Click here to download the German edition. The forthcoming English edition will be available in September 2019.

Video reposted from YouTube, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung

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David Bollier and Silke Helfrich: If there is one recurring theme described in this book, it is the importance of exploring the inner dimensions of commoning as a social form, moving beyond economistic notions of the commons as a mere resource to be managed. Commoning is an attitude, an ethic, an impulse, a need and a satisfaction – a way of being that is deeply inscribed within the human species. But it is up to us to make it thrive. We must choose to practice commoning and reflect on its impact on our lives and the Earth, the more consciously, the better.

The great appeal of commoning is simultaneously a reason for its invisibility: it calls on us to see the world from a fundamentally different perspective, acknowledging that the self emerges from relationships with others and can exist only through these relationships and as a result of them. Failing to perceive the diverse types of “we’s” that exist and their complex dynamics and logics is tantamount to trying to live on Earth without an atmosphere. Our lives are enframed and defined by “we’s.” These collectives are not merely the sum of individuals, but distinct systems of organization that emerge from our encounters with each other and committed joint action.

More: a commons is dynamic and evolving, and therefore proposes a more realistic idea of human life. It does not propose a static economic perspective that assumes what we supposedly are; it recognizes that we are always becoming. Commoning draws upon our distinct, situated identities, cultures and roots as essential elements of governance, production, law and culture. This perspective helps us grasp that we not only create the world; the world in turn shapes and creates us. So we must attend to the larger, holistic consequences of our own world-creating capacities, to make sure that the selves that we each cultivate through our relationships and world-making are the selves that we truly wish to be and worlds we wish to live in. Or as Lau Tzu put it with such wisdom, “Be a pattern for the world.”

The commons quivers with aliveness precisely because it is a reflexive, open system that resists attempts to make it schematic, regularized and tightly controlled. The commons is alive because it offers space for people to apply their own imaginations and energy to solve problems – and human ingenuity and cooperation tend to produce many surprising results. In their self-created zones of freedom, commoners have the latitude to build their own worlds without the tyranny of the Market/State, bureaucratic procedures or confining social roles (consumer, seller, employee, expert).

Needless to say, an economy and society that truly respects commons requires a re-imagination of politics itself. They require social processes that invite collective participation and express collective sentiments, not “leaders” who may be only crudely accountable to people and captive to capital and its imperatives. Commons require a primary focus on meeting everyone’s needs, not on catering to the ever-proliferating wants of the few. Expanding the scope and scale of commons so that they can become a powerful alternative to capital driven markets, and spur mutual coordination and federation, introduces a whole new set of challenges, of course. It requires that we work for new configurations of state authority and clear limits on market power. Yet there are many promising scenarios of policy, law, governance and politics that seek to advance this vision: the focus of our next anthology.

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“What is, then, a philosophy of relation?

Something impossible, as long as it is not conceived of as poetics.”

 – Edouard Glissant

The World as Consciousness

Near Sant’Andrea, Italy, the sea laps onto the slabs of rock that form the edge of the island of Elba. The waves, smooth as fish bellies, slate gray, white, and aquamarine, shatter into liquid fragments on the rock. In the distance lies Corsica, barely visible in the haze, under a fan of fingers of light. The water that strokes the stones, the boulder rounded and worn away, the wind tousling one’s hair, the birds blown by and lost again, come together in a dance. We are commoners of a commons of perception from which our own experiences, our own identities and those of the world emerge.

Our identities arise through that which we are not: through impressions and touch, through sensory exchanges with that which is stone and water, molecule and light quantum, all of which somehow transform themselves into the energy of the body. All life, from the very beginning, derives from solar energy that is given to all. Our existence in an ecosphere suffused with life is part of a vast commons even before individuality can be perceived. Each individual belongs to the world and is at the same time its owner, owner of the rough stone speckled by the waves, ruffled by the wind, stroked by rays. All perception is commons, which is to say, the result of a dance of interdependency with the world. The world belongs to us completely, and at the same time, we are fully entrusted to it. It is only through this exchange that we become conscious of it and of ourselves.

Beyond Humanism

A new self-understanding that aspires to supplant modernity is currently developing. It is still in a state of flux, unformed in many ways. But often, it can be discerned as a struggle by humanism to overcome the limits of Enlightenment rationality. It questions the separation of the world into a sphere of humans and a sphere of things that consists of natural resources, animals, objects and ideas. Humans are no longer to be at the center – but the idea of nature as an independent order is also rejected.

Proponents of this type of thinking have given it various names – “Anthropocene,” “Posthumanism” and “Metahumanism,” among others. What they all share is an attempt to reconceive the relationship between humanity and nature, thus articulating the human in a different way. The proponents of this project – for example, the Italian philosopher and writer Francesca Ferrando – see “an urgency for the integral redefinition of the notion of the human” (Ferrando 2013:26).

This quest will shift completely our understanding of ourselves and of the world we are part of. As a consequence it will also imply a reordering of the realms of politics and economics. If we do not see the world any longer under a duality of “human actors” and “natural resources,” then the boundaries between that which is being distributed and those who are using it become blurred. In such a world, socioeconomics can no longer pursue only the goals of just and fair distribution because “producers” and “consumers” are often the same people. We can already witness this in the many commons now arising, and in those that have always been there and are now being rediscovered.

In other words, in the epoch of the Anthropocene and the posthumanist thinking it entails, a new metaphysics of “householding” is emerging, revealing how exchanges of matter and metabolites – and human meaning – are deeply intertwined. This is an astonishing opportunity to escape the dilemmas of modernity and to reimagine our ontological condition. It might be compared to the great transformation occurring at the beginning of the Enlightenment period.

Seeking a new concept of what is human, numerous thinkers are doing away with the separations between humans and “nature,” “nature” and “culture,” and body and mind, which have dominated our self-understanding since the Enlightenment. New propositions are challenging these dualisms and, in turn, undermining the worldview that has given rise to the neoliberal “free market” economy and the biological ideology that all organisms strive to be “efficient.” The old conceptual barriers that thwarted a more benevolent relationship between humanity and the rest of the living world can now be overcome, or at least the terms of the relationships can be shifted.

Today, we are not only in a time of economic or social upheaval, but also in a crisis of self-awareness; the very metaphors we use to describe our role in the world are inadequate. This crisis of normative perception and thought offers the rare opportunity to achieve a more balanced relationship between humans and the earth than was possible with thinking that presumes a human/nature separation. But our crisis today could also result in the opposite, namely, a more commanding, coercive vision of human dominance. Will a new form of anthropocentrism, a new toxic utopia, emerge from the current competition between perspectives? Will this worldview ultimately dominate natural history by comprehending the biological solely as an object of technical creativity? Will it treat the human as a derivative version of the cyborg – a perspective that some representatives of Anthropocene thought seem to believe? Or can we instead develop a comprehensive ontology of creative aliveness?

It is imperative to go beyond Enlightenment categories of thought to recover those currents of humanism that earlier, rationalizing streams of the Western world banished. It is equally important to evaluate some important new perspectives that contemporary thought are able to add, drawing upon co-creative perspectives in biology, anthropology and poetics. To date, theories of the Anthropocene and Posthumanism do not sufficiently include the perspective of creative aliveness; this is the diagnosis of this essay. These theories still follow mainly the notion that the world can be accurately understood as a body of inert physical matter, or, that it needs human stewardship as a controlling agent or a “gardener” (Marris 2013) to fully reach its creative potential.

This essay challenges this belief by recovering the dimension that has been forgotten since the Enlightenment and has not yet been rediscovered in the Anthropocene – the radical philosophical practice and perspective of the commons, without which the relationship of humans to reality cannot be understood. I argue that reality, from which we are descended and through which we experience and engender ourselves, is itself a commons that must be understood and connected to as such.

The commons of reality is a matrix of relationships through which aliveness is unfolding in ecosystems and history. It conveys the aliveness of biological and human communities from a perspective of metabolic dependency, exchanges of gifts, and the entanglement of actors within their vectors of activity. Living participants bring each other into being by establishing relationships (metabolism, predator/prey relationships, social ties), thus producing not only their environments but their very identities (Weber 2014).

Thus, the commons describes an ontology of relations that is at the same time existential, economic and ecological. It emphasizes a process of transformation and identity formation that arises out of a mutuality that is not only material, but also experienced. For humans, then, this ontology produces meaning and emotional reality. This process also encompasses what has recently been described as “conviviality” – “an art of living together (con-vivere) that allows humans to take care of each other and of Nature, without denying the legitimacy of conflict, yet by using it as a dynamizing and creativity-sparking force” (Alphandéry et al 2014).

In the following pages, I will attempt to describe a perspective of reality based on connecting all humans and all other creatures. I seek to shatter the familiar categories of “culture” and “nature,” which are invariably seen by moderns as separate and distinct. The two realms are in fact one, if we can recognize that reality is founded upon aliveness as the critical, connecting element. Aliveness is not limited to “nature” or “culture.” It is intrinsic to all social and biological systems. It has an objective, empirical substance and a subjective, tangible dimension, and it is always interweaving dimensions of matter with perception and experience (Weber 2013).

It is therefore essential that we elucidate a self-understanding of the Anthropocene from this perspective – an ontology of the commons. After all, without this perspective to complete the picture, the Anthropocene – the new epoch characterized by the dominance of human beings – would disregard a core attribute of reality. To distinguish the necessary new perspective from the technical rationality of the Enlightenment, I refer to this emerging perspective as Enlivenment – a theme that I explored in a previous essay (Weber 2013). Enlivenment is an ontology of aliveness, of coming to life, that is at once physical and intangible, and scientific and spiritual. It calls people to live in an unfolding natural history of freedom and self-realization.

The Anthropocene Hypothesis as a Commodification of the Creative

How, exactly, do the many, burgeoning posthumanist interpretations of our time fail to grasp the cosmos as a creative reality? Let us begin with the Anthropocene. Today, climate researchers assume that humans have become the defining biogeochemical force on Earth since the year 1800, more or less, and that the Holocene era, the phase that started with the last Ice Age, has ended (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000:17-18). Today, we are living in the “epoch of mankind,” the Anthropocene. This hypothesis, of course, is not only a scientific finding about the history of the climate: it is simultaneously a cosmological statement about the status of human beings, one that eliminates the familiar division of reality into a sphere of human activity and a sphere of nature.

It is this variant of the Anthropocene hypothesis that is increasingly affecting our deliberations on how to achieve sustainability. Its focus is frankly solipsistic – how should we humans deal with other animals and plants, and what changes should we make to our economic system? But this view lacks a critical element – an account of the more-than-human world as a living reality. The Anthropocene hypothesis may help us overcome thinking that pits humans against nature, but it fails precisely in that endeavor as long as it celebrates humans as the masters of nature. Anthropocene thinkers often enthusiastically annex the planet into the sphere of culture in what appears like a philosophical equivalent of globalization; reality is re-cast to ratify the triumph of human beings over the natural world.

To be sure, our earlier concepts of “nature” are obsolete, but not in the sense that they would have to find their place in the human world. Rather, the Anthropocene is misguided because it projects human methods for solving problems onto a cosmos that is still not understood. It speaks from within the mindset of human power. Sustainability pioneer Wolfgang Sachs observes, “At first, the term ‘Anthropocene’ expressed the diagnosis of anxiety. Ten years on, it meant power of authority” – a methodology of domination (personal communication, July 21, 2014).

If we consider “nature” to be formed predominantly by culture and technology, the Anthropocene consummates the colonialization of elemental nonhuman creative forces that Western culture has dreamed of for centuries. In other words, Anthropocene thinking is proving to be a new, more extensive iteration of enclosure. To advance narrow human purposes, it not only seizes control of self-organizing creative forces in nature (e.g., genetic engineering, nanotechnologies); it also seizes the self-organizing wild creativity within us.

Admittedly, it is hard to determine who is to blame for this habit of thinking, which is so deeply anchored in the self-understanding of the West as to be utterly invisible. We are not talking about a particular discourse, but the very foundation of our concept of reality. Forms of thinking and feeling that deviate from this sense of reality are hardly possible. Or they are considered “unscientific” and thus unserious. This subtle cognitive form of enclosure occurs with the best of intentions. Since the early modern period, the “Bacon project” has sought to achieve the separation of humans and resources. This is the quest for total self-empowerment of mankind that began with the British Renaissance scholar Francis Bacon’s “novum organon” (Schäfer 1993). This project was intended to improve human life and keep death in check. The logic and appeal of this worldview remain very much in force today. In the realm of ecology, for example, humans often regard “nature” as an inert physical Other – or they may consider themselves stewards of natural systems and their functions, which are essential for our survival.

Yet this arrangement paradoxically deepens the gulf between what is human and the rest of the world. In the end, such a stance tempts people to conceive of everything nonhuman as a soulless physical resource. From here, it is only a small step to its actual transformation into a commodity, a saleable good that can be used however we wish. Once we adopt this orientation toward the world, all further enclosures seem as necessary and desirable steps. Every physical enclosure of wild and emotionally unbridled reality can be traced back to this separation of living entities from the living context of which they are a part – a separation that neutralizes the generative power of life itself.

This dynamic can be seen in the enclosures of commons in sixteenth century England, the patenting of the human genome and in the sterile, proprietary seeds produced by gene patenting. Such outcomes are the inevitable physical expressions of a conceptual dualism, as it were, that elevates a narrow human instrumentality over the essential wildness of reality.

Dualism as an Invisible Colonialization of the Soul

This dualism is not a mere abstraction; it has been the driving force separating humans from the experience of creative vitality. It also lies at the heart of the historical Enlightenment idea that the world can become a habitable place only by means of reason, which itself is the basis for the logic of the market that also differentiates between actors and things. All of these phenomena have the same roots and are the consequence of an enclosure that is initially imaginary. The liberal market system, which makes a distinction between resources (which are traded) and subjects (who trade or who want to be supplied with things), is the product of this dualism. Dualism has appeal because it is a method for asserting control by dividing the world in two: an inanimate sphere (“nature”) that is to be dominated and a sphere of human subjects ordained to assert control.

From this perspective, there is no difference between enclosure, commodification, and colonialization. All three not only attack living systems that have no single owner, they at the same time trample on the psychological and emotional identities connected to these resources. They are all attacks on “aliveness” itself – a capacity of life that is unavailable and incomprehensible to the dualistic mind. Therefore, they are also attacks on reality. In this vein, political scientist David Johns (2014:42) observes, “Colonialism is nowhere more apparent and thriving than in the relationship between humanity and the rest of the earth.”

Actual action thus is always preceded by a tacit enclosure sanctioned by the deep assumptions of the mind. Enclosure usurps the categories of existence and disparages the concept of aliveness as well as the dimensions of experience linked to it. The practices of conceptual enclosure preemptively deny the existence of an unavailable Other, making it impossible to conceptualize and honor real, subjective experience. This Other is not only “nature” or a person from a foreign culture; it is the experience of a dimension of reality that can only be lived and not captured by rational conceptualization. This Other is the domain of physically experienced reality that precedes all conceptualization and colonialization: it is the bliss when we watch the sun rise or see a beloved partner or a young dog, or the dimension of meaning in a piece of work that benefits everyone and not just ourselves. It is the domain of what Manfred Max-Neef catalogues as “human needs” – the existential dimensions of healthy relationships to self and others (Smith & Max-Neef 2010).

Enclosure occurs through a type of thinking that ignores creative processes and the meanings of emotions, both of which originate in the body. Enclosure instead subordinates these feelings to “rationality,” “stewardship,” empiricism, discursivity and control. Such thinking culminates in the idea that “nature” and the body themselves do not exist, but are solely artifacts of culture. In modern culture, it is considered naïve to believe that “nature” can be experienced as a domain of creative unfolding, or that there is a perceptible kinship of being alive that is shared by all living things and which can be experienced. This reality is denied by our cognitive frameworks and language, resulting in what amounts to mental and spiritual enclosure. This colonialization of our innermost essence inescapably results in an “empty self,” as biophilosopher David Kidner (2014:10) predicts. This de facto “empty self” is indeed diagnosed by many as a current psychopathological “civilizational narcissism” that marks our times.

In humanity’s resurgent obsession with treating Earth as a raw, inert resource (e.g., geoengineering to forestall climate change, synthetic biology to “improve upon” nature, etc. ), the Enlightenment is pushing one last time for sovereignty over the cosmos. Here the Anthropocene is completely identical with Anthropocentrism. The old notions of human superiority, control and technical mastery are concealed by equating humans and “nature,” putting them on an equal footing. Even a sophisticated theorist such as Bruno Latour falls for this category error when he reassures his readers, “The sin is not to wish to have dominion over nature but to believe that this dominion means emancipation and not attachment” (quoted in Shellenberger & Nordhaus 2011). Since people are in fact connected in relationships (with the Earth, with each other), the fallacy lies in attempting to dominate what embraces them in ways they do not understand; they are blind to reality and prone to act destructively.

Italian philosopher Ugo Mattei believes that even the act of dividing the world into subject and object results in commodifying both (quoted in Bollier 2014). The commodification of the spirit inevitably finds a warped expression at the real and political level. “Nature” is banished to the periphery of the human world even though it still nourishes and sustains us, produces everything we eat, and remains the wellspring of creative energy. Every separation into subject and object divides the world into two realms, resources and profiteers. This boundary is not necessarily between things and people (or between matter and creatures), but between that which is used up, and those who benefit from that consumption.

Thus, we are suffering not only because of the commodification of the natural and social world. We are suffering because our conceptualization of the world itself allows commodification as the sole way to relate to it. It is no longer possible to speak about the world in the categories of subjective aliveness. We are suffering because of the enclosure of the spiritual through myriad cultural fictions of separation and domination that falsely parse the world into an outside (resource) and inside (actor). Concepts such as strict cause-and-effect relationships, causal mechanisms, the separation of body and soul – all of them fundamental premises of Enlightenment thinking – result in our taking reality hostage. We colonize it by believing in the concept of a treatable, repairable, controllable world. Any experience that contradicts this enclosure of reality must be discounted or denied.

Yet hardly anyone is aware of the profoundly misleading taxonomic screens of our language and worldview. We can barely imagine the extent to which our view of reality is distorted by spiritual enclosure. We do not realize that the self-organizing nature of our everyday lives has disappeared from view – a dispossession far more radical than the one experienced by commoners locked out of their forests a few hundred years ago. We do not appreciate how conceiving of our own selves as biomachines has impoverished us as humans, and how treating our emotional feelings chiefly as “chemical imbalances” (to be corrected through pharmaceuticals) denies an elemental dimension of our humanity.

Cutting living subjects off from participating in the commons of reality and its mixture of practices and emotions, objects and aspects of meaning, is destructive in another serious respect: It blinds us to the nature of enclosure itself. As psychologists Miguel Benasayag and Gérard Schmit (2007:101f) observe, the overarching ideology of enclosure is an ideology of control and dominance, and a denial of enduring relationships. This systemic worldview is not simply unjust and dangerous, it brazenly defies reality. It is cruel because it violates the web of relational exchange which reality is.

Every metaphysics that separates humans from the world furtively transforms itself into an inhumane ideology. The ideology of enclosure is inhumane because it generates a hierarchy in reality, ostensibly for human benefit, by installing humanity as custodian of the rational, the protector of the ordered, the knight battling chaos. Yet reality is not chaotic. On the contrary, it simply embodies an order that we are not always able to discern. Reality is structured as a creative expression of living agents, both human and more-than-human. Its structure, however, is sometimes invisible because its systems cannot be universalized, regimented or monetized without destroying life itself.

Posthumanism as an Extension of Our Machine Dreams

A flurry of new critiques are ostensibly seeking to break away from the dualisms of the Enlightenment by using “post” in their names – for example, postenvironmentalism or posthumanism. Regrettably, they do not really come to terms with creative reality. Instead they put forward hybrid versions of human nature that exist between “object” and “subject.” But ultimately they are not rooted in the processes of the creative wild, but in technological artifacts made by humans.

Posthumanism is in fact fixated on machines. It is mostly about cyborgs and hybrid humans, and has little interest in grasshoppers, geckos or the integration of the natural and the social as we see, say, in indigenous communities’ systems of thought. With the notable exception of the influential Donna Haraway, a feminist scholar who writes extensively about human-machine and human-animal relations, posthumanism wants little to do with other species. Posthumanism is oriented toward machines because they are our species-specific creations. They are artifacts that bear witness to this special feature of ours, namely being not only biological creatures of the cosmos, but also sovereign creators, controllers and engineers. Technical hybrids – i.e., humans whose cognitive abilities are enhanced by means of electronic tools or combinations of humans and machines – represent a type of the wild that fascinates many posthumanist thinkers. But a genuine posthumanism would recognize that we must imagine the deconstruction of the machines as functional essence of what is human. The “function” of our hands, after all, is not just to pick up things, but to be able to sensitively caress a stone, a loved one’s neck, or a black poodle’s fur in the warm sun.

Posthumanism as now conceived still erects walls around a colony of abstraction. It strictly guards an enclave of rationality and shies away from the practice of living connectedness. And so except for sporadic lapses when the metaphysical fabric accidentally rips, posthumanism continues to overlook the enclosure of the living body as a place of experience, feeling and self. It fails to see itself as a vehicle for any sort of exchange with the Other. Every self-styled philosophy of emancipation is on shaky ground if it is not clear about the self-concealed enclosures of the wild that it commits against our selves, our thinking and our identities.

Recognizing the Commons of Existence: The Key to the Anthropocene

The hypothesis of the Anthropocene, namely that “man and nature are one today,” can be considered in a meaningful way only if it acknowledges a theory of reality as a commons. A concept of the Anthropocene can be fruitful only if we do not grasp it as yet another “epoch of humankind,” but as an epoch in which the living co-creative reality of ecosystems becomes the foundation for how humans perceive and experience reality.

To this end, we must recognize reality itself as a commons that is pressing forward to unfold in a natural history of freedom. This history must embrace the role of the bodies and subjective experiences of all living subjects. The point is that commons are not only entities designed by humans. They are an existential, self-created necessity of all living exchange – i.e., of life itself. As theologian Martin Buber (1937) puts it, “all actual life is encounter.” All reality, every act of perception which accesses and produces the world, is a negotiation, a creative transformation between two poles, each of which is at the same time object and actor.

Even in our absence, reality is a commons. We can approach it by shaping it according to a pattern of mutual giving and giving in return, and then witness the transformational ripples following from each act of giving. Human culture has the opportunity to shape the world as a commons as it participates in the web of interdependent living things, thus making the world more real. In the Anthropocene, this new perspective on natural history as the unfolding of freedom and depth of experience and expression should be put at center stage. This idea, not a narrow vision of human instrumentality, should explicitly guide our self-understanding and our economic and political agenda. Without such an orientation, we will continue to act destructively toward other living things and our planet.

As a philosophy and practice, commoning considers the coexistence of living things on this planet as a joint, creative process, one that increases the aliveness of the biosphere and the cultural sphere. Thinking in the categories of the commons actualizes an ontology that, while not fundamentally new in Western thinking, has been underestimated and suppressed for a long time. This ontology alone makes it possible for us to grasp the conditions of evolutionary reality in which we exist and then to play a constructive part in shaping the unfolding reality. The existential realities of the world have brought us forth as participants in the natural history of the cosmos and its social, metabolical, and existential dimensions; we in turn are continually extending and recreating this natural history.

A commons is a way of entering into relationships with the world, both materially and conceptually. It does so without the usual dualistic concepts of the Enlightenment (culture/nature, animate/inanimate, etc.) and it fuses theory and practice as one. Principles of acting are embedded in concrete, situational processes of conflict, negotiation and cooperation, which in turn alter reality and generate new situations.

All principles that animate this process are intrinsic to it and cannot come from “outside” of it. The principles do not fall into our laps, and no god, state or moral-philosophical process of any kind can posit them. At the same time, however, the process of commoning – and this is true of the commons of reality, too – is anything but devoid of rules. It follows the principles for how creative relationships arise among various counterparties and thereby create their identities, shape their bodies and determine their interests. Commoning is an ecological and evolutionary reality based on concrete interactions, which always have to mediate between the flourishing of individuals and the prosperity of the encompassing whole. In this sense, existential success always is a negotiation between autonomy and fusion. Its shape can never be codified because it is a living, dynamic process; existential success can only be lived.

In this reading, all commons are “posthuman.” Our undeniable human agency is inscribed within a living system of other animate forces, each of which is both sovereign and interdependent at the same time. In commons, humankind does not hold arbitrary sway as a ruler, but as an attentive subject in a network of relationships. The effects of (inter)actions reflect back on those acting and all other nodes, animated or metaphorical – human subjects, bats, fungi, bacteria, aesthetic obsessions, infections, or guiding concepts – are active as well. Every commons is a rhizome – a material and informal network of living connections which constantly changes as it mutates and evolves.

The innermost core of aliveness cannot be classified and negotiated rationally. It is only possible to be involved in experiences and creative expression. That is why the idea of the commons, which is fundamentally about real subjects seeking nourishment and meaning through physical, pragmatic, material and symbolical means, is the best way to describe a “posthuman” connection to the rest of the biosphere. For a commons is always an embodied, material, perceptible, existential and symbolic negotiation of individual existence through the Other and the whole. It is an attempt to echo the forms of order implied in the self-creating wild through acts of creative transformation, in response to the existential imperatives of the wild.

Each of these acts involves both self-awareness and material interactions. Each is real and metabolic in that the participants of the ecosystem are linked together through the exchange of eating and being devoured, of taking and giving, and of subtly influencing the order of the whole and being influenced by it. This process is imaginative because it is triggered by the experiences of joy, fear and other feelings – which in turn are the basis for consequential actions and material changes.

The concept of the commons helps bridge – and transcend – the dualities that otherwise structure our self-awareness. It bridges the connection between the “natural” – the world of beings and species – and the “social” or “cultural” – the sphere of human-made symbolic systems, discourses and practices – by generating an interdependent, organic whole. For this reason, conceiving of “nature” as a commons of living entities is also a way of understanding ourselves anew. It helps us see and name our biological and our social aliveness as an indivisible whole conjoined to the rest of the world.

An ontology that describes reality through the lens of the commons, in other words, makes it possible to focus on aliveness as both a conceptual idea and experience. Therein slumbers the opportunity to arrive at a new, relational understanding of ourselves and the world. Going beyond “objective” structures, algorithms, and cause-and-effect scenarios that look at observable external behaviors, we can also take account of the internal feelings of the actors (which are motive-forces in their own right), and thereby escape the sterile dualism that has crippled the Western mind for so long.

The Anthropocene can reconcile and integrate humans and “nature” only if we comprehend that we exist as agents who are continuously transformed in a process that is both material and filled with meaning – a process that experiences itself emotionally and reproduces itself creatively, and in so doing generates and expresses ever more complex degrees of freedom (in a larger context of dependency on other living systems).

In this sense, “nature” and “human” are aligned and quite literally identical. Both rely on “imagination” to produce a world and self-reproduce themselves. Our identities are rooted in the uncontrollable wild and in creative self-organization, neither of which can be entirely subject to control or “stewardship.” Such control (even when asserted through enclosure) cannot prevail ultimately because the instruments of control that we devise are themselves built on “uncontrollable forms” – wildness – which remain beyond strict control and understanding. So while humans may “dominate” “nature” in ways that posthumanism celebrates, conversely, we humans are grounded by forces of wildness that ultimately cannot be subdued and mastered through cultural control because culture relies on them as the basic principles of creation, self-organization and co-creative relations.

In regarding reality as commons, we do not resolve the contradictions of existence by reducing them to one aspect – only mind, only matter, only discourse, only market. Nor do we seek anything such as a higher synthesis – the classic, devastating response to the paradoxes of existence ever since Hegel and then his student Marx, who promised a contradiction-free, higher state of being that drove utopians mad in violent anticipation.

The mundane reality is that true being is “higher” and “lower” at the same moment. And for a simple reason: What is alive resists any and all synthesis. Inner, immaterial and experiential identity, coiled within a material body, is itself the greatest paradox. This identity, which becomes real only through a body, has no separate physical mass and occupies no space. And yet still it profoundly alters the physical world and space through a continual and self-referential process.

This dimension of living reality should follow a “dialogic” rather than a binary logic, as French philosopher Edgar Morin claims. Morin’s dialogic does not try to eliminate contradictions but explicitly seizes them to illuminate the point. Living reality is a logic of dialogue and polyphony, of encounters, conversations, mutual transformations and interpretations, in the logic of negotiation and striking compromises (Morin 2001:272). It is this stance of negotiating, adapting and enduring that has determined the way in which humans have dealt with the commons since time immemorial. It is what is called commoning.

