Chinnagounder’s Challenge: The Question of Ecological Citizenship (1999), by Deane Curtin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Reviewed by Dave Howland

Abstract

access to the knowledge and resources that will ultimately influence the decision to burn or not, and eventually affect social meaning of burning. The book's theoretical contributions should not overshadow the book's strong qualitative and ethnographic contributions. Jansen's long-term fieldwork in El Zapote and his use of different field methods provide a rich and informative account of human side of agriculture and environment in El Zapote. His historical work is particularly insightful and adds a much needed time depth to the book. Ethnographically, the book is important because of its concern with social life in the hinterlands and the role of coffee and cattle, particularly for mountain areas. The book highlights that we need to know more about the local dynamics of coffee production, particularly how environmental and socioeconomic factors articulate. In this book, Jansen has successfully integrated complex theory with complex ethnographic processes. His focus has been to understand both local farming practices and environmental transformations, while providing a "grounded" alternative to a number of macro-level theories that posit the primacy of dominant, single explanatory factors to account for environmental degradation. While one can disagree with the importance given particular socio-political processes or histories, in terms of affecting individual agriculture and environmental behavior, depending the ethnographic specifics, one cannot dismiss the importance of social relations, structures and histories, constructed and reconstructed at the local level. Also, it may be the case that local knowledge may have more of a shared pattern, and that more extensive quantitative data might provide insights on patterns of production linked to producers' models of agricultural and environmental processes. Still, the book provides a well-articulated argument for grounding our theories of environmental degradation in the local particulars, and it does so without losing sight of the theoretical parameters. Jansen makes this especially clear in the book's final section, where he offers well-reasoned and thoughtful suggestions for moving "post political ecologies" beyond overly relativistic and discursive analyses. As he argues, a "realist political ecology" must incorporate the material realities that confront farmers in El Zapote. Although multiple meanings and interpretations arise out of discourse and socio-political processes, these interpretations are also affected by "real-world" material/environmental processes that are of concern to El Zapote farmers, environmentalists and conservationists alike. Recognition of this has less to do with modernity and post-modernity, or structural versus post-structural, and more to do with an acknowledgment that real-world ecological processes are generative of meaning along with our socio-cultural processes, and that a political ecology capable of bridging the divide between social and natural sciences in the study of environmental degradation must include the material and a ...

Performing Punk: Bad Brains and the Construction of Identity

“…Unable to stay within the confines of a certain sociohistorical framework (that of a traditional—and political—black genre of jazz), the band re‐imagined surrogation, dissolving Mind Power after an unsuccessful two months. Says H.R., “All the while we was jazz, we wanted to innovate; we wanted to be part of something new and different and real” (Howland).…”

“…For punk rock in general, and Bad Brains in particular, ludic space again involves an almost‐violence associated with the underground status of the music and its audience. Banned from regular clubs and restaurants because of the level of noise and related aggression, with an audience base far too small to warrant major music locales, and after “verbal battle[s] with the police, who tried to pull the plug on an outdoor show” (Howland), Bad Brains was forced into basements, houses, or the dirty, dangerous (though now idealized) CBGBs. Often these built environments were cramped, forcing physical closeness, and small, allowing the band to play on the same level as the audience, without the use of a raised stage.…”

“…Through the reinvention of traditional musical space and place, a newly transformed sort of cultural capital emerged. In this way, Bad Brains and punk rock engaged with displaced transmission, whereby there is an “adaptation of historical practices to changing conditions, in which popular behaviors are restituted in new locales” (Howland). Clearly, the notion of cultural capital had not changed—just as citizens gathered at coffeehouses, symphonies, or the theater to participate in meaning‐making and cultural capital production, so too did Bad Brains and their audiences.…”