Water,power, and refusal: confronting evasive accountability in a Palestinian village

This article interprets the meanings and motivations of refusal to pay water bills within a context of fragmented sovereignty. Residents of a village in the occupied Palestinian West Bank call for solutions to water shortages and failed infrastructure, but do so amidst capricious power, where would-be sovereigns evade accountability. Lacking avenues for direct engagement with authorities, residents speak in generalized ethical terms of their legitimate water claims, and they resort to bill refusal. Setting villagers’ bill refusals within the broader set of interactions between would-be sovereigns and subjects, this article contributes to anthropological scholarship on refusal by demonstrating how it can be a way of not only dismantling state power, but also summoning a responsible sovereign. Furthermore, it highlights how common dilemmas faced by refusers – dismissal and co-optation – can be exacerbated by the same evasive accountability against which they protest.     

Understanding Youth Development From the Practitioner's Point of View: A Call for Research on Effective Practice

This article calls for research on the expertise of youth development practitioners. We argue for studies focused on understanding youth practice from practitioners' points of view—as they experience and enact it—with the aim of contributing findings and frameworks that are helpful to their work and learning. To improve youth programs, first, it is essential to better understand the challenges frontline staff face in their work. We review evidence showing that running a program and facilitating youth development is more challenging and multidimensional than is generally appreciated. Second, it is essential to understand the strategies effective practitioners employ to address these challenges. Studies indicate that the expertise of frontline staff is central to program impact; we review findings suggesting the diverse, contextually-attuned skills this expertise entails. Case studies in three domains of decision-making (designing programs, youth's motivation, and ethical dilemmas) are used to provide a vision for this research.     

Rethinking Human–Nonhuman Primate Contact and Pathogenic Disease Spillover

Zoonotic transmissions are a major global health risk, and human–animal contact is frequently raised as an important driver of transmission. A literature examining zooanthroponosis largely agrees that more human–animal contact leads to more risk. Yet the basis of this proposition, the term contact, has not been rigorously analyzed. To understand how contact is used to explain cross-species spillovers, we conducted a multi-disciplinary review of studies addressing human–nonhuman primate (NHP) engagements and pathogenic transmissions and employing the term contact. We find that although contact is frequently invoked, it is employed inconsistently and imprecisely across these studies, overlooking the range of pathogens and their transmission routes and directions. We also examine a related but more expansive approach focusing on human and NHP habitats and their spatial overlap, which can potentially facilitate pathogenic transmission. Contact and spatial overlap investigations cannot, however, explain the processes that bring together people, animals and pathogens. We therefore examine another approach that enhances our understanding of zoonotic spillovers: anthropological studies identifying such historical, social, environmental processes. Comparable to a One Health approach, our ongoing research in Cameroon draws contact, spatial overlap and anthropological–historical approaches into dialog to suggest where, when and how pathogenic transmissions between people and NHPs may occur. In conclusion, we call for zoonotic disease researchers to specify more precisely the human–animal contacts they investigate and to attend to how broader ecologies, societies and histories shape pathogen–human–animal interactions.     

Computational exploration of metal–organic frameworks: examples of advances in crystal structure predictions and electronic structure tuning

The purpose of this article is to consider some recent developments in the area of the computational chemistry of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs), and more specifically on their crystal structure prediction and electronic structures. We intend here to illustrate how computational approaches might be powerful tool for the discovery of new families of hybrid frameworks, helping to understand their often complex energy landscapes. Also, MOFs have attracted a lot of attention due to their potential use for photocatalysis and optoelectronic, making it necessary to develop strategies to control their electronic structures. We will show how recent computational studies in this area have allowed a better understanding of their electronic properties and their potential tunability, highlighting when they have given successful guidelines for the discovery of novel MOFs with targeted properties.     

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]     

Parallel and divergent landscapes: cultural encounters in the ethnographic space of Tuareg medicine

This essay explores the dialogue between the local quest for healing and the anthropological quest for healing knowledge, and local assessments of knowledge-power relationships in these processes. The context is medical discourse among the Tuareg of Niger Republic, West Africa, and my research experiences among these people. I examine local medical specialists and their traditional and changing practice in terms of how they perceive and respond to wider knowledge and power systems that impinge on local health care. Paramount in these systems are central state policies and medical anthropological research on healing, as these intersect in a postcolonial and post-separatist/rebellion setting. The essay analyzes parallels between the exchange of medicine and the exchange of knowledge and reflects upon how anthropological knowledge of African healing systems is constructed in an environment highly charged with power and danger--of political violence and economic crisis. The broader issue addressed here is how to give greater empowerment to local residents' voices in their "indigenous critique" of the medical anthropological project.     

Boom to bust,ashes to (coal) dust: the contested ethics of energy exchanges in a declining US coal market

This essay explores how rank-and-file producers of energy evaluate the ethics of energy exchanges, which sheds light on some of the unexamined assumptions animating anthropological studies of energy and ethics. Exploring how coal miners experience a massive downturn in Wyoming, the centre of US coal production, reveals differing logics of exchange between the producers and consumers of electricity. Most Americans engage with electricity as consumers through a commodity framework, paying utility companies a fee to purchase kilowatt hours that are abstracted from their productive origins. In contrast, the miners experience energy as more of a gift exchange, keeping in view the network of the ultimate consumers of the coal they produce. These differing logics of exchange entail different ethical obligations in the face of the termination of those relationships as the country moves away from coal-fired electricity, helping to explain the outrage that was felt in ‘coal country’ – an outrage that Donald Trump exploited for political purposes during the 2016 US presidential election.     

