Water Works: Agency and Creativity in the Mitchell River Catchment

This paper outlines some of the theoretical developments in cultural anthropology that have been particularly useful in elucidating human engagements with land and resources. It examines some of the meanings and values encoded in water by a range of water using groups along the Mitchell River in northern Queensland, and their diverse ideas of what constitutes environmental ‘productivity’. Exploring some of the cultural and sub‐cultural beliefs and practices within the catchment area, it considers how these intersect with ecological issues; social issues; and with local conflicts over the ownership, control and management of water.     

Fadiman and beyond--the dangers of extrapolation

Cross-cultural patient care is an issue that challenges healthcare providers. Caring for patients who reject some biomedical treatments because of religious or cultural reasons requires knowledge of that person's beliefs for effective treatment. This essay looks at several case studies involving Hmong patients and the way the medical staff reacted to treatment difficulties because of cultural and religious conflicts with surgery. The dangers of universalizing communication methods are stressed.     

Beliefs Matter: Cultural Beliefs and the Use of Cervical Cancer-Screening Tests

In this article we examine the influence of cultural beliefs on behavior or, more specifically, beliefs about cervical cancer risk factors and the use of Pap exams. Individual Latinas' (Hispanic women) holding of beliefs similar to Latinas' generally (cultural consonance) did not significantly influence their use of Pap exams. Rather, structural factors such as medical insurance, age, marital status, education, and language acculturation explained Latinas' use of this medical service. However, when Latinas held beliefs similar to those of Anglo women, then they were significantly more likely to have had a Pap exam within the past two years. Latinas whose beliefs were closer to those of physicians were significantly less likely to have had the exam recently. Arriving at these findings involved both ethnographic interviews and survey research. That these beliefs proved to be significant influences on behavior suggests not only the important ways that beliefs matter but that ethnographic methods for examining those beliefs also matter. [ Latinas and cervical cancer, Pap exams, culture and behavior, ethnography and survey research ]     

Health Development Meets the End of State Socialism: Visions of Democratization, Women's Health, and Social Well-Being for Contemporary Russia

As development organizations undertake thetask of improving the public health in formersocialist states, their interventions are shaped by aparticular cultural logic and predetermined frame ofpossible action. In the context of local encounters,however, they often confront competing interpretationsof a society's prevailing needs. How they managesuch differences may not only explain the outcomes ofa given project, but may also reveal the capacitiesand limitations of development agencies to engineerpost-socialist change. This article examines a recentWHO project in St. Petersburg, Russia, which definedwomen's ``social well-being' as a local health concern.While the project employed a discourse of ``democracy'to promote women's empowerment in the clinic, itsparameters of intervention neither incorporated localknowledge nor addressed the structural relationsunderlying clinic-level conflicts. Two kinds ofresults ensued: the ideology of democracy wasrejected, while WHO's recommendations were partiallyappropriated as profit-making strategies.     

Social Learning and the Maintenance of Cultural Variation: An Evolutionary Model and Data from East Africa

Human societies maintain between-group variation despite mixing of people and ideas. In order for variation to remain, migrants or their children must preferentially adopt local norms, customs, and beliefs. Yet the details of how cultural variation is maintained, despite mixing, remain unknown. This article addresses this problem by using a simple model of the evolution of cultural learning to interpret the results of a study of cultural variation in a small region of East Africa. I argue that the manner in which migrants of two diverse regions adapt to local beliefs and behavior depends on the costs and accuracy of learning in each domain. Observational studies are never definitive tests of any hypothesis, but these results suggest that conclusions about the significance of cultural learning for understanding individual attitudes and behavior depend strongly upon the domain of investigation.     

Birds and people: from conflict to coexistence

Negative interactions between humans and animals are becoming increasingly frequent, as wild habitats shrink and human presence and activities expand throughout the world. Conflicts between people over conservation are one of the outcomes of this increased interaction, with severe consequences for both wildlife and people. Globally, conflicts can arise across diverse ecosystems, species and circumstances. Even if most attention in wildlife-related conflicts has been on mammals, birds are also often at the centre of such conflicts, but conflict research is still not explicitly present in ornithological literature. Examples of such conflicts include those related to birds and agriculture, forestry, hunting, fishing and public health interests. Conflicts are often more complex than initial assessments might suggest, involving ecological, economic, cultural, social and political elements. Reflecting the complexity of these issues and their increasing relevance to bird conservation, a British Ornithologists' Union conference was organized in November 2021 that aimed to highlight examples of conflicts that exist between people over birds and their conservation. Building on this conference, we provide here a review of key themes relating to the understanding of conflicts, including the importance of conflict perceptions, the collaboration between multiple disciplines and the different types of knowledge needed to better understand conflicts. We then consider the management of bird conservation conflicts, including the key issues of dealing with uncertainty, the role of technical solutions and the importance of collaboration and building trust, illustrating each theme with real-world examples. Finally, we outline potential future conflicts around bird conservation and how best to address them proactively.     

