[Stoves] Response to Ron (about Leaping)- role of stove anthropologists in empowering stove users/producers to form & ask own questions

Cecil Cook cec1863 at gmail.com
Fri May 26 00:28:48 CDT 2017


Dear Ron and list,

Something went wrong with my post to the bio-energy list. Here it is
cleaned up. Excuse me!

I do not typically use questionnaires when I work because I find that they
tend to generate false data which often  ‎does not tell us about what stove
users and operators hold dear to their hearts. So anthropologists do their
best to observe the behavior of stove users while operating their
traditional stoves to heat their homes, cook food and perform other kinds
of income generating work. My role is not one of asking questions. My role
is to figure out what questions are foremost in the minds of the stove
operators and buyers and to gradually assemble an overview of what the
stove using/buying public  perceive to be important, what they most
appreciate about their stoves or - what is the hierarchy of values which
guide their judgments about good or bad stoves.

So my methodology is to accompany stove users and households through a
series of meals or discrete stove tasks which includes gathering, preparing
and storing firewood, igniting and operating their stoves, dousing and
turning off their stoves (how is the retained heat of the stove used?). The
timing and duration of discrete tasks may be critically important.

You notice what kind of biomass is used as fuel at different times of the
year and how much work is involved in gathering and preparing these fuels,
igniting them, and what kind of fire is produced. For example what is the
ethnoscience of stove users about different kinds of biomass? What are the
preferred fuels for particular stove tasks and you ask the stove operator
to explain his or her fuel preferences in situ while face to face with a
traditional stove

So, not to waste time on the obvious, stove ethnographers try to discover
what stove functions and performances are considered to be mandatory (and
why these particular stove functions and attributes are demanded or
preferred). Once these perceptions and preferences are understood from the
perspectives of different types of stove users  - or the perspectives of
the stove buyers, fuel gathers and preparers, stove makers, or stove
sellers, then it becomes possible to construct a questionnaire that asks
meaningful questions from the perspective of these different role players
within the dominant stove - user- fuel - fabricator system(s).‎<br/><br/>I
have only been hired by GIZ, WB, UNDP, etc for short periods of time to
reconnoiter the domain of stoves and the many different tasks that stoves
are called upon to perform. I used those brief periods when functioning as
a stove anthropologist to advise Crispin about what I observed stove
operators doing in  kitchens, houses, kiosks and pushcarts, small
restaurants, etc.  And remember I was trying to piece together a very
provisional overview of "culture" of stoves which embodies (1)
Foods and cooking, (2) Family context, (3) Fuels & Forests  and (4)
Fabrication (the 4 F's) . I decided my job was to understand the
perceptions and performance preferences of "indigenous" stove users and to
communicate their expectations and demands to the stove developers and
fabricators, testers, funders, standard setters, and strategists.

It is obvious I have not pushed the boulder very far up the hill - thinking
here of the punishment of Sisyphus - and I admit to my several short
comings as a stove anthropologist but it is not my fault that I have never
been offered an opportunity to carry out enough ethnographic field work in
a particular stove culture and system to understand its integrating
patterns  and most powerful drivers. But for better or worse I have been
privileged to work closely with one exceptionally receptive stove innovator
who understood the importance of permitting the stove using public to tell
stove engineers and testers and funding agents and economists and air
quality experts what stove-fuel performance functions they want from their
stoves!

Like you Ron I am old and drooping in my saddle so the best use of my
limited time is probably to work closely with the younger generation of
stove experts to encourage them to realize that culture "trumps"
technology ever time and therefore the first step on the path to innovating
a better stove requires developers to discover what targeted stove users
and customers  identify as non-negotiable performance characteristics of a
traditional stove. That is the starting point.

My contribution is to encourage stovers to deeply appreciate what the users
of traditional stoves demand from their stoves. Once you have teased out
the functional preferences of the stove using/buying public you want to
serve (what size is the cooking surface and pot holes, what is the
preferred height off the ground, what are the main dishes cooked and in
what cooking vessels and what are the range of different fuels used for
cooking and stove work at different seasons, and how long does a
traditional stove last, how much does it cost, etc) then you know what the
challenge is. If you can introduce additional benefits like faster cooking,
smoke reduction, less fuel collection or lower expenditures on fuels, cell
phone charging and led lighting, warmer indoor temperatures less inside
pollution, water heating, additional cooking or stove work functions,
greater durability,  reduced clean up work, etc then such innovation will
surely speed up the displacement of the traditionally dominant & "old
faithful" stoves.

