Arquivo da tag: Cultura

Do neighborhood conditions affect school performance? (The University of Chicago Urban Network)

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March 1, 2012

A recent report issued by the Center on Education Policy predicted that 48 percent of US public school students would not meet reading and math standards by 2014, as legally mandated by the decade-old No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The law was originally established to address the comparatively low test scores of low-income students. With the limited success of NCLB, the discussion about school performance has again grabbed the headlines.  While social scientists have always been interested in the dynamics behind the low achievement of students living in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods, in recent years researchers have been trying to establish precisely the extent to which neighborhood conditions, net of other factors, influence educational achievement.

Better neighborhoods, higher test scores

Social scientists Jens Ludwig, Helen Ladd, and Greg Duncan used data from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment to investigate the impact of neighborhood environment on educational outcomes. The MTO experiment was conducted in five cities: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Families who volunteered were randomly assigned to different treatment groups. Whereas the experimental group received counseling and vouchers to move into low-poverty neighborhoods, the second group simply received regular Section 8 subsidies without being encouraged to move out of high-poverty areas. A third group functioned as a control group and received no subsidies at all. Using data from the Baltimore site, Ludwig, Ladd, and Duncan found that elementary school students in the experimental group who had moved to better neighborhoods scored about one-quarter of a standard deviation higher in reading and math tests than children in the control group. Robert Sampson, Patrick Sharkey, and Stephen Raudenbush foundsimilar results when they investigated the impact of neighborhood disadvantage on the verbal ability of African American children.  Based on intelligence tests administered within the framework of the Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods project, they found that children who live in disadvantaged neighborhoods on average score four points lower than children living in better-off areas—a result that is almost equal to missing a year of schooling.

Better neighborhoods, no improvement?

A more recent analysis of MTO data from all five cities generated very different results. Social scientists Lisa Sanbonmatsu, Jeffrey Kling, Greg Duncan, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunnfound that math as well as reading scores did not significantly improve for children aged between six and twenty. The children were assessed four to six years after they had moved to a low-poverty neighborhood. Sanbonmatsu and her colleagues also revisited the children in the Ludwig Baltimore sample and found that the Baltimore elementary school children did not sustain their educational gains. In the final results of the MTO experiment, published in October 2011, Sanbonmatsu and her colleagues confirmed that there are few significant improvements in test scores ten to fifteen years after children had moved to less disadvantaged neighborhoods. There was no significant difference in achievement between those children who stayed in high-poverty areas and those who had moved away. The researchers suggested that the results may be related to the segregated, low-quality schools the children continued to attend even though they had moved to low-poverty areas.

In a review of neighborhood-effects studies and a reanalysis of the MTO data, sociologistJulia Burdick-Will and her colleagues challenged this null finding. They argued that the results of MTO, the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, and other studies showed that neighborhood effects may work in nonlinear ways. The size of the effect visible may be contingent on other factors, such as exposure to violence or the relative disadvantage of the neighborhood the child lives in. Children who come from very disadvantaged neighborhoods may experience larger neighborhood effects than those living in moderately disadvantaged areas. Consequently, the size of the neighborhood effect depends on the city. In high-poverty areas of Chicago and Baltimore, the MTO data showed an improvement in test scores. In Boston, Los Angeles, and New York, where neighborhoods are comparatively less disadvantaged, the researchers did not find clear test-score improvements.

Cultural factors

Sociologist David Harding argued that neighborhood effects mainly work through cultural pathways. Children living in disadvantaged neighborhoods are exposed to a greater variety of educational choices than their peers in other areas. He suggested that living in a culturally heterogeneous neighborhood has a negative impact on educational achievement. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescence (AddHealth), he showed that inner-city children observe educational behavior ranging from dropping out of high school to graduating from college. This greater variety of educational models seems to be affecting children’s own educational aspirations, by forcing them to decide among too many competing alternatives. Analyzing the same data set in another recent article, Harding also found that high levels of neighborhood violence may have a detrimental effect on high school graduation rates. He found that living in neighborhoods with high rates of violence was associated with significantly lower chances of high school graduation, regardless of family structure, income, and language spoken in the household.

Multigenerational effects

Sharkey and sociologist Felix Elwert have recently argued that neighborhood poverty has a cumulative effect across generations. Relying on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), they showed that children who were raised in poor neighborhoods by parents who had grown up in similarly disadvantaged communities had cognitive ability scores more than half a standard deviation below their peers. The children scored on average 9.27 points lower on the reading test and 8.36 points lower on the problem-solving test than children who were raised in non-poor neighborhoods by parents who had grown up in similarly non-poor areas. Though the authors demonstrated the presence of multigenerational effects through advanced statistical models, they explained that disentangling the precise interactions underlying the complex web of mechanisms at work over generations was impossible.

While researchers try to disentangle the impact of neighborhoods and generational effects on schooling, policy makers are beginning to consider alternatives to NCLB. In September of 2011, President Obama announced that states may now opt out of the program under certain conditions. With schools failing to meet the test score standards of NCLB, the government is rethinking its approach to helping the most disadvantaged students.

The right’s stupidity spreads, enabled by a too-polite left (Guardian)

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Conservativism may be the refuge of the dim. But the room for rightwing ideas is made by those too timid to properly object

by George Monbiot, The Guardian

Self-deprecating, too liberal for their own good, today’s progressives stand back and watch, hands over their mouths, as the social vivisectionists of the right slice up a living society to see if its component parts can survive in isolation. Tied up in knots of reticence and self-doubt, they will not shout stop. Doing so requires an act of interruption, of presumption, for which they no longer possess a vocabulary.

Perhaps it is in the same spirit of liberal constipation that, with the exception of Charlie Brooker, we have been too polite to mention the Canadian study published last month in the journal Psychological Science, which revealed that people with conservative beliefs are likely to be of low intelligence. Paradoxically it was the Daily Mail that brought it to the attention of British readers last week. It feels crude, illiberal to point out that the other side is, on average, more stupid than our own. But this, the study suggests, is not unfounded generalisation but empirical fact.

It is by no means the first such paper. There is plenty of research showing that low general intelligence in childhood predicts greater prejudice towards people of different ethnicity or sexuality in adulthood. Open-mindedness, flexibility, trust in other people: all these require certain cognitive abilities. Understanding and accepting others – particularly “different” others – requires an enhanced capacity for abstract thinking.

But, drawing on a sample size of several thousand, correcting for both education and socioeconomic status, the new study looks embarrassingly robust. Importantly, it shows that prejudice tends not to arise directly from low intelligence but from the conservative ideologies to which people of low intelligence are drawn. Conservative ideology is the “critical pathway” from low intelligence to racism. Those with low cognitive abilities are attracted to “rightwing ideologies that promote coherence and order” and “emphasise the maintenance of the status quo”. Even for someone not yet renowned for liberal reticence, this feels hard to write.

This is not to suggest that all conservatives are stupid. There are some very clever people in government, advising politicians, running thinktanks and writing for newspapers, who have acquired power and influence by promoting rightwing ideologies.

But what we now see among their parties – however intelligent their guiding spirits may be – is the abandonment of any pretence of high-minded conservatism. On both sides of the Atlantic, conservative strategists have discovered that there is no pool so shallow that several million people won’t drown in it. Whether they are promoting the idea that Barack Obama was not born in the US, that man-made climate change is an eco-fascist-communist-anarchist conspiracy, or that the deficit results from the greed of the poor, they now appeal to the basest, stupidest impulses, and find that it does them no harm in the polls.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to what two former Republican ideologues, David Frum and Mike Lofgren, have been saying. Frum warns that “conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics”. The result is a “shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based ideology” which has “ominous real-world consequences for American society”.

Lofgren complains that “the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital centre today”. The Republican party, with its “prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science” is appealing to what he calls the “low-information voter”, or the “misinformation voter”. While most office holders probably don’t believe the “reactionary and paranoid claptrap” they peddle, “they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base”.

The madness hasn’t gone as far in the UK, but the effects of the Conservative appeal to stupidity are making themselves felt. This week the Guardian reported that recipients of disability benefits, scapegoated by the government as scroungers, blamed for the deficit, now find themselves subject to a new level of hostility and threats from other people.

These are the perfect conditions for a billionaires’ feeding frenzy. Any party elected by misinformed, suggestible voters becomes a vehicle for undisclosed interests. A tax break for the 1% is dressed up as freedom for the 99%. The regulation that prevents big banks and corporations exploiting us becomes an assault on the working man and woman. Those of us who discuss man-made climate change are cast as elitists by people who happily embrace the claims of Lord Monckton, Lord Lawson or thinktanks funded by ExxonMobil or the Koch brothers: now the authentic voices of the working class.

But when I survey this wreckage I wonder who the real idiots are. Confronted with mass discontent, the once-progressive major parties, as Thomas Frank laments in his latest book Pity the Billionaire, triangulate and accommodate, hesitate and prevaricate, muzzled by what he calls “terminal niceness”. They fail to produce a coherent analysis of what has gone wrong and why, or to make an uncluttered case for social justice, redistribution and regulation. The conceptual stupidities of conservatism are matched by the strategic stupidities of liberalism.

Yes, conservatism thrives on low intelligence and poor information. But the liberals in politics on both sides of the Atlantic continue to back off, yielding to the supremacy of the stupid. It’s turkeys all the way down.

Twitter: @georgemonbiot

Climate and the culture war (The Washington Post)

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By Michael Gerson, Published: January 16, 2012

The Washington Post

The attempt by Newt Gingrich to cover his tracks on climate change has been one of the shabbier little episodes of the 2012 presidential campaign. His forthcoming sequel to “A Contract with the Earth” was to feature a chapter by Katharine Hayhoe, a young professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas Tech University. Hayhoe is a scientist, an evangelical Christian and a moderate voice warning of climate disruption.

Then conservative media got wind. Rush Limbaugh dismissed Hayhoe as a “climate babe.” An Iowa voter pressed Gingrich on the topic. “That’s not going to be in the book,” he responded. “We told them to kill it.” Hayhoe learned this news just as she was passing under the bus.

A theory about the role of carbon dioxide in climate patterns has joined abortion and gay marriage as a culture war controversy. Climate scientists are attacked as greenshirts and watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside). Skeptics are derided as flat-earthers. Reputations are assaulted and the e-mails of scientists hacked.

A few years ago, the intensity of this argument would have been difficult to predict. In 2005, then-Gov. Mitt Romney joined a regional agreement to limit carbon emissions. In 2007, Gingrich publicly endorsed a cap-and-trade system for carbon.

What explains the recent, bench-clearing climate brawl? A scientific debate has been sucked into a broader national argument about the role of government. Many political liberals have seized on climate disruption as an excuse for policies they supported long before climate science became compelling — greater federal regulation and mandated lifestyle changes. Conservatives have also tended to equate climate science with liberal policies and therefore reject both.

The result is a contest of questioned motives. In the conservative view, the real liberal goal is to undermine free markets and national sovereignty (through international environmental agreements). In the liberal view, the real conservative goal is to conduct a war on science and defend fossil fuel interests. On the margin of each movement, the critique is accurate, supplying partisans with plenty of ammunition.

No cause has been more effectively sabotaged by its political advocates. Climate scientists, in my experience, are generally careful, well-intentioned and confused to be at the center of a global controversy. Investigations of hacked e-mails have revealed evidence of frustration — and perhaps of fudging but not of fraud. It is their political defenders who often discredit their work through hyperbole and arrogance. As environmental writer Michael Shellenberger points out, “The rise in the number of Americans telling pollsters that news of global warming was being exaggerated began virtually concurrently with the release of Al Gore’s movie, ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’”

The resistance of many conservatives to arguments about climate disruption is magnified by class and religion. Tea Party types are predisposed to question self-important elites. Evangelicals have long been suspicious of secular science, which has traditionally been suspicious of religious influence. Among some groups, skepticism about global warming has become a symbol of social identity — the cultural equivalent of a gun rack or an ichthus.

But however interesting this sociology may be, it has nothing to do with the science at issue. Even if all environmentalists were socialists and secularists and insufferable and partisan to the core, it would not alter the reality of the Earth’s temperature.

Since the 1950s, global temperatures have increased about nine-tenths of a degree Celsius — the recent conclusion of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project — which coincides with a large increase in greenhouse gasses produced by humans. This explanation is most consistent with the location of warming in the atmosphere. It best accounts for changing crop zones, declining species, thinning sea ice and rising sea levels. Scientists are not certain about the pace of future warming — estimates range from 2 degrees C to 5 degrees C over the next century. But warming is already proceeding faster than many plants and animals can adapt to.

These facts do not dictate a specific political response. With Japan, Canada and Russia withdrawing from the Kyoto process, the construction of a global regulatory regime for carbon emissions seems unlikely and may have never been possible. The broader use of nuclear power, the preservation of carbon-consuming rain forests and the encouragement of new energy technologies are more promising.

But any rational approach requires some distance between science and ideology. The extraction and burning of dead plant matter is not a moral good — or the proper cause for a culture war.

michaelgerson@washpost.com

Antas dos brancos, veados grandes, onças de criação (ComCiência)

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Artigo

Por Felipe Ferreira Vander Velden
10/12/2011

O antropólogo francês Philippe Descola argumentou certa vez que, se as Américas contribuíram de modo decisivo com produtos agrícolas, vegetais, para a economia e a culinária europeias, o traço distintivo do fluxo oposto – da Europa para terras americanas –bem poderia ter sido a introdução de numerosas espécies de animais domesticados no Novo Mundo: bois, cabras, ovelhas, cavalos, galinhas, porcos, e mesmo cães e patos, cujas populações nativas alcançavam apenas certas porções do continente (América do Norte e Central, Andes e a região do escudo das Guianas).

