Grief as social experience: Death and bereavement in Lihir,Papua New Guinea1

This paper explores the nature of grief in Lihir, Papua New Guinea, in light of psychological theories of bereavement and grief. Anthropologists have demonstrated that culture has an impact on both the expression and experience of grief and can offer both a challenge to established theories and new perspectives on the conceptualisations and experiences of the bereaved. Until recently, ‘grief work’ was the foremost model for understanding bereavement as a psychological process and was also used by anthropologists in cross‐cultural work. However, since the 1990s, a number of alternative models of normal grief have emerged, including the dual process coping model and the model that proposes resilience as a central concept. These newer models, particularly the one which incorporates resilience, offer more for understanding grief in Lihir. The article argues that grief in Lihir has a phase of sorrow and worry that is dealt with through the sociality and activity of the mourning period, and then a longer phase of active remembering and forgetting of the deceased. The social and cultural context of bereavement is not adequately captured in current psychological conceptualisations of social support, which need to be broadened to encompass cross‐cultural material.     

“The Trust is Over! We Want to Plough!”: Social Differentiation and the Reversal of Resettlement in South Africa

In the early 1980s residents of Hobeni, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, were subjected to forced resettlement, under “betterment” policy ostensibly aimed at soil conservation. They were moved into a spatially contiguous but socially differentiated village. South Africa’s political transition ended this policy, and in the early 1990s, some people, mainly from part of the resettlement area (Kunene) characterized by dense kinship networks who had faced pressure to leave, and began to return voluntarily to their former sites, opting to live in dispersed, flexible settlements. Few people resettled in Mhlanganisweni, a part of the village more diverse in its social composition, returned to their former sites. This research highlights the ways exclusion within “socially-embedded” land tenure systems, together with the layout of resettlement areas and other forms of social and economic differentiation, caused patterns of resettlement to diverge from planners’ intentions.     

Political Conflict ana Revolution in an African Town

The emerging patterns of life in contemporary Africa are most apparent in the often competing social and political groupings which have developed as basically rural populations have attempted to deal with the complexities of modern life. During the colonial period, these new groupings—whether rural or urban—were under the control of a dominant administration and seldom came into overt conflict. However, this is not now the case in most African towns. There, as in Ouagadougou, the capital of Upper Volta, a multiplicity of socio-political factions and multiple governing bodies all claim rights to power and legitimacy. The result is more open competition and conflict. This suggests that the "stability" claimed for colonial African societies was more a function of exogenous political factors than of inherent structural features in the social systems described. Until new dominant political structures emerge in Africa and establish mediating linkages with other institutional forms, there may well be a period of conflict and revolution.     

Post-civil war adaptation and need in Managua, Nicaragua

Within seven years after the end of the Nicaraguan civil war in 1990, forced migrants, whose lives had been most disrupted by the conflict, were self-settled in a squatter community in the capital city of Managua and lived in extreme poverty with minimal health, education, security and social service supports. Compared with voluntary migrant neighbours, whose lives had been less affected by the conflict, forced migrants exhibited equal clinically significant symptoms of physical and mental health and psychosocial maladaptation. These findings run counter to generally held theory and assumptions about the negative long-lasting effects of the trauma and stress of war, forced migration and resettlement. Explanations are offered to explain the discrepancies between theory and the study findings as well as the dominance of poverty and socioeconomic status. Implications are also drawn for increasing social support and other durable forms of assistance that emerge from the study as important to meeting the needs of equally poor and unhealthy forced and voluntary migrants in proliferating squatter communities throughout the Third World.     

Thinking with relations in nature conservation? A case study of the Etosha National Park and Haiǁom

The area of the Etosha National Park in Namibia has been inhabited for many centuries by Haiǁom, a group of (now former) hunter-gatherers. In 1907, Etosha was proclaimed as a game reserve, although Haiǁom were still allowed to live in the area until they were expelled in the 1950s due to then-dominant ideas of fortress conservation. In recent years, Haiǁom have been provided with several resettlement farms by the Namibian government as a reaction to the colonial land dispossession. In this article, I explore the onto-epistemology of Haiǁom (i.e. their being in and knowing the Etosha area), focusing on their relations with the land and with human and beyond-the-human beings before their eviction. I argue that the eviction implies not only economic marginalization but also social deprivation, which is inadequately addressed with resettlement. I suggest that thinking with relations, illustrated with the Haiǁom case, would call for other solutions in the context of measures taken for past land dispossessions and would open new paths for Namibia's nature conservation initiatives.     

