Introduction: From the "New Ecology" to the New Ecologies

An earlier ecological anthropology defined its project within the compass of the idealism v. materialism debate. Culture was an adaptive tool, instrumental rather than formal; it was intelligible with respect to its material effects, not—as the idealists would maintain—in terms of itself, as an autonomous, self-determining order of reality. This argument was mounted with respect to bounded, stable, self-regulating, local, or at best regional entities and the environment they inhabited. All of the premises of the earlier ecology have since been challenged, and today's ecologies—symbolic, historical, and political—radically depart from the reductions and elisions of the ecological anthropology of the past. In particular, the new ecologies override the dichotomies that informed and enlivened the debates of the past—nature/culture, idealism/materialism—and they are informed by the literature on transnationalist flows and local-global articulations. This introduction positions Rappaport's work within this historical shift from a polarized field of mutually exclusive frameworks to today's synthetic new ecologies and their antireductive materialism. Rappaport's work, produced over three decades, serves, in and through its own transformations, as a bridge between the reductive materialism of the past and a new-materialist ecology. [Rappaport, ecological anthropology, materialism v. idealism, the new materialism]     

Primates and pandemics: A biocultural approach to understanding disease transmission in human and nonhuman primates

Investigations into zoonotic disease outbreaks have been largely epidemiological and microbiological, with the primary focus being one of disease control and management. Increasingly though, the human–animal interface has proven to be an important driver for the acquisition and transmission of pathogens in humans, and this requires syncretic bio-socio-cultural enquiries into the origins of disease emergence, for more efficacious interventions. A biocultural lens is imperative for the examination of primate-related zoonoses, for the human-primate interface is broad and multitudinous, involving both physical and indirect interactions that occur due to shared spaces and ecologies. I use the case example of a viral zoonotic epidemic that is currently endemic to India, the Kysanaur Forest Disease, to show how biocultural anthropology provides a broad and integrative perspective into infectious disease ecology and presents new insights into the determinants of disease outbreaks. Drawing on insights from epidemiology, political ecology, primate behavioral ecology and ethnoprimatology, this paper demonstrates how human-primate interactions and shared ecologies impact infectious disease spread between human and nonhuman primate groups.     

设计生态系统绩效研究专题导读

面对全球,特别是中国大范围的生态与环境问题,设计生态学应运而生:通过人工设计生态关系,修复、重建甚至创造基于自然的生态系统,已经成为当下生态文明和美丽中国建设的关键途径。人类有关生态科学的研究成果、古老文明的生态智慧积累和当代人对美好生活的向往是设计生态的三大灵感源泉,使设计的生态具有基于自然的、以综合生态系统服务为导向的、科学和艺术完美结合的特质。本专栏发表了对若干人工设计生态系统的绩效研究,研究结果已经给设计生态学在解决中国当下生态与环境问题的前景带来希望,尤其在城乡大规模生态修复方面显示出广泛的应用前景。设计生态学必将成为生态文明时代的一门崭新而极富挑战的新学科。     

Systems ecology,people ecology,and the anthropology of fishing communities

Ecological approaches within maritime anthropology are reviewed, particularly those concerned with resource management in fisheries and characterized by certain assumptions of systems ecology. The systems ecology approach used in anthropology exhibits certain problems, including the assumption of equilibria, the tendency to restrict analyses to immediate and natural environmental relations, and the reification of analytical systems. Under the rubric of people ecology, data from research among commercial fishermen of Fogo Island, Newfoundland, are used to explore an alternative that emphasizes people rather than systems as starting points for study, and underscores the role of larger social and political processes in affecting local man — environment relations.     

Culture and Rights after Culture and Rights

Building on a critical, theoretical approach outlined in Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives (Cowan et al. 2001a), I posit rights processes as complex and contradictory: Both enabling and constraining, they produce new subjectivities and social relations and entail unintended consequences. To encourage interdisciplinary engagement on these themes, I explore selected texts that consider the relationship between culture and rights, addressing two literatures: (1) debates on culture, rights, and recognition in the context of multiculturalism among political philosophers and (2) an emerging literature by anthropologists, feminists, critical legal scholars, and engaged practitioners analyzing empirical cases. Although political philosophers elucidate ethical implications and clarify political projects, an outmoded arsenal of theoretical concepts of "culture,""society," and "the individual" has hampered their debates. When accounts are both theoretically informed and empirically grounded, contradictions, ambiguities, and impasses of culture and rights are more fully explored and the liberal model of rights and multiculturalism is more open to interrogation.     

