Blaut's Early Natural/Social Theorization, Cultural Ecology, and Political Ecology

摘要

When James Blaut was a graduate student at the Louisiana State University (LSU) during the 1950s, Hill Memorial Library housed the general stacks rather than special collections like the 22 linear feet of boxes labeled "Kniffen (Fred B) Papers". Half a century later, the letters and other materials that Kniffen saved help bring to life the process through which one of his doctoral students, namely Blaut, produced a dissertation. At the end of that process of research and writing, in 1958, Blaut had worked out a natural/social theory that would remain central to his thinking throughout the subsequent 42 years of his career. Moreover, because Kniffen was Carl Sauer's third doctoral student and a key figure in the so-called Berkeley School, Blaut's natural/social theory must relate in some way to the emergence of geographical cultural and political ecology, the two approaches to research on nature and society that Sauer's academic progeny championed in the decades following 1958. While anything more than a tentative understanding of how Blaut's early natural/social theorization relates to the subsequent trajectories of cultural and political ecology remains too ambitious a task relative to the brevity of this forum, some provisional conclusions become possible on the basis of two fundamental tasks. The first must be a description of the dissertation, with an emphasis on natural/social theorization. The second task must be, because the interactions between doctoral student and major professor are central to the genesis of any dissertation, an analysis of the relationship between Blaut and Kniffen.