Domestic Transitions, Desiccation, Agricultural Intensification, and Livelihood Diversification among Rural Households on the Central Plateau, Burkina Faso

ABSTRACT   Understanding how and why domestic groups alter their function and form has long been a theme within anthropology. Numerous accounts have detailed the processes that drive household transformations and their underlying mechanisms. Mostly, these studies describe how domestic groups fission and fuse between extended and nuclear forms. In recent years, scholars have emphasized that these transformations should be understood within larger contexts of social and environmental change. Mossi communities on the Central Plateau of Burkina Faso provide an excellent opportunity to explore such processes because the large extended households documented 30 years ago were predicted to decline and eventually disappear. In this study, I examine dynamics of household transformations and test the validity of this prediction. I use perspectives from sustainability science and computer-simulation modeling to understand how regional desiccation, agricultural intensification, and livelihood diversification articulate with domestic transitions.     

Taste the Traditions: Crabs, Crab Cakes, and the Chesapeake Bay Blue Crab Fishery

For centuries, people in the Chesapeake Bay watershed have harvested and consumed blue crabs (Callinectes sapidus). Historically, the production of the crabs was intimately connected to the work and knowledge of commercial watermen. In recent years, declining crab populations have resulted in an increased local use of pasteurized crab meat imported from Asia and South America. Also emerging is an ecological discourse that emphasizes pollution reduction to save crabs to eat. In this article, I analyze these production and consumption changes for Chesapeake Bay blue crabs within a broad-ranging framework of cultural models and environmental anthropology. Explicit textual information increasingly suggests that the cultural model of Chesapeake blue crabs as food is one of crab cakes made (with imported crab meat) in the "local tradition" and, to a lesser degree so far, is an emerging discourse presenting blue crabs as a culinary poster child for antipollution campaigns.     

Capitalism as culture,and economy1

Contemporary cultural anthropology has been marked by its distance from the analysis of economy. I argue that anthropology as a discipline has suffered from this distance and suggest a form in which these interests can be reconciled for the purposes of ethnographic research. The discussion is divided into three sections. In the first, I trace the ‘disappearing’ of economy from cultural anthropology. In the second, I propose a schema for bringing economy back. This schema involves adopting a phenomenology of the subject that relies on notions of value drawn from Appadurai and from Heidegger and Marx. Finally, I instance two examples of this schema in my own ethnographic research. One concerns Central Australia and pertains to recent debates about remote indigenous life. The other concerns Kingston Jamaica and references debates about gender, sex and dancehall. Both milieux involve types of change and violence that can bear on modern subjects. My suggestion is that anthropology will address these issues in more interesting ways if economy becomes a part of ethnographic analysis.     

Reforestation of Bottomland Hardwoods and the Issue of Woody Species Diversity

Bottomland hardwood forests in the southcentral United States have been cleared extensively for agriculture, and many of the remaining forests are fragmented and degraded. During the last decade, however, approximately 75,000 ha of land—mainly agricultural fields—have been replanted or contracted for replanting, with many more acres likely to be reforested in the near future. The approach used in most reforestation projects to date has been to plant one to three overstory tree species, usually Quercus spp. (oaks), and to rely on natural dispersal for the establishment of other woody species. I critique this practice by two means. First, a brief literature review demonstrates that moderately high woody species diversity occurs in natural bottomland hardwood forests in the region. This review, which relates diversity to site characteristics, serves as a basis for comparison with stands established by means of current reforestation practices. Second, I reevaluate data on the invasion of woody species from an earlier study of 10 reforestation projects in Mississippi, with the goal of assessing the likelihood that stands with high woody species diversity will develop. I show that natural invasion cannot always be counted on to produce a diverse stand, particularly on sites more than about 60 m from an existing forest edge. I then make several recommendations for altering current reforestation practices in order to establish stands with greater woody species diversity, a more natural appearance, and a more positive environmental impact at scales larger than individual sites.     

How Do Real Indians Fish? Neoliberal Multiculturalism and Contested Indigeneities in the Colorado Delta

ABSTRACT   There has been a growing interest in anthropology regarding how certain political conditions set the stage for "articulations" between indigenous movements and environmental actors and discourses. However, relatively little attention has been paid to how these same conditions can suppress demands for indigenous rights. In this article, I argue that the pairing of neoliberalism and multiculturalism in contemporary Mexico has created political fields in which ethnic difference has been foregrounded as a way of denying certain rights to marginalized groups. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in northern Mexico, I analyze how the arguments of a group of Cucapá for fishing rights in the Colorado Delta have been constrained within these political circumstances. I argue that cultural difference has been leveraged by the Mexican federal government and local NGOs to prevent the redistribution of environmental resources among vulnerable groups such as the Cucapá.     

