Journal Article

Permanent link for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10535/5

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Anthropogenic Drivers of Ecosystem Change: An Overview
(2006) Nelson, Gerald C.; Bennett, Elena M.; Berhe, Asmeret A.; Cassman, Kenneth
"This paper provides an overview of what the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) calls 'indirect and direct drivers' of change in ecosystem services at a global level. The MA definition of a driver is any natural or human-induced factor that directly or indirectly causes a change in an ecosystem. A direct driver unequivocally influences ecosystem processes. An indirect driver operates more diffusely by altering one or more direct drivers. Global driving forces are categorized as demographic, economic, sociopolitical, cultural and religious, scientific and technological, and physical and biological. Drivers in all categories other than physical and biological are considered indirect. Important direct drivers include changes in climate, plant nutrient use, land conversion, and diseases and invasive species. This paper does not discuss natural drivers such as climate variability, extreme weather events, or volcanic eruptions."
Anthropology and Parallelism: The Individual as a Universal
(2009) Kirsh, Marvin
"It is difficult to define perspective within sets that are self belonging. For example in the study of mankind, anthropology, both men and their studies fall into the same category that contains the topic outline. This situation entails a universal quality of uniqueness, an instance of it, to the topic of anthropology that may be viewed in parallel with the topic of nature as the set of unique particulars. Yet one might assent to the notion in the inclusive study of man, anthropology, that nothing in its’ content should conceivably be construed to exceed it, though in approaches to the topic, reference to the topic of nature, unavoided, refer to the scientific topic of nature in which contemporary notions, when contrasted, exceed the perceptual experience of nature. In this presentation problems in approaches and in the application of available tools for analysis to the study of man will be discussed. Framed with respect to a concept of parallelism, notions and stimuli are introduced to augment and reorient towards a more creative perspective with respect to the organization of first perspective considerations in studies. The theories of relativity, the idea of mathematical relations for simultaneous events, the presence of artifactual paradoxes as they are reflected in thinking and the scientific tools applied towards investigations are discussed and hopefully highlighted so that they may hopefully be perceived distinctly form realities involved in the pursuit of studies."
Changing Name-Tags: A Legal Anthropological Approach to Communal Lands in Portugal
(1999) Brouwer, Roland
"This paper aims to illuminate issues concerning common property rights in land using the 'thick' mode of analysis through a legal anthropological study of communal lands in Portugal. It sees the composition of the bundle of rights constituting any particular property as malleable, and argues that a successful claim to attach to it a particular name-tag (as 'state', 'common', 'private' or other land) may produce a strategic advantage. "The terminology referring to communal areas of land in Portugal differs between popular language, in which they are montes, and administrative discourse, in which they are baldios, meaning uncultivated, waste land. The Civil Code enacted in 1867 consigned such lands to the state, as municipal or parish property. State policy was to convert them into private property until the 1974 revolution led towards the restitution of the commons. "The importance of the different idioms of property law may be seen from a case study of a dispute in 1989-90 between a parish council and two villages within a neighbouring parish. The villages claimed that certain lands were baldios, and their communal lands; the council claimed that they were its parish land. The dispute arose in a sense from historical circumstances which had caused uncertainty about title to this property. But it involved issues as to the different perception of the land as baldios or private property. A â??thickâ?? analysis of the case shows the importance of the label baldios, and the specific circumstances in which a protagonist may succeed by attaching the label."
Changing Protection Policies and Ethnographies of Environmental Engagement
(2005) Campbell, Ben
"Attempts to protect nature by control of human intervention in areas demarcated for biodiversity have given rise to difficult questions of practicality and social justice. This introduction to a set of studies by anthropologists on the relationship between conservation and local community responses to protection measures, looks at the twin processes of rethinking conservation in socially inclusive ways and theoretical developments in viewing human relationships with environments that emphasise their interactive qualities. Whereas oppositional contrasts between nature and society characterised both conservation and anthropology in most of the twentieth century, more mutualistic frameworks are now emergent. Participatory conservation seeks to give voice to local concerns and indigenous perspectives, while social theory has increasingly recognised the cultural and political baggage that accompanies attempts to impose natural states on environments characterised by histories of human environmental engagement. A central focus is given to the dynamics of place in this special issue, so that the impacts of global agendas for nature protection are viewed from the grounded positions of peoples lives and their ways of thinking about and dealing with the changes brought about by conservation measures, which reconfigure relations of community, territory and resources."