To repeat: all the stove anthropologist does is appreciate the many ways
old stove are integral parts of old cultural systems and environments  and
encourage stove users to truthfully communicate the performances they
demand from their traditionally dominant stoves. What are the customers'
non negotiable expectations of the dominant stove? The aim of stove
anthropology is to discover what are the deep questions stove users ask
about any and all candidate improved stoves. The question is the question!
It is not the questions asked by the anthropologist that count. It is the
questions asked by the end user and stove customer that count! At his best
the anthropologist is a scribe who translates the preferences and demands
of the indigenes into the languages of the modernizers and globalizers.
Stove speak mostly speak local cultural languages!

In search and service,
Cecil the Cook

From: Ronal W. Larson. Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2017 7:17 PM
To: Discussion of biomass; Cecil Cook Cc: Nigel Pemberton-Pigott; Gosia
(Biczyk) Malgorzata CIM-IF KG; Laurent Durix; Nikhil Desai; Xavier Brandao;
Harold Annegarn<
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Leaping about
List and ccs

It would be a big help to this list to see the stove questionnaires and
reports you produced. Are they available to this list?

Ron

On May 23, 2017, at 2:16 PM, cec1863 at gmail.com wrote:

Dear stovers, CPP's remarks have reminded me Subject that anthropologists
deserve to be given equal standing with physical scientists, engineers, air
quality experts, earth first environmentalists, gender rights advocates‎
(feminists?), result based economist, and energy policy wonks when it comes
to assessing performance of baseline stoves and figuring out what stove
innovations are most likely to be well received and adopted by particular
communities of stoves users, Anthropologists are almost essential when it
comes to understanding the subtle dynamics of communities and households
where biomass and/or coal stoves are widely used and often preferred -
sometimes alone or together with electricity, LPG, kerosene, or even
locally sourced renewable energies to perform cooking, heating, and many
other agricultural and income generating functions.

The unknown question for me is who is willing to listen‎ to me when I try
to act as an advocate for different categories of the stove using public or
when I have been hired as a member of a team which is composed of mostly
western educated urban residing, upper middle class techno-centric
professionals. Such professionals typically know best what needs to be done
to promote improved stoves in particular target markets! When such
professionals are hired to advise USAID, the WB, GIZ, DFID, etc. about what
technological improvements should be considered, innovated, tested and
incorporated into improved stoves for X, Y, or Z stove using publics it is
my experience that we all have trouble listening to each other and we do
not understand the stove culture and stove use practices of the target
populations.

My position as an over the hill anthropologist is that in the end the
indigenous stove makers, users/operators, fabricators‎, sellers, and buyers
of the world will have the last word on what kind of stoves they will
welcome into their homes and communities. This stove list like the WB and
USAID and most other stove development agencies is obviously stove
technology centered. One must speak the language of the physical, natural
and biological sciences to have standing in these discussions. People like
myself who pay more attention to the cultural, social, economic and
environmental functions of both traditional stoves or are asked to evaluate
innovative stoves typically concentrate on the cultural matrix generated by
the food, fuel/forest, fabrication,and family parameters (the 4 F's) of
stove performance. Any proposed advance in stove hardware has to improve a
candidate stove enough to substantially out perform the traditional stoves
with respect to the 4 F's. Stove "techies" who apparently constitute the
bulk of the members on the bioenergy list are not that interested in ‎the
cultural and operator variables which are prerequisites for widespread
uptake and quick adoption from the customers' point of view. Tragically,
the stove customer is not a king. He or she is a subsidized
"peon" who will receive the modern stove that we teckies and
members of the cosmopolitan professorate deem to be the best for the:

1). world carbon balance,
2) the local and regional health of family and community,
3) the bio-dynamic health of the local and regional eco-system, and
4) the long term well being of the global economy,

The pre-modern small scale and pre-industrial economies of the planet must
be coercively straight-jacketed into the Euro American conception of
modernity. And let's face it folks there are so many other wonderful way to
be modern, most of them unexplored and "beckoning". For some strange reason
Crispin takes my stove culture centered readings of village and urban stove
users in Mozambique, Malawi, the DRC, Zambia, Namibia, Swaziland, Botswana,
Xhosaland, Mongolia, Indonesia and Cambodia SERIOUSLY even when the
technologists, economists and the politicos promising & "happy days are
here again" or just around the next corner do not want to take the time to
understand the sophisticated systems of food, fuel/forest, fabrication, and
family institutions of values, symbols, skills, ethno-sciences, and
interdependence which such systems represent.

