Anna Willow: No Such Thing as Distant Objectivity
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[00:00:00] Anna Willow: _Over the course of my career, I really have switched from seeing myself as an observer of society to someone who actually wants to change it, right? So anthropologists study culture, and I would not say I've given up on studying and understanding culture, but more than anything else, I actually want to change culture for the better. I wanna change our culture so that we can have a more sustainable, more just more fulfilling way of life._ 

[00:01:01] David Staley: I am pleased to be joined today over Zoom by Anna Willow, professor of Anthropology, the Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. Professor Willow is an engaged environmental anthropologist who has devoted her career to studying human environment relationships in context of an anthropogenic environmental transformation, with a specific emphasis on how diverse groups of people experience and respond to externally imposed resource extractive industrial development. Welcome to Voices, Dr. Willow. 

[00:01:37] Anna Willow: Thank you so much. It's great to be here. 

[00:01:39] David Staley: So I've just introduced you as an environmental anthropologist, and so I'd like you to start there. Who's an environmental anthropologist? 

[00:01:48] Anna Willow: So an environmental anthropologist is any anthropologist who puts the environment at the front and center of their work. Obviously the environment is the lived surrounding for all humans, and as anthropologists study humans, it's something that is inevitable, right?

[00:02:05] We can't avoid it, but someone would describe themselves as an environmental anthropologist, if that is a real specific focus of their work. So in your introduction, you talked about studying human environment relationships, and that relationship is really at the core of what I do.

[00:02:24] David Staley: So tell us more about that. What sort of relationships do you, do you tend to study? And we're gonna dive into your research, but I'd like to hear more about what that means. 

[00:02:32] Anna Willow: Well, so that could take a lot of different pathways for different people, but I can speak to my own experience and my own research. So for me what I have studied tends to be issues surrounding natural resource conflict. So for example, my dissertation research was in a place called Grassy Narrows First Nation, Northwestern Ontario, or sub Scotia Gang in the Anishinaabemowin language. So when I did work there, I was looking at anti clearcutting activism among a group of indigenous activists. So people who, 

[00:03:11] David Staley: They're cutting up forests, right?

[00:03:13] Anna Willow: Yeah, yeah. so around the world, right? And in this one specific place as well. Forests are being caught down to supply the world with paper, timber. Companies are doing the cutting, and in many cases there are government agencies that allow that to proceed through signing off leases and things like that.

[00:03:35] So in the case that I was learning about and looking at what was going on is that there is a group of indigenous peoples, Ojibwe or Anishinaabe people, who are, very concerned about the forest being cut down, not just for the, you know, environmental sanctity, which is something that does matter to them, but also because the forest and their land base is really sort of the home place or the landscape on which they live their cultural lives and because there's a whole lot of treaty rights and politics involved as well. So, that was one thing that got me started. So that really kickstarted my journey into understanding in more depth these relationships between people who are trying to protect, preserve their homelands and other places, and people who may have very different views of places and resources.

[00:04:31] So one thing that has always really been at the heart of what I look at is understanding why someone would choose to protect an environment, whereas another person who may superficially look quite similar might choose to damage that environment or destroy it. So that question of why, right?

[00:04:49] Why protect, why preserve, why do what we do has been at the heart of what I did. Throughout my career. And as also I think really gets to something you said in an introduction that you gave for me too is the word engaged, right? What does it mean to be an engaged anthropologist? And that idea of understanding why people are doing what they do in order for us to ultimately be able to sort of shift the emphasis, shift the conversation, and actually protect the planet that we share, is something that I take very seriously.

[00:05:21] David Staley: So in 2018, you published Understanding Extractivism Culture and Power in Natural Resource Disputes, and I'd like you to tell us a little bit about this research. What were your main findings? 

[00:05:33] Anna Willow: So that book is, very much published for a general audience or an undergraduate audience. So although I do actually draw on some of my own personal firsthand research, a lot of it is case studies from the around the world that look at different resources that are extracted, and then examples of conflicts that have surrounded those. So there are chapters in that book on you know, coal extraction, oil extraction, mineral extraction, water power extraction, which is something people might not necessarily think about when they think about extraction, right?

