Week 12: Plantations and plots on climate frontiers

Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology for a better world
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
Social Sciences Building 410
October 28, 2025

Main reading: Barra (2023)

Other reading: Barra and Jessee (2024); Barra (2024); Jessee (2022)

Song of the day: Justnique, “Tocco Illimitato,” Love Can Wait (EP, 2023).

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What’s the problem with having a home?

A theme of this class is home. Our approach is the best possible example of how anthropologists think:

• Everyone has a place they call home, and maybe everyone needs a home.
• No one else ever alone at home. One’s home is always with other people.

but

• One’s home isn’t necessarily the same as anyone else’s.
• One’s relationships at home aren’t the same for everyone.
• Home feels like its constant, but it can change over one’s life, or even from moment to moment.
• Not everyone has a home.

When we think about needs, we think in terms of nature: constant, universal, and material.

If home is a need, it’s not a material need. So what is it?

This week we discuss the kinds of relationships people and groups have with natural environments, but it also extends our thinking about this question.

• Is relocation a new home?
• Is restoration of a coastline enough to save a home?

Our own worst enemy

Kayapo, the Xingu River, and the Brazilian state: A real-life Avatar?

Resistance to Brazil’s plans for hydroelectric dams in the Amazon has unfolded from the 1970s to now (see Pérez 2016).

• 1979: Dam sites, and flood zones, on the Xingu River identified.
• 1988: Paiakan, other Kayapo chiefs, and ethnobotanist Darrell Posey present their opposition to hydroelectric dams on the Xingu to the World Bank.
• 1990s–2000s: An international movement grows to include NGOs, Indigenous activists, the founder of the Body Shop, Anita Roddick, and celebrities like Sigourney Weaver and Sting. Dam projects are delayed, redesigned, resumed and halted several times.
• 2010: James Cameron, director of Avatar (2009)¹, joins protests over the Xingu River dams, noting in several reports that the Belo Monte dam project is “a real-life Avatar” (Phillips 2010; Ross 2010; see also Hance 2009).
• 2016: In spite of ongoing opposition, Belo Monte dam completed and begins operation. Activists and Indigenous communities continue their campaigns, now focusing on environmental damage.

Does Pogo’s aphorism apply here?

Avatar is an old story

Over history, a number of thinkers have tried to explain people’s differences by saying they are caused by climate. They represent a position of environmental determinism:

• In the Politics, Aristotle states that people living in colder climates are incapable of governing themselves (Aristotle [350BC] 1885, 218)
• Ibn Khaldun, Arab historian, argued that the most advanced civilizations lay in temperate climates and not in tropical ones (Siddiqi and Oliver 2005).
• Montesquieu ([1748] 1777, 296–98) says that people of “southern” climates are indolent physically and mentally, and thus live by traditional rules that they never think about changing.
• In the 20th century, Ellen Churchill Semple and Ellsworth Huntington argued that all cultures were products of their environmental geography (see Wallis 1926).

Versions of environmental determinism are still with us, especially when you consider the subtext.

• The observers arguing for environmental determinism are Goldilocks: their climate is juuust riiight.
  • The people who are too hot or too cold aren’t just different, they’re inferior. They are mastered by nature because they have not mastered nature.
  • People might reject a deterministic argument, but still accept the premise that some people are closer to nature.

Humans and nature: Anthropology contra environmental determinism

With few exceptions, anthropologists have always wanted to break with environmental determinism, especially the openly ethnocentric versions of it.

Every society has to adapt to its environment but no society is closer to nature than any other.

• Two cultures adapt to the same environment in different ways.
  • Hopi and Navajo peoples live in the same arid landscape, but have completely different ways of obtaining food to sustain themselves (Lowie 1917, 50–51)
• And, nature limits what people can do, but less than you might think
  • Tubetube island in Papua New Guinea is a low-lying atoll and has little topsoil, but people’s diet depends on garden vegetables.
  • The island is rich in clay that can used to produce pots; people on Tubetube trade their pots with partners on larger islands for all the food they need (Macintyre 1980).
• A society’s institutions draw upon nature for resources but also in turn shape the ecology that produces those resources (Rappaport 1967; Horton 1982).

Each culture has its own perspective on its environment. The resources it depends on are social facts.

#NoDAPL, or Standing with Standing Rock

In September 2016, “water protectors” of the Standing Rock tribe in North Dakota established a camp to blockade the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) (Whyte 2017; see also Estes and Dhillon 2019).

• The camp was established on the pipeline route, on ancestral land yet outside of the contemporary Standing Rock reservation.
  • The tribe had previously sued to stop construction, arguing that its path over the Missouri River would threaten the reservation’s water supply.
• While framed as a protest action, protectors and their supporters believed they were creating a space of “ceremony, prayer, and water protection” (Whyte 2017, 156).
• Water protection was, furthermore, connected to traditions of self-government that had been suppressed under US colonialism (Whyte 2017, 159).

