Female Genital Cutting, The Veil, and Democracy: Navigating Cultural Politics in Human Rights Discourse

This paper explores the perceived incompatibilities between human rights discourse and traditional values in the Middle East and North Africa. After reviewing relevant literature and concepts, it posits that this conflict is the result of social, political, and economic factors within a historical context and suggests using capabilities approach forwarded by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen as a tool for better understanding and implementing human rights in the region. Rather than see culture as an adversary, this approach explains the potential of culture and religion in resolving ideological conflicts, especially for ambiguous human rights. This paper presents veiling, gential cutting, and democracy as examples of vaguely defined human rights and posits that the capabilities approach is uniquely equipped to navigate its role in cultural politics and human rights discourse

Mentoring is an intellectual pillar of ethnobiology

Ethnobiology relies on community partnerships and relationships between elders or other knowledge keepers and students. Our Society of Ethnobiology, like all academic organizations, has its own issues with discrimination and abuses of power. But more than other academic disciplines, contemporary ethnobiology is practiced with and strengthened by close, respectful working relationships. As such, we offer our thoughts on the lessons ethnobiology brings to mentorship and accountability while outlining some of the specific steps we are taking as an academic and practicing community.Published versio

Cultivating Knowledge: The Production and Adaptation of Knowledge on Organic and GM Cotton Farms in Telangana, India

This dissertation explores the ways in which genetically modified (GM) cotton seeds, rice seeds, and organic cotton seeds in Telangana, India set farmers on diverging economic, environmental, and social trajectories. GM cotton, a cash crop sold under hundreds of different brand names by private corporations, leads farmers to rapidly change to new seeds and copy their neighbors’ choices as they chase high yields that counter their high investments in an input-intensive agriculture. Rice, a subsistence and market crop distributed largely by public breeders, allows farmers to change their seeds more slowly as they carefully evaluate durability and taste alongside overall yield. Organic cotton seeds, often provided free of cost by sponsoring NGOs or ethical fiber companies, show farmers that agricultural cost-benefit analysis can be less important than learning to work in tandem with a sponsoring organization. The solutions to agrarian crisis or underdevelopment are often presented as a series of technological fixes. However, agriculture is a fundamentally social act, hinging on the ways in which farmers learn to manage their fields. Taking individual seeds as a lens, I use ethnographic detail and quantitative analysis to study how farmers learn to navigate confusing seed markets, state programs, ethical supply chains, and the village hierarchies that determine who looks to whom for agricultural advice. This work has implications for international development as well as a broader question of modern life: how do we make technologies sustainable in new contexts

Development roles: contingency and performance in alternative agriculture in Telangana, India

Paul Richards invokes the metaphor of performance in agriculture to highlight the ways in which farmers improvise and draw on repertory knowledge to address new and unexpected problems in the field. This skillset helps farmers respond to shifting weather patterns or changing pest cycles, but it also helps farmers take advantage of new markets, technologies, and development interventions – a question of planning and context as much as improvisation in the moment. This article discusses two intervention failures and one success in Telangana cotton agriculture, arguing that such agricultural interventions succeed when farmers can align development performances with their own visions of development and agricultural success. In doing so, it offers a political ecology of farmer performance on two levels. First, it brings attention to the ecological and socioeconomic factors that inspire performances and structure farmer improvisations. Second, it argues that development initiatives must recognize their efforts as embedded within local agricultural planning and contingent on local calculations of social capital. In two ultimately unsuccessful interventions, farmers withdrew from programs that required investments of time and agricultural methods but did not underwrite important social and agricultural vulnerabilities identified by participants. In one successful intervention, farmers found that an NGO's willingness to respond to their agricultural needs and provide a stage for the cultivation of a local celebrity more than compensated for the new demands of non-certified organic agriculture. In a rural Indian context, where farming is a moral as well as agricultural process, the performance of a development identity is an integral part of performances and plans that guide farmer decision-making. Because these performances create a knowledge that cannot be separated from actors, roles, and stages present, these contingent performances ultimately have lasting impacts on the agrarian landscape. Key Words:  India, alternative agriculture, performance, knowledg

Publishing in Ethnobiology Letters in 2018

Ethnobiology Letters was launched in 2010 with the goal of providing a free-to-publish, open-access, online venue for short peer-reviewed articles in ethnobiology (Wolverton et al. 2010). Over the course of nine volumes, which comprise 12 issues, published since that date, Ethnobiology Letters has grown and changed, with new editors, authors, and submission categories. We write this editorial to highlight those changes, as well as to report submission and review metrics for the journal since the inception of our online journal management system. We describe the current status of Ethnobiology Letters and plans for the future of the journal.Published versio

