No Country for Old Men

Within affluent societies, people who grow up in deprived areas begin reproduction much earlier than their affluent peers, and they display a number of other behaviors adapted to an environment in which life will be short. The psychological mechanisms regulating life-history strategies may be sensitive to the age profile of the people encountered during everyday activities. We hypothesized that this age profile might differ between environments of different socioeconomic composition. We tested this hypothesis with a simple observational study comparing the estimated age distribution of people using the streets in an affluent and a socioeconomically deprived neighborhood which were closely matched in other ways. We were also able to use the UK census to compare the age profile of observed street users with the actual age profile of the community. We found that people over 60?years of age were strikingly less often observed on the street in the deprived than in the affluent neighborhood, whereas young adults were observed more often. These differences were not reflections of the different age profiles of people who lived there, but rather of differences in which residents use the streets. The way people use the streets varies with age in different ways in the affluent and the deprived neighborhoods. We argue that chronic exposure to a world where there are many visible young adults and few visible old ones may activate psychological mechanisms that produce fast life-history strategies.     

To Know One's Place: Belonging and Differentiation in Alice Springs Town

Based on research in the town of Alice Springs in Central Australia the article explores how social and material aspects of the town generate meaningful understandings of oneself and differentiated others. Drawing on anthropology of place and space and analytical notions of belonging, I explore shared and divergent ways in which a range of people in town come to ‘know their place’ both in a socio-cultural sense and in the sense of relating to the built environment. Paying just as detailed attention to non-indigenous experience as scholars have long paid to indigenous lives, the article suggests that a focus on how people form material and social attachments to place can facilitate more open-ended understandings of changing forms of indigenous-settler relations than the more common focus on difference and division between categories of indigenous and non-indigenous people and domains of life.     

Powhatan's Werowocomoco: Constructing Place, Polity, and Personhood in the Chesapeake, C.E. 1200--C.E. 1609

Colonial encounters within the Powhatan village of Werowocomoco in Tidewater Virginia have captured the public's imagination through romantic literature and popular films. Shifting the focus of inquiry away from English colonial narratives and toward a history of landscape provides an alternative understanding of Werowocomoco as a Native place. Archaeological investigation has identified evidence of earthworks and related social practices that altered Werowocomoco's built environment and subjective experiences of its spaces in ways that colonial chroniclers failed to appreciate. A landscape history combining built environments, cognitive maps, and spatial practices across the historic—precontact divide indicates that the settlement became a ritualized location for the production of political status and social personhood well before English colonization in the Chesapeake. Spatial practices rooted in Algonquian cosmology and centered on Werowocomoco shaped the origins of the Powhatan chiefdom and early colonial history through which Powhatans sought to incorporate Jamestown colonists into their world. A biography of Werowocomoco as a Native place illustrates how a deep historical anthropology may challenge notions of a "prehistoric" past comprised of homogenized societies lacking history.     

Community Writing, Participatory Research, and an Anthropological Sensibility

Participatory research is a radical praxis through which marginalized people acquire research capabilities that they use to transform their own lives. In this article, I examine how parent writers incorporated facets of community writing into their research practice as they developed their practices and identities as researchers. I also consider how anthropology, as both research practice and sensibility, contributed to the ways I engaged as an outside collaborator with these parent researchers.  [community writing, participatory research, praxis, anthropological sensibility]     

Putting the Ninth Ward on the Map: Race, Place, and Transformation in Desire, New Orleans

In this article, we consider how long-term patterns of resistance to structural violence inform citizens' responses to displacement before and after Katrina. Drawing on Abdou Maliq Simone's (2004) conceptualization of people as infrastructure, we recenter the discussion about the rebuilding of New Orleans around displaced residents, taking the place-making practices of members of a social club as a lens through which to examine the predicament of the city as a whole. Members have been generating alternative ways of thinking about and dwelling together in a restructuring city. Their perspectives are articulated through in-depth interviews, focus groups, and the embodied practices of club members and their followers as they make claims to the city through massive, participatory street processions known as second lines. These distinctive ways of thinking and being in the city—the subaltern mainstream of the second-line tradition—are now being deployed by exiled New Orleanians reconsidering their relationship to home.     