Poetic Materialism

The Anthropocene lacks the understanding that any exchange – of things (in the economy), of meanings (in communication), of identities (in the bond between subjects) – always has two sides: an external, material side and also an internal, existential side in which meaning is expressed and experienced. Reality is creative and expressive precisely because it never lets itself be reduced to one of these sides. Since all processes are founded upon relationships that convey meanings (which all subjects experience as emotions), the most appropriate way to formulate such a reality is through the idea of poetics.

The poetic dimension is the world of our feelings, our social bonds, and everything that we experience as significant and meaningful. Poetics is at the same time symbolic and material and therefore it is inextricably linked to social communication, exchange and interactions with others and the environment. Poetics describes the world that we experience in the perspective of the first person – the world in which we are at home in an intimate way and the world that we seek to protect through political arrangements. Economic exchange, which is always a meaningful householding among living beings, also takes place in this world described by a poetic reality.

In our time, the great discourses – empirical rationality, human freedom as a rational actor, instrumental reason in economics – are being exposed as deficient, provoking a mad scramble to salvage them as coherent perspectives. The real issue of our time, then, is to activate a new language. After 300 years of Enlightenment thinking, the challenge is to redefine aliveness and humanity within it by complementing techné with the concept of poiesis. Techné means explainability, analysis and successful replication. Poiesis, by contrast, means creative self-realization – an element that brings forth reality, that cannot be suppressed, and that can never be sufficiently understood to be successfully controlled.

In the end, everything is techné in one sense – but in another, everything is also poiesis. Techné is cause and effect, control, management, understanding, exchange. Poiesis is inner goal-directedness, bringing forth oneself, giving oneself over, self-expression, feeling, and accepting. Techné is planning and sustainability. Poiesis is the “wasteful” promiscuity of creation. Life needs both. Reality is both. Creative transformation grows out of the tension of this contradiction without ever resolving it.

Perhaps one could call such a perspective poetic materialism. Any thinking in relationships can take place only in the form of poetic acts. Living relationships, however, organize themselves only among bodies which constantly transform themselves, which grow and decay. In systems in which change occurs dynamically as participants seek to negotiate and transform each other, experience cannot be expressed as a fixed identity, but only as the transient expression of one through the other – in other words, poetically.

The poetic dimension is simultaneously a modification of the individual and a modification of the whole. It becomes distinct and visible in an individual only through forms of experience and symbolic expression. In this sense, as a poetics of relationships defines the individual reality, and a poetics of relationships can be understood as a commons, reality appears to the individual as a commons. Systematic thinking joined with the lived practice of commons – commoning – are based on a poetics of relations. Their idea of exchange considers both embodied things and the existential (inner) reality of meaning and feeling. All are aspects of a “creative householding” – the ability to express and experience things, which constitute the freedom that is constantly being enacted in natural history.

The idea of understanding reality through the lens of a “poetics of relation” was first formulated by the French-Carribean poet and philosopher Edouard Glissant. Glissant calls his poetics a “creolization of thinking”: a mutual transformation and fertilization of self and other without clear hierarchies. Everyone involved has equal standing. They are actors and objects. They belong to themselves. And they can be means – even food – to everyone else (see Glissant 1997).

A creolization of thinking requires “peership” between empirical reality and feeling. All processes take place inside and outside an organism simultaneously; they are always conceptual and spiritual, but they are also always real in space and time. Taking the step across the abyss between the two cultures means understanding and reevaluating creative aliveness as the center of reality. Creative action is the experience of what is alive, as experienced from the inside, subjectively. One might call it “affective objectivity” – a universal and real phenomenon, but one that is also evanescent and resistant to measurement.

Indian geographer Neera Singh has shown the extent to which this emotive power encourages commoners to act and provides subjective rewards for their action. She demonstrates that villagers in rural India not only make resources more productive through their commoning with forests. They also satisfy emotional needs and “transform their individual and collective subjectivities” (Singh 2013). They are engaging in an active poetics of relating, in which the human affect and the “material world” commune with each other and alter one another.

It bears emphasizing that “collective subjectivity” extends beyond the human community to include the subjectivities of the living environment – the trees, the supportive vegetation, the birds, the flows of water, the “real” ecosystem elements that human subjectivities actually alter. Commoners, one could say, follow a poetic reason that has emotive substance, but also material manifestations in people’s bodies, community life and local ecosystems. The poetic moment of their action manifests itself when the living forest and social community flourish together, in entangled synergy. This is something that can be perceived by the senses and experienced emotionally through the forest’s opulent biodiversity (and yes, also measured, but the measurements will invariably fail to grasp the animating power of the human affect).

It is telling that cultures for whom participation in natural processes amounts to emotional engagement in a poetic reality, do not make the distinctions between “animate” and “inanimate” or “nature” and “culture” – dualities that are taken for granted in Western thinking. The basic affective experience of being in a lively exchange with the world, taking from it and contributing to it, is denied by the West’s worldview and language: a perniciously subliminal type of enclosure.

Singh calls the psychological-emotional engagement arising from caring for a commons “emotional work.” In the absence of this affective dimension, both subject and object lose their paired identities: those working on the land, say, as well as the object of such work, the animate whole. Geographers and philosophers are increasingly beginning to comprehend land and people as a lived reality – a factor of real interactions and an existential, poetic enactment.

If such a commons is colonialized – which today would mean to be reduced to a mere resource by industrial agriculture – the emotional needs of the people involved – belonging, meaning, identity – can no longer be fulfilled. This is precisely what has happened to our purportedly modern minds – a colonization of emotions that are denounced as backward, superstitious, unenlightened or unscientific. The emotional work of caring for a commons, however, is both an ecological necessity and a material reality, as well as it is a psychological need. Therefore the collapse of affect (belonging, meaning, identity) has material consequences. As human relationships to an ecosystem erode, so does respect for the ecosystem, and the ecosystem’s stability. A kind of ecological death occurs, in turn, one that has both spiritual and biodiversity-related dimensions. The two depend on one another and balance one another.

In other words, a healthy culture is a co-creative interpretation of nature in all its irrepressible aliveness. That is why subjectivity, cooperation, negotiation and irreconcilable otherness must not be seen as patterns that only we lay upon the world, as is currently done by most economy and culture approaches. Rather it is the other way round: Subjectivity, meaning-creation, “weak” non-causal interaction, code and interpretation are deep features of living nature. Its most basic principle comes down to the paradoxical self-realization of an individual through the whole, which at the same time is “the other” that needs to be fenced off.

Need, distance and momentary balance in beauty: Aliveness as such is a commoning process. Perception thus becomes a co-creative commons integrating a subject concerned with care for its self and its environment – which both mutually imagine, nourish and bring forth one another. In this perspective our deeper feelings are themselves a distinguishing feature of patterns of creative aliveness. They affect the perceptions of subjects and impel them to participate in a co-creative commons with their environment; subjects and environment actively imagine, nourish and engender each other.

Culture therefore is not structurally different from nature in the sense that it is only human – a feature putting man apart as incommensurate with the remainder of the world. Nature, on the other hand, is not underlying human culture in a reductionist sense. Nor can all cultural structures can be explained (socio-)biologically. The causal-mechanic, efficiency-centered approach as a whole is mistaken. Nature is based on meaning, open to creative change and constantly bringing forth agents with subjective experiences. It is always creative in order to mediate the realization of the individual through the whole. Any exchange-relationship in Nature always involves both metabolism and meaning, and in this way generates feeling. Nature is a process of unfolding freedom, tapping inexhaustible creativity and intensifying experiential and expressive depth (Weber 2015).

In this sense (although not in any superficial, reductionistic pattern), culture has to be like nature. This is an idea somewhat parallel to what philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (2013) is claiming when he argues that any art worthy of its name does not copy nature’s objects but rather follows its deep process of creative unfolding, freedom and “non-identity” – the impossibility of reducing an agent to just one substance, be that a causal mechanism or language-games. Culture is structurally not different from ecological exchange processes, but echoes them in the human species-specific creative forms. It expresses our own poetic interpretation of the ever-recurring theme of coping with the irresolvable paradox of autonomy and wholeness. That is why human culture cannot control and engineer nature as a passive, non-living object. Because we humans are implicated in the creative aliveness of nature, our culture must also honor our own aliveness as the best way to foster our own freedom and long-term survival. We must shape our selfhood according to the needs of a larger whole that is necessary to all life. Autonomy is always inscribed within a larger whole and only possible through it. Paradoxically, autonomy is possible only through relation.

Seen from this perspective, it becomes essential to adopt a first-person viewpoint as a counterpoint to the purportedly scientific perspective of “objective reality,” which is typically expressed in the third person. In the ontological reality that we are describing here, the first-person perspective is both poetic (rich with meaning, feeling and implications for identity) while genuinely objective (material, scientifically measurable). The first-person viewpoint mediates our perception with our material reality, which is only possible from the perspective of a meaning-making self (see Weber & Varela 2002 for more details). Internal, first-person insights that were ruled out by a worldview that accepts only the empirical/objective point of view – because they are not “real” in the material, physical sense – become valid. Once natural ecosystems are seen as creatively alive, it becomes necessary to complement rational thinking and empirical observation with the “empirical subjectivity” of living things, and its complement, the “poetic objectivity” of meaningful experiences. This new standpoint cannot be dismissed as a soft, vague emotion, but must be heeded as a critical genre of evolutionary intelligence.

As living organisms, we must learn to experience and describe the world “from the inside” (emotionally, subjectively, socially) while at the same time treating it as a physical reality outside of us. Poetic objectivity is a solution to the destructive dualities that since the Enlightenment have separated the human species as above and apart from “nature.” Poetic objectivity represents the missing first-person-centered perspective in human culture that must act as a complement to the dominant but partial objectivist approach.

Commoning as Partaking in Reality

This essay has so far focused on the philosophical dimensions of the challenge facing humankind, but of course, the practical test is how to bring this ontological sensibility into the world and make it real. Fortunately, the social practices of creating and maintaining a commons – commoning – offer excellent opportunities for blending the subjective and objective, humanity and “nature,” and for overcoming the many other dualisms that deny our creative aliveness.

The process of commoning challenges the dualisms upon which “the economy” as conventionally understood is based. It does this by enacting different roles than those ordained by neoliberal economics and policy (such as “producer” and “consumer,” and “investor” and “natural resource”) and by building provisioning systems that are oriented toward meeting basic needs in situated contexts, and in ways that generate a sense of life and personal integration. The point of commoning projects and policies is to restore enlivenment to the center of any economy activity, which means it must strive to reflect the shared interests of all, subjective human needs and the integrity of natural ecosystems.

This can be seen in Anne Salmond’s essay in this volume (pp. 309-329), which describes how the culture of the Māori people in New Zealand expresses “the fundamental kinship between people and other life forms….They are linked together in an open-ended, dynamic set of complex networks and exchanges.” The same idea is expressed by the notion of Buen Vivir, the idea of “good living” that people in Ecuador and Bolivia use to speak about living in mindful ways with Pachamama (“Mother Earth”), the community and one’s ancestors. Needless to say, this poses serious challenges to the “modernist cosmo-logic” of the nation-state and capitalist markets. Traditional and contemporary examples add to an endless number of human ways to relate to the Other, social and natural, and defy the artificial borders of animate and inanimate. In so doing, these forms of commoning represent identity systems “beyond nature and culture,” as Collège-de-France anthropologist Philippe Descola (2013) has it.

Such patterns of commoning are not confined to people with premodern cultural roots. Even people raised in that modernist cosmo-logic of globalized industry and commerce are building commons that nourish an ontology of creative aliveness. The permaculture network is deliberately designing and engineering forms of agriculture in alignment with ecological forces. A key principle of permaculture is “integrate rather than separate,” so that farming practices build relationships among those things that work together and support each other.¹ For its part, the Burning Man community celebrates the principles of “radical inclusion” and “communal effort” in conjunction with “radical self-reliance,” “participation” and “immediacy.”² The point is to honor the wildness within every human being while insisting upon a civil social order and sustainable relationship to the land.

The idea of working with the forces of nature and the social dynamics of living communities – rather than trying to deny them, bureaucratize them or forcibly overpower them – is a key principle of commons-based governance. It is why social critics like Ivan Illich embraced the commons as a path for the spiritual reintegration of people in the face of a dehumanizing modernity. The commons helps move in this direction because it honors “affective labor” as a critical force binding people to each other, to natural systems and to earlier and future generations. The commons cultivates identity, meaning, ritual and culture among people as they work with resources to meet their everyday needs. In the process “resources” are retransformed into things that are inflected with personal and community meaning. The artful blending of the social, moral and physical into an integrated commons is what gives the commons paradigm such durability and power. It taps into wellsprings of creative aliveness in people and in so doing engenders deep satisfaction, identity, commitment, flexibility and vitality.

It is admittedly a difficult challenge for the nation-state born of ultra-rational Enlightenment principles to engineer new types of law and public policy to recognize and support commoning. The cosmo-logic of a liberal, modernist polity has trouble understanding the efficacy or desirability of governance based on subjective feelings, locally rooted knowledge and singular historical relationships; the bureaucratic state prefers to govern with universalized abstractions and atomized individuals shorn of their histories and contexts. Paradoxically, this is arguably why the nation-state and bureaucratic organizations are increasingly losing the loyalty, respect and commitment of people – their remote, impersonal modes of governance have become indifferent to the creative aliveness that human beings need and invariably seek.

The idea of citizen/consumers interacting with the market/state duopoly to advance their self-interests corresponds to the individual seeking to act smartly and efficiently to be a sovereign agent using all available resources to build up an identity and resilient self. When personal identity is regarded from this standpoint, it naturally follows that other subjects, human or otherwise, to whom the self becomes attached, are legitimately seen as mere resources for advancing one’s interests. Relationships in this picture become solely a means to a selfish end, a way of functionalizing the Other, rather than open-ended, imperfect processes of transformative exchange.

This may also be why so many commoners working on open networks – e.g., open source software, open design and production, open source agriculture, and much else – are outflanking markets that prize predictable financial gains over all else. Businesses may recognize the abundance that can be produced through common-based peer production, which necessarily draws upon people’s creative aliveness – but they are structurally designed to enclose the commons because of their ontological commitment to the subject/object division which is perfectly executed by money. Money is a means to objectify and separate. Putting a price on something reduces self-contained purpose to mere function. Therefore cash-based relationships generally disdain the value of “affective labor” and long-term commitments. Through its deep alliance with markets, the state generally colludes in denying the ontological reality of living systems despite the existential catastrophes that are now raining down on the entire planet, notably in the form of climate change.

The guardians of the state and “free market” would do well to admit their own structural limitations and legally recognize commons as a salutary form of governance. But as products of modernity and its cosmo-logic, the Market/State is mostly unable to participate as a respectful peer in the natural history of the planet; it is unwilling to acknowledge creative aliveness as an ontological foundation of reality.

It is telling that many proponents of the Anthropocene who interpret it as an epoch of world-gardening and technological stewardship over the biosphere – such as Shellenberger and Nordhaus (2013) and Marris (2013) – celebrate ultra-neoliberal free-market approaches as the best way to organize human interactions with the rest of the biosphere, and to distribute and allocate goods, and make sense of the world. They hail market creativity as the key force for inventing planet-healing technologies. This alone confirms that the postdualism of the Anthropocene is in fact still entirely anthropocentric; we are still enacting Enlightenment principles, but this time it hides behind a different mask.

This is why the tendency of certain sustainablity thinkers to hail “green economy” ecological economics and “green accounting” is questionable. To “factor in” natural services may be a quick, expedient amendment and it may in fact help otherwise-endangered ecosystems. Still, it deeply misunderstands the nature of our relationship with reality. As explained above, it fails to recognize that any exchange process is always and inevitably happening on many entangled, mutually dependent levels that reciprocally co-create one another, from the physiological to the spiritual. In a reality that consists of a dynamic and mutual unfolding of transformative relations, or existential commoning, that inescapably transforms both sides of an exchange, an economics and policy regime based on anthropocentric dualisms, including “posthumanism,” can never truly heal.

Epilogue: The Affirmation of Belonging

Modernity has sought human emancipation from nature by dominating it. The thinkers of the Anthropocene and posthumanism strive to put an end to this stance – but they continue (tacitly) to separate humans from the rest of reality. In contrast, the poetic materialism of Enlivenment outlined here, which expresses itself in successful processes of commoning, sees humans and “nature” as inextricably entangled in an exchange of mutual responsibilities, materially and culturally. The sharing of creative principles is both material and symbolic. It accepts that aliveness is a defining principle of nature just as for all species, one of which is Homo sapiens. The principles of exchange include physical embodiment, co-creativity with other living creatures, birth through death, mutual transformation through commoning, and the paradox that every connection is also a separation – because to connect, a separation is needed in the first place. It is a oneness achieved through the conjunction of two distinct unities. Identity is not wholeness, but “interpenetration,” as the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye would have put it.

The Anthropocene as a reconciliation of humans and nature will function only if we grasp that we are “nature” because we share aliveness with every being, and that creative aliveness is the underlying character according to which reality unfolds. We are transient transformations in a larger process defined by of material/semiotic referentialities. Viewed in this light, reality is revealed as a commons of those perceiving and those perceived, and their ongoing interactions. Its objectivity is not simply an academic discourse. Nor is it invented or constructed by human culture. Instead, reality is both a way of describing the world as it is and as a set of experiential practices. Like Aristotle’s ethical ideal of a mediation between the “wise and the many” (Nussbaum 2001), the ontology of the world is never fixed and unequivocal; it is always process, always birth, always becoming. The goal lies in participating in the enterprise of creative aliveness in order to make the world more real.

*       *       *

After the sun has set in Sant’Andrea off Elba, the thunderstorm, gray and , has moved on toward Corsica. The sea simultaneously mirrors the colors of the atmosphere and shakes them off, while its choppy suit of armor takes on every hue: turquoise, sky blue, gray, orange, violet, ultramarine. The ocean has no colors, it has nothing but energy. The ocean is the “wine-dark sea” that Homer celebrated in song, the power that enables the actualization of living things. It is a power that makes things more real and that lends itself to everyone who carries it further and transforms it.

We can overcome the misunderstanding of the Anthropocene that celebrates itself as the “era of humans.” To do so, however, we need an attitude of inclusivity, of mutual acceptance between attitudes, bodies, identities and sensations. We need the affirmation of belonging and a willingness to engage in an ongoing negotiation within a reality that we recognize as a commons. We can adapt our behaviors to its ongoing transformations and amalgamation. Since this is the inescapable existential reality of life itself, we must acknowledge that the fertile wild ultimately cannot be denied, suppressed or enclosed without a profound constriction on our own freedom.

References

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Alphandéry, Claude et al. 2014. Abridged version of the Convivialist Manifesto, http://lesconvivialistes.fr.

Benasayag, Miguel and Gérard Schmit. 2007. L’epoca delle passioni tristi. Milano: Feltrinelli.

Bilgrami, Akeel et al. 2013. “The Anthropocene Project: An Introduction.” Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

Bollier, David. 2014. Think like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. Gabriola Island, B.C. New Society Publishers.

Buber, Martin. 1937. I and Thou. Eastford, CT: Martino (2010 reprint of the original American edition).

Crutzen, Paul J. and E. Stoermer. 2000. “The ‘Anthropocene’.” Global Change Newsletter 41:S. 17 – 18.

Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago. Chicago University Press.

Ferrando, Francesca. 2013. “Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms: Differences and Relations.” Existenz 8(2):26-32.

Frye, Nortrop. 1991. Double Vision. Identity and Meaning in Religion. Toronto, Ontario. Toronto University Press.

Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University Press.

Johns, David. 2014. “With Friends Like These, Wilderness and Biodiversity Do Not Need Enemies.” In: George Wuerthner, Eileen Crist and Tom Butler, editors. Keeping the Wild. Against the Domestication of the Earth. Washington, D.C. Island Press.

Kidner, David W. 2014. “The Conceptual Assassination of Wilderness.” In Wuerthner et al. 2014.

Marris, Emma. 2013. The Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. New York. Bloomsbury.

Morin, Edgar. 2001. L’identité humaine. La methode, tome 5, L’humanité de l’humanité. Paris. Seuil.

Nussbaum, Martha. 2001. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy And Philosophy. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University Press.

Schäfer, Lothar. 1993. Das Bacon-Projekt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Shellenberger, Michael and Ted Nordhaus, 2011. “Evolve: The Case for Modernization as the Road to Salvation.” In Dies, Love Your Monsters. Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene. Oakland, California. The Breakthrough Institute.

Singh, Neera M. 2013. “The Affective Labor of Growing Forests and the Becoming of Environmental Subjects: Rethinking Environmentality in Odisha, India.” Geoforum 47:189-198.

Smith, Philip B. and Manfred Max-Neef, 2010. Economics Unmasked: From Power and Greed to Compassion and the Common Good. Green Press.

Weber, Andreas. 2012. “The Economy of Wastefulness. The Biology of the Commons.” In David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, editors., The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State. Amherst, MA: Levellers Press.

———. 2013. Enlivenment: Towards a Fundamental Shift in the Concepts of Nature, Culture and Politics. Berlin: Heinrich Böll Foundation.

———. 2014. Lebendigkeit. Eine erotische Ökologie. München: Kösel.

———. 2015. Healing Ecology. Finding the Human in Nature. Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society Publishers.

Weber, Andreas & Varela, Francisco J. 2002. “Life After Kant: Natural Purposes and the Autopoietic Foundations of Biological Individuality.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1:97 – 125.

Andreas Weber (Germany) is a biologist, philosopher and book and magazine writer based in Berlin. His longstanding interest is how human feeling, subjectivity and social identity are related to biological worldmaking and cognition. He recently published Enlivenment: Towards a Fundamental Shift in the Concepts of Nature, Culture and Politics (Heinrich Böll Foundation 2013), and Healing Ecology: Finding the Human in Nature (New Society Publishers, 2015).

Special thanks to David Bollier for inspiration, corrections and support, particularly for the section on commoning.

The post Patterns of Commoning: Reality as Commons, A Poetics of Participation for the Anthropocene appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Is the so-called tragedy of the commons¹ ever averted in the biological world and might this possibility provide solutions for our own species? One plausible scenario is natural selection at the level of groups. A selfish farmer might have an advantage over other farmers in his village, but a village that somehow solved the tragedy of the commons would have a decisive advantage over other villages. Most species are subdivided into local populations at various scales, just as humans are subdivided into villages, cities and nations. If natural selection between groups (favoring cooperation) can successfully oppose natural selection within groups (favoring non-cooperation), then the tragedy of the commons can be averted for humans and non-human species alike.

At the time that Hardin published his article and I was working on my thesis, this possibility had been considered and largely rejected. A book titled Adaptation and Natural Selection, written by evolutionary biologist George C. Williams and published in 1966, was on its way to becoming a modern classic. Williams described between-group selection as theoretically possible but almost invariably weak compared to within-group selection. By his account, attempts to explain evolutionary adaptations as “for the good of the group” reflected sloppy and wishful thinking. Hardin’s article reflected the same pessimism about avoiding the tragedy of the commons other than by top-down regulation. My interest in rethinking the plausibility of group selection placed me in a very small group of heretics (see Okasha 2006, Sober and Wilson 1998, Wilson and Wilson 2007, and Wilson 2015 for more on the controversy over group selection, which in my opinion has now been mostly resolved).

Evolutionary theory’s individualistic turn coincided with individualistic turns in other areas of thought. Economics in the postwar decades was dominated by rational choice theory, which used individual self-interest as a grand explanatory principle. The social sciences were dominated by a position known as methodological individualism, which treated all social phenomena as reducible to individual-level phenomena, as if groups were not legitimate units of analysis in their own right (Campbell 1990). And UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher became notorious for saying during a speech in 1987 that “there is no such thing as society; only individuals and families.” It was as if the entire culture had become individualistic and the formal scientific theories were obediently following suit.

Unbeknownst to me, another heretic named Elinor Ostrom was also challenging the received wisdom in her field of political science. Starting with her thesis research on how a group of stakeholders in southern California cobbled together a system for managing their water table, and culminating in her worldwide study of common-pool resource (CPR) groups, the message of her work was that groups are capable of avoiding the tragedy of the commons without requiring top-down regulation, at least if certain conditions are met (Ostrom 1990, 2010). She summarized the conditions in the form of eight core design principles: 1) Clearly defined boundaries; 2) Proportional equivalence between benefits and costs; 3) Collective choice arrangements; 4) Monitoring; 5) Graduated sanctions; 6) Fast and fair conflict resolution; 7) Local autonomy; 8) Appropriate relations with other tiers of rule-making authority (polycentric governance). This work was so groundbreaking that Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009.

I first met Lin (as she preferred to be called) just a few months before she was awarded the prize, at a workshop held in Florence, Italy, titled “Do Institutions Evolve?” (recounted in Wilson 2011a). Similar events were taking place all over the world in 2009 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species. Multilevel selection theory, which envisions natural selection operating on a multi-tier hierarchy of units, had become more widely accepted by then, especially with respect to human cultural evolution, making me much in demand as a speaker. I had also cofounded a think tank called the Evolution Institute² that formulates public policy from an evolutionary perspective, giving me a strong interest in the workshop topic. I had become somewhat familiar with Lin’s work but having the opportunity to talk with her at length had a transformative impact.

I quickly realized that Lin’s core design principle approach dovetailed with multilevel selection theory, which my fellow-heretics and I had worked so hard to revive. Her approach is especially pertinent to the concept of major evolutionary transitions, whereby members of groups become so cooperative that the group becomes a higher-level organism in its own right. This idea was first proposed by cell biologist Lynn Margulis (1970) to explain how nucleated cells evolved from symbiotic associations of bacteria. It was then generalized during the 1990s to explain other major transitions, such as the rise of the first bacterial cells, multicellular organisms, eusocial insect colonies and human evolution (Maynard Smith and Szathmary 1995, 1999).

– the defining criterion of a major evolutionary transition (Boehm 1993, 1999, 2011). With disruptive competition within groups held largely in check, succeeding as a group became the main selective force in human evolution. The entire package of traits regarded as distinctively human – including our ability to cooperate in groups of unrelated individuals, our ability to transmit learned information across generations, and our capacity for language and other forms of symbolic thought – can be regarded as forms of physical and mental teamwork made possible by a major evolutionary transition.

Lin’s design principles (DP) had “major evolutionary transition” written all over them. Clearly defined boundaries (DP1) meant that members knew they were part of a group and what the group was about (e.g., fisherman with access to a bay or farmers managing an irrigation system). Proportional equivalence of costs and benefits (DP2) meant that members had to earn their benefits and couldn’t just appropriate them. Collective choice arrangements (DP3) meant that group members had to agree upon decisions so nobody could be bossed around. Monitoring (DP4) and graduated sanctions (DP5) meant that disruptive self-serving behaviors could be detected and punished. Fast and fair conflict resolution (DP6) meant that the group would not be torn apart by internal conflicts of interest. Local autonomy (DP7) meant that the group had the elbow room to manage its own affairs. Appropriate relations with other tiers of rule making authority (DP8) meant that everything regulating the conduct of individuals within a given group also was needed to regulate conduct among groups in a multi group population.

The concordance between Lin’s core design principle approach and multilevel selection theory had three major implications. First, it placed the core design principle approach on a more general theoretical foundation. Lin’s “Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD)” framework emanated from political science and she was an early adopter of economic game theory, but her main case for the design principle approach was the empirical database that she compiled for common-pool resource groups around the world, as described in her most influential book Governing the Commons (Ostrom 1990). Multilevel selection theory showed how the core design principle approach follows from the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation in all species and from our own evolutionary history as a highly cooperative species.

Second, because of its theoretical generality, the core design principle approach is likely to apply to a much broader range of human groups than those attempting to manage common-pool resources (CPRs). Almost any group whose members must work together to achieve a common goal is vulnerable to self-serving behaviors and should benefit from the same principles. An analysis of business groups, churches, voluntary associations and urban neighborhoods should yield the same results as Lin’s analysis of CPR groups.

Third, the core design principle approach can provide a practical framework for improving the efficacy of groups in the real world. It should be possible for almost any kind of group to assess itself with respect to the design principles, address shortcomings, and function better as a result. This prospect was especially appealing to me as president of the Evolution Institute, since I was now actively engaged in formulating and implementing public policy from an evolutionary perspective.