>From my perspective, it's the 4 F system that we must understand more than
the stove technology. But what I do I know? I don't seem to fit into the
WB's knowledge system and administrative processes very well or at all. So
it is better for me to wait and watch patiently from the sidelines and to
have off the record conversations with Crispin.Come to think of it thank
you Crispin for listening to a backslide applied stove anthropologist. It
has been a pleasure being part of your stove culture and ethno-science team.

In search & service,
Cecil Cook

 Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.<br/>> Original Message <br/>>
From: Crispin Pemberton-Pigott<br/>> Sent: Tuesday, May 23, 2017 10:03
AM<br/>> To: 'Stoves (stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org)'<br/>>
Reply To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves<br/>> Subject: [Stoves]
Leaping about<br/>> <br/>> Dear Improved Biomass Stove Fans<br/>>
<br/>> From<br/>> <br/>> LPG fuel subsidies in Latin America and
the use of solid fuels to cook<br/>> Karin Troncoso, Agnes Soar
es da Silva (Energy Policy 107 (2017) 188-196)<br/>> Pan American Health
Organization/World Health Organization, 525 23 St. NW., Washington, DC
20037, USA;

“In Mexico, despite the fact that most of the population has physical
access to LPG, it has been documented that some people stop using LPG once
they have an improved biomass stove (Masera et al., 2005; Berrueta et al.,
2007). From a health perspective, this is a leap backwards.” While the
sources are a little dated now, the fact that people switch to biomass once
it is made ‘acceptable’ is valuable information. I think it is a bit of a
leap (false statement) to say ‘it is a leap backwards’. The ‘energy ladder’
is an abstract construct that exists in the minds of the Development Set.

First, there is no field assessment included in the statement that ‘health
was negatively affected’ by using an improved biomass stove. In most cases
the improvement includes a chimney, not so? Aren’t these 100% improved
plancha stoves with a chimney? If all the ‘emissions’ are put out side,
then the health impact between using LPG in an unventilated kitchen and
wood fuel in a ventilated on are probably comparable (anyone have
measurements?).

 Second, there is nothing ‘backward’ about biomass as a fuel. There are
some bass-ackwards implementations of burning it, but deprecating an entire
fuel class?? We can do a lot better than that. So the old saw about ‘solid
fuels cannot be burned cleanly enough to provide health benefits’ is once
again on our table. Where does this nonsense come from? Who is sustaining
this nonsense? In whose interest is this nonsense repeated and repeated as
if it was true?

There has to be some accountability. If measurements are not accompanied by
uncertainties, and claims are not based on measurements, there should be no
expectation that funding will follow.There is another aspect of this whole
‘cooking’ thing which is that many populations do not consider heating
water to be ‘cooking’. A stove that is used to cook and heat water and heat
the living space is a triple-function device, not doing double-duty. The
separation of cooking from water heating is very obvious in many kitchens.
I will be making a point of this in Warsaw. For stoves to be acceptable
they have to perform the expected functions.

Famously the 2011 (?) national census in Indonesia asked the question,
“What is you main cooking fuel” and 40% selected ‘biomass’ as the answer.
Another 40% marked, ‘LPG’ and the rest chose ‘kerosene’ or ‘electricity’.
What this single question did not unearth (but the stove anthropologist
Cecil Cook did) is that 70% of that first 40% use LPG some of the time for
cooking food or making tea (a cooking function and a water heating
function), and 70% of the LPG users heat water with wood. Wow!

So 68% of the population uses biomass to heat water, not counting those
using electricity and kerosene for cooking who were not asked about their
wood fuel use. Certainly the total is above 75% using biomass. Is all
biomass fuel use a step backwards?  Asked why the use wood, the universal
answer is, ‘to save money.’ Is saving money always a step backwards? If
fuel costs more is it a step forwards?

There seems to be a smidgeon of arrogance in this matter of who is moving
backwards.

Regards Crispin _______________________________________________
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