Pode-se afirmar, todavia, que o que de mais importante os europeus trouxeram para a América – e, aqui, passo a referir-me especificamente à América do Sul e, ainda mais precisamente, às terras baixas do continente, uma vez que a zona andina (as terras altas, montanhosas) possui características muito particulares quanto a essas questões – não foram os animais em si, mas a própria domesticidade enquanto critério definidor de certa relação entre seres humanos e animais. Com efeito, não havia animais domesticados, no sentido estrito do termo – populações animais mantidas em estreito contato com agrupamentos humanos por meio do controle reprodutivo e da seleção artificial – por estas plagas; havia, isto sim, e em abundância, animais que chamamos familiarizados, ou amansados (na tradução do inglês tamed, ou do francês apprivoisée), isto é, trazidos como filhotes da floresta e criados no convívio com humanos nas aldeias: aquilo que os povos Tupi costeiros denominavam xerimbabos.

Credito: Revista de Atualidade Indígena, ano II, nº 8, 1978. Funai. Primeiro contato com os Matis, no vale do Javari (AM): os índios pediram filhotes de cães aos funcionários da Funai

Essa domesticidade foi, evidentemente, transformada aqui, de modos diversos, processo que continua a se desenrolar hoje em dia. Não obstante, se a presença de animais de origem exógena nas aldeias indígenas na Amazônia e em outras partes das terras baixas sul-americanas despertou algum interesse (pouco, é verdade), este foi sobretudo anedótico ou, quando muito, impressionista: “abundam cães” em uma aldeia Tapirapé, ou os Parintintim “criam galinhas em quantidade” ou, ainda “os Bakairi adotaram a criação bovina no início do século XX”. Nada mais do que isso, carecemos de pesquisas detalhadas que compreendam o lugar ocupado por essas espécies alienígenas nos universos sociais, cosmológicos, técnico-econômicos e rituais das diferentes sociedades indígenas no continente, mesmo naqueles locais em que esses seres emergiram inequivocamente como de capital valor simbólico e de crucial importância no conjunto de práticas e conhecimentos nativos, tal o cavalo entre os Kadiweu (inclusive chamados, no período colonial, de “índios cavaleiros”) no Mato Grosso do Sul e os bovinos entre os Wayuu (também conhecidos como Guajiro) na fronteira venezuelana-colombiana.

Tal ausência dos animais domesticados de origem europeia nas reflexões de cientistas sociais contrasta fortemente com a ubiquidade desses seres nas aldeias, no passado e atualmente e, provavelmente, expressa uma faceta daquilo que a antropóloga Joanna Overing definiu como “um desinteresse antropológico pela domesticidade e pelo cotidiano”. Focada em uma interpretação que toma, como definidora das sociocosmologias nativas das terras baixas, a relação com a alteridade definida pelo idioma da afinidade (aliança) e atualizada em mecanismos de abertura violenta para o exterior como a caça, o canibalismo, o xamanismo e a guerra, a etnologia e a história indígenas da América do Sul têm deixado, tradicionalmente, de lado as dimensões “internas” das sociedades nativas, os modos por meio dos quais a sociedade é criada a partir das relações de consanguinidade, de filiação, de amizade, de companheirismo, de mutualismo, de confiança, de afeição. Ora, qualquer um que tenha animais de estimação, ou que se interesse minimamente pelo tema, sabe que este é o vocabulário absolutamente compreensível e corrente: falar de animais domésticos é falar em convivência (ou convivialidade, como a mesma Joanna Overing prefere dizer).

A afinidade, portanto, parece não servir bem como modelo para abordar as relações entre índios e animais domesticados. Serve para a caça, mas não para a domesticidade, melhor descrita pelos idiomas da familiarização e da consanguinidade. Os Karitiana – povo de língua Tupi-Arikém em Rondônia, com quem trabalho há dez anos, e entre os quais desenvolvi uma pesquisa sobre a presença desses seres exóticos – afirmam que “cachorro é como filho”, destacando, assim, a relação de familiaridade/consanguinidade que corta as fronteiras entre o humano e o não-humano. Como tal, os animais criados por eles assumem uma posição em tudo análoga à das crianças humanas: há um genuíno prazer na criação desses seres, no cuidado cotidiano com eles; prazer que, inclusive, porta dimensão estética, pois se diz que os animais de criação (como são chamados), como as crianças, “enfeitam a aldeia”, tornando-a agradável ao olhar de todos; há, ainda, a percepção de que esses seres cumprem um ciclo de vida tal qual o dos humanos: filhotes são mimados e protegidos, mas animais adultos devem portar-se como indivíduos autônomos e responsáveis, cuidando de suas próprias necessidades e desejos – da mesma forma que qualquer humano maduro; por fim, há de se frisar que o cuidado com os animais domésticos é, sobretudo, assunto de mulheres, competência de uma esfera de saberes e afetos propriamente femininos.

Como filhos, matar esses animais com quem se convive diuturnamente torna-se uma questão complexa e prenhe de implicações afetivas e emocionais. Há, nas aldeias Karitiana, sempre muitas galinhas, e os índios afirmam que as comem; entretanto, conforme relatado por outros autores, os Karitiana “dizem que comem, mas não comem”. Ao menos, não comem as galinhas de sua criação, pois não parece haver problema em deliciar-se com galinhas alheias, roubadas do vizinho, compradas na cidade ou cedidas para outrem. Apenas duas vezes vi pessoas terem de sacrificar suas próprias galinhas em função da necessidade de se ter carne para o almoço – e, como é amplamente sabido, na Amazônia uma refeição sem carne está lamentavelmente incompleta: nas duas ocasiões as aves foram perseguidas por homens armados de arco e flechas, numa perfeita simulação do ato de caçar. Assim, para que sejam tornadas alimento, as galinhas domésticas precisam, antes, ser convertidas em caça, des-familiarizadas violentamente, interpondo entre elas e a panela a ação das armas que buscam quebrar o vínculo forte entre os animais e as mulheres que as criam. O que não quer dizer que o consumo dessa carne seja, deste modo, tornado simples e desprovido de sentimentos: toda morte de um animal gera sentimentos ambíguos e, no caso dos animais de criação, genuína tristeza e raiva (contra o agressor), especialmente nas mulheres e nas crianças.

Para comer, pois, é necessário caçar: o termo Karitiana para (animal de) caça (himo) é, significativamente, o mesmo para carne. Os animais de criação, então, não são carne e, em certo sentido, não são mesmo animais, presos à convivência direta e contínua com seus pares humanos: o que define a animalidade propriamente dita – a intolerância à presença humana, a agressividade, a fuga, a timidez e, acima de tudo, a comestibilidade (pois caça é carne e é animal) – falta aos animais domésticos, comensais dos homens e mulheres, seus protegidos, seus filhos. Sua eventual conversão em carne, como visto acima, envolve operações simbólicas precisas não isentas, contudo, de fortes implicações afetivas.

O idioma da predação, portanto, não parece prestar-se à domesticidade. Isso, quanto aos animais introduzidos pelos brancos: este ser por definição doméstico não é familiarizado no sentido usual do termo – tornado familiar de um afim genérico, como acontece, por contraste, com o animal trazido do mato e amansado nas aldeias, conforme Carlos Fausto. Ele parece, desde já, portar uma familiaridade intrínseca, talvez por vir sempre acompanhado de humanos (brancos) e, em certo sentido, ser feito por eles: “criado”, na dupla acepção da palavra em português (fazer e cuidar). Talvez por isso os Karitiana sustentem uma diferença notável entre os animais nativos e aqueles introduzidos: estes, diz-se, “não têm história”, destacando-se que não existiam nos tempos míticos – o que denominam “tempo antigamente” – e não foram feitos pelos criadores do universo Karitiana, como aconteceu com os xerimbabos nativos. Vieram “pela mão dos brancos”, como contam as narrativas dos primeiros encontros de vários dos homens e mulheres mais idosos, que viram essas curiosas criaturas, pela primeira vez, na infância, lá pelos anos de 1940.

Assim, esses animais – exóticos, exógenos, introduzidos – portam uma dupla marca de estranheza, advinda do fato de terem se apresentado sempre na companhia dos colonizadores brancos: não partilham da história antiga do povo Karitiana, e não habitam a floresta (gopit), espaço por excelência dos animais criados pelo demiurgo Botyj no início de tudo. Estranheza que os Karitiana buscaram administrar por meio da designação dessas novas espécies de seres, feita a partir das criaturas que já conheciam: assim, cavalos viraram “veados grandes” (de ty), bois tornaram-se “antas dos brancos” (opoko irip’), cachorros, “onças de criação”, “onças domésticas” (obaky by’edna). Galinhas, denominadas opok ako, “o muito dos brancos”, quer seja, aquilo que os brancos possuem e carregam em abundância, sinaliza outro tema importante da percepção Karitiana não só desses animais, mas também dos brancos e de seus bens em geral: a multiplicidade, ou a capacidade de reproduzir-se de maneira descontrolada e exagerada. De fato, xerimbabos nativos só muito raramente reproduzem no interior das aldeias; galinhas, contudo, contrariam essa esterilidade aldeã de forma notável; assim fazendo, apontam na direção das formas de apropriação contemporânea desses animais entre numerosos povos indígenas nas terras baixas.

Mulher Tapuia, de Albert Eckhout (1643) pintada no período da ocupação holandesa do Nordeste. Símbolo da ferocidade e do caráter diabólico, a presença do cachorro está em consonância com a imagem que os europeus tinham dos índios do interior nordestino, selvagens e bárbaros em comparação com os Tupi da costa. A obra também pode sugerir a convivência e relação próxima existente entre índios e cães – introduzidos com a colonização – no sertão desde, pelo menos, o século XVII

O animal doméstico: história e antropologia

A introdução de animais domesticados de origem exógena em populações indígenas é uma constante na história do Brasil, intercâmbio inaugurado na própria certidão de nascimento do Brasil, a carta de Pero Vaz de Caminha, que narra o encontro entre índios e portugueses no litoral sul da Bahia em abril de 1500, e que conta como os índios reagiram à aproximação de cabras e galinhas trazidas nas embarcações europeias. Desde então, esses seres exóticos espalharam-se rapidamente pelo território nacional, naquilo que o biogeógrafo Alfred Crosby definiu como “imperialismo ecológico”: a paulatina transformação da biota nativa em paisagens cada vez mais parecidas com a Europa, colonização movida pela “pata do boi”, no dizer de Capistrano de Abreu. Conhecemos razoavelmente bem os mecanismos e os efeitos da “frente de ocupação pastoril” – conforme a definiu Darcy Ribeiro – mas apenas em suas linhas-mestras; o detalhe permanece-nos obscuro, e sabemos menos ainda dos modos como a ocupação do Brasil por esses animais estrangeiros impactou as múltiplas sociedades indígenas que habitavam, e habitam, a região. Menos ainda se sabe sobre como esses seres – bovinos, caprinos, suínos, equinos, caninos, galináceos – ocuparam a Amazônia, dado que, nas áreas de floresta densa, os animais não podem se mover livremente, dependendo da condução de seres humanos: dado para o qual atentam os Karitiana, que afirmam ter conhecido esses seres desde sempre “na companhia dos brancos”. Uma história da ocupação animal da floresta amazônica ainda está por ser escrita.

Ocupação cuja face perversa estamos vendo se agravar nos dias correntes, com o avanço da pecuária sobre a hileia, na última fronteira do processo que tornou o Brasil o dono do maior rebanho de bois e o maior exportador de carne bovina do planeta. Este processo de transformação do país em um gigante global do agronegócio tem sido feito às custas da brutal destruição da Amazônia e da sua transformação em extensas pastagens.

Vários povos indígenas na Amazônia – como os Karitiana – e alhures não escapam a essa febre agropastoril, e vêm, crescentemente, se interessando por projetos de implementação de criação animal em suas aldeias. Vinculando a introdução da pecuária a políticas de segurança alimentar e combate à fome e à desnutrição, os proponentes desses projetos – ligados a esferas estatais e a organizações não-governamentais – ignoram aspectos importantes da natureza das relações entre índios e animais. O mecanismo de familiarização – animais tratados como filhos – acima evocado, por exemplo, traz importantes implicações para a tripla relação entre animais, povos indígenas e esses novos agentes de formulação e implantação de políticas públicas. Com efeito, muitos dos projetos destinados às aldeias indígenas, em seus componentes geração de renda e economia, preconizam a instalação da criação animal em escalas ampliadas. Esses projetos desconsideram, ainda, a experiência, pois as perspectivas de sucesso têm se mostrado, em geral, pífias: colecionam-se fracassos – galinheiros destruídos, bois abandonados, gramíneas forrageiras invasoras espalhando-se descontroladamente, abate indiscriminado, desconhecimento técnico – mas as razões para eles ainda são pouco conhecidas.