Lin inspired me to begin several projects in parallel with each other. One was to collaborate with her and her postdoctoral associate Michael Cox to write an academic article, “Generalizing the Core Design Principle for the Efficacy of Groups” that established the three major implications listed above for an academic audience (Wilson, Ostrom and Cox 2013). Michael was the lead author of a 2010 article that evaluated the core design principle approach for the literature on CPR groups that had accumulated since Lin’s original analysis (Cox et al. 2010). Our article was published in a special issue of the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization titled “Evolution as a General Theoretical Framework for Economics and Public Policy.” Both the article and the special issue should be consulted for more on the theoretical framework that underpins the design principle approach.

In addition, I started to use the design principle approach in projects that involved working with real-world groups in Binghamton, New York. One was a collaboration with the City of Binghamton and United Way of Broome County called “Design Your Own Park,” which used the opportunity to turn a neglected space into a neighborhood park. Neighborhood groups that formed to create a park would be coached in the core design principles and start to manage the affairs of their neighborhood in other respects. This project led to the creation of four neighborhood parks—and their groups—in our city (Wilson 2011b).

The second project was a collaboration with the Binghamton City School District to create a “school within a school” for at-risk youth called the Regents Academy (Wilson, Kaufmann, and Purdy 2011). This was our most ambitious and best documented project because we were able to employ the gold standard of scientific assessment, the randomized control trial, which randomly assigns participants into an experimental group and a control group to identify significant variables that might affect outcomes. To the best of its ability, the Regents Academy implemented the eight core design principles and two auxiliary design principles deemed to be important in a learning context (a relaxed and playful atmosphere and short-term rewards for long-term learning goals). Not only did the Regents Academy students vastly outperform the comparison group, but they even performed on a par with the average high school student on the state-mandated Regents exam (see Wilson, Kauffman and Purdy 2011 for details). This is a strong indication that the design principle approach can be generalized beyond CPR groups and can be used as a practical framework for improving the efficacy of groups in our everyday lives.

The third project was a collaboration with a number of religious congregations in Binghamton to reflect upon the core design principles in relation to their faith and social organization. These conversations did not lead to a formal effort to change practices but they were invaluable for exploring how the success of religious groups can be understood in terms of the design principles approach.

All of these projects were instructive and broadly confirmed the relevance of the core design principle approach for any group whose members must work together to achieve a common purpose. They also showed how the design principles can be sadly lacking in some groups, such as disadvantaged neighborhoods and public schools. It is important to remember that Ostrom was able to derive the core design principles for CPR groups because they varied in how well the design principles were implemented. Some did well without needing to be taught, while others did poorly and might benefit from some coaching. Based on my own projects, I became convinced that all groups are likely to face similar challenges in implementing the core design principles.

At the same time that I was working with Lin, I was working with three leaders in the applied behavioral sciences: Tony Biglan, past president of the US-based Society for Prevention Research; Steven C. Hayes, cofounder of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science; and Dennis Embry, a scientific entrepreneur who markets evidence-based practices for positive behavior change. I was excited to work with them because they had much more experience accomplishing positive behavioral change in real-world settings than I did. They were excited to work with me because they saw that evolutionary theory could provide a more general theoretical framework for their disciplines, in the same way as for the core design principles.

This experience underscored what’s special about evolutionary theory: Now that its generality within the biological sciences has been established, it can expand its domain into the basic and applied human behavioral sciences. One result of our collaboration was a major review article, “Evolving the Future: Toward a Science of Intentional Change” (followed by peer commentaries and a reply), published in the academic journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences (Wilson, Hayes, Biglan and Embry 2014), a piece that expanded the theoretical foundation I was building with Lin and Michael. The first half of the article sketches a basic science of intentional change centered on evolutionary theory. The second half reviews examples of successful positive behavioral and cultural change from the applied disciplines, which illustrate the concept of wisely managing the process of cultural evolution but are little known outside their disciplinary boundaries. As we conclude our article, we are closer to a science of intentional change than one might think.

These collaborations have resulted in an ambitious Evolution Institute project called PROSOCIAL (Wilson 2014), which has three objectives. The first is to create an Internet platform that will enable any group, anywhere in the world, to evaluate itself and increase its efficacy based on a fusion of the core design principle approach and evidence-based methods from the applied behavioral sciences. The second objective is to provide a way for these groups to interact with and learn directly from each other, which is an example of facilitating the process of cultural evolution. The third objective is to use information provided by these groups to create a scientific database, much as Lin had done for common-pool resource groups, which enabled her to identify the core design principles in the first place. This project has been in the development phase for several years and should be operational and accessible through the Evolution Institute website by mid-2015.

Sadly, Lin died of cancer in June 2012. I was with her only a few months before at a workshop, “Rules as Genotypes in Cultural Evolution,” which we organized together and hosted at her Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, at Indiana University. She was simultaneously trying to care for her aging husband Vincent, satisfy the worldwide demand for speaking appearances, manage her projects and care for herself. I am grateful to be among the many who were touched by her and proud to contribute to her legacy by helping to generalize the core design principle approach and make it available to any group whose members must work together to achieve shared goals.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

References

Boehm, Christopher. 1993. “Egalitarian Society and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy.” Current Anthropology, 34:227 – 254.

———. 1999. Hierarchy in the Forest: Egalitarianism and the Evolution of Human Altruism. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

———. 2011. Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. New York: Basic Books.

Campbell, Donald T. 1990. “Levels of Organization, Downward Causation, and the Selection-Theory Approach to Evolutionary Epistemology.” In G. Greenberg & E. Tobach, editors, Theories of the Evolution of Knowing, 1 – 17. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Cox, M., G. Arnold & S. Villamayor-Tomas. 2010. “A Review of Design Principles for Community-based Natural Resource Management.” Ecology and Society. 15.

Hardin, Garrett. 1968. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science. 162:1243-1248.

Margulis, Lynn. 1970. Origin of Eukaryotic cells. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Maynard Smith, John, & E. Szathmary. 1995. The Major Transitions of Life. New York: W.H. Freeman.

———. 1999. The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Okasha, Samir. 2006. Evolution and the Levels of Selection. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2010. “Polycentric Systems for Coping with Collective Action and Global Environmental Change.” Global Environmental Change. 20:550 – 557.

Sober, Elliot, & Wilson, D. S. 1998. Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Williams, George. C. 1966. Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Wilson, D.S. 2011a. The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time. New York: Little, Brown.

———. 2011b. “The Design Your Own Park Competition: Empowering Neighborhoods and Restoring Outdoor Play on a Citywide Scale.” American Journal of Play. 3:538 – 551.

———. 2014. “Introducing PROSOCIAL: Using the Science of Cooperation to Improve the Efficacy of Your Group.” This View of Life.

———. 2015. Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Wilson, D.S., Kauffman, R. A., & Purdy, M. S. 2011. “A Program for At-risk High School Students Informed by Evolutionary Science.” PLoS ONE, 6(11), e27826. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0027826

Wilson, D.S., & Gowdy, J. M. 2013. “Evolution as a General Theoretical Framework for Economics and Public Policy.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. 90:S3 – S10. doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2012.12.008

Wilson, D.S., Hayes, S. C., Biglan, A., & Embry, D. 2014. “Evolving the Future: Toward a Science of Intentional Change.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 37:395 – 460.

Wilson, D.S., E. Ostrom & M. Cox. 2013. “Generalizing the Design Principles for Improving the Efficacy of Groups.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. 90:supplement, S21 – S32.

Wilson, D.S., & E.O. Wilson. 2007. “Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology.” Quarterly Review of Biology. 82:327 – 348.

David Sloan Wilson (USA) is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University in Binghamton New York, President of the Evolution Institute, and Editor in Chief of the online magazine This View of Life. His books include Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (2002),Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives (2007), The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time (2011), and Does Altruism Exist? (2015).

Photo by Szymon Stoma

The post Patterns of Commoning: Generalizing the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I. Commons and Worlds

Commons exist within worlds. Long before private property showed its ugly head and started to devour territories, people created what today we call commons as a principal strategy to enact their worlds. These worlds, made up of human and nonhuman, living and nonliving, material and spiritual beings and forms woven together in inextricably entangled ways, have continued to persevere nevertheless.

Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda (1984) describes how the introduction of barbwire for cattle ranching in the Caribbean Coast region of Colombia at the dawn of the twentieth century interrupted flows of people and animals, regularized landscapes and even desiccated wetlands and lagoons in some areas. Despite these challenges, the region’s people had a resilient culture and strove time and again to reconstitute their commons. They sought to recreate the sensual wholeness that Raoul Vaneigem describes as a casualty of the economy:

The economy is everywhere that life is not….Economics is the most durable lie of the approximately ten millennia mistakenly accepted as history….With the intrusion of work the body loses its sensual wholeness…work existed from the moment one part of life was devoted to the service of the economy while the other was denied and repressed (Vaneigem 1994:17, 18, 27, 28).

And so, and against all odds, and like many other people throughout the world, the Caribbean people described by Fals go on enacting a world of their own, creating with every act and every practice worlds in which the commons – indeed, commoning – still find a breathing space and at times even the chance to flourish. Commoners are like that. They refuse to abide by the rules of the One-World World (OWW) that wishes to organize everything in terms of individuals, private property, markets, profits, and a single notion of the Real. OWW seeks to banish nature and the sacred from the domain of an exclusively human-driven life (Law 2011).

Those who insist on commoning defy this civilization of the One-World (capitalist, secular, liberal, patriarchal, white) that arrogates for itself the right to be “the world” and that reduces all other worlds to nonexistence or noncredible alternatives to what exist (Santos 2002). Vaneigem is again instructive:

Civilization was identified with obedience to a universal and eternal market relationship….The commodity is the original form of pollution….Nature cannot be liberated from the economy until the economy has been driven out of human life….(From the moment the market system minimizes the fruits of the earth by seeing them only in terms of the fruits of labor, the market system treats nature as its slave)… As the economy’s hold weakens, life is more able to clear a path for itself (Vaneigem 1994).

This reality has always been evident to most of the world’s peoples-territory (pueblos-territorio).¹ An activist from the Process of Black Communities of Colombia said: “The territory has no price. Our ancestors cared for the territory with a great sense of belonging. This is why we have to create our economies not from the outside coming in but the other way around: from the inside going outwards.”² The world this activist talks about has persevered, again despite all odds. Let us visit this this world for a brief moment.

II. Yurumanguí: Introducing Relational Worlds

In Colombia’s southern Pacific rainforest region, picture a seemingly simple scene from the Yurumanguí River, one of the many rivers that flow from the Western Andean mountain range towards the Pacific Ocean, an area inhabited largely by Afrodescendant communities.³ A father and his six-year old daughter paddling with their canaletes (oars) seemingly upstream in their potrillos (local dugout canoes) at the end of the afternoon, taking advantage of the rising tide; perhaps they are returning home after having taken their harvested plantains and their catch of the day to the town downstream, and bringing back some items they bought at the town store – unrefined cane sugar, cooking fuel, salt, notebooks for the children, or what have you.

On first inspection, we may say that the father is “socializing” his daughter into the correct way to navigate the potrillo, an important skill as life in the region greatly depends on the ceaseless going back and forth in the potrillos through rivers, mangroves and estuaries. This interpretation is correct in some ways; but something else is also going on. As locals are wont to say, speaking of the river territory, acá nacimos, acá crecimos, acá hemos conocido qué es el mundo (“Here we were born, here we grew up, here we have known what the world is”). Through their nacer~crecer~conocer they enact the manifold practices through which their territories/worlds have been made since they became libres (i.e., free, not enslaved peoples) and became entangled with living beings of all kinds in these forest and mangrove worlds.

Let us travel to this river and immerse ourselves deeply within it and experience it with the eyes of relationality; an entire way of worlding emerges for us. Looking attentively from the perspective of the manifold relations that make this world what it is, we see that the potrillo was made out of a mangrove tree with the knowledge the father received from his predecessors; the mangrove forest is intimately known by the inhabitants who traverse with great ease the fractal estuaries it creates with the rivers and the always moving sea; we begin to see the endless connections keeping together and always in motion this intertidal “aquatic space,” (Oslender 2008) including connections with the moon and the tides that enact a nonlinear temporality. The mangrove forest involves many relational entities among what we might call minerals, mollusks, nutrients, algae, microorganisms, birds, plant, and insects – an entire assemblage of underwater, surface and areal life. Ethnographers of these worlds describe it in terms of three non-separate worlds – el mundo de abajo or infraworld; este mundo, or the human world; and el mundo de arriba, or spiritual/supraworld. There are comings and goings between these worlds, and particular places and beings connecting them, including “visions” and spiritual beings. This entire world is narrated in oral forms that include storytelling, chants and poetry.

This dense network of interrelations may be called a “relational ontology.” The mangrove-world, to give it a short name, is enacted minute by minute, day by day, through an infinite set of practices carried out by all kinds of beings and life forms, involving a complex organic and inorganic materiality of water, minerals, degrees of salinity, forms of energy (sun, tides, moon, relations of force), and so forth. There is a rhizome “logic” to these entanglements, a logic that is impossible to follow in any simple way, and very difficult to map and measure, if at all; it reveals an altogether different way of being and becoming in territory and place. These experiences constitute relational worlds or ontologies. To put it abstractly, a relational ontology of this sort can be defined as one in which nothing preexists the relations that constitute it. Said otherwise, things and beings are their relations; they do not exist prior to them.

As the anthropologist from Aberdeen Tim Ingold says, these “worlds without objects” (2011:131) are always in movement, made up of materials in motion, flux and becoming; in these worlds, living beings of all kinds constitute each other’s conditions for existence; they “interweave to form an immense and continually evolving tapestry.” (2011:10) Going back to the river scene, one may say that “father” and “daughter” get to know their local world not through distancing reflection but by going about it, that is, by being alive to their world. These worlds do not require the divide between nature and culture in order to exist – in fact, they exist as such only because they are enacted by practices that do not rely on such divide. In a relational ontology, “beings do not simply occupy the world, they inhabit it, and in so doing – in threading their own paths through the meshwork – they contribute to their ever-evolving weave.” (Ingold 2011: 71) Commons exist in these relational worlds, not in worlds that are imagined as inert and waiting to be occupied.

Even if the relations that keep the mangrove-world always in a state of becoming are always changing, to disrupt them significantly often results in the degradation of such worlds. Such is the case with industrial shrimp farming schemes and oil palm plantations for agrofuels, which have proliferated in many tropical regions of the world. These market systems, often built at the expense of mangrove and humid forest lands, aim to transform “worthless swamp” into agroindustrial complexes (Ogden 2012; Escobar 2008).

Here, of course, we find many of the operations of the One-World World at play: the conversion of everything that exists in the mangrove-world into “nature” and “nature” into “resources”; the effacing of the life-enabling materiality of the entire domains of the inorganic and the nonhuman, and its treatment as “objects” to be had, destroyed or extracted; and linking the forest worlds so transformed to “world markets,” to generate profit. In these cases, the insatiable appetite of the One-World World spells out the progressive destruction of the mangrove-world, its ontological capture and reconversion by capital and the State (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). The OWW, in short, denies the mangrove-world its possibility of existing as such. Local struggles constitute attempts to (re)establish some degree of symmetry by seeking to influence the partial connections that the mangrove-worlds inevitably maintain with the OWW.

III. Territoriality, Ancestrality and Worlds

Elders and young activists in many territorial communities worldwide (including increasingly in urban areas) eloquently express why they defend their worlds even at the price of their lives. An activist from the Afrodescendant community of La Toma of Colombia’s southwest, which has struggled against gold mining since 2008, said: “It is patently clear to us that we are confronting monsters such as transnational corporations and the State. Yet nobody is willing to leave her/his territory; I might get killed here but I am not leaving.”⁴

Such resistance takes place within a long history of domination and resistance, and this is essential for understanding commoning as an ontological political practice. La Toma communities, for instance, have knowledge of their continued presence in the territory since the first half of the seventeenth century. It’s an eloquent example of what activists call “ancestrality,” referring to the ancestral mandate that inspires today’s struggles and that persists in the memory of the elders, amply documented by oral history and scholars. (Lisifrey et al. 2013) This mandate is joyfully celebrated in oral poetry and song: Del Africa llegamos con un legado ancestral; la memoria del mundo debemos recuperar (“From Africa we arrived with an ancestral legacy; the memory of our world we need to bring back”).⁵ Far from an intransigent attachment to the past, ancestrality stems from a living memory that orients itself to a future reality that imagines, and struggles for, conditions that will allow them to persevere as a distinct, living mode of existence.

Within relational worlds, the defense of territory, life and the commons are one and the same. This is the ontological dimension of commoning. To this extent, this chapter’s argument can be stated as follows: The perseverance of communities, commons, and movements and the struggles for their defense and reconstitution can be described as ontological. At its best and most radical, this is particularly true for those struggles that incorporate explicitly ethno-territorial dimensions and involve resistance and the defense and affirmation of commons.

Conversely, whereas the occupation of territories implies economic, technological, cultural, ecological, and often armed aspects, its most fundamental dimension is ontological. From this perspective, what occupies territories and commons is a particular ontology, that of the universal world of individuals and markets (the OWW) that attempts to transform all other worlds into one; this is another way of interpreting the historical enclosure of the commons. By interrupting the neoliberal globalizing project of constructing One World, many indigenous, Afrodescendant, peasant, and poor urban communities are advancing ontological struggles. The struggle to maintain multiple worlds – the pluriverse – is best embodied by the Zapatista dictum, Un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos, a world where many worlds fit. Many of these worlds can thus be seen as struggles over the pluriverse.

Another clear case of ontological occupation of territories comes from the southernmost area in the Colombian Pacific, around the port city of Tumaco. Here, since the early 1980s, the forest has been destroyed and communities displaced to give way to oil palm plantations. Nonexistent in the 1970s, by the mid-1990s they had expanded to over 30,000 hectares. The monotony of the plantation – row after row of palm as far as you can see, a green desert of sorts – replaced the diverse, heterogeneous and entangled world of forest and communities.

There are two important aspects to remark from this dramatic change: first, the “plantation form” effaces the socioecological relations that maintain the forest-world. The plantation emerges from a dualist ontology of human dominance over so-called “nature” understood as “inert space” or “resources” to be had, and can thus be said to be the most effective means for the ontological occupation and ultimate erasure of the local relational world. Conversely, the same plantation form is unthinkable from the perspective of the forest-world; within this world, forest utilization and cultivation practices take on an entirely different form, closer to agroforestry; even the landscape, of course, is entirely different. Not far from the oil palm plantations, industrial shrimp farming was also busy in the 1980s and 1990s transforming the mangrove-world into disciplined succession of rectangular pools, “scientifically” controlled. A very polluting and destructive industry especially when constructed on mangrove swamps, this type of shrimp farming constitutes another clear example of ontological occupation and politics at play (Escobar 2008).

IV. Commons Beyond Development: Commoning and Pluriversal Studies

The ontological occupation of commons and worlds just described often takes place in the name of development. Development and growth continue to be among the most naturalized concepts in the social and policy domains. The very idea of development, however, has been questioned by cultural critics since the mid-1980s; they questioned the core assumptions of development, including growth, progress, and instrumental rationality. These critiques came of age with the publication in 1992 of a collective volume, The Development Dictionary. The book started with the startling claim: “The last forty years can be called the age of development. This epoch is coming to an end. The time is ripe to write its obituary.” (Sachs 1992; Rist 1997) If development was dead, what would come after? Some started to talk about a “post-development era” in response to this question (Rahnema 1997). Degrowth theorists, notably Latouche (2009), contributed to disseminate this perspective in the North.

Postdevelopment advocates argued that it is possible for activists and policymakers to think about the end of development, emphasizing the notion of alternatives to development, rather than development alternatives. The idea of alternatives to development has become more concrete in South America in recent years with the notions of Buen Vivir (good living, or collective well-being according to culturally appropriate ways) and the rights of Nature. Defined as a holistic view of social life that no longer gives overriding centrality to the economy, Buen Vivir (BV) “constitutes an alternative to development, and as such it represents a potential response to the substantial critiques of postdevelopment” (Gudynas and Acosta 2011; Acosta and Martínez 2009). Very succinctly, Buen Vivir grew out of indigenous struggles for social change waged by peasants, Afrodescendants, environmentalists, students, women and youth. Echoing indigenous ontologies, BV implies a different philosophy of life which subordinates economic objectives to ecological criteria, human dignity and social justice. Debates about the form BV might take in modern urban contexts and other parts of the world, such as Europe, are beginning to take place. Degrowth, commons and BV are “fellow travelers” in this endeavor.

Buen Vivir resonates with broader challenges to the “civilizational model” of globalized development. The crisis of the Western modelo civilizatorio is invoked by many movements as the underlying cause of the current crisis of climate, energy, poverty and meaning. This emphasis is strongest among ethnic movements, yet it is also found, for instance, in peasant networks such as Via Campesina for which only a shift toward agroecological food production systems can lead us out of the climate and food crises. Originally proposed by the Centro Latinoamericano de Ecología Social (CLAES) in Montevideo and closely related to the “transitions to post-extractivism” framework, Buen Vivir has become an important intellectual-activist debate in many South American countries (Alayza and Gudynas 2011; Gudynas 2011; Massuh 2012). The point of departure is a critique of the intensification of extractivist models based on large-scale mining, hydrocarbon exploitation or extensive agricultural operations, particularly for agrofuels such as soy, sugar cane or oil palm. Whether they take the form of conventional – often brutal – neoliberal extractivist policies in countries like Colombia, Perú or México, or the neoextractivism of the center-left regimes, these models are legitimized as efficient growth strategies.

This implies a transition from One-World concepts such as “globalization” to concepts centered on the pluriverse as made up of a multiplicity of mutually entangled and co-constituting but distinct worlds (Blaser, de la Cadena and Escobar 2013; Blaser 2010). There are many signs that suggest that the One-World doctrine is unraveling. The growing visibility of struggles to defend mountains, landscapes, forests and so forth by appealing to a relational (non-dualist) and pluriversal understanding of life is a manifestation of the OWW’s crisis. Santos has powerfully described this conjuncture with the following paradox: We are facing modern problems for which there are no longer modern solutions (Santos 2002:13).

This conjuncture defines a rich context for commons studies from the perspective of pluriversal studies: on the one hand, the need to understand the conditions by which the one world of neoliberal globalization continues to maintain its dominance; and on the other hand, the (re)emergence of projects based on different ways of “worlding” (that is, the socioecological processes implied in building collectively a distinctive reality or world), including commoning, and how they might weaken the One-World project while widening their spaces of (re)existence.

The notion of the pluriverse, it should be made clear, has two main sources: theoretical critiques of dualism, and the perseverance of pluriversal and non-dualist worlds (more often known as “cosmovisions”) that reflect a deeply relational understanding of life. Notable examples include Muntu and Ubuntu in parts of Africa, the Pachamamaor Mama Kiwe among South American indigenous peoples, Native US and Canadian cosmologies, and even the entire Buddhist philosophy of mind. Examples also exist within the West as “alternative Wests” or nondominant forms of modernity. Some of the current struggles going on in Europe over the commons, energy transitions, and the relocalization of food, for instance, could be seen as struggles to reconnect with the stream of life. They also constitute forms of resistance against the dominant ontology of capitalist modernity. Worldwide, the multiple struggles for the reconstruction of communal spaces and for reconnecting with nature are giving rise to political mobilizations for the defense of the relational fabric of life – for instance, for the recognition of territorial rights, local knowledges, and local biodiversity. Struggles over the commons are key examples of such activation.

V. The Commons and Transitions Towards the Pluriverse

Economically, culturally, and militarily, we are witnessing a renewed attack on anything collective; land grabbing and the privatization of the commons (including sea, land, even the atmosphere through carbon markets) are signs of this attack. This is the merciless world of the global 10 percent, foisted upon the 90 percent and the natural world with a seemingly ever-increasing degree of virulence and cynicism. In this sense, the world created by the OWW has brought about untold devastation and suffering. The remoteness and separation it effects from the worlds that we inevitably weave with other earth-beings are themselves a cause of the ecological and social crisis (Rose 2008). These are aspects of what Nonini (2007) has insightfully described as “the wearing-down of the commons.”

The emergence, over the past decade, of an array of discourses on the cultural and ecological transitions necessary to deal with the interrelated crises of climate, food, energy and poverty, is powerful evidence that the dominant model of social life is exhausted. In the global North and the global South, multiple transition narratives and forms of activism are going beyond One-World strategic solutions (e.g., “sustainable development” and the “green economy”) to articulate sweeping cultural and ecological transitions to different societal models. These Transition discourses (TDs) are emerging today with particular richness, diversity and intensity. Those writing on the subject are not limited to the academy; in fact, the most visionary TD thinkers are located outside of it, even if most engage with critical currents in the academy. TDs are emerging from a multiplicity of sites, principally social movements and some NGOs, from emerging scientific paradigms and academic theories, and from intellectuals with significant connections to environmental and cultural struggles. TDs are prominent in several fields, including those of culture, ecology, religion and spirituality, alternative science (e.g., complexity), futures studies, feminist studies, political economy, and digital technologies and the commons.

The range of TDs can only be hinted at here. In the North, the most prominent include degrowth; a variety of transition initiatives (TIs); the Anthropocene; forecasting trends (e.g., Club of Rome, Randers 2012); and the movement towards commons and the care economy as a different way of seeing and being (e.g., Bollier 2014). Some approaches involving interreligious dialogues and UN processes are also crafting TDs. Among the explicit TIs are the Transition Town Initiative (TTI, UK), the Great Transition Initiative (GTI, Tellus Institute, US), the Great Turning, (Macy and Johnstone 2012) the Great Work or transition to an Ecozoic era, (Berry 1999) and the transition from The Enlightenment to an age of Sustainment. (Fry 2012) In the global South, TDs include the crisis of civilizational model, postdevelopment and alternatives to development, Buen Vivir, communal logics and autonomía, subsistence and food sovereignty, and transitions to post-extractivism. While the features of the new era in the North include post-growth, post-materialist, post-economic, post-capitalist and post-dualist, those for the south are expressed in terms of post-development, post/non-liberal, post/non-capitalist, and post-extractivist. (Escobar 2011)

VI. Conclusion: Commoning and the Commons as Umbrella and Bridge Discourses

What follows is a provisional exploration, as a way to conclude, on the relation between commoning and the commons and political ontology and pluriversal studies. To begin with TDs, it is clear that there needs to be a concerted effort at bringing together TDs in the global North and the global South. There are tensions and complementarities across these transition visions and strategies – for instance, between degrowth and postdevelopment. The commons could be among the most effective umbrellas for bringing together Northern and Southern discourses, contributing to dissolve this very dichotomy. As Bollier (2014) points out, the commons entails a different way of seeing and being, a different model of socionatural life. Seen in this way, the commons is a powerful shared interest across worlds. Struggles over the commons are found across the global North and the global South, and the interconnections among them are increasingly visible and practicable (see, e.g., Bollier and Helfrich 2012). Commons debates show that diverse peoples and worlds have “an interest in common,” which is nevertheless not “the same interest” for all involved, as visions and practices of the commons are world-specific (de la Cadena, 2015).

Second, reflection on commons and commoning makes visible commons-destroying dualistic conceptions, particular those between nature and culture, humans and nonhumans, the individual and the communal, mind and body, and so forth (see Introduction to the volume). Commons reflection reminds those of all existing in the densest urban and liberal worlds that we dwell in a world that is alive. Reflection on the commons resituates the human within the ceaseless flow of life in which everything is inevitably immersed; it enables us to see ourselves again as part of the stream of life. Commons have this tremendous life-enhancing potential today.

Third, debates on the commons share with political ontology the goal of deconstructing the worldview and practice of the individual and the economy. No single cultural invention in the West has been more damaging to relational worlds than the disembedded “economy” and its closely associated cognate, “the autonomous individual.” These two cornerstones of the dominant forms of Western liberalism and modernity need to be questioned time and again, particularly by making evident their role in destroying the commons-constructing practices of peoples throughout the planet. Working towards a “commons-creating economy” (Helfrich 2013) also means working towards the (re)constitution of relational world, ones in which the economy is re-embedded in society and nature (ecological economics); it means the individual integrated within a community, the human within the nonhuman, and knowledge within the inevitable contiguity of knowing, being and doing.

