Sean Downey - YouTube
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[00:00:02] Sean Downey: I always hesitate when I use this term slash and burn. And it's, a very pejorative term. I think as your Listeners hear me say it. They probably know what I'm talking about. We use it and in society and slash and burn politics and these kinds of things. . I don't know if you know the history of that word, but it actually comes from the colonial period when Europeans were going into tropical regions around the world.

[00:00:25] And they were interested In products of those environments that they could bring back and sell in Europe and make a profit. And in Belize, where I work early on, the earliest product was logwood. Well, once they cut down all the logwood trees they moved on to mahogany, which of course is famous for furniture building and for carpentry. The steeple of the South Church in Boston, for example, is built out of Belizean mahogany, which is sort of a little factoid there for, for the history professor. 

[00:00:54] Speaker: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide ranging as Art, Astronomy, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Physics, Emergent Materials and Mathematics and Languages, among many others, the college always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now.

[00:01:23] David Staley: I'm pleased to be joined today in the ASC Tech studios by Sean Downey, Associate Professor of Anthropology at The Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. He is an ecological anthropologist whose research explores the social and environmental dynamics of farming and foraging societies, both past and present. Dr. Downey, welcome to Voices. 

[00:01:46] Sean Downey: Thank you very much. I'm pleased to be here. 

[00:01:47] David Staley: Well, I'm delighted you're here and I have introduced you as an ecological anthropologist. So I think I know what ecology is. I think I know what an anthropologist is. , what's an ecological anthropologist?

[00:01:58] Sean Downey: Well, anthropology typically studies human behavior, past and present, and, an ecological anthropologist like myself is particularly interested in the relationship that human societies have developed with the environments that are around them over time. Now those, norms and behaviors and beliefs and rituals can have accumulated over hundreds of years or longer. they can also accumulate very quickly as people learn about their environments and develop strategies to interact with them. So, ecological anthropologists study all aspects of that. Behavioral, cognitive, social, institutions and norms they relate to those dynamics. 

[00:02:34] David Staley: Is this a relatively new field, or is this something that anthropologists have always considered? They always consider the environment. 

[00:02:40] Sean Downey: anthropologists and archaeologists have always been interested in, how our environments constrain our behaviors, our societies, and that goes back ages. there was a resurgence of interest in this question in the kind of mid 19th century. That's really when I'd say, the current trajectory began, with Julian Stewart, sort of a famous name in, in my field.

[00:02:59] And, know, I think I'm in that lineage, up through today. have a sort of different theoretical approach, certainly than Stuart had then, but that's part of that trajectory, for sure. 

[00:03:08] David Staley: Different how? When you say a different theoretical approach? 

[00:03:10] Sean Downey: Well I think Stuart in the past, he had, sophisticated ideas, but the models that they, that he was using to understand those relationships were fairly straightforward, what we would call linear models. If A happens, then you can expect B to result. Well, now we have sort of more sophisticated, Cognitive, conceptual, and mathematical models that express sort of how different outcomes can occur based on sort of simple interactions at a low level. 

[00:03:38] David Staley: And, I want to hear more about, your lab, the Human Complexity Lab.

[00:03:42] Sean Downey: Mm hmm. Sure, yeah. The Human Complexity Lab is, of course, my invention here at Ohio State University. It's such a privilege to have the opportunity to create these kinds of research groups, which I think you fantasize about when you're a PhD student. You're like, oh, maybe someday I can, get my own research group going together.

[00:03:58] And, yeah, that's what the HCL is. a small group right now. currently bringing in some more students for next year, PhD students, and I also have undergraduates working in the lab. And basically we're, working on, what you just asked me about, these sort of human environmental interactions related to my current research project, which is, an NSF career project focused on slash and burn or swidden agriculture in Belize.

[00:04:21] And, the current project we're working on, for example, is using remote sensing imagery, trying to link that with Behaviors on the ground in these Kekchi Mayan communities that I've worked in. 

[00:04:31] David Staley: Say it again, remote sensing. 

[00:04:32] Sean Downey: Remote sensing. 

[00:04:33] David Staley: What is this? 

