[Stoves] REVISED Re: Leaping about

Tue May 30 00:02:37 CDT 2017

Sorry, I hit the send button unknowingly.

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>
> You have given so much valuable information and analysis here. Let me pick
> on a few that I am afraid threaten the received wisdom of what I will call
> "physicists" crowd (which has nothing to do with their training, just the
> obsession with partial energy balances):
>
> 1. You:"the sophisticated systems of food, fuel/forest, fabrication, and
> family institutions of values, symbols, skills, ethno-sciences, and
> interdependence which such systems represent. "
>

 In the modern education system, children are given a smattering of
information without much understanding of systemic interactions. Those who
pursue architecture, geography, journalism, or design and operations of
complex industrial or power systems, acquire a "systems" perspective that
you have laid out. But the stove enterprise right from the beginning has
been obsessed with one and only one thing -- save free fuel. Here and there
there is a smattering of opinions about food, forest, sociology of
decision-making and rigidity of gender controls. People like Gerry and
Melissa Leach - and some others I will send another post about - repeatedly
cautioned the better-informed crowd about the risks of "stoves" mania. But
the physicists were only concerned with energy balances. Over the last 15
years, they built fictitious "data bases" and computed mindless estimates
of DALYs. It is their arrogance and glibness - and the diffidence and
gullibility of the rest of us - that has dominated the stoves enterprise.

2. I hope and trust that this influence will soon wither away, either
because LPG and electricity - plus "outsourcing of the kitchen" - and even
charcoal will pretty quickly reduce the direct woody fuel, straw and dung
consumption for household cooking, or because a new generation of thinkers
and doers will question and ultimately do "household energy" differently.
Standardized questionnaires "tend to generate false data" as you point out,
but false data have a critical purpose -- brainwashing of graduate students
so they produce silly papers that professors congratulate them on and help
get jobs. "False data" -- meaning inadequate and irrelevant measurements or
opinions - have given us grandiose debates about "ladders" v. "stacks".
What you claim to do - " 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" - is the primary step for
clearing up pre-conceived notions, so one knows whether to have a
standardized questionnaire and what to put in it. In physicists' view, the
reason stove programs have gone "Up in Smoke" is that stove science is more
difficult than rocket science. That need not be the case; all they need to
know is "The timing and duration of discrete tasks may be critically
important. " No energy balance would say that.

I can understand your feeling that your work is Sisyphean. What is probably
happening is not that your rock falls down but that walls of vested
interests and overblown egos thwart any challenge to groupthink. We have
seen that enough in GACC's response to Xavier's advocacy for renouncing
WBT.

Nikhil

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> Nikhil Desai
> +91 909 995 2080 <+91%2090999%2052080>
> Skype: nikhildesai888
>
> On May 25, 2017, at 5:30 PM, Cecil Cook <cec1863 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
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