18 research outputs found

    FORAGERS, FARMERS AND FISHERS: RESPONSES TO ENVIRONMENTAL PERTURBATION

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    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

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    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

    Andaman Islanders, Pygmies, and an extension of Horn's model

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    Horn's model is generalized to state that the "optimal" pattern of distribution for foragers will correlate with the degree of resource patchiness; in particular (1) where resource attributes are less patchy, the "optimal" distribution for foragers is to be dispersed, and (2) where resource attributes are more patchy, the "optimal" distribution for foragers is to be aggregated. "Optimality" is assessed as the minimum round-trip distance from the forager's home base to a resource item. Patchiness is assessed according to the state taken by any of four resource attributes: dispersion (in space), supply (in time), particle size, and lasting properties. Horn's original contrast between (1) stable and evenly dispersed resources, and (2) mobile and clumped resources is shown to have been internally contradictory; that is, the "optimal" distribution for foragers would have been the same in both cases

    Are kubo hunters 'show offs'?

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    The 'show off' hypothesis proposed by K. Hawkes, and tested using data on Ache foragers, makes important connections between food resource choice, reproductive strategies, and food sharing by human foragers. We test predictions derived from that hypothesis concerning contexts of meat acquisition, association between individuals, mobility, and reproductive success among Kubo hunter-horticulturalists of the interior lowlands of Papua New Guinea. Application of the hypothesis to both the Kubo and Ache cases is questioned. Differences between Kubo males in means and variances of returns from hunting arise as a consequence of differential target specialization; they do not map onto variation in reproductive success

    Sago games: Cooperation and change among sago producers of Papua New Guinea

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    In 1986-1987 at a small community in lowland Papua New Guinea, residents with greater rights to local land (owners) produced more sago flour than residents with fewer rights to that land (guests) and shared their produce with the latter. This behavior was interpreted as a case of reciprocal altruism on the understanding that customary patterns of settlement relocation would have the outcome that individuals would often change status as owners or guests and, hence, as donors and recipients. Recent influences resulting in greater stability of community composition and location have reduced the likelihood that individuals could expect to change status vis à vis others. Thus, the central condition for reciprocal altruism has been lost, and we predicted that individuals would alter their behavior in relation to sago production. Four predictions regarding the expected directions of change in effort and patterns of association were supported by data obtained in 1995, and the magnitude of three of these changes was substantial. We conclude that behavior observed in 1986-1987 qualified as reciprocal altruism and discuss it in terms of the repeated prisoner's dilemma. While unable to establish the particulars of rules, mechanisms, or logistics that shaped the actual probability of reciprocation, we have established that once the potential for reciprocation was lost the "sago game" broke down

    Yams and megapode mounds in the lowland rain forest of Papua New Guinea

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    Kubo people of Papua New Guinea sometimes grew Dioscorea yams in mounds of forest litter that were made as egg-incubation sites by birds (Megapodiidae).' The small yam plots were included within larger banana gardens and, in the latter, it was yams, not bananas, that took precedence in the gardening decisions of people. The technique would be viable in the absence of a larger garden. It is interpreted as an expression of an ancient pattern of small-scale plant domestication
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