[00:06:09] Because water is something that we think of as a renewable resource rather than a non-renewable thing that's taken out of the ground and carted off. But actually the philosophy of extractivism, right, which I define as taking as much as you can as quickly as you can for your own human purposes and gains which are often financial in the neoliberal capitalist system that we live in.

[00:06:34] So I spent a lot of time in the book looking at what Extractivism really is and the various ways that it can proceed. 

[00:06:44] David Staley: So I should note for the audience that Extractivism is EXTR and then all in caps, ACTIVISM, activism. 

[00:06:54] Anna Willow: Mm-hmm. 

[00:06:55] David Staley: So why that particular framing? 

[00:06:58] Anna Willow: Yeah. Well, so there's a story behind that.

[00:07:00] So starting in around 2012, I got involved in a group within the Society for Applied Anthropology called the Extraction Topical Interest Group. We came together for the first time at a meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and really came up with this term to describe what we were studying because it's a dynamic, right?

[00:07:22] It's a dialogue and a tension between extractivism, right? Which is the sort of processes of extraction that I described earlier, but also activism in people around the world who are standing up and opposing this kind of undertaking, but also opposing the philosophy that underlies and permits it to take place.

[00:07:43] David Staley: You had used the term engaged anthropologist a few moments ago. 

[00:07:48] Anna Willow: Right.

[00:07:48] David Staley: And, so what does that mean? What does it mean for an anthropologist to be engaged? 

[00:07:53] Anna Willow: So there are tons of different definitions and interpretations of that. You know, I actually would suggest if people really wanna delve into that, they could look at the introduction to the edited volume I published in 2020 called Anthropology and Activism, New Contexts, New Conversations. To me personally, being an engaged anthropologist means being someone who is interested in having their work make a difference in the world, in immediate practical ways. 

[00:08:21] So very often anthropologists and other social scientists are trained to study the world and to approach the study of the world as if they were an objective observer.

[00:08:34] Anna Willow: An engaged anthropologist takes the stance that there is really no such thing as this distant objectivity, that that's an illusion. And that no matter what we do, we are always acting on the world that we're living in. We're part of that world. So over the course of my career, I do think part of it have come with the academic freedoms that tenure provide.

[00:08:56] But over the course of my career, I really have switched from seeing myself as an observer of society to someone who actually wants to change it, right? So anthropologists study culture, and I would not say I've given up on studying and understanding culture, but more than anything else, I actually want to change culture for the better. I wanna change our culture so that we can have a more sustainable, more just more fulfilling way of life. 

[00:09:27] David Staley: How have you done that? 

[00:09:30] Anna Willow: So that's a difficult question to answer. I've done that in several different ways. And it has been quite the journey. So, starting with my dissertation research on anti clearcutting activism in Ontario, I certainly, was a, sort of writing activist. I don't know, what the best term for that is, but somebody who aims to make a difference, not by standing up and protesting, but by writing in a way that draws readers into the story, that gets them thinking about the actions that they take, the positions of privilege that they hold, that gets them thinking about what they might actually do to support the people that they're reading about and others with similar stories. I think Paul Farmer an late anthropologist and a really well known, amazing medical anthropologist, used the term pragmatic solidarity to refer to that undertaking, right?

[00:10:25] So, get people thinking about what they can do from where they are to help in a struggle. So that's one way that I have tried to do that and I've continued on that journey through many different things that I've studied and many different things that I've worked on. So right now what I'm working on is understanding the transition movement, which is a sort of movement of movements.

[00:10:49] It's comprised of local initiatives that are linked together through global network. And it's a movement for climate change resiliency, right? So the idea that change is coming. We need to be ready and we need to take proactive and positive pragmatic action in order to prepare. So here and now I'm not just studying that movement. I am actually a part of that movement. So I've really sort of merged my life and the way that I work and live in the world with the things that I study. So that's a work in progress. But I think that's one thing I would encourage for people who have the ability to do that is to actually try to take a look at yourself, understand what you're doing and maybe put your money where your mouth is a little bit.

[00:11:36] David Staley: You just mentioned your work with the transition movement. Tell us a little bit more about this is, the idea that climate change is coming and that we can't do anything about that except to live with it.