Anecdotal,Historical and Critical Commentaries on Genetics: Darwin and Darwinism: The (Alleged) Social Implications of The Origin of Species

Most scientific theories, even revolutionary ones, change the practice of a particular science but have few consequences for culture or society at large. But Darwinism, it has often been said, is different in this respect. Since the publication of The Origin of Species, many have claimed that Darwinism has a number of profound social implications. Here, I briefly consider three of these: the economic, the political, and the religious. I suggest that, for the most part, these supposed implications have been misconstrued or exaggerated. Indeed, it is reasonably clear that the chain of implication sometimes primarily ran in the opposite direction—from, for instance, economics and political theory to Darwinism.THE appearance of The Origin of Species launched one of the greatest, and most justly celebrated, revolutions in the history of science. But in the 150 years since the appearance of Darwin''s book, many scholars, scientists, and pundits have claimed that Darwinism did more than revolutionize biology. Darwinism, they claim, also had a number of social and cultural consequences: economic and political, medical, eugenic, educational, and religious. Some of these consequences are to be applauded and others regretted, but all, it is said, can be traced to important strands of thought in The Origin of Species. One of the ironies of modern history would thus seem to be that the close scientific study of pigeons, mockingbirds, and barnacles could have such consequences.But while the case for the scientific importance of Darwinism is incontestable, the case for its presumed social and cultural consequences is far more complex and, in places, dubious. Here I consider three of these supposed consequences: the economic, the political, and the religious. Because the economic and religious cases have been widely discussed, I focus on the political one. I should note that I am not an expert on economics, political theory, or religion, but a biologist. Perhaps fortunately, then, little that I have to say is new but reflects the efforts of many social scientists and historians. Because their ideas seem little known among biologists, they may be worth recounting here.     

The Never Ending Dance: Islamism,Kemalism and the Power of Self‐institution in Turkey

Kemalism in Turkey is often presented as an exemplary case of paternalistic and authoritarian modernisation from above, and lauded or condemned for that very reason. Represented in these terms, certain analytic and political binaries are also activated: state versus society; world‐view versus life‐world; universality versus particularity; inauthenticity versus indigeneity; homogeneity versus heterogeneity/resistance. By contrast, in this paper I seek to sidestep these organising categories to focus on Kemalism and Islamism as rival forms of the same social imaginary signification, and not as shorthand for these polarities. Using a number of representative texts, I argue that the extravagance of Islamist resistance in Turkey post‐1980 brings to light the fantastical power of Kemalism itself, exposed as a project of the triumph of the will. This being the case, what has been written in anthropology about acts of ‘self‐institution’? The work of Nigel Rapport and Cornelius Castoriadis emphasises, in different ways, the arbitrariness and gratuity of social creation out of nothing or self‐institution. Pierre Bourdieu's work, on the other hand, is radically contrary to Rapport's in its structuralist elaboration of agency as guided action. My analysis of processes of change within both the Islamist and Republican social movements in Turkey from the early 1990s to the present seeks a temporary rapprochement, at least in this case, between Rapport's methodological individualism and Bourdieu's methodological holism.     

Between votes and bullets. Conflicting ethnic identities in the Basque Country

With settlement of the Northern Irish conflict, the Basque Country hosts the most threatening nationalist conflict in the European Union. After the breakdown of the ceasefire late in 1999, a return of intensive and indiscriminate ETA violence has provoked a political and social crisis for Basque (and Spanish) society, and, according to all recent opinion polls, the issue of terrorism now ranks first among citizens' worries. This article focuses on the historical origins of the Basque conflict, its evolution during the Francoist dictatorship (1939–75), and the reasons for its continuity in the new political context of democracy. Special attention is paid to the attempt of kick-starting a peace process in 1998, comparison with the Northern Irish experience, and factors which contributed to the collapse of that attempt of peaceful accommodation. Finally, in the light of the most outstanding theoretical approaches towards the explanation of political violence in the Basque Country, several proposals for the necessary rethinking of this problem are presented.     

