Patrick Kupper, Bernhard Gissibl, and Sabine Höhler are the editors of Civilizing Nature, published in November 2012 by Berghahn Books. Civilizing Nature examines the phenomenon of the national park from a historical and transnational perspective.
Why did you choose a global history approach to studying national parks?
Patrick:
National parks have arguably been the most important tool of nature conservation worldwide. Since the first patches of nature were segregated under that label in the late 19th century, parks have become a global phenomenon – there are thousands of them all over the world, and they occupy an astonishing amount of terrestrial and, more recently, also maritime space. We found a paradoxical relationship between the national and the global in nature conservation, and the connections behind parks a striking and illustrative instance of what we have become accustomed to call globalization. Delving into this genuinely global history says a lot about the making and the nature of global environmentalism.
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As anthropologists who have worked in the Pacific Islands since the 1990s, we both felt that most political analyses of the region have been flawed for one simple reason: they overlook the enormous but complex political influence of Christian churches. This influence does not always take the form that observers of American politics might expect, where particular churches take explicit stances on political issues or support particular candidates or parties. The political influence of churches in Oceania is both more subtle and more pervasive than that. Time and again during our fieldwork in Fiji and Solomon Islands, we saw how the words of preachers and pastors, activities of Christian organisations, and interpretations of the Bible shaped how people understood their place in political communities. In Oceania, like everywhere else, there is no single Christianity, making it frustratingly difficult to generalize about ‘Christian politics’. Although anthropologists have increasingly turned attention to Christianity, little attention has yet been given to the ways that rival churches position themselves against each other. Our ethnographic research led us to see denominationalism as key source of social friction and creative energy, essential to any understanding of politics in the region.
Berghahn has just released Two Sides of One River: Nationalism and Ethnography in Galicia and Portugal, an English translation by Martin Earl of the original Portuguese volume by António Medeiros. This book explores the historical intersections between nationalism and the emergence of ethnographic traditions in Portugal and Galicia, and plays this history against the author’s own ethnographic research in both places at the turn of the 20th century.
