The Himalayas: Barrier and conduit for gene flow

The Himalayan mountain range is strategically located at the crossroads of the major cultural centers in Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Although previous Y‐chromosome studies indicate that the Himalayas served as a natural barrier for gene flow from the south to the Tibetan plateau, this region is believed to have played an important role as a corridor for human migrations between East and West Eurasia along the ancient Silk Road. To evaluate the effects of the Himalayan mountain range in shaping the maternal lineages of populations residing on either side of the cordillera, we analyzed mitochondrial DNA variation in 344 samples from three Nepalese collections (Newar, Kathmandu and Tamang) and a general population of Tibet. Our results revealed a predominantly East Asian‐specific component in Tibet and Tamang, whereas Newar and Kathmandu are both characterized by a combination of East and South Central Asian lineages. Interestingly, Newar and Kathmandu harbor several deep‐rooted Indian lineages, including M2, R5, and U2, whose coalescent times from this study (U2, >40 kya) and previous reports (M2 and R5, >50 kya) suggest that Nepal was inhabited during the initial peopling of South Central Asia. Comparisons with our previous Y‐chromosome data indicate sex‐biased migrations in Tamang and a founder effect and/or genetic drift in Tamang and Newar. Altogether, our results confirm that while the Himalayas acted as a geographic barrier for human movement from the Indian subcontinent to the Tibetan highland, it also served as a conduit for gene flow between Central and East Asia. Am J Phys Anthropol 151:169–182, 2013. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Weaving carpets, weaving lives: Childhood and ethnicity in downtown Kathmandu

In the developing metropolis public perceptions about caste and ethnicity are influenced by historical trends in decisions about occupations; but what does this mean for children whose families decide they work? In Kathmandu's carpet industry, a large percentage of workers are Tamang, an ethnic group who represent a small percentage of the country's population. Organisations working with Tamang child labourers have predominantly used quantitative research data to construct their intervention strategies. This has left many factors unexamined. This paper discusses qualitative and quantitative research data generated by a team of Nepali practitioners striving to address child labour issues. The purpose of their study was to examine the social and cultural factors influencing child migration and the quality of life for children in the carpet industry. The methodology included participatory indicators of children's social, economic, physical and psychological well-being. The paper will draw on children's perspectives to highlight the role of ethnicity in opportunity and exploitation.     

The Himalayas as a directional barrier to gene flow

High-resolution Y-chromosome haplogroup analyses coupled with Y-short tandem repeat (STR) haplotypes were used to (1) investigate the genetic affinities of three populations from Nepal--including Newar, Tamang, and people from cosmopolitan Kathmandu (referred to as "Kathmandu" subsequently)--as well as a collection from Tibet and (2) evaluate whether the Himalayan mountain range represents a geographic barrier for gene flow between the Tibetan plateau and the South Asian subcontinent. The results suggest that the Tibetans and Nepalese are in part descendants of Tibeto-Burman-speaking groups originating from Northeast Asia. All four populations are represented predominantly by haplogroup O3a5-M134-derived chromosomes, whose Y-STR-based age (+/-SE) was estimated at 8.1+/-2.9 thousand years ago (KYA), more recent than its Southeast Asian counterpart. The most pronounced difference between the two regions is reflected in the opposing high-frequency distributions of haplogroups D in Tibet and R in Nepal. With the exception of Tamang, both Newar and Kathmandu exhibit considerable similarities to the Indian Y-haplogroup distribution, particularly in their haplogroup R and H composition. These results indicate gene flow from the Indian subcontinent and, in the case of haplogroup R, from Eurasia as well, a conclusion that is also supported by the admixture analysis. In contrast, whereas haplogroup D is completely absent in Nepal, it accounts for 50.6% of the Tibetan Y-chromosome gene pool. Coalescent analyses suggest that the expansion of haplogroup D derivatives--namely, D1-M15 and D3-P47 in Tibet--involved two different demographic events (5.1+/-1.8 and 11.3+/-3.7 KYA, respectively) that are more recent than those of D2-M55 representatives common in Japan. Low frequencies, relative to Nepal, of haplogroup J and R lineages in Tibet are also consistent with restricted gene flow from the subcontinent. Yet the presence of haplogroup O3a5-M134 representatives in Nepal indicates that the Himalayas have been permeable to dispersals from the east. These genetic patterns suggest that this cordillera has been a biased bidirectional barrier.     

