Nature - autonomous learning

de-naturalisation 121hazards was determined by the hazards themselves and, secondarily, byprotective measures implemented by individuals and communities.Plausible though the dominant view seems at first sight, Hewitt (1983:29) argued that it was the ‘single greatest impediment to improvement in[the] . . . quality and effectiveness’ of hazards analysis and hazard management.We can understand Hewitt’s assertion by looking at the findingsof Michael Watts (of the University of California, Berkeley), one of thecontributors to Interpretations of Calamity. His illuminating chapter in the bookseeks to answer the following knotty question: why do societies thathave, in the past, successfully adjusted to certain ‘natural hazards’ suddenlyfind themselves vulnerable to the effects of these hazards? One possibleanswer to this question is that the hazards have become more extreme(i.e. greater in magnitude). Another is that the societies in question havesomehow lost the expertise and knowledge to deal with the hazards inquestion. In Watts’s case study – focused on Hausa peasants in northernNigeria during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – neither situationapplied. What, then, could possibly explain the Hausa’s increasedvulnerability to drought (the particular hazard Watts focused on)?To answer this question Watts looked at events internal to societynot those pertaining to the physical environment. Like Harvey, he drew onMarxist ideas and applied the concepts of mode of production and moral economyto his analysis of the Hausa. A mode of production is the specific way inwhich a society organises its productive activities and comprises productiveclasses (those engaged in producing goods), relations of productions(the specific relations between productive classes), means of production(the principal technologies used in production) and production goals(the ends that production serves).A moral economy comprises the norms,beliefs and values that lend order and coherence to the relations ofproduction and hence to the mode of production as a whole. In pre-colonialNigeria, the mode of production was a peasant-pastoral one, based on thecultivation of sorghum and millet. Households produced crops for theirown subsistence needs, but gave part of their surplus (or else their labour)to village heads who, in turn, were answerable to district heads and thenceup to thirty or so emirs who governed the Sokoto caliphate – a Muslimconfederation with its own laws, customs and armies.Within this networkof vertical and horizontal production relations, crops were produced mainlyfor their use-value (i.e. for direct consumption within the caliphate) usingbasic implements in a labour-intensive way.