Olhar para a introdução de animais domesticados em povos indígenas nas terras baixas da América do Sul implica, portanto, também estar atento às inflexões locais de processos macropolíticos e macroeconômicos. Ademais, questões de saúde pública (zoonoses) também se colocam, sem falar na reflexão – ainda por fazer, mas mais do que necessária – sobre a precária condição de muitos desses seres nas aldeias vis-à-vis à legislação ambiental e de proteção aos animais do país e os intensos debates, acadêmicos e leigos, acerca da defesa e da libertação animal.

A antropologia pode e deve, seguramente, ser uma ferramenta a contribuir com esse importante conjunto de debates públicos, ao olhar com cuidado para as modalidades indígenas de constituição das relações entre humanos e animais. O foco nos afetos, emoções e vínculos, contudo, sugere que um passo a mais deve ser dado na análise consagrada de taxonomias e de representações indígenas de seres e da relação com esses mesmos seres. Não o animal como signo, ou símbolo, mas – conforme defende o antropólogo John Knight – o animal como sujeito, como partícipe ativo e agente na construção e reconstrução das sociabilidades comunitárias. Animais e humanos como elementos de um conjunto de laços de natureza simbiótica, naturezaculturas, na inspirada sugestão de Donna Haraway. Só assim poderemos compreender melhor o que é o animal domesticado, esta figura ambígua e complexa entre a natureza e a cultura ou, como dizem os Karitiana, entre a casa e o mato e entre a aldeia e a cidade. Assim poderemos avaliar com justeza o papel central que tiveram esses seres não só na história geral do Novo Mundo, mas nas histórias particulares de cada um de seus povos nativos.

Para saber mais:

– “Rebanhos em aldeias: investigando a introdução de animais domesticados e formas de criação animal em povos indígenas na Amazônia (Rondônia)”, de Felipe Vander Velden. Espaço Ameríndio, vol. 5, no. 1, 2011, disponível em http://seer.ufrgs.br/EspacoAmerindio/article/view/16602)

– Número especial da Revista de História da Biblioteca Nacional (no. 60, setembro de 2010) dedicado a abordagens historiográficas sobre os animais, e que traz alguns artigos sobre a introdução de espécies no Brasil colonial. (disponível apenas para assinantes)

Felipe Vander Velden é professor do Departamento de Ciências Sociais e do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social da Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCar). A tese de doutorado (Inquietas companhias: sobre os animais de criação entre os Karitiana, Campinas, Unicamp, 2010) de Felipe Vander Velden, na qual discute aprofundadamente os temas apenas evocados neste artigo, será publicada, em breve, pela Alameda Casa Editorial.

Profetas da chuva do sertão, por Raquel de Queiroz

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“Vá, por exemplo, ao sertão nordestino, nos meses de novembro e dezembro. O povo, lá não tira os olhos do céu, em procura dos prenúncios. Pequenas nuvens ao poente… pequenas, claro, ainda não é tempo das grandes, mas, se elas se juntam para o sul, quer dizer uma coisa; se aparecem ao poente, a coisa muda. Só o que elas não dizem é que a coisa será essa: como todos os adivinhos do mundo, gostam de se envolver em mistério. E aquelas nuvens inocentes são branquinhas como se fossem feitas só de gelo e neve, não, têm nada a ver com chuva, são só enfeites do céu…” (p. 13)

QUEIROZ, Rachel. Existe outra saída, sim. Fortaleza: Fundação Demócrito Rocha, 2003.

Desenvolvimento e destruição (Ciência Hoje)

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O antropólogo Luiz Fernando Dias Duarte aborda na sua coluna de dezembro as contribuições críticas de uma antropologia voltada ao enfrentamento direto dos desafios que o projeto de desenvolvimento econômico apresenta para o planeta e as sociedades contemporâneas.

Por: Luiz Fernando Dias Duarte

Publicado em 02/12/2011 | Atualizado em 02/12/2011

Desenvolvimento e destruiçãoA locomotiva a vapor, ícone da Revolução Industrial, foi ao mesmo tempo um símbolo do progresso triunfante e um agourento fantasma a recobrir de cinza e fumaça os campos e as cidades. (foto: Jim Daly/ Sxc.hu)

Há poucas categorias tão onipresentes nas discussões atuais sobre a condição de nossas sociedades quanto a de ‘desenvolvimento’. Cadernos inteiros de nossos jornais dedicam-se regularmente aos desafios e dilemas que cercam o projeto do desenvolvimento econômico de nosso país ou de toda a humanidade.

De um modo geral, estamos informados sobre a permanente busca das políticas governamentais modernas de progresso material por meio da expansão das bases da atividade econômica, de sua circulação mercantil e de sua apropriação pelo consumo generalizado.

Mas sabemos provavelmente mais ainda sobre os riscos e ameaças que essa expansão vem acarretando para nossa população e para o planeta em geral. Nos últimos dias, quem não se assustou com o vazamento de petróleo na costa fluminense ou não se preocupou com a retomada das obras da hidrelétrica de Belo Monte no Rio Xingu e com a possibilidade de abertura do Parque Nacional da Serra da Canastra à exploração de diamantes?

Ainda aqui na Ciência Hoje On-line, meu colega Jean Remy Guimarães acaba de descrever com detalhes os desastres ambientais decorrentes da mineração desenfreada de ouro no Equador (Leia coluna Sobre ouro, ceviche e arroz).

A questão não é nova, porém. Desde o começo da Revolução Industrial contrapõem-se sistematicamente os desejos de uma constante e infinita melhoria das condições de reprodução econômica das populações e os alertas sobre a destruição física e a degradação humana acarretadas pelo industrialismo e pelas relações capitalistas de produção.

A imagem da locomotiva a vapor foi ao mesmo tempo um símbolo do progresso triunfante e um agourento fantasma a recobrir de cinza e fumaça os campos e as cidades. O próprio socialismo, crítico da desumanização proletária, não renegou o princípio do avanço ilimitado das forças produtivas e dá, ainda hoje, o aval à desastrosa modernização chinesa.

Mancha de óleo provocada pelo vazamento no poço da Chevron na Bacia de Campos, no norte fluminense. Ao mesmo tempo em que somos informados sobre a busca permanente das políticas governamentais de progresso material, sabemos dos riscos envolvidos, para a população e o planeta em geral. (foto: Agência Brasil)

Antropologia e desenvolvimento

Acaba de se realizar em Brasília a 2ª Conferência de Desenvolvimento (Code), organizada pelo Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada (Ipea), com o propósito de “debater e problematizar as diversas formulações possíveis para conceitos, trajetórias, atores, instituições e políticas públicas para o desenvolvimento brasileiro”.

Diversas associações de ciências humanas juntaram-se a esse debate, tendo a Associação Brasileira de Antropologia organizado e participado de duas séries de mesas em que se assumiu o desafio do encontro.

Todos reconhecem a insanidade do sistema atual de exploração a qualquer custo dos recursos ambientais

Há duas vias possíveis para a discussão da relação entre desenvolvimento e antropologia.

A primeira segue o rumo da institucionalização crescente de uma ‘antropologia do desenvolvimento’, dedicada ao conhecimento das formas pelas quais se organiza esse campo, ou seja, as ações voltadas para o progresso material e a promoção social das populações humanas em situações desprivilegiadas ou vulneráveis em todo o planeta. Isso envolve particularmente o que se desenrola no plano internacional, associado à dinâmica da globalização.

A segunda via é a do reconhecimento e articulação de um vasto número de linhas de pesquisa antropológica que tem em comum abordar questões de reprodução, identidade e transformação social em contextos desprivilegiados, vulneráveis e subordinados a dinâmicas de grande escala, inclusive transnacionais.

No entanto, esses trabalhos não se voltam prioritariamente a uma problemática do ‘desenvolvimento’ em si. Constituem, assim, não uma especialização disciplinar, mas um foco, a que se pode chamar de ‘antropologia e desenvolvimento’.

No encontro de Brasília, antropólogos, sociólogos, economistas e cientistas políticos examinaram de diversos ângulos as formas contemporâneas do dilema do desenvolvimento.

“Todos reconhecem a insanidade do sistema atual de exploração a qualquer custo dos recursos ambientais e todos denunciam a violência com que os grandes projetos de desenvolvimento são implantados, em detrimento do interesse de amplas populações locais.”

Debate sobre Belo Monte no Congresso
Congressistas discutem com comunidades indígenas violações de direitos humanos na região onde funcionará a usina de Belo Monte, um dos grandes empreendimentos desenvolvimentistas do governo federal. (foto: Antonio Cruz/ ABr)

Desatino coletivo

Embora haja um grande ceticismo por parte desses atores em relação às possibilidades de plena assunção pelos governos atuais de uma nova visão de ‘desenvolvimento sustentável’, eles não pretendem esmorecer em sua ação combinada de estudos e intervenção pública, visando a conscientização e responsabilização pelo destino não apenas de nossa geração, mas de todo o planeta e, com ele, de toda a humanidade.

Essa verdadeira militância científica denuncia os procedimentos autoritários com que se afirmam os empreendimentos desenvolvimentistas e também os saberes que justificam tais políticas com argumentos naturalistas, tecnicistas, em que um abstrato ‘bem comum’ ocupa o lugar concreto do bem de todos e de cada um.

Luta por uma disposição democrática na condução dos projetos econômicos de grande escala, atenta ao que já se vem chamando de ‘justiça ambiental’ ou de ‘modernidades alternativas’.

É generalizada a consciência de que não se poderá mudar de um dia para o outro o paradigma do melhorismo iluminista, dessa aspiração de construção de um paraíso de consumo sobre a terra.

“Há conhecimento suficiente sobre a vida social, econômica e política de todo este mundo para deixar claro que o paradigma terá que ser desviado de um curso insano”

Há hoje, porém, conhecimento suficiente sobre a vida social, econômica e política de todo este mundo para deixar claro que o paradigma terá que ser modificado, nuançado, desviado de um curso insano.

A política da competição entre as nações, armada pela crescente interdependência econômica global, é por ora um estímulo ao desatino coletivo. A destruição se dá no Brasil, assim como no Equador, na China ou na África do Sul.

A antropologia se esforça para conhecer e dar a conhecer os infindáveis nódulos de tão grande trama e, nessa luta, não pode calar ao se deparar com os mil infernos localizados que essa inglória busca de gozo incendeia aqui e ali.

Mais do que o sentido, é o destino global do humano que está em jogo.

Luiz Fernando Dias Duarte
Museu Nacional
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

Senado deve voltar a debater acordo ortográfico (Agência Senado)

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JC e-mail 4394, de 29 de Novembro de 2011.

Novo uso do hífen, resistência de alguns países e dificuldades dos professores em compreender e repassar as novas regras são alguns dos argumentos.

A senadora Ana Amélia (PP-RS) solicitará que a Comissão de Educação do Senado (CE) promova no início do ano que vem uma audiência pública sobre o novo acordo ortográfico. Enquanto o Brasil deve concluir a implementação do acordo em 2013, outros países de língua portuguesa enfrentam resistências – inclusive Portugal. Uma das providências que podem ser estudadas pelo Senado é a criação de um grupo de trabalho sobre o assunto.

Ana Amélia anunciou a audiência logo após se reunir, nesta segunda-feira (28), com o professor Ernani Pimentel. Autor de diversas críticas ao novo acordo ortográfico, o professor criou o Movimento Acordar Melhor para divulgar suas ideias.

Simplificação – Pimentel defende a simplificação das regras, porque, segundo ele, o novo acordo contém “incoerências, incongruências e muitas exceções”. Um dos vários exemplos que citou foi a dificuldade para se compreender quando se deve usar ou não usar o hífen.

– Por que ‘mandachuva’ se escreve sem hífen e ‘guarda-chuva’ se escreve com hífen? É ilógico. E há muitos outros exemplos – afirmou ele.

De acordo com Pimentel, “nenhum professor de português de nenhum país signatário é capaz de escrever totalmente de acordo com as novas regras e, como os professores não têm condições de compreender, os países não terão condições de implantá-las”.

Pimentel apoia a criação de um grupo de trabalho, no âmbito da Comissão de Educação do Senado (CE), para discutir o acordo. Ele também sugeriu que os países signatários criem uma espécie de órgão similar à Real Academia Espanhola, que seria responsável pela uniformização da ortografia nos países de língua portuguesa.

Mercado e soberania – Ao comentar as resistências externas ao acordo, ele lembrou que alguns países alegam – “com razão”, observou – que as novas regras foram pensadas somente a partir de Brasil e Portugal, ignorando especificidades culturais de outras nações de língua portuguesa. Ele também disse que há uma divisão em Portugal, entre os que defendem o acordo e os que preferem adiá-lo devido aos interesses do mercado editorial português (que, dessa forma, não enfrenta a concorrência de livros brasileiros em seu próprio país e também nos países africanos de língua portuguesa).

Sobre a atuação do Ministério das Relações Exteriores, Pimentel declarou que “o Itamaraty está correto ao querer a unificação, mas está errado ao permitir que o interesse político desconsidere as questões educacionais, pedagógicas e culturais”.

– Ao forçar o acordo, o Brasil está sendo visto como impositor. É importante que haja discussão entre os países – avaliou ele.

Ações judiciais – Segundo Pimentel, o acordo ortográfico que vem sendo implantado no Brasil contém alterações feitas posteriormente – e sem a aprovação do Congresso Nacional – pela Academia Brasileira de Letras. Ele afirma que isso é ilegal e, por isso, entrou com uma ação judicial para exigir que o Congresso ratifique (ou não) tais mudanças. Além disso, o professor solicitou na Justiça que o Brasil tenha mais tempo para discutir e implementar o acordo ortográfico.

