Household Extension and Fragmentation: Investigating the Socio-Environmental Dynamics of Mossi Domestic Transitions

Recent studies in West Africa and other parts of the world suggest that globalization and modernization make extended forms of domestic organization untenable in the face of modern economic and ecological circumstances. Unlike the large and extended domestic groups of pre-industrial and pre-colonial periods, households today tend to be small and nuclear. Thirty years ago, a series of case studies conducted on the Central Plateau of Burkina Faso documented this nucleation process among Mossi rural communities and predicted the decline and demise of Mossi extended households. This article tests the degree to which these predictions were correct based on ethnographic fieldwork in three villages in 2004. The results indicate that extended households indeed persist. Their persistence is explained by analyzing the roles of environmental and social change on the twin processes of household extension and fragmentation. Regional desiccation, off-farm income-generating opportunities, and agricultural intensification have created conditions that equally promote both household extension and fragmentation.     

Gendered migrations,social reproduction and the household in Europe

As a framework for empirical studies, global chains of care has become the favored theoretical lens to capture the global transfer of physical and emotional labor from less wealthy regions, whether in the South or the poorer regions of the North to wealthy regions. However, the global chains of care literature has tended to channel research into a narrow set of sectors, skills and sites. In particular, its analysis is framed in terms of flows between households, thus rendering invisible the other sites, external agents and institutions of care interacting with the household as well as the diversity of familial arrangements within the household. Moreover, the household in feminist analysis had moved from being a site of unpaid work to a site of unpaid care. In this article, I suggest we need to unpack what is actually happening in the household in a period of economic, social and political change in which inequalities have increased massively, and state intervention is reshaping how and what activities are undertaken in particular sites and institutions. In order to do this, I suggest in this paper that revisiting the concept of social reproduction would enable us to better appreciate the complexity of the transfer of labor, both in relation to different institutional arrangements and the spatial extension of social reproduction. I firstly briefly review the relationship between social reproduction and its relationship with care in the last 30 years and consider some of the initial North American analyses applying the concept of social reproduction to migrant labor and its increasingly globally extended reproduction. The analysis of specific developments of social reproduction in the household focuses on the European Union.     

‘The complexity of an enduring relationship’: gender,generation, and the moral economy of the Gambian Mandinka household

This article examines the moral economy of the Gambian Mandinka household, focusing on girls' labour contributions in the time of neoliberalism. Scholarship on the moral economy of the household within rural production systems reduces the term to altruism and harmony within the domestic unit. This article provides a more theoretically nuanced understanding of the moral economy of the household, with a focus on the cultural codes that underpin intra‐household relations, the inter‐generational contract, as well as the generational and gendered hierarchies that inform processes of negotiation in relation to labour contributions. Transitions in the moral economy of the household can be captured in the shifting nature of girls' labour contributions and in their changing attitudes towards these contributions. Interpretations of work obligations are increasingly framed in terms of exchanges and incentives. Further, girls aspire to get an education and a good job, or marry well in order to move out of farming. Such novel interpretations and practices recast the moral economy of the household as dynamic and subject to change. These ethnographic insights have relevance for the anthropological study of children's labour, intra‐household relations, and the moral economy of the household.     

Modernity, Conservative Religious Movements, and the Female Subject: Newly Ultraorthodox Sephardi Women in Buenos Aires

Conservative religious movements are multivalent. Depending on the context in which they are practiced, they are capable of signifying to their adherents modernity as much as tradition. Women who embrace these movements may find them meaningful and appealing precisely for this reason and irrespective of their apparent patriarchy. In this article, I examine the case of Argentine Jewish women of Syrian descent who have abandoned their self-described traditional form of Jewish practice and embraced Jewish ultraorthodoxy. I focus on how local concerns about modernity and "Third Worldism" inform these transformations. In so doing, I demonstrate that women, as conservative religious actors, may be motivated by the same kinds of public sphere concerns that are normally attributed to their male counterparts.     