Fourth, there are a whole series of issues that could be fruitfully explored from the double perspective of commons and political ontology as paired domains. These would include, among others: alternatives to development such as Buen Vivir; transitions to post-extractive models of economic and social life; movements for the relocalization of food, energy, transport, building construction, and other social, cultural, and economic activities; and the revisioning and reconstruction of the economy, including proposals such as the diverse economy as suggested by Gibson-Graham et al. (2013), subsistence and community economies, and social and solidarity economies (e.g., Coraggio and Laville 2014). There are many ontological and political questions relating to these issues that cross-cut both commons and political ontology, from how to question hegemonic forms of thinking more effectively to how to imagine truly innovative ways of knowing, being and doing with respect to “the economy,” “development,” “resources,” “sustainability,” and so forth. Along the way, new lexicons will emerge – indeed, are emerging – for transitions to a pluriverse within which commoning and relational ways of being might find auspicious conditions for their flourishing.

Today, the multiple ontological struggles in defense of commons and territories, and for reconnection with nature and the stream of life, are catalyzing a veritable political awakening focused on relationality. Struggles over the commons are key examples of such activation. Moving beyond “development” and “the economy” are primary aspects of such struggles. But in the last instance .

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

References

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Helfrich, Silke. 2013. “Economics and Commons?! Towards a Commons-Creating Peer Economy.” presentation at “Economics and the Commons Conference,” Berlin, Germany, May 22, 2013. See report on the conference, pp. 12-15, at
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Arturo Escobar (Colombia/USA) is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Research Associate, Grupo Nación/Cultura/Memoria, Universidad del Valle, Cali.

Photo by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center

The post Patterns of Commoning: Commons in the Pluriverse appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The settlement is squeezed between the Clare Estate and the Bisasar Road garbage dump, the largest in Africa. Trucks continually enter the dump, passing Electron Avenue and other similarly named roads from a bygone age of technological innovation under apartheid “development.” Along Kennedy Road, the dump is ringed by a long concrete fence and topped by perfume rods that spray out fumes in an attempt to mask the smell. People walk constantly up and down the hill, to and from their jobs as domestic workers or gardeners in the houses on the Clare Estate, or to pick through the dump. Entry to the noxious and toxic dump is officially prohibited to shack dwellers, but if one walks alongside the fence that abuts the shack settlements one sees that, every few yards, concrete panels have been removed for easy access, and many make a living by sifting through the detritus, collecting cardboard, plastic, or metal to sell to recyclers in the “informal economy.”

Most of the Kennedy Road “informal settlement” is not “on” Kennedy Road, but is accessible through numerous paths that crisscross the hills.² The people there are desperately poor. Forgotten in post-apartheid South Africa, they live without basic services like sanitation, water or electricity, in shacks dug into the side of the hill and built out of advertising boards, corrugated iron, branches and mud; their “temporary” shelter having become more or less permanent. For a long time, there wasn’t even refuse collection.

Kennedy Road itself is on the Clare Estate, a mainly Indian, middle- and upper-middle-class residential area that has experienced skyrocketing real-estate prices. In the interstices of the estate – in the valleys and along riverbanks, and against the municipal dump – there are eight different shack settlements, each with different histories and organizations. One of them is the Kennedy Road settlement, which has a radically democratic political culture that took years to develop. Other shack settlements have different forms of government, some based on political patronage which are often overseen by an induna (chief), some more respected than others, but often governance is along hierarchical and patronage lines.³ Because there are material interests at stake, the creation of democracy is often a continually contested and hard-fought struggle. Each settlement is configured by different material realities, often limited by physical space, size and geography, which determine the feasibility of such things as common meeting spaces. But, despite these constraints, looking down from the hilltops, there is something special about this area of Durban. The real-estate developers understand it, and it is not lost on the shack dwellers either.⁴

On March 19, 2005, despite the local councillor’s promises, the bulldozers moved in. Seeing their “Promised Land” being levelled, the shack dwellers acted, blockading Umgeni Road with burning tires and mattresses, bringing traffic and businesses to a halt. The police, taken by surprise, called for support. They attacked with dogs, punching protestors. Four hours later, fourteen of the 750 people from the Kennedy Road settlement had been arrested, including two teenage students. Two days later, on March 21 – Human Rights Day in South Africa (the anniversary of the day in 1960, when apartheid police fired on pass-law protesters in Sharpeville, and killed 69 people) – 1,200 people demonstrated, demanding that the local police release the fourteen people or arrest the whole community. The people themselves had begun to self-consciously mobilize for their own rights; they were finally beginning to press the state to be accountable. For more than a decade, the people’s anger had been steadily rising. Many people had given up hope of formal employment, or were being forced to use what the World Bank terms their “entrepreneurial” aspirations and “resourcefulness” in the informal economy. But collecting cardboard, plastic or metal from the stinking dump, or even gardening and cleaning for residents on the Clare Estate, doesn’t provide many “opportunities.”

The shack dwellers had understood that change promised by the government would be slow and that they needed to take responsibility for their own welfare; but by 2005, it had become crystal clear that their interests weren’t being considered at all. As one shack dweller put it, they had finally grown “tired of living and walking in shit” (quoted in Kockott 2005).

So, on that March day, the people from the Kennedy Road settlement organ­ized quickly and staged their protest. They revolted because they felt betrayed. Although they might not have initially seen it in these terms, their action proved to be the beginning of a movement. They saw themselves as being on their own against the local government, the police, businesses, the rich, the media and the courts. Characteristically, they did not wait for the media or for professional activists to arrive. What was key to their actions was that they already had a democratic decisionmaking body, the Kennedy Road Development Committee, whose participatory meetings and social demands quickly caught the imagination of adjacent communities.

Indeed, this imagination was captured at the welcome-home party for those who had been arrested, when the chair of the Kennedy Road Development Committee, S’bu Zikode, affirmed the actions of the crowd with a memorable speech: “The first Nelson Mandela was Jesus Christ. The second was Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. The third Nelson Mandela is the poor people of the world” (quoted in Patel and Pithouse 2005). The resonance was clear. The poor weren’t Christ, but Christ was the first Mandela, the first liberator who articulated a new heaven on earth. Mandela is Christ reborn, grounding liberation firmly on South African soil, his long imprisonment during apartheid a metaphor for the nation, just as his release is identified with the birth of a new South Africa.

Yet, the failure of the historical Mandela to really liberate South Africa demanded the birth of a new Mandela: the poor themselves. After many promises, all of them broken, they saw through the empty rhetoric of the local authorities. Enough was enough – sekwanele, sekwanele! – truth emanated from their own experiences: they had become the “new reality of the nation,” declaring the shack dwellers’ movement a university where they “think their own struggles” and “are not poor in mind” (Zikode 2006). Subtly criticising Mandela’s historical leadership, the poor were taking matters into their own hands, seeing themselves as the force and reason for their own liberation; they had become their own Mandelas.

This has been the essential aspiration of all commoners, everywhere – to throw off the chains of alien governance that dispossesses them; to assert their own rules for governing themselves and resources that matter to them; and to become protagonists in their own history. In this sense, the shack dwellers’ movement has been a pioneering struggle of commoning as a way to secure survival and basic dignity.

Origins of the Shack Dwellers’ Movement

Even if they had previously never heard of a “social movement,” by March 2005, the shack dwellers had effectively become such a movement by virtue of their self-organization and by developing their own relationships with other shack dwellers. For it was the universality of the Kennedy Road shack dwellers’ experience and demands that was immediately understood and taken up by neighboring settlements. The development of such horizontal links among shack settlements suggested a new kind of movement in the making. By May 2005, the people from Kennedy Road and five other shack settlements, as well as residents from local municipal flats, had organized a march of over 3,000 people. With banners expressing their collective will (“We want our land”) and homegrown political education (“The University of Kennedy Road”), the marchers presented a memorandum of ten demands that they had drawn up through a series of meetings and community discussions. Written by the shack and flat dwellers after careful discussion, this memorandum, which included the need for housing, jobs, sanitation, medical care, education, and safety from police brutality and environmental toxins, became a people’s charter⁵ – one that sought to represent not only Durban’s 800,000 shack dwellers, but the poor across South Africa, where nearly three million households live in “informal” housing.

Their demands were far from revolutionary; they were the demands of loyal citizens making reasonable requests, borne of their citizenship, for inclusion in the “new South Africa.”

The march ended at the offices of the local ANC councillor, and there the marchers announced that if the councillor did not resign, they, his constituents, would declare Ward 25 without a councillor. They brought along a coffin to represent the councillor’s political death. The point is obvious, but what is also worth noting is the marchers’ self-consciousness, both as a class pitted against the interests of property and as a collective pressing the government to deliver not only on its promises, but also to include those promises in its future deliberations. The marchers, in other words, were self-consciously challenging the elite character of the local government and by implication, the class character of the “elite transition” in South Africa.⁶

Some months later, following a meeting of twelve settlements at Kennedy Road, the shack dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, was launched.⁷ There was no donor funding, no NGO, no civil-society funding nor political-party backing. Consistently ignored by the local council and often treated as criminals, shack dwellers across Durban began to join the movement. “The only language they understand is when we put thousands of people on the street,” proclaimed Zikode (2006:187), and throughout the following year, mass marches and demonstrations brought the plight of the shack dwellers to local, national and even international attention, with stories being featured in The Economist and other international and local media, including a full-page story in The New York Times.

On a quick learning curve and with few resources, the movement was able not only to represent itself but also to respond to misrepresentation in the media. And soon it became clear that the shack dwellers weren’t going away. Daily demonstrations and actions in all of South Africa’s major cities continued to occur alongside Abahlali’s growing reputation and media presence.⁸ Despite President Mbeki’s call for these actions to stop, they continued. “These are the things the youth used to do in the struggle against apartheid,” he complained, but that was exactly why the actions were legitimate.

In early 2006, Abahlali began to organize a boycott of the local-government elections scheduled for March of that year. This was a logical development following the “burial” of the councillor, and the decision to boycott was marked by a march from the Foreman Road settlement into Durban’s city center, under the slogan “No Land, No House, No Vote,” which had earlier been employed by the South African Landless People’s Movement in a national campaign in 2004. Though the march was legal, it was banned by Durban’s city manager, Mike Sutcliffe. Two days later, on February 3, 2006, surrounded by riot police, the 3,000 shack dwellers amassed at the Foreman Road settlement and decided to go ahead with the march. Behind the banners of “University of Abahlali baseMjondolo” and “No Land, No House, No Vote,” they marched out of the settlement. As they entered the paved road, the police immediately attacked. A number of people were seriously injured and forty-five were arrested. Sutcliffe issued another ban, this time on a march planned for February 27. The police again cordoned off the exits to three large settlements, and made a number of arrests. But this time the people were prepared. With the support of progressive lawyers, Abahlali was able to take Sutcliffe to the High Court and won an interdict allowing them to march into the city.

Certainly there are continuities between these struggles and the struggles against apartheid. Many in Abahlali see their challenges as unfinished, and even Mandela had acknowledged the shack dwellers’ movement in 1993, when it was widely believed that the end of apartheid would see the upgrading of “informal settlements” and that these settlement conditions were a direct consequence of apartheid.⁹ In fact, South Africa has always been a country of extremes, of rich and poor, and developments in the South African economy have always been the province of powerful mining and financial interests in the context of global capitalism. The end of apartheid actually strengthened this proprietorship.

While co-opting some of the best brains of the struggle and transforming the formal movements into structures of governance, the ANC promised that the legacies of apartheid would be addressed. Yet, the ANC’s actual policies and practices never matched its rhetorical promises. At first this was put down to the politics of transition, especially at the local-government level, where apartheid functionaries lingered. But after the government’s embrace of neoliberal economic policies, the shift became clear. Though subject to international pressures, the direct authors of the “homegrown” structural adjustment were the new Black and old White elites. Alan Hirsch (2005) suggests that the neoliberal program was instituted by the government to protect South Africa’s sovereignty from the IMF/World Bank’s institution of a neoliberal program.

Today it is clear that the main beneficiaries of post-apartheid economic redistribution have been (and continue to be) South Africa’s banks and multinationals, now even freer than they were under apartheid. This includes the moneyed White elites, as well as the new much smaller Black elites, and the South African economy is more integrated into the global economy than at any time in its history. Moreover, post-apartheid South Africa’s quick move to roll out a neoliberal economic model to encourage global investment shifted priorities and resulted in deep cuts in budgets for social services, below the levels in the first years of the ANC government. Serious discussion of the social and economic consequences of years of colonialism and apartheid in the 1990s has given way to a neoliberal discourse about the poor, who are represented as “undifferentiated, unwilling carriers of social diseases” (Barchiesi 2007:46-7) – in other words, as morally corrupt and behaviorally undisciplined – or, to use the language of apartheid, “surplus population.” Needless to say, the post-apartheid housing program is part of this project, ultimately aimed at moving the poor out of the cities. Built far from the urban centers, one-room closet-sized houses are economically nonviable for many. On the contrary, living close to both economic opportunities and to educational opportunities for their children, is vital. Thus, when the Durban municipality described its plan for a “city without slums,” it was correctly understood by the shack dwellers as the return of the apartheid policy of “influx control” and the removal of “black spots.”¹⁰ Once again, Black people were to be pushed out of the city and dumped in the peripheral ghettoes.

The class character of the situation is plain. This is also evident when it comes to water and electricity supply. Access to “sufficient water” (twenty-five liters per day and person) is guaranteed in the South African Constitution, but this seems to miss the point in the context of the shacks. Reducing general water consumption and controlling it through a metering system are pointless in a situation in which there are few working taps and toilets to serve thousands of people. The same is true for electricity supply.

And it is not simply that those in the shacks can’t afford sufficient water and electricity – some can – but insufficient water and no electricity, along with the fact that fire engines are often not dispatched when fires do start, has resulted in frequent fires and avoidable deaths. As S’bu Zikode put it: “We have seen that when the wild forests and plantations of the rich are on fire, there are often large helicopters with hundreds of tons of water to extinguish the fires. But when our shacks are on fire, the helicopters and ambulances are nowhere to be found…Helicopters only come for us when we march. The state comes for us when we try to say what we think.” (Zikode 2008a)

On April 21, 2006, twelve years after the birth of a new South Africa, generated by the first full and free election, 5,000 South African shack dwellers from the fourteen informal settlements that had joined Abahlali the preceding year came out, not to celebrate freedom, but to mourn “Unfreedom day,” and they have done so ever since. How can “we celebrate freedom when we only hear tales of freedom or see people’s lives changed for the better in other parts of the country, but never in our communities?” asked S’bu Zikode, questioning, in effect, the state of freedom in the whole country.

Zikode, the founding president of the shack dwellers’ movement, Abahlali’s baseMjondolo, is a forty-year-old former petrol-station worker. (Early in 2007 Zikode lost his job at the petrol station because of his political activity.) A father of four who moved to the Kennedy Road settlement in 1997, he is a former Boy Scout from a small rural town who gained distinction at school but had no money for university. A short, slight man with a welcoming manner and warm smile, Zikode is both engaging and articulate, with a reflective and calm demeanor. A radical humanist, not a firebrand, but a teacher and listener, Zikode has become a significant national public figure, appearing on television, on radio, and in the national and local print media, his words frequently reprinted in pop-culture magazines with a combined circulation of five million (Bryant 2008). (For more of his biography, see Zikode 2009.)

While S’bu Zikode might be viewed as Abahlali’s philosopher – indeed he articulates the struggle as “thought on the ground, running” – he has rigorously resisted calls to run for local government or to be the single spokesperson of the movement. He maintains that the problems are systemic, and sees himself only as the people’s servant, elected on their behalf and subject to recall. Zikode has remained remarkably consistent and true to the principles of grassroots democracy, shared leadership, and to critically reflecting on these struggles. In 2008, he decided not to run as president of the movement arguing:

My intention was always to remain strongly committed to the movement but it seemed clear to me that all the positions at all levels of leadership in our movement need to be shared, that the burden of leadership in a movement of volunteers needs to be shared, that I need time for my family and to be able to read and think about what we have achieved with our living politics, a politics that was always based on us thinking carefully about our lives and our struggles. We have to change ourselves before we can change the world and, without time to think, that change becomes difficult (Zikode 2008a).

This is an important articulation of principle. It insists not only on the space for thinking, but also on the centrality of self-reflexive thought to the movement itself. When members called on Zikode to reconsider his decision not to run, he took it seriously, adding that the movement’s “calls for a leader who is willing to learn and who is prepared to be led…[is] very important in our Movement’s work of defining itself and knowing itself before someone else from somewhere else defines our Movement” (2008a).¹¹ This, of course, is an expression of a Fanonian principle: the leader does not lead the people, but rather helps in the work of self-clarification; the philosophic idea of “knowing thyself” is and must be a social and collective process.

Zikode has developed a knack of talking over the head of the government to a larger constituency, and his message is a challenge to the nation. “Government officials, politicians and intellectuals who associate the shack dwellers with the Third Force [a term that alludes to the murderous apartheid-sponsored violence of the early 1990s] have no idea what they are talking about. They are too high to really feel what we feel.” And quite literally, high up in their offices, they cannot see the people down below – physically, conceptually and experientially – and quite possibly, for this reason, the Third Force may not be something the politicians can understand. Zikode continues: “We are driven by the Third Force, the suffering of the poor. Our betrayers are the Second Force. The First Force was our struggle against apartheid. The Third Force will stop when the Fourth Force comes. The Fourth Force is land, housing, water, electricity, health care, education, and work” (Zikode 2006). The implication is clear: The “Second Force,” the ANC in power, had betrayed the struggle and produced not liberation but a “Third Force,” namely the suffering of the poor. In this logic, the as-yet unrealized “Fourth Force” is, of course, a vision of an egalitarian future.¹²

A Struggle of Moral Discourse and Democratic Practice

Boycotting the election was not taken lightly, but for Abahlali, democracy means much more than a periodic vote. The decision to boycott represented a real shift in thinking about the core values of post-apartheid society. For Abahlai members, democracy was not about an election every five years, but about day-to-day life that included reciprocity, caring, and the inclusion of those who had been systematically excluded and told that they were too stupid to understand. Abahlali was simply speaking a different language that emanated from below, and was grounded in the struggle of the everyday. The organization was concerned not with political negotiations but with principles that flowed from an open and egalitarian moral discourse and democratic practice: “Our struggle is for moral questions, as compared to the political questions as such. It is more about justice,” declared Zikode. “Is it good for shack dwellers to live in mud like pigs, as they are living? Why do I live in a cardboard house if there are people who are able to live in a decent house? So it is a moral question” (Zikode quoted in Ngiam 2006).

Just as the struggle against apartheid brought the vote, the shack dwellers’ struggle has challenged the meaning of the vote, and given a voice to the poorest of the poor: “Now the tide has turned,” argued Zikode in 2006, “you are hearing from the horse’s mouth…We have come out to say this is who we are, this is where we are and this is what we want” (interview with Zikode in Beresford 2006; original emphasis). Continuously staying open to new creative impulses and questions and to innovation from below remains a core principle. As self-organized shack dwellers, Abahlali was becoming an author of its own history with everyone able to participate – an example, in Fanonian terms, of the “practice of freedom” taking place in the “structure of the people” (1968:143).

Abahlali has consistently refuted the discourse of “service delivery”; they insist instead that their demands are about “being human.” “It is not only about physical infrastructure,” says Zikode, “we have shifted our thinking”; from the beginning, “the struggle is the human being, the conditions that we live in which translates into demands for housing and land.”¹³ Through Abahlali, he adds, “people are starting to remember that they are human beings” – even the police. Often harassed and criminalized (with trumped-up murder charges and such), with leaders including Zikode imprisoned and beaten up in Sydenham police station, members of Abahlali have suffered at the hands of the police. But after sustained mobilization in late 2007, a shift in police behavior became apparent, and Abahlali was determined to continue this trend and work with the police around issues of safety.¹⁴

A deeply rooted humanism guides “the culture of Abahlalism,” a set of ethical norms in which everyone shares everyday suffering and pain, as well as laughter. Reflected in the democratic openness and respectfulness with which they conduct their meetings, Abahlalism is a culture of sharing that is rooted in the ideas of community and reciprocity found in the long struggle against apartheid. “We fought, died, and voted for this government,” Zikode says, “so that we could be free and have decent lives,” but “this government does not treat us like people who can speak and think for ourselves” (Butler and Ntseng 2007). Thus life is not only about a struggle for decent living conditions, but also about a mental liberation from years of subservience and the lack of self-confidence that so oppressed the poor during the apartheid period, and sadly also during the post-apartheid period. One of the major goals of Abahlali, therefore, is a kind of moral revolution, the creation of a society where the poor will be treated as human beings with minds of their own.

Yet at every turn, Zikode is reminded that poor people in post-apartheid South Africa are not valued as much as others. While Abahlali has successfully forced itself onto the agendas of government institutions and “civil society,” there is a constant struggle not only to keep these spaces open but through their inclusion to transform them. Whatever tactic has been employed, from mass marches to challenges in the courts, from meeting with local government to the No Vote campaign, what remains essential is that no actions take place without ongoing discussion and decisionmaking at the meetings in the shack settlements. Court cases (including appeals to the Constitutional Court), for example, can be long, procedural and expensive affairs that can drain the resources and challenge the integrity of any poor people’s movement. And while it appreciates the pro bono work of lawyers, Abahlali has always been careful to develop and sustain a mode of organizing from the bottom-up, through constant consultation and principled refusal of “biryani money.” Thus, as a movement, it has avoided two pitfalls, namely dependency on donors and professionalization:

All decisions about money are taken collectively, publicly and democratically in the movement’s open weekly meetings and all donations should therefore be channeled through the movement’s official structures so that decisions about how to use the money can be taken in these meetings. Abahlali is a 100 percent volunteer organization and no member is paid for any work undertaken for the organization and no money is allocated to individuals – it all goes for collective expenses such as lawyers, bail, transport, sound hire, etc. as determined by the discussion at the weekly meetings (Abahlali 2006a).

Abahlali’s critique of the discourse of service delivery thus emerges from the conception of being counted as active participants in decisions and actions, rather than being seen as pariahs to be managed and controlled. They have deliberately chosen to force themselves into those spaces where they have not been invited, and make their presence in these spaces a kind of “insurgent citizenship” (Holston 2007), one that contests the elite form of South Africa’s democracy. Their claim to practical and intellectual equity, remarks Cooper-Knock (2009:57), “does not rest on claims to equal, technical knowledge but…in their capacity to reason through their situation.” In other words, the shack dwellers’ knowledge derives from their existentially experienced situation of being in the shacks, and their politics from theorizing their situation.

Thinking in Communities

The shack dwellers’ movement cannot be explained by issues of resource mobilization, or the aid of outside forces, or even the event’s material success. What was expressed through the shack settlement’s initial self-mobilization was its insistence on open meetings where all could speak and hash out issues, coupled with the straightforwardness and moral suasion of their demands. The growth of the movement came about through word-of-mouth and personal communication, which, by the end of the first year, 2005, had engendered a new organization, Abahlali baseMjondolo. And if Abahlali’s commitment to growth is tempered, it is only because it is invested in the principle of discussing things openly and thoroughly in meetings, and making decisions with the commitment of all.

Each shack settlement that joins, each new branch that forms, has to follow the democratic principles of Abahlali.¹⁵ This means that each demonstration or march requires a number of meetings, then meetings of subcommittees, as well as communication among settlements. Press releases are discussed, written and distributed. And each settlement and branch, through its own autonomous committees, sends delegates to Abahlali. The Abahlali meetings rotate among all the affiliated settlements, are usually attended by about thirty to forty elected representatives from the various committees, and are open to all residents from the local settlements (Beresford 2006). It is worth noting that, though the democratic culture of the organization has spread across the settlements, it doesn’t always overcome authoritarianism or conservative ideas. Even where settlements have strong Abahlali activists, it has been difficult, at times, to get beyond the armed authoritarianism of “leaders” who trade votes for private deals with the state.

Governed on such a grassroots democratic basis, with meetings open to all adults (regardless of age, gender,¹⁶ ethnicity, origin, and length of time in residence), each settlement has at least one weekly meeting, and representatives from each of the settlements elected each week meet as Abahlali baseMjondolo every Saturday. Every day there are a number of meetings of various subcommittees. The meetings are very formal, with decisions arrived at by consensus and with an emphasis on the inclusive process of “listening to others’ ideas” and “being together” (Bryant 2008:48).

Through these process the movement has consistently rejected offers of money, proffered mostly by NGOs and parties attempting to buy political credibility. It has remained very suspicious of outsiders who try to speak for it or take control and, over time, it has come to understand who its real friends and enemies are. At its inception, three “outsiders” – activist academics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Fazel Khan, Raj Patel and Richard Pithouse – were directly involved with the movement on a daily basis. Committed to the Fanonian belief that a movement of the poor should speak for itself, these activist academics had put themselves “in the school of the people,” to be educated by the movement. They not only helped put the shack dwellers’ organization in touch with committed lawyers, typed up press releases and developed a website, but took the thinking being done in the communities seriously.

In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon writes, “It is true that if care is taken to use only a language that is understood by graduates in law and economics, you can easily prove that the masses have to be managed from above. But if you speak the language of the everyday…then you will realize that the masses are quick to seize every shade of meaning…Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you really want them to understand…The more people understand, the more watchful they become and the more they come to realize that everything depends on them.” This idea helps explain, as noted by Zkorde (2008a), how the shack dwellers’ conception of politics is not about political office; it is a politics of the poor in the language of the people. Participation is based on shared experience, and their political practice is dependent on democratic meetings in the settlements: “Our politics is a traditional home politics which is understood very well by all the old mamas and gogos [grannies] because it affects their lives and gives them a home.” It is a language which all can speak and understand; it is simple and transparent and thus creates a situation which is consciously collective and inclusive.¹⁷ In Zikode’s words, “We look after each other and think about the situation and plan our fight together” (2008:115). Zikode’s notion is a challenge to the elite politics that has characterized the post-apartheid transition and its corporate and technicist aftermath. It is not a question of empowerment or inclusion in terms of having a seat at the policy table, nor it is not simply a question of being consulted, although that would be an important beginning; it is a challenge to the alienation inherent in the attitudes and proposals of the housing-policy experts, an alienation that arises out of their attitude towards the poor, and the poor’s systemic exclusion from the policy decisions made about them.

Thus, at first, the Kennedy Road movement saw itself as a movement unto itself, local and immediate, utterly divorced from liberal NGO or left anti-globalization discourses. A year later, in his 2006 presentation, Zikode directly linked the self-activity of the shack dwellers, not only to housing politics, but also to national politics:

We believe that the housing policy does not only require housing specialists, rich consultants and government. We believe that housing policy requires most importantly, the people who need the houses. But we also know, as poor communities and as shack dwellers that the broader poor have no choice but to play a role in shaping and reshaping this country into an anti-capitalist system (Zikode 2008: 115; my emphasis).

And this alternative, he added, comes out of “the thinking that we do in communities.” The challenge to academics and intellectuals in the university setting is quite clear; their work requires listening to, and taking seriously, the thinking that is done in the communities. In other words, it requires shifting the geography of reason, and challenging preconceived ideas of who does the thinking and where it is done. This is not simply about territoriality, but about restoring agency to the people who know the situation, who can and should do the thinking so that they can demand, in a Fanonian sense, a more reality-based and a more rational¹⁸ and effective mode of operation that will lead to a self-conscious realization that they are “equal to the problems that confront them” (Fanon 1968:193). In practice, this has meant that Abahlali’s meetings, its finances and its organizational structures are open to all.

Beyond Liberal Ideas of “Freedom” and “Inclusion”

In the early days of the movement, the struggle’s discourse centered on ideas of dignity and self-respect. The declaration that “we are human beings” was echoed in the shack dwellers’ outrage at the politicians who ignored their plight. Thus, from its beginnings the struggle was not over a technical issue about the redistribution of resources (though it includes that) but a most concrete reflection on being human, about the fact that human beings should live in homes fit for human beings. The shack dwellers don’t only demand recognition as human beings. Their demand for recognition has been consistent and goes beyond the liberal tradition of “inclusion” in a political or legal system. They take the freedom won in the struggles against apartheid seriously, and thus reject the equation of freedom with neoliberal ideas as “unfreedom” since for them those ideas only amount to absence of freedom. They want freedom to be truly equal.