Saber dos xamãs jaguares do Yuruparí é nomeado patrimônio imaterial (Folha de S.Paulo)

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27/11/2011 – 06h19

DA EFE

O saber tradicional dos xamãs jaguares do Yuruparí, na Amazônia colombiana, entrou neste domingo para a Lista Representativa do Patrimônio Cultural Imaterial da Humanidade da Unesco.

O comitê de analistas da Unesco aprovou sua inclusão durante reunião em Bali, na Indonésia, ao considerar que este modo de vida, herança milenar dos ancestrais, é um sistema integral de conhecimento com características físicas e espirituais.

“Esta notícia é um enorme esperança para a comunidade que tem plena certeza de que esta decisão é um instrumento de salvaguarda desta sabedoria”, disse o diretor de Patrimônio da Colômbia, Juan Luis Isaza, em seu discurso de agradecimento.

Os xamãs do Yuruparí transmitem “uma cosmovisão associada a um território sagrado para eles, um conhecimento graças ao qual acham que o mundo pode estar em equilíbrio”, explicou Isaza.

Os jaguares de Yuruparí, que habitam nas cercanias do rio Pirá Paraná, transmitem por via masculina e desde o nascimento o Hee Yaia Keti Oka, uma sabedoria que foi entregue a eles desde suas origens pelos Ayowa (criadores) para cuidar do território e da vida.

O diretor de Patrimônio da Colômbia detalhou que esta cultura está ameaçada pela perda de interesse dos mais jovens e a interação com a “arrasadora cultura ocidental”.

A designação também ajudará, segundo Isaza, a combater os perigos que espreitam este povo que viveu sempre isolado do “contato com colonos, madeireiros, mineiros e políticos que, segundo os xamãs, vulneram o território e o equilíbrio”.

“O reconhecimento da Unesco serve para proteger e resgatar não só seu pensamento, também seu território, porque estão profundamente relacionados”, assegurou Isaza.

Durban climate change conference: ‘Sideline the UN’ says leading academic (The Ecologist)

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Matilda Lee

7th November, 2011

Ahead of the latest UN climate conference, leading academic Anthony Giddens explains why it’s time to switch to smaller agreements between major world powers

Lord Anthony Giddens

Lord Anthony Giddens, a Labour peer and former director of the London School of Economics

Ecologist: In your book the Politics of Climate Change, you give credit to the green movement for challenging orthodox politics on climate change, yet you say that it’s flawed at source. Why?

Anthony Giddens: I call myself a non-green green because I support a lot of the objectives of some elements of the green movement – globally and locally – but I am not ideologically opposed to nuclear power like many greens, although I am reserved about it. I believe in the primacy of science in trying to resolve these issues, especially around climate change. Although I am interested in protecting the forests in terms of CO2 and so forth, I think what we are trying to save is really a decent future civilisation for us. There are aspects of the development of the green movement that I am not very comfortable with, including not all conservation measures, because while some are worthwhile, sometimes you have got to take risks in the interests of controlling greater risks. Climate change, to me, being one of the primary risks we face in this century.

As far as this country is concerned, I was pleased that the coalition sustained most of the framework that Labour had put into place and I think that is important because as you know, in the US the complete polarisation of climate change issues is really unfortunate for not just the US, but the rest of the world. Here, at the moment, we don’t have that. Of course you can carp about what the government is doing now, whether it’s going back on some of its initial presumptions, and to some degree this is true. Nevertheless, there is a pretty large cross-party consensus. Ideally, I’d like every country to have that. Climate change is not a left-right issue, it concerns everybody. You’ll need all sorts of coalitions to support climate change progressive policies. But there is this tendency to polarise around left or right, especially in the US.

You need long-term policies, you don’t want parties coming in that reverse the positions of the parties before them. My feeling about the UK is that we’ve got a reasonable framework but we don’t have results from that framework. The UK is still way down the league in terms of proportion of energy taken from renewables, if you exclude nuclear. It’s more the framework than a set of substantive achievements. You have to be a bit reserved about British position or other positions where it’s all ends and objectives rather than the substantive achievements, which are in short supply across the world.

Ecologist: You mention renewable energy. Do you think the government has shot itself in the foot with backtracking on the feed-in tariff?

AG: Yes, I do. Unfortunately this has happened in other countries too. Some of the most impressive achievements in introducing renewables happened in Portugal and Spain. They introduced feed-in tariffs and one or two other subsidies and they achieved results which no one could quite believe because they introduced a high proportion of renewables within five or six-year period. We used to think, like in the case of Denmark or Sweden, it took about 25 years to do this. Now with new technology, and if you organise things right, you can do it quickly. I read an account saying that there was one day last year when Portugal met 100 per cent of its energy needs from renewables.

Even though I’m worried about the experiments in Germany, I think it was also quite interesting, the commitment to phase out nuclear power and see if you could achieve 20 per cent of renewables by 2020. I think that could be a very useful experiment for the rest of the world because Germany does have a lot of technological know-how.

Ecologist: How much value do you put on reaching an international post-Kyoto agreement?

AG: I think the UN is an indispensable organisation in global terms, but I think we need to judge in terms of substance and achievement. So far, it’s been pretty limited. I don’t think one could say in spite of 20 years next June since Rio and 17-18 years since climate change negotiations started that those negotiations have had much impact really, in terms of reducing carbon emissions, which is the only feasible measure. I think we have to keep them going, but I think we have to recognise that you’ll need more substantial agreements alongside them that would be bilateral or regional.

I think we are already seeing a change in the pattern of leadership globally, in respect of climate change issues, as a result of what happened in Copenhagen and in Cancun in which some of the large developing countries assumed much more of a leadership position, even as compared to the industrial countries. I think Brazil, under Lula has made important developments. It’s a country which has very unusually energy patterns, since about 80 per cent of its energy comes from non-fossil fuel sources. Latin America is a region that could have a leadership position, hopefully China will. I think the Chinese over the last 6-7 years have really woken up to the dangers of the glaciers melting, the threat of climate change which to me is so real and frightening in its outer edges in terms of risks.

The main joker in terms of international arena is the United States. I was hoping that there’d be important bilateral agreements between China and the US, which would lead to substantial programmes of energy transformation. So far they’ve had talks but these haven’t led to much. Lack of American leadership I find deeply disappointing. When I wrote the first edition of the book, I had high hopes that President Obama would be an inspirational leader for climate change policy. Partly because I think they put the Health Care bill ahead of everything else, it served to polarise the country and now federal leadership is more or less stymied in the US.

Ecologist: Should policy makers be focusing more on adaptation?

AG: We have to focus on adaptation anyway, because it’s close to certain as one could be that fairly high levels of climate change is embedded in the system. I think a lot of lay people hearing that world temperatures increased by 1.4 degrees think that doesn’t sound like very much. But when you think that in the Arctic it has increased several degrees and the main consequence will be extreme weather of all kinds – a combination of droughts and flooding – then you see the thin envelope that we live within, certainly in the poorer countries, we should be spending a lot on what I call “pre-emptive adaption”. But we are not. All the promises of billions flowing from the developed to developing countries – where’s the money? It would surprise me a lot if it was forthcoming in Durban given the economic situation in Europe, which is supposedly one of the main sources of this money. Again you have this distance between ambition and reality.

Ecologist: To what extent do you think developed countries can dictate the terms of development to less industrialised countries?

AG: I don’t think they can dictate terms at all. Whether we like it or not we are in a more multi-polar international environment. Many people wanted that but it is proving to be very difficult to exert systematic governance when you’ve got a more multipolar system. No one is going to be able to tell China or India or Brazil what to do. We hope they will emerge as more important leaders than in the industrial countries, but industrial countries must reform because they’ve created most of the greenhouse gases historically anyway.

I think the main thing is to focus on substance everywhere. It seems to me very important that we concentrate attention on areas where you can really make substantial progress and don’t just talk in terms of endless frameworks and negotiation.

Ecologist: Which areas are you referring to?

AG: I don’t think we are anywhere near resolving the issues without a fairly heavy dose of innovation. Both globally and nationally we should be spending to try and produce such innovation and even though you can’t predict the future, you can certainly see some areas where it would be very valuable. For example, if we could find some way of storing electricity on the large scale, it would be very valuable in terms of promoting the spread of renewable energy. I think we have to start spending now on geo-engineering. At the moment we are just miles away from being able to control carbon emissions. The most effective form of geo-engineering, if someone could make a breakthrough would be finding some way of taking greenhouse gas emissions out of the atmosphere on a large scale. We don’t know whether it will ever be possible to do that but I think we have to invest and investigate to try and find some projects that wouldn’t be counter-productive. As you know, they could be very dangerous as people may interpret this to mean we don’t need to do anything because they’ll be some fix at the end, which is in no sense guaranteed.

I think we need to support hundreds of bottom-up innovations that are going on around the world – whether they are social, political or economic. My view is that we’ve also got to have what I call “utopian realism”. We are living through the end of industrial civilisation as it existed for the past 150 years driven by fossil fuels. This will involve changes in the way people live, which could in principle be very profound over a 20 or 30-year period. I think we’ve got to experiment on how we produce these changes and make them converge with desirable critical outcomes.

One concrete place I try to think about is transportation, which is still driven 95 per cent by oil. Look what the car has done to city centres. I’m sure we could construct more creative cities, more creative transport systems. I quote the MIT study on the future of automobiles – where they envisage a “mobility internet” and big differences from how we organise transport now – bringing down private and public distinctions, organising Smart Cars to enter in transit in different parts of transport systems. Having a fair proportion of driver-less cars on the roads, trying to reintegrate that with designing more effective communities within cities. All of us have got to explore different development models. If we have, after the recession, several years of 1 per cent growth, surely in the West there is a new invitation to discuss the nature of growth and its relationship to prosperity and wider political goals like Tim Jackson suggests in his book Prosperity without Growth.

Ecologist: Why do you suggest we need to do away with the term ‘sustainable development’?

AG: It became a popular term ever since the Bruntland report. Now there are similar terms like “green growth” and the “green economy”. To me, if you examine them they fall apart a bit. Let’s get something more substantial, something that’s not just an empty phrase. Let’s work out what it actually means on the ground and how you might achieve that. If you take the green economy, I’m in favour of it, I might prefer low-carbon economy but the point is we don’t know what a green economy is like. We haven’t done enough intellectual or practical work on it. It’s not going to be an economy where you simply have a few more renewables in it and everyone lives the same way.

Let’s say Denmark has successfully reduced its emissions to zero. It’s going to change lots of things all across the economy: job creation, job structures, transportation systems, lots of things about how people live. We need to work on this some more, and not just make empty claims. The same thing goes about green growth. We know you can create jobs through renewable technologies in some contexts, but they’ve got to be net new jobs and we’ve got to look at what happens when people lose their jobs in sectors that become less prominent.

I think we will get most growth through lifestyle change rather than the introduction of renewable technologies. When people invented the idea of the coffee shop 15 years ago, no one really thought we wanted better coffee because we lived, in the US and UK with bad coffee for hundreds of years. What people who set these things up did was to anticipate emerging trends – it wasn’t just having a dozen new kinds of coffee it was that it intersected with the information technology revolution, with people having more flexibility with where they work and therefore using computers in new places. If you generalise that, there will be many changes produced by a movement towards a more sustainable society.

The Politics of Climate Change, second edition by Anthony Giddens (Polity Press, Sept 2011, £14.24)

[Original article here]

THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS (MYOO)

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CULTURE

What untranslatable words reveal about the Brazilian culture, from Brazilian author Roberto Taddei.

Illustration by Andrew Holder.

Illustration by Andrew Holder.I. ONE LANGUAGE, MAS QUE NADA

You might not know it, but Portuguese is part of your daily spoken English. Many words made it into English by way of Asia and Africa—places where the Portuguese landed during the Age of Discoveries (also known as the Age of Exploration 15th-17th centuries). Albino, for instance, and Dodo from doido (crazy). Sometimes the English word retains it’s original meaning buried within, like “fetish,” which comes from feitiço (charm and sorcery).

Other words, like those for native-grown food from Brazil, came from Brazilian indigenous languages, like cayenne and cashew. Then there are culture-specific words that migrated into English as the phenomenon became popularized: samba,bossa nova, caipirinha, Ipanema (originally meaning fish-less river),“Mas que Nada,” and so on. But although these words come to represent Brazil abroad the country is much more than a bracing drink or a sexy girl.

The spirit of Brazil can be found in it’s language, but like the country, the language is remarkably diverse. As with American English, the Brazilian version of Portuguese is a mixture of languages. The Roman language brought by the Europeans in 1500 suffered a long process of accommodation along the centuries. It first encountered the Tupi language, then used all over the Brazilian coast. Later it mixed with two major African languages: Bantu and Yoruba. Two hundred years later, the entire country was speaking a new language, Nhengatu

Nhengatu is a combination of the nearly 200 native idioms of Brazil, remnants of Roman Portuguese, Bantu and Yoruba. This hybrid language was widely used, reaching nearly across the entire country. When Robinson Crusoe lived in Bahia before his shipwreck he would have spoken Nhengatu, not Portuguese.