Humans and nature: Nature is cultural, and nature is an object of political struggle

There are two main ways that anthropologists have sought to break with environmental determinism:

• Human ecology is the study of how each human society adapts in selective ways to its environment.
  • A community depends on an environment’s resources, but
  • it also shapes that environment (see, e.g. Rappaport 1967).
• Political ecology is the study of what happens when natural resources and natural environments are subject to different, competing values from different groups.
  • Different societies exist in a shared landscape, but adapt to it in different ways.
  • Shared natural resources, like land, become objects of political conflict between different groups, especially different classes within one society, or smaller and larger societies in a global economic system (for a definition, see Blaikie and Brookfield (1987), 17).

If climate change is a matter of unequal impacts rather than a truly global threat, then we need a perspective from political ecology to understand it.

What’s the matter with climate change?

Recall what we discussed in Week 1. Climate change is a global problem. It affects everyone, but in different and unequal ways. The response has to be global, too,

• and that means different people with different experiences and conditions have to work together—even if they don’t agree on what the problem is.

Frontiers and plantations

In Module 1, we concluded that in every contemporary society we can find two opposed forces:

• The logic of the gift and reciprocity, or the fact of society as state of interdependence
• The logic of private property and capital

These forces each compel people to view their own environments in distinct ways. This is how we can understand the nature of climate change and its unequal effects.

How colonialism reshapes space

A frontier is the space beyond the outer edge of a territory. If one zone is governed by law, then the frontier is the limit of that law.

Many societies are based on the myth of the frontier (Weber [1992] 2009; cf. Turner 1921):

• Australia: The myth of terra nullius (no man’s land).
• The United States, Canada: The myth of the “wild West” open for settlement.
• Indonesia: Transmigration programs were a strategy for developing rural areas and creating national unity but, according to critics, were really a “Javanization” effort (Hoshour 1997).
• Tsarist and Soviet Russia viewed Siberia and Central Asia as empty places they could expand into (Bassin 1991).

In reality, no space is empty. What is perceived as an empty frontier is usually a borderlands, a meeting place or “middle ground” (White 1991; see also Reynolds [1981] 2006).

• In the borderlands, different people and communities encounter and interact with each other, and in some way negotiate whether and how they will share space, land, and the natural environment.

The myth of the frontier only makes sense if you sustain a fiction of land as private property, that is, something you can take.

• As Marx says, property is theft; so expansion into a “frontier” is really dispossession of people living in the borderlands (e.g. Li and Semedi 2021).

The plantation and the plot

A plantation is an example of and metaphor for the colonial dispossession of land and its transformation

• New World colonialism was based on a “triangle trade” between Africa (a source of slave labor), agricultural enterprises in the US South, Caribbean and Latin America, and Europe (a source of capital and market for products).
  • Plantations were the first steps toward industrial agriculture, and needed a lot of empty land and slave labor to produce commodities like tobacco, cotton, sugar, etc.
• When you see a borderlands as an empty frontier, you believe you can (and must) create something from nothing.
  • In various parts of the world, colonial settlers planted themselves, taking over and transforming land according to their own design.
  • In the abstract, we can speak of ranches, stations, missions, etc. as plantations of a kind as well.

The plantation system does not completely transform the land in which it exists. It is shadowed by a distinct alternative, the plot (Wynter 1971, 99–100; see also McKittrick 2013, 10–11)

• In New World plantations, slave masters often gave slaves small parcels of land, known as plots, for their own household cultivation (much like peasant agriculture).
  • In some plantations, slaves produced enough to feed themselves and engage in market trade, reducing costs for owners, and making the whole plantation system viable.

Plots sustain plantations, but also contain the potential to escape from them

• Plantations are planned spaces. They are the projection of one society’s values onto nature.

• Plantations, as actual systems, are necessarily incomplete; and so, plantation owners allowed for people to work plots.

• Work on a plot is not based on land or labor as a resource to be owned, managed, or quantified.

• Work in plots thus also promotes the flourishing of alternative values and creates the possibility for individual and collective autonomy.

  • Plots are, in another sense, similar to spaces of marronage, or refuge from plantations.

• The history of the world economy, whether told as a story of capitalism or colonialism, contains within it a “secretive” history, a separate, parallel world based on distinct values of communal interdependence and collective self-determination (Wynter 1971, 101).

• Side note: This distinction is relevant to how anthropologists talk about modes of subsistence.

  • You can’t have plantation agriculture without spaces for people to engage in horticulture. Moreover horticulture is not a distinct technology; it’s a distinct way of life.