The God Allusion

It has previously been suggested that the historically and geographically widespread persistence of religious beliefs occurs because it is a by-product of normal cognitive processes, ones which first evolved to confer survival advantages in the social domain. If this theory holds, then it is likely that inter-individual variation in the same biases may predict corresponding variation in religious thoughts and behaviors. Using an online questionnaire, 298 participants answered questions regarding their tendency to detect agency, the degree to which they displayed schizotypal traits, their ability to understand the emotions and motivations of others (“mentalizing”), and their religious beliefs and behaviors. Path analysis suggests that mentalizing, agency detection, and schizotypal thinking were each independently related to religiosity. Furthermore, schizotypal thinking and agency detection were highly interrelated with one another, whereas mentalizing was not. Although the degree to which an individual engages with religious or spiritual beliefs will be influenced by their cultural and historical context, this paper helps to elucidate the interplay between various cognitive processes that might predispose some individuals but not others toward holding such beliefs in the first place.     

Letter to my doctor

Considerable attention is now being given to ethical conflicts raised by such issues as the disclosure of diagnosis and prognosis, the role of the family in making medical decisions, and the withholding or withdrawing of treatment of terminally ill patients. Already complicated, these issues take on added complexity in contexts where medical professionals and patients have differing cultural beliefs and practices. Ethical dilemmas that develop in multicultural settings have been largely unaddressed. Through the analysis of a case involving the hospital admission and death of a Chinese woman with metastatic lung cancer, we examine some of these dilemmas and their effect on the patient, family, and physicians. Many issues were raised by this case regarding the relationships among ethnic background, bioethics, and medical care.     

Medical disclosure and refugees. Telling bad news to Ethiopian patients.

The strong value in American medical practice placed on the disclosure of terminal illness conflicts with the cultural beliefs of many recent refugees and immigrants to the United States, who often consider frank disclosure inappropriate and insensitive. What a terminally ill person wants to hear and how it is told are embedded in culture. For Ethiopians, "bad news" should be told to a family member or close friend of the patient who will divulge information to the patient at appropriate times and places and in a culturally approved and recognized manner. Being sensitive to patients'' worldviews may reduce the frustration and conflict experienced by both refugees and American physicians.     

Toward Human-Carnivore Coexistence: Understanding Tolerance for Tigers in Bangladesh

Fostering local community tolerance for endangered carnivores, such as tigers (Panthera tigris), is a core component of many conservation strategies. Identification of antecedents of tolerance will facilitate the development of effective tolerance-building conservation action and secure local community support for, and involvement in, conservation initiatives. We use a stated preference approach for measuring tolerance, based on the ‘Wildlife Stakeholder Acceptance Capacity’ concept, to explore villagers’ tolerance levels for tigers in the Bangladesh Sundarbans, an area where, at the time of the research, human-tiger conflict was severe. We apply structural equation modeling to test an a priori defined theoretical model of tolerance and identify the experiential and psychological basis of tolerance in this community. Our results indicate that beliefs about tigers and about the perceived current tiger population trend are predictors of tolerance for tigers. Positive beliefs about tigers and a belief that the tiger population is not currently increasing are both associated with greater stated tolerance for the species. Contrary to commonly-held notions, negative experiences with tigers do not directly affect tolerance levels; instead, their effect is mediated by villagers’ beliefs about tigers and risk perceptions concerning human-tiger conflict incidents. These findings highlight a need to explore and understand the socio-psychological factors that encourage tolerance towards endangered species. Our research also demonstrates the applicability of this approach to tolerance research to a wide range of socio-economic and cultural contexts and reveals its capacity to enhance carnivore conservation efforts worldwide.     

Do Australian graziers have an offset mindset about their farm trees?