By the end of the 18th century, Portugal decided to bring the country back to speaking Portuguese by force. But despite their efforts Brazilian Portuguese retained ethnic and cultural echoes of the country itself. One example is the use of the null subject in Brazilian Portuguese, which is very distinct from Portugal. In several cases, some particularities of Brazilian Portuguese were initially seen by Portugal as grammatical errors, such as the usage of distinct pronouns and verbal agreements. But throughout the years, these “errors” came to be reinforced by Brazilian poets and speakers as a sign of post-colonial national identity. As the modernist Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade once noted: “Tupy or not Tupy, that’s the question.”

II. THE UNTRANSLATABLES

Despite a influx of Brazilian Portuguese words into English, one word in particular has resisted eager translators—be they Nobel laureates, poets, scholars or songwriters. The word is saudade. Maybe you’ve heard of it, since saudade is used in English without translation. Considered one of the top ten untranslatable words in the world, saudade is particularly difficult because it combines several emotions at once: fierceness, longing, yearning, pining, missing, homesickness, or all or none of the above. It is so complex that when I tried to explain it to a friend once she cut me short: “I’m sure I’ve never felt saudade.”

For this reason, of the most celebrated songs in Brazilian culture, “Chega de Saudades,” has never been translated into English. But the song lyrics, roughly translated, help explain saudade in part. The lyrics were written by Brazilian poetVinicius de Moraes. They describe feeling saudades as being deprived of peace and beauty, full of sadness and a melancholy that never goes away because the poet’s muse has abandon him.

Vinicius frequently collaborated with the songwriter and maestro Tom Jobim. Tom had a country house a couple of hills away from Elizabeth Bishop and almost two decades after she wrote her “Song for the Rainy Season” he also composed a song to the Brazilian rain. “Waters of March” was created both in Portuguese and in English and yet the versions are not identical. The Brazilian version sings about the end of the summer in Rio. The English version is about the beginning of Spring in the North. Since the beginning of Spring in America (around March, the rainy season) is also the end of the hot weather in Brazil (also March, when the rains come) the translation evokes the same season of mists.

Tom and Vinicius’ collaboration resulted in many hit songs that have since become Brazilian standards. Many of their songs have bilingual versions, which helped them become popular internationally. Except of course for the elusive “Chega de Saudades,” whose message remains locked in the meaning of one untranslatable word.

In 1968, Clarice Lispector (a Ukranian-born Brazilian author also translated by Elizabeth Bishop) tried her own definition of saudade: it “is a bit like hunger. Only disappears when one eats the presence. But sometimes the longing is so deep that the presence is not enough: one wants to absorb the whole other person. This will of one being the other in a complete unification is one of the most urgent feeling that we have in life.”

As poetic as this sounds, her definition raises another translation problem. The very notion of “presence” in Brazil is also untranslatable. Like all Roman languages, Portuguese has two verbs for the English “to be”. There is a distinction between being in a physical place and being as an emotional or ontological state.

It’s not only grammar, “being” itself is also seen differently in Brazilian culture. If the Portuguese carried to the New World the cartesian definition of presence, “I think, therefore I am,” once they got to Brazil they encountered cultures who thought about “being” very differently. Anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro made a lifetime study of amerindian perspectivism and discovered that some Brazilian native groups would have laughed at the idea of “I think, therefore I am,” suggesting as it does that the condition of thought predates existence. To them, the saying would likely go “the other exists, therefore she thinks.” This doesn’t mean that they were necessarily more generous than the Portuguese. It seems like a simple construction until you compare it with “I think, therefore I am” and see that to the Portuguese existence could be proven in a vacuum, while for native Brazilians existence depended on the existence of others. In this community-based definition of existence the other would be more important than the self since it is only through the other that I can recognize myself.

That’s why we so often use the word saudade in Lispector’s way, as an urge to “eat the other,” because the closer we get to understanding ourselves the closer we get to the other, and perhaps it is only by fully incorporating the other that we can escape the existential question of whether or not we actually exist. Comparing Elizabeth Bishop and Tom Jobim’s verses to the Brazilian rain you notice that the former is fundamentally about the poet, the latter sings about the outer world.

In an informal talk with Clarice Lispector in the 70s’, Tom Jobim explained that Brazil “is a country with an extremely free soul.” This freedom encourages creative expression, but, he says, Brazil is not “a country for amadores.” The Portuguese “amadores” means both amateurs and lovers, a linguistic challenge that could get in the way of aspiring lovers themselves.

Ultimately, necessity and usage determines which words are absorbed into the culture; which we translate or use as-is (like caipirinha) and which words remain culturally specific. In Brazil there are no translations for several English terms—like commodity, online, drag queen, shopping center—which seem to be more “authentic” in their original English format since what they refer to has an American or British origin. Brazilians seem to have never needed words like serendipity or patronize, just as English speakers perhaps never needed cafuné (caressing someone’s head with one’s fingers), or safadeza (a mixture of shamelessness, naughtiness, debauchery and mischief), both used on a daily basis below the Equator.

The more we know a language and its speakers, them more we understand their national culture. As Salman Rushdie writes in his novel Shame: “to unlock a society, look at its untranslatable words.”

– ROBERTO TADDEI is a writer and journalist who studied creative writing at Columbia. He lives in São Paulo and is adapting his first novel from English into Portuguese

http://myoo.com/stories/the-secret-life-of-words-2/#.Ts-jUhdGXrc.email

Ritual de tribo brasileira é indicado a patrimônio da Unesco (BBC)

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Atualizado em  22 de novembro, 2011 – 12:39 (Brasília) 14:39 GMT

Ritual Yaokwa. Foto: acervo IphanLista de indicados inclui cerimônia do povo enawenê-nawê (Foto: acervo Iphan)

Um ritual de um povo indígena brasileiro, voltado para “manter a ordem social e cósmica”, foi indicado para integrar uma lista de patrimônios culturais imateriais “em necessidade urgente de proteção” elaborada pela Unesco, a agência da ONU para a educação e a cultura.

O yaokwa é a principal cerimônia do calendário ritual dos enawenê-nawê, povo indígena cujo território tradicional fica no noroeste do Mato Grosso.

O Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional (Iphan) registrou o ritual Yaokwa como bem cultural em 2010. Segundo dados da Fundação Nacional de Saúde (Funasa), o povo enawenê-nawê – que fala a língua aruak – é formado por cerca de 560 integrantes.O ritual, que marca o início do calendário enawenê, dura sete meses e é realizado com a saída dos homens para realizar uma pesca coletiva com o uso de uma barragem e de armadilhas construídas com cascas de árvore e cipós.

A partir desta quarta-feira, a comissão intergovernamental da Unesco pela salvaguarda do patrimônio cultural imaterial se reúne em Bali, na Indonésia, para avaliar os rituais e tradições indicados para ser protegidos. A reunião se encerra no próximo dia 29.

O Brasil país conta com 18 bens inscritos na lista do Patrimônio Mundial da Unesco.

Entre o patrimônio imaterial, dedicado a tradições orais, cultura e a arte populares, línguas indígenas e manifestações tradicionais, estão as Expressões Orais e Gráficas dos Wajãpis do Amapá e o Samba de Roda do Recôncavo Baiano.

Se entrar na lista, o ritual dos enawenê-nawê passará a contar com apoio da entidade na sua preservação.

Muitas atividades da Unesco estão prejudicadas desde que os Estados Unidos retiraram o seu financiamento da agência, depois que ela aceitou a Palestina como Estado-membro pleno.

Seres subterrâneos

Com o ritual Yaokwa, os enawenê-nawê acreditam entrar em contato com seres temidos que vivem no subterrâneo, os yakairiti, cuja fome deve ser saciada com sal vegetal, peixes e outros alimentos derivados do milho e da mandioca, a fim de manter a ordem social e cósmica.

Para a realização do ritual, os indígenas se dividem em dois grupos: um que fica na aldeia junto às mulheres, preparando o sal vegetal, acendendo o fogo e oferecendo alimentos, e outro que sai para a pesca, com o objetivo de retornar para a aldeia com grandes quantidades de peixe defumado, que é oferecido aos yakairiti.

Construção de barragem. Foto: acervo IphanIndígenas constroem barragem para pesca; alimentos servem de oferenda (Foto: acervo Iphan)

Os indígenas realizam a pesca em rios de médio porte da região. Com os peixes e os demais alimentos, os enawenê-nawê realizam banquetes festivos ao longo de meses, acompanhados de cantos com flautas e danças.

Encantamento de camelos

Além do yaokwa, outro ritual indicado para proteção urgente na América do Sul é o eshuva, composto pelas orações cantadas do povo huachipaire, do Peru.

A lista de proteção urgente também inclui como indicados a dança saman, da província indonésia de Aceh, as tradições de relatos de histórias no nordeste da China e o “encantamento de camelos” da Mongólia, no qual as pessoas cantam para as fêmeas, a fim de persuadi-las a aceitar os filhotes de camelo órfãos.

Já para a lista representativa de patrimônio cultural imaterial da humanidade (sem indicativo de necessidade urgente de proteção), são indicados, pela América do Sul, o conhecimento tradicional dos xamãs jaguares de Yurupari (Colômbia) e a peregrinação ao santuário do senhor de Qoyllurit’i (Peru).

Outras tradições indicadas pela Unesco são as marionetes de sombras chinesas, o kung-fu dos monges Shaolin (China), a porcelana de Limoges (França), a música dos mariachis mexicanos e o fado (música tradicional portuguesa).

Are We Getting Nicer? (N.Y. Times)

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By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: November 23, 2011

It’s pretty easy to conclude that the world is spinning down the toilet.

So let me be contrary and offer a reason to be grateful this Thanksgiving. Despite the gloomy mood, the historical backdrop is stunning progress in human decency over recent centuries.

War is declining, and humanity is becoming less violent, less racist and less sexist — and this moral progress has accelerated in recent decades. To put it bluntly, we humans seem to be getting nicer.

That’s the central theme of an astonishingly good book just published by Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard. It’s called “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” and it’s my bet to win the next Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

“Today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence,” Pinker writes, and he describes this decline in violence as possibly “the most important thing that has ever happened in human history.”

He acknowledges: “In a century that began with 9/11, Iraq, and Darfur, the claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time may strike you as somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene.”

Still, even in a 20th century notorious for world war and genocide, only around 3 percent of humans died from such man-made catastrophes. In contrast, a study of Native-American skeletons from hunter-gather societies found that some 13 percent had died of trauma. And in the 17th century, the Thirty Years’ War reduced Germany’s population by as much as one-third.

Wars make headlines, but there are fewer conflicts today, and they typically don’t kill as many people. Many scholars have made that point, most notably Joshua S. Goldstein in his recent book “Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide.” Goldstein also argues that it’s a myth that civilians are more likely to die in modern wars.

Look also at homicide rates, which are now far lower than in previous centuries. The murder rate in Britain seems to have fallen by more than 90 percent since the 14th century.

Then there are the myriad forms of violence that were once the banal backdrop of daily life. One game in feudal Europe involved men competing to head-butt to death a cat that had been nailed alive to a post. One reason this was considered so entertaining: the possibility that it would claw out a competitor’s eye.

Think of fairy tales and nursery rhymes. One academic study found that modern children’s television programs have 4.8 violent scenes per hour, compared with nursery rhymes with 52.2.

The decline in brutality is true of other cultures as well. When I learned Chinese, I was startled to encounter ideographs like the one of a knife next to a nose: pronounced “yi,” it means “cutting off a nose as punishment.” That’s one Chinese character that students no longer study.

Pinker’s book rang true to me partly because I often report on genocide and human rights abuses. I was aghast that Darfur didn’t prompt more of an international response from Western governments, but I was awed by the way American university students protested on behalf of a people who lived half a world away.

That reflects a larger truth: There is global consensus today that slaughtering civilians is an outrage. Governments may still engage in mass atrocities, but now they hire lobbyists and public relations firms to sanitize the mess.

In contrast, until modern times, genocide was simply a way of waging war. The Bible repeatedly describes God as masterminding genocide (“thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth” — Deuteronomy 20:16), and European-Americans saw nothing offensive about exterminating Native Americans. One of my heroes, Theodore Roosevelt, later a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, was unapologetic: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely in the case of the tenth.”

The pace of moral progress has accelerated in the last few decades. Pinker notes that on issues such as civil rights, the role of women, equality for gays, beating of children and treatment of animals, “the attitudes of conservatives have followed the trajectory of liberals, with the result that today’s conservatives are more liberal than yesterday’s liberals.”

The reasons for these advances are complex but may have to do with the rise of education, the decline of chauvinism and a growing willingness to put ourselves in the shoes (increasingly, even hooves) of others.

Granted, the world still faces brutality and cruelty. That’s what I write about the rest of the year! But let’s pause for a moment to acknowledge remarkable progress and give thanks for the human capacity for compassion and moral growth.

Arjun Appadurai: A Nation of Business Junkies (Anthropology News)

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Guest Columnist
Arjun Appadurai

By Anthropology News on November 3, 2011

I first came to this country in 1967. I have been either a crypto-anthropologist or professional anthropologist for most of that time. Still, because I came here with an interest in India and took the path of least resistance in choosing to maintain India as my principal ethnographic referent, I have always been reluctant to offer opinions about life in these United States. I have begun to do so recently, but mainly in occasional blogs, twitter posts and the like. Now seems to be a good time to ponder whether I have anything to offer to public debate about the media in this country. Since I have been teaching for a few years in a distinguished department of media studies, I feel emboldened to offer my thoughts in this new AN Forum.