Thus, while fighting for what is guaranteed by the South African Constitution is important,¹⁹ what is at stake is the need to address deep-rooted structures of economic inequality that are legacies of apartheid and colonialism, reproduced in contemporary neoliberal South Africa. In that sense, the demand for “redistribution” is a real and urgent one, but it also implies a critique of elite-driven politics (or the anti-politics discourse of “service delivery”), be that right-wing, top-down technocracy, NGO paternalism, vanguardism,²⁰ or left-wing technocratism. The latter describes a situation in which too much attention is paid to technical instruments, and too little to popular participation. In contrast to reforms developed by scholars and NGO staff “while the poor and their grassroots organizations play only a very secondary role in terms of strategy building and intellectual elaboration” (De Souza 2006:337), the shack dwellers seek to be an essential part of decisionmaking and thus agents of refashioning democracy.

When Fanon wrote in The Wretched that intellectuals needed to put themselves in the school of the people, he had in mind the grounding of new concepts in what Zikode calls “thinking that is done in the communities.” This thinking, which emerges from experience, is at once pragmatic and critical. Ideas and formulas repeated at meetings help generate new ways of knowing in the communities and, in the case of Abahlali, the movement’s intellectuals are truly organic to it. They live in the settlements, and this goes a long way towards overcoming the separation of intellectuals from the masses that so preoccupied Fanon.

Over time, some NGOs and other individuals have given practical support, but Abahlali is not dependent on any external funds. It remains particularly concerned about its ability to maintain political autonomy within the democratic structure of the organization. “It’s quite interesting because sometimes we are aware that these organizations have got money but they don’t have constituents, you know, people,” argued Zikode, “Abahlali is the poor struggle – struggle of the poor – therefore money will not tempt us…we cannot therefore be bought” (Zikode quoted in Pithouse 2006). In other words, Abahlali became aware of the potentially disastrous effects of external funding on a poor people’s movement, that it may not only broker a movement but also potentially destroy it.

Again, Zikode (2008:122) reminds us that human beings do not live on bread alone. “We are poor,” he says, “we know that, and we might be poor in life, but we are not poor in mind,” recognizing, as Marx put it, the real wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of real social and intellectual relationships.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

References

Abahlali baseMjondolo. 2006. “Supporting Abahlali.”
http://www.abahlali.org/node/269.

Alexander, Neville. 1993. Some Are More Equal Than Others: Essays on the Transition in South Africa. Cape Town: Buchu Books.

ANC [African National Congress, South Africa]. 1993. “Southern Natal Statement on the Housing Crisis.” November 9.

Aristide, Jean-Bertrand and Christophe Wargny. 1993. Aristide: An Autobiography Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Barchiesi, Franco. 2007. “Wage Labor and Social Citizenship in the Making of Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 42(1):39-72.

Beresford, Alex. 2006. ‘Trapped in Corporatism? Trade Union Linkages to the Abahlali baseMjondolo Movement in Durban’. http://www.abahlali.org/files/Beresford.pdf

Bryant, Jacob. 2008. “Toward Delivery and Dignity.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 43(1):41-62.

Butler, Mark and David Ntseng. 2007. “Minutes of the Abahlali baseMjondolo Meeting to Discuss Legal and Political Strategies to Oppose the Slums Bill.” July, 13. Kennedy Road Hall, Durban. http://abahlali.org/node/1718.

Calland, Richard. 2007. “Resist the Prison of Expertocracy.” Mail and Guardian, January 21.

Cooper-Knock, Sarah. 2009. “The Role of Citizens in Post-Apartheid South Africa: a Case-Study of Citizen Involvement in Informal Settlement Projects,” M.A. Thesis, Oxford University.

De Souza, Marcelo Lopes. 2006. “Together with the State, Despite the State, Against the State: Social Movements as ‘Critical Urban Planning’ Agents.” City10(3):327-42.

Dunayevskaya, Raya. 2002. The Power of Negativity. Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, editors. Lanham, MD. Lexington Books.

Fanon, Frantz. 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. Constance Farrington, translator. New York. Grove Press.

Gibson, Nigel C., editor. 2006. Challenging Hegemony: Social Movements and the Quest for a New Humanism in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1-14.

Hirsch, Alan. 2005. Season of Hope: Economic Reform Under Mandela And Mbeki Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Holston, James. 2007. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Khan, Fazel. 2006. “Outside the ICC again.” Independent Media Centre, September 12. http://www.southafrica.indymedia.org/news/2006/09/11083.php

Kockott, Fred. 2005. “Shack Dwellers’ Fury Erupts.” Tribune. March 20.

Loftus, Alex. 2006. “Reification and the Dictatorship of the Water Meter.” Antipode 38(5):1023-45.

Ngiam, Xin Wei. 2006. “Taking Poverty Seriously: What the Poor Are Saying and Why it Matters.” http://www.abahlali.org.

Patel, Raj and Richard Pithouse. 2005. “The Third Nelson Mandela.” http://www.voiceoftheturtle.org/show_article.php?aid=435.

Pithouse, Richard. 2005. “The Left in the Slum: The Rise of a Shack Dwellers’ Movement in Durban, South Africa” (History and African Studies Seminar, November 23, 2005, University of KwaZulu-Natal).

———. 2006. “Our Struggle is Thought on the Ground Running”: The University of Abahlali baseMjondolo. Centre for Civil Society Research Report, No. 40, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.

———. 2009. “A Progressive Policy without a Progressive Politics: Lessons from the Failure to Implement Breaking New Ground.” Town Planning Journal 54: 1-14.

Platzky, Laurine. 1986. “Relocation in South Africa.” South African Review 3. Johannesburg: Ravan.

Zikode, S’bu. 2006. “We Are the Third Force.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 41(1/2):185-9. Also, http://www.abahlali.org/node/17.

———. 2008. “Sekwanele Sekwanele” (Enough is Enough). Journal of Asian and African Studies 43(1):119-24.

———. 2008a. “Post Annual General Meeting Speech.” December 14. http://abahlali.org/node/4666

———. 2009. “To Resist All Degradations and Divisions.” Interview by Richard Pithouse. http://antieviction.org.za/2009/04/28/to-resist-all-degradations-divisions-an-interview-with-sbu-zikode

This essay is derived from a chapter by Nigel Gibson, “Unfinished Struggles for Freedom: The Birth of a New Shack Dwellers’ Movement,” in Fanonian Practices: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo, Pietermaritzburg: University of Kwa-Zulu Natal Press and New York: Palgrave Press: 2011.

 Nigel C. Gibson (USA) is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College and research associate at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. In addition to Fanonian Practices, he is the author of Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination and the editor of eight books, including Rethinking Fanon and Biko Lives. 

Photo by thatmelgirl

The post Patterns of Commoning: The Ethical Struggle to Be Human: A Shack Dwellers Movement in South Africa appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“If something goes wrong, its not only our beaches that get ruined. It’s everyone’s.”

[Tweedie Waititi, Te Whanau-a-Apanui, Sunday Star Times]

Anne Salmond: In April 2011, a small flotilla of protest vessels headed out to sea from the Eastern Bay of Plenty in New Zealand. Among them was a fishing boat, the San Pietro, owned by the local iwi (kin group), Te Whanau-a-Apanui, and skippered by Elvis Teddy, an iwi member. Rikirangi Gage, a senior tribal leader, was also on board.

At that time, a large ship, the Orient Explorer, contracted by the Brazilian oil company Petrobas, was conducting a seismic survey of the Raukumara Basin, about 300 kilometers north of East Cape. In 2010, Petrobas had been granted a permit by the New Zealand government to prospect for oil in these waters, which crossed Te Whanau-a-Apanui’s ancestral fishing grounds.

When they learned of this permit from press reports, the iwi leaders were incensed. Under the Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840, Queen Victoria had guaranteed their ancestors the “full, exclusive, undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates Forests Fisheries and other properties… so long as it is their wish and desire to retain the same in their possession.” (Waitangi Tribunal)

Since 1975 the Waitangi Tribunal, established to inquire into breaches of the Treaty, had held hearings around the country and investigated many complaints by Maori kin groups, including those relating to fishing and the ocean. The Tribunal issued reports and made recommendations, and over this period, successive governments had offered apologies and settlements in cash and kind to many iwi around the country.

When Te Whanau-a-Apanui leaders met with the Prime Minister to state their opposition to drilling for oil in their ancestral waters, he expressed sympathy, but refused to revoke the permit. Determined that their point of view should be heard, the tribe put out a call for assistance, and the environmental group Greenpeace responded by sending a flotilla of protest vessels to the Bay of Plenty.

As anger about the oil prospecting increased, placards and signs sprang up on windows and fences along the road between Opotiki and Gisborne. Bonfires were lit in protest, and large-scale haka (war-dances) performed on the beaches.

In April 2011 Greenpeace protestors swam into the path of the Orient Explorer, watched by members of the Air Force, Navy and police. The police issued notices under the Maritime Act, ordering the protest boats and their crews to stay 200 meters from the ship, or to face a fine of NZ$10,000 or up to a year in jail (Hill 2011).

In a press interview, Tweedie Waititi from Te Whanau-a-Apanui expressed surprise at the depth of feeling among her people: “We are the most placid iwion earth. And I tell you what, the government has awakened some sort of taniwha [guardian creature]. It’s quite a surprise to see my people react the way they are reacting. We’re all virgins at doing this. We never fight.” (Waititi 2011).

Like other New Zealanders, tribal members had heard a great deal about the Deep Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico the previous year, and the damage done to the ocean, sea life, coasts and estuaries, and the livelihoods of local people. They were fearful that a similar catastrophe might happen in their ancestral waters.

Tweedie also expressed concern for the moki, a sacred fish that migrates every year from Hawaiki, the ancestral homeland, to Te Whanau-a-Apanui waters. “That’s the moki’s home”, she said, “Right where they want to drill. Every June, there is a star that shines in the sky and her name is Autahi, and that’s our indication that the moki has come home.”

The story of the moki is told in paintings in the dining hall and carved meeting-house at Kauaetangohia marae, at Whangaparaoa. I had also heard about this sacred fish many years earlier when I worked with Eruera Stirling, a leading elder of the iwi, on a book about his ancestors and his life. He told me about a time in his youth when a senior elder, Manihera Waititi, invited him and his elder brother to catch the “first fish” to open the moki season.

On that occasion, the two boys went to the Whangaparaoa River before dawn and boarded Manihera’s boat. With a land breeze behind them, the elder took them to the moki fishing ground about one hundred yards offshore from Ratanui, a beach where ancestral voyaging canoes had come ashore.

After catching several moki, they headed out to a deep water fishing ground, where they caught several more of the sacred fish. Back on shore, the old man gave them the moki to take home to their mother, Mihi Kotukutuku. As the tribe’s senior leader, it was customary for her to be presented with the first fish of the season.

According to Eruera, the waters offshore from Raukokore, his home village, are known as Te Kopua a Hine Mahuru, the deep waters of Hine Mahuru, named after the ancestress of his people. Its fishing grounds and shellfish beds are linked with the carved meeting-house on shore, also named after this high born woman, whose mana(ancestral power) extended over the land and sea.

A rock named Whangaipaka stands in these waters, guarded by a kai-tiaki or guardian, a large sting-ray. If a stranger went there without permission, a great wave carrying the stingray would sweep over the rock, drowning the intruder. Eruera told me that in his time, shellfish beds and fishing grounds were jealously guarded:

Each district had its own mussel beds, and they were reserved for the people of that place. If the people saw a stranger picking their mussels, look out! He’d be a dead man if he came ashore. Fishing was very tapu [imbued with ancestral presence], and each family had its own fishing grounds, no one else could fish there or there would be a big fight.

The old people were very particular about the sea, and nobody was allowed to eat or smoke out on the boats. If a man took food with him when he went fishing, he’d sit there all day with his hook and line empty and the fish would stay away.

Sometimes if the fishing was very bad the people would start asking questions, and if they found out the guilty man, he’d get into big trouble for breaking the sacred law of tapu. The people would just about knock him to pieces, and he wouldn’t be allowed to go out to sea again for quite a while. If a thing like that happened at home, you were well marked by the people (Stirling 1980:106).

Given the intensity of this bond between people, their land and ancestral waters, it is not surprising that Te Whanau-a-Apanui were outraged when, without prior warning, the government issued a permit for an oil company to explore their ancestral waters. As Tweedie Waititi remarked, it was as though a taniwha, a powerful ancestral being, had woken up and was thrashing around in the ocean.

When Rikirangi Gage, an acknowledged senior leader of the iwi, joined the protest flotilla, the government ignored this gesture. Several days later, Te Whanau-a-Apanui’s fishing boat San Pietro motored across the bow of the Orient Explorer, trailing tuna fishing lines and a string of buoys tied together with rope. When the captain of the survey ship told them to stay away, Gage replied, “We won’t be moving. We’ll be doing some fishing.”

Soon afterwards police officers boarded the fishing boat and arrested the skipper, Elvis Teddy, charging him with an offense under the Marine Transport Act. Back on shore, Teddy defended his actions, saying that he was simply exercising his right under the Treaty of Waitangi to fish his ancestral waters. If his boat had come close to theOrient Explorer, it was the fault of the drilling ship’s commander for not avoiding a fishing vessel.

Teddy was prosecuted, and during his trial in the Auckland District Court, his lawyers argued that since the confrontation had happened outside New Zealand’s twelve mile territorial zone, the Maritime Transport Act did not apply. The judge agreed, and the charges were dismissed.

When the police appealed the judgment to the High Court, however, the Court ruled that as a New Zealand vessel, the San Pietro came under New Zealand jurisdiction, even on the high seas (Woolford 2013). Although there was no specific provision in the Maritime Transport Act to this effect, the Act must apply beyond the twelve mile limit, or the New Zealand government would be unable to uphold its international obligations under the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. (Webster and Monteiro 2013).

After this verdict, Teddy’s lawyer issued a statement saying that by granting a drilling permit in their ancestral waters without consulting Te Whanau-a-Apanui, and by sending the Navy, Air Force and police to stop Teddy and Gage from fishing in ancestral waters, the New Zealand Government had breached not only the Treaty of Waitangi but the International Convention of Indigenous Rights, which New Zealand has also signed (Te Whanau-a-Apanui 2012).

Soon afterwards, the New Zealand government took further steps to tighten its control over New Zealand vessels on the high seas, passing a hotly debated act that prohibits protest at sea in the vicinity of oil exploration vessels (Devathasan 2013).

This clash between Te Whanau-a-Apanui on the one hand, and Petrobas and the Crown on the other, was not just a physical confrontation. It was an ontological collision – a clash between different “worlds” or ways of being. Different claims to the sea, different ideas about collective rights, and different kinds of freedoms and constraints were being negotiated.

At the same time, this is not a simple confrontation between different “cultures” or “ethnicities.” It is a complex story, with different resonances for different people.

The Sea as a Theater of Protest

For many in New Zealand, the standoff between the San Pietro and a large oil drilling ship recalled an episode in 1973 when the New Zealand government tried to stop French nuclear testing in the Pacific. Two naval frigates, one with a cabinet minister on board, were sent to Moruroa atoll, a testing site in the Society Islands. When a Greenpeace yacht was boarded off Moruroa, its skipper was assaulted by French marines.

In 1984 when the New Zealand government declared the nation nuclear-free and refused to allow visits by US nuclear vessels, the country was ejected from the ANZUS alliance. A year later, French agents sank the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior, which was about to lead another protest flotilla to Moruroa, in Auckland harbor (Thakur 1986).

In New Zealand, as one can see, freedom to protest at sea is deeply entangled with national identity, and a concern for environmental issues. For many New Zealanders, by pitting its small boat against the oil drilling ship, Te Whanau-a-Apanui was following in that tradition, fighting to protect the ocean.

For many members of Te Whanau-a-Apanui, on the other hand, this was more a question of protecting the mana of their kin group. The San Pietro and its crew were asserting the right of their iwi to protect their ancestral fisheries against unwanted intrusion, based on the guarantee of “full, exclusive and undisturbed possession” of their fishing grounds under Article 2 of the Treaty of Waitangi.

At the same time, for the Government and many other New Zealanders, it was a matter of upholding the sovereignty of the Crown, and the government’s right to manage the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone; to issue exploration permits to oil companies; and to protect prospectors from interference by protest vessels, including those owned by iwi.

Nevertheless, this was not an ethnic confrontation. Many of the protestors were not Maori, and as Tweedie Waititi remarked, “If something goes wrong, it’s not only our beaches that get ruined. It’s everyone’s. I’m pretty sure that not only Maori have a connection to the sea.” Also, some iwi were flirting with the idea of supporting oil exploration: “Like our lawyer said,” she added, “our mana’s not for sale and no amount of money could pay us off. Maybe some iwi you could dangle a carrot. But this one’s not biting.”

In order to explore these ontological collisions, and what they tell us about different relationships between people and the ocean in New Zealand, and different ideas about the commons, I’d like to explore some of the deep, taken-for-granted presuppositions that underpin the positions adopted by different protagonists, along with previous alliances and confrontations.

The Fountain of Fish: The Ocean in Te Ao Maori

As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins once remarked, “The [Mori] universe is a gigantic kin, a genealogy… a veritable ontology” (Sahlins 1985:195). Te Ao Maori [the Maori world] is ordered by whakapapa – vast, intricate networks of relationships in which all forms of life are mutually defined and linked, and animated by hau [breath, wind, life force].

In 1907, Elsdon Best, a New Zealand ethnologist who had spent a lifetime studying Maori customs, wrote to an elder called Tamati Ranapiri, asking him to explain the idea of the hau. Ranapiri replied:

As for the hau, it isn’t the wind that blows, not at all. Let me explain it to you carefully. Now, you have a treasured item (taonga) that you give to me, without the two of us putting a price on it, and I give it to someone else. Perhaps after a long while, this person remembers that he has this taonga, and that he should give me a return gift, and he does so.

This is the hau of the taonga that was previously given to me. I must pass on that treasure to you. It would not be right for me to keep it for myself. Whether it is a very good taonga or a bad one, I must give to you, because that treasure is the hau of your taonga, and if I hold on to it for myself, I will die. This is the hau. That’s enough (Ranapiri 1907).

The hau is at the heart of life itself. As Ranapiri explains, if a person fails to uphold their obligations in such exchanges, their own life force is threatened. As gifts or insults pass back and forth, impelled by the power of the hau, patterns of relations are forged and transmuted, for better or for worse.

When Elsdon Best wrote about Ranapiri’s account of the hau, it captured the imagination of a French sociologist, Marcel Mauss. In 1925, Mauss published The Gift, a classic work exploring gift exchange in a range of societies, including his own. Quoting Ranapiri, he contrasted the Maori concept of the hau and chiefly generosity with the utilitarian assumption in contemporary capitalism that all transactions are driven by self-interest, arguing that this gives an impoverished, inaccurate view of how relations among people shape social life.

For Mauss, the hau, or the “spirit of the thing given” impels a gift in return, creating solidarity. His discussion of the concept is perceptive, but in fact, it only scratches the surface. In Maori philosophy, hau drives the whole world, not just human communities. It goes far beyond the exchange of gifts among people.

According to the tohunga [experts] in the ancestral whare wananga [schools of learning], hau emerged at the beginnings of the cosmos. In a chant recorded by Te Kohuora, for example, the world begins with a burst of energy that generates thought, memory and desire (Te Kohuora 1854).

Next comes the Po, long aeons of darkness. Out of the Po comes the Kore, unbound, unpossessed Nothing, the seedbed of the cosmos, described by one of Best’s contemporaries as “the Void or negation, yet containing the potentiality of all things afterwards to come” (Tregear 1891:168).

In the Void, hau ora and hau tupu, the winds of life and growth begin to stir, generating new phenomena. The sky emerges, and then the moon and stars, light, the earth and sky and the ocean.

When the forest ancestor Tane creates the world of light and life by forcing earth and sky apart, his brother Tawhiri, the wind ancestor, attacks him and his children, the trees, smashing their branches, and the ancestors of root crops, forcing their offspring to hide in the ground. In this cosmic battle, only Tu, the ancestor of people, stands tall against the Space Twister. For his bravery, he earns for his descendants the right to harvest the offspring of his brothers – birds, root crops, forest foods and trees, fish, crayfish and shellfish.

Utu, the principle of reciprocity, drives the interactions between individuals and groups and all other life forms in the Maori world, working towards (an always fragile) equilibrium. In the process, hau is exchanged among and between people and other life forms, binding their fates together.

Here, individuals are defined by their relationships, and subject and object are not radically divided. From this we can see that any idea of the commons that presupposes this Cartesian division is rooted in a particular modernist cosmo-logic, one that cannot claim universal validity or application.

In Maori life, the mingling of self and other is reflected in many ways. When greeting one another, for instance, Maori people press noses and breathe, mingling their hau [wind of life] together. People speak of themselves as ahau[myself], and when rangatira or chiefs speak of an ancestor in the first person, it is because they are the kanohiora [living face] of that ancestor.

A refusal to enter into reciprocal exchanges, on the other hand, is known as hauwhitia, or hau turned aside. Hauhauaitu [or “harm to the hau”] is manifested as illness or ill fortune, a breakdown in the balance of reciprocal exchanges. The life force has been affected, showing signs of collapse and failure.

This also applies to people’s relations with other life forms. Unless the exchanges between people and the sea are balanced, for instance, the hau of both the ocean and the people alike will suffer.

Stories about the sea illustrate this point. According to Timi Waata Rimini, an elder from Te Whanau-a-Apanui, many generations ago the son of the ancestor Pou drowned in the Motu River. Setting off in search of his son, Pou arrived at the home of the sea ancestor Tangaroa, a “fountain of fish” teeming with different species, where he asked the sea ancestor whether he had taken his son. When Tangaroa denied it, knowing that he was lying, Pou asked him to attend his son’s tangi [funeral].

Returning to the Bay of Plenty, Pou told his people to make a great net. That summer, a huge shoal of kahawai (Arripis trutta) approached the coast, escorting the sea ancestor to the funeral. On a signal, Pou ordered his people to cast the great net. Thousands of Tangaroa’s children were caught and fed to the crowds that had gathered to mourn Pou’s son (Rimini 1901).

As Rimini explained, when the kahawai arrive at the mouth the Motu River every year, a chiefly youngster was sent out to catch three kahawai, which were offered to Pou and the high chief of the region. By acknowledging the mana of the sea ancestor, these “first fish” rituals opened the fishing season, protecting the fertility and abundance of the ocean.

Other local customs related to the kehe or granite trout, a sacred fish that frequented rocky channels in the reefs, grazing on kohuwai, a particular type of seaweed. There were a number of methods used to catch this fish, including shaping channels in the reef with stones, waiting until the kohuwai grew back again, and then using a hoop net to scoop up the kehe as they grazed on the seaweed, or using a pole to drive them into the net.

When the chief’s wife at Omaio became pregnant, he said, the rahui or sacred prohibition on a famous kehe fishing ground called Te Wharau was lifted, and as people gathered on the beach, men with hoop nets were sent to stand on particular named rocks. When the tohunga or expert called out Rukuhia, people dived into the channels, swimming underwater and driving the keheinto the hoop nets, in a joyous pandemonium. Afterwards, the fish were cooked and presented to the chieftainness as a delicacy (Te Rangihiroa 1926).

In this onto-logic, the sea itself was alive and breathing. When Te Parata, a powerful being in the heart of the ocean, breathed out, the tide began to flow, and children were born. When he breathed in, a great vortex formed, swallowing canoes at sea. At death, a great rangatira might be farewelled with the chant, “The eddy squall is gone, the storm is passed away, the Parata is gone, the big fish has left its dwelling place.” (Colenso 1887:422).

Here, ideas about collective rights acknowledge the vitality of other life forms – fish, rivers, mountains and land, for example. Rights in particular localities are distributed between people and other phenomena, nested and linked in exchange relationships at various scales. In relation to the sea, these ideas allow the control of use rights, along lines of kinship and descent or gift exchange.

In contemporary times, these ways of thinking are receiving legal recognition in New Zealand. In 2014, for instance, in a Waitangi settlement with the Whanganui iwi, the Crown has recognised their iconic river as a legal being; while in a Waitangi settlement with Tuhoe, an inland people, their ancestral land Te Urewera has been recognized in the same way, with co-management regimes with the Crown and regional authorities being established.

In many ways, these legal innovations echo contemporary biological understandings in which people and other phenomena (such as the ocean) are engaged in complex interactive systems, mutually implicated at every scale, while the idea that people might be linked by kinship with marine life forms is shared with evolutionary biology, for instance.

The virtue of these arrangements is that the well-being of a lake, a river or the ocean can be given legal priority in the allocation of resource rights and management regimes, alongside the interests of human beings.

The Ocean in the Enlightenment

There are both divergences and resonances between Western and Maori ideas about the sea. When Captain Cook’s ship Endeavour arrived off the east coast of the North Island in October 1769 and brought the first Europeans ashore, for instance, the ship was a travelling sideshow of the Enlightenment in Europe, laden with a cargo of colliding cosmologies.

This was a scientific naval expedition, sponsored by the Royal Society of London to observe the Transit of Venus in Tahiti, and by the Admiralty to find Terra Australis, the Unknown Southern Continent. It is a mistake to think of the meetings that followed as binary clashes between two “cultures,” however. As at present, Maori and European ways of thinking alike were diverse.

One strand of Enlightenment thought, for instance, can be traced back at least as far back as the seventeenth century, when the philosopher Descartes had a new vision of reality, at once powerful and intoxicating. In his dream, the Cogito – the “thinking self” or Subject – became the eye of the world, which in turn became an Object for inspection.

The Cartesian division between mind (res cogitans) and matter (res extensa), Subject and Object is historically and culturally specific. During the Enlightenment in Europe, as culture was separated from nature, the natural sciences and the humanities and social sciences began to diverge (Descola 2013).

As entities were detached from each other, they were objectified and classified, and the different disciplines emerged. This “Order of Things,” as Michel Foucault called it, was at the heart of Enlightenment science (Foucault, 1970). It also shaped the law of the sea, and how forms of control were distributed over the ocean.

In this style of thinking, the ancient motif of the grid was used to divide and sort different dimensions and entities into bounded units, bringing them under control for practical purposes. Often, the grid was hierarchical – the old idea of the Great Chain of Being, for example, with God at the apex followed by angels, divine Kings, the aristocracy and successive ranks of people, from “civilized” to “savage,” followed by animals, plants and minerals in descending order (Lovejoy 1936, Hodgen 1971).

As the cogito or thinking self became the guarantor of being, the all-seeing “Eye of God” was replaced by the “Mind’s Eye,” and human beings were put in charge of the cosmos. Often, this was understood as a machine, made up of distinct, divisible working parts that performed particular functions.

In the mid-eighteenth century in Europe, the Order of Things went viral. Many aspects of life were transformed – administration (with censuses, surveys, and bureaucratic systems), industry (with manufacturing based on mechanization and standardization, the replication of parts and processes), and science (with the use of instruments and quantification, and the increased specialization of knowledge), for instance (Frängsmyr, Heilbron and Rider 1990). In the case of surveying, this was closely associated with military activities, and the scientific use of force (Edney 1994).

As it happened, Captain James Cook, the first European explorer to land in New Zealand, as a leading hydrographer, was in the vanguard of this way of reimagining the sea. Like his cartographic peers, he adopted an imaginary vantage point high above the earth – an “Eye of God” perspective.

In Cook’s charts, the ocean – grey or blue-green, the home of birds, fish and whales, surging with tides and currents, ruffling or roaring in the wind – was transformed into a static, white, two-dimensional expanse, gridded by lines of latitude and longitude and mathematically partitioned and measured.

Near harbors or lagoons, the depth of the coastal seabed was measured with the lead, and these soundings were recorded on his charts. Using a process of instrumental observation, the blurred, shifting liminal zone between land and sea was reduced to a simple line (Salmond 2005).

As Jordan Branch has recently argued, this process of cartographic simplification was intimately entangled with imperial power and the creation of the modernist nation-state. Except for scatters of islands, new stretches of the Pacific were depicted as vacant expanses, waiting to be explored, charted, claimed and ruled by European powers (Branch 2011).

At this time in Europe, the sovereignty of the Crown (or imperium) in Europe was held to extend about a league (three nautical miles) from the coastline, or within cannon shot, although property rights [dominium] could be granted within that limit (Bess 2011:87). Captain Cook had instructions from the Admiralty to claim any new lands he might “discover” for the British Crown.

