Beyond Regions and Ideology: Using Cultural Theory to Explain Risk Perception in Canada

Cultural theory (CT) has been widely used to explain variations in risk perception but has rarely been tested in Canada. This contribution represents the most thorough attempt to adapt CT to the Canadian context. Study results suggest that respondents’ commitment to egalitarianism was strongly correlated with risks from technology, while respondents’ commitment to hierarchism was strongly correlated with risks from criminal or unsafe behaviours. Respondents’ commitment to individualism was also correlated with risks from criminal and unsafe behaviours but differed from hierarchism in that individualism was not correlated with risk perceptions from prostitution and marijuana use. Respondents’ commitments to fatalism were strongly correlated with risk perception of vaccines. These conclusions are reinforced by results from a survey question that tests the extent to which such cultural predispositions map onto the myths of nature hypothesized by CT and by a survey experiment that tests how cultural commitments predict perceived risks from a controversial pipeline.

FORAGERS, FARMERS AND FISHERS: RESPONSES TO ENVIRONMENTAL PERTURBATION

This paper proposes an anthropological approach to understanding responses to environmental perturbation, one that is aligned with the humanistic and environmentalist agendas of political ecology while seeking to develop a more generic understanding of processes that shape human action in, as well as on, the worlds that people experience. We outline a comparative model that recognizes and prioritizes the role of prevailing expressions of ethos and sociality in conditioning responses to perturbation and takes variation in those expressions as focal to analysis. The model concerns the complexity of social systems, identifying two dimensions of complexity that we label ‘the involvement of parts’ and ‘the individuation of form’. Drawing on our own ethnographic studies of two, linguistically-defined, societies in Papua New Guinea and two, activity-defined, communities of commercial fishers in Australia we show, first, how differences in sociality and ethos may influence short-term responses to environmental perturbation and, secondly, how environmental perturbation may, in the longer term, influence the emergence of new forms of sociality and ethos. Where new forms do emerge, we argue, the trajectory of change will be strongly influenced by people’s prior understandings of their relations with environment and with each other, with their understandings of the extent to which they themselves were causal agents and, hence, their understandings of the extent to which they may act to ameliorate the likelihood or the effects of similar perturbations in the future.Keywords: environmental perturbation, social change, myths of nature, blame

Truth of the Myths of Nature

The term "nature myths" designates narratives presenting whatis as intelligible in terms of value and meaning. Such narratives function to motivate ecological activism by articulating such presuppositions as the conviction that what we do matters, destruction of nature is intrinsically wrong, and the possibility of nondestructive human beings. However, such narratives motivate only if they are regarded in some sense as true. The question is, in what sense? Not in an objectivist sense (e.g. von Ranke), since value-even if intrinsic-is a subject related reality. Not in an idealist sense (e.g. Cassirer), since they respect the autonomy of reality. Nor in a "depth" sense of expressing an alleged "essential condition of guilt" (e.g. Heidegger and Patocka), since this would remain a positivist description, albeit one level removed. Instead, I propose treating nature myths as orienting the world (e.g. Jaspers) and guiding human components therein. As such, nature myths can be said to be true (as in Ricoeur’s "adamic" myth) or false (as in the myth of "Man the Master") inasmuch as they provide or fail to provide adequate guidance for sustainable coexistence with all of the Earth.