FORAGERS, FARMERS AND FISHERS: RESPONSES TO ENVIRONMENTAL PERTURBATION

This paper proposes an anthropological approach to understanding responses to environmental perturbation, one that is aligned with the humanistic and environmentalist agendas of political ecology while seeking to develop a more generic understanding of processes that shape human action in, as well as on, the worlds that people experience. We outline a comparative model that recognizes and prioritizes the role of prevailing expressions of ethos and sociality in conditioning responses to perturbation and takes variation in those expressions as focal to analysis. The model concerns the complexity of social systems, identifying two dimensions of complexity that we label ‘the involvement of parts’ and ‘the individuation of form’. Drawing on our own ethnographic studies of two, linguistically-defined, societies in Papua New Guinea and two, activity-defined, communities of commercial fishers in Australia we show, first, how differences in sociality and ethos may influence short-term responses to environmental perturbation and, secondly, how environmental perturbation may, in the longer term, influence the emergence of new forms of sociality and ethos. Where new forms do emerge, we argue, the trajectory of change will be strongly influenced by people’s prior understandings of their relations with environment and with each other, with their understandings of the extent to which they themselves were causal agents and, hence, their understandings of the extent to which they may act to ameliorate the likelihood or the effects of similar perturbations in the future. Keywords: environmental perturbation, social change, myths of nature, blam

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Risk, Uncertainty and Decision-Making by Victorian Fishers

In this paper, decision-making by Australian commercial fishers is explored with reference to aspects of risk or uncertainty that characterize their experience of the physical and biological environment, the socioeconomic environment and the environment of management. In these environments decisions are grounded in, respectively and particularly, skill, strategy and (often) recklessness. In a broader frame it is argued that ways in which fishers ‘place’ themselves in these distinct environments with respect to certainty, social identity, personhood, agency and temporal orientation have parallels with conventional anthropological and sociological representations of ‘premodern’, ‘modern’ and ‘late modern’ societies respectively. Our argument directs attention to the multidimensional life-worlds of fishers and serves as an ethnographically-based critique of the universalizing and essentializing themes of some recent approaches in social theory. Key Words: risk, uncertainty, decision-making, commercial fishing, management, late modernity, Australia

A necessary unity: The articulation of ecological and social explanations of behaviour

This article is concerned with the way that ecological and social factors interact to influence behaviour, and takes issue with those who ascribe causal priority to one or the other set of factors. Ecological relationships are identified as those that affect the material outcome that can be expected from an action; social relationships are identified as those that affect the use an actor could make of that outcome. This distinction maps onto that between production and consumption, between the simultaneous acquisition and utilization of resources which is entailed in all action. Both classes of relationship constrain the value of an action and thus affect the probability of its reproduction; they should be understood as mutually constitutive systems, articulated through the actor. Explanations which emphasize ecological constraints on behaviour, and explanations which emphasize social constraints, are shown to trace different paths through the same field of relationships between persons and environments

A collection of large core tools from lowland Papua, Western Province, Papua New Guinea

Ten large tools found at or near Gwaimasi village are described. The four waisted blades in the collection were generally somewhat shorter than the unwaisted tools, but no other attributes consistently distinguished these categories. Local people identified all these tools, irrespective of shape, as nut-opening hammers but this interpretation is doubtful. -Autho