The terms of the debate: Untangling language about ethnicity and ethnic movements

Theoretical debates on ethnicity suffer from a general confusion about the divergent meanings which academics ascribe to key terms. ‘Primordialist’ approaches include biological, psychological and cultural explanations, whose conflation tends to confuse proponents and critics alike. ‘Instrumentalist’ approaches conflate all ethnic movements within a profile of political opportunism, failing to recognize the varying degrees to which underlying social‐institutional incompatibilities may contribute to ethnic conflict. ‘Constructivist’ approaches vacillate between a focus on the influence of intellectual ethnic discourse and an understanding of ethnic identity as developing out of wider bodies of social experience. Greater attention to the varying contribution of ‘deep’ culture to ethnic conflict can clarify why these subschools find such differences among ethnic movements, which can indeed be understood to vary along a spectrum of political functions: at one pole, ethnic movements seek to inflate ethnic sentiment for political purposes; at the other, they seek rather to reconstruct the existing political position of a distinct cultural formation. This distinction can permit more appropriate policy‐making towards the resolution of ethnic conflict, yet raises new challenges to the biases of the researcher.     

The San Lucas mountain range in Colombia: how much conservation is owed to the violence?

The imminence of forest conversion in the northern Andean region requires a careful evaluation of the social, political and economic context in which environmental efforts take place in order to achieve conservation. Through its socioeconomic effects violent conflict can result in threats pertinent to both conservation and resource management schemes. A survey of the San Lucas mountain range, at the northern tip of the Colombian Central Andes, is presented as a case study of factors associated with violent conflict that may hinder or enhance conservation in this complex social and political setting. Instability in land use and tenure associated with armed conflict were identified as major pressures associated with further conversion of tropical forest habitats; while low rates of settlement and measures enforced by armed rule were very effective in preserving certain tracts of forest. War certainly alleviates demographic pressure from settlers, but contemporary patterns of colonization in San Lucas suggest that armed conflict is detrimental to conservation purposes and to key members of the biological community.     

城乡结合部人-环境系统关系研究综述

城乡结合部往往是人-环境系统关系最严峻的地区之一.20世纪80年代以来,城市扩张在城乡结合部所引起的生态环境效应受到了越来越多研究者的关注.城乡结合部土地利用/覆盖变化的监测、模拟及其驱动力分析,自然与农业生态系统的演变与调控,以及环境污染等逐渐成为研究热点.众多研究证实了人类活动干扰下城乡结合部环境系统的脆弱性,生态退化和环境污染往往十分严重.城乡结合部环境系统的演变对人类社会经济系统的反馈影响也受到一些研究者的关注.研究认为城乡结合部自然和农业生态系统的丧失不仅危及到当地居民的生计,也对当地社会资本造成影响,并有可能引发一些社会矛盾.目前,针对城乡结合部人-环境系统关系的研究,多采用单学科的方法进行,系统的综合性研究还较少,难以揭示该区域人-环境系统错综复杂的交互作用关系;在研究尺度上,往往从宏观或中观尺度人手,研究城乡结合部的外部力量对环境系统的影响,微观尺度上的个体和地方力量很少被关注.未来有必要进一步加强该区域人-环境系统关系的跨学科、多尺度的综合性研究.     

Displacement Behaviour Solving a Silent Contradiction

Displacement acts, once a hot topic in ethology, but wrapped in silence for two decades since, have recently been suggested to indicate and relax social tension (Maestripieri et al., 1992; Wiepkema, 1987). The first of these contentions seems to be in contradiction with some of the classical ethological studies of displacement behaviour, in particular those supporting the disinhibition hypothesis, since the latter would not predict any positive correlation between amount of tension (i.c. intensity of the conflict) and the occurrence of displacement acts.A critical examination of these studies reveals that a positive correlation of the sort has been found, but that proponents of the disinhibition hypothesis tried to explain it in terms of their own model, rather than taking it at its face value. (The reason for this is that they viewed it as pleading for the surplus hypothesis which they rejected). It can be shown that at least some of their explanations are grounded on assumptions which are arbitrary. Also, the disinhibition hypothesis does not account for the occurrence of displacement behaviour in contexts with tension but without conflict.This discussion leads to a new interpretation of displacement behaviour, in which tension is the direct cause, whether generated by conflict or otherwise, and relaxation is brought about by a breaking of the cognitive symmetry between actors. It is indicated how this interpretation may be tested with experiments.     

