What Counts as ‘Natural’? Unlearning the Flows That Shape Us

This week’s adventures in anthropology have taken me on a journey through the history of the 19th and 20th centuries, following the lives of coal, oil and borders. I’ve visited Dominica to learn about paternity, a small Malay fishing community to hear stories about food and kin-making, and the banks of the North Saskatchewan River to meet oil as an ancestor.

Across my classes, whether we were talking about energy regimes, migration governance, or kinship systems, a thread began to emerge. Power, it seems, depends on making certain relationships look inevitable, natural even, as though they’ve always been that way.

To naturalise is to render historical choices invisible and to make power look like nature.

‘Natural’ resources are anything but

Like me, you may have some vague sense about the role of oil in shaping the politics of the Middle East. But fossil fuels have played a pivotal role in shaping democracy around the world since the days of coal (Mitchell, 2009).

The material qualities of coal, mined in the 18th and 19th centuries in relatively few places in the world by workers largely underground and with a degree of autonomy from supervision, not to mention the transport nodes that could easily be choked off by striking workers, helped fuel the emergence of mass politics in the early 20th century. It was the power of this version of carbon democracy that saw the achievement of episodes of welfare and labour gains in Europe and North America.

As production of energy shifted to oil from the Middle East in the mid-20th century, the properties of oil allowed for a weakening, rather than an extension, of political mobilisation in both the West and the Middle East. The energy system moved from something geographically concentrated, which gave power to the workers, to something more flexible and diffuse; moving oil by tanker and pipeline meant companies could divert flows away from striking ports and still get paid. Oil production, with its ways of organising knowledge, shaped a new world of economics regarding the future as “a limitless horizon of growth”, something that has had much broader implications for the health of our planet than just the CO2 released through the burning of fossil fuels (Mitchell, 2009).

This is a site where the natural (fossil fuels) becomes political through invisibility; after all, it’s just ‘energy’. Tracing the flows of fossil fuels and their relations with human development, it becomes clear that these are political and social resources, not just ‘natural’ ones.

Nations, migrants, and the myth of belonging

Just as oil and coal were made to seem like neutral forces of progress, the nation-state was naturalised as the only imaginable way to organise human life.

When was the last time you paused to wonder whether it might be possible to organise the world in something other than nations? I’ll confess, it’s not something I give much time to. But nations are relatively new. Considered to date back to the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, national forms of state sovereignty have had a heyday since the end of WWII; between 1945 and 1960, nearly 40 new states were granted restricted autonomy or full independence from their previous imperial rulers (Sharma, 2000).

This also marked a profound shift in the ways we think about the movement of people. Empires, in large part, focused on bringing more people under their jurisdiction and preventing people from escaping; nation-states, on the other hand, require immigration and citizenship controls to make and maintain their identities. There are “people of a place” and “people out of place” (Sharma, 2000). Thus, the idea of a ‘migrant’ was born.

This dichotomy between National-Natives and Migrants turns out to be highly advantageous for capital. Immigration controls produce competitive labour markets. They strengthen the ability of both employers and states to exploit and control workers (Sharma, 2000).

Citizens, nationals, natives, migrants, refugees. None of these terms has a fixed meaning. ‘Native’, for example, is a legacy of imperialism, where the binary of European/Native was clear. It was denigrated as other, until it became the “quintessential criterion for being a member of the nation” in the post-war postcolonial world order (Sharma, 2000 p. 8). These are not “natural, timeless categories” (Sharma, 2000 p. 21). They are inherently political; they contain complex histories and context.

Kinship might not be ‘natural’ either

Surely, though, there can’t be anything more natural than who you’re related to? It turns out anthropologists have had quite a bit to say about that over the years.

The anthropologists of the early and mid-20th century were what are known as structural functionalists or structuralists. There was an emphasis on studying ‘descent groups’ (Radcliffe-Brown), aka lineages, and their role in providing the social glue necessary in so-called stateless societies. Levi-Strauss, on the other hand, constructed theories of ‘marriage alliance’ and imagined kinship as relationships of exchange and reciprocity. Studies of kinship tended to be abstract, depicted through elaborate kinship charts (family trees to you and me) that overlooked the everyday realities of relating.

Then came the 1970s and the rise of the culturalists with David Schneider, who did his ethnography in his home country of the US, rather than overseas.

Theories of ‘chosen families’, kinship as a relational category, and the substances of kinship (blood, milk, food and so on) abounded, largely through female anthropologists, like Marilyn Strathern, Janet Carsten, Katherine Dow and Jie Li. Kinship evolved from being a static category to a process of kin-making; kinship came to be seen as emergent, rather than given. The role of homes and houses was studied as sites where kin-making happens as an activity that requires care and nurture, and anthropologists began to build an understanding of what happened when the home was a site of violence, exclusion, abuse and hierarchy (Carsten).

And then we come full circle back to oil.

“The fossil fuels which animate the political economy of my home province [Edmonton/amiskwaciwâskahikan] are a paradoxical kind of kin - the bones of dinosaurs and the traces of flora and fauna from millions of years ago which surface in rocks and loamy earth in Alberta act as teachers for us…” (Todd, 2013 p. 104. Emphasis is mine).

Zoe Todd is an Inuvialuk scholar whose work explicitly brings together Indigenous ontologies, decolonial and feminist perspectives, petro-politics…this is the second times I’ve come across her work in the readings and I’m so much looking forward to more.

I have a whole week of multi-species anthropology coming up, but for now, let me tell you how excited I am that anthropologists are drawing on animist worldviews to imagine kin as extending beyond our human relations. What changes when we regard animals, plants, and even fossil fuels as kin? As agential beings in their own right? Far from being ‘natural’ resources, maybe they are social and spiritual ‘resources’ too.

Imagining something different

One of the things that motivated me to take this course was the invitation to reimagine different futures for ourselves. Imagination plays such a critical role in what the future might hold for us, individually and collectively (including our more-than-human kin).

After all, "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism", (attributed to both Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek).

When the world around us appears inevitable, it’s almost impossible to see alternative futures. But things didn’t have to be this way. The world is the way it is because of choices people have made. US car companies chose to sell the new V8 engines as “the dream of every middle-class family”, rather than the more efficient, more durable 4-cylinder engines produced by European manufacturers because they wanted to make more money (Mitchell, 2009). Choices.

Things could have been, and still could be, different.

If education, as Freire says, is the practice of freedom, perhaps it begins with unlearning what we’ve been taught is ‘natural’ (Freire, 1968). To denaturalise is to reclaim imagination: to see energy, migration, and kinship not as fixed facts but as living relationships that could be otherwise. Unlearning what we’ve been taught is natural is intellectual, political and imaginative work. It’s how we find the cracks where freedom might still live.

Fiere, P. 2005. Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30 Anniversary Edition. New York: Continuum

Mitchell, T. 2009. Carbon Democracy, Economy and Society, 38(3): 399-432.

Sharma, Nandita. “Home Rule: The National Politics of Separation.” In Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants 1–36. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.

Todd, Zoe. 2017. Fish, Kin and Hope: Tending to Water Violations in Amiskwaciwâskahikan and Treaty Six Territory, Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 43 (March): 102–7