Worldwide, the footprint of agriculture is higher than that of any other land use, making the local decisions of millions of farmers a global force for achieving the maintenance of ecosystem services. Biodiversity offsets are increasingly used to attempt to reconcile conflicts between production and conservation. Offset policies operate on the principle of habitat substitutability, but little work has considered whether those targeted by such policies perceive nature that way. For instance, do landholders perceive trees of different arrangements, ages or species to be interchangeable? We used a large-scale landholder survey to understand how graziers manage their farm trees, and whether their beliefs are amenable to substitution. Three natural clusters were found, that: (A) liked a tidy farm but did not differentiate trees by species, age or arrangement; (B) strongly supported the need for diversity in tree cover; and, (C) preferred woodlands and connective strips to sparse trees. Those positions were consistent with their beliefs about the costs and benefits of different arrangements of trees, but were largely inconsistent with their declared tree planting and protection activities. Tree management activities were more easily explained by commodity (pro-woodland graziers (C) were most likely to be cropping) or by career stage and what that meant for time and money resources to do conservation work (contrasting A and B). Offset policies and policy incentives encouraging vegetative heterogeneity would motivate at least these first two clusters, helping to sustain a diversity of tree cover and thus ecosystem services on farms.     

Warum töten Menschen Menschen? Soziobiologie

Why humans kill humans Violence seen in animals is often part of agonistic behaviour to ensure individual and social resources in competitive situations. Agonistic behaviour in social conflicts seems to be also an essential part of human behaviour nevertheless of humans ability to modify behaviour in a great measure by individual and social learning. One consequence of more complex social competitions during the socio‐cultural evolution may be the development of war strategies. Considering humanists obligation the interrelationship between phylogentic routs and requirements of the modern human society should be profoundly analyzed to avoid an acceleration of future conflicts.     

Diagnostic Dilemmas and Cultural Diversity in Emergency Rooms

Language and cultural beliefs play an extremely important role in the interaction between patients from diverse cultural groups and physicians. Especially in emergency rooms, there are many dangers in missed communications. A patient from a foreign culture, especially one who does not speak English, often expresses symptoms in ways that are unfamiliar to many American physicians. Specific areas of cultural vulnerability can be identified for the major ethnic groups in the United States as they interact with the scientific medical system. A short review of folk medical beliefs and recommendations for improving diagnostic accuracy and treatment may assist emergency room staffs in offering care that is culturally acceptable to patients of diverse ethnic backgrounds.     

Discrimination criteria for apparent two-site transport models.

The medical beliefs of a people have in the past been studied principally by cultural anthropologists. The focus of these studies is usually on intrasocietal dynamics and cultural relativism—a striking orientation. However, beliefs about disease are integral to the way groups have and continue to adapt, and are thus important to both social and biological scientists. In order to study the role of medical beliefs in the adaptation of the group, a comparative approach is needed. This requires viewing these beliefs more generically, comparing their symbolic properties, and analyzing how they are used in explaining and dealing with actual occurrences of disease. The concept of a taxonomy of disease is introduced, as well as the notion of different semantic regions in the taxonomy. In the attempt to clarify the biological significance of a group's taxonomy of disease, and of its mode of operation, the ideas of uncertainty and information are employed. The significance and fruitfulness of this approach is discussed.     

Ravens reconcile after aggressive conflicts with valuable partners

Reconciliation, a post-conflict affiliative interaction between former opponents, is an important mechanism for reducing the costs of aggressive conflict in primates and some other mammals as it may repair the opponents' relationship and reduce post-conflict distress. Opponents who share a valuable relationship are expected to be more likely to reconcile as for such partners the benefits of relationship repair should outweigh the risk of renewed aggression. In birds, however, post-conflict behavior has thus far been marked by an apparent absence of reconciliation, suggested to result either from differing avian and mammalian strategies or because birds may not share valuable relationships with partners with whom they engage in aggressive conflict. Here, we demonstrate the occurrence of reconciliation in a group of captive subadult ravens (Corvus corax) and show that it is more likely to occur after conflicts between partners who share a valuable relationship. Furthermore, former opponents were less likely to engage in renewed aggression following reconciliation, suggesting that reconciliation repairs damage caused to their relationship by the preceding conflict. Our findings suggest not only that primate-like valuable relationships exist outside the pair bond in birds, but that such partners may employ the same mechanisms in birds as in primates to ensure that the benefits afforded by their relationships are maintained even when conflicts of interest escalate into aggression. These results provide further support for a convergent evolution of social strategies in avian and mammalian species.     