[00:04:34] Well, so this is little bit out of the purview of anthropology, actually. You'll find that I'm an interdisciplinary scholar, as they say. and so remote sensing is, of course, the pictures that the satellites are taking of the planet. They're actually, it's kind of amazing. IN the last 10 years or so, the satellites are imaging the whole planet almost daily these are data that aren't just available to the spy agencies and such, but actually to academics here at Ohio State University and around the world, for little or no money in some cases for research purposes.

[00:05:04] Sean Downey: And so we have pictures of what the forests look like around these Kekchi Mayan villages where I've studied as an anthropologist and spent time, living and, working with people. people there understanding their norms and customs, and I'm trying to Relate the patterns in those pictures to the behaviors that I've observed as an anthropologist on the ground in Belize.

[00:05:24] David Staley: What have you discovered? What have you found?

[00:05:25] Sean Downey: We just had a paper come out recently, that was the result of several years of work. And, it's a pretty cool finding you were asking me a moment ago about, trajectory of the field in ecological anthropology, well for ages anthropologists have known that, Small scale indigenous societies have deep knowledge about the environments that they live in.

[00:05:45] it's sort of intuitive. but there's lots of good evidence from field workers in the 60s and the 70s and the 80s, that document this using things like lists of species names that people have in their indigenous languages. What's been missing in many of those arguments is how that knowledge relates to actual ecosystem outcomes.

[00:06:04] In other words, like how quickly does the forest grow back when you cut it down? Or how does that knowledge relate to the biodiversity of the forest? It's a little bit harder to measure that. And so that's one of the things that we're trying to do in the HCL and this paper that we 

[00:06:18] just published in November, actually identifies, the relationship between the on the ground farming patterns in these Q'eqchi Mayan communities and a particular pattern that, is related with a higher level of biodiversity. And it's a little bit technical, I mean I can give you the technical explanation if you want me to, but, in simple terms in, forests, this form of agriculture, which I've referred to as slash and burn, but I'd like to talk more about that later.

[00:06:45] We can come back to that. but anthropologists prefer to call it swidden. you know, you can imagine there's, Too much forest that you could clear down, forest would go away, or there's not enough and people wouldn't have any food to eat because of course they're planting fields, in corn and these kinds of crops that they're subsisting on.

[00:07:01] Well, it turns out in this paper that we discovered there's sort of a Goldilocks zone in the middle, an intermediate level of disturbance that is related with this higher level of forest biodiversity. And so, that was a pretty, pretty big finding because we've been able to finally connect the behavior with an ecological pattern. And I think these are the kinds of things that that Stewart probably thought about and wished he could do, but of course the satellites didn't exist at the time to, enable those kinds of analyses. 

[00:07:27] David Staley: You said you wanted to go back to slash and burn. 

[00:07:30] Sean Downey: Yeah. So, you probably heard it in my voice. I always hesitate when I use this term slash and burn. And it's, a very pejorative term. I think as your Listeners hear me say it. They probably know what I'm talking about. We use it and in society and slash and burn politics and these kinds of things. Well history. I don't know if you know the history of that word, but it actually comes from the colonial period when Europeans were going into tropical regions around the world.

[00:07:57] And they were interested In basically the sort of products of those environments that they could bring back and sell in Europe and make a profit. And in Belize, where I work early on, the earliest product was logwood. It's a particular kind of tree that Creates this beautiful magenta dye that was used to create women's dresses, actually, in London back in the Victorian period.

[00:08:19] Well, once they cut down all the logwood trees they moved on to mahogany, which of course is famous for furniture building and for carpentry. The steeple of the South Church in Boston, for example, is built out of Belizean mahogany, which is sort of a little factoid there for, for the history professor.

[00:08:34] the point here is that when these colonists came into these countries where indigenous societies were cutting down and burning forest well, they were burning logwoods and mahogany and the colonists said, well, this is a terrible practice. We could make money on that. This is not an economic best use.

[00:08:51] And so that's where that negative connotation of that term slash and burn came from. I hesitate to use it because of that, but also everybody knows what it means and it refers to a an indigenous practice of subsistence or agriculture that people use to grow food, to feed their families.