The evolution of costly displays,cooperation and religion: credibility enhancing displays and their implications for cultural evolution

This paper lays out an evolutionary theory for the cognitive foundations and cultural emergence of the extravagant displays (e.g., ritual mutilation, animal sacrifice and martyrdom) that have so tantalized social scientists, as well as more mundane actions that influence cultural learning and historical processes. In Part I, I use the logic of natural selection to build a theory for how and why seemingly costly displays influence the cognitive processes associated with cultural learning — why do “actions speak louder than words?” The core idea is that cultural learners can both avoid being manipulated by their models (those they are inclined to learn from) and more accurately assess their belief commitment by attending to displays or actions by the model that would seem costly to the model if he held beliefs different from those he expresses verbally. Part II examines the implications for cultural evolution of this learning bias in a simple evolutionary model. The model reveals the conditions under which this evolved bias can create stable sets of interlocking beliefs and practices, including quite costly practices. Part III explores how cultural evolution, driven by competition among groups or institutions stabilized at alternative sets of these interlocking belief-practice combinations, has led to the association of costly acts, often in the form of rituals, with deeper commitments to group beneficial ideologies, higher levels of cooperation within groups, and greater success in competition with other groups or institutions. I close by discussing the broader implications of these ideas for understanding various aspects of religious phenomena.     

Geomycology: biogeochemical transformations of rocks, minerals, metals and radionuclides by fungi, bioweathering and bioremediation

The study of the role that fungi have played and are playing in fundamental geological processes can be termed ‘geomycology’ and this article seeks to emphasize the fundamental importance of fungi in several key areas. These include organic and inorganic transformations and element cycling, rock and mineral transformations, bioweathering, mycogenic mineral formation, fungal–clay interactions, metal–fungal interactions, and the significance of such processes in the environment and their relevance to areas of environmental biotechnology such as bioremediation. Fungi are intimately involved in biogeochemical transformations at local and global scales, and although such transformations occur in both aquatic and terrestrial habitats, it is the latter environment where fungi probably have the greatest influence. Within terrestrial aerobic ecosystems, fungi may exert an especially profound influence on biogeochemical processes, particularly when considering soil, rock and mineral surfaces, and the plant root–soil interface. The geochemical transformations that take place can influence plant productivity and the mobility of toxic elements and substances, and are therefore of considerable socio-economic relevance, including human health. Of special significance are the mutualistic symbioses, lichens and mycorrhizas. Some of the fungal transformations discussed have beneficial applications in environmental biotechnology, e.g. in metal leaching, recovery and detoxification, and xenobiotic and organic pollutant degradation. They may also result in adverse effects when these processes are associated with the degradation of foodstuffs, natural products, and building materials, including wood, stone and concrete. It is clear that a multidisciplinary approach is essential to understand fully all the phenomena encompassed within geomycology, and it is hoped that this review will serve to catalyse further research, as well as stimulate interest in an area of mycology of global significance.     

Politics And Gastropolitics: Gender And The Power Of Food In Two African Pastoralist Societies

Male-centred aspects of political behaviour have generally remained the explanatory and interpretive focuses in analyses of the social organization of African pastoralists. While recent work on African pastoralists has shed increasing light on the lives of women, I argue that key assumptions underlying anthropological models of male dominance in these societies have been insufficiently challenged. Drawing on recent approaches in gender and social organization that highlight the mutual constitution of domestic and political domains, I examine comparative material from two well-known pastoralist societies: the Samburu of northern Kenya and the Nuer of southern Sudan. In doing so, I suggest strong linkages between male-dominated 'political spheres' and areas of domestic life in which the role of women is more significant – particularly processes of domestic food distribution. In re-examining central facets of Samburu politics – which are best known through Paul Spencer's seminal analysis of the gerontocratic aspects of Samburu political life – I suggest that the status and identities of Samburu men are in fundamental ways defined through their relationship to women as providers of food within Samburu households. Comparative material from the Nuer suggests, additionally, the strategic use of food by women in influencing male 'political spheres'. In comparing these cases, I suggest a more general model through which domestic processes of food allocation as realms of female-centred social action may be seen to play a central role in the forms and processes of pastoral 'political' life.     