Anthropological poetics: Reflections on a new perspective

Conclusion Given that the poetic dimension in anthropology is real, a code for understanding, a metaphor for truth, a myth about anthropology-as-practised, revealing the paradoxes of that discipline, where then does Reflections lead us? What are the implications of realizing that there are whole areas of anthropological field experience that have never been communicated in monographs and journal articles? Does a resolution of paradox, of the myths created by anthropologists, require the leaving of anthropology and university departments and an active engagement in praxis rather than an armchair documentation of consciousness raising? Is there to be an inversion between a practical endeavor that is non-praxis in outlook?It is true that a reflexive self-aware anthropology and the radicalness of poetic expression puts anthropology into question, but therein lies the basis of evolution to a different kind of anthropology. This is important as it becomes more and more difficult to justify fieldwork, particularly for professionals alienated from their own society and discipline.There is, however, a more important consideration. If the field lies to a great extent within us, then the question arises as to just what is anthropology doing in other people's cultures? Rarely are anthropologists invited to a particular field locale by the cultural groups living there. Their own presuppositions and career dictates lead to a global selection which is then rationalized and justified to university departments and funding bodies. It is an obvious but often overlooked fact that the discipline and culture of the anthropologist is located firmly within the social and ideological context of which it is a part. Anthropologists, therefore require a critical awareness of their relationship to the ideology of their own society and must take care that they do not unthinkingly aid in the reproduction of those conditions that in fact frame their object of study. The major part of anthropological practise has dealt with traditional and modernizing societies and anthropologists are often identified with the ideological dimension of a dependency that has already been defined in economic and political terms.Much of the reaction to and ambivalence towards anthropologists on the part of native groups is in terms of their implicit awareness that the anthropologist is part of the process that defines their present situation. Furthermore, they more often than not realize that the anthropologist needs them far more than they need the anthropologist! Without a critical awareness it is unfortunately the case that despite the best intentions of the anthropologist his presence in another culture is often part of an ongoing process that weakens and eventually destroys the culture chosen. Lévi-Strauss is exceedingly bitter about the role of anthropology as the harbinger of destruction [] because an anthropology geared to the exigencies of professionalism is the vanguard of a destructive process that seems unrelenting. I want a different kind of anthropology, one that will engage dialectically with the cultural other and express it in a way that is ultimately useful for the other culture and my own society.Edmund Carpenter's introduction to Stephen Williams' The Inuit Today speaks eloquently to this issue of destruction. He describes how the newcomers could not see the patterns of Inuit life; they smashed into them almost as innocently as men walk through cobwebs []. Professionalism, whether by anthropologists, explorers, or art experts resulted in a devastation that Carpenter alludes to as a faith being lost, an art replaced. We emptied graves, moved sacred objects from secret caves to public vaults, transferred songs to tapes, stored myths on dustry shelves. Reverential became referential; private, became public, theirs became ours []. And later — When Inuit history got classified as loot, the past was rewritten to justify the present. We re-invented the Inuit, then hired them to act out this action on film. We even re-invented their art, the taught them how to make it []. Carpenter's anger is directed at the way in which scholars use their tribe for self promotion, for movement along a professional career trajectory that bears little relation to those communities that hosted their initial intrusion. A double and devastating alienation. It must be pointed out, however, that anthropologists have increasingly moved into new venues —large urban areas of their own and other cultures, hospitals, factories, ghettoes and unemployment lines. The potential for unwitting damage is less obvious but one wonders if the ideological component of a hierarchical methodology is just as dangerous in these situations.Does all this necessarily lead us into the streets, missions and revolutions of this world or is it possible for anthropology to find an additional documentation of observation that will heighten perception about cultural others then diffuse to the civilization surrounding us? Both options are readily open, just as are the different methods of dealing with alienation for self and society — praxis or a gathering of the forces that may overcome alienation.This is where I wish to root my argument about anthropological poetics. My contention is that there is something crucial that is missing from fieldwork reporting. The collision of cultural assumptions that is the raw material of the discipline is usually expressed in emic/etic distinctions whereas