[00:09:08] And so I use it initially to create the connection about what people are doing and then I try to qualify it and say, well, I don't really like using that term. And in fact, in anthropology, we tend to use the term swidden agriculture to refer to the practice itself without the sort of pejorative gloss, if you will.

[00:09:25] David Staley: You mentioned in addition to using satellite imagery, you mentioned doing field work, which I suspect is more common practice among anthropologists. Tell us a little bit about the process of field work. What does that look like to a non anthropologist. 

[00:09:40] Sean Downey: Yeah, of course. Thank you. 

[00:09:41] anthropologists are sort of known for doing field work back to our early progenitors in the, early part of the, 19th century.

[00:09:48] Yeah, those are the ones Malinowski and Margaret Mead. Well, so fieldwork continues to be a really important part of anthropology, although the field itself has actually tried to switch away from that being a requirement. And so actually there's lots of anthropologists now doing fieldwork, so to speak, in their own communities.

[00:10:09] And there are lots of advantages to this, but I admit I sort of went that traditional route. I wanted the experience and sought out fieldwork in Belize and Central America. And the idea behind that approach to anthropology is that you know, a person is brought up in a culture, in a society, and learns the norms, the language that your society uses.

[00:10:29] And when you go to a society that's very different than your own it's easier to see the differences because they sort of jump out at you. And I think that's the, probably the simplest explanation for why fieldwork is important. It's because in anthropology the primary sensor, is really you.

[00:10:46] You know, you're, the person that's making the observation. Certainly, we're putting all the remote sensing stuff behind us now. This is traditional anthropology. You, go to the field, you talk to people, you do things like participant observation, which is it's not just showing up. It's actually a formal method where you, document what you observe around you, the behaviors and the practices.

[00:11:05] and such in field notebooks and reflect on those and organize those notes. And so, yeah, you're the, scientific instrument for observing society when you're doing field work. And it's an amazing way to to create hypotheses, to create understanding to create cross cultural communication and also to work with communities you know, and to, help train local students I know in Belize, and I, I was really privileged to be able to have a a small impact on several young people. Of course, now I've been working there over 20 years. It's, been fun to see the little, kids that were babies when I first went to the village during my Ph. D. back in the, mid 2000s to they're now adults.

[00:11:42] And, taking on jobs like the rest of us. And, and it's fun, been fun to sort of. track them through their lives. 

[00:11:47] David Staley: Is that common for anthropologists to spend two decades same location, studying the same place? Is that common? 

[00:11:55] Sean Downey: Yeah, it is. That's really the goal, I think, is to create these deep deep relationships and deep understandings of communities that you work in and work with.

[00:12:05] Yeah. where the the insights come from, I think. it's not superficial. Ideally, it's not superficial, and that only occurs after time. I mean, you can visit a place and you see what's there on the ground, but it really takes going back, reflecting, asking new questions that you may not have thought of until after 

[00:12:24] you know, you've, left the place and reflected for a while.

[00:12:27] David Staley: When did you come to remote sensing, I guess, which is that part of your training in graduate school? Or is that something that you came to after your PhD? 

[00:12:34] Sean Downey: Actually, I took a class in it, believe it or not. As a PhD student, I'm not sure if I actually knew what I was going to do with it, but I knew it seemed relevant to studying forests.

[00:12:44] I never envisioned this particular analysis that I talked about a moment ago, but, reflecting back, I think it was sort of, a framework of a plan for a career trajectory to take that class. But I'm going to answer a slightly different question. I mean, I've always sort of had computational skills.

[00:12:59] I've been able to bend computers to my will starting back in the 1980s with my Commodore Vic 20. We were dating ourselves before the interview started here. And so that's my, era. And uh, yeah, I continued up through graduate school. So I took a class in remote sensing. Not actually remote sensing so much, but GIS, which is an acronym for Geographic Information Systems, basically creating maps and analyzing spatial data.

[00:13:26] And you know, it was aligned with my ability to use computers and to code and to, create models. And it's a, relevant tool kit for, studying ecological anthropology. 

[00:13:35] David Staley: You really are interdisciplinary, aren't you? Your lab has the word complexity in it. And I know that one of the frameworks that guide your research is the idea of complex adaptive systems. First of all. Tell us what that means, and then how does that inform your research? 

