Social Theory through the Narrows: From Dominance to Kinship Centric Frameworks in Environmental Sociology

In gentle introspective conversations, often during basket weaving workshops, Wabanaki elder Judy Dow invites young people to imagine a future of less, to share with what treasured kin and kindred relationships they will journey through “the narrows”, a coming era of increasing constraints. Standing in stark contrast to the mainstream modern American ideal of conspicuous consumption and limitless growth, Dow’s represents one of many traditional world views that envision humanity as a part of a vast and complex ecology of living beings. Hers is one that soberly accepts that this system, now out of balance under the weight of a human-dominant extractive industrial age, has welcomed a great unsettling in our natural and social worlds. She believes it the responsibility of elders to prepare the young for the great challenges to come.

Kinship-centered frameworks fundamentally differ from the humanist and human supremacist understandings that undergirded enlightenment-inspired scientific revolution from which sociology also emerged. Here I present an analysis of the development of these contrasting frameworks and the social-historical transformations that now open the field to new social theories of our human predicament. First, I delineate a critical politics of knowledge history of how the field of sociology has drawn on human-supremacist assumptions and frameworks. Next, I discuss the persistence of these world views in sociological research and writing on the environment. Finally, I trace how, in the latter half of the twentieth century to today, the unsettling of ecological and social relations has created new openings to embrace wider perspectives that include humble engagements with the possibility of a narrower future for humankind. I point to the growing inclusion of kinship centered theories in the academy and invite scholars to consider what sociology might take with it in a future passage through the narrows.