I am proposing that a dialectic which subsumes both emic and etic considerations and moves both to a new language of experience is the missing component in anthropology. It can be expressed in various ways — art, narrative, theatre — anthropological poetics is simply the medium I have chosen to write about. What I am referring to is a process of incorporation that is coded in a symbolic way that then alters the professional perception of self/cultural other which then makes a different kind of impact on the professional's own society. The experience of other cultures by anthropologists should have diffused a greater humanism into Western consciousness. By and large this has not happened because as professionals we have not found the means to accurately represent the dialectic engaged with in the field. It is my conviction that anthropological poetics is one way of completing the anthropological endeavor, and thereby changing it. This is one of the major challenges facing the discipline in the closing era of the twentieth century. This latter theme has been elucidated in a highly instructive form in Stanley Diamond's poetry volume Totems [], which brings me to a final statement.Stanley Diamond, in an interview with Dan Rose, charted his evolution as a poet with the attendant circumstances that led to the latency of his poetic expression in favor of anthropological work. He emerged with a marvellous line to the effect that he chose anthropology because it was the next best thing to poetry []. I appreciate and admire Diamond's insight and humor but neither he nor I think anthropology is the next best thing to poetry. Diamond's original contribution to anthropological poetics demonstrates how the sensibilities of self and the cultural other can be fused []. Poetry in its own right is a powerful and moving mosaic of experience, but for anthropology in its present state of evolution it is so much more. It is a vital spark, a new signifying process for a discipline that is rethinking its own foundations and methodology.By methodology I refer specifically to the context of observer effects and follow Rose in treating poetry as poetic observation []. His comments are a critique, particular to Stanley Diamond's Totems. Diamond achieves the interiority I have referred to earlier, more strikingly than any other anthropologist-poet I have read. It is not so crucial for me or Dan Rose that he is a superb poet, it is that he has taken ethnography into a new domain, beyond the emic/etic distinction that shackles the discipline to methodological stasis. Diamond's ethnographic accounts in his poetics mirrors that which is not yet communicated within the discipline but it speaks directly to his own society rather than simply reporting on the state of the cultural other or Diamond himself. This is why I wish to take Rose's particular comments and move to the general as his observations about Diamond provide possible guidelines for the further development of anthropological poetics.Rose has described poetic observation as a vantage point where the poet resides in relation to his experience and to the poem, where the subjects of the poem exist in relation to the poet and where the reader stands in relation to subjects, author (observer) and text []. This set of connections succinctly exposes the dilemmas of interpretation and communication found in every field situation. The argument is that anthropological poetics as methodology permits another culture and comprehension of it to be expressed and interpreted in a way that moves beyond it. In this way one refers not just to interpretation but to a different way of relating to meanings inherent in another cultural system. Rose argues further that The accepted fieldwork device of plunging from the global to the local and rising from the local to the global preserves an older hierarchical methodology — a legacy of our anthropological forebears []. He invites us to compare this hierarchical legacy with the establishment of a new dimension between the anthropologist and native that involves different ways of perceiving the relation between cultural others and ourselves.Anthropological poetics — poetry as observations — thus has a crucial transforming role that should not be confined to the literary outlets of the day, but placed within the mainstream of anthropology as an evocation of a new consciousness for the discipline and the society of which it is but a part. It is an ethnographic statement that is presently missing from the discipline, wherein the anthropologist uses a rich linguistic code and different structures to express certain crucial areas of field experience that have not been communicated in professional monographs and articles. In addition the evocation of a critical self awareness within the discipline underlines the argument that a significant part of the field for anthropology lies within its professional practitioners. Fieldwork therefore belongs to us and our own civilization, the cultural other is a crucial part of our developing self-awareness. The anthropologist-as-poet using field experience as part of his raw material has chosen a form to convey the experience of the cultural other which then has the power to alter the listener, the reader, the unconvinced, irreversibly in a direction at once more human and humane []. It also may change the manner in which anthropology is justified and perhaps practiced.J. Iain Prattis is a Professor in the Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, Ottawa.