Playing development roles: the political ecology of performance in agricultural development

Performance is a useful lens through which to analyze agrarian life, as performance illuminates the ways that farmers manage the complex socioecological demands of farm work while participating in social life and in the larger political economy. The dialectic of planning and improvisation in the farm field has produced scholarship at multiple scales of political ecology, including the global ramifications of new technologies or policies, as well as the hyper-local engagements between farmers and fields in the context of modernity and development. Political ecologists are also beginning to understand how affects, such as aspirations and frustrations, influence agriculture by structuring how farmers and other stakeholders make decisions about farms, households, capital, and environments. To understand farm work as a performance is to situate it within particular stages, roles, scripts, and audiences at different scales. The articles in this Special Section ask how farmers have improvised, planned, and performed in response to agroecological challenges, bridging scholarship in political ecology, development studies, and the study of agrarian landscapes through new empirical case studies and theoretical contributions. Agriculture both signals social values and fosters improvisations within farming communities' collective vulnerability to weather and the political economy. We argue that the lens of performance situates the political ecology of agriculture within the constraints of the political economy, the aspirations and frustrations of daily life, and the dialectic between improvised responses to change and planning in the field. Keywords: Performance, agriculture, planning, improvisation, agrarian studie

Ethnobiology after four years of socioecological violence

Published versio

DHA supplementation during pregnancy does not reduce BMI or body fat mass in children: follow-up of the DHA to Optimize Mother Infant Outcome randomized controlled trial

First published March 30, 2016The omega-3 (n-3) long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acid (LCPUFA) docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) has proven effective at reducing fat storage in animal studies. However, a systematic review of human trials showed a lack of quality data to support or refute this hypothesis.We sought to determine whether maternal DHA supplementation during the second half of pregnancy results in a lower body mass index (BMI) and percentage of body fat in children.We conducted a follow-up at 3 and 5 y of age of children who were born to mothers enrolled in the DOMInO (DHA to Optimize Mother Infant Outcome) double-blind, randomized controlled trial, in which women with a singleton pregnancy were provided with DHA-rich fish-oil capsules (800 mg DHA/d) or vegetable-oil capsules (control group) in the second half of pregnancy. Primary outcomes were the BMIzscore and percentage of body fat at 3 and 5 y of age. Potential interactions between prenatal DHA and the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-γ (PPARγ) genotype as a measure of the genetic predisposition to obesity were investigated.A total of 1614 children were eligible for the follow-up. Parent or caregiver consent was obtained for 1531 children (95%), and these children were included in the analysis. BMIzscores and percentages of body fat of children in the DHA group did not differ from those of children in the control group at either 3 y of age [BMIzscore adjusted mean difference: 0.03 (95% CI: -0.07, 0.13;P= 0.61); percentage of body fat adjusted mean difference: -0.26 (95% CI: -0.99, 0.46;P= 0.47)] or 5 y of age [BMIzscore adjusted mean difference: 0.02 (95% CI: -0.08, 0.12;P= 0.66); percentage of body fat adjusted mean difference: 0.11 (95% CI: -0.60, 0.82;P= 0.75)]. No treatment effects were modified by thePPARγgenotype of the child.Independent of a genetic predisposition to obesity, maternal intake of DHA-rich fish oil during the second half of pregnancy does not affect the growth or body composition of children at 3 or 5 y of age. This trial was registered atwww.anzctr.org.auas ACTRN1260500056906 and ACTRN12611001127998.Beverly S Muhlhausler, Lisa N Yelland, Robyn McDermott, Linda Tapsell, Andrew McPhee, Robert A Gibson, and Maria Makride

The Factish in the Field: An Anthropological Inquiry of Genetically Modified Seeds and Yields as Beings

Research in GM crops is of pressing importance to biotechnologists, development economists, government officials, and concerned citizens.  Each of these stakeholders carries preconceived notions of success and failure that not only influence how data regarding GM crops is shared but also reify the objective reality of GM seeds as a technology that might exist outside the idiosyncracies of a farmer’s field.  In this essay, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among GM cotton planting farmers in Telangana, India to deconstruct the process by which scientific facts are created, leveraged, and then divorced from their subjective contexts in agricultural research.  In paying closer attention to the ways that the science of agricultural development has limited possibilities of farmer experience and transformed GM seeds into autonomous beings, this paper attempts to take up Latour’s call for a compositionist investigation of a common world slowly assembled by its constituent actors