Tucker Bram, Tombo Jaovola, Hajasoa Patricia, Nagnisaha Charlotte
Department of Anthropology, University of Georgia Athens, GA, USA.
Department of History, Université de Toliara Toliara, Madagascar.
Front Psychol. 2015 Oct 13;6:1533. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01533. eCollection 2015.
A fact of life for farmers, hunter-gatherers, and fishermen in the rural parts of the world are that crops fail, wild resources become scarce, and winds discourage fishing. In this article we approach subsistence risk from the perspective of "coexistence thinking," the simultaneous application of natural and supernatural causal models to explain subsistence success and failure. In southwestern Madagascar, the ecological world is characterized by extreme variability and unpredictability, and the cosmological world is characterized by anxiety about supernatural dangers. Ecological and cosmological causes seem to point to different risk minimizing strategies: to avoid losses from drought, flood, or heavy winds, one should diversify activities and be flexible; but to avoid losses caused by disrespected spirits one should narrow one's range of behaviors to follow the code of taboos and offerings. We address this paradox by investigating whether southwestern Malagasy understand natural and supernatural causes as occupying separate, contradictory explanatory systems (target dependence), whether they make no categorical distinction between natural and supernatural forces and combine them within a single explanatory system (synthetic thinking), or whether they have separate natural and supernatural categories of causes that are integrated into one explanatory system so that supernatural forces drive natural forces (integrative thinking). Results from three field studies suggest that (a) informants explain why crops, prey, and market activities succeed or fail with reference to natural causal forces like rainfall and pests, (b) they explain why individual persons experience success or failure primarily with supernatural factors like God and ancestors, and (c) they understand supernatural forces as driving natural forces, so that ecology and cosmology represent distinct sets of causes within a single explanatory framework. We expect that future cross-cultural analyses may find that this form of "integrative thinking" is common in unpredictable environments and is a cognitive strategy that accompanies economic diversification.
对于世界农村地区的农民、狩猎采集者和渔民来说，生活中的一个事实是作物歉收、野生资源变得稀缺，以及狂风阻碍捕鱼。在本文中，我们从“共存思维”的角度探讨生存风险，即同时应用自然和超自然因果模型来解释生存的成功与失败。在马达加斯加西南部，生态世界的特点是极端的变异性和不可预测性，而宇宙世界的特点是对超自然危险的焦虑。生态和宇宙学原因似乎指向不同的风险最小化策略：为了避免干旱、洪水或狂风造成的损失，人们应该使活动多样化并保持灵活性；但为了避免因冒犯神灵而造成的损失，人们应该缩小自己的行为范围，遵守禁忌和供奉的准则。我们通过调查马达加斯加西南部的人们是否将自然和超自然原因理解为占据 separate、相互矛盾的解释系统（目标依赖性），是否他们在自然和超自然力量之间没有绝对的区分，并将它们整合在一个单一的解释系统中（综合思维），或者是否他们有单独的自然和超自然原因类别，这些类别被整合到一个解释系统中，以便超自然力量驱动自然力量（整合思维）来解决这个悖论。三项实地研究的结果表明：（a）被调查者参照降雨和害虫等自然因果力量来解释作物、猎物和市场活动为何成功或失败；（b）他们主要用上帝和祖先等超自然因素来解释个人为何成功或失败；（c）他们将超自然力量理解为驱动自然力量，因此生态和宇宙学在一个单一的解释框架内代表了不同的原因集。我们预计未来的跨文化分析可能会发现，这种“整合思维”形式在不可预测的环境中很常见，并且是一种伴随经济多样化的认知策略。