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Keeping Biological Anthropology in Anthropology, and Anthropology in Biology

Considerable tension among the subfields has existed within the discipline of anthropology. As a result, some anthropology departments have splintered, and the hallmark "holistic approach" of anthropology has been considered more myth than reality. However, as promoted by the American Anthropological Association and the American Anthropologist for over one hundred years, enhancing the holistic nature of anthropology remains an important and necessary endeavor. This article provides an introduction to this special issue of the American Anthropologist , which focuses on the subfield of biological anthropology. Hopefully, as a result, increased connections among the subfields will be fostered, for the betterment of both biological anthropology and anthropology in general. The underlying theme of this article and the subtext for the entire special issue is clear: Biological anthropology needs anthropology, and anthropology needs biological anthropology. [Keywords: biological anthropology, subfields, four-field approach, holistic]     

Social and River Networks for the Trees: Wounaan's Riverine Rhizomic Cosmos and Arboreal Conservation

ABSTRACT   The effects of environmental conservation and development are of significant anthropological interest. Recent focus on the politics of knowledge and translation has shown the importance of cosmology in conservation encounters. I examine how Wounaan indigenous peoples and extralocal conservation practitioners "translate" eastern Panama based on their own cosmologies. ¹ Specifically, I explore how Wounaan's social and river-networked rhizomic cosmos is overlooked in the practice of forest-focused conservation. This results from Panama's environmental history, in which actors simplified early representations of a complex landscape to one characterized by forests, as well as a Western bias toward forests with scant attention paid to cosmology. Finally, I note how Wounaan negotiate this cultural disconnect by emphasizing their ties to forests. In so doing, they buttress the arboreal bias, in turn reinforcing power relations, but also giving themselves political leverage in conservation activities. These results inform recent discussion about politics and scientific praxis in conservation.     

Reclaiming Applied Anthropology: Its Past, Present, and Future

Growing concerns about anthropology's impact in both academia and the broader social arena have led to calls for more "public" and more relevant anthropology. In this article, we expand on these exhortations, by calling for systematic joining of critical social theory with application and pragmatic engagement with contemporary problems. We argue for the repositioning of applied anthropology as a vital component of the broader discipline and suggest that it should serve as a framework for constructing a more engaged anthropology. In revisiting disciplinary history and critiques of applied anthropology, we demonstrate the central role that application has played throughout anthropology's evolution, address common misconceptions that serve as barriers to disciplinary integration, examine the role of advocacy in relation to greater engagement as well as the relationship of theory to practice, and conclude with an assessment of the diverse work that is subsumed under the inclusive rubric of "anthropology in use."     

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

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

The Profession of the Color Blind: Sociocultural Anthropology and Racism in the 21st Century

In this essay, I suggest that American sociocultural anthropology has been a "color blind" profession for nearly a half century and that, as a discipline, we need to restore and refine our color perceptions in order to fight the supposedly fixed opposition in American society between "black" and "white" and deal with the racist consequences of this folk opposition. In the first section, 'How Anthropology Became 'Color Blind,'" I delineate the circumstances under which anthropology became the "color blind" profession. In the second section, "Teaching Color Blindness," I discuss the tendency, in teaching sociocultural anthropology, to ignore racism and its effects. In the final section, "Restoring Color Vision," I take up the questions of what the profession needs to do next to cope with racism and its consequences, emphasizing especially the issue of group identities, how they are formulated, inculcated, and overcome, and proposing a Foucauldian model—following Foucault's lead in analyzing relations of biopower and race—for formulating new ways of responding to and resisting the inevitable recastings of racist ideas,     

The reification of concrete work in Egyptian film production

The anthropology of cinema has been instrumental in describing the ‘unseen’ labour invested in making films. What has been less explored is film workers’ erasure of each other's concrete effort in a similar manner. This process is what I call ‘reification’. Extending Georg Lukács's reflections, I argue that the relations of production throughout the film-making process seem to be transformed into relations between things (images and sounds) in a recurring pattern. In Egypt, this transformation impacts every juncture in commercial film production, and film workers manage its continuous impact via conventional means of recognition towards their concrete work. The overarching project is to understand, on the one hand, how the serial erasure of concrete work contributes to creating the film as a commodity and, on the other hand, how workers find value in their work under conditions where their effort is consumed by the things that they produce.     