[00:11:49] Anna Willow: Mm-hmm. 

[00:11:49] David Staley: To deal with it, to adapt to it. Is that the thinking? 

[00:11:52] Anna Willow: No, it's not the thinking. I mean, so on the one hand, I think people are involved in this movement do accept that change is coming no matter what. That we are kind of past a lot of the points of no return, where we might have drawn the line and said, no more carbon emissions. Climate change isn't gonna happen, right. And honestly, you know, I think it's probably been many decades, right, since we've been past that point. But the thinking is absolutely not fatalistic: let's resign ourselves to whatever happens to us and let it be as bad as possible. The thinking in my personal interpretation, right, so I'm not speaking for anyone but myself here, but my personal interpretation of it is that many of the actions that we take to prepare for a changed world do happen to be actions that do mitigate the worst case scenario when we're coming to climate change, right?

[00:12:44] So down the road, right? If fossil fuel runs out, if the current system that we live in is no longer viable, right? We are going to have to find alternative supply chains and more local means to supply our food, right? So we're going to have to grow our own food. We're going to have to source things locally. We won't have that luxury in the future. But by starting to do those things now, we actually are also reducing the fossil fuels that are emitted into the atmosphere by reducing trucking costs, by perhaps reducing the amount of fertilizers and things like that, that are put into the food system, right? So the idea is sometimes people talk about movements that are prefigurative, right? Which basically is a fancy way of saying it's a movement or a way of living that kind of attempts to live what it would like to see, right? So we bring the future into the present, right? We say, let's do this now.

[00:13:47] David Staley: Looking specifically at your study of the transition movement, how do you, as the anthropologist work and operate here? Are you reporting, but you do more than that, right? You're an engaged anthropologist. You're not just simply observing and reporting. How would you describe your method? 

[00:14:03] Anna Willow: Yeah, well, so my methods are qualitative and mainly ethnographic. So what that means is that I actually go into the field, right, and I'm making air quotes, when I say the field and study the natives again, in air quotes, even though you can't see them on the podcast because anthropologists like myself have a long history of going all kinds of places around the world to study ongoing processes in their natural context, right? So we don't conduct experiments; we don't manipulate things. We find situations that we're fascinated about in the real world, and we go there, right? So we spend time studying with people who are insiders, right? And that's what I mean by natives to their own culture, their own community.

[00:14:53] We pay post attention to what is going on. The famous Clifford Geertz called ethnography deep hanging out, right? Which is one way of thinking about some of what we do. So we hang out with people, but as we do that, we pay close attention to what's going on and make connections. I also conduct interviews with people which you know, is what we're doing right here. Right? So it's a conversation between people and basically my job is to get them talking, to really listen and to later go home and make sense of what they said and pay attention to commonalities and differences between the different individuals that I talk with.

[00:15:31] David Staley: I'm thinking almost of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle: as an anthropologist you can't be an objective observer. By virtue of the fact that you are studying or engaged with, say, the transition movement, do you in any way sort of alter the very thing that you're trying to understand?

[00:15:48] Anna Willow: Yeah. 

[00:15:49] David Staley: Because of your participation? 

[00:15:50] Anna Willow: Yeah. I mean, so people who claim that they're engaged, anthropologists, I think would say right away, well, of course, right. People who are not engaged anthropologists, who are anthropologists who don't see their work as engaged and anthropologists 50 years ago who certainly went into the situations that they studied much more with the idea that they were going to observe objectively, those people still influenced the cultures and the context that they were studying, whether or not they admitted it and to whatever degree because it's impossible when you're working with humans, right? In order to not become part of what you're studying, in order to not become part of the community that you're working with. I often tell my intro students, right, I say it's very different than working with pea plants or something like that, where you can simply measure them and step back and walk away, because for humans, right, that simply doesn't exist. Right? Humans are always aware that you're there. They respond to how you are studying them, and even the language that you use to introduce yourself and what you're doing is critically important, and the answers that they give you and how much they're willing to open and share their lives.

[00:17:00] David Staley: So you co-edited a collection called Extraction Impacts, Engagements and Alternative Futures. And I just note again, extraction is EXTR and then all caps, ACTION, Action. 