Social status,social context,and arterial blood pressure

As social change and economic development have proceeded, the prevalence of chronic diseases, especially cardiovascular diseases, has increased in the developing world. In part this is due to the adoption of diets and other health behaviors characteristic of industrialized nations; in part it is a function of changing social and economic circumstances. In this paper, we describe the development and testing of a model designed to account for social and economic effects on cardiovascular disease risk. The model incorporates the fact that global economic processes have made a lifestyle characterized by the consumption of Euroamerican material goods and information a basis for the assignment of social status in local communities. But economic change at the local level is rarely sufficient to provide a foundation for individuals' status aspirations. Hence, many individuals attempt to maintain a lifestyle inconsistent with their economic standing, a variable we term lifestyle incongruity. Here we describe how this factor is associated with higher blood pressure in a variety of settings and also how the effects of lifestyle incongruity can be modified in local contexts by social class and social role processes. This latter process, contextual modification, is illustrated by data from American Samoa. In this example, the association of lifestyle incongruity with blood pressure is examined in 30 male household heads and 26 spouses. After an examination of Samoan ethnography focused attention on the importance of age and gender differences as defining social contexts of intracultural variation, the model was modified to assess interactions between age and gender as they affect the association of lifestyle incongruity and blood pressure. Lifestyle incongruity is strongly associated with higher systolic and diastolic blood pressure for the younger household heads, minimally associated with blood pressure for older household heads, and only slightly associated with the blood pressure of their spouses. The regression coefficients for the lifestyle incongruity by age by sex interaction term was significant at P ≤ 0.01 for both systolic and diastolic blood pressure. The consistency of these results with expectations based on the ethnographic record is emphasized in the interpretation. We feel that the lifestyle incongruity model represents an empirically successful attempt to link global political-economic processes, local social structure, and biological outcomes. Am J Phys Anthropol 102:55–66, 1997. © 1997 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

Transnational Migration in Rural Oaxaca, Mexico: Dependency, Development, and the Household

Contradictory models of dependency and development have dominated the discussion of migration between Mexico and the United States. Transnational models of migration resolve these contradictions by defining a series of interdependencies (economy and society, for example). Using data collected in a rural Zapotec community in Oaxaca, Mexico, this article focuses on three areas: the stage-specific development of transnational movement; the domestic cycle, household decision making, and migration/remittance outcomes; and the changing nature of community participation. Rooting the discussion in household decision making captures the important role local social variability and economic dynamism play in understanding transnational processes and advancing migration studies. [ households, migration, transnationalism, dependency and development, Oaxaca, Mexico ]     

Signaling in Cell Differentiation and Morphogenesis

All the information to make a complete, fully functional living organism is encoded within the genome of the fertilized oocyte. How is this genetic code translated into the vast array of cellular behaviors that unfold during the course of embryonic development, as the zygote slowly morphs into a new organism? Studies over the last 30 years or so have shown that many of these cellular processes are driven by secreted or membrane-bound signaling molecules. Elucidating how the genetic code is translated into instructions or signals during embryogenesis, how signals are generated at the correct time and place and at the appropriate level, and finally, how these instructions are interpreted and put into action, are some of the central questions of developmental biology. Our understanding of the causes of congenital malformations and disease has improved substantially with the rapid advances in our knowledge of signaling pathways and their regulation during development. In this article, I review some of the signaling pathways that play essential roles during embryonic development. These examples show some of the mechanisms used by cells to receive and interpret developmental signals. I also discuss how signaling pathways downstream from these signals are regulated and how they induce specific cellular responses that ultimately affect cell fate and morphogenesis.     

Documenting discontent: Struggles for recognition in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea

Within the context of the Purari Delta’s transforming materialities of resource extraction, and the legacy of the Tom Kabu iconoclastic modernist movement (1946–69), I examine the processes of materialisation bound up with two related but different things: heirlooms (eve uku) and documents (Incorporated Land Group (ILG) forms). Eve uku (‘hand head’) lie within a continuum of things (names, relations, totemic ancestral spirit‐beings and sites in the environment) through which ancestral actions are shown to have happened, and descent groups’ identities manifest. However, given the ambiguous status of the traditional past among the I’ai, the power of these forms is circumscribed to the village thus making them ineffectual tokens in the bid to secure royalties from resource extraction. Instead, highly coveted documents known as ILG certificates have emerged as efficacious things by which royalties can be secured. Examining these certificates as objects, I investigate how these documents help materialise anew descent groups, communities’ relations to their environment and thus their aspirations for development with its attending materialities. The problem for the I’ai, however, remains how to obtain these documents and, as with eve uku, how to control them.     

The making of an ‘ideal’ live-in migrant care worker: recruiting,training, matching and disciplining

This essay investigates the contested processes through which gender and racial ideologies are practised and thereby place specific groups of women in particular gendered and racialized labour markets. The migration of female live-in care workers to Taiwan exemplifies how gender and racial ideologies are embodied in everyday practices that justify the paid care work done by these women and that produce their subordinate status. In this essay, I take the problematic of representation of ‘migrant care workers’ as a point of entry, to investigate how a gendered-racialized ideology is utilized to legitimate and naturalize the gendered-racialized division of care labour within the global capitalist context.     

