L’imbrication des processus vitaux et des processus techniques dans la gestion et la préparation du manioc chez les Makushi de Yupukari (Guyana)

This paper makes use of the methodological approach known as “chaîne opératoire” to examine the ways in which Makushi villagers living in southern Guyana cultivate and process manioc tubers, taking example on the way Ludovic Coupaye studied yam cultivation process in Papua New Guinea (Coupaye 2013). Manioc-based foods and drinks, which are prepared using unique indigenous techniques and artefacts, have been, and to a large extent continue to be, central to Makushi subsistence and way of life. Basing myself on ethnographic data I collected in the late 1990s, as well as on data collected by Lewis Daly in the last few years, I examine the particular ways the Makushi have of distinguishing plants, objects, and techniques. This leads me to discuss the varied uses of the agency inherent in living kinds people make in their everyday practical encounters with the plants they grow, and to reflect on the nature of changing technical choices. I conclude with a theoretical discussion of plant domestication as it can be envisaged from the perspective of modes of articulation between vital and technical processes

Attention to infrastructure offers a welcome reconfiguration of anthropological approaches to the political

This constitutes the edited proceedings of the 2015 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory held at Manchester

Phosphatidylserine on viable sperm and phagocytic machinery in oocytes regulate mammalian fertilization

Fertilization is essential for species survival. Although Izumo1 and Juno are critical for initial interaction between gametes, additional molecules necessary for sperm: egg fusion on both the sperm and the oocyte remain to be defined. Here, we show that phosphatidylserine (PtdSer) is exposed on the head region of viable and motile sperm, with PtdSer exposure progressively increasing during sperm transit through the epididymis. Functionally, masking phosphatidylserine on sperm via three different approaches inhibits fertilization. On the oocyte, phosphatidylserine recognition receptors BAl1, CD36, Tim-4, and Mer-TK contribute to fertilization. Further, oocytes lacking the cytoplasmic ELMO1, or functional disruption of RAC1 (both of which signal downstream of BAl1/BAl3), also affect sperm entry into oocytes. Intriguingly, mammalian sperm could fuse with skeletal myoblasts, requiring PtdSer on sperm and BAl1/3, ELMO2, RAC1 in myoblasts. Collectively, these data identify phosphatidylserine on viable sperm and PtdSer recognition receptors on oocytes as key players in sperm: egg fusion

Antropologías hechas en Ecuador. Antología (Volumen I)

La serie Antropologías hechas en Ecuador forma parte de la Colección Antropologías hechas en América Latina, un proyecto editorial promovido por la Asociación Latinoamericana de Antropología con el objetivo de dibujar un mapa de las antropologías de América Latina que haga posible identificar sus genealogías, propuestas metodológicas, sus reflexiones y construcciones teórico-prácticas, con el objetivo de re-conocernos y buscar los puntos de soldadura y las preocupaciones que nos integran o diferencian. La publicación consta de dos partes. La primera es una Antología de dos volúmenes que recoge investigaciones basadas en el trabajo de campo y producidas por la academia durante las dos últimas décadas, principalmente, las cuales dan cuenta de una diversidad muy grande de autores y autoras, temáticas y enfoques. La segunda parte, Aportes actuales, también en dos volúmenes, está conformada por los artículos resultado de una convocatoria abierta e incluyen estados de la cuestión, lecturas críticas y reflexivas de trayectorias disciplinarias y, también, estudios de caso. En este primer volumen de la Antología constan los siguientes temas: Antropología amazónica, Antropología andina, Antropología de la costa, Antropología y Lingüística, Antropología y Educación, Cultura y Naturaleza y Antropología, Economía y Desarrollo

From Carbon Projects to Better Land-Use Planning: Three Latin American Initiatives

I start with a discussion of the limits of the United Nations' Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation and cobenefits (REDD+) program and the need to embed forest carbon within integrated ecosystem services on a landscape scale. By comparing a REDD+ project with two non-REDD+ projects, I show that there are diverse ways of applying the Earth system governance lens