[00:13:49] Sean Downey: Yes, lots of jargon here, but I'll, I'll try to, I'll try to boil it down the best I can. And I think your listeners will, be familiar with the term the sum is more than the parts, right? And, and really that, captures the essence of complex adaptive systems.

[00:14:03] The, big idea is that in, many systems in the world, you have lots of individuals, people animals. We kind of generically refer to them as agents. And these, people or animals or agents can interact and often interact with each other in particular kinds of ways. And, sometimes the interactions lead to outcomes that are unpredictable.

[00:14:25] But there are other times when The system itself manifests properties that are unexpected and that's where this idea of the sum is greater than the parts comes in. A pretty classic study was done in the 1960s about segregation actually in Washington, D. C. And it turns out that this is called the Scheller model.

[00:14:45] And uh, he received a Nobel Prize for his work after the end of his career. But model actually is very simple. in the Scheller model The way that it works is that you have an individual, and you can imagine that individual wants to live in a community with some people that, are similar to them, and maybe with some diversity.

[00:15:03] Well Scheller was driving, actually, between his home and, and Washington, D. C., where he taught, and he noticed that, It was quite a segregated city in the 60s, and so he wanted to understand how that pattern of segregation occurred. And he had some ideas you know, he didn't think that it was due to really strict racial or racist housing practices.

[00:15:25] But he thought most people that were, choosing where to live weren't like that, that they were making other kinds of decisions and he was curious how those other kinds of decisions might relate to these housing patterns. And so he built a little computer model. You can actually go out and download this and play with it on the internet.

[00:15:42] I think it's Scheller, S C H E L L E R. Google it and then Google the word NetLogo and you'll, you'll find a link to a model. And what he found out is that it, it actually doesn't take very much preference for living with people like yourself to create pretty strict patterns of spatial housing segregation.

[00:16:01] And this is an emergent property. It turns out that if you want to live in a community and you choose to live near three people that are like yourself and seven people that are unlike you and you have tens or hundreds or thousands of people doing that en masse, then you'll actually get pretty, clear patterns, pockets in that community where you have, groups of people that are very homogenous like existed in Washington, D.

[00:16:25] C. or Columbus, for that matter and continues to. So it's a, general principle that relates to housing preference that manifests over large spatial scales. 

[00:16:34] David Staley: And you use this idea, this notion, complex adaptive systems, in your work in Belize? 

[00:16:39] Sean Downey: Absolutely. The, research that I was talking about earlier, while that wasn't a modeling paper, that was a statistical analysis, the ideas that underlie the pattern that we found, I believe relate to this, idea of complex adaptive systems.

[00:16:53] I think Kʼicheʼ farmers Mayan farmers, are making choices about where to put their agricultural fields in tropical forest. How big a piece of land to clear not just with respect to the number of mouths they need to feed in their houses, but also somehow related to social norms that, lead to this effect that, we found, that we discovered the sort of Goldilocks zone of disturbance , that relates to higher levels of biodiversity.

[00:17:21] So, the higher level of biodiversity results from or is an emergent property of the social norms that exist for forest clearing and planting in Southern Belize, I believe. 

[00:17:33] David Staley: Not the sort of thing that one can plan for, I'm guessing, or control. 

[00:17:37] Sean Downey: That's exactly the point. Yeah, absolutely. You don't actually want somebody controlling it. Because if somebody were to control it, they would probably do a bad job. When you have leaders with lots of power that would be able to do that control, there tends to be a tendency to take a little bit more for yourself. But if you have a system where the agents or the lower level people are making decisions then, there's less incentive and less ability to sort of take more for yourself.

[00:18:01] And so a system like this actually relies on the fact that there is no top down management of the large scale forest, that the management actually occurs at the lower levels of the social system. 

[00:18:13] David Staley: A few moments ago you had talked about your ease with the computational, and I know one of the things you're working on right now is a bachelor's and undergraduate degree in computational social science. I'm very interested to hear more about this. 

[00:18:25] Sean Downey: Yes, this is uh, this is plan in process. We're currently putting together a proposal to go to ASC, the Arts and Sciences College at Ohio State University, and then up through the, system. The idea behind this program is to train interdisciplinary or really transdisciplinary scholars in computation and the social sciences.

