[Stoves] News: National Geographic on promotion of gas stoves over improved woodstoves - in Guatemala

[Cecil Cook]

Dear Crispin and Gordon,

As a some time stove anthropologist and long time collaborator of Crispin
in southern Africa I can only concur with his call for more in depth
collaboration between stove designers, testers, standard setters, funders,
fabricators and the ORIGINAL human beings who choose to build, buy and use
what they discover to be radically improved domestic stove.

>From  where I sit on the side lines, I see that stove buying/using publics
are often interviewed only as an after thought to determine whether they
like or dislike what the stove makers have innovated. Many of the new
stoves are pure technocritic fantasies...or is it a chimera?

The human/social/cultural sciences can help the stove hardware engineers
and testing  scientists by helping the stove designers/standard
setters/testers to describe what identifiable stove using publics see as
the preferred (or sometimes mandatory) functions of their household stoves
(both manifest & latent/conscious & intuitive functions).

If a comprehensive baseline study of well identified stove communities is
conducted before new & IMPROVED stoves are designed, fabricated, and field
tested then the stove innovators at least have targets to aim at. Right now
domestic stoves are designed and fabricated to meet the stove performance
objectives of influential interest groups and powerful institutions
involved with (1.) human health (clean indoor air &  outdoor air
pollution), (2.) gender liberation & security, (3.) environmental
protection  (deforestation, reversing climate change), (4.) international
stove funding & promoting agents including influential global NGOs,
and (5.) the PR minions of world  corporations  defending & expanding their
turf (future shaping?).  It is impossible to design and deliver a domestic
stove that simultaneously meets the demands of these powerful interest
groups and as well as the primary demands of the stove using households.
Whose stove performance preferences is a stove innovator going to
privilege?

Whose demands are preferred? The introduction of the subsidies to induce
the original primary clients to "buy" or use &  eventually adopt a
particular cooking or heating stove is simply a bribe.  So now we get a
highly politicized economy of dueling stove interest groups and the
resulting influence peddling and partisanship corrupts domestic stove
"science" to the point that the needs and interests of the original stove
users is strangely (perversely??) forgotten.

The poor amongst us are being force fed stove innovations that they do not
know. Where is the justice, socio-economic rationality, or programmatic
feasibility, agency, and justification for imposing novel cooking
technologies such as char producing TLUD gasifier stoves. The TLUD gasifier
is not binge singled out here ...it is simply one of many examples of force
feeding innovations to captive populations of poor households and
struggling communities because they help reduce CO2 in the atmosphere or
solve other planetary challenges.

The anthropologist in me demands we respect the intersect of multiple
dimensions of culture in a traditional operator-stove-fuel-cuisine system
as the first step in starting an incremental process of in situ stove
innovation. Such a radical bottom up process of stove innovation is the
beginning of a largely endogamous (insider led) process of
socio-technological change where the insiders discover the superiority of -
say - gassifier stoves and spontaneously embrace a new technology because
it better serves their own interests. Such endogamously led processes of
stove innovation can move along rapidly once they get started.

But as CP Snow alerted us in the 1960's we Western folk suffer from two
culture schizophrenia - the humanities and the sciences.  My view is we
must stop inflicting our two culture madness on to the search for improved
stoves.

Healing this culture war requires strong spiritual medicine. If we get
lucky we can synergize and cohabitate with the enemy ....and pacify the
"others" who ever those pesky others may be.  "Don't close your your
eyes.....God made them to synergize, synergize, synergize!"

in search,
Cecil the Cook
On Sep 4, 2017 6:01 PM, "Crispin Pemberton-Pigott" <
crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:

> Dear Gordon
>
>
>
> - What are people trying to do?
>
>
>
> Invent cool stuff and get it adopted to help save the world.
>
>
>
> - What problems are getting in the way of your success?
>
>
>
> Ignorance about how to invent cool stuff and get it adopted.
>
>
>
> - What collaborations are possible?
>
>
>
> The best one would be for the ‘stovers’ to approach social scientists to
> find out in much clearer detail why people behave the way they do when they
> use domestic energy and apply it in their lives.
>
>
>
> There is usually a gulf between the wanna-be designers and the potential
> users, as large as the gap between marketing people and the self-same
> designers.
>
>
>
> A three-way collaboration between marketing, design/engineering and
> behavioural scientists would produce products that would naturally attract
> funding.
>
>
>
> At the moment people seek funding first, technical solutions second,
> marketing expertise third, and a deep understanding of the users last.
>
>
>
> Hence, the current mess.
>
>
>
> Regards
>
> Crispin
>
>
>
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