My examination of changes in the media over the last few decades is not based on a scientific study. I read the New York Times every day, the Wall Street Journal occasionally, and I subscribe to The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, the Economist, and a variety of academic journals in anthropology and area studies. I get a smattering of other useful media pieces from friends on Facebook and other social media sites. I also use the Internet to keep up with as much as I can from the press in and about India. At various times in the past, I have subscribed to The Nation, Money Magazine, Foreign Policy, the Times Literary supplement and a few other periodicals.

I have long been interested in how culture and economy interact. Today, I want to make an observation about the single biggest change I have seen over my four decades in the United States, which is a growing and now hegemonic domination of the news and of a great deal of opinion, both in print and on television, by business news. Business news was a specialized affair in the late 1960’s, confined to a few magazines such as Money and Fortune, and to newspapers and TV reporters (not channels). Now, it is hard to find anything but business as the topic of news in all media. Consider television: if you spend even three hours surfing between CNN and BBC on any given day ( surfing for news about Libya or about soccer, for example) you will find yourself regularly assaulted by business news, not just from London, New York and Washington, but from Singapore, Hong Kong, Mumbai and many other places. Look at the serious talk shows and chances are that you will find a talking CEO, describing what’s good about his company, what’s bad about the government and how to read his company’s stock prices. Channels like MSNBC are a form of endless, mind-numbing Jerry Lewis telethon about the economy, with more than a hint of the desperation of the Depression era movie “They Shoot Horses Don’t They?”, as they bid the viewer to make insane bets and to mourn the fallen heroes of failed companies and fired CEO’s.

Turn to the newspapers and things get worse. Any reader of the New York Times will find it hard to get away from the business machine. Start with the lead section, and stories about Obama’s economic plans, mad Republican proposals about taxes, the Euro-crisis and the latest bank scandal will assault you. Some relief is provided by more corporate news: the exit of Steve Jobs, the Op-Ed piece about the responsibilities of the super-rich by Warren Buffet, Donald Trump advertising his new line of housewares to go along with his ugly homes and buildings. Turn to the sports section: it is littered with talk of franchises, salaries, trades, owner antics, stadium projects and more. I need hardly say anything about the section on “Business” itself, which has now virtually become redundant. And if you are still thirsty for more business news, check out the “Home”, “Lifestyle” and Real Estate sections for news on houses you can’t afford and mortgage financing gimmicks you have never heard off. Some measure of relief is to be in the occasional “Science Times” and in the NYT Book Review, which do have some pieces which are not primarily about profit, corporate politics or the recession.

The New York Times is not to blame for this. They are the newspaper of “record’ and that means that they reflect broader trends and cannot be blamed for their compliance with bigger trends. Go through the magazines when you take a flight to Detroit or Mumbai and there is again a feast of news geared to the “business traveler”. This is when I catch up on how to negotiate the best deal, why this is the time to buy gold and what software and hardware to use when I make my next presentation to General Electric. These examples could be multiplied in any number of bookstores, newspaper kiosks, airport lounges, park benches and dentist’s offices.

What does all this reflect? Well, we were always told that the business of America is business. But now we are gradually moving into a society in which the business of American life is also business. Who are we now? We have become (in our fantasies) entrepreneurs, start-up heroes, small investors, consumers, home-owners, day-traders, and a gallery of supporting business types, and no longer fathers, mothers, friends or neighbors. Our very citizenship is now defined by business, whether we are winners or losers. Everyone is an expert on pensions, stocks, retirement packages, vacation deals, credit- card scams and more. Meanwhile, as Paul Krugman has argued in a brilliant recent speech to some of his fellow economists, this discipline, especially macro-economics, has lost all its capacities to analyze, define or repair the huge mess we are in.

The gradual transformation of the imagined reader or viewer into a business junkie is a relatively new disease of advanced capitalism in the United States. The avalanche of business knowledge and information dropping on the American middle-classes ought to have helped us predict – or avoid – the recent economic meltdown, based on crazy credit devices, vulgar scams and lousy regulation. Instead it has made us business junkies, ready to be led like sheep to our own slaughter by Wall Street, the big banks and corrupt politicians. The growing hegemony of business news and knowledge in the popular media over the last few decades has produced a collective silence of the lambs. It is time for a bleat or two.

Dr. Arjun Appadurai is a prominent contemporary social-cultural anthropologist, having formerly served as Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at The New School in NYC. He has held various professorial chairs and visiting appointments at some of top institutions in the United States and Europe. In addition, he has served on several scholarly and advisory bodies in the United States, Latin America, Europe and India. Dr. Appadurai is a prolific writer having authored numerous books and scholarly articles. The nature and significance of his contributions throughout his academic career have earned him the reputation as a leading figure in his field. He is the author of The Future as a Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (Verso: forthcoming 2012).

Ken Routon is the contributing editor of Media Notes. He is a visiting professor of cultural anthropology at the University of New Orleans and the author of Hidden Powers of the State in the Cuban Imagination (University Press of Florida, 2010).

Why Culture Matters in the Climate Debate (The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media)

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Keith Kloor, October 25, 2011

A new paper argues that climate educators and communicators are ignoring deeply held beliefs that influence climate skepticism.

It is the great riddle of the day in climate circles: Why is public concern about global warming so shallow, and why do widespread doubts about man-made climate change persist?

Everyone seems to have a pet theory. Al Gore blames the media and President Obama. Some green critics argue that Gore should look in the mirror. Let’s not ignore the recession, scholars remind us. Yes, but the lion’s share of blame must go to those “merchants of doubt”, particularly fossil fuel interests, and climate skeptics, plenty others assert. Err, actually, it’s our brain that’s the biggest problem, social scientists now say.

Commentary

Another reason, similar to that last one, is that cultural and religious beliefs predispose many to dismiss evidence that humans can greatly influence the climate. In fact, geographer Simon Donner in a paper published this week in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, argues:

“Successful climate change education and outreach programs should be designed to help overcome perceived conflict between climate science and long-held cultural beliefs, drawing upon lessons from communication and education of other potentially divisive subjects like evolution.”

Donner is not the first to try to bridge the gap between science and religion. E.O. Wilson gamely attempted to do so several years ago, with his book, The Creation. In a 2006 interview with NPR, Wilson acknowledged that, “the usual approach of secular science is to marginalize religion” in debates on environmental issues. After the book’s publication, this writer facilitated a lengthy dialogue between Wilson, ecologist Stuart Pimm and leading evangelical Richard Cizik, on areas where science and religion could find common ground. Expanding on that public dialogue has proven difficult. If anything, the polarized political landscape and the continuing climate wars have narrowed the space for science and religion to be reconciled.

Still, those who want to overcome obstacles to climate action should be mindful of culture’s importance, Donner stresses in his paper. He writes that “lingering public uncertainty about anthropogenic climate change may be rooted in an important but largely unrecognized conflict between climate science and some long held beliefs. In many cultures, the weather and climate have historically been viewed as too vast and too grand to be directly influenced by people.”

Donner writes that scholars studying public attitudes on climate change should factor in such cultural worldviews when accounting for climate skepticism. He surmises: “Underlying doubts that human activity can influence the climate may explain some of the malleability of public opinion about the scientific evidence for climate change.”

Donner suggests that climate educators and communicators learn from approaches that have worked in the evolution debate. He informs us:

“Pedagogical research on evolution finds that providing the audience with opportunities to evaluate how their culture or beliefs affect their willingness to accept scientific evidence is more effective than attempting to separate scientific views from religious or cultural views.”

Moreover, Donner argues that “reforming public communication” on climate change “will require humility on the part of scientists and educators.” He concludes:

“Climate scientists, for whom any inherent doubts about the possible extent of human influence on the climate were overcome by years of training in physics and chemistry of the climate system, need to accept that there are rational cultural, religious and historical reasons that the public may fail to believe that anthropogenic climate change is real, let alone that it warrants a policy response. It is unreasonable to expect a lay audience, not armed with the same analytical tools as scientists, to develop lasting acceptance during a one-hour public seminar of a scientific conclusion that runs counters to thousands of years of human belief. Without addressing the common long-standing belief that human activity cannot directly influence the climate, public acceptance of climate change and public engagement on climate solutions will not persist through the next cold winter or the next economic meltdown.”

The intersection where science and religion meet is all too often home to an ugly collision. Donner advises that such crack-ups can and should be avoided in the climate debate.

Can it be done?

Keith Kloor is a New York City-based freelance journalist who writes often about the environment and climate change. (E-mail: keith@yaleclimatemediaforum.org)

Atrair a atenção do público é o grande desafio para os satisfeitos jornalistas de ciência (Fapesp)

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Pesquisa FAPESP
Edição 188 – Outubro 2011
Política de C & T > Cultura científica
Leitores esquivos

Mariluce Moura

Dois estudos brasileiros sobre divulgação científica, citados em primeira mão na Conferência Mundial de Jornalismo Científico 2011, em Doha, Qatar, no final de junho, propõem quando superpostos um panorama curiosamente desconexo para esse campo no país: se de um lado os jornalistas de ciência revelam um alto grau de satisfação com seu trabalho profissional, de outro, uma alta proporção de uma amostra representativa da população paulistana (76%) informa nunca ler notícias científicas nos jornais, revistas ou internet. Agora o mais surpreendente: no universo de entrevistados ouvidos no estado de São Paulo nesta segunda pesquisa, 52,5% declararam ter “muita admiração” pelos jornalistas e 49,2%, pelos cientistas, a despeito de poucos lerem as notícias elaboradas por uns sobre o trabalho dos outros. Esses e outros dados dos estudos provocam muitas questões para os estudiosos da cultura científica nacional. Uma, só para começar: a satisfação profissional do jornalista de ciência independe de ele atingir com sua produção seus alvos, ou seja, os leitores, os telespectadores, os ouvintes ou, de maneira mais geral, o público?

A Conferência Mundial, transferida de última hora do Cairo para Doha, em razão dos distúrbios políticos no Egito iniciados em janeiro, reuniu 726 jornalistas de 81 países que, durante quatro dias, debateram desde o conceito central de jornalismo científico, passando pelas múltiplas formas de exercê-lo e suas dificuldades, até os variados problemas de organização desses profissionais na Ásia, na África, na Europa, na América do Norte ou na América Latina, nos países mais democráticos e nos mais autoritários. Uma questão que atravessou todos esses debates foi o desenvolvimento da noção de que fazer jornalismo científico não é traduzir para o público a informação científica – seria mais encontrar meios eficazes de narrar em linguagem jornalística o que dentro da produção científica pode ser identificado como notícia de interesse para a sociedade. A próxima Conferência Mundial será realizada na Finlândia, em 2013.

Apresentado por um dos representantes da FAPESP na conferência, o estudo que trouxe à tona a medida preocupante do desinteresse por notícias de ciência chama-se “Percepção pública da ciência e da tecnologia no estado de São Paulo” (confira o pdf) e constitui o 12º capítulo dos Indicadores de ciência, tecnologia e inovação em São Paulo – 2010, lançado pela FAPESP em agosto último. Elaborado pela equipe do Laboratório de Estudos Avançados em Jornalismo da Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Labjor-Unicamp) sob a coordenação de seu diretor, o linguista Carlos Vogt, em termos empíricos a pesquisa se baseou num questionário composto por 44 perguntas aplicado a 1.076 pessoas na cidade de São Paulo e a mais 749 no interior e no litoral do estado, em 2007. Portanto, foram 1.825 entrevistados em 35 municípios, distribuídos nas 15 regiões administrativas (RAs).

Vale ressaltar que esse foi o segundo levantamento direto em uma amostra da população a respeito de sua percepção da ciência realizado pelo Labjor e ambos estavam integrados a um esforço ibero- -americano em torno da construção de indicadores capazes de refletir a cultura científica nessa região. A primeira enquete, feita entre 2002 e 2003, incluiu amostras das cidades de Campinas, Buenos Aires, Montevidéu, além de Salamanca e Valladolid, na Espanha, e seus resultados foram apresentados nos Indicadores de C,T&I em São Paulo – 2004, também publicado pela FAPESP. Já em 2007, a pesquisa, com a metodologia mais refinada e amostra ampliada, alcançou sete países: além do Brasil, Colômbia, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Panamá e Espanha. O núcleo comum do questionário era constituído por 39 perguntas e cada região podia desenvolver outras questões de sua livre escolha.

O outro estudo brasileiro apresentado em Doha chama-se “Jornalismo científico na América Latina: conhecendo melhor os jornalistas de ciência na região” e, a rigor, ainda está em curso. Os resultados preliminares apresentados baseavam-se nas respostas a um questionário composto por 44 perguntas – desenvolvido pela London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) –, encaminhadas até 21 de junho. Mas a essa altura, mais de 250 jornalistas responderam ao questionário, dentre eles aproximadamente 80 brasileiros, segundo sua coordenadora, a jornalista Luisa Massarani, diretora da Rede Ibero-americana de Monitoramento e Capacitação em Jornalismo Científico, instituição responsável pelo estudo, em parceria com o LSE. O levantamento tem ainda o apoio de associações de jornalismo científico e outras instituições ligadas à área de divulgação científica na Argentina, Bolívia, Brasil, Chile, Colômbia, Costa Rica, Equador, México, Panamá e Venezuela.