What is wrong with ethics review,the impact on teaching anthropology,and how to fix it: results of an empirical study

There is no empirical evidence that ethics review protects anthropologists’ research participants, but there is ample evidence that it is stifling research agendas and reshaping how we teach anthropological research methods, entrenching a positivist, clinical model of what constitutes research. This paper examines the impact of ethics review on student research in Australia, based on interviews conducted at 14 Australian universities. The data clearly show that the risks posed by student research are minor, and vastly overestimated by ethics committees. To avoid problems with ethics committees, we shepherd students into undertaking low‐risk, and consequently low‐impact, research. Many departments are abandoning research‐led teaching altogether because of the obstacle of ethics review. One solution would be to locate ethics discussions in disciplines and departments, radically restructuring the encounter to reconceptualise it as collegial debate about ethics dilemmas rather than ‘ethics review’.     

Organization of the Brain Systems of Aim-Directed Behavior: New Data

Currently, the dominating approach to studying functional brain organization is based on the so-called activation studies, in the frameworks of which the functional specializations of different brain structures in the context of studied nature of activity are specified according to their energy states. The concept of organization of brain systems is formed largely thanks to such activation research. However, our studies devoted to the analysis of functional relations between different nodes of the brain systems show that they are much more complicated than they are presented in the activation studies. The structure of brain systems is not limited to those elements that are involved in its work by changing their local neuronal activity. This fact dramatically changes our views on how the brain systems are organized.     

Advancing urban ecological studies: Frameworks,concepts, and results from the Baltimore Ecosystem Study

Abstract Urban ecological studies have had a long history, but they have not been a component of mainstream ecology until recently. The growing interest of ecologists in urban systems provides an opportunity to articulate integrative frameworks, and identify research tools and approaches that can help achieve a broader ecological understanding of urban systems. Based on our experience in the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES), Long‐term Ecological Research project, located in metropolitan Baltimore, Maryland, USA, we identify several frameworks that may be useful in comparative urban studies, and may be worthy of consideration in other integrative urban ecosystem studies: (i) spatial patch dynamics of biophysical and social factors; (ii) the watershed as an integrative tool; and (iii) the human ecosystem framework. These frameworks build on empirical research investigating urban biota, nutrient and energy budgets, ecological footprints of cities, as well as biotic classifications aimed at urban planning. These frameworks bring together perspectives, measurements, and models from biophysical and social sciences. We illustrate their application in the BES, which is designed to investigate (i) the structure and change of the urban ecosystem; (ii) the fluxes of matter, energy, capital, and population in the metropolis; and (iii) how ecological information affects the quality of the local and regional environments. Exemplary results concerning urban stream nutrient flux, the ability of riparian zones to process nitrate pollution, and the lags in the relationships between vegetation structure and socio‐economic factors in specific neighbourhoods are presented. The current advances in urban ecological studies have profited greatly from the variety of integrative frameworks and tools that have been tested and applied in urban areas over the last decade. The field is poised to make significant progress as a result of ongoing conceptual and empirical consolidation.     

The annual Day of the Dead song contest: musical‐linguistic ideology and practice,piratability, and the challenge of scale

Building on research theorizing scale, this article proposes augmentations to existing frameworks that will help illuminate how localities are linked to ‘stranger collectives’ like nations, ethnicities, and global religious ‘communities’. In this case of ethnic revival from Mexico's Sierra Mazateca, people use new vernacular literacy practices tied to local musical performances as a way of ‘customizing’ modular forms deployed by national and global institutions to manage indigenous difference. People ‘re‐imagine’ locality through a localized indigenous literacy that takes templates provided by the Mexican state and the Catholic Church and places them in productive tension with local context: musical properties of the indigenous language Mazatec, locally valued performance practices, and local musical‐linguistic ideologies. While this revival movement draws on immanently modular forms, once locally embedded they become ‘unpiratable’, and constitute a new resource for inscribing local belonging. This case suggests the importance of considering linguistic and musical aspects of social context often taken for granted in anthropological investigations of scale.     

Introduction: Current Directions in Australian Anthropologies of the Environment

Environmental anthropology is an expanding field in Australia. Extensive research on Aboriginal relationships to land and natural resources has provided the foundation for growing anthropological interest in the interactions of other Australians with the biophysical environments they inhabit. Australian‐based anthropologists also continue to contribute to research on environmental beliefs and practices in other parts of the world. This paper provides a brief overview of previously explored themes in this field as a precursor to introducing new research and proposing additional areas of research. It is suggested that these could be usefully developed to enhance anthropological contributions to debates about environmental change in Australia and surrounding regions. We argue that there are roles for anthropologists as `cultural translators' in cross‐disciplinary engagements with environmental scientists and natural resource managers; as cultural theorists skilled at documenting and interpreting changing environmental attitudes; and as environmental advocates pursuing the knowledge needed to create more ecologically sustainable human communities. We also suggest that Australian anthropologies of the environment can make valuable theoretical and ethnographic contributions to this important international field of study.     