'A Disgrace to A Farmer': Conservation and Agriculture on a Nature Reserve in Islay, Scotland
(2009) Whitehouse, Andrew
"This article is an investigation into contestations about the landscape of Loch Gruinart, a nature reserve managed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) on the Scottish island of Islay. Farmers argued that the low-lying areas of the reserve should have been farmed more intensively to support higher numbers of geese, which farmers disliked because they caused damage to their own grass crops. Instead, the RSPB managed the land to support wetland species through less intensive agricultural practices and by flooding fields. The article takes a symbolic approach that focuses on the ambiguity of Loch Gruinart as both a farm and nature reserve. It is argued that this enables the reserve to be used as a metaphor of relations between conservation and farming. The article demonstrates how farmers used the reserve both to situate themselves and to claim that the reserve was not a real farm. In response, RSPB staff argued for the logic of their management and advocated education and community involvement as a means to help farmers understand their aims. Such controversies, it is argued, are a consequence of conservationists’ attempts to bring non-humans into the political arena and can thus be seen as essential to the integration of conservation into Islay rather than inimical to it."
Fit in the Body: Matching Embodied Cognition with Social-Ecological Systems
(2012) Hukkinen, Janne
"Analysis of fit has focused on the macrolevel fit between social institutions and ecosystems, and bypassed the microlevel fit between individual cognition and its socio-material environment. I argue that the conceptualizations we develop about social-ecological systems and our position in them should be understood as ways for a fundamentally cognitive organism to adapt to particular social and ecological situations. Since at issue is our survival as a species, we need to better understand the structure and dynamics of fit between human cognition and its social-ecological environment. I suggest that the embodied cognition perspective opens up possibilities for 'nudging' evolution through the conceptual integration of the cognitively attractive but ecologically unrealistic neoclassical economics, and the cognitively less attractive but ecologically more realistic adaptive cycle theory (panarchy). The result is a conceptually integrated model, the Roller Coaster Blend, which expresses in metaphorical terms why competitive individuals are better off cooperating than competing with each other in the face of absolute resource limits. The blend enables the reframing of messages about the limits of the social-ecological system in terms of growth rather than degrowth. This is cognitively appealing, as upward growth fires in our minds the neural connections of 'more,' 'control', and 'happy.' The blend’s potential for nudging behavior arises from its autopoietic characteristic: it can be both an account of the social-ecological system as an emergent structure that is capable of renewing itself, and a cognitive attractor of individuals whose recruitment reinforces the integrity of the social-ecological system."
The Forest of Symbols Embodied in the Tholung Sacred Landscape of North Sikkim, India
(2006) Arora, Vibha
"The paper explores the forest of symbols and the cultural politics embodied in the Tholung sacred landscape of North Sikkim, India. Representations of the Lepchas as the guardians of the sacred grove are gaining ground in the contemporary context of their cultural revival and regional ethnopolitics. To nuance these perspectives, this study furthers the socioecological debate on conservation, socio-religious fencing, and the mediating role of state. Sacred groves and landscapes are often perceived as an example of indigenous forest management practices and the antithesis of the sanctuary rationally managed by the forest department of the government. I emphasise that conservation is a latent consequence while the idea of a sacred site preserves the forest and keeps it inviolate. I argue that Tholung constitutes the nerve centre of Lepcha life, their identity, and embodies the nationalist practices of the former Kingdom of Sikkim. As a sanctified site, Tholung legitimised the authority of the Namgyal dynasty that ruled Sikkim until its incorporation into India in 1975. I explain how rituals performed by the Lepchas regenerate the human body, the land, the ancestral connections of the Lepchas, and their indigenous identity. The community, the forest and the state are conjoined in the locus of the sacred grove as it legitimises the power of the state and sustains the ethnic-nationalism of the Lepchas in the region."