An evolutionary analysis of psychological pain following rape:: II. The effects of stranger,friend, and family-member offenders

In earlier papers we discussed a hypothesis for the evolutionary significance of psychological pain. In the present paper we discuss briefly the hypothesis and its application to the psychological pain experienced by rape victims. We have hypothesized that psychological pain reflects a psychological adaptation that is designed to focus on individual's full attention on fitness-reducing social circumstances, allowing correction of the pain causing events and their future avoidance. Psychological pain following rape is proposed to accomplish a focus of victims' attention on the fitness reducing circumstances of rape. Using a data-set comprised of 790 rape victims in the U.S. whose post-rape psychological trauma was assessed, we evaluate the effects of rape by strangers, friends and family members. The victims in the sample are most likely to be raped by strangers; this is especially the case for women as opposed to prereproductive-aged girls. Prereproductive-aged girls were more likely to be raped by family members than were women. Rape by strangers is the most psychologically traumatizing of the three rape-offender categories and family-member rape the least. The importance of victim's age and marital status as predictive factors in the degree of psychological trauma following rape—with reproductive-aged and married victims showing significantly more trauma than pre- or post-reproductive-aged and unmarried victims (see N.W. Thornhill and R. Thornhill 1990)—is not confounded by the type of rape perpetrator.     

Parks-people conflicts: the case of Gonarezhou National Park and the Chitsa community in south-east Zimbabwe

National parks have been the centre piece of international conservation strategies in developing countries. The expansion in the network of national parks has enabled the conservation of biodiversity and habitats but the acquisition of vast areas into the park system has often been achieved through the displacement of resident local communities. Displaced people are exposed to a variety of impoverishment risks and this stokes up animosity towards parks. The research reported here seeks to understand the key issues involved in the occupation of a section of Gonarezhou National Park by Headman Chitsa’s people. The paper examines how the interplay between the history of displacement and dispossession, demographic pressures, limited economic opportunities, the ‘fast track’ land reform programme and dynastic politics are fomenting the land conflict between Gonarezhou and Chitsa community. Secondary actors with diverse interests have also come into the fold. Official efforts to resolve the conflict using a top-down approach have yielded little success. This culminated in a shift towards the use of traditional mechanisms of resolving a chieftaincy dispute as a step towards addressing the broader parks-people land conflict. Lessons from the case study are, inter alia, that interventions aimed at resolving parks-people conflicts should be alive to local culture, livelihood needs and power dynamics and, to the extent possible, eschew forcible relocations. Finally, we draw attention to the need to address the wider contradiction between policies promoting wildlife conservation and those promoting agriculture. The article is written to share lessons with readers interested in parks-people conflicts.     

Of Trees and People: The Changing Entanglement in the Israeli Desert

This article portrays the shift experienced in the role of acacia trees during environmental–political struggles as the entanglement of trees and people. Drawing on a four-year ethnographic study around Israel’s Arava desert valley, the article narrates human interactions with these trees amid an environmental conflict fraught with personal and political conflict, opposing perspectives on natural preservation and scientific debate, as well as disputes among environmental organisations. Contrary to current approaches in anthropology that –theoretically at least – confer agency on the non-human, I refocus on the human practices that weave the non-human into the social fabric. In this article, I argue that the trees – not actors in their own right, yet inhabiting a tapestry of people and other elements – are essential to understanding a variety of social processes.     