[00:17:15] Anna Willow: Yeah. 

[00:17:16] David Staley: Tell us about extraction. Yeah. Extraction, but with action emphasize, so. Mm-hmm. So, tell us about this work and again, why you chose that particular title.

[00:17:24] Anna Willow: Yeah, so that collection grew out of the Society for Applied Anthropology Extraction, topical Interest Group. There was a collection of us that really we realized that there was a sort of gap in the attention to environmental issues that was unfolding. We wanted to study especially fracking, which was a huge, huge deal in the earlier two thousands.

[00:17:50] It still is a big deal, but it's not quite as newsworthy, I guess, as it used to be. So, hydraulic fracturing, right, which is, using chemical and technological processes to extract oil and natural gas from shale layers under the ground through a process called hydraulic fracturing whereby they crack the layers and then release the hydrocarbons, the flow to the surface.

[00:18:15] So that unconventional and very sort of expensive and potentially environmentally damaging process was rapidly expanding, especially in Eastern Ohio and the Marcellus Shale to our northeast and other places around the world and a lot of attention was drawn to that. That actually was what brought our small group together.

[00:18:38] But then we started saying, Hey, we can use these same ways of understanding what's going on. The same mindset, right? That is underlying this sort of last gasp attempt to get everything we can right from the Earth. We saw that that was unfolding in other places around the world and pulled together a lot of authors to sort of lend their perspectives.

[00:19:01] David Staley: The alternative futures part gets my attention, so. Mm-hmm. So what do you mean by alternative futures and how did this work in this research? 

[00:19:10] Anna Willow: Yeah. Well, so it means how things can be different, right? So it doesn't have to be like this, right? Other worlds are possible. And again, this is the engaged anthropology and the overlap with activism that comes into my work and many of my colleagues work is this idea that we actually do have the power to A, envision other ways that things might be. And if we do not bother envisioning more positive different futures that we can almost assure that we're not going to get to them. And B, we do have it within our ability, especially as anthropologists who study people from around the world to use situations in other places as positive examples that we can learn from and potentially emulate and adapt to our own situations. 

[00:19:58] David Staley: This is a question that's been animating my own thinking recently, so we can envision the future that we want. How do we bring that about? 

[00:20:08] Anna Willow: Well, that's a great question. Because futures are always incredibly contested. This is actually a great question for an historian, right? So I'm almost turning this back on you, but, I think if we think about any conflict in the world, whether it's World War II or conflicts deep into the past and we think about what, the fighting was over. it's very rare for it to be phrased this way, but I think almost any conflict we could say it's people were struggling to control what shape the future took.

[00:20:36] People were struggling to control the reality that they were able to inscribe or not inscribe onto the actual landscape and the social landscape. So I don't know how we actually make the futures we want to see happen. For any once and for all answer I could give, many, many different answers to this and it's a lot more amorphous. But , I think one thing that we can do is we can simply do it, right? So this is what I was talking about earlier with that idea of pre-configuration, and this is one thing that people in the transition movement take very seriously, right? This idea that, you don't necessarily have to sit around and wait for the powers that be to realize that we need to make change. You don't necessarily, although it's valuable to do this, right, you don't necessarily have to lobby or petition for political changes and policy differences, right? In many cases, we're attracted to the things that we can actually do here and now today, right?

[00:21:39] I don't remember this person's name but the idea is that, like something like gardening in a city might be a radical act, right? That's actually something that's stepping out of the normal flows of politics, but it's actually inviting radical change by living differently and by daring to do something other than what the status quo sees.

[00:22:02] David Staley: When I talk about these issues with my students, , you talk about the powers that be. This is what I always hear from students. We know the future we want, but we don't have the power to enact it, or power is held by someone else. 

[00:22:16] Anna Willow: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, and I think lots and lots of people do feel that way. It's very easy to feel that way in a system that's designed to make us feel that way. Right. So I think those feelings of disempowerment are intentional. What I would say to students with that view is, and what I say to my own teenagers is, you don't have to sit around and wait.

[00:22:40] You actually do have a lot of power because what you can do is you can actually choose to live differently, right? If you don't like something, you can not buy what they're selling. Right. And it is very hard because it is cultural. It is what we have been enculturated to do since the time we've been born, right.