Historical Meadow Dynamics in Southwest British Columbia: A Multidisciplinary Analysis
(2003) Lepofsky, Dana; Heyerdahl, Emily K.; Lertzman, Ken; Schaepe, Dave; Mierendorf, Bob
"The recent encroachment of woody species threatening many western North American meadows has been attributed to diverse factors. We used a suite of methods in Chittenden Meadow, southwestern British Columbia, Canada, to identify the human, ecological, and physical factors responsible for its historical dynamics and current encroachment by woody vegetation. We evaluated three hypotheses about the origin and processes maintaining the meadow: the meadow is (1) of recent human origin; (2) of ancient human origin, maintained by aboriginal burning; and (3) of ancient non-human origin, not maintained by aboriginal burning. "Our data supported the idea that the meadow had ancient non-human origins and its recent history and current status have resulted from complex interactions among landform, climate, and fire. Soil properties (both horizonation and charcoal content) indicate that the meadow is of ancient, non-human origin. Tree ages in the meadow and surrounding forest indicate that encroachment is recent, not related to a variety of recent human activities, and is probably a result of increasing spring temperature and decreasing spring snow depth. Although ethnographic surveys and historical documents revealed indigenous use of the general area over millennia, including the use of fire as a management tool, we found little direct evidence of indigenous use of the meadow. However, there was no proxy record of fire frequency in the meadow that we could have used to determine the role of fire in maintaining the meadow in the past, or the role of humans in igniting those fires. Thus, the historical role of humans in the maintenance of the meadow by prescribed fire remains indeterminate. Based on these conclusions, we combined hypotheses (2) and (3) into an a posteriori hypothesis that reflects changing interactions among people, fire, and climate over time. Without management intervention, we expect that tree encroachment will continue. "Several general lessons emerge from our study of Chittenden Meadow. A single modern ecosystem condition may result from diverse antecedents, but ecosystems may not carry a memory of all the processes driving their historical dynamics. The historical role of indigenous reource management activities may be one such process: despite millennia of human occupation and resource use in the region, local First Nations left only a light footprint on Chittenden Meadow. Finally, there is value and challenge in integrating data and perspectives from different disciplines."
How to Maintain Domesticity of Usages in Small Rural Forests? Lessons from Forest Management Continuity through a French Case Study
(2012) Sourdril, Anne; Andrieu, Emilie; Cabanettes, Alain; Elyakime, Bernard; Ladet, Sylvie
"The management of small private forests in the Western World has been under threat owing to rural and agricultural transformations since the Second World War. The actions put in place to preserve those forests are hard to implement because the forests are managed essentially in an unofficial way that is not clearly understood. Through multidisciplinary approaches, our aims were to understand local forest management processes, to assess the continuities and discontinuities of usages and practices in the Coteaux de Gascogne area of France, and to propose guidelines for future forest management. Forest management is shaped by a traditional but unrecognized social system called the house-centered system, which has contributed to a high degree of domesticity and diversity in forestry practices in this area. If forest management guidelines are to be effective, any guidelines put in place should take into account the roots of the traditional management system and attempt to comply with local social organizations. This is a major challenge regarding the long-term preservation of small private forests."
Law for Country: The Structure of Warlpiri Ecological Knowledge and Its Application to Natural Resource Management and Ecosystem Stewardship
(2013) Holmes, Miles C. C.; Jampijinpa, Wanta
"Indigenous Ecological Knowledge (IEK) is deeply encoded in social processes. Our research shows that from an Indigenous perspective, IEK is a way of living whose core aim is to sustain the healthy functioning of people and country through relationships of reciprocity. However, IEK is often portrayed more prosaically as a body of knowledge about the environment. We introduce a framework, called ngurra-kurlu, that enables appreciation of indigenous perspectives on IEK. The framework was identified from the collaborative work of the authors with Warlpiri aboriginal elders in the Tanami Desert region of central Australia. Ngurra-kurlu facilitates cross-cultural understanding by distilling, from a complex cultural system, the five distinct conceptual categories that comprise IEK: law, skin, ceremony, language, and country. The framework enables engagement with nuanced environmental knowledge because it synthesizes, for cross-cultural audiences, all the key areas of knowledge and practice in which IEK is located. In particular, the framework highlights how social systems mediate the transmission, deployment, and regulation of environmental knowledge in on-ground situations, including collaborative natural resource management. Although the framework was generated in relation to one indigenous group, the epistemological structure of Warlpiri IEK is relevant throughout Australia, and the framework can be applied internationally to the emerging interest in fostering ecosystem stewardship in which the cultural connections between people and place are an integral part of ecosystems management."
