Author's response: Worship, wilderness, and cultural coevolution

When I learned that Worship and Wilderness was to be featured at an Author Meets Reader panel at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association, at first I felt grateful. I would be able to discuss in an open forum with knowledgeable colleagues the results of a research and writing project to which I had devoted much of the previous six years of my life. But I also felt just a little trepidation, and for the same reason: my work would be subject to some fairly strict public scrutiny by critics well versed in the fields constituting the subtitle of the book. Under the strict scrutiny standard of review, I could only hope the panelists would conclude that I had a compelling scholarly interest in bringing Worship and Wilderness into being, and that I had done so by means least intrusive on the traditional disciplinary boundaries separating the subtitle fields of culture, religion, and law as they pertain to the management of our commonly held public lands. As I learned at the panel presentation and as the written critiques in this forum generally reflect, my colleagues seem to have decided in the affirmative on the former question, and perhaps have cast a split vote on the second. Flirting With Theory Development One of the observations that panel chair Marianne Constable made in her introductory remarks at the 2003 LSA meeting was echoed there by Susan Gooding, to the effect that while in the introductory chapter I suggest a theoretical construct grounded in both the ethnographic fieldwork and the more extensive document review and analysis done for this project, it is a theoretical framework never fully developed either in the opening chapter or at later stages in the book. In her written comments herein, Gooding goes on to demonstrate how, had I adopted an alternative mode of inquiry based on a more theoretical and critical literature that is not centrally featured in Worship and Wilderness (hereinafter, "W&W"), I might have been able to make a more original contribution to our understanding of how indigenous and dominant cultures have sought and are seeking to influence each other's thought and behavior regarding the sacred in nature. In particular, both she and Constable note-and I agree-that I could have done a better job of explaining what I meant in concluding that what I had discovered during the course of my research was an example of "cultural coevolution" (W&W, p. 6). In explanation if not in defense on this point, the four stated purposes for doing this research were 1. to develop a better understanding of the spiritual dimensions of the relationship that the indigenous and dominant culture groups have with their environment 2. to learn what role in these matters has been played by the public law of the dominant culture 3. to learn how managers of public lands have tried to achieve mutual accommodation and cultural reconciliation among various groups contesting the use of sacred sites 4. (based on this case study data) to suggest how we all might most constructively think about and deal with these issues in the future (W&W, pp. 13-4). I readily acknowledge probably having done a more thorough job of achieving the second and third goals than the first and fourth. For in doing this work I often felt pulled in two different directions. On the one hand, I wanted to suggest novel or substantially untried frames of reference for thinking about these issues, since I find conventional discourse on these matters to often be predictably and sometimes dangerously predeterminative of outcomes. But I also wanted to work with conceptual constructs already familiar to public land managers and federal judges, since the practical playing out of dispute resolution efforts over contested sacred sites on public lands does and will continue to depend in large part on how these two groups of public sector professionals understand the dynamics of these disputes and exercise their considerable discretion in resolving them. …