From Types to Populations: A Century of Race, Physical Anthropology, and the American Anthropological Association

In the 1960s, U.S. physical anthropology underwent a period of introspection that marked a change from the old physical anthropology that was largely race based to the new physical anthropology, espoused by Washburn and others for over a decade, which incorporated the evolutionary biology of the modern synthesis. What actually changed? What elements of the race concept have been rejected, and what elements have persisted, influencing physical anthropology today? In this article, I examine both the scientific and social influences on physical anthropology that caused changes in the race concept, in particular the influence of the American Anthropological Association. The race concept is complicated but entails three attributes: essentialism, cladistic thinking, and biological determinism. These attributes have not all been discarded; while biological determinism and its social implications have been questioned since the inception of the field, essentialism and the concomitant rendering of populations as clades persists as a legacy of the race concept. [Keywords: race, essentialism, physical anthropology]     

The State of Biological Anthropology in 2008: Is Our Discipline Strong and Our Cause Just?

ABSTRACT   Biological anthropologists inform a largely professional discourse on the evolutionary history of our species. In addition, aspects of our biology, the ways in which we vary, and certain patterns of behavior are the subjects of a more public and popular conversation. The social contexts in which we work not only define our times but also produce the anthropologists that in turn construct an emergent understanding of our species' (and our societies') inner workings. In this review of scholarly production, I focus on developments within a selection of "sub-subdisciplines" that were particularly influential in bending the arc of biological anthropology in 2008, namely: evolutionary medical anthropology, anthropological neuroscience, forensic anthropology, primatology, and paleoanthropology. Ultimately, this review demonstrates, yet again, anthropology's great contribution: the ability to incorporate new technologies and research methodologies into a synthetic and integrative interdisciplinary approach toward the elucidation of human behavior, evolution, and biocultural engagements with the environment. [Keywords: biological anthropology, year in review, 2008, science and society]     

Restaging the Will to Believe: Religious Pluralism, Anti-Syncretism, and the Problem of Belief

In this article, I examine anthropological conceptions of religious belief by concentrating on the problems that arise in employing them in socioreligious fields characterized by pluralism, a high degree of mobility in changing religious affiliation, and by what Rosalind Shaw and Charles Stewart have called "anti-syncretism" (1994). Instead of discarding the concept for anthropology, however, as some scholars have proposed, I suggest that indigenous discourses referring to and practices of belief represent an important field of anthropological inquiry, particularly as concerns non-Western forms of Christianity. In this article, I argue that people's ideas of and experiences with spiritual entities engender particular ways of talking about and practicing belief. Analyzing religious practices among the Zambian Gwembe Tonga, it is shown that some conceptual problems can be overcome by shifting the focus from belief as a stable and perpetual interior state of religious practitioners to the practice of cyclically regenerating a condition of internalized "believing."     

Introduction to "Anthropology and Human Rights in a New Key"

In this "In Focus" introduction, I begin by offering an overview of anthropology's engagements with human rights following the American Anthropological Association's (AAA) 1947 "Statement on Human Rights." After offering a rereading of the Statement, I describe the two major anthropological orientations to human rights that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, following several decades of relative disengagement. Finally, I locate the articles in relation to this history and indicate how, when taken as a whole, they express a new key or register within which human rights can be studied, critiqued, and advanced through anthropological forms of knowledge. This "In Focus" is in part an argument for an essentially ecumenical anthropology of human rights, one that can tolerate, and indeed encourage, approaches that are both fundamentally critical of contemporary human rights regimes and politically or ethically committed to these same regimes.     

Epistemic artefacts: on the uses of complexity in anthropology

Distinctions between the ‘simple’ and the ‘complex’ have enjoyed a long and varied career in anthropology. Simplicity was once part of a collective fantasy about what life was like elsewhere, tingeing studies of tribal life with human longing for simpler ways of being. With the reflexive turn and the rise of cultural critique, simplicity has been all but excommunicated in favour of widespread diagnoses of complexity. In this article, I tease out some transformations in the uses of complexity in anthropology, and weave in some critical responses to these uses, spanning many decades, from within the discipline. I pay special attention to recent critiques by anthropologists who are beginning to grow weary of complexity as both an end‐in‐itself for scholarship and an empirical diagnosis. For these critics, complexity is deeply entwined with anthropological methods and knowledge practices. Drawing on these critical views, I suggest that complexity may be an epistemological artefact, rather than something that can be diagnosed ‘out there’, and offer a way of reframing complexity as a ‘dominant problematic’ in anthropology and beyond.