Animals and the Limits of Ethnography

Is ethnography (as constituted in the social sciences) a reliable method with which to understand interspecies intersubjectivity? Can a method that has become a cornerstone approach to a qualitative understanding of humans for more than a century interrogate the social ties between humans and animals? Will it illuminate the similarities and differences between humans and their animal familiars? Using a programmatic approach to ethnography, and drawing on lessons from cyber ethnography, this article examines the challenges facing an ethnography that takes animals seriously as social beings and ethnographic subjects. The ability of ethnography to deliver a faithful portrait of being relies in large part on the communicative trust developed between ethnographers and their participants and interlocutors; it lies in the quality of the intersubjective exchange. Communicative intersubjective trust is both the paragon quality one wants in ethnographic social exchange and the most ill-defined and difficult to ascertain. So much ethnographic authority is underpinned by the hope that ethnographers have understood the people they work with in their terms and can faithfully re-present and interpret that world view. This article argues that the tricky and ambiguous business of intersubjective exchange poses important methodological questions for anthrozoology.     

Dam-Induced Displacement and Agricultural Livelihoods in China’s Mekong Basin

Households in China’s Yunnan Province were surveyed to understand the impacts of hydropower development and resettlement on the agricultural livelihoods of rural villagers. Household-level data from this survey are analyzed to test whether income and landholdings vary by resettlement status. Independent sample t-tests and one-way ANOVAs are used to examine how resettlement status relates to income, land allotments, agricultural crops, and government subsides. Results showed that, contrary to predictions, resettlement corresponds to higher household incomes, while differences in landholdings were mixed. Results indicate that while productive landholdings are less for resettled households, new wage labor, government subsidies, and intensified agriculture may contribute to a higher annual mean income at the household level. However, the tradeoff of receiving wage income for reduced landholdings may be a significant vulnerability for the affected households of the Mekong River Basin, since this loss in productive land corresponds to a long-term loss in social security.     

Land,livestock, and livelihoods: Changing dynamics of gender,caste, and ethnicity in a Nepalese Village

Over the past 10 years, Ghusel VDC, Lalitpur District has moved from primarily subsistence agriculture into the wider cash economy aided by the Small Farmers' Development Program (SFDP), which provides credit to farmers mainly for the purchase of buffalo for milk production, and by the National Dairy Corporation, which supports local dairy cooperatives. Analysis reveals that buffalo-keeping and milk sales are increasing the well-being of many households, while at the same time creating new inequalities in gender roles and responsibilities, greater inequities between Brahmin and Tamang residents in Ghusel, and placing pressures on the ecosystem for increased supplies of fodder and fuelwood. Evidence suggests that there is critical, need for attention to the social, and particularly gender-based, implications of maintaining livestock for milk sales and to the ecological underpinnings of this livelihood system.     

Ethnographic Studies of Childhood: A Historical Overview

In this article, I briefly survey the ethnographic research literature on childhood in the 20th century, beginning with the social and intellectual contexts for discussions of childhood at the turn of the 20th century. The observations of Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead in the 1920s were followed by later ethnographers, also describing childhood, some of whom criticized developmental theories; still others were influenced initially by Freudian and other psychoanalytic theories and later by the suggestions of Edward Sapir for research on the child's acquisition of culture. The Six Cultures Study led by John Whiting at midcentury was followed by diverse trends of the period after 1960—including field studies of infancy, the social and cultural ecology of children's activities, and language socialization. Ethnographic evidence on hunting and gathering and agricultural peoples was interpreted in evolutionary as well as cultural and psychological terms. The relationship between ethnography and developmental psychology remained problematic.     

"Who is healthy among the Korwa?" Liminality in the experiential health of the displaced Korwa of Central India

The Korwa, an indigenous community of Central India, were displaced from their forest abode four decades ago because of the state's forest policy. The resettled Korwa do not consider the new space their home and summarize their journey of displacement from hill forest to lowland villages in terms of deprivation of healthy life. The Korwa complain of fever, diffuse aches, fatigue, and frail bodies forming a part of their everyday lives thereby signaling the loss of experiential health attributed to alienation from the forest. During an intensive ethnographic fieldwork in Chhatisgarh, the Korwa informants were found to be drawing a sharp contrast between the "health-generating" attributes of forest life and the "health-threatening" miseries of current wage labor economy. Using liminality framework, this article attempts to understand health experiences of the displaced Korwa as embodiment of their social and material conditions of existence.     

The discursive detachment of race from gentrification in Cartagena de Indias,Colombia

In this article, I provide an ethnographic account of the gentrification process and its relationship to race and racism in the community of Getsemaní in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. I introduce Racial Attachment Processes as a conceptual framework for understanding how individuals reconcile Latin American discourses that suggest that race is not a primary stratifying principle with the material spatial realities of racial hierarchies that counter such discourses. Drawing on ethnographic participant observation and semi-structured interviews, including those employing photo-elicitation, I demonstrate how people discursively mobilize race in everyday life, yet selectively detach race in ways that allow them to interpret processes of gentrification as untethered to their racial underpinnings. This paper ultimately demonstrates how the discursive detachment of race from understandings of Colombian socio-spatial, political and economic relations obscures the relationship between racial domination and social inequality.     