'We don't know our descent': how the Gitanos of Jarana manage the past

Although Gypsies have often been described as people 'oriented towards the present', the question of how their approach to the past might illuminate their particular mode of being in the world has been left largely untheorized. In fact, understanding how Gypsies manage the past is essential to understanding the processes through which they survive as a group in the midst of non-Gypsy society. In this article I analyse how the Gitanos of Jarana (Madrid) work upon the past so as to remove certain past events and periods from the communal gaze and to ensure that others receive only limited elaboration. I also explore the links between these Gitanos' downplaying of the past in their accounts of themselves and their particular ways of organizing social relations. Therefore, my focus lies on the relationships between the past and the imagined community, and between the latter and its structural supports.     

Assessing the Effects of Indigenous Migration on Zootherapeutic Practices in the Semiarid Region of Brazil

Human migration implies adaptations to new environments, such as ways to benefit from the available biodiversity. This study focused on the use of animal-derived remedies, and we investigated the effects of migration on the traditional medical system of the indigenous Truká people. This ethnic group lives in Northeast Brazil and is currently distributed in four distinct villages. In these villages, the zootherapeutic knowledge of 54 indigenous people was determined through semi-structured questionnaires given from September 2013 to January 2014. The interviewees indicated 137 zootherapeutic uses involving 21 animal species. The variety of species and their uses have a higher similarity between villages that are closer to each other, which can be a reflection of geographic and environmental factors. However, even close villages showed a low similarity in the zootherapeutic uses recorded, which reflects a strong idiosyncrasy regarding the knowledge of each village. Hence, each village may be influenced by the physical environment and contact with other cultures, which may maintain or reduce the contact of younger villages with the original village.     

Social intelligence, human intelligence and niche construction

This paper is about the evolution of hominin intelligence. I agree with defenders of the social intelligence hypothesis in thinking that externalist models of hominin intelligence are not plausible: such models cannot explain the unique cognition and cooperation explosion in our lineage, for changes in the external environment (e.g. increasing environmental unpredictability) affect many lineages. Both the social intelligence hypothesis and the social intelligence-ecological complexity hybrid I outline here are niche construction models. Hominin evolution is hominin response to selective environments that earlier hominins have made. In contrast to social intelligence models, I argue that hominins have both created and responded to a unique foraging mode; a mode that is both social in itself and which has further effects on hominin social environments. In contrast to some social intelligence models, on this view, hominin encounters with their ecological environments continue to have profound selective effects. However, though the ecological environment selects, it does not select on its own. Accidents and their consequences, differential success and failure, result from the combination of the ecological environment an agent faces and the social features that enhance some opportunities and suppress others and that exacerbate some dangers and lessen others. Individuals do not face the ecological filters on their environment alone, but with others, and with the technology, information and misinformation that their social world provides.     

Genetic and environmental interactions determine seizure susceptibility in epileptic EL mice

Gene identification has progressed rapidly for monogenic epilepsies, but complex gene-environmental interactions have hindered progress in gene identification for multifactorial epilepsies. We analyzed the role of environmental risk factors in the inheritance of multifactorial idiopathic generalized epilepsy in the EL mouse. Seizure susceptibility was evaluated in the EL (E) and seizure-resistant ABP/LeJ (A) parental mouse strains and in their AEF1 and AEF2 hybrid offspring using a handling-induced seizure test. The seizure test was administered in three environments (environments I, II and III) that differed with respect to the number of seizure tests administered (one test or four tests) and the age of the mice when tested (young or old). The inheritance of seizure susceptibility appeared dominant after repetitive seizure testing in young or old mice, but recessive after a single test in old mice. Heritability was high (0.67-0.77) in each environment. Significant quantitative trait loci (QTL) that were associated with environments I and III (repetitive testing) were found on chromosomes 2 and 9 and colocalized with previously mapped El2 and El4, respectively. The El2 QTL found in environment I associated only with female susceptibility. A novel QTL, El-N, for age-dependent predisposition to seizures was found on proximal chromosome 9 only in environment II. The findings indicate that environmental risk factors determine the genetic architecture of seizure susceptibility in EL mice and suggest that QTL for complex epilepsies should be defined in terms of the environment in which they are expressed.     