A Model of Human Cooperation in Social Dilemmas

Social dilemmas are situations in which collective interests are at odds with private interests: pollution, depletion of natural resources, and intergroup conflicts, are at their core social dilemmas. Because of their multidisciplinarity and their importance, social dilemmas have been studied by economists, biologists, psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists. These studies typically explain tendency to cooperation by dividing people in proself and prosocial types, or appealing to forms of external control or, in iterated social dilemmas, to long-term strategies. But recent experiments have shown that cooperation is possible even in one-shot social dilemmas without forms of external control and the rate of cooperation typically depends on the payoffs. This makes impossible a predictive division between proself and prosocial people and proves that people have attitude to cooperation by nature. The key innovation of this article is in fact to postulate that humans have attitude to cooperation by nature and consequently they do not act a priori as single agents, as assumed by standard economic models, but they forecast how a social dilemma would evolve if they formed coalitions and then they act according to their most optimistic forecast. Formalizing this idea we propose the first predictive model of human cooperation able to organize a number of different experimental findings that are not explained by the standard model. We show also that the model makes satisfactorily accurate quantitative predictions of population average behavior in one-shot social dilemmas.     

Coral bleaching patterns are the outcome of complex biological and environmental networking

Continued declines in coral reef health over the past three decades have been punctuated by severe mass coral bleaching‐induced mortality events that have grown in intensity and frequency under climate change. Intensive global research efforts have therefore persistently focused on bleaching phenomena to understand where corals bleach, when and why—resulting in a large—yet still somewhat patchy—knowledge base. Particularly catastrophic bleaching‐induced coral mortality events in the past 5 years have catalyzed calls for a more diverse set of reef management tools, extending far beyond climate mitigation and reef protection, to also include more aggressive interventions. However, the effectiveness of these various tools now rests on rapidly assimilating our knowledge base of coral bleaching into more integrated frameworks. Here, we consider how the past three decades of intensive coral bleaching research has established the basis for complex biological and environmental networks, which together regulate outcomes of bleaching severity. We discuss how we now have enough scaffold for conceptual biological and environmental frameworks underpinning bleaching susceptibility, but that new tools are urgently required to translate this to an operational system informing—and testing—bleaching outcomes. Specifically, adopting network models that can fully describe and predict metabolic functioning of coral holobionts, and how this functioning is regulated by complex doses and interactions among environmental factors. Identifying knowledge gaps limiting operation of such models is the logical step to immediately guide and prioritize future experiments and observations. We are at a time‐critical point where we can implement new capacity to resolve how coral bleaching patterns emerge from complex biological–environmental networks, and so more effectively inform rapidly evolving ecological management and social adaptation frameworks aimed at securing the future of coral reefs.     

Within a Range of Possibilities: Morality and Ethics in Social Life

Despite its now common currency the anthropological concept of morality remains underdeveloped. One anthropologist who has made several important attempts to work out a more precise theoretical concept of morality is Joel Robbins. In his most recent contribution to this endeavor Robbins addresses the tension in anthropology between what he calls the morality of reproduction and the morality of freedom. In this article, I suggest an alternative solution to the problem of conceiving the distinction between a nonconsciously enacted morality and the conscious awareness of ethical dilemmas and moral questioning. I will support this distinction with ethnographic and life-historical material from my research on the moral lives of some Muscovites.     

Permeable persons and plastic packaging in India: from biomoral substance exchange to chemotoxic transmission

In contemporary India, it has become commonplace to hear middle-class people speak of ‘chemicals’ in the environment, in food, and in everyday commodities. Anxieties revolve around the bodily absorption of these ‘chemicals’, and plastic packaging has come under particular scrutiny as a source of such leached substances. Although anthropological studies have highlighted South Asian conceptions of the person as permeable and affected, through the exchange of biomoral substances, by transactions with the environment, humans, and nonhumans, the concern about ‘chemicals’ references a different type of transfer: that of chemotoxic transmission. Such concern foregrounds new anxieties about the permeable body in the contaminated, ecologically damaged world of late modernity. The case of plastic packaging is illustrative of the differences between frameworks of biomoral substance exchange and chemotoxic transmission. In illuminating those differences, this article focuses on public concerns regarding the bodily absorption of ‘chemicals’, why these concerns are compelling as a political ecological critique of capitalist extraction, and the insights they can offer to anthropological research on the permeable body.     

The evolution of one-shot cooperation: An experiment

Can people rationally advance their own material interests by cooperating in one-shot prisoner's dilemmas, even when there is no possibility of being punished for defection? We outline a model that describes how such cooperation could evolve if the presence of a cooperative disposition can be discerned by others. We test the model's key assumption with an experiment in which we find that subjects who interacted for thirty minutes before playing one-shot prisoner's dilemmas with two others were substantially more accurate than chance in predicting their partner's decisions.