The Role of Ecotones in Emerging Infectious Diseases

Recognition of the significance of the boundary between ecological systems, often referred to as the ecotone, has a long history in the ecological sciences and in zoonotic disease research. More recent research in landscape ecology has produced an expanded view of ecotones and elaboration of their characteristics and functions in ecosystems. Parallel research on emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) and the causes of increased rates of pathogen transmission, spread, and adaptation suggests a correspondence between ecotonal processes and the ecological and evolutionary processes responsible for zoonotic and vector-borne emerging infections. A review of the literature suggests that ecotones play a role in a number of the most important EIDs. Yet these are the only diseases for which specific landscape ecological information exists in the literature or disease reports. However, the similar disease ecologies of these with about half of the approximately 130 zoonotic EIDs suggests ecotones, particularly their anthropogenic origination or modification, may be generally associated with ecotones and the global trend of increasing EIDs.     

From forest fires to fisheries management: Anthropology,conservation biology,and historical ecology

Human‐environmental relationships have long been of interest to a variety of scientists, including ecologists, biologists, anthropologists, and many others. 1 , 2 In anthropology, this interest was especially prevalent among cultural ecologists of the 1970s and earlier, who tended to explain culture as the result of techno‐environmental constraints. 3 More recently researchers have used historical ecology, an approach that focuses on the long‐term dialectical relationship between humans and their environments, as well as long‐term prehuman ecological datasets. 4 - 7 An important contribution of anthropology to historical ecology is that anthropological datasets dealing with ethnohistory, traditional ecological knowledge, and human skeletal analysis, as well as archeological datasets on faunal and floral remains, artifacts, geochemistry, and stratigraphic analysis, provide a deep time perspective (across decades, centuries, and millennia) on the evolution of ecosystems and the place of people in those larger systems. Historical ecological data also have an applied component that can provide important information on the relative abundances of flora and fauna, changes in biogeography, alternations in food webs, landscape evolution, and much more.     

God,Fatherland, Home: revealing the dark side of our anthropological virtue

The article uses ethnographic research on right-wing anti-government movements in Bolivia conducted at the height of social conflict and cultural violence in 2008 and 2009 to reflect more generally on the relationship between anthropological research, ethical commitment, and the politics of knowledge. The article first describes the relevant epistemological and political contexts in which engaged anthropology emerged as an important disciplinary current. It then goes on to consider how and why the author's research on right-wing political practice in Bolivia diverged from the disciplinary expectations of engaged anthropology. After reflecting on the implications of this shift, the article concludes by arguing for a methodological recalibration that allows anthropologists to take seriously the ideologies and cultural logics of contemporary right-wing mobilization, particularly social and political movements that are animated by what Edmund Burke described as ‘just prejudice’.     

Dowry and Public Policy in Contemporary India

In modern Indian political discourse the custom of dowry is often represented as the cause of serious social problems, including the neglect of daughters, sex-selective abortion, female infanticide, and the harassment, abuse, and murder of brides. Attempts to deal with these problems through legislative prohibition of dowry, however, have resulted in virtually no diminution of either dowry or violence against women. In contrast, radically different interpretations of dowry can be found in the literatures of structural-functionalist anthropology, economics, and human behavioral ecology which muster wide-ranging forms of qualitative and quantitative evidence to support functional models of dowry as a form of inheritance or investment in daughters and/or their children. This paper argues that a functionalist perspective on dowry could lead to improved dowry policy, and that an approach based in human behavioral ecology (HBE) is uniquely suited to this task. After reviewing the relevant literature on dowry in South Asia, I discuss current dowry legislation and its limitations. I then develop a behavioral ecology model of Indian dowry and test it with quantitative and qualitative data. I conclude that if dowry legislation is to achieve broad support or bring about effective social change, it must address and support the positive motivations for and effects of dowry and take a targeted approach to dowry violence, which is not uniformly distributed across regions, castes, or social classes.     

Methodological Reflections on the Use of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Science in Human Ecological Research

Environmental analysts increasingly utilize remote sensing (RS) and geographic information science (GIS) techniques to study the relationship between human societies and their biophysical environment. This paper considers the influence these techniques have had on environmental research. Using the case of the Sahel, the paper first relates contemporary applications of RS/GIS to the history of the environmental scientific practice in the region. While facilitating an expansion of spatiotemporal scales, applications of these new techniques continue the methodological failings of the past by relying on visual measures of environmental change and problematic indicators of human land-use pressures. The human ecology fields (human, cultural, and political ecologies), by emphasizing the causal connections between local management and environmental change, can address the problems inherent with the spatial analytical turn in environmental science. Using the author's experience with the use of GIS in a political ecology study of grazing management in western Niger, ways of more closely integrating RS/GIS techniques into human ecological research are discussed.     

