A National Vocation

This article writes engineers into the history of Lebanese political-economic thought. Historians of Lebanon's postindependence period have emphasized how a narrow, elite “consortium” espoused a national ideology that authorized laissez-faire monetary and trade policies. These intellectuals and businessmen invoked environmental determinism to claim that trade, tourism, and services were Lebanon's national vocation. This article reveals that engineers formed an influential and underexamined countercurrent advocating statist developmentalism. Engineer-bureaucrats saw the postindependence era as an opportunity to claim their profession's status and redefine bourgeois culture and its relationship to governing institutions according to their conceptions of modernity. By reinterpreting the consortium's environmental narrative of Lebanese history, the hydrological engineer Ibrahim Abd-El-Al portrayed rational development of water resources and agriculture as an organic expression of national identity. These efforts cultivated a critical and technically literate reading public that favored statism and shaped how that public understood their national subjectivity and relationship to the natural world.

Battle ground: Environmental determinism and the politics of painting the Iraqi landscape

Beginning in the late 1940s, Iraqi artists began writing critiques of the Euro-American art movement impressionism, claiming that the way the movement framed the environment was not suited to the Iraqi landscape. Embedded in this argument was the notion that Iraqis could not paint European-style landscapes because of the fact that their environment was different from that of Europe. At the same time, paintings of the Iraqi landscape by European artists in the early twentieth century reinforced the idea that the Iraqi landscape was other than the European one because of its bright sun and empty desert, concepts familiar from nineteenth-century Orientalist discourse. This article will trace the way European painters’ representations of Iraq as other ultimately contributed to Iraqi painters seeking out a distinctive form of European landscape painting in the 1940s.

Rawa Pening and the Surrounding: A Study of Environmental Determinism

Rawa Pening Lake is one of the landscapes in Semarang Regency. The existence of the lake has social, cultural, and economic impacts on the people who live around it, giving rise to a pattern of relationships between humans and nature. The relationship pattern between Lake Rawa Pening and the surrounding community is studied in terms of environmental determinism, that the environment shapes the culture and characteristics of the surrounding society Environmental determinism provides a scientific foundation to see how society lives and to see the society's mindset that is formed as a result of the pattern of human relations with nature. This research also focuses on the community's meaning of Lake Rawa Pening. The method used in this research is qualitative and data collection techniques with in-depth interviews, participant observation, documentation, and literature study. The research was conducted in Bejalen Village, Ambarawa District, Semarang Regency. The results of interviews and literature studies show that there are several patterns of community relations with Lake Rawa Pening such as livelihoods by region, livelihood by groups, work equipment, local knowledge, and traditions

Environmental history: introduction

The papers presented here serve as examples of intellectual, political, and social responses to climate-related phenomena and their consequences. They grapple with several key issues including the agency of nonhuman nature and environmental determinism, environmental governance, climate as a cultural construction, the history of environmental ideas and discourse, environmental narratives, and the commodification of nature.

Power and all its guises. Environmental determinism and locating ‘the crux of the matter’

Can we theorize the relationship between discourses that antagonize each other? In a recent article, Arponen et al. demonstrate the tension between two different research models, and spotlight the compelling impact these methods have on archaeological interpretation. In response to their observations, this paper theorizes how we can understand the position of the researcher in relation to the events they analyse. Using Michel Foucault’s approach to the ‘discursive formation’ and Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism, in this reaction I argue that focusing on a single and most important point (the crux) is problematic, and theoretically outline how creating conceptual space for polymorphous causality can aid the analysis of a ‘dispersion of events’.

The Discourse of Ethnicity

Chapter 2, “The Discourse of Ethnicity,” identifies environmental determinism as the primary discourse in early medieval East Asia within which cultural differences were discussed and evaluated. Those differences can be regarded as “ethnic” if they were understood to be both inherent/immutable and politically salient. The chapter explores the evolution of this discourse in the Central Plains region of the Yellow River, particularly as it was applied to the peoples south of the Huai River, especially the Wu people, or Wuren. The conclusion is that the discourse increasingly became more ethnicizing, and clearly identified the Wuren as a distinct, and inferior, ethnic group.

Conclusion

This section has established that medieval East Asia did in fact have a discourse of ethnicity. Environmental determinism, which dominated the conceptualization of cultural variation in the medieval Sinosphere, was certainly not the same as the modern concept of ethnicity, but it is comparable in its “harder” forms, in which geographically determined cultural characteristics were regarded as inbred, inherent, and immutable, and almost always as inferior. In the Central Plains from the third to the sixth centuries, the discourse of environmental determinism saw a significant drift toward these “harder” forms, strengthening ethnic discourse and facilitating the ethnicization of cultural Others....

Adaptasi Etnis Buton sebagai Petani Garam di Desa Tendakinde

A human relationship to the environment is that humans must be able to choose whether to be passive towards or need to dominate the environment. In this case the element used in the research is the adaptation of the Buton community to become salt farmers. The location used as the research site was the village of Tendakinde, Wolowae Sub district, District of Nagekeo, East Nusa Tenggara Province. The problems include, (1) How is the adaptation of Buton ethnic to the coastal environment so that they succeed in becoming salt farmers? (2) What factors cause the Buton community to adapt to the environment of the Kaburea coast so that they become salt farmers? The aim was to find out the adaptation of Buton ethnic to the coastal environment so that they succeeded in becoming salt farmers as well as factors that caused Buton ethnic groups to settle and become salt farmers in Tendakinde village, Wolowae Sub-district, Nagekeo district until now. The concept of adaptation as a human survival strategy, the concept of salt farmers, a socio-economic concept. Thus the theory used by the theory of environmental adaptation was initiated by Khon Bennet in 1976, and the theory of environmental determinism was triggered by several figures, one of which was Julian Steward. The technique of data collection is by first determining the informant, environmental observation, as well as in-depth interviews and literature studies. This data was analyzed using descriptive approach in the form of written and oral words from people and observed behavior. The initial interaction was only aimed at selling caught fish and trading copra with a barter system and to replenish drinking water supplies, but because of the increased intensity of communication it develop into a close relationship. The interaction began in 1939 and continues to be maintained as a kinship legacy. After being acculturated with Toto culture, Buton ethnic groups were introduced to how to cultivate land for farming. The procedure for processing this field is one of the elements of indigenous ethnic Toto culture as a result of their adaptation to the environment that serves the livelihood. After acculturation, the Toto ethnic group was also introduced to the procedures for shipping and fishing. They began to learn how to catch fish using bubu, knew how to read the direction when sailing using the location of star signs, as well as many new things related to the sea. Knowledge of processing the salt they obtained while sailing, finally practicing it in the village of Kaburea and ethnic Buton also managed to become salt farmers. One of the factors that influence the adaptation of Buton ethnic as salt farmers in Kaburea are environmental factors and family economic factors and socio-cultural community.