Can the ‘ontological turn’ help us to criticise conservation policy, or any policy for that matter? Knut Nustad clearly believes that it can: viewed from the perspective of ontology, he argues, prior analyses appear shallow. Like many of those monographs, Creating Africas looks longitudinally at a site of environmental conflict, in this case the Greater St. Lucia Wetland Park in South Africa's Kwazulu-Natal Province. Users and managers of this space have variously hunted mammals, planted commercial trees and – most recently – restored ‘wilderness’. In the vein of William Cronon, Knustad takes readers masterfully through this tale of destruction and modification, culminating in a bizarrely battered ‘nature’. As in so many places, African people lost rights and access to the very landscape they inhabited, used and shaped. What is to be done? Knustad is not content simply to refute conservationists' assertions regarding deforestation or species composition. He considers, for instance, the approach of James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, which famously demonstrated the anthropogenic quality of West African forests supposedly threatened by rural people. Such empiricism, he writes, merely underscores the notion of ‘an objectively existing world’. And, this subject-object dualism drives the engine of conservation in the first place. To shatter that constraint, Nustad, ‘argues for an approach … which conceives of our relationships with our environments as constitutive of a multitude of possible, emergent realities’ (p. 41). Colonial foresters and forest dwellers differ not so much in how they represent forests as in the very worlds they inhabit.
Although rooted in philosophy, such a claim necessarily raises the bar on ethnography as well. To substantiate the argument, an anthropologist would surely need to discover and explicate some sort of ‘native’ cosmology free of Culture-versus-Nature partition. In Ecuador's Amazon, for example, Eduardo Kohn finds a forest that thinks with and through people and other animals. Not satisfied to call it a ‘worldview’ of Runa people, Kohn explains this anti-Cartesian world in ethnographic detail that allows the reader to glimpse it briefly as a common sense. Nustad appears not to have conducted this sort of fieldwork or writing. The bulk of the book concerns grand theory and local history, collected through secondary sources. He and his field assistants conducted interviews, summarised in one chapter. The ethnography of ‘deep hanging out’, which occupies the same chapter, overwhelmingly derives from participant observation at one workshop in 2008. Knudstad quotes from the English-language summary report of that event: a group of women advocate that ‘land [be] officially transferred to them and [that] white people leave’ (p. 146). ‘Two different emergent realities are played out’, he concludes. They don't sound that different to me. Black people and white people seek to evict each other from a land base. The very concept of eviction – going back, for some, to the Fall – relies upon Man-Nature dualism. How, by contrast, would a world similar to that of the Runa tolerate forced displacement? I don't really know, but I imagine that a self truly constituted by its surroundings either jumps space and scale as spirit, or dies, or does both in either order. Nustad never suggests – or never detects – such options in and around St. Lucia. Readers schooled in positivism need not grapple with alternative philosophies to decipher the data of Creating Africas. In this work at least, ‘ontology’ emerges as a theoretical solution in search of a research problem.