Amazonian historical ecologies

Historical ecology may be defined as the undertaking of a diachronic analysis of living ecological systems, with the view to accounting more fully for their structural and functional properties. Historical ecology, more an approach or a research strategy than a paradigm, addresses a central question: 'How does environmental change relate to the historical development of human societies?' An integral part of the new ecological anthropology, historical ecology seeks to dereify the concepts of nature and culture, and to rethink critically the complexity of the biological world, particularly the problematic distinction between the wild and the domesticated, which has hitherto inspired natural science research on the diversity of biological life. This paper examines the ways in which historical ecology has been used to research nomadic bands subsisting with few or no domesticates in lowland South America. I argue that current knowledge of the Amazon biome, which is far more sophisticated than it was in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, when Steward edited the Handbook of South American Indians , allows us to rethink human occupation of, and adaptation to, the Amazon; to redefine the forces that have shaped the material dimensions of social life, and to recognize that Amazonian hunter-gatherers have played an active part in the making of the natural environment that they have occupied for millennia. I also argue that 'trekking', far from representing a necessary intermediary stage in the regression from horticulture to foraging, constitutes, in some cases, a sui generis solution to deep contradictory forces of a political, religious, and social character. Such internal processes may have long predated the Conquest and the disruptions it caused. I conclude that reliance on resources created in the past may be a characteristic shared by various trekking and foraging groups of the Upper Amazon.     

Primate Behavioral Ecology: From Ethnography to Ethology and Back

Nonhuman primates occupy a special niche in anthropology because of the comparative insights into humans they provide. Initial anthropological interest in primates targeted the apes for their close phylogenetic relationships with humans, and the semiterrestrial Old World monkeys for their ecological similarities with hominids adapting to life on the ground. From the earliest anecdotal reports of tool use and hunting to more contemporary quantitative analyses of local "cultural" traditions, nonhuman primates have challenged deep-rooted concepts of human uniqueness and redefined the boundaries between us and other animals. Yet, despite the long-standing influence of primate studies in anthropology, approaches to studying primates began diverging from those of earlier ethnographers. Advances in primatology, particularly during the 1990s, have included a much deeper understanding of how ecology, phylogeny, and demography affect behavior. Insights into intraspecific, population-level variation represent an important area of convergence between primatology, other areas of anthropology, and conservation biology. [Keywords: primate behavioral ecology, anthropocentrism, evolutionary theory, systematic methods, biology]     

An institutional mechanism for assortment in an ecology of games

Recent research has revived Long's "ecology of games" model to analyze how social actors cooperate in the context of multiple political and social games. However, there is still a paucity of theoretical work that considers the mechanisms by which large-scale cooperation can be promoted in a dynamic institutional landscape, in which actors can join new games and leave old ones. This paper develops an agent-based model of an ecology of games where agents participate in multiple public goods games. In addition to contribution decisions, the agents can leave and join different games, and these processes are de-coupled. We show that the payoff for cooperation is greater than for defection when limits to the number of actors per game ("capacity constraints") structure the population in ways that allow cooperators to cluster, independent of any complex individual-level mechanisms such as reputation or punishment. Our model suggests that capacity constraints are one effective mechanism for producing positive assortment and increasing cooperation in an ecology of games. The results suggest an important trade-off between the inclusiveness of policy processes and cooperation: Fully inclusive policy processes reduce the chances of cooperation.     

Historical foundations and future directions in macrosystems ecology

Macrosystems ecology is an effort to understand ecological processes and interactions at the broadest spatial scales and has potential to help solve globally important social and ecological challenges. It is important to understand the intellectual legacies underpinning macrosystems ecology: How the subdiscipline fits within, builds upon, differs from and extends previous theories. We trace the rise of macrosystems ecology with respect to preceding theories and present a new hypothesis that integrates the multiple components of macrosystems theory. The spatio‐temporal anthropogenic rescaling (STAR) hypothesis suggests that human activities are altering the scales of ecological processes, resulting in interactions at novel space–time scale combinations that are diverse and predictable. We articulate four predictions about how human actions are “expanding”, “shrinking”, “speeding up” and “slowing down” ecological processes and interactions, and thereby generating new scaling relationships for ecological patterns and processes. We provide examples of these rescaling processes and describe ecological consequences across terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems. Rescaling depends in part on characteristics including connectivity, stability and heterogeneity. Our STAR hypothesis challenges traditional assumptions about how the spatial and temporal scales of processes and interactions operate in different types of ecosystems and provides a lens through which to understand macrosystem‐scale environmental change.     