Birth seasonality,photoperiod, and social change in the Central Canadian Arctic

Birth seasonally at high latitudes is a complex phenomenon which is undoubtedly affected by a subtle interaction between environmental rhythmicity (most notably in photoperiod and temperature) and cultural adaption. There is intriguing evidence that human gonadotrophic activity (and hence fertility) may be affected by seasonal fluctuations in light intensity and duration. Nevertheless, cultural factors are important insofar as they mediate between environmental rhythmicity and human fertility/birth patterns. This article examines the distribution of births over several decades in an Inuit community located 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Several shifts in birth seasonality are noted, the most significant of which is a dramatic shift from pronounced seasonality in the 1970s to non-seasonality in the 1980s. Longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork has allowed an examination of social and economic changes accounting for the rather sudden disappearance of birth seasonality. These include increasing reliance upon wage employment and social assistance, decreased dependence upon subsistence hunting and trapping, changing attitudes on the part of young people entering their prime reproductive years, and the introduction of television, radio, and southern-style recreational activities.     

Discursive Formation,Ethnographic Encounter,Photographic Evidence: The Centenary of Durkheim's Basic Forms of Religious Life and the Anthropological Study of Australian Aboriginal Religion in His Time

Historical research on the work of Émile Durkheim has often been confined to textual analysis aiming to reconstruct his research in the context of anthropological discourses at the turn of the 20th century. As radical changes in the visual culture of the late 19th century shaped the formation of anthropology as an academic discipline, the ambition of this article is to elaborate the ways Durkheim's use of ethnographic data and visual material formed the foundation of the theoretical and methodological design of his approach to religion. By tracing features in his Basic Forms that emphasize visual material and prioritize religious practice, I submit that the photographic evidence given in Spencer and Gillen's account of Aboriginal religion allowed Durkheim to theorize religion primarily through ritual. Photography, as a visual means of representation, enhanced the study of religion by focusing on ritual without necessarily demanding consideration of its mythical narratives and cosmological accounts. Based on a thorough analysis of his Basic Forms, this article argues that Durkheim used the photographs of the Aborigines of Central Australia systematically and that this use of photographs consequently guided his ethnographic depiction and his selection of theoretical concepts and methodological procedures.     

The flight of the self: Exploring more‐than‐human companionship in rural Pakistan

The construct of multispecies anthropology has helped explain some of the ways through which humans develop sensory and embodied connectedness with the more‐than‐human. Yet there is a need to fully comprehend how such connectedness leads to the discovery of the inner self. Through an ethnographic study carried out with rural South Punjabi pigeon flyers in Pakistan between 2008 and 2018, this paper argues that companionship with pigeons allows people to generate a meaningful relationship with their animals, explore their inner emotions and achieve a deeper understanding of the self. This paper takes inspiration from Donna Haraway's critique of Jacques Derrida's cat encounter, and philosophical thoughts of a 12th‐century Muslim mystic poet, Farid ud‐Din Attar, to examine how becoming‐with pigeons enables the flyers to structure their lifeworlds, develop entrenched companionship and shape their social choices to achieve wellbeing despite everyday social troubles and emotional anxieties.     

Interethnic Interaction,Strategic Bargaining Power,and the Dynamics of Cultural Norms

Ethnic groups are universal and unique to human societies. Such groups sometimes have norms of behavior that are adaptively linked to their social and ecological circumstances, and ethnic boundaries may function to protect that variation from erosion by interethnic interaction. However, such interaction is often frequent and voluntary, suggesting that individuals may be able to strategically reduce its costs, allowing adaptive cultural variation to persist in spite of interaction with out-groups with different norms. We examine five mechanisms influencing the dynamics of ethnically distinct cultural norms, each focused on strategic individual-level choices in interethnic interaction: bargaining, interaction-frequency-biased norm adoption, assortment on norms, success-biased interethnic social learning, and childhood socialization. We use Bayesian item response models to analyze patterns of norm variation and interethnic interaction in an ethnically structured Amazonian population. We show that, among indigenous Matsigenka, interethnic education with colonial Mestizos is more strongly associated with Mestizo-typical norms than even extensive interethnic experience in commerce and wage labor is. Using ethnographic observations, we show that all five of the proposed mechanisms of norm adoption may contribute to this effect. However, of these mechanisms, we argue that changes in relative bargaining power are particularly important for ethnic minorities wishing to preserve distinctive norms while engaging in interethnic interaction in domains such as education. If this mechanism proves applicable in a range of other ethnographic contexts, it would constitute one cogent explanation for when and why ethnically structured cultural variation can either persist or erode given frequent, and often mutually beneficial, interethnic interaction.     