No alvo desse estudo, como indicado, aliás, pelo título, está uma preocupação em saber quantos são, quem são e que visão têm da ciência os jornalistas envolvidos com a cobertura sistemática dessa área na América Latina. “Não temos ideia sobre isso, sequer sabemos quantos jornalistas de ciência existem no Brasil e se eles são ou não representativos dentro da categoria”, diz Luisa Massarani, que é também diretora do Museu da Vida da Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (Fiocruz) e coordenadora para a América Latina da Rede de Ciência e Desenvolvimento (SciDev.Net). Até algum tempo, lembra, “a Associação Brasileira de Jornalismo Científico (ABJC), com base em seu registro de sócios, situava esse número em torno de 500, mas isso na verdade incluía cientistas e outros profissionais interessados em divulgação da ciência”. A propósito, a ABJC vai iniciar no próximo mês o recadastramento dos sócios, junto com uma chamada para novos associados, o que poderá contribuir para esse censo dos jornalistas de ciência no Brasil.

Crença na ciência – Com 46 gráficos e 55 tabelas anexas que podem ser cruzados de acordo com o interesse específico de cada estudioso, o estudo de percepção da ciência bancado pela FAPESP e coordenado por Vogt permite uma infinidade de conclusões e novas hipóteses a respeito de como a sociedade absorve ciência por via da mídia ou como as várias classes sociais ou econômicas no estado de São Paulo reagem à exposição a notícias da área científica. Ao próprio coordenador, um dos pontos que mais chamaram a atenção nos resultados da pesquisa foi a relação inversa que ela permite estabelecer entre crença na ciência e informação sobre ciência. “O axioma seria quanto mais informação, menos crença na ciência”, diz. Assim, se consultado o gráfico relativo a grau de consumo autodeclarado de informação científica versus atitude quanto aos riscos e benefícios da ciência (gráfico 12.11), pode-se constatar que 57% dos entrevistados que declararam alto consumo acreditam que ciência e tecnologia podem oferecer muitos riscos e muitos benefícios simultaneamente e 6,3% acreditam que podem trazer muitos riscos e poucos benefícios. Já daqueles que declararam consumo nulo de informação científica, 42,9% veem muitos riscos e muitos benefícios ao mesmo tempo e 25,5% veem muitos riscos e poucos benefícios. “Ou seja, entre os mais informados é bem alta a proporção dos que veem riscos e benefícios na ciência ao mesmo tempo”, destaca Vogt, presidente da FAPESP de 2002 a 2007 e hoje coordenador da Universidade Virtual do Estado de São Paulo (Univesp), indicando que essa seria uma visão realista. Registre-se que o grau de pessimismo é muito maior entre os que declararam consumo nulo de informação científica: 8,1% deles disseram que a ciência não traz nenhum risco e nenhum benefício, enquanto esse percentual foi de 5,8% entre os que declararam consumo baixo, de 2,3% entre os que se situaram na faixa de consumo médio baixo, de 0,7% na faixa médio alto e de zero entre os altos consumidores de informação científica.

 

Na parte do trabalho sobre interesse geral em C&T, chama a atenção como o tema está medianamente situado pelos entrevistados em quinto lugar, depois de esporte e antes de cinema, arte e cultura, dentre 10 assuntos usualmente cobertos pela mídia (gráfico 12.1). Mas enquanto para esporte 30,5% deles se declaram muito interessados e 34,9%, interessados, em ciência e tecnologia são 16,3% os muito interessados e 47,1% os interessados, ou seja, a intensidade do interesse é menor. Vale também observar como os diferentes graus de interesse em C&T aproximam a cidade de São Paulo de Madri e a distanciam imensamente de Bogotá (gráfico 12.2). Assim, respectivamente, 15,4% dos entrevistados em São Paulo e 16,7% dos entrevistados em Madri declararam-se muito interessados em C&T; para a categoria interessado, os percentuais foram 49,6% e 52,7%; para pouco interessado, 25,5% e 24,8%, e para nada interessado, respectivamente, 9,4% e 5,9%. Já em Bogotá, nada menos que 47,5% declararam-se muito interessados. Por quê, não se sabe. Os interessados totalizam 33,2%, os pouco interessados, 15,3% e os nada interessados, 4%.

Não há muita diferença no nível de interesse por idade. Jovens e pessoas mais velhas se distribuem democraticamente pelos diversos graus considerados (gráfico 12.6a). Já quanto ao grau de escolaridade, se dá exatamente o oposto: entre os muito interessados em ciência e tecnologia, 21,9% são graduados e pós-graduados, 53,9% têm grau de ensino médio, 21,5%, ensino fundamental, 1,7%, educação infantil e 1% não teve nenhuma escolaridade. Já na categoria nada interessado se encontra 1,2% de graduados e pós-graduados, 26,3% de pessoas com nível médio, 47,4% com ensino fundamental, 8,8% com educação infantil e 16,4% de pessoas que não tiveram nenhum tipo de escolaridade (gráfico 12.5).

A par de todas as inferências que os resultados tabulados e interpretados dos questionários permitem, Vogt destaca que se a maioria da população não lê notícias científicas, ela entretanto está exposta de forma mais ou menos passiva à informação que circula sobre ciência. “Cada vez que o Jornal Nacional ou o Globo Repórter fala, por exemplo, sobre um alimento funcional, praticamente a sociedade como um todo passa a tratar disso nos dias seguintes”, diz. Ele acredita que pesquisas de mídia e de frequência do noticiário sobre ciência na imprensa poderão dar parâmetros de indicação para estudos que possam complementar o que já se construiu até agora sobre percepção pública da ciência.

Profissionais satisfeitos – Luisa Massarani observa que se hoje já se avançou nos estudos de audiência em muitos campos, especialmente para as telenovelas no Brasil, na área de jornalismo científico ainda não existem estudos capazes de indicar o que acontece em termos de percepção quando a pessoa ouve e vê uma notícia dessa especialidade no Jornal Nacional. “As pessoas entendem bem? A informação suscita desconfiança? Não sabemos.” De qualquer sorte, permanece em seu entendimento como uma grande questão o que significa fazer jornalismo científico, em termos da produção e da recepção.

Por enquanto, o estudo que ela coordena conseguiu identificar que as mulheres são maioria entre os jornalistas de ciência na América Latina, 61% contra 39% de homens, e que essa é uma especialidade de jovens: quase 30% da amostra situa-se na faixa de 31 a 40 anos e 23% têm entre 21 e 30 anos. De forma coerente com esse último dado, 39% dos entrevistados trabalham há menos de 5 anos em jornalismo científico e 23% entre 6 e 10 anos. E, o dado impressionante, 62% estão satisfeitos com seu trabalho em jornalismo científico e mais 9% muito satisfeitos. É possível que isso tenha relação com o fato de 60% terem emprego formal de tempo integral na área.

Por outro lado, se os jornalistas de ciência da América Latina não têm muitas fontes oficiais que lhes deem um feedback de seu trabalho, 40% deles es–tão seguros de que seu papel é informar o público, 26% pensam que sua função é traduzir material complexo, 13% educar e 9% mobilizar o público. E avaliando o resultado do trabalho, 50% creem que o jornalismo científico produzido no Brasil é médio, 21% bom e somente 2% o classificam como muito bom.

A melhor indicação do quanto os jornalistas de ciência gostam do que fazem está na resposta à questão sobre se recomendariam a outros a carreira. Nada menos do que a metade respondeu que sim, com certeza, enquanto 40% responderam que provavelmente sim. De qualquer sorte, ainda há um caminho a percorrer na definição do papel que cabe aos jornalistas entre os atores que dizem o que a ciência é e faz. “Quem são esses atores?”, indaga Vogt. “Os cientistas achavam que eram eles. Os governos acreditavam que eram eles. Mas hoje dizemos que é a sociedade. Mas de que forma?”

Little Ice Age Shrank Europeans, Sparked Wars (NetGeo)

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Study aims to scientifically link climate change to societal upheaval.

London’s River Thames, frozen over in 1677. Painting by Abraham Hondius via Heritage Images/Corbis

Brian Handwerk, for National Geographic News

Published October 3, 2011

Pockmarked with wars, inflation, famines and shrinking humans, the 1600s in Europe came to be called the General Crisis.

But whereas historians have blamed those tumultuous decades on growing pains between feudalism and capitalism, a new study points to another culprit: the coldest stretch of the climate change period known as the Little Ice Age.

(Also see “Sun Oddly Quiet—Hints at Next ‘Little Ice Age’?”)

The Little Ice Age curbed agricultural production and eventually led to the European crisis, according to the authors of the study—said to be the first to scientifically verify cause-and-effect between climate change and large-scale human crises.

Prior to the industrial revolution, all European countries were by and large agrarian, and as study co-author David Zhang pointed out, “In agricultural societies, the economy is controlled by climate,” since it dictates growing conditions.

A team led by Zhang, of the University of Hong Kong, pored over data from Europe and other the Northern Hemisphere regions between A.D. 1500 to 1800.

The team compared climate data, such as temperatures, with other variables, including population sizes, growth rates, wars and other social disturbances, agricultural production figures and famines, grain prices, and wages.

The authors say some effects, such as food shortages and health problems, showed up almost immediately between 1560 and 1660—the Little Ice Age’s harshest period—during which growing seasons shortened and cultivated land shrank.

As arable land contracted, so too did Europeans themselves, the study notes. Average height followed the temperature line, dipping nearly an inch (two centimeters) during the late 1500s, as malnourishment spread, and rising again only as temperatures climbed after 1650, the authors found.

(Related: “British Have Changed Little Since Ice Age, Gene Study Says.”)

Others effects—such as famines, the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), or the 164 Manchu conquest of China—took decades to manifest. “Temperature is not a direct cause of war and social disturbance,” Zhang said. “The direct cause of war and social disturbance is the grain price. That is why we say climate change is the ultimate cause.”

The new study is both history lesson and warning, the researchers added.

As our climate changes due to global warming (see interactive), Zhang said, “developing countries will suffer more, because large populations in these countries [directly] rely on agricultural production.”

More: “Climate Change Killed Neanderthals, Study Says” >>

Seeing Value in Ignorance, College Expects Its Physicists to Teach Poetry (N.Y. Times)

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By ALAN SCHWARZ

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — Sarah Benson last encountered college mathematics 20 years ago in an undergraduate algebra class. Her sole experience teaching math came in the second grade, when the first graders needed help with their minuses.

Sarah Benson has a Ph.D. in art history and a master’s in comparative literature, but this year she is teaching geometry. Shannon Jensen for The New York Times
And yet Ms. Benson, with a Ph.D. in art history and a master’s degree in comparative literature, stood at the chalkboard drawing parallelograms, constructing angles and otherwise dismembering Euclid’s Proposition 32the way a biology professor might treat a water frog. Her students cared little about her inexperience. As for her employers, they did not mind, either: they had asked her to teach formal geometry expressly because it was a subject about which she knew very little.

It was just another day here at St. John’s College, whose distinctiveness goes far beyond its curriculum of great works: Aeschylus and Aristotle, Bacon and Bach. As much of academia fractures into ever more specific disciplines, this tiny college still expects — in fact, requires — its professors to teach almost every subject, leveraging ignorance as much as expertise.

“There’s a little bit of impostor syndrome,” said Ms. Benson, who will teach Lavoisier’s “Elements of Chemistry” next semester. “But here, it’s O.K. that I don’t know something. I can figure it out, and my job is to help the students do the same thing. It’s very collaborative.”

Students in Ms. Benson’s class discussing Euclid.Shannon Jensen for The New York Times

Or as St. John’s president, Chris Nelson (class of 1970), put it with a smile only slightly sadistic: “Every member of the faculty who comes here gets thrown in the deep end. I think the faculty members, if they were cubbyholed into a specialization, they’d think that they know more than they do. That usually is an impediment to learning. Learning is born of ignorance.”

Students who attend St. John’s — it has a sister campus in Santa Fe, N.M., with the same curriculum and philosophies — know that their college experience will be like no other. There are no majors; every student takes the same 16 yearlong courses, which generally feature about 15 students discussing Sophocles or Homer, and the professor acting more as catalyst than connoisseur.

What they may not know is that their professor — or tutor in the St. John’s vernacular — might have no background in the subject. This is often the case for the courses that freshmen take. For example, Hannah Hintze, who has degrees in philosophy and woodwind performance, and whose dissertation concerned Plato’s “Republic,” is currently leading classes on observational biology and Greek.

“Some might not find that acceptable, but we explore things together,” said Ryan Fleming, a freshman in Ms. Benson’s Euclid class. “We don’t have someone saying, ‘I have all the answers.’ They’re open-minded and go along with us to see what answers there can be.”

Like all new tutors, Ms. Benson, 42, went through a one-week orientation in August to reacquaint herself with Euclid, and to learn the St. John’s way of teaching. She attends weekly conferences with more seasoned tutors.

Her plywood-floor classroom in McDowell Hall is as almost as dim and sparse as the ones Francis Scott Key (valedictorian of the class of 1796) studied in before the college’s original building burned down in 1909. Eight underpowered ceiling lights barely illuminated three walls of chalkboards. While even kindergarten classrooms now feature interactive white boards and Wi-Fi connected iPads, not one laptop or cellphone was visible; the only evidence of contemporary life was the occasional plastic foam coffee cup.