Taking into account local practices and indigenous knowledge in an emergency conservation context in Madagascar

At the 5th World Parks Congress, held in Durban, South Africa in 2003, the President of Madagascar committed his government to tripling the country’s protected zones over the next 5 years. The announcement reflected a desire to combine rapid conservation efforts with sustainable development. Conservationists in Madagascar focused their attention on the endemic baobab tree, Adansonia grandidieri. This paper aims to identify the contradictions between the political emergency of the biodiversity conservation effort and local development needs. Eighty-three semi-structured interviews were conducted in two villages near the protected area of “Baobab Alley” in the Menabe region. Malagasy conservationists believed the area’s protected status would benefit the local economy through eco-tourism. However, the conservation actions undertaken there display limited understanding of local dynamics and conflict with farmers’ needs. To protect the baobabs, the government has prohibited rice cultivation without providing compensation. We show that the multifunctional baobab tree is integrated into an agroforestry system and protected by farmers. Based on these results, we address the issue of how to combine conservation and local development objectives through the involvement of farmers and the recognition of local knowledge in tree management. We also demonstrate that an emergency approach to conservation is not conducive to the successful integration of conservation and development.     

ATTITUDES TOWARD THE DUBIOUS COMPENSATION CLAIM

Laws providing for compensation of workmen for occupational injury are a powerful socio-economic force.In settlement of compensation claims the goal, difficult to achieve, is fairness to employee, employer and insurance carrier. Often, medical, legal, economic and social considerations conflict with one another. A “fact” in one field may not be considered so in another.Since medical data and testimony often guide the ultimate decision of a compensation claim, the physician''s attitude is a large factor not only immediately and directly in determination of the case at hand but, perhaps more important, in the ultimate direction of the socio-economic forces which spring from the sum of all such determinations.To perpetuate the good in workmen''s compensation laws, the next generation of physicians—and of lawyers and business administrators as well, for they, too, are involved—ought to have basic training in the social sciences in order that they may have a broad rather than a segmental view of the problems with which they deal.     

The impact of armed conflict on protected-area efficacy in Central Africa

What determines the vulnerability of protected areas, a fundamental component of biodiversity conservation, to political instability and warfare? We investigated the efficacy of park protection at Garamba National Park (Democratic Republic of Congo) before, during and after a period of armed conflict. Previous analysis has shown that bushmeat hunting in the park increased fivefold during the conflict, but then declined, in conjunction with changes in the sociopolitical structures (social institutions) that controlled the local bushmeat trade. We used park patrol records to investigate whether these changes were facilitated by a disruption to anti-poaching patrols. Contrary to expectation, anti-poaching patrols remained frequent during the conflict (as bushmeat offtake increased) and decreased afterwards (when bushmeat hunting also declined). These results indicate that bushmeat extraction was determined primarily by the social institutions. Although we found a demonstrable effect of anti-poaching patrols on hunting pressure, even a fourfold increase in patrol frequency would have been insufficient to cope with wartime poaching levels. Thus, anti-poaching patrols alone may not always be the most cost-effective means of managing protected areas, and protected-area efficacy might be enhanced by also working with those institutions that already play a role in regulating local natural-resource use.     

Mitigation under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act: where it comes from, what it means

The requirement to mitigate impacts to wetlands and streams is a frequently misunderstood policy with a long and complicated history. We narrate the history of mitigation since the inception of the Clean Water Act Section 404 permit program in 1972, through struggles between the US Environmental Protection Agency and the US Army Corps of Engineers, through the emerging importance of wetland conservation on the American political landscape, and through the rise of market-based approaches to environmental policy. Mitigation, as it is understood today, was not initially foreseen as a component of the Section 404 permitting program, but was adapted from 1978 regulations issued by the Council on Environmental Quality as a way of replacing the functions of filled wetlands where permit denials were unlikely. EPA and the Corps agreed in 1990 to define mitigation as the three steps of avoidance, minimization, and compensation, principles which must be applied to permit decisions in the form of the environmental criteria in EPA’s 404(b)(1) Guidelines. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the compensation component of mitigation has become nearly the sole focus of mitigation policy development, and has been the subject of numerous guidance documents and memoranda since 1990. Avoidance and minimization have received far less policy attention, and this lack of policy development may represent a missed opportunity to implement effective wetland conservation.