Significance of microbial interactions in control of microbial ecosystems

A microbial ecosystem represents a delicately balanced population of microorganisms each interacting with and influencing the other members of the population. An understanding of the nature and effects of these interactions is essential to improving the performance of these ecologies, which are important, in such diverse processes as biological waste treatment procedures, water pollution abatement, industrial fermentations, human or animal digestives processes and in soil. There are several types of mocrobial interactions, such as commensalism, inhibition, food competition, predation, parasitism, and synergism, which either singly or in combination may influence the functioning of the microbial ecology. To understand interactions, it is necessary to perform a detailed study of the physiology of the individual predominating microorganisms to establish their requirements with respect to such environmental factors as nutrients, temperature, pH, oxidation-reduction potential, removal of waste products, or toxic materials which may be involved in control processes and to determine how these factors affect their capabilities. The sum total of this information will indicate the possible interactions between the microorganisms and will form the basis for conducting experiments either in the laboratory or with mathematical models. Such experiments will lead to an understanding of microbial activities and to the formulation of control measures, often using an alteration of the environmental factors for regulation of the microbial ecologies. Extensive research remains to be done on the microbial interact inns in obtain the desired, precise control of these ecological processes.     

The Promise of Particularism and the Theology of Culture: Limits and Lessons of "Neo-Boasianism"

This article compares the status of "culture" as a politically engaged concept in Franz Boas's time and in our own time. Taking a Boasian approach to "neo-Boasianism," I examine the limits of this comparability in order to shed light on the nature of public culture-talk today and to identify dimensions of the Boasian concept of "culture" particularly relevant to a contemporary anthropology.     

Whatever happened to economic anthropology?1

In the 1970s, economic anthropology, along with kinship and ecological anthropology, was regarded as a core discipline in the teaching of anthropology. The centrality of all these subjects was reflected in the debates of the time. For economic anthropology, understanding the articulation of modes of production was the problem; the holy trinity—tribe, peasant, capitalist—provided the key terms of the debate. These terms, and this problem, are history. The discipline of anthropology has been de‐cored over the past 30 years: economic anthropology, kinship and ecological anthropology are not even on the agenda in many universities today (ANU included). This presents us with a paradox because these academic trends are in inverse proportion to the importance of contemporary developments in the economy, the family and ecology as global problems facing humanity. This paradox must be addressed not by arguing for a rehabilitation of the core subjects of the 1970s—those days are long gone—but by taking a critical look at the implicit theories of value that inform anthropological thinking about the economy, the family and ecology today. I shall argue that, along with neoliberalism, ‘agency’ has been the key term of the new paradigm that emerged in the 1970s, that this paradigm is about to become history and that new ways of thinking about the economy will have to emerge as we all become victims of the ‘financialisation’ of Europe, the industrialisation of Asia and the desiccation of Australia.     

Supply-Side Sushi: Commodity, Market, and the Global City

Urban anthropology has been simultaneously challenged and transformed as forces of globalization—variously defined in economic, political, social, and cultural terms—have been theorized as "de-territorializing" many social processes and trends formerly regarded as characteristic of urban places. Against a seemingly dis-placed cityscape of global flows of capital, commerce, commodity, and culture, this paper examines the reconfiguration of spatially and temporally dispersed relationships among labor, commodities, and cultural influence within an international seafood trade that centers on Tokyo's Tsukiji seafood market, and the local specificity of both market and place within a globalized urban setting. [Tokyo, markets, food culture, globalization]     

中国景观生态学发展历程与未来研究重点

景观生态学从其诞生到现在,已经历了70余年。中国景观生态学的发展从其引入,到发展、壮大、逐渐成熟,也经历了30余年。在这个发展过程中,中国景观生态学在跟踪国际前沿研究基础上,结合中国实际情况开展了大量研究,在许多研究领域取得了重要进展。简述了国际景观生态学会成立与发展过程,通过系统综述中国景观生态学文献,重点分析了中国景观生态学的发展历程;根据中国景观生态学研究特点,将中国景观生态学发展划分为五个阶段:摸索与酝酿阶段(20世纪80年代以前)、吸收与消化阶段(1980—1988年)、实践与迅速发展阶段(1989—2000)、发展与思索阶段(2001—2010)、思考与创新阶段(2011—?)。在此基础上,重点从土地利用格局与生态过程及尺度效应、城市生态用地与景观安全格局构建、景观生态规划与自然保护区网络优化、森林景观动态模拟与生态系统管理、绿洲景观演变与生态水文过程、景观破碎化与遗传多样性保护、多水塘系统与湿地景观格局设计、稻-鸭/鱼农田景观与生态系统健康、梯田文化景观与多功能维持、源汇景观格局分析与水土流失危险评价等方面系统分析了中国景观生态学研究的特点。最后从学科发展与理论研究、重点研究地区和应用实践三个方面分析了中国景观生态学未来发展的重点方向。