Phylogenetic approaches for studying diversification

Estimating rates of speciation and extinction, and understanding how and why they vary over evolutionary time, geographical space and species groups, is a key to understanding how ecological and evolutionary processes generate biological diversity. Such inferences will increasingly benefit from phylogenetic approaches given the ever‐accelerating rates of genetic sequencing. In the last few years, models designed to understand diversification from phylogenetic data have advanced significantly. Here, I review these approaches and what they have revealed about diversification in the natural world. I focus on key distinctions between different models, and I clarify the conclusions that can be drawn from each model. I identify promising areas for future research. A major challenge ahead is to develop models that more explicitly take into account ecology, in particular the interaction of species with each other and with their environment. This will not only improve our understanding of diversification; it will also present a new perspective to the use of phylogenies in community ecology, the science of interaction networks and conservation biology, and might shift the current focus in ecology on equilibrium biodiversity theories to non‐equilibrium theories recognising the crucial role of history.     

Who let the dogs out? Exploring the spatial ecology of free‐roaming domestic dogs in western Kenya

The spatial ecology of free‐roaming dogs determines their role in the transmission of zoonoses. This study describes the geographic range of and identifies sites frequently visited by free‐roaming domestic dogs in western Kenya.Eight sites in Busia county, western Kenya, were selected. At each site, ten dog‐keeping households were recruited, a questionnaire was administered, and a GPS logger was fixed around the neck of one dog in each household. Loggers were programmed to capture the dog''s position every minute, for five consecutive days. Individual summaries of GPS recordings were produced, and the daily distance traveled was calculated. 50% and 95% utilization distribution isopleths were produced, and the area within these isopleths was extracted to estimate the size of the core and extended Home Ranges (HRs), respectively. Linear regression analyses were performed to identify factors associated with the movement parameters. The centroid points of the 10, 50, and 90% isopleths were reproduced, and the corresponding sites identified on the ground.Seventy‐three dogs were included in the final analyses. The median daily distance traveled was 13.5km, while the median core and extended HRs were 0.4 and 9.3 ha, respectively. Older dogs had a larger extended HR and traveled more daily, while the effect of sex on dog movement depended on their neutering status. Dogs spent most of their time at their household; other frequently visited sites included other household compounds, fields, and rubbish dumps. One of the centroids corresponded to a field located across the international Kenya–Uganda border, emphasizing the fluidity across the border in this ecosystem. Multiple dogs visited the same location, highlighting the heterogeneous contact networks between dogs, and between dogs and people.The field data presented are of value both in understanding domestic dog ecology and resource utilization, and in contextualizing infectious and parasitic disease transmission models.     

Resilience Theory in Archaeology

The past can be characterized by periods of changing and stable relationships between human groups and their environment. In this article, I argue that use of "resilience theory" as a conceptual framework will assist archaeologists in interpreting the past in ways that are interesting and potentially relevant to contemporary issues. Many of the authors in this "In Focus" section primarily concentrate on the relationships associated with patterns of human extraction of resources and the impacts of those human activities on the continuing condition of the ecosystem. These processes are, of course, embedded in a complex web of relationships that are based on multiple interactions of underlying patterns and processes of both the ecological and social domains. In this article, I introduce a resilience theory perspective to argue that these transformations were characterized by very different reorganizations of the socioecological landscape and were the product of a variety of factors that operated at different scales of geography, time, and social organization.     

Music notation: a new method for visualizing social interaction in animals and humans

Background

Researchers have developed a variety of techniques for the visual presentation of quantitative data. These techniques can help to reveal trends and regularities that would be difficult to see if the data were left in raw form. Such techniques can be of great help in exploratory data analysis, making apparent the organization of data sets, developing new hypotheses, and in selecting effects to be tested by statistical analysis. Researchers studying social interaction in groups of animals and humans, however, have few tools to present their raw data visually, and it can be especially difficult to perceive patterns in these data. In this paper I introduce a new graphical method for the visual display of interaction records in human and animal groups, and I illustrate this method using data taken on chickens forming dominance hierarchies.

Results

This new method presents data in a way that can help researchers immediately to see patterns and connections in long, detailed records of interaction. I show a variety of ways in which this new technique can be used: (1) to explore trends in the formation of both group social structures and individual relationships; (2) to compare interaction records across groups of real animals and between real animals and computer-simulated animal interactions; (3) to search for and discover new types of small-scale interaction sequences; and (4) to examine how interaction patterns in larger groups might emerge from those in component subgroups. In addition, I discuss how this method can be modified and extended for visualizing a variety of different kinds of social interaction in both humans and animals.