The discussion centered not on examples and exercises, but on the disciplined narrative of Euclid’s assertions, the aesthetic economy of mathematical argument. When talk turned to Proposition 34 of Book One, which states that a parallelogram’s diagonal divides it into equal areas, not one digit was used or even mentioned. Instead, the students debated whether Propositions 4 and 26 were necessary for Euclid’s proof.

When a student punctuated a blackboard analysis with, “The self-evident truth that these triangles will be equal,” the subliminal reference to the Declaration of Independence hinted at the eventual braiding of the disciplines by both students and tutors here. So, too, did a subsequent discussion of how “halves of equals are equals themselves,” evoking the United States Supreme Court’s logic in endorsing segregation 2,200 years after Euclid died.

Earlier in the day, in a junior-level class taught by a longtime tutor about a portion of Newton’s seminal physics text “Principia,” science and philosophy became as intertwined as a candy cane’s swirls. Students discussed Newton’s shrinking parabolic areas as if they were voting districts, and the limits of curves as social ideals.

One student remarked, “In Euclid before, he talked a lot about what is equal and what isn’t. It seems here that equality is more of a continuum — we can get as close as we want, but never actually get there.” A harmony of Tocqueville was being laid over Newton’s melody.

The tutor, Michael Dink, graduated from St. John’s in 1975 and earned his master’s degree and Ph.D. in philosophy from the Catholic University of America. Like most professors here, he long ago traded the traditional three-course academic career — writing journal articles, attending conferences and teaching a specific subject — for the intellectual buffet at St. John’s. His first year included teaching Ptolemy’s “Almagest,” a treatise on planetary movements, and atomic theory. He since has taught 15 of the school’s 16 courses, the exception being sophomore music.

“You have to not try to control things,” Mr. Dink said, “and not think that what’s learned has to come from you.”

This ancient teaching method could be making a comeback well beyond St. John’s two campuses. Some education reformers assert that teachers as early as elementary school should lecture less at the blackboard while students silently take notes — the sage-on-the-stage model, as some call it — and foster more discussion and collaboration among smaller groups. It is a strategy that is particularly popular among schools that use technology to allow students to learn at their own pace.

Still, not even the most rabid reformer has suggested that biology be taught by social theorists, or Marx by mathematicians. That philosophy will continue to belong to a school whose president has joyfully declared, “We don’t have departmental politics — we don’t have departments!”

Anthony T. Grafton, a professor of history at Princeton and president of the American Historical Association, said he appreciated the approach.

“There’s no question that people are becoming more specialized — it’s natural for scholars to cover a narrow field in great depth rather than many at the same time,” he said. “I admire how St. John’s does it. It sounds both fun and scary.”

Archaeologists Find Sophisticated Blade Production Much Earlier Than Originally Thought (Tel Aviv University)

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Monday, October 17, 2011
American Friends of Tel Aviv University

Blade manufacturing “production lines” existed as much as 400,000 years ago, say TAU researchers

Archaeology has long associated advanced blade production with the Upper Palaeolithic period, about 30,000-40,000 years ago, linked with the emergence of Homo Sapiens and cultural features such as cave art. Now researchers at Tel Aviv University have uncovered evidence which shows that “modern” blade production was also an element of Amudian industry during the late Lower Paleolithic period, 200,000-400,000 years ago as part of the Acheulo-Yabrudian cultural complex, a geographically limited group of hominins who lived in modern-day Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.

Prof. Avi Gopher, Dr. Ran Barkai and Dr. Ron Shimelmitz of TAU’s Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations say that large numbers of long, slender cutting tools were discovered at Qesem Cave, located outside of Tel Aviv, Israel. This discovery challenges the notion that blade production is exclusively linked with recent modern humans.

The blades, which were described recently in the Journal of Human Evolution, are the product of a well planned “production line,” says Dr. Barkai. Every element of the blades, from the choice of raw material to the production method itself, points to a sophisticated tool production system to rival the blade technology used hundreds of thousands of years later.

An innovative product

Though blades have been found in earlier archaeological sites in Africa, Dr. Barkai and Prof. Gopher say that the blades found in Qesem Cave distinguish themselves through the sophistication of the technology used for manufacturing and mass production.

Evidence suggests that the process began with the careful selection of raw materials. The hominins collected raw material from the surface or quarried it from underground, seeking specific pieces of flint that would best fit their blade making technology, explains Dr. Barkai. With the right blocks of material, they were able to use a systematic and efficient method to produce the desired blades, which involved powerful and controlled blows that took into account the mechanics of stone fracture. Most of the blades of were made to have one sharp cutting edge and one naturally dull edge so it could be easily gripped in a human hand.

This is perhaps the first time that such technology was standardized, notes Prof. Gopher, who points out that the blades were produced with relatively small amounts of waste materials. This systematic industry enabled the inhabitants of the cave to produce tools, normally considered costly in raw material and time, with relative ease.

Thousands of these blades have been discovered at the site. “Because they could be produced so efficiently, they were almost used as expendable items,” he says.

Prof. Cristina Lemorini from Sapienza University of Rome conducted a closer analysis of markings on the blades under a microscope and conducted a series of experiments determining that the tools were primarily used for butchering.

Modern tools a part of modern behaviors

According to the researchers, this innovative industry and technology is one of a score of new behaviors exhibited by the inhabitants of Qesem Cave. “There is clear evidence of daily and habitual use of fire, which is news to archaeologists,” says Dr. Barkai. Previously, it was unknown if the Amudian culture made use of fire, and to what extent. There is also evidence of a division of space within the cave, he notes. The cave inhabitants used each space in a regular manner, conducting specific tasks in predetermined places. Hunted prey, for instance, was taken to an appointed area to be butchered, barbequed and later shared within the group, while the animal hide was processed elsewhere.

Expedição no Amazonas vai divulgar astronomia indígena na Semana Nacional de C&T (Jornal A Crítica, de Manaus)

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JC e-mail 4365, de 17 de Outubro de 2011.

Calendário indígena do povo dessana associa constelações às mudanças do clima e ao ecossistema amazônico.

Surucucu não é apenas a mais perigosa serpente da Amazônia. Para os povos indígenas da etnia dessana, também é uma das inúmeras constelações que os ajudam a identificar o ciclo dos rios, o período da piracema, a formação de chuvas e sugere o momento ideal para a realização de rituais.

Na astronomia indígena, outubro é o mês do desaparecimento da constelação surucucu (añá em língua dessana) no horizonte oeste – o equivalente a escorpião na astronomia ocidental. O desaparecimento da figura da cobra está associado ao fim do período da vazante. Os dessana têm outras 13 constelações, sempre associadas às alterações climáticas.

Para divulgar a respeito da pouco conhecida astronomia indígena, um grupo de estudiosos promoverá no próximo dia 19 uma expedição de dois dias a uma aldeia da etnia dessana localizada na Reserva de Desenvolvimento Sustentável Tupé, em Manaus.

Expedição – A comunidade é composta por famílias dessana que se deslocaram da região do alto Rio Negro, no Norte do Amazonas, e ressignificaram suas tradições, cosmologias e rituais na comunidade onde se estabeleceram na zona rural de Manaus. O astrônomo Germano Afonso, do Museu da Amazônia (Musa), que desenvolve há 20 anos estudo sobre constelações indígenas no país, coordenará a expedição. Com os dessana, o trabalho de Germano Afonso é desenvolvimento há dois anos.

Ele descreve a programação como um “diálogo” entre a astronomia indígena e o conhecimento científico. “Será um diálogo entre os dois conhecimentos. Vamos escutar os indígenas e ao mesmo tempo levar uma pequena estação meteorológica que mede temperatura e velocidade. A ciência observa com equipamentos, o indígena vê isso empiricamente”, explicou.

Uma embarcação da Secretaria Municipal de Educação (Semed) levará as pessoas interessadas em participar da experiência. “Vamos fazer atividades de astronomia, meteorologia e química com os indígenas. Será uma atividade integrada à Semana de Ciência e Tecnologia”, explica Afonso.

O traço identificado como surucuru pelos indígenas é mais visível por volta de 19h, pelo lado oeste. Depois da surucuru, é a vez do tatu – outra espécie comum na fauna amazônica.

Desastres – Germano Afonso conta que os povos indígenas observam o céu, a lua, as constelações e sabem exatamente qual a época ideal para fazer o roçado, para se prevenir de uma cheia ou de uma seca. Também sabem qual o momento ideal para realizar um ritual.

A diferença em relação ao conhecimento científico, ocidental, é que não utilizam equipamentos e tecnologia para prever alterações do tempo e mudanças do clima. Mas há uma diferença mais significativa: os indígenas não caem vítimas de desmoronamentos, de grandes cheias ou de uma vazante extraordinária.

“Quem tem mais cuidado com o meio ambiente e evitar os desastres ambientais? Os índios sabem exatamente quando vai cair uma chuva forte e teremos uma grande enchente. Mas eles não morrem por causa disso”, destaca Afonso, que tem ascendência indígena guarani.

Trading Knowledge As A Public Good: A Proposal For The WTO (Intellectual Property Watch)

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Published on 14 October 2011 @ 2:23 pm

By Rachel Marusak Hermann for Intellectual Property Watch

Years of deadlock in the Doha Round of trade negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) has prompted some to question the institution’s effectiveness, and even, its relevance. But for others, the stalemate seems to be favourable for new ideas and new ways to think about global trade.

During the 19-21 September WTO Public Forum 2011, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) and IQsensato, both not-for-profit organisations, held a joint panel session on a proposal to the WTO entitled, “An Agreement on the Supply of Knowledge as a Global Public Good.” The 21 September session provided a space to debate the feasibility of adding the supply of public goods involving knowledge as a new category in negotiated binding commitments in international trade.

James Love, director of KEI, presented the idea. “The agreement,” he explained, “combines voluntary offers with binding commitments by governments to increase the supply of heterogeneous public goods. It would be analogous to existing WTO commitments to reducing tariffs, subsidies, or liberalising services.”

Limited access

The idea of “public goods” has been around for a while. A KEI 2008 paper on the proposal, John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1958 book, The Affluent Society, which created a stir about society’s over-supply of private goods versus a growing under-supply of public goods. The KEI paper also cites the contribution to the debate made by Joseph Stiglitz, who identified five global public good categories: international economic stability, international security (political stability), the international environment, international humanitarian assistance, and knowledge.

It’s this last category that KEI would like to see put up for negotiation. According to its 2008 paper, “In recent decades, an influential and controversial enclosure movement has vastly expanded the boundaries of what knowledge can be ‘owned,’ lengthened the legal terms of protection and enhanced the legal rights granted to owners of the collection of legal rights referred to as “intellectual property.”

Proposal advocates argue that in the wake of such knowledge protection, the global community faces an under-supply of public goods, including knowledge. Shandana Gulzar Khan, of the permanent mission of Pakistan to the WTO, seconds this sentiment. “I feel that an acute restriction of access to public goods and services is indeed a reality for the majority of the world’s population.”

Love argued that the WTO is the right international institutional to contribute to the solution. He cited a description of the WTO found on its website: “Above all, it’s a negotiating forum…Essentially, the WTO is a place where member governments go, to try to sort out the trade problems they face with each other…. Although negotiated and signed by governments, the goal is to help producers of goods and services, exporters, and importers conduct their business, while allowing governments to meet social and environmental objectives.”

Defining Good

When it comes to defining what qualifies as a global public good, Love mentioned how the International Task Force on Global Public Goods describes them as goods that “address issues that are deemed to be important to the international community; and that cannot, or will not, be adequately addressed by individual countries acting alone.” The list of such priorities is long and far-reaching.

Examples of potential ask/offers includes collaborative funding of inducement prizes to reward open source innovation in areas of climate change, sustainable agriculture and medicine; agreement to fund biomedical research in areas of great importance, such as new antibiotics, avian influenza, and the development of an AIDS vaccine; funding of projects to improve functionality and usability of free software; and new open public domain tools for distance education.

Some experts cautioned that deriving a universal definition of what constitutes global public goods is a tall task. Panel speaker Antony Taubman, director of the Intellectual Property Division at the WTO, cautioned that public goods do not bring with them an idea of prioritization. “One of the underlying challenges, of course, is how to multi-lateralise the concept of public goods…. What might be considered a high priority public good from one country’s perspective would possibly be even rejected by another country.”

Taubman mentioned hormones for beef or genetically modified crops as current examples of controversial public goods. “Would one country’s contribution of a new drought resistant genetically modified crop really be considered a valuable public good by countries that regarded that as an inappropriate technology?”

Another panellist, José Estanislau do Amaral from the permanent mission of Brazil to the WTO and other economic organisations in Geneva, suggested ways to take the proposal forward.

“There seems to be a double objective in the proposal,” he said. “One is to support the creation of certain public goods and the other one is to increase access to those goods. Both of course are interlinked and they are mutually reinforcing. But they are objectives in themselves…. I am inclined, at this stage, to suggest that there might be benefits in those two objectives being pursued separately. Access to existing knowledge must not be required to wait for the supply of new knowledge.”

The Brazilian official suggested that KEI construct a structured draft treaty of the proposal so there could be a more advanced debate on the idea. Love said that a draft agreement should be ready by the end of February 2012.

Rachel Marusak Hermann may be reached at rachel@rachels-ink.com.