Knowledge, Learning and the Evolution of Conservation Practice for Social-Ecological System Resilience

There are two broadly conceptualized ways in which conservation knowledge may evolve: the depletion crisis model and the ecological understanding model. The first one argues that developing conservation thought and practice depends on learning that resources are depletable. Such learning typically follows a resource crisis. The second mechanism emphasizes the development of conservation practices following the incremental elaboration of environmental knowledge by a group of people. These mechanisms may work together. Following a perturbation, a society can self-organize, learn and adapt. The self-organizing process, facilitated by knowledge development and learning, has the potential to increase the resilience (capability to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change) of resource use systems. Hence, conservation knowledge can develop through a combination of long-term ecological understanding and learning from crises and mistakes. It has survival value, as it increases the resilience of integrated social--ecological systems to deal with change in ways that continue to sustain both peoples and their environments.     

THE SCORPION'S STING: YOUTH, MARRIAGE AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SOCIAL MATURITY IN NIGER

Through a focus on the problems associated with bridewealth and wedding expenses in Dogondoutchi, a predominantly Muslim town of some 38,000 Hausa speakers in rural Niger, I discuss the predicament of young Mawri men who, in the double pursuit of marriage and maturity, often struggle to satisfy contradictory sets of moral and financial requirements. I trace the distinctive and divergent ways in which Mawri men and women of different generations participate in interpenetrating debates about wealth, domesticity, and sexuality to highlight how the experience of social reproduction is shaped by distinctly local dynamics of gender and generation. In contemporary Niger, the combined effects of neo-liberal economics and reformist Islam have massively transformed the terms and meaning of marriage. What emerges most conspicuously from this exploration of the ways in which processes of identity formation are played out in the controversial arena of marriage is the palpable sense of declining opportunities that young men experience as they delay marriage.     

The Importance of Being Serious: Subjectivity and Adulthood in Kenya

While anthropological scholarship on the life course transitions of young people has aimed to contribute to theories of structure and agency, social reproduction and change, it has done so relatively independently from the anthropological literature on subject formation. This paper explores how subjectivity – how people feel, think, and experience – is implicated in grappling with life course transitions. It addresses how ‘being serious’ is considered a critical adult competency and its achievement delineates a key life transition that young women in western Kenya variously resent and value, resist and seek. The analysis illuminates ways in which people grapple with their own subjectivity as a problem as well as a project, and how such problems and projects of subjectivity are problems and projects of social reproduction. I argue that taking account of such subjective transformations can augment political economy analysis of meanings and modes of life.     

Design of hierarchical coordination model for ubiquitous application

Our research targets collaborative environments with focus on mobility and teams. This environment comprise a number of people working on multiple tasks and activities simultaneously. As mobile and wireless technology advances people are no longer bound to their offices. Team members are able to collaborate while on the move. So, mobile ubiquitous application can be a best solution to provide a mobility and collaboration for the environment. And the issue must be considered how to coordinate these ubiquitous application seamlessly and efficiently.     

Television's Interpellation: Heeding, Missing, Ignoring, and Resisting the Call for Pan-National Identity in the Brazilian Amazon

ABSTRACT   In this article, I focus on the ways in which audiences in the Amazonian community of Gurupá respond to television's interpellation for pan-national identity. I examine how viewers heed, miss, ignore, and resist the call for identity as well as how their various responses to this "call" shape their worldview and behavior and impact the process of nation building. Utilizing audience ethnography over a 25-year period, I show in this study how televisual messages are contextualized and localized, mitigating the forces of nationalistic homogenization.     

Many Possible Worlds: Expanding the Ecological Scenarios in Experimental Evolution

Experimental microbial evolution has focused on the particular ecological scenario where a population is placed suddenly in an environment where its fitness is low, and then adapts while the environment remains stable. In line with this, most microbial evolution studies use fitness measures that report how evolved genotypes fare when competed directly against their own distant ancestor while other studies compare life history traits (such as growth rates) of ancestral and evolved genotypes. This standard way of measuring and reporting changes in fitness has resulted in a consistent body of literature that explains adaptation when populations evolve in this “standard ecological scenario.” Here, I suggest that for experimental evolution to investigate adaptation in other ecological scenarios, such as fluctuating or persistently changing environments, measures of fitness must be expanded such that they not only continue to be comparable between experiments, but also account for evolution and demographic effects in all environments that an evolving lineage experiences. I examine two non-standard measures of fitness—fitness flux and the total number of reproductive events—as potential ways to quantify adaptation by integrating historical information about selection over many environments. This approach could allow us to make quantitative and biologically-meaningful comparisons of adaptation across diverse ecological scenarios. I use the case study of understanding how phytoplankton communities may respond to global change, where environmental variables change continuously, to explore concrete ways of using non-standard fitness measures that consider both demographic effects and selection in changing, rather than in changed, environments.     