[00:22:59] To live in our sort of surroundings. Right. We rarely see what things look like because we are the fish swimming in the fish bowl, right? Fish didn't discover water. So, in a lot of cases it just sort of takes that waking up and looking at ourselves and saying, Hey, we don't have to do things this way.

[00:23:20] We can actually live a radically different lifestyle if we choose to do so. And if we can convince others to come along with us a lot of the sociology literature, says it doesn't take that huge of a percentage of people to decide to do things differently in order for systemic change to take place.

[00:23:38] David Staley: Tell us about the classes that you teach. 

[00:23:41] Anna Willow: I will tell you specifically about one class that I'm excited to talk about because it's new. Some of the listeners may know Ohio State has recently revised the general education requirements. So there are now themes that students can select from, right?

[00:23:58] So they need to take a citizenship theme course, but they can also choose from other themes. So I've become pretty heavily involved in the sustainability theme, and I designed a course called Social and Ecological Systems from Problems to Prospects, which is a pretty comprehensive for-credit introduction with a research intensive piece to the topic of systemic resilience.

[00:24:24] So in that course we trace some of the big picture of how we got here, sort of the origins of world problem. We take a close look at some of the actual issues that are impacting our world and how they're viewed from different disciplinary perspectives.

[00:24:41] And then a lot of the course is forward or solutions looking. So looking at different ways that problems can be solved and students are actually given a sort of take action research project within that course. 

[00:24:56] David Staley: Tell us how you ended up as an anthropologist as opposed to, I don't know, an historian or a sociologist or a physicist. 

[00:25:03] Anna Willow: Yeah. So this is an interesting story. I actually started out my college career as a fine arts major. I went to the San Francisco. Yeah, I went to the San Francisco Art Institute was very passionate about that, but I realized that I just didn't have the stomach for the sort of politicking that came into getting gallery shows and things like that.

[00:25:25] And I'd been interested in more academic and intellectual pursuits all along. I ended up transferring to the University of Wisconsin. And in deciding what my major was gonna be, I really do feel like anthropology kind of picked me. I guess I realized that this was my way of thinking all along, even if I didn't necessarily have the vocabulary for describing it.

[00:25:47] So , I guess I was always an anthropologist and just sort of realized that, right. So it's a process of realization rather than selecting the field. So , that basically is, history, no pun intended, right. Given that you asked about how I did not end up being a historian.

[00:26:03] I will say though, that I think there is a ton of overlap between a lot of the fields that you mentioned. In another life, I could have easily been a human geographer. In my work, I do, look at the history of the places and peoples that I interact with because there's no other way to understand things.

[00:26:23] And I have become more and more interested in understanding the future, right? So, I actually have one recent piece called the Ethnography of the Future, which, I think may overlap with your histories of the future studies. I'm not sure. But basically the promise was that I could use ethnographic methods to understand how people envision their futures, and I could actually use the same sort of ethnographic qualitative framework in order to create a collective vision of what a more positive future might be, which then I can amplify, right? I don't know if I can necessarily create it. I certainly can't create it overnight, but I can amplify these visions and, and hope to get others on board. 

[00:27:08] David Staley: Before we started recording, you had said something to the effect of, when you switched to anthropology that you already had an anthropological way of seeing the world.

[00:27:17] Anna Willow: Mm-hmm. Right. 

[00:27:18] David Staley: What do you mean by that? 

[00:27:19] Anna Willow: So an anthropological way of seeing the world is one that recognizes that there are many different perspectives in the world and that your own perspective is just one among many, right? That there is no right way of seeing the world. That doesn't exist.

[00:27:39] So of course, your way of seeing the world is not going to be right, right? It is simply part of this larger human fabric. A lot of times anthropologists use the term cultural relativism to describe this way of, of thinking. Taken to an it's extreme, relativism ends up getting debated a lot, but basically the idea is that there's no culture that is better or worse than any other. All cultures, all views are equally valid.

[00:28:11] David Staley: Anna Willow, thank you. 

[00:28:13] Anna Willow: Yeah, thank you. It's my pleasure.