At the same time, as Peter Hans Reill has remarked, one should not underestimate the diversity of Enlightenment thinking. In the mid-eighteenth century, for instance, men including Erasmus Darwin and Priestley, many of those involved in the Scottish Enlightenment, Buffon in France, Benjamin Franklin in America, and later the Humboldt brothers, understood reality as living networks of relations among different phenomena, animated by complementary exchanges – an account that has strong resonances with Maori and Polynesian thinking (Reill 2005; see also Israel 2006).

In this Enlightenment tradition – the Order of Relations, one might call it – people are just one life form among many, and the world is constantly changing. Ideas such as justice, truth, equality and honor, and balance and equilibrium suggested how exchanges – particularly among people – should be handled. Here one can find the origins of participatory democracy, and much of contemporary anthropology, earth sciences, cosmology, ecology and evolutionary theory. The World Wide Web and scientific ideas about complex systems and networks also trace back to this strand of modernist thought.

Not surprising, this diversity of views was reflected on board the Endeavour. In addition to his orders from the Admiralty, Cook had a set of “Hints” from the Earl of Morton, the President of the Royal Society, which acknowledged the legal rights of Pacific people to control their own lands and coastlines, and suggested how to describe in detail the people, places, plants, animals and minerals that they might encounter during their voyage around the world.

While Cook’s charts abstracted the land and sea, the journals, sketches and collections produced by the scientists and the ship’s officers restored them to life again, at least in part, with meticulous depictions of local people and landscapes, canoes and fishing gear, different species of fish, as well as currents, tides and the temperature of the ocean (Salmond 2004).

During the Endeavour’s circumnavigation of New Zealand in 1769-1770, these divergent strands in Enlightenment thought – as reflected in the Admiralty orders and the Earl of Morton’s “Hints” in particular – helped to shape what happened. The presence of Tupaia, a brilliant man later described as a “genius” by Georg Forster, also powerfully shifted the dynamics of these encounters. A high priest from one of the homelands of Maori, he was quickly able to master the sound shifts between Maori and Tahitian, and speak with the local people.

The warriors who came out in their canoes to challenge the ship were unsure what this bizarre apparition might be. In Turanga, for instance, the first harbor visited by the Endeavour in New Zealand, the people thought this might be Waikawa, a sacred island off the end of the Mahia peninsula, floating into their harbor. Nevertheless, they used their own time-honored rituals for challenging the strangers, performing wero [ritual challenges], karakia [incantations] and haka [war dances].

While Cook followed his Admiralty orders and took possession of New Zealand, marching the marines ashore to set up a British flag, he also followed the “Hints” by negotiating with Maori, using Tupaia, the Ra’iatean star navigator, as his interpreter. When the first encounters on land and sea ended in shootings, Cook was bitterly chagrined.

There were many such clashes around the coastline of New Zealand. When the Endeavour arrived at Waikawa, for instance, off the end of the Mahia peninsula, a sacred island and the site of a school of ancestral learning, priests chanted and warriors in canoes threw spears at the hull of the Endeavour. As they sailed across Hawke’s Bay, flotillas of canoes came out, led by elderly chiefs wearing fine cloaks, chanting, making speeches and brandishing their weapons, preventing the Europeans from making a landing.

When the Endeavour headed north and arrived in the Bay of Plenty, a large canoe carrying sixty warriors came out from Whangaparaoa in Te Whanau-a-Apanui waters, and circled the ship, a priest reciting incantations as the crew performed a war dance. They cried out, “Come to land and we will kill you,” paddling at high speed to attack the Endeavour and stopping only when a volley of grapeshot was fired beside their canoe. When a cannon loaded with round shot was fired overhead, they fled back to the land.

As one can see, there is a strong continuity between Rikirangi Gage’s presence on board the San Pietro and their confrontation with the oil drilling ship, and these earlier clashes in which Te Whanau-a-Apanui defended their mana(ancestral power) over their tribal waters.

On the whole, Captain Cook respected these challenges, retorting with warning shots rather than shooting the warriors. The Earl of Morton had insisted that people in these new lands had the right to defend their own territories, including their coastal waters. Later, this same understanding underpinned the promise in the English text of the Treaty of Waitangi that Maori would enjoy “full, exclusive, undisturbed possession of their Fisheries and other properties… so long as it is their wish and desire to retain the same in their possession.”

It was not until quite recently in New Zealand (in 1965) that the Crown’s sovereignty was formally extended out to three miles from the coast, to twelve miles in 1977, and in 1982 under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (or UNCLOS) out to 200 miles, defining an oceanic “Exclusive Economic Zone” that the Government sought to defend against Whanau-a-Apanui and Greenpeace protestors.

Thus in very recent times, the high seas or mare liberum¹ – that part of the ocean which falls outside the Exclusive Economic Zones, an expanse free to all nations but belonging to none – has been shrinking, as nation-states expand their terrestrial sovereignty out from their coastlines – a kind of oceanic enclosure. As we have seen, such cartographic visions of the ocean embody particular assumptions about the world. This atomistic, quantifying, abstracting, commodifying logic is still unfolding.

This cosmo-logic fragments the sciences, detaches people from “the environment” and makes the well-being of other life-forms contingent. It therefore is not particularly successful at understanding or safeguarding the vitality of those intricate socio-biophysical systems in which human beings participate, and on which their own well-being and futures rely.

In New Zealand, as in other situations where the government has sought to commodify and privatize resources formerly held in common, Maori have reacted by challenging the Crown’s right to make these decisions. As Alex Frame, a law professor in New Zealand, has observed, under the Treaty of Waitangi:

The commodification of the “common heritage” has provoked novel claims and awakened dormant ones…Claims to water flows, electricity dams, airwaves, forests, flora and fauna, fish quota, geothermal resources, seabed, foreshore, minerals, have followed the tendency to treat these resources, previously viewed as common property, as commodities for sale to private purchases. Not surprisingly, the Maori reaction has been, if it is property, then it is our property (Frame 1999:234).

The Foreshore and Seabed

It would be possible to examine the unfolding of this logic with the quantification of fish stocks in the fisheries quota system in New Zealand, for instance, which provoked one of the first claims to the Waitangi Tribunal. Here, however, I will focus on the confrontations between many Maori and the Crown over the foreshore and seabed, since this forerunner to the clash between Te Whanau-a-Apanui and the Crown also illuminates complexities in contemporary debates about the commons.

The foreshore and seabed saga began in the Marlborough Sounds, at the northern end of the South Island. Although the local tribes had repeatedly applied to the local District Council for licenses to farm mussels in their ancestral rohe (territory), none were granted. Finally in frustration, they finally applied to the Maori Land Court to recognize their customary rights over the foreshore and seabed in the Sounds (Bess 2011:90-93; Boast 2005).

In Maori ancestral practice, the foreshore is a fertile place. At the time of the Treaty, clans and families moved from gardens and forests to wetlands, sandy beaches, rocky reefs and out to sea in seasonal migrations, maintaining relations with a complex mosaic of fish, plants and animals, and harvesting at peak times of plenty. Particular groups held nested use rights to particular resources at particular times of the year, creating overlapping, shifting networks of rights that crossed the shoreline, binding people, land and sea together.²

According to English common law in 1840, on the other hand, land and sea were divided at the high tide mark, and subject to different regimes of control. On land, the Crown held the right of imperium or sovereignty, whereas dominium or ownership was generally held as private property; whereas at sea, it was assumed that the Crown held both imperium and dominium, at least as far as three miles offshore, unless it had granted the right of ownership to other parties.

When land began to be surveyed, partitioned into bounded blocks and sold in New Zealand, the government and European purchasers alike generally assumed that if they bought coastal land, they owned it to the high tide mark, but that the foreshore or tidal zone and the seabed belonged to the Crown.

From the beginning, Maori contested this assumption, which clashed with the Article 2 Treaty promise about their control of ancestral fisheries. But in 1963, when the Court of Appeal ruled in a case over the Ninety Mile beach that customary rights to the foreshore had been extinguished when the Native Land Court had issued title to coastal land, the matter was assumed to be legally settled.

The application of the Marlborough iwi to the Maori Land Court overturned that legal precedent, however. The judge held that the legislation cited by the Attorney General, including the Ninety Mile Beach case, had not in fact extinguished the customary rights of the Marlborough iwi.

The case was appealed, and then referred to the High Court, where the judge reversed the ruling, and then to the Court of Appeal, where the judges ruled unanimously that upon the signing of the Treaty, the Crown had acquired only a radical right or imperium over the sea with the acquisition of sovereignty.

Citing the doctrine of aboriginal title, they ruled that unless the rights of dominium had been legally extinguished, they remained with Maori kin groups, and that this was also the case with the foreshore and seabed. Furthermore, they argued, the distinction in English common law between land above the high water mark, and land below it, did not apply.³

As Judge Elias said, “The common law as received in New Zealand was modified by recognized Maori customary property interests. There is no room for a contrary presumption derived from English common law. The common law of New Zealand is different.” The judges referred the case back for the Maori Land Court to determine whether or not the Marlborough iwi had customary ownership of the foreshore and seabed in their ancestral territories (Elias, S, in the Court of Appeal of New Zealand, CA 173/01).

By this time, however, most New Zealanders took it for granted that, apart from riparian rights, the foreshore and seabed were owned by the Crown, and the decision caused a furor. Over the generations, many non-Maori New Zealanders had also formed close ties with particular beaches and stretches of coastline, echoing an ancestral Maori habit of setting up summer fishing camps by heading to beaches and coastal camping grounds, and spending a great deal of time fishing, diving, surfing and sailing.

Although some Maori leaders insisted that they only wished to exercise kai-tiakitanga or guardianship over the foreshore and seabed, and not treat them as private property, others were clearly interested in commercial possibilities, and claimed property rights in the ocean. Fearing that their relationship with particular beaches and harbors would be severed, and their recreational as well as commercial interests in these places would be lost to Maori, many non-Maori New Zealanders were incensed by the Court of Appeal’s decision.

Again, this was not strictly an ethnic confrontation. None of the Court of Appeal judges, for example, were Maori. Nevertheless, public anger was such that in 2004, the Government hastily passed legislation to ensure that the foreshore and seabed would be owned by the Crown, with open access for all, subject to various regulatory restrictions and acknowledging Maori customary interests (but not allowing this to be translated into freehold title).

When a hikoi (march) of thousands of Maori protesters marched on Parliament, they were dismissed by the Prime Minister as “wreckers and haters,” a comment that hurt and horrified many of the elders who participated.

In the aftermath, however, as different iwi signed Treaty deeds of settlement with the Crown, anger on all sides gradually cooled (Palmer 2006:197-214). When a new Government formed a coalition with the Maori Party, which had been created in protest against the Foreshore and Seabed Act, in 2010 new legislation gave Maori further customary (but not freehold) rights to these areas, while protecting public access and enjoyment by defining the foreshore and seabed as “public domain” (Bess 2011:92-93).

Out at sea, on the other hand, the Crown reserved its right to allocate oil and mineral licences, without public participation. By the time that Te Whanau-a-Apanui’s fishing boat confronted the Orient Explorer, they had many non-Maori supporters who shared their fears for the future of the ocean. In October 2011 when a container ship the Rena ran aground on a reef in the western Bay of Plenty, it seemed that they had been prescient. A cargo including hazardous materials, fuel oil and diesel spilled into the sea, causing widespread environmental and economic damage.

“Tie the Knot of Humankind”: Experiments Across Worlds

As one can see, in New Zealand, fundamentally different onto-logics about human relations with the ocean have proved very resilient. At the same time, there have been significant transformations, both to Maori ideas and to modernist thinking.

In the law, for example, at different times, the doctrine of continuity in relation to Maori rights has transformed English common law by the incorporation of Maori customary law. As Sian Elias, now the Chief Justice of New Zealand, put it succinctly, “The common law of New Zealand is different.” One can see this in many New Zealand laws that cite tikanga (ancestral conventions), whether in general or in particular,⁴ including those recent laws giving effect to those Waitangi settlements in which ancestral rivers and stretches of land are recognized as beings with their own legal rights.

At the same time, while particular tikanga may be cited in legislation, their content has often fundamentally shifted. One can see this in the case of kai-tiakitanga, for example, once exercised by non-human beings such as sharks and stingrays over particular ancestral stretches of the ocean. Today, a more anthropocentric version is common, with people regarding themselves as kai tiaki (guardians) of these places.

On the other hand, the assumption that with the signing of the Treaty, sovereignty was transferred to the British Crown, has not been seriously disturbed, despite many challenges, since this provides a fundamental scaffolding for legal processes in New Zealand.

In relation to the sea, this means that mechanisms such as mataitai and taiapure, where Maori kin groups either exercise or share limited rights over coastal subsistence fishing with other community members, operate within strict limits. For example, Ministers appoint tribal “representatives” to management groups and require that their arrangements not clash with commercial fishing rights.

Simultaneously, however, the idea of the “Crown” itself has also altered, so that any pure opposition between Maori and the Crown is now difficult to sustain. For many years in New Zealand, Maori have been lawyers and judges, officials, members of Parliament and Ministers. In fact, it was a Maori Minister of the Crown, Matiu Rata, who helped to set up the Waitangi Tribunal.

Again, the relation between iwi and the Crown is structural rather than strictly ethnic, and this is played out in fisheries management as well, with non-Maori as well as Maori managing fishing quota for iwi according to strictly commercial principles; while in mataitai and taiapure, the management of customary fishing is usually shared with non-Maori community members (Jacobson and Moller 2009).

At the same time, some non-Maori New Zealanders now speak of themselves as kai-tiaki or guardians for rivers, beaches and endangered species. As Maori terms increasingly shift into Kiwi English, both European and Maori ways of thinking are being transformed.

This holds promise for the future, because in relation to the sea, experiments of this kind are urgently needed. In New Zealand as elsewhere, a radical division between Nature and Culture, born of one strand of modernist thought, and the belief that Nature is there for human beings to exploit without limit and that any damage can be fixed, is fundamentally disruptive to relations between people and the ocean.

While surfers, swimmers, divers and fishers still frequent our beaches and coasts, and sailors still cross the Pacific, their activities are increasingly at risk from water-borne pollution, sedimentation, over-harvesting of reefs, shellfish beds and fisheries, and the intense storms, acidification and current shifts driven by climate change, for example.

Contemporary scientific models, with their fragmented partitions, and the split between Nature and Culture with its deep separation between people and other phenomena (also born of the Order of Things), are flawed. They fail to adequately grasp the cascading dynamics of complex systems in which people are implicated at every scale, putting the future of many marine species andcoastal human communities at risk.

Ideas of the commons do not always escape these limitations. In New Zealand, these play out in complex ways, sometimes to oppose Maori claims to fisheries or waterways (“No one owns the water!”), whose control may then be privatized – but also to forge alliances with Maori kin groups (in the case of the San Pietro, for example) to try and prevent extractive activities that seem too damaging or dangerous.

Until people grasp that their being and that of the sea are bound together, they will not demand that human activities that put our futures at risk are conducted within survivable limits. We need new ways of thinking about the shifting relations between people and the ocean – and indeed, all the intricate biophysical systems of which human beings are a part.

In New Zealand, deep resonances may be found between relational thinking from the Enlightenment (including the commons); Maori ideas of complex networks that bypass Cartesian divisions between subject and object, mind and matter, society and nature; and the contemporary science of complex systems. These convergences may help to incubate some new ideas about the ocean.⁶

Just as the physicist Niels Bohr drew upon Asian conceptions to grasp quantum theory, or Marcel Mauss reflected on the Maori idea of the hau to imagine alternatives to a commodified world, such cross-philosophical experiments (and not just in New Zealand) might help to engender new kinds of environmental science.

They might also foster ideas of the commons based on complex systems – those intricately entangled, cascading, dynamic, interactive networks among people, and between people and other life forms at different scales – and legal arrangements in which rivers and the ocean have their own being and their own rights.

As my mentor, Te Whanau-a-Apanui elder Eruera Stirling, used to chant:

Whakarongo! Whakarongo! Whakarongo!

Ki te tangi a te manu e karanga nei

Tui, tui, tuituiaa!

Tuia i runga, tuia i raro,

Tuia i roto, tuia i waho,

Tuia i te here tangata

Ka rongo te po, ka rongo te po

Tuia i te kawai tangata i heke mai

I Hawaiki nui, i Hawaiki roa,

I Hawaiki pamamao

I hono ki te wairua, ki te whai ao

Ki te Ao Marama!

English Translation:

Listen! Listen! Listen!

To the cry of the bird calling

Bind, join, be one!

Bind above, bind below

Bind within, bind without

Tie the knot of humankind

The night hears, the night hears

Bind the lines of people coming down

From great Hawaiki, from long Hawaiki

From Hawaiki far away

Bind to the spirit, to the day light

To the World of Light!

References

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• Blomley, Nicholas. 2003. “Law, Property and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey and the Grid.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93(1):121-141.
• Boast, Richard. 2005. Foreshore and Seabed. Wellington: LexisNexis.
• Branch, Jordan. 2011. “Mapping the Sovereign State: Cartographic Technology, Political Authority, and Systemic Change.” PhD thesis in Political Science, Berkeley.
• Brookfield, F.M. 2004. “Maori Customary Title in Foreshore and Seabed.” New Zealand Law Journal 34(1).
• Colenso, William. 1887. “Ancient Tide Lore, and Tales of the Sea.” Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute 20:418-22.
• Cox, Michael, Arnold, Gwen, and Tomás. 2010. “A Review of Design Principles for Community-based Natural Resource Management.” Ecology and Society 15(4):38.
• Descola, Phillipe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Devathasan, Anna. 2013. “The Crown Minerals Act 2013 and Marine Protest.” Auckland University Law Review 19:258-263.
• Diaw, Mariteuw. 2008. “From Sea to Forest: An Epistemology of Otherness and Institutional Resilience in Non-Conventional Economic Systems.” http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/bitstream/handle/10535/312/diaw.pdf?sequence=1
• Edney, M.H., 1994. “British Military Education, Mapmaking, and Military ‘Map-mindedness’ in the Later Enlightenment.” The Cartographic Journal 31:14-20.
• Frame, Alex. 1999. “Property and the Treaty of Waitangi: A Tragedy of the Commodities?” In Janet McLean, editor. Property and the Constitution. Oxford: Hart Publishing: 224-234.
• Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things. London: Tavistock.
• Frängsmyr T., J.L. Heilbron and R. Rider, editors. 1990. The Quantifying Spirit in the 18th Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Grotius, Hugo, translator. Ralph Magoffin. The Freedom Of The Seas: Or, The Right Which Belongs To The Dutch To Take Part In The East Indian Trade. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Henare [Salmond] AJM. 2007. “Taonga Maori: Encompassing Rights and Property in New Zealand.” In A. Henare, M. Holbraad and S. Wastell, editors. Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge. 47-67.
• Hill, Marika. 2011. “Police Make Arrest on Protest Ship.” Stuff NZ, April 23.
• Hodgen, Margaret. 1971. Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Israel, Jonathan. 2006. “Enlightenment. Which Enlightenment?” Journal of the History of Ideas 67(3):523-545.
• Jacobson C., and H. Moller. 2009. “Two from the same cloth? Comparing the outcomes of Mtaitai and Taipure for delivering sustainable customary fisheries.” He Khinga Rangahau No. X. Dunedin: University of Otago.
• Lovejoy, Arthur. 1936. The Great Chain of Being: The History of an Idea. Boston: Harvard University Press.
• Mauss, Marcel. 1966. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Cohen and West Ltd.
• Palmer, M. 2006. “Resolving the Foreshore and Seabed Dispute.” In Raymond Miller and Michael Mintrom, editors. Political Leadership in New Zealand. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 197-214.
• Ranapiri, T, 1907. Letter to Peehi (Elsdon Best), 23 November 1907, p. 2, MS Papers 1187-127, in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. Anne Salmond, translator.
• Reill, P.H. 2005. Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment. Berkeley, California. University of California Press.
• Rimini, Tiimi Waata. 1901. “Te puna kahawai i Motu.” Journal of the Polynesian Society 10(4):183-190.
• Sahlins, Marshall. 1985. “Hierarchy and Humanity in Polynesia.” In A. Hooper and J. Huntsman, editors. Transformations of Polynesian Culture. Auckland. The Polynesian Society.
• Salmond, Anne. 1992. Maori Understandings of the Treaty of Waitangi, F19, for the Waitangi Tribunal, Muriwhenua Land Claim.
• —– . 2004. The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas. London: Penguin.
• —– . 2005. “Their Body is Different, Our Body is Different: European and Tahitian Navigators in the 18th Century.” In History and Anthropology,16 (2):167 – 186.
• —– . 2010. Brief of Evidence of Distinguished Professor Dame Anne Salmond, WAI 1040, #A22, for the Waitangi Tribunal.
• Stirling, Eruera, as told to Anne Salmond. 1980. Eruera: The Teachings of a Maori Elder. Christchurch: Oxford University Press.
• Te Kohuora of Rongoroa, dictated to Richard Taylor. 1854. [The Maori text is in Taylor, Richard (1855), Te Ika a Maui. London:15-16.]
• Te Rangihiroa, Peter Buck. 1926. “The Maori Craft of Netting.” Transactions of the New Zealand Institute 56: 597-646.
• Thakur, Ramesh. 1986. “A Dispute of Many Colours: France, New Zealand, and the Rainbow Warrior Affair.” The World Today 42(12):209-214
• Schmidt, Jeremy and Mitchell, Kyle. “2014 Property and the Right to Water: Towards a Non-Liberal Commons.” Review of Radical Political Economics46(1):54-69.
• Te Whanau-a-Apanui. 2012. Statement of Te Whanau-a-Apanui, iwimaori.weebly.com/…/te_whanau_a_apanui_statement_16_may_2012
• Tregear, Edward. 1891. The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary. Wellington: Lyon and Blair.
• Waitangi Tribunal. http://www.justice.govt.nz/tribunals/waitangi-tribunal/treaty-of-waitangi
• Waititi, Tweedie. 2011. Quoted in Sunday Star Times. April 24.
• Woolford, J. 2003. Judgment in NZ Police vs. Elvis Heremia Teddy, CRI-2011-470-00031 [2013, NZHC 432].
• Webster, Kerryn and Felicity Monteiro. 2013. “High Court clarifies jurisdiction over New Zealand ships on high seas, International Law Office.” http://www.internationallawoffice.com/newsletters/detail.aspx?g=96970d24-7159-4b4c-b41f-71d8c0f58 

Anne Salmond (New Zealand) is a Distinguished Professor of Mori Studies and Anthropology at the University of Auckland. For many years she has worked with indigenous leaders and groups in New Zealand and the Pacific. As a writer, she has won many literary and academic awards. A passionate environmentalist, she has also led major ecological projects in New Zealand. In 2013 she was awarded the Rutherford Medal, New Zealand’s top scientific award, and was made the New Zealander of the Year.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Photo by amg1994

The post Patterns of Commoning: The Fountain Of Fish: Ontological Collisions At Sea appeared first on P2P Foundation.

When I first began thinking about ideas of subjectivity and emotion in relation to fisheries most people thought I was crazy. Talk to fishermen about their feelings? But it quickly became clear that I was on the right track. As one fishermen’s advocate said to me, laughing, “People are definitely not rational, especially fishermen. They make decisions based on other factors.”¹ I became fascinated by what some of these “other” factors might be.

My project begins with the excellent work done by Ostrom² and others on design principles for the commons. Design principles focus on the institutional rules and norms required for effective management of collective resources. This work has been done within a rational choice framework, however, which leaves little space for understanding alternative rationalities or “nonrational” behaviors. If we simply add in perspectives on gender, kinship relations, emotional attachments to resources and land- and seascapes to our understanding of design principles, it prevents us from exploring how design principles emerge in the first place. Rather, I suggest we need to explore how institutions, resources and societies are co-emergent. This starting point shows how the “design” of a commons is a product of personal interactions, histories and relationships that need to be continually renewed.³

Taking co-emergence as a starting point has major implications for how we understand the dynamics of the commons. It is not a question of explaining how resource use affects the commons, but rather a question of exploring how the commons, as an institution, a place and an ecosystem, is embedded within and productive of the communities that rely on commons. The two cannot be neatly separated, spatially, temporally or analytically.

My research has been on the Scottish inshore Nephrops norvegicus fishery, which is the largest fishery in Scotland in terms of landings and number of boats. Nephrops are also known as Norwegian lobster or prawns and are the main species marketed as scampi or langoustines. They are fished both by creel and by trawl net, although the creel fishery produces a higher value, live product. Skipper-owned boats, operated out of small ports on a daily basis, dominate the fishery.

The west coast is a mixed fishery with creelers (pots on the sea bed) and trawlers (nets towed across the sea bed) sharing the same fishing grounds. One community on the west coast has banned all trawl gear from its fishing grounds and operates a formal (although not legally binding) scheme to limit the number of creels fished per day per boat. They are an unusual case because the UK government sets and distributes prawn quotas, leaving limited opportunities for fishers to make their own rules for managing fish catches. The situation is rapidly changing as the government implemented inshore fisheries groups in 2009 to decentralize management. How much authority they have, however, is still quite restricted. It is in this context that I want to explore the “(non)rational commons.”

Design Principles and the (Non)rational

Much of the work done on the commons has centered on the institutions that make collective management of shared resources viable. Institutions (rules and norms) are vital to limiting and monitoring resource extraction. Yet I want to focus on the dynamics of institutions, the everyday practices through which institutions come into being and are reproduced over time and space. In particular, I want to add in a consideration of subjectivities, including gender, race, class and even identities such as “fishermen,” which I suggest are equally important to how a common-pool resource is managed. When we take into consideration alternative rationalities, then the reasons that some well-designed institutions fail becomes clearer. It is the ongoing enactment of institutions as well as their underlying rules and norms that are crucial to outcomes.

Subjectivities are important to the operation of institutions as they are integrally bound up with how people understand their relationship to others. In a fisheries context, I focus on the practices and interactions that are required for one to be considered a “fisherman” and the contradictory ways in which these interactions both promote and frustrate attempts at collaboration.

For example, when I tell inshore fishermen I am interested in how they cooperate, they laugh and say they do not. And yet, when I have been on boats with them, there is an almost constant stream of communication as skippers radio others about the sea conditions, alert them to a strange boat in their waters, or warn trawlers they are too close to someone’s creel line. When I point this out, they readily agree that they cooperate in these ways. In fact, I think most would agree that they must cooperate in order to ensure their safety and that of their gear and catch. The question then becomes whether or not these forms of cooperation help to build a foundation for more formal collaboration.⁴

The types of relationships driving cooperation can be considered “rational” in certain respects. Taking account of community obligations, the need to preserve kinship relationships and an emotive attachment to the sea can be seen as “rational,” particularly over long time scales. Kinship relationships, for example, can be vital to supporting people during times of crisis and therefore are logically considered important to maintain. This kind of rationality, however, is not the kind of “rational fisherman” that rational choice theorists have in mind. I am therefore interested in challenging the dominant idea of the greedy fisherman by highlighting the alternative or “(non)rational” relations and commitments that underpin cooperation.

Subjectivity and Cooperation

I suggest that subjectivity is an important component of the “(non)rational” relations that underpin informal and formal modes of cooperation. Subjectivity is often conflated with identity, but the two concepts are different in important ways. Subjectivity refers to the ways in which people are brought into relations of power, or subjected, as well as how they resist them. Power is at the heart of social interactions; it is impossible to conceptualize relationships that are not bound by power in some way. Power can operate in the commons in many different forms, from gender, caste, and ethnicity inequalities within commons user-groups, to the relations between fisheries policy or policy makers and fishermen, to more subtle dimensions of power such as those that arise from differences in experience and knowledge of commons resources – all of which produce different subjectivities. These serve to position people engaged in the commons differently in relation to each other and in relation to the commons itself.

In fisheries, to be “a fisherman” requires that one goes to sea and catches fish. This relationship between the resource and subjectivity is crucial for how fishers see themselves and integrate certain attitudes and behaviors into other aspects of their lives, including formal institutions to manage the fishery.

Subjectivities are not necessarily negative; they are a consequence of the multidimensional aspects of power, making it difficult to think of power as simply unidirectional or even bidirectional. Power is what gives the subject the ability to act, and any resistance to a dominating power will always have some contradictory outcomes. In order to resist power, one has to first accept that they are subject to that power.