[00:18:45] And, what we've observed is that social scientists many of them want to be able to write computer code and to do complex analyses and to, work with machine learning algorithms, for example. But the training that you need to do that currently typically exists in colleges of engineering and computer science.

[00:19:03] And so there's a tension between the courses that we offer in the social sciences and the ability to take those higher level classes. On the other side, in the computer science side, while there is tremendous interest and ability to understand social science theory, there's less training for computer scientists.

[00:19:19] And so we're building a program that increases the rigor of the social science theory training at the same time that it increases the rigor of the methodological training of computer scientists for these students. And the key here is that it's going to happen at the undergraduate level.

[00:19:35] There's several programs in computational social science at the Ph. D. or graduate level around the country. But as far as we've been able to determine, there's really only a handful, maybe less than a handful, at the undergraduate level, and you know, speaking as an anthropologist , that loves when somebody that can code applies to my Ph. D. program, so if you're out there, call me, we think that this training needs to happen earlier than graduate school. Certainly, it's not too late in graduate school, but, the ability to pick up code, the ability to pick up some mathematical skills, and the ability to really understand the importance of, social theory must start earlier on to really manifest as well as it 

[00:20:13] could.

[00:20:14] David Staley: Hmm. I'm curious to know why you ended up as an anthropologist. As opposed to something else, as opposed to an historian or, I don't know, a physicist or a violinist, who knows? Why anthropology? 

[00:20:27] Sean Downey: I'm definitely not musical, so we can rule that one right out. an anthropo yeah, It is inherently an interdisciplinary field.

[00:20:36] I mean that goes back to, you mentioned Boas earlier. Boas was interdisciplinary at the turn of last century. And that has always appealed to me, because I have this sort of interest and aptitude computation. But also really an interest in making the world a better place. And I think the social sciences are really well poised to do that.

[00:20:55] We've been studying how societies operate and we have, a wonderful, it's a treasure trove of theory and data about how the world works in history, in anthropology, in sociology, all of these fields, psychology. And so, anthropology allowed me As a field to combine those interests, there's always been as I've noted a place for interdisciplinarity within anthropology.

[00:21:20] And so that's how I got into it. At at a theoretical level. 

[00:21:25] David Staley: why Belize? Why the particular research focus? Why'd you end up in, that area? 

[00:21:31] Sean Downey: Well, there's two answers. The, the off the cuff answer is that I you know, 

[00:21:34] I loved to travel when I was a kid. My father I really owe gratitude to him for inspiring me to go see the world.

[00:21:41] And, he helped me do that. We would take trips together when I was in high school. Visited places like Egypt and Panama. And of course Central America. And so that actually led to me looking at Belize as a possible place for doing research. It turned out when I started exploring beyond the tourist parts of Belize that there were communities there that, were suitable study sites for the kinds of questions I was, going to ask.

[00:22:07] But, I can, can I tell you a quick story? so when I was traveling with my father we went to Belize, actually. It was 1987, and we were talking about 60 Minutes a minute ago. We actually had seen, there's an episode on Belize that 60 Minutes put out in, I thought it was probably 1986. We can go look at the archives, and they were bringing Belize to the world and the reason that it was on 60 Minutes radar was because it had recently gotten independence from Britain.

[00:22:32] the moment when Belize became an independent country and not a colony, which had happened a few years earlier. And so my father and I saw that and we said, well, let's go. And so we went to Belize. We rented an old Bronco II from the little rental shop near the airport, and I think we made it actually I know where we broke down for the first time, just outside Belize City.

[00:22:52] I think we made it about 15 minutes, and I waited with the car while he went back and got another one. Anyways, we, trundled around Belize on the dirt roads that existed at the time, and we eventually ended up in Guatemala on the other side of the, border with with Belize at the archaeological site of Tikal, and I don't know if you've ever been to Tikal, or if any of your listeners have been there, but it's a very famous Mayan site. Absolutely amazing. And uh, 

[00:23:16] at at the time, some of the pyramids had not been fully excavated, and so we were visiting the site, and one of the pyramids that had not been excavated was still available and you could kind of go up to it and there was a rope up the side of the pyramid and it was all bushy and it was just this sort of magical it was like a shot from a movie and in fact this, site was used, if you're familiar with Star Wars episode four, do you remember the site where the resistance base was?