Local Community Attitudes toward Forests Outside Protected Areas in India: Impact of Legal Awareness, Trust, and Participation
(2011) Macura, Biljana; Zorondo-Rodríguez, Francisco; Grau-Satorras, Mar; Demps, Kathryn; Laval, Marie; Garcia, Claude; Reyes-García, Victoria
"The success of long-term sustainable management of natural resources depends on local peoples support. Assessing local peoples attitudes, taking into account their needs, and respecting their opinions should become a management priority. In India, in the last 20 years, community needs and aspirations in forest management were handled through Joint Forest Management with varying degrees of success. Recently, the Forest Rights Act (2006) was passed to recognize and vest forest rights in forest dwelling communities. This major policy development is still in implementation, but little is known about how this devolution process will affect peoples attitudes toward forests. In this paper, we analyze associations between attitudes toward state controlled forests (Reserved Forests) and (i) awareness about the Forest Right Act, (ii) attitudes toward the State Forest Department, and (iii) participation in forest management groups of mostly tribal forest dwellers in the district of Kodagu (Karnataka). We collected information with a structured questionnaire among 247 villagers living under three different land tenure and management regimes: (1) private coffee plantations, (2) Reserved Forest, and (3) National Park. The results of the multivariate analyses show that people are more likely to appreciate Reserved Forests if they have more knowledge about the Forest Rights Act and if they have positive attitudes toward the State Forest Department. A sobering result in our sample is that participation in formal forest management groups is negatively associated to attitudes toward Reserved Forests, suggesting the Joint Forest Management model doesnt necessarily help the transition from coercion to consent. Increasing local people awareness about their rights and improving their relations with the formal forest stewards remain priorities for sustainable forest management to emerge in India."
A New Ecosystems Ecology for Anthropology
(2003) Abel, Thomas; Stepp, John Richard
"Conversation between anthropology and ecosystems ecology was interrupted in the early 1980s, due to several well-reasoned critiques of then-popular applications of ecosystems theory in anthropology and due, especially perhaps, to the appearance of promising alternative ecological and evolutionary paradigms and programs. Since then, ecosystems ecology has been both refined and transformed by the study of complex systems, with its radical critique of science. The resulting 'new ecology' answers most of the early criticisms of ecosystems, and proposes theory and methods to address the dynamics of ecosystems as complex systems."
Ostrom for Anthropologists
(2011) Acheson, James M.
"Elinor Ostrom has devoted much of her career to understanding the conditions under which people have incentives to conserve or over-exploit commonpool resources (e.g. oceans, air, irrigation, unowned forests and grassland). While a growing number of anthropologists have taken an interest in this critically important topic, her work is not well known to many anthropologists. This paper describes three different aspects of Ostroms work which should be of interest to anthropologists. First is her analysis of collective action problems and the conditions under which people in local communities have devised rules and institutions to solve those dilemmas to conserve resources. Second is Ostroms discussion and classification of the complex rules used to manage resources. Third is her analysis of four kinds of goods (i.e. public goods, common-pool resources, toll goods and private goods) and the property regimes that produce them in different combinations. Last, I outline several directions in which her work seems to be going."
SOCIAL-CULTURAL STIGMAS AND ENCOUNTERS FACED BY ‘STILL UNMARRIED’ WOMEN AND THEIR FAMILIES
(2023) Bukhari, Nayab
Marriage is an important institution of human society that binds two humans socially, morally, and religiously. Due to recent trends and transformations in society, most women do not prefer to get married or are not eligible to get married as per various socio-cultural norms and demands. This research is focused on the issues single women face — from social unacceptability to finding accommodation to finding places to interact safely with each other which — are not being addressed by society or the state. The purpose of the study was to explore women’s experiences of being stigmatized by society as leftover and to find out sociocultural constraints faced by still unmarried women and their families. In this regard, the sample of 10 still unmarried women aged 35 and above was selected by using the snowball sampling technique for conducting in-depth interviews. For thematic analysis, it was concluded that still unmarried girls are not only facing problems by themselves but their families too are faced with various social pressures Theoretical considerations of social, economic, and demographic factors promoting delayed marriage. All this requires an identity shift to reframe single as a positive social identity which begins by raising awareness about singlism. The findings of this study may promote positive social change by raising awareness about singlism.
Social-Ecological Systems, Social Diversity, and Power: Insights from Anthropology and Political Ecology
(2014) Fabinyi, Michael; Evans, Lousia S.; Foale, Simon J.