Cooperation or cooptation: A southwest French wine cooperative

Conclusion Cooperatives, with respect to the history of wine production in the southwest of France, require that they be graced as the outcome of the transformation from the era of captitalist markets to the era where the capitalist mode of production became dominant—a transformation marked by the creation of a market in labor as predominant among winegrowers. As Marx showed through his many works on the development of capitalism, the translation of market exchanges into a quantifiable economic entity only serves to mask the social relations on which it is based. It was therefore my intent in the first part of this essay to highlight, if only suggestively, the process that led to expanded commercialization of wine in the Aquitaine and the deployment of a specific system of labor. Although wine proprietors and growers were divided by social class early on, the market in labor matured slowly, especially in the sector of the production of table wines. The market in labor among winegrowers followed from the appearance of the grand crus in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and from the social consequences that ensued from the phylloxera in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The grand crus ushered in new specialized labor while the phylloxera intensified this process by turning wealthy merchants and large proprietors towards the volume production of table wines, thus usurping the last vestige of the small independent producer.Markets were not left to follow their own telos as the state played a central mediative role in creating legislation that both encouraged and pressured small independent producers to collectivize their resources in vinification cooperatives. This was not a conspiracy of the state legislature against the excesses of production on the part of the small producers. Wine cooperative legislature was an attempt on the part of the state legislature to resolve the periodic crises in viticulture caused by overproduction and to implement a long overdo agricultural policy The problems faced by the Sigouls Cooperative today are largely a product of the past history of wine production in the southwest of France. Currently, seventy-five percent of the Cooperative's plantation is in white wines. The high plantation in white wines reflects northern European preferences that are traceable to the sixteenth century and earlier. More recently, in France and elsewhere, there has been a gradual shift in consumer preferences from white to red wines. Consumer preferences in part can be attributed to the vicissitudes of taste. However, one must not overlook concerted efforts through advertising to shape consumer taste. Recently, the best known example is the enthusiasm for Beaujolais Nouveau cultivated through clever advertising in major urban centers such as Paris and New York. Since wine cooperatives have not had sufficient capital to invest in advertising and promotion to establish trends, they have had to settle for keeping pace with new developments. Although Sigouls has exceeded its neighboring cooperative, Monbazillac, in keeping pace with the latest trend, it must be recognized that it requires at least five years for a red wine stock such as merlot to mature after plantation.Although wine cooperatives can be seen as assimilatory institution in that they have served the absorption of small independent producers of wine into the capitalist mode of production, it should be recognized equally that wine cooperatives have been the only means available to small producers for continuing the cultivation of their vineyards given the constraints of capitalist social relations. With this in mind, one must avoid the conclusion that wine cooperatives are simply an instrument of the capitalist mode of production, French legislature, the ruling class and nothing else. Although the political motives that led some of the Sigouls Cooperative's early members to pool their vinification and marketing resources have given way to pragmatics, or as my informants related la rentabilité (profitability), the Cooperative has preserved, albeit in a transformed medium, an ageold meaningful livelihood, a sense of local pride in the production of wine, and some sense of independence from the fate of wage labor.Robert Ulin is Professor of Sociology & Anthropology, Allegheny College, Meadville, Pa.

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Pratiques funéraires et recrutement : reprise d’étude des collections osseuses issues des dolmens du Languedoc oriental et sud des Cévennes à la fin du Néolithique

Collective burials were the main and most widespread funerary practice at the end of the Neolithic, beginning of the Bronze Age in the south of France. Megalithic monuments required a huge investment of time and labor. According to ethnographic studies, these monumental tombs are generally built and managed collectively. One can therefore wonder who was buried inside these structures because several archaeological studies indicate that access to these tombs can sometimes be restricted to certain members of the population. Indeed, ethnography highlights that access to certain tombs can be structured by variables such as kinship, social status, etc. While previous studies have mainly focused on the architecture and function of these monuments, this article focuses on the process of deposition of human remains and the characterization of the population buried inside these monuments. Since 2012, a project has been undertaken on the dolmens of the south of France in order to discuss funerary practices and to compare them with data from other archaeosciences to rediscuss the funerary traditions in place at the end of the Neolithic, the beginning of the Bronze Age.     