In Scottish fisheries, the subject “fisherman” is dependent upon a large web of economic, political and social relationships wherein fishing as an historical, cultural, technological and legal activity is defined and policed. If we consider the operation of power in this context, fishers cannot contest fishing regulations without first accepting that they are subject to those regulations. This power over them also provides the power to act in a variety of ways. Similarly, fishermen cannot make claims about protecting their fishing grounds without simultaneously reinforcing the idea that fishermen exploit their fishery and that the fishing grounds belong to someone.

In most thinking on the commons, power is either something which might derail an otherwise well functioning community, or as something contained in individuals that they can use to maximize their profits by overexploiting the shared resources in defiance of the rest of the users.

For example, even though overfishing or violating quotas is a familiar phenomenon, recently some Scottish fishers have been at the forefront of voluntary schemes to create sustainable fisheries. One is a scheme for white fish boats to report and actively avoid areas where large concentrations of young cod are found. Another is the case, mentioned above, where mobile gear was banned from a creel fishery. (This is rather unusual in that part of the fishing ground is “protected” by a military zone on one side, and that combined with the topography of the coast lines serves to demarcate a relatively clear “local fishing ground” that is clearly identifiable on a map.) About fifteen years ago fishers in this area became concerned over the decline in their fishery. They engaged in a variety of legal and somewhat more dubious tactics in what is known as the “trawl wars” to exclude mobile gear from their area. One of the most notorious incidents was the sinking of a caravan to interfere with the trawl gear. This was successful in deterring the trawlers but the culprit was identified because, as one informant told me, “they forgot to take off the licence plate, so that wasn’t so smart.”

The group succeeded in getting a partial ban in the fishing ground that excludes mobile gear and limits the number of creels fished per day, per boat. They also use escape hatches to allow the smaller prawns to leave the creel before it is lifted. These agreements are voluntary, but the exclusion of mobile gear has been legally confirmed, although not permanently. The exclusion has to be renewed regularly (roughly every ten years, but it changes with changes in Scottish fisheries policy). Because this has helped produce excellent fishing ground, “there are more boats, especially in the south end of the area that aren’t signed up [to our agreement] and aren’t complying. Especially Max [pseudonym]… is not a fisherman, he’s just a businessman.” My respondent explains why some fishers are committed to limiting the fishery and others are not by invoking the difference between “fishermen” who respect the local customs and seek to limit their fishing, and a “businessman” who simply wants to catch as much profit as possible. In another area, a creeler contrasted the “businessmen” who trawl, with creeling which he described as, “days you’re out there and you’re barely making a living but you’re at sea…It’s a way of being.” He went on to complain that the large trawlers do not spend money in the village and have no commitment to the community. Not only is the trawl catch more indiscriminate, but he suggests that their emotional attachments to the sea and the community are dissimilar, and as a result, they do not have the same commitments to try to manage the fishery sustainably. Both of these schemes are constructive, pro-active attempts to protect their fishery.

Neither scheme provides short-term financial returns for the fishers although most people involved believe and hope that longer term it will ensure the viability of the fishery. Under a rational choice framework, however, these schemes are considered highly irrational. They are not seen as advancing the best interests of individual fishers because they often result in fishers earning less money from their days at sea. But my point here is that these schemes only appear as “unusual” or “innovative” because of the dominant view (fostered by rational-choice theory itself!) that fishers are only interested in self-improvement or profits. Schemes to limit the fishery are all based on the assumption that fishers will try to catch as many fish as they can when they are out on the sea. Yet the everyday practices of fishers generally do not reflect these assumptions. This is largely because the identity of being a “fisherman” emerges from the act of going to sea and living in a web of kinship, community and peer relationships that are crucial to supporting fishing as an activity and as an industry. Significantly, this identity persists regardless of the institutional rules and to a certain extent regardless of dominant theoretical paradigms. Thus attention to alternative rationalities and identities is crucial to understanding how cooperation or noncooperation emerges – and therefore how a commons can function so effectively.

Fishing produces particular kinds of bodies and emotions that are not insignificant when it comes to trying to draw up management agreements. Men who are used to coping with dangerous and physically demanding environments, find it literally uncomfortable, physically and subjectively, to situate their bodies in a meeting room. In other words, this experience changes what it means to be a fisherman. This change is as much an embodied experience as it is a political and emotional one. A fisherman working on his boat, providing food and income for his family, is often in a relatively powerful position. I have met few fishers in Scotland who are not proud of their occupation. And yet, that changes to a very different kind of subjectivity when they find themselves the target of decommissioning schemes, blamed personally for degradation of their fishing grounds, or forced to interact with policymakers. The exercise of power changes in profound ways and they end up in a more defensive position relative to their occupational identity.

Conceptualizing power and subjectivity in this way brings into focus the kinds of relationships and practices that shape how cooperation occurs within the commons, many of which are not “rational” as narrowly defined by rational choice theory.⁵ Every relationship linked to the commons – from that between policymakers and resource users, to internal user-group dynamics, to those between resource users and the larger community – contain the possibility for power to produce either a resistant, uncooperative subject or a variety of subjectivities that are more conducive to working collectively.

The spaces within which these interactions occur are also important in shaping power and relationships. Therefore, we need to shift the focus in commons work from institutional design (rules and norms) to the everyday spaces, experiences and practices wherein commons management occurs. It is those elements that shape whether management rules are accepted, who accepts them, who polices them and the kinds of social and environmental transformations they produce.

Working the Sea: Everyday Practices and the Operation of Power

This discussion, however, still seems remote from the pitching fishing boats and smelly piers wherein fishers spend most of their time. I think that attention needs to be paid to the embodied experiences of fishermen in the spaces wherein they interact: the pier, on boats, in meeting halls, and in the community.

In Scotland, the inshore fishery is often the lifeblood of small, coastal villages. Many places have few other job possibilities outside of tourism, which itself is dependent on selling the idealized “fishing village” image to guests. In response to a question about what had caused the biggest changes in her west coast community, an older woman said,

Well, mainly the fishing, the prawn fishing. Years ago now, I suppose ten or fifteen years ago, there weren’t that many boats out of here and most of the young ones were really going away from the place. But now a lot of the young ones are back… They are buying houses and they are building houses…

Fishing, then, is far more than an occupation. It is one of the activities that keeps the community viable and lively. As a result, fishers are embedded in a set of relationships that support fishing in symbolic and emotional ways, even if local people buy very little fish directly off the boats. Fishers do not financially gain from the community, but the relationships bind them together – which itself enacts an alternative rationality to profit maximization. The benefits of fishing flow from these relationships and from that particular place; they provide subconscious emotional support to fishers when they may not catch any fish. This kind of support is crucial to keeping fishers rooted in place and dissuades them from moving to more productive fishing grounds, as “rational” theory suggests they should.

As more “local” boats have appeared, many fishers are concerned that there are now too many fishers. Yet none of them suggests that people should be actively excluded. Rather they highlight the ways they cooperate, as one fisherman said,

Everyone is free to go where they want but I mean basically your [fishing ground] is marked and it’s…well, it’s more of a kind of gentleman’s agreement that you don’t go and shoot over the top of someone else’s creels…I mean it does happen…basically because people think maybe somebody else is getting something better but its generally put down to a mistake with tides…but if someone was blatantly doing it, moved in here and just plastered on top of everyone there would have to be something done that maybe you wouldn’t put down on paper. [laughter]

Here, the fisher suggests that the ability to exclude someone from your fishing ground is tied up in being a legitimate member of the community. He assumes that a blatant violator of the “gentlemen’s agreement” would be an outsider. Thus being a “fisherman” in a locally understood sense is also to be part of the community.

Another fisherman spoke about how it was unpleasant to have confrontations with people, indicating that relationships are often more important than the catch. In localities where two communities’ fishing grounds overlapped, they actively tried to avoid fishing in areas that might cause conflict. People aren’t willing to risk causing an altercation just to catch a few more prawns.

These “fishermen” are very different from the “fishermen” of fisheries policy. In many respects, they act “irrationally” in the face of competition in the fishery. One would expect fishers to try to exclude new boats or to capture as much catch as they can individually, even if it meant conflict with people they do not know. While certainly the local men involved in the fishery compete with each other in a variety of ways, they are also highly valued because of the jobs and prosperity they bring into the village. They need to live up to their reputations and feel bound by certain local etiquettes that supersede some of the more blatant forms of self-interested behavior. When I speculated on some of these ideas to a fisherman’s wife she immediately broke in, “They don’t have a choice. I don’t even think it’s conscious; they have to be a part of things here. It’s part of who they are. It’s how we do things here.”⁶

Similarly, in two other west coast fisheries, the creelers know that they would have bigger and more prolific prawns if trawlers were banned from their fishing grounds. But they are acutely aware that the fishing ground has to be shared and are against trying to ban the trawlers altogether. In one place, the brother of a successful creeler is physically disabled and while he can run a trawl boat, he would be physically unable to creel. Everyone agrees that he needs to have an opportunity to fish, too. It is also common for fishers to trade in their creels for a trawler when they get older and find the physical demands of creeling to be too difficult. It is these kinds of community obligations and alternative rationalities that make all fishers in those particular areas committed to a mixed gear (creel and trawl) fishery.

Interestingly, this commitment is rapidly changing as fuel prices increase and more trawlers are converting to creeling which uses significantly less fuel. The creel fishermen also federated in late 2012 and their organization is trying to provide an alternative lobbying voice to that of the trawlers. It is also promoting creeling as a clear commitment to conservation of the fishery for the short and long term. For example, the federation issued a public statement embracing the new marine-protected areas along the Scottish coast as a welcome development in marine spatial planning. Some of these areas will allow limited fishing while others will exclude fishers entirely. The trawl-dominated federations have been adamantly against marine protected areas.

Clearly, such relations of power can also lead to noncompliance and defiance of peer pressures to be a “good community (or federation) member.” Many fishing communities have at least one such person, and indeed, at one of my field sites I was told to stay away from one man because he is considered dangerous. Yet for the vast majority of the fishers I have worked with, they are consciously and unconsciously bound within relations that make them unwilling to resist the subject “good community member.”

Fishing in Scotland is very much a masculine activity, with the work and time demands deemed inappropriate for women raising children. With a few exceptions, women (wives) do most of the paperwork and onshore fisheries-related activities but rarely go on the boats themselves. This is important because the kinds of conflicts that emerge are linked to ideas of how men should behave in a west coast fishing village. One woman vividly described for me the priorities of the men in her village: “Oh, you know these West Highland men, it’s work, pub, wife.” She held her hands up in front of her and placed “work” right in front, “pub” right next to it, and then stretched her arms all the way to the side and placed “wife” there. She continued, “I’m sure in their heads they think it’s the opposite but it isn’t.” [laughter] The notion that “good men” work hard is emphasized along with the idea that men’s and women’s places are very different. Very few women hang out in the pubs. Maintaining your reputation, providing for your family, working hard and drinking in the pub are key ways in which males become “men,” and through their activities on the sea, become “fishermen.”⁷

What makes it so difficult to understand the relationships I’ve described is that attempting to identify patterns or to associate identities with particular motivations is inappropriate. Community obligations can just as easily lead to a ban on mobile gear as it can to a mixed gear fishery – as is the case in different places on the Scottish west coast. It is important to recognize that relationships are complex, contingent and changeable. If the commons is not successful, it is more likely due to problems with these relationships than it is with the institutional design. Therefore I propose the (non)rational commons, one which takes account of how power operates in the fishery, including the kinds of relationships I’ve described here.

Meetings, Emotion and Subjectivity

In order to understand more fully the relationships relevant for cooperation in the fishery, it is also necessary to consider the meeting room. A variety of meetings occur in relation to fisheries, ranging from informal chats on the pier between skippers and other users of the sea such as tourist boat operators or port authorities, to policy meetings in Edinburgh and Brussels attended by fishers’ representatives, policymakers and scientists. The shift from their boats to the meeting room subjects fishermen in radically different ways. Here I focus on the consultation meetings that usually involve policymakers and fisheries regulators with fishermen, fishermen’s advocates, and occasionally other stakeholders such as environmental groups or local development authorities. Most often, these meetings are held in larger west coast towns or areas central to the dispersed fishing villages.

In the interviews many fishers expressed a much stronger emotion and pragmatic connection with their resources than with policy meetings. One fisherman put it poignantly, “People sitting in their office, they are not even affected by the rain.” Another said, “They are so divorced from what it’s about. We have a lot of conversations about what it’s about to live here. We are surrounded by greens and blues [i.e., nature], [policy makers] coming from the city, they don’t have that, they do not understand what that means.”⁸” These men insist that managers do not understand the realities of the act of fishing and living in a remote coastal village, and this is seen by them as a major problem for collective solutions. In other words, the fishermen and the policymakers inhabit very different relationships with the resource and this is crucial for how relations of power are exercised.

The meeting room itself produces a very different subjectivity among fishermen than time on the boat. They are clear that the meeting room is not their place. One man said, “It’s the difference between standing on the landing and jumping in the sea.” Another said, “One’s real and the other is not. Well yeah, I’m happier for one [on the boat].” Equally importantly, many fishermen pointed out that policy makers are paid to attend meetings whereas they are not. Instead, they take time away from their boats or other activities in order to have their voices heard. The space of the meeting room itself produces particular kinds of subjects for both the fishermen and policymakers that sets them literally, on opposite sides of the room.

The fishermen are well aware of these relations and how the assumptions of fisheries regulators shape meeting dynamics. One man said about a recent meeting, “The guys come with their preconceptions, it’s almost like here we go again. We threw them a surprise [when we started talking about limiting the creel fishery in addition to banning trawling]. Someone talking about their own sector, they didn’t expect that.”⁹ Another man said, “You explain your point of view but they don’t want to hear it. They’ve made up their mind before they go in the meeting.”

These preconceptions emerge from the normative practices of fishing. Policymakers base their policies and their meeting agendas on ideas of “rational fishermen,” who by definition need to be policed and regulated. By this reckoning, the creel fishermen I have described here shift from being family providers, bound by “gentlemen’s agreements” and subjected by the “community,”to being an overexploiter of the sea who needs to be told about proper fisheries management. This shift in subjectivity is central to why there is so much antagonism between fishermen and policymakers.

Alternative rationalities or the “nonrational” are therefore key components of commons management. The relationships and places within which fishers interact are important components of their subjectivities, which in turn is integral to how power is exercised. My work suggests that these kinds of relations of power are central to whether fishers bond together to cooperate (sometimes to manage the fishery, sometimes to protest against rules) or fiercely resist any kind of collective action.

These embodied interactions create openings and close down others for particular kinds of cooperation. What emerges is an important difference between “managing a common-pool resource” as fisheries policy schemes try to do, and the “gentlemen’s agreements” that emerge out of community commitments and obligations I have described here. While the Scottish case shows that such gentlemen’s agreements are vulnerable to noncompliance and even to lack of support from state regulatory structures, they also point to the tremendous possibilities that arise when people bring their commitments to “commoning” into their everyday lives. Or as Silke Helfrich puts it, “If you consider yourself a commoner and if you realize and reflect upon what you’re doing in terms of commoning, then it’s likely to be a successful commons.” Emotional attachments to land and seascape and community subjectivities can help to foster such consciousness.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Andrea J. Nightingale (Sweden) is a Geographer by training and presently Chair of Rural Development in the Global South at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Uppsala, Sweden. Her current research interests include climate change adaptation and transformation debates; public authority, collective action and state formation; and feminist work on emotion and subjectivity in relation to theories of development, collective action and cooperation. She previously worked at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden and the University of Edinburgh, Geography, School of GeoSciences, Scotland.

I would like to give a special thanks to the people on the west coast who contributed their time, thoughts and patience to my project. They have shown a generosity in working with me that helped me to better understand the importance of the “community obligations” I discuss. I would also like to thank David Donan, Jim Atkinson, Jim Watson and Hamish Mair for discussions on the policy context and pressures facing the fishery and being open to thinking about the social science aspects of the science they do.

Photo by Chris Golightly

The post Patterns of Commoning: Commons and Alternative Rationalities: Subjectivity, Emotion and the (Non)rational Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Étienne Le Roy: Writing about commons as a member of a scientific community, which itself has developed only recently, has raised a number of problems for me.

First, there is the time lag with which the complex problem of the commons gained our attention in the first place. Why didn’t that happen fifty years ago? Why did it take so long to overcome the obstacles that made us unable to recognize social phenomena as commons phenomena and to think about them as such? Even though I had answers to many questions and was already writing within the paradigm of sharing, I was still unable to ask the questions using commons terminology.

The second problem lies in the fact that opening up the topic of the commons triggers a kind of domino effect. As soon as the first domino falls over – by invoking the commons – many of the concepts on which the idea of modern Western civilization rests lose their apparent balance, and the whole edifice, previously believed to be well-founded, collapses onto itself: the state, the law, the market, the nation, work, contracts, debts, giving, the juristic person, private property, as well as institutions such as kinship, marital law, and the law of succession, are suddenly called into question. We often consider these concepts to be universally valid, but intercultural comparison reveals that they are only a custom, a folkway that deeply influenced our modern Western legal tradition (which itself proves to be a folk law of its own).

Finally, the third problem has to do with the highly political, even polemic character of the contemporary commons debate, as currently expressed in France by Pierre Laval and Christian Dardot in their book Commun. Even the subtitle does not mince words: “Essay on the revolution in the 21st century.” Laval and Dardot bring important questions back into the academic debate, questions that Karl Marx raised as early as the mid-nineteenth century when reflecting upon the meaning and the role of capital.

The attention currently granted the commons suggests approaching these problems one by one, first in order to make the “question of the commons” comprehensible, and then to examine how they relate to contemporary law. One thing should be clear from the outset, however: theoretically, commons could be an alternative to the market and the state, but practically, we are a long way from achieving that. And if we follow Professor Elinor Ostrom, then the unresolved social question of the twenty-first century.¹ should in any case focus on how commons and private property might coexist and complement each other.

I graduated from university with degrees in anthropology and public law in 1964. While I was conducting research for my thesis (corresponding to a master’s degree today), I discovered Michel Alliot, a young professor coming from Africa, as well as the scientific discipline of legal anthropology and the land question in Africa, particularly in Senegal. These three discoveries were to change my life.

I selected Michel Alliot as my academic advisor and wrote my doctoral dissertation, one of the first in legal anthropology in France (Le Roy 1970), about the Senegalese land reform and Law 64-46, which was one of the first dissertations on legal anthropology in France. My ambition was to comment not only on the origins and roots of this reform, but also to explain what it actually sought to cover and regulate: namely consuetudinary law, or customary, unofficial types of law.²  I dug into the history of possession of land in a sub-Saharan African society, all the way back to the sixteenth century, and discovered the field of the commons, but could not find a concept, a term for it.

I later discovered that this was because of the ethnocentric ideology of colonialism³ and the foundations on which the thinking of the modern age and the notion of development of that time rested.⁴ So-called consuetudinary law was an Unidentified Scientific Object (USO). Only a few scholars had attempted to actually comprehend its more profound features. The scientific community usually dealt with legal phenomena in Africa as if they were the opposite of Western legal concepts developed over the past three centuries. Primitivism⁵ and scientific arrogance are never far apart.

This USO status of consuetudinary law also has to do with the fact that its rules are not formulated according to generally recognized standards or the impersonal criteria of modern laws; instead they manifest themselves as enduring patterns of behavior and the willingness of people to engage in certain forms of action that is stable over time. Now, these can be grasped and researched only by employing specific models, so I decided to use a matrix to represent consuetudes as legal acts. Legal acts not in the sense of written law, but in the sense of patterns that are expressed in behavioral rules that can be found in the various communities.

That is how I succeeded in responding to a phenomenon that I had just discovered and that challenged received bodies of research: legal pluralism. It was surprising that even by organizing my research according to the principles of a matrix analysis, I had already discovered the basic elements of the description of the commons – without being aware of it: a community in which everyone has status, an activity recognized and appreciated by the others, and a resource that – symbolically – permits the intentions and dispositions of everyone involved to be interconnected. In sum, a sanctionable system that amounts to “law.”

In my early works and in those of the 1970s in which I developed the anthropological models of the relationship of human beings to land (Le Roy 2011), I focused on the problem of communities. I could discern fundamental community-based conceptions that influence actions, and my discussions also included the civil-law concept of common goods. But however surprising from today’s perspective, the term “commons” never appeared in my work, even though the mbock thinking of the West African Wolof had already left its mark on my analyses.

Mbock – in the Wolof language – means kinship, and at its core, it also means sharing. At times, it refers to common ancestors, at others, to a particular field (with its specific area and boundaries), a herd, forest areas, and many other things. The discovery that sharing is preferred to exchange suddenly challenges all those insights that anthropology felt to be certain: namely, limited exchange within kinship relations, according to the theory of Claude Lévi-Strauss,⁶ the concept of the gift according to Marcel Mauss,⁷ that of property according to Maurice Godelier⁸, and others. Sharing is the predominant principle of organization in the commons. But I came to understand that only between 1980 and 1990 while I elaborated a new model for managing land and areas for fruit cultivation (Le Roy 1996). In that model, I attempted to explain how Africans (and other humans, too) combine various legal forms of property and resource uses in their complex practices – transcending cultural boundaries that we imagine as defining. Modern science considers the incompatibility or even incoherence of many such combinations practically a truism.

A Reform of Unforeseen Consequence

I told the stories of all these intellectual adventures in my synthesis on land policy on Senegal, from a theoretical perspective (Le Roy 2011). In it, I combined the legal relationships of individualistic modernity (public and private) with those of communitarianism (external, internal and coalitions). In other words, I correlated the categories publicand private, or a combination of the two, with external and internal, respectively. The concept of the common proved useful in ordering these relationships according to the following logic:

•  public = belonging to all
•  external = belonging to “n” groups
•  alliance = belonging to two or more groups
•  internal = belonging to one group
•  private = belonging to a juridical or physical individual, or legal entity

Doubtless, all these possibilities of collective organization did not already lead to what contemporary commons theory (Bollier 2014; Dardot & Laval 2014) considers to be “commons,” but since 1996, avant la lettre, at least this concept of the common has been at the center of my analyses of land policy. With a thirty-year time lag!

One of the reasons for this false start lies in the anthropological paradigm itself. It concerns itself with “the law” – in my case, regarding land use in Senegal. Accordingly, the conceptual and methodological tools that are required for understanding what has not and literally cannot be thought in the realm of consuetudinary law, can only be expressed in the intellectual categories of lawyers – in other words, norms and legal provisions. Whereas from the anthropologists’ perspective, “law [is] not so much what the texts say, but rather what the actors do with it” (Le Roy 1999). The texts are important, but how they are interpreted and applied is even more important. Or as a French saying goes, “It’s a long way from the cup to the mouth.” In the endogenous, oral African contexts, there are no texts that could be interpreted and no explicit norms which could be the subject of legal commentary. One can only observe the practices! By granting the requisite attention to the positions and roles of actors, their status, their actions and their interrelationships, anthropologists are able to escape the abstractions that fundamentally structure Western legal systems, but which are not to be found in the Wolof and other societies that anthropologists study.

The concept of the commons is an abstraction circulated first and foremost by the field of economics. And it is precisely in economics that Garrett Hardin’s all-too-famous “tragedy of the commons” parable has gained currency since its publication in 1968.⁹ For at least a generation this make-believe idea that shepherds are unable to use their pastures jointly has undermined and marginalized research on collective resource management. Incidentally, I admit that I did not take this laughable story seriously until the mid-1980s when I began to recognize the collateral damage of this pseudo-theory and its sloppy generalizations.¹⁰

The second reason for the false start of the commons in the intellectual debate concerns the theories on “development” applied to countries that were called “underdeveloped” at the time. By passing the Law Concerning the Territory of the Country,¹¹ Senegal finally emancipated itself from a development model that is fundamentally connected to the market and private property. This took place in the name of an African socialism that was at least as open to poet-president Léopold Senghor’s¹² Négritude – a poetic discovery of African roots – as it was to breaking with capitalism. Yet in this case, it was not about breaking with capitalism, but about placing limits on the outright dominance of private property norms – a legacy of the colonial era. Accordingly, Law 64-46 did not seek to abolish private property; it even permitted completion of all pending proceedings concerning private rights still awaiting resolution in land registry processes. Applications above and beyond this (for example, for recording further private real estate in the land registry) would thereafter be subject to the control of the administration. This provision was intended to prevent private property, which President Senghor called “egoistic” in a 1964 speech, from having direct effects on social relationships.

According to this reform, the only justification for transforming local, endogenous property rights into state property is to enable market transactions for the public good (Article 13), which then authorizes the state to transfer the rights to private individuals. This approach is based on the assumption that public institutions in Senegal, like any institutions of a liberal, democratic state, are neutral and fair-minded – a presumption that was unfortunately disproven by later facts. We shall see how this “nationalization” flirts with socialism. To this end, we shall first examine the wording of the law and then its practical application.

From the Wording of the Law…

Formally speaking, 96 percent of Senegal’s territory belongs to the nation-state; the remainder is publicly administered plots of land or private landholdings that have already been recorded in the land registry. This “territory belonging to the nation” has no legal personality and is not a legal entity, and so by default it belongs to the Senegalese state. Accordingly, what truly matters in a legal and political sense is the interpretation of the term “belong.” Article 2 interprets it in the sense of trust in a common-law context.

In other words, Law 64-46 changes the arrangements concerning possession of land in a way that is to prove forward-looking for Senegal, for colonial law usually treated these tracts of land as the private property of the state; they were considered unused, “ownerless” areas available to the administration for whatever it chose. Today, by contrast, they are entrusted to specific local administrators and divided into four areas subject to different regulations: 1) urban land; 2) development land (zones classées); 3) land in rural areas (zones de terroirs); and 4) pioneer areas.

A substantial part of this very brief law – just seventeen articles – is concerned with these zones de terroirs that are managed by rural collectivities (communautés rurales). This is where the most references to commons are to be found. The law states that “the land in rural areas (zones de terroirs) are used by members of the local municipalities who guarantee its management and conduct it under state control (…)” (Article 8) and that the decisionmaking power for specific uses (Article 9) or setting aside land (Article 15) lies with the relevant councils of the municipality rural community in question. That is one provision that would actually have authorized self-organization among people to create and formalize a culture of the commons – had party politics not interfered. And this is where real life comes into play.

…to Real Life

Building on my first fieldwork in 1969, and making use of my contacts with the Minister of Rural Development, Ben Mady Cissé, I wanted to get to the bottom of the land-policy questions raised by the experimental implementation of Law 64-46. Following the defense of my doctoral dissertation in 1970, I actually sent my research findings to President Senghor, who unfortunately entrusted them to his Minister of the Interior Jean Colin. Colin, a former colonial civil servant, had become Senegalese by marriage. He saw my findings as a threat to his own plans to place the rural communities under government supervision (in typical French-Jacobin manner) and manage them as regional grassroots collectives (collectivités territoriales de base). The transition from the principle of self-organization to integration in a central administrative network fundamentally changed the role of the rural municipalities’ communities despite the decentralization of government power in 1972.

Commons theory usually underlines the independence of commons from both the market and the state. While markets in Senegal were at a distance from commons, the state got quite involved in land use at the local level by reducing the autonomy of rural communities. The idea of the commons was not only nonexistent as a legal concept, but any disagreements about the commons were settled – at least officially.

Yet the Senegalese people on the ground continued to take up the original reform ideas. Despite a lack of sufficient administrative procedures and overly detailed interventions by the relevant divisions, people took on responsibility for managing their own resources and rallied behind an ethic to curb the spread of private property rights. Even the powerful religious Muslim brotherhoods cooperated, which cannot be said of domestic and foreign investors. They have called for repeal of Law 64-46 since 1980. But despite all the many controversies and conflicts, the law marked its fiftieth anniversary in 2014. Amazingly, despite political, economic, and procedural ambiguities and at times radical opposition in the highest echelons of the Senegalese state, in the end a logic of the commons prevailed in practice. Was this a unique case?

Functional Rather than Institutional Logic

In 2012, I decided to attend a conference for lawyers and legal historians at the University Paris VIII-Saint-Denis on the topic, “The Resurgence of the Commons: Between Illusions and Necessities,” whose debates were later documented in a publication (Parance and Saint Victor 2014). The conference painted a much more positive picture of the commons than was discernible at first from the invitation. I developed three arguments in my presentation:

1. Our modern society has lost the experience of commons and commoning.
2. The rediscovery of the commons suggests that the paradigm of sharing is more attractive than that of exchange.
3. The rise of commons necessarily raises the question about legal pluralism.