"A social-ecological system (SES) framework increasingly underpins the 'resilience paradigm.' As with all models, the SES comes with particular biases. We explore these key biases. We critically examine how the SES resilience literature has attempted to define and analyze the social arena. We argue that much SES literature defines people’s interests and livelihoods as concerned primarily with the environment, and thereby underplays the role of other motivations and social institutions. We also highlight the SES resilience literature’s focus on institutions and organized social units, which misses key aspects of social diversity and power. Our key premise is the importance of inter- and multi-disciplinary perspectives. To illustrate this, we draw attention to the critique of earlier ecological anthropology that remains relevant for current conceptualizations of SESs, focusing on the concepts of social diversity and power. And we discuss insights from social anthropology and political ecology that have responded to this critique to develop different ways of incorporating social diversity and power into human-environment relations. Finally, we discuss how these social science perspectives can help improve the understanding of the 'social' in SES resilience research."
Testing Hypotheses for the Success of Different Conservation Strategies
(2006) Brooks, J.S.; Franzen, M.A.; Holmes, C.M.; Grote, M; Borgerhoff Mulder, M.
"Evaluations of the success of different conservation strategies are still in their infancy. We used four different measures of project outcomes – ecological, economic, attitudinal, and behavioral --to test hypotheses derived from the assumptions that underlie contemporary conservation solutions. Our hypotheses concerned the effects of natural resource utilization, market integration, decentralization, and community homogeneity on project success. We reviewed the conservation and development literature and used a specific protocol to extract and code the information in a sample of papers. Although our results are by no means conclusive and suffer from the paucity of high-quality data and independent monitoring (80% of the original sample of 124 projects provided inadequate information for use in this study), they show that permitted use of natural resources, market access, and greater community involvement in the conservation project are all important factors for a successful outcome. Without better monitoring schemes in place it is still impossible to provide a systematic evaluation of how different strategies are best suited to different conservation challenges."
Total Environment of Change: Impacts of Climate Change and Social Transitions on Subsistence Fisheries in Northwest Alaska
(2012) Moerlein, Katie J.; Carothers, Courtney
"Arctic ecosystems are undergoing rapid changes as a result of global climate change, with significant implications for the livelihoods of Arctic peoples. In this paper, based on ethnographic research conducted with the Iñupiaq communities of Noatak and Selawik in northwestern Alaska, we detail prominent environmental changes observed over the past twenty to thirty years and their impacts on subsistence-based lifestyles. However, we suggest that it is ultimately insufficient to try to understand how Arctic communities are experiencing and responding to climate change in isolation from other stressors. During interviews and participant observation documenting local observations of climatic and related environmental shifts and impacts to subsistence fishing practices, we find the inseparability of environmental, social, economic, cultural, and political realms for community residents. Many of our informants, who live in a mixed economy based on various forms of income and widespread subsistence harvesting of fish and game, perceive and experience climate change as embedded among numerous other factors affecting subsistence patterns and practices. Changing lifestyles, decreasing interest by younger generations in pursuing subsistence livelihoods, and economic challenges are greatly affecting contemporary subsistence patterns and practices in rural Alaska. Observations of climate change are perceived, experienced, and articulated to researchers through a broader lens of these linked lifestyle and cultural shifts. Therefore, we argue that to properly assess and understand the impacts of climate change on the subsistence practices in Arctic communities, we must also consider the total environment of change that is dramatically shaping the relationship between people, communities, and their surrounding environments."
Toward a Panther-centered View of the Forests of South Florida
(2000) Kerkhoff, Andrew J.; Milne, Bruce T.; Maehr, David S.
"Anthropogenic habitat degradation and loss is the single largest threat to the endangered Florida panther, Puma concolor coryi. Conservation of the subspecies must be undertaken on the scale of the entire landscape. Thus, a view of the forested landscape of South Florida must be developed that is meaningful with reference to the panther. We approach this problem by analyzing the spatial interactions of panthers and forests at multiple scales. We apply tools derived from fractal geometry to the analysis of 12 years of telemetry observations of panthers and remotely sensed forest cover imagery. A fractal characterization extends conventional scale-dependent measures of forest density and relates intuitively to panther ecology. To move toward a panther-centered view of the forests of South Florida, we adopt a scale-dependent notion of association and compare the density of forest cover associated with panther locations to that of the forest at large. Panthers interact with forest cover over a wide range of scales, consistently selecting denser than average forest areas. We discuss landscape-scale management of the panther in light of our findings and propose a protocol for mapping forest cover with reference to the panther at multiple scales as a mangement tool for habitat assessment."

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