Conclusion

This method can help researchers develop new insights into the structure and organization of social interaction. Such insights can make it easier for researchers to explain behavioural processes, to select aspects of data for statistical analysis, to design further studies, and to formulate appropriate mathematical models and computer simulations.     

Hispanic Farmers and Farmworkers: Social Networks, Institutional Exclusion, and Climate Vulnerability in Southeastern Arizona

ABSTRACT   In the U.S. Southwest, prolonged drought may force those most dependent on water to abandon their livelihoods. By focusing on Hispanic farmers and farmworkers, in this article I examine how ethnicity and other factors compound risk and create highly vulnerable groups. I use the concept of "social capital" to understand how the critically vulnerable access resources embedded in informal social networks of mutual aid to reduce their vulnerability. By contrasting their situation to that of Anglo farmers, I explore how social networks emerge as a result of diverse socioeconomic and ethnic contexts. Under a more permanent scenario of increased aridity, a better understanding of the risk management mechanisms deployed by vulnerable groups sheds light on how collective approaches build resilience and on the role of policy in promoting or inhibiting these approaches. I seek to contribute to discussions about the importance of sociocultural dynamics and policy decisions to improving society's adaptive capacity.     

Divergence, convergence, and the ancestry of feral populations in the domestic rock pigeon

Domestic pigeons are spectacularly diverse and exhibit variation in more traits than any other bird species [1]. In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin repeatedly calls attention to the striking variation among domestic pigeon breeds-generated by thousands of years of artificial selection on a single species by human breeders-as a model for the process of natural divergence among wild populations and species [2]. Darwin proposed a morphology-based classification of domestic pigeon breeds [3], but the relationships among major groups of breeds and their geographic origins remain poorly understood [4, 5]. We used a large, geographically diverse sample of 361 individuals from 70 domestic pigeon breeds and two free-living populations to determine genetic relationships within this species. We found unexpected relationships among phenotypically divergent breeds as well as convergent evolution of derived traits among several breed groups. Our findings also illuminate the geographic origins of breed groups in India and the Middle East and suggest that racing breeds have made substantial contributions to feral pigeon populations.     

Metropolitanism and the Transformation of Urban Space in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Metropoles

In this paper, I argue that the nineteenth-century movement of "metropolitanism" was a transnational attempt to rebuild and re-imagine cities in a bourgeois image and through a capitalist process of investment. This movement began with the attempt by wealthy residents of imperial metropoles to remake their cities in ways that created greater social distance between themselves and their colonies—both external and internal. I explore how a discourse with specific urban content can engender a movement that revolutionizes people's view of the city. The analysis points toward a revitalization of this movement in the present moment of global transformations, suggesting that the reshaping of urban social organization and urban institutions through transnational processes is not new. [urban, metropolitanism, colonialism, housing, architecture]     

Life in a Double-Hotspot: The Transformation of Hawaiian Passerine Bird Diversity following Invasion and Extinction

Although recent research has shown that non-indigenous species often increase local-scale species richness, few have documented how such increases translate into compositional changes across biological scales. In particular, transformations of biodiversity patterns may be acute within regions that are simultaneously extinction and invasion hotspots (i.e. double-hotspots), such as the Hawaiian Islands. Nevertheless, modification of diversity relationships in such places are rarely quantified. Here, I utilize passerine non-indigenous species introductions and native species extinctions on Hawaii to quantitatively explore the changing relationship between within- (alpha), between- (beta), and across-island (gamma) diversity. My results indicate that, even after incorporating the enrichment effects of non-indigenous species invasions, across-island passerine diversity has dropped substantially. Nevertheless, within-island diversity has remained largely unchanged, or in some cases increased. Perhaps the more profound changes in diversity have come from the loss of between-island diversity. Because nearly all native Hawaiian passerines are extinct or near extinction, the current diversity relationships are inordinately influenced by patterns in the transportation and establishment of non-indigenous birds. These human-induced ‘dispersal’ patterns are markedly different from natural ones. In addition, these dispersal patterns may be unique to vagile species such as birds, thus indicating that transformations of diversity within other groups (e.g. plants or freshwater fishes) currently inhabiting Hawaii may differ. These results suggest the need to explore how alteration of diversity relationships translate into the loss of ecosystem services, or other valued components of biodiversity.