To provide evidence for this, I referred to two different experiences: land reforms in Africa and the island states of the Indian Ocean, as well as observations about French society in both urban and rural areas.

Land Reforms and the Limits of Private Property

Putting land reform into practice is always a delicate undertaking. In the African context, it also poses conundrums, because one often must create ownership of land in the first place where previously no such ownership existed – and at times the communities involved refuse to accept its existence at all. And for good reason: they feel safer if they are protected by kinship or other relationships where they live, and not by remote civil institutions directed by people unknown to them. The world has surely changed, but not for everyone, and not in a linear fashion.

The Senegalese land reform illustrated a combination of political concerns, lobbying by international donors, and uncertainty about the dynamics of rapidly changing societies. In the end, experts seeking to set policies face a dilemma. On the one hand, there is an officially proclaimed commitment to so-called modernization at the global level, which must in no case be abandoned; and on the other hand, the resilience¹³ of communities and societies in the face of countless changes must be supported or there may be outbreaks of unprecedented violence (Appadurai 2013). If it is impossible to reject “progress” in the modern capitalist sense, then at least changes must correspond to the needs of the entire population, and not only to those of the Westernized elite. And they must recognize the limits of reproducible and sustainable “development” driven by globalization.

Even if we researchers have not understood everything over the course of these roughly thirty years, at least we have all learned a lot, in particular through activities of the Association for the Advancement of Research and Studies on the Possession of Land in Africa (APREFA)¹⁴, which I chaired from 1986 until 1996. At the time, we established a technical committee – i.e., without political decisionmaking power – on possession of land and development, within the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We sought to bring together the researchers’ expertise with diplomats and development cooperation staff who need informed analysis. The committee pursued a notion of applied research and development cooperation practice, and at the same time sought to promote interdisciplinary basic research. Here, too, the central research question was about the extent and form in which private ownership of land was to be recognized.

Our work showed that private property¹⁵ and property (as its equivalent in common law) are necessary only in contexts in which the market, organized along capitalist principles, is ubiquitous. Various intermediate forms between a lack of titles of ownership on the one hand and “absolute” property on the other, can both accommodate the needs of local producers and reduce the risk of land-grabbing. The models for dominance and control of soil and natural resources described above are based on this assumption. So are the solutions used by various communities of practice who also implement a commons logic and ethic, but whose practices have rarely been described theoretically. This, too, is a lesson arising from our work: the illusions of development, according to which everyone was to somehow become a private property owner and entrepreneur. Such narrative ideals conceal the necessary displacement of populations, the consolidation of land rents into few hands, and the decline of smaller, more locally oriented producers.

Let us remember: good governance in twenty-first century land policy should include variable configurations of private and common property, always aligned to the needs of respective groups of people on the ground. The Senegalese experience began by desiring to control the expansion of private property rights. For this purpose, the state was accorded a role that it exceeded so tremendously that it in effect eclipsed the commons as a functional and legal entity in Senegalese villages. At the same time, we must recognize the importance of different types of property, just as various kinds of commons exist. This is precisely what my experience on the Comoros has taught me since 1986.

At the time, the FAO (the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) asked me to head a group of experts tasked with stabilizing land policy on the Comoros. A former French colony, the country experienced a revolutionary crisis between 1975, when it gained independence, and 1978. Among other things, this brought about the occupation of the former colonial properties, where vanilla and flowers for perfume were grown. It also resulted in all land registers being burned; entire archives were annihilated – and with them, the titles of ownership. In 1986, in an economically unstable situation and under pressure from international donors, the government was forced to clarify land policy in order to attract investors, and to do so without provoking new rounds of violence.

Since I was an expert on land rights, my job was to propose various scenarios. I outlined six options and described their potentials and limits. They ranged from “everything” (proactive and rapid expansion of private property to the entire population) to “nothing” (the government would settle for resolving the most sensitive conflicts, thus permitting local power relationships and local forms of negotiation to prevail). If, after almost thirty years, it looks like we are close to “nothing,” because no reform was ever formally put into practice, then we would be closing our eyes to the intellectual and technical revolution that permitted the functionaries of rural development to tackle the problem of land use according to the principle of inalienability that the government approved in 1987. The parliament of the Comoros was unable to fully implement the wording of the law because Hamed Abdallah, the president of the republic, was murdered in November 1989.

The future of major transnational corporations was in danger. And our challenge was now to stabilize smallholder agriculture, so that it could feed the country and guarantee the export of certain colonial goods. To do so, some innovations were necessary, for example, the enclosure¹⁶ of plant material on those lands that had previously been freely accessible and had been managed as village commons, but were used by individual families.¹⁷

In addition, technical consultants and rural technicians helped hold regular village administrative council meetings: reliable, but hardly formalized meetings of farmers and elders every Friday evening as they left the mosque. The meetings were intended to prevent problems and resolve local tensions before they developed into conflicts. The options I had presented in my legal texts were implemented in social practices because a culture of negotiation prevailed at all levels of political-administrative life, and because the notion of inalienability was favored over that of absolute property. The development consultants had two beneficial effects: they saved the government the political costs and uncertainties of land reform, and they guaranteed the citizenry a lifestyle that, although modest and often close to poverty, was more dignified than that of many of the country’s neighbors (such as Madagascar, which in 1991 had fallen back to its 1896 poverty level again).

Later on, I was to work in Madagascar, too, but only after two more assignments: the first one took me to Niger to contribute to drafting the country’s agricultural legislation (Code rural), the second to Mali, where I observed numerous legal inconsistencies concerning the possession of land. I had been tasked with helping to rescue the country’s cotton industry. All three countries – Niger, Mali and Madagascar – already had their own histories of land tenure law, so simply “copying and pasting” systems that seemed to work in other countries was unthinkable. That would have produced problems similar to those arising in the aftermath of colonialism: private ownership of land that could be used or sold for any purpose; undue state interference in property ownership; and no legal recognition of people’s traditional practices in managing land.

In Madagascar, I plunged into the so-called real economy and observed the wood energy sector. The communally managed eucalyptus plantings on the so-called tanety¹⁸ provided a livelihood for the local population. Then I expanded my research to the contractual relationships as I was interested in the substance and extent of leasehold clauses¹⁹ as well as sharecropping²⁰ and the true nature of the relevant property rights. I collaborated very closely with Alain Karsenty – a social economist working for CIRAD²¹, the French research center for international agricultural and development questions – and in 1996, I witnessed the adoption of the so-called GELOSE legislation by Madagascar’s government.

The law does not refer to “absolute property rights.” Instead, it authorizes the parties involved to negotiate resource management contracts, provided the relative security of property rights to land is guaranteed. In 2005 this step resulted in a more far-reaching land reform that permitted a trading office to be established in every municipality where so-called land certificates can be discussed and negotiated. The certificates are legally binding. They are legal documents that ensure the security of the transaction in the relevant administrative region, whereby the desire for more security naturally continues to be linked to the idea of (registered) land registry titles. The certificates provide an interesting middle course between communal management by like-minded people and land titles freely exchangeable on the market, but they are also called into question precisely for this reason. The experience in Madagascar has attracted a great deal of attention internationally, but has not been reproduced elsewhere.

Commons Re-emerge in France, Too

My other world of experience stems from the fact that since the mid-1970s, I have been thinking about how a scientific approach that up to then was exclusively Africanistic could be applied to French (or European) society. The basic idea was to establish legal anthropology, which was still an exotic field, “at home,” too, to get beyond ethnocentric perspectives. And while I was asking myself time and again what law actually was, I developed the idea to expand the fieldwork I had done in Senegal in 1969 and then in the Congo in 1972/73. I was looking for ways in which collective aspirations and communitarian practices were expressed in France – in the relationship between humans and land, and then in negotiations for managing conflicts in France’s juvenile justice system of the 1980s.

In exploring this question, I selected my own ethnic group as the object of investigation, since my cultural belonging made it easy for me to access certain pieces of information and behavior patterns; also, the people of Picardy in northern France are renowned for their consuetudinary law and I had privileged access to detailed information about a specific area within Picardy, the medieval county of Vermandois: it was genealogical material, “commonplace books,” a kind of calendar in which all economic activities, all sales and purchases, all work activities, special weather or political events, even laborers’ jokes, were recorded. The commonplace books as well as the business managers’ records provided the key to understanding how communal practices were retained in a world of farming that was increasingly subject to the capitalist market.

This world fell victim to the trenches on the Somme in 1916, which destroyed the historical legacy as well as the architecture and the landscape of the area.²² Since the eighteenth century, private property had become increasingly powerful in this region of the world. And in the nineteenth century, it continued to spread, but various social and legal practices still bore witness to common points of reference, to the obligation to “keep something jointly,” just as one “keeps company.” For example, commoning means sharing the art of hunting, the social protocols of weddings and funerals, the patronage of one’s own clients and workers, and all the traditions that express social belonging and solidarity in the face of life and death. In France as in Africa, the local agricultural milieu is rich in family relationships and professional ones. And just as in Africa, the limitations on one’s behavior that this entails are experienced and perceived intensely, but not mentioned – and certainly not to a stranger.

Pluralism is a condition for a community to function harmoniously, but this is usually not made a topic of discussion as such. My interviewees agreed in that regard, yet they had never thought about the problem of land from a pluralist perspective before! Examining the structure of ownership revealed that in the villages where I worked, everything belonged to someone. Not a single place was unowned. The land is expensive and among the best in France. Giving away even the smallest portion of land is unthinkable. And indeed there were only a few communal organizational structures in the swamp landscapes along the rivers running through the area.

Yet the physical areas devoted to specific common activities bear witness to longstanding common practices even on “private property,” e.g., playing fistball or gathering forest fruits. That was my first lesson. It was to be confirmed in the Amiénois, my own area of Picardy: a “common” function which is thus inherent and not made explicit can be superimposed on a right of ownership that is exclusive and absolute in principle. That function would then limit the exercise of this right, to the benefit of all members of a certain community insofar and as long as this function requires it. In the absence of players, for example, the fistball fields were transformed into community squares, flowerbeds, places for storing materials, and the like.²³ Functional logic triumphs over institutional logic!

These practices illustrate that notions about common space that usually remain in the dark emerge when one starts to look at common uses and the sharing of places. These notions about space are familiar in African societies, but have been forgotten here in Europe where geometrical notions about space dominate. Geometrical notions lead to the surveying and measuring of space, thus enabling people to assign an exchange value to the measure and finally to marketize what has been surveyed and measured (Le Roy 2011); social uses disappear from view. In a topocentric concept, by contrast, all spaces are identifiable by a place (location, point) that retain their own functional identities. These spaces can overlap if they fulfill different functions, and they can create borders and even territories if the functions are similar. The functions may be political, economic, religious, or otherwise. All of this characterizes how a territory is formed.

In other words, one can observe how commons with different functions overlap in a single area. At the same time, a physical space is generally assigned to concrete ownership rights according to the rules of positive law. Of course, such “layerings” of the law with various forms of control complicate the understanding of the people’s culture and their networks. After all, fundamentally speaking, as soon as we enter into the logic of the commons, some of our accustomed mechanisms for interpreting the functioning of a society and its formal regulatory authorities fail. At times, all they can do is represent information in a distorted way – or more likely, as caricatures.

I returned to Michel Alliot’s analyses (2003), in which he asserted that a community shares in three ways: areas of life, a particular type of behavior, and a decision area. This threefold sharing makes communities potentially totalitarian if the practices of sharing are not corrected by plural belongings and identities. By default, as a fact of life, we live in many worlds simultaneously, after all: family, school, political circles, professional life, sports, etc. In each of these worlds, we have a status of our own and an identity of our own. Even if societies transformed by market-oriented norms and state control no longer recognize traditional, communal, threefold sharing as a general rule, practices of sharing continues to flourish among communities comprised of people with multiple part-time identities. I call these groups “neo-communities.”

A supplement to Le Monde of April 4, 2014, on sustainable development, with the suggestive title “Betting on sharing,” took up the commons from the perspective of “alternative consumption.” Above all, it sketched the effects of carpooling and forms of living in cooperatives as promoted in France by the ALUR Act (Law on access to housing and urban redevelopment) following the German model. Journalist Marie-Béatrice Baudet commented that “customs are changing, especially among young people. That is certain, but not yet a revolution.” She quoted Remy Oughiry of the opinion research institute IPSOS: “The followers of collaborative consumption do not reject the consumer society at all. They simply want to regain control over it.” And Oughiry added, “The desire to own property remains very strong.”

Just as Monsieur Jourdain in Molière’s The Bourgeois Gentleman (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) discovered that he had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it, we have been practicing commoning through and in our common experiences that we no longer call common. After all, under the influence of neoliberalism, the concept of community has been transformed in French political debate into something negative, an antithesis to the idea of the good life and a negative buzzword in the political debate, with all the side effects that entails (Hatzfeld 2011).

As a result, we are confronted with a difficulty that I linked to an enigma in the land question at the beginning of this chapter. We participate in sharing behaviors that are often long-lasting, but are not identified as commoning. And if people try to name these behaviors, then tend to use terms like “common good,” which have a convenient semantic and political ambiguity but may in fact be undermined by the legal realities. In civil law, a good is a thing in private possession and which can be disposed of at will in any way desired, while a commons must remain intact as a collective resource and cannot be sold at will. For this reason, I will devote the final section of this essay to the legal status of the commons. In principle, this would require that new categories and legal concepts be introduced, but I will refrain from doing so due to a lack of space.

The Legality of the Commons

The commons, singular or plural²⁴, confront us with two problems: the fact that the law is silent, and yet a torrent of legal words purports to regulate what existing law cannot regulate effectively at all. This obvious contradiction requires a kind of anthropological demystification of the state of the law in order to clarify the difficulties of conventional law in managing commons.

The fact that lawyers abuse the law is explained by the very practices of their profession. Still, a majority of citizens continue to trust formal law to deal with problems that it can hardly grasp, or not at all. That is not acceptable. My anthropological experience as a researcher makes me concede that formal law, which we claim is universal in human thinking, is nothing but a construct that credibly corresponds to a particular temporal and local situation and has endured for several generations (for example, in Rome). In Europe, it is only since the seventeenth century that people have come to believe that law can take on a life of its own, largely independent of human agency and more and more specialized, finally brokering an alliance between the state and the market. Bound to political and economic power in this way, and in the course of the colonial adventures of the nineteenth century, this originally Western form of law has now spread to the entire world. Yet the rule of weapons and capital cannot make us forget that what is called “law,” and what goes hand in hand with the modern state, does not correspond to the experiences of three or four billion of our contemporaries around the world. For them, law instead triggers their mistrust and resistance.

In terms of the history of mankind, the law is only a folk law, a local interpretation of a process that is much more general. I call this process legality, or juricidité. If this legality is barely studied, it is because powerful political, economic and ideological interests prevent it. They are the same interests that do not permit the commons to be apprehended and named.

In addition, there is a problem in how to characterize law. If only the law itself is considered as autonomous (Le Roy 2009) – and if its interpreters derive normative categories from it and can treat them semantically as categories of law – then other experiences, whether they are Confucian, indigenous, Muslim, animist, or other traditions, are in principle heteronomous.²⁵ They may resemble law, but they are instead based on social traditions. Legality, by contrast, is identifiable in and through those practices that can be held legally responsible by an authority that is nominally empowered by the group itself to exercise appropriate sanctions. Legality in this sense is tautological because its grounding in social practice may or may not even exist!

This apparent lack of formal recognition of what is and is not law is deeply unsettling to European minds, especially for the Cartesian ones. For they tend to practice a kind of juridification (juridisme), to use Pierre Bourdieu’s (1986) term. Bourdieu considers this a bad habit of anthropologists and others – to formulate legal rules and thus orient rules along the particular conventions of the law in cases where there is actually only habitus, i.e., material for representing structural conditions of existence, preferences that are stable over time. For this reason, it is imperative that two things be respected: on the one hand, not to consider anything to be law which is actually only a standard enacted and recognized by the state (in other words, what is called positive law); and on the other hand, to treat everything else that emerges organically from communities as an authentic product of legality as relevant phenomena: the li²⁶ and fa²⁷ of Confucianism, the Hindu Dharma,²⁸ the Muslim Fiqh²⁹ and Sharia, customs and traditions, etc. Laws belong to the legal order and are its dominant expression, but other forms of social expression and regulation have always existed as well, and will continue to unfold – in particular, forms that regulate the relationships among people in managing their shared wealth. It is precisely these practices that we need to use if we are to enable people to “be commoners” and to take paths that are secured in a different way – not purely through the legality of laws and property rights. If we think that legality offers inappropriate answers, then we must rely on innovative forms of the legal order. And it is up to us to invent them.³⁰

From the Law to Control: About Masteries for Exploring a New Legal Order

Two innovations have already been put up for discussion. I now come back here to legal dominance and control over soil and resources. The idea has taken hold that one could exercise a right to land (ius in re) or could have a claim to be allotted a plot of land or to be a creditor. It has taken hold so firmly that it is difficult to admit that this, too, is only a specific product of our way of thinking. In this way of thinking, law becomes autonomous; it is considered something independent. It is also a condition for constituting the autonomy of the individual in society. The great adventures of democracy in England, America and France are all based on important declarations of rights. Other cultural traditions tend to try and conceive of human beings as parts of complex networks in their interactions with and their obligations toward others, as well as in their ability to mobilize these networks.

In order to do justice to both approaches, I have decided to use an intercultural concept, that of maîtrise,³¹ of dominance and control, which I first define as follows:

The concept of control mastery suggests a power and a force that grants particular responsibility to those who reserve the rights to a territory more or less exclusively because they are actually affected by what happens there. The concept permits sovereignty and property to be combined – the two concepts provide a “frame” for the debate about land use (…) – by emphasizing that rights and responsibilities can arise from a concrete relationship to space [Translator’s note: Here: “land”] and that this responsibility must be retained or ensured at its core. (Le Roy 1995:489)

By taking up anthropological and intercultural aspects, this concept of control, following Catherine and Olivier Barrière, enables the establishment of “a system for managing the assets of socioecological relationships at the heart of the internal and external relationships of communities.” (Barrière & Barrière 2002:315)

This concept – as well as further clarity about the forms in which resources and their communal management are appropriated and used – enables us to evaluate what does and does not stem from a commons logic in accordance with the conventions of each group, community, or society at a particular moment in its history. As a scientific approach, this concept does not require an a priori definition of what commons are “in their essence.” Instead, it focuses our view on what people share, and it moves strategies of communal management to the center of attention.

Conclusion

Making commons come alive again in everyday life and in the economic and legal systems seems like a revolution that can be interpreted through two lenses. Is it a rediscovery of precapitalist and prestate organizational principles or is it a break with the current political order? Perhaps even this framing does not do justice to the issue. In the epilogue to their book quoted above, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval write: “Commons are the new political rationality that must replace the neoliberal rationality” (2014: 572). They regard revolution as the self-institution of society, an idea of Promethean dimensions of greatness.

I believe their most important hypothesis is summed up in the following quotation: “As a principle, commons define a norm of inappropriability. This indeed requires establishing all social relationships anew, with this idea as a starting point: Inappropriability does not mean… that it would be impossible to appropriate something, but that it is socially unacceptable to appropriate it. In other words, that appropriating something as one’s private property is not permitted because that thing is reserved for common use.” (Dardot and Laval 2014: 583) “There are no common goods; what matters is creating commons.”³²

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

References

Alliot, Michel. 2003 [1980]. “Modèles sociétaux : les communautés,” Le droit et le service public au miroir de l’anthropologie, Paris. Karthala. S. 73-78.

Appadurai, Arjun. 2013. Condition de l’homme global. Paris: Payot.

Barrière Catherine aund Olivier. 2002. Un droit à inventer. Foncier et environnement dans le delta intérieur du Niger. (Mali), Paris. IRD.

Bollier, David, 2014. La renaissance des communs, pour une société de coopération et de partage. Paris. Éditions Charles Léopold Mayer.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. “Habitus, code et codification, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. Vol. 64, septembre, S. 40-44.

Dardot, Pierre aund Christian Laval. 2014. Commun, essai sur la révolution au XXI° siècle. Paris, Le Découverte.

Hatzfeld, Marc. 2011. Les lascars, une jeunesse en colère. Paris. Autrement, 2011.

Le Roy, Étienne. 1970. Système foncier et développement rural, essai d’anthropologie juridique sur la répartition des terres chez les Wolof ruraux de la zone arachidière nord, Sénégal. DiplomarbeitPH Dissertation. FDSE Paris. Ronéo.

———. 1995. “Le pastoralisme africain face aux problèmes fonciers,” Daget Philippe, Godron Michel, editors, Pastoralisme; Troupeaux, espaces, societies. Paris. Hatier AUPELF-UREF, S. 487-510.

———. (with A. Karsenty und A. Bertrand). 1996. La sécurisation foncière en Afrique, pour une gestion viable des ressources renouvelables. Paris. Karthala.

———. 1999. “Au delà de la relation public-privé, l’apparition de la notion de ‘communs’ dans les expériences actuelles de décentralisation administrative en Afrique francophone,” in Rösel Jacob und von Trotha, Trutz (Hg..), Dezentralisierung, Demokratisierung und die lokale Repräsentation des Staates. Köln, Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, S. 69-78.

———. 2009. “Autonomie du droit, hétéronomie de la juridicité.” In Sacco Rodolfo, editor, Le nuove ambizioni del sapere del giurista: anthropologica giuridica e traducttologia giuridica. Rome. Academia Nazionale dei Lincei, Atti dei convegni Lincei 253, S. 99-133.

———. 2011. La terre de l’autre, une anthropologie des régimes d’appropriation foncière. Paris, LGDJ, col. Droit et société, série anthropologie.

———. 2014 [2012]. “Sous les pavés du monologisme juridique, prolégomènes anthropologiques.” In Parance et al. 2014. S. 81-101.

Parance Béatrice. Saint Victor Jacques de, editors. 2014. Repenser les biens communs. Paris, CNRS éditions. Saïd Mahamouadou, 2009. Foncier et société aux Comores. Paris. Karthala.

Étienne Le Roy (France) is emeritus Professor of Legal Anthropology at the University Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris 1 where he has directed the research Laboratory for Legal Anthropology of Paris from 1988 to 2007 and Curricula of African Studies, from 1993 to 2003. Since the mid-Sixties he has devoted his fieldwork to the study of land tenure systems and policies governing the appropriation of territories in Africa. Among many publications, Le jeu des lois, (Paris, LGDJ, 1999) offers his theoretical contribution to a legal “dynamic” anthropology and La terre de l’autre, une anthropologie des régimes d’appropriation foncière is the synthesis of forty years of research on land issues.

Photo by Rosmarie Voegtli

The post Patterns of Commoning: How I Have Been Conducting Research on the Commons for Thirty Years Without Knowing It appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In Part III, we would like to delve more deeply. We believe that the diversity of the commons, which may appear confusing at first, can be seen as embodiments of other ways of being and a deeper set of ontological principles. This is precisely what the authors of Part III try to show us in different contexts. In the opening chapters, Étienne LeRoy realizes, after studying land use and property rights systems in Africa for thirty years, that he was in fact studying the commons; the tensions between formal legality and social functionality and legitimacy are illuminating.

Andrea Nightingale then provides a fascinating ethnographic account of how people on the coast of Scotland become and live as fishers through commons. What are the subjective experiences and cultural dimensions of this identity? Anne Salmond in her essay describes the relationships between some indigenous Maori communities, their fishery practices, and the ocean – and how their commoning has come into conflict with the politics and law of the New Zealand state. The other authors of Part III also draw on an anthropological perspective. They focus on commoning as a process of subjectification, outlining the factors, conditions, and ways of thinking that affect our actions as commoners – that is, the kinds of people that we are constantly becoming.

Bringing into focus this constant process of becoming is important. It helps emphasize our innate propensity to cooperate with each other and to seek stable social arrangements. As human beings, we are embedded in many and diverse relationships, and we depend on them. They forge our subjectivities. If the processes we are involved in are primarily mediated by money and can be easily measured and calculated, then we become traders or transactionists. We experience ourselves as customers or producers and come to build an identity and culture around those practices. We constantly deliver things, or things are delivered to us, and we become suppliers or recipients of services – often switching roles several times a day. Pressed into using market-oriented infrastructures and social habits, we practice the role of homo economicus daily, like actors rehearsing their roles or musicians practicing their parts, often driven by institutional priorities, political considerations, media spectacles, and the artistically contrived illusions of advertising.

If the stories of Part II have any lessons, it is that we must practice commoning; after all, it is only commoning itself that makes us commoners. And this “practice” cannot be achieved once and for all; it must be re-enacted time and again, and become a living, pulsating element of social life and culture.

In describing the attitudes, customs and actions of the people who manage common resources, solve problems, and defend their collective rights together – as Nigel Gibson does for the shack dwellers in South Africa – the authors of Part III help us more fully understand a point made in Intermezzo I – that (mature) commons point toward some very different ways of knowing, seeing, being and acting. All this requires a certain amount of perseverance because commoning is a process of constantly trying things out and putting them into practice. It requires the opportunity to make mistakes, to scrap ideas, to consult with others, and to start over, time and again. Commoning needs time and support – not least, and especially, from the realm of politics. It requires protected spaces for experimenting, for developing a sense of independence and confidence, and for acknowledging skepticism and resistance.

Furthermore, people must have psychic room and time for processing (both intellectually and emotionally) what is happening in a particular circumstance so that something different can emerge from the interpersonal relationships and the specific relationships between human beings and nature (or other resources). People must have space to make sense of their problems and circumstances, and be able to experiment in finding solutions, without the coercive threat of enclosure. This is an important political challenge: to retain open spaces for commoning. Simply having such spaces free from the threat of market enclosure – whether an open Internet, legally recognized forest commons or protection for lifeforms as shared wealth, not patented commodities – is an important political challenge. Some things must be kept as “nobody’s (private) property” – but many people’s responsibility. Eventually, this struggle, if it succeeds in creating a new and stable commons, produces its own treasured world of feelings that are experienced by its creators as entirely natural and self-evident.

This perspective on the commons requires that we adopt a different intellectual approach and methodology than one that focuses on inventing or changing laws in existing institutional structures to achieve healthier forests, cleaner bodies of water, more stable fish stocks, and so on. This very idea presumes that experts armed with sufficient authority and resources can generate, through a complex calculus, the results they wish. The struggle for a free, fair and sustainable future must always begin with the question of how we wish to live together, and how this communal life is to be designed so that nobody feels taken advantage of. This implies always asking: Who is affected? Who is responsible? Who can shape things, and for what reasons? Who can say no? Who can support or obstruct things, and why? Such questions inevitably lead to larger questions about the whole economic and social system.

Thinking like this and taking this approach moves us away from linear concepts of development. It cultivates a more helpful set of “pluriversal perspectives,” in the words of Arturo Escobar – the theme of his essay. This idea helps reveal that many struggles to defend territories and resources managed as commons are, in fact, ontological debates. Political and policy debates often dismiss the other’s worldview as “irrational” when the actual conflicts are fundamentally directed against the worldviews engendered by commoning.

Because each commons is forged by unique forces and circumstances, it is perilous to overgeneralize about commons by claiming a faux taxonomy of institutions, products or results. There are too many floating variables. Evolutionary scientist David Sloan Wilson, who vividly describes his collaboration with Elinor Ostrom in the final years of her life, refers to the many contingencies at play in the functioning of commons, something that receives support from institutional economics, complexity theory and evolutionary biology. Biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber takes this idea one step further at the end of this volume when he writes about reality itself as a commons that is a dynamic matrix of relationships that are alive. “Creative aliveness” is a fundamental dimension of commons, he writes: “Therein slumbers the opportunity to arrive at a new, relational understanding of the world, which encompasses not only structures, algorithms, and causalities, but also the actions and feelings of the actors, and that is thus no longer a dualism.”

Seen in this light, the commons opens up new opportunities for pursuing genuine freedom to shape one’s own sense of being, identity and purpose in the present moment. Unlike the asocial, individualist fantasies celebrated by market culture, a serious commitment to freedom requires enduring human relationships, a commitment to nature and place, and concrete social actions developed together. Any real emancipation in the future will depend upon the creative energies and innovations that flow from such freedom.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

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