Ecological and Cultural Landscape Restoration and the Cultural Evolution towards a Post-Industrial Symbiosis between Human Society and Nature

I discuss ecological and cultural restoration within the broader context of the critical transition period from the fossil fuel age to the post-industrial global information age. In this cultural evolutionary process, the restoration of natural and cultural landscapes should play a vital role. For this purpose, it has to be guided by a holistic and transdisciplinary systems approach, aiming not only at the organismic but also at the functional and structural restoration of ecological and cultural diversity as total landscape ecodiversity. For the development of suitable restoration strategies, a clear distinction has to be made between different functional classes of natural and cultural solar-powered biosphere and fossil-powered technosphere landscapes, according to their inputs and throughputs of energy and materials, their organisms, their control by natural or human information, their internal self-organization and their regenerative capacities. Not only technosphere landscapes but also intensive agro-industrial landscapes have lost these capacities and are heavily subsidized by fossil energy and chemicals, to the detriment of the environment and human health. They therefore have to be rehabilitated by more sustainable but not less productive agricultural systems based on organic farming. But their natural regenerative capacities can be restored only by regenerative systems, with the help of cultural "neotechnic" information. The promise for an urgently required evolutionary symbiosis between human society and nature in a sustainable post-industrial total human ecosystem lies in the functional integration of such innovative regenerative systems and all natural and cultural biosphere landscapes with healthier and more livable technosphere landscapes. To this goal, ecological and cultural landscape restoration can make an important contribution.     

Methods for studying cultural attraction

Cultural attraction theory (CAT) describes a general evolutionary process, cultural attraction, by which the spread and stability of cultural items (beliefs, practices, artifacts, etc.) result not just from differential reproduction, but also from transformations that systematically favor the reconstruction of cultural items of specific types. In this way, CAT aims to provide a general framework for the study of cultural evolution. In a thoughtful critical analysis, Buskell questions the ability of CAT to provide methodological guidance for research in cultural evolution. Can CAT be used to develop the sort of mid‐range theories and models that often drive empirical work? Here we argue that CAT can indeed be used in this way, and we outline the methodological practices that students of cultural attraction have used and are currently developing.     

What can conservation strategies learn from the ecosystem services approach? Insights from ecosystem assessments in two Spanish protected areas

Biodiversity conservation strategies that overlook the interests of local people are prone to create conflicts. The ecosystem service approach holds potential for more comprehensively integrating the social dimension into decision-making in protected areas, but its implementation in conservation policies is still in its infancy. This research assesses the extent to which ecosystem services have been implemented in conservation strategies in protected areas. The study was conducted in two outstanding Spanish protected areas, covering a wetland (Doñana Natural and National Parks) and a Mediterranean mountain system (Sierra Nevada Natural and National Parks). Data were collected from deliberative workshops with managers and researchers, face-to-face surveys with users and a review of management plans. We found that, beyond intrinsic values of ecosystems and biodiversity, these areas provide multiple ecosystem services that deserve further attention to ensure their sustained delivery. Our research shows that environmental managers and researchers have different perceptions and priorities regarding ecosystem services management compared with ecosystem service users. Environmental managers and researchers in both protected areas perceived that human-nature relationships and ecosystem services are already widely included in management plans, if often not explicitly. We found that different ecosystem service categories receive uneven attention in management plans. These contained measures to manage provisioning and cultural services whereas measures for managing regulating services were perceived to be largely absent. We conclude by summarizing insights on how the ecosystem service approach may enhance the consideration of social interests in the management of management protected areas.     

The cultural contagion of conflict

Anecdotal evidence abounds that conflicts between two individuals can spread across networks to involve a multitude of others. We advance a cultural transmission model of intergroup conflict where conflict contagion is seen as a consequence of universal human traits (ingroup preference, outgroup hostility; i.e. parochial altruism) which give their strongest expression in particular cultural contexts. Qualitative interviews conducted in the Middle East, USA and Canada suggest that parochial altruism processes vary across cultural groups and are most likely to occur in collectivistic cultural contexts that have high ingroup loyalty. Implications for future neuroscience and computational research needed to understand the emergence of intergroup conflict are discussed.