[00:23:40] Yeah. You know, they're kind of flying in over the this tropical forest and there's pyramids. Well, this is the site of Tikal. 

[00:23:46] David Staley: Yeah. Okay. 

[00:23:47] Sean Downey: So anyways, we were at the base of one of these pyramids unexcavated in 1987. We climbed up the side of this thing and got to the top. And there's like a little house at the top of these pyramids.

[00:23:57] And there's you know, stone house and in this, one, there was what, the archaeologists call a lintel, which is just a supporting beam and the lintel at the top of the pyramid had these amazing hieroglyphic carvings in it. And I sat up there with my father and we smoked a cigar, and looked out over the forest and it was just, such a formative moment for me because here was this city where tens of thousands of people lived a thousand years ago and it just really ignited my passion for figuring out.

[00:24:24] what happened here? What were the people like? what were they thinking? How did they live? And why did they go away? why is this now abandoned? and can this happen again? So I think back to your question about anthropology, this is you know, another reason that I got into the field, because it's a, field where we can ask those kinds of questions and we have the privilege of being able to try to answer them.

[00:24:45] David Staley: that's so evocative. How would you describe the applications of your work? Beyond expanding our knowledge about Belize. 

[00:24:53] Sean Downey: Of course. I mean this is really an important question, so thank you for asking it. You know, these communities where I've had the privilege working are, disenfranchised, to put it lightly.

[00:25:05] Mayan communities, indigenous communities around the world have been subject to repression, oppression subjugation throughout the last several hundred years. And the anthropology that I do, the work that I do I see as, a support for you know, the contemporary indigenous rights movement.

[00:25:23] And that manifests in a lot of ways. For example, in, Southern Belize right now, there's indigenous leaders who are traveling to for example, the United Nations COP conference that just occurred in the Middle East, the indigenous leaders in southern Belize just traveled to COP 28 in Dubai and they were there because indigenous communities are poised to make a tremendous contribution to the international battle against climate change. And so I see my work as supporting these efforts on both sides. Research like mine can firstly, Western audiences a scientific rationale for the importance of, creating spaces for indigenous communities to behave in ways of their own determination and that those ways of determination may lead to beneficial effects that can contribute to these global efforts against climate change. For the indigenous communities themselves, these The science, the articles, the research can help them have those conversations as well.

[00:26:28] And so I see the work really being sort of the basic science or background to a facilitated conversation on both sides. But it's absolutely essential that global actors really provide spaces for indigenous societies and smallholder societies to come up. with creative and innovative solutions that work in their communities.

[00:26:50] And so my research is designed to support that. And really anthropology, I think, is incredibly well poised to provide this kind of work because of the ethnography that we do on the ground, the research, the interviews, the time that we spend with people leads to an understanding of the need for these kinds of innovative solutions and for the space for these communities to create those innovative solutions. So that's how I see my work fitting in. 

[00:27:18] David Staley: Tell us what's next for your research. 

[00:27:21] Sean Downey: Well you know, I've spent a lot of time in Belize on the ground in the Toledo District, and I think in the next phase of my work, I'm actually interested in seeing how this scales up to the planetary level, very much in the way that I've just been talking about a moment ago.

[00:27:36] There are hundreds of millions of people around the world that live in similar kinds of communities that are using Swidden agriculture. Current statistics, it's hard to pin down the numbers, but there are probably three to five hundred million people that currently use Swidden agriculture to feed their families.

[00:27:53] And so there's a huge contribution that can be made. And so I'm really interested in scaling from the local to the global. certainly because of the urgency of climate change, but also because of the upswelling of support for indigenous communities for land rights for indigenous communities.

[00:28:09] These are battles that are continuing to be waged in the courts around the world. And I think that that there's a place for this kind of basic research, and, and making linkages between local and global. so that, that's where I see my work going. 

[00:28:24] David Staley: Sean Downey, thank you. 

[00:28:26] Sean Downey: Thank you very much.

[00:28:27]