand of social anthropology?
It does seem like a long shot. However, there is a shared commitment to comparison and a desire to allow small facts to speak to large issues. Radcliffe-Brown and I would also agree that quantitative data, while valuable, are inadequate if the objective is to understand the dynamics of social life. His hostility to history has been exaggerated; what he opposed was partly mere historical description without theoretical ambitions. More acute was his critique of speculative cultural history, which had a visible presence in British social anthropology in the 1920s, largely owing to the energetic efforts of the hyper-diffusionist Grafton Elliot Smith. Explaining how social structure works in practice, he emphasises that ‘the continuity of social structure through time [is] a continuity which is not static like that of a building, but a dynamic continuity, like that of the organic structure of a living body’ (Radcliffe-Brown 1940). For this continuity to be understood, a processual and historical perspective is necessary. Like biosemioticians, he was less interested in competition or cooperation as recipes for cohesion than the ongoing mutual adjustment and coadaptation between social institutions.
More important than these commonalities in the present context is nevertheless the possibility that Radcliffe-Brown would have met creolisation with curiosity rather than hostility or dismissal. His opposition against racial segregation in South Africa is well known. He correctly pointed out that cultures do not interact: individuals do, and in South Africa, they were integrated in the same economic system and political superstructure. Therefore, South African nationalism had to be one of black and white (Kuper 1999).
In place of the study of the formation of new composite societies, we are supposed to regard what is happening in Africa as a process in which an entity called African culture comes into contact with an entity called European or Western culture, and a third new entity is produced, or is to be produced, which is to be described as Westernized African culture. To me this seems a fantastic reification of abstractions. European culture is an abstraction and so is the culture of an African tribe (Radcliffe-Brown 1940: 10).
By using the term ‘new composite societies’, Radcliffe-Brown reveals the same shortcoming as Uexcüll does when describing the Umwelt of an organism as ‘a bubble’. Neither of them overcomes the boundary as a foundational systemic feature, be it between organisms or groups. Contemporary biosemiotics describes a more fluid world, as does creolisation theory.
We may nevertheless speculate that if Radcliffe-Brown’s vision for a non-segregated South African society had been taken a generation or two forward, adjusting and changing on the way, the outcome could have been a thoroughly creolised society, certainly in terms of so-called race, but also as regards cultural meaning and flows. Signification flows and is continuous. Unless fixed boundaries prevent these flows, this principle has general relevance and also applies to biological species and the entire semiosphere.
Regardless of his positivism and ultimately static view of social structure, Radcliffe-Brown’s policy advice regarding South Africa, anchored in his epistemology, is compatible with the impurities and semiotic complexity of creolisation. Jakob von Uexcüll, by contrast, had a complicated relationship with national socialism. Along with Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger and other German professors, he endorsed the ideology as late as 1933, seeing its holistic, ‘organic’ alternative to democracy as being compatible with Umwelt theory (Schnödl & Sprenger 2022). Only the next year, however, he abandoned his faith in Hitler and dedicated a book to a Jewish colleague who had been dismissed due to so-called racial politics.
This is not meant to imply that authoritarian ideologies of purity and boundaries follow from Umwelt theory, or that structural-functionalism could have saved South Africa from apartheid. Rather, to return to my starting-point, the semiosis in which we engage, the threads we spin and the webs in which we are enmeshed are just as much the product of historical circumstances as of scientific curiosity. Today, those historical circumstances are irreducibly shaped by Anthropocene challenges and effects almost wherever you look—from the unique and threatened fynbos heath of the Western Cape to the extreme flooding which dislocated more than a hundred thousand Kenyans last weekend7—and these experiences will inevitably shape the semiosis of common rooms, seminars, publications and lectures given by academics like ourselves for many years to come. Hopefully not just with the people in place, but including the entire world of living systems.
Acknowledgements
I am honoured and grateful to the British Academy for having been given the opportunity to speak about these matters of great significance, and I would in particular like to thank Edwin Coomarasu for having taken care of practicalities and logistics in a smooth and professional way. It was also humbling and a great honour to have been introduced by Professor Tim Ingold, whose work I have followed and admired for several decades. Finally, I should thank the wonderful audience present at the event and, in particular, those who subsequently went out of their way to discuss the issues with me.
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1
The final vote took place on 26 March 2024. See Working Group on the Anthropocene, International Commission on Stratigraphy. http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/working-groups/anthropocene/
2
For an excellent introduction to Uexcüll, see Schroer (2021). For a full discussion of his work, see Brentari (2015).
3
See Hoffmeyer (1996).
4
An exception is the philosopher Morten Tønnessen (e.g., 2010). See also Eriksen (2021).
5
For example, see Smil (2011).
6
What is the Half-Earth Project? https://eowilsonfoundation.org/what-is-the-half-earth-project/
7
I have kept this reference as a reminder that this text was originally a lecture performed on 30 April 2024.
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DOI: 10.5871/jba/013.a02
Published on: 14 March 2025
Volume: 13
Issue: Issue 1
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© The author(s) 2025. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Eriksen, T.H. with Ingold, T. (2025), ‘Loss and recovery of diversity in the Anthropocene’, Journal of the British Academy, 13(1): a02 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/013.a02Crossref
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