The Noble Savage Reconfigured: Paradox and Mimesis on Safari in the Okavango Delta,Botswana

ABSTRACT

Tourists to Africa covet close encounters with dangerous wildlife, revelling in the simulation of the primal risks of the savannah, and yet they expect to be kept safe. Similarly, many tourists wish to engage with exotic local people, but in ways that ensure they feel comfortable socially and physically. Safari guides in the Okavango Delta fulfil these desires by facilitating close encounters with wildlife during luxury camping safaris, while becoming objects of fascination themselves as they perform the role of the ecologically noble savage. The exoticness of a number of these Botswana citizens is, however, rendered familiar and comfortable for tourists through the fact of their whiteness. In this paper, I explore the paradoxes evident within Okavango Delta tourism, with a focus on the ‘familiar exotics’ guiding tourists through landscapes constructed around notions of ‘safe danger’. In making sense of this paradigm, I argue that mimesis is at play within white citizens’ embodiment and commodification of cultural values and practices normatively associated with indigenous peoples. This case demonstrates that within the tourism nexus, the ecologically noble savage trope evident in romanticised global imaginaries of indigeneity has largely failed to empower Botswana’s indigenous Bushmen communities, while perpetuating white privilege.     

Physiological responses and thermal sensations of the elderly in cold and hot environments

1. 1. 10 elderly and 10 college-aged females served as subjects in cold and heat environments. The subjects changed into the standard clothing (0.63 clo), and stayed in the neutral environment (25°C) for 23 min, thereafter they were exposed to the cold (10°C) or hot (35°C) environment for 49 min.

2. 2. Then they returned to the neutral environment, and stayed there for 47 min. Oral temperature, skin temperatures at 10 sites, blood pressure and thermal sensation were measured during the experiments.

3. 3. In the cold environment, the elderly could not reduce heat loss by vasoconstriction as did young people, and their blood pressures increased more rapidly than in young people. In the hot environment, the elderly could not promote heat loss by vasodilation as did young people. Moreover, there is a delayed sensitivity to cold for the elderly. Therefore, in the houses of the elderly, it is important to have heating and cooling systems which also includes the areas where the people do not stay for a long period of time (e.g. toilet, passageways).

How should parents adjust the size of their young in response to local environmental cues?

Models of parental investment typically assume that populations are well mixed and homogeneous and have devoted little attention to the impact of spatial variation in the local environment. Here, in a patch‐structured model with limited dispersal, we assess to what extent resource‐rich and resource‐poor mothers should alter the size of their young in response to the local environment in their patch. We show that limited dispersal leads to a correlation between maternal and offspring environments, which favours plastic adjustment of offspring size in response to local survival risk. Strikingly, however, resource‐poor mothers are predicted to respond more strongly to local survival risk, whereas resource‐rich mothers are predicted to respond less strongly. This lack of sensitivity on the part of resource‐rich mothers is favoured because they accrue much of their fitness through dispersing young. By contrast, resource‐poor mothers accrue a larger fraction of their fitness through philopatric young and should therefore respond more strongly to local risk. Mothers with more resources gain a larger share of their fitness through dispersing young partly because their fitness in the local patch is constrained by the limited number of local breeding spots. In addition, when resource variation occurs at the patch level, the philopatric offspring of resource‐rich mothers face stronger competition from the offspring of other local mothers, who also enjoy abundant resources. The effect of limited local breeding opportunities becomes less pronounced as patch size increases, but the impact of patch‐level variation in resources holds up even with many breeders per patch.     

A Method for Measuring the Motion of Culture

ABSTRACT  Beginning with Edward Tylor's (1889) definition of culture as socially "acquired," I focus in this article on motion as social acquisition and transmission through "artifacts"—both durable (like ceramic pots) and fleeting (like sounds). Motion can be detected by comparison of the artifacts to which people are exposed with those they in turn produce. I examine rates of interaction with artifacts and changes in rates as evidence of the operation of "forces" such as interest and metaculture. I develop a set of axioms or laws of motion, growing out of fine-grained research on naturally occurring discourse, and endeavor to demonstrate their utility through application to three empirical cases. Although I deal with relatively small-scale artifacts, I conclude this article with the suggestion that its methods may prove useful in the broader study of cultural phenomena.