Early-Norse Home-Field Productivity in the Faroe Islands

In the early Norse settlement period throughout the North Atlantic, effective management of the land area surrounding the domestic settlement, the home-field, was essential. In the Faroe Islands, the extent of home-field land suitable for growing fodder or cereal crops is limited by topography and by drainage highlighting the need to optimize the management of these land areas. In this paper we examine the management of home-fields through a modeling approach, allowing the long-term sustainability of the past agrarian system in the home-field area to be examined. The CENTURY agroecosystem model is used to predict soil organic carbon levels and the potential hay meadow and cereal production for locations around three settlements on the islands of Su{–}deroy, Sandoy, and Eysteroy. Using paleoclimatic data and measurements from buried soil materials alongside ethnographic and historical evidence on land management, the results from this model reveal maximum hay and barley yields attainable through early agrarian practices. Comparisons between modeled outputs and recorded yields from the nineteenth century show that there is a strong moderating influence on longer-term climatic fluctuations. The role of soil management is emphasized through comparison of long-term climate/yield data. This has been undertaken using statistical time series analyses, which reveal fluctuations in yield related to climate are relatively slight, except going into the twentieth century. It is concluded that intensity of soil management is the primary determinant of yield and could buffer cereal and hay yields against climatic downturns, and that from a low yield baseline in the early Norse settlement period, yield improves to an equilibrium level by the twelfth century.     

Ways of Asking,Ways of Telling

The interpretive understanding that can be derived from interviews is highly influenced by methods of data collection, be they structured or semistructured, ethnographic, clinical, life-history or survey interviews. This article responds to calls for research into the interview process by analyzing data produced by two distinctly different types of interview, a semistructured ethnographic interview and the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM, conducted with participants in the Navajo Healing Project. We examine how the two interview genres shape the context of researcher-respondent interaction and, in turn, influence how patients articulate their lives and their experience in terms of illness, causality, social environment, temporality and self/identity. We discuss the manner in which the two interviews impose narrative constraints on interviewers and respondents, with significant implications for understanding the jointly constructed nature of the interview process. The argument demonstrates both divergence and complementarity in the construction of knowledge by means of these interviewing methods.     

Changing household composition,labor patterns,and fertility in a highland New Guinea population

The European demographic transition of the nineteenth century is often proposed as a model for demographic change in twentieth century developing nations, and economic development is seen as leading to an inevitable reduction in total fertility in these nations. This paper examines data from the Gainj of Papua New Guinea, a natural fertility population with very low reproductive output, and suggests that the effects of development on fertility change are much more complex than a simple demographic transition model would suggest. Looking at two variables known to contribute significantly to low total fertility among the Gainj, late age at first birth for women and long interbirth intervals, the paper suggests that households, in their recruitment and allocation of labor, may exert a mediating influence in the relationship between economic development and fertility.     

Construction of an Yucatec Maya soil classification and comparison with the WRB framework

Background

Nepal is small in size but rich in bio-cultural diversity. The rugged terrain of the country is home to a number of unique assemblages of fauna, some of which are endemic. Not only faunal resources the country also harbors some very ancient populations whose interrelationship with these diverse faunal resources is very intimate and thus demands scientific study. Animals play important role in both material and spiritual spheres of their life. There are more than hundred groups of such populations in the country and the group Tamang is one of these. The present paper studies Tamang-animal relationships in central Nepal. There is a growing trend of scientific ethnozoological studies all across the globe, but this field is yet in its infancy in Nepal. The country is losing important fauna as well as ancient human cultures at the advent of development processes. As a result, ethnozoological knowledge is also teetering on the brink of extinction.

Methods

Ethnozoological data were collected by applying different participatory approaches techniques such as semi-structured interviews, participatory rural appraisal, key informant interviews and focus group discussions. Quantitative data were obtained by employing a household level questionnaire survey. Data were collected from the period of September 2004 to August 2005. Most of the animals were identified up to the species level with the help of standard taxonomic keys.

Results

The Tamang community treasures knowledge on various uses of 41 genera belonging to 28 families. Out of total number of animals, 14.6% belong to the Invertebrate group and the rest to the Vertebrate group. Of the total uses 58% fall in the food and medicinal use category, 16% in the magico-religious use category, 18% in the category of omen indication, and 2% each in the categories such as weather forecasting, trophy, ethnomusical and taboos.

Conclusions

The Tamang maintain strong ties with animals both at a material as well as spiritual level. While some animals are the sources of important traditional medicines, others are omen indicators and weather forecasters. High priority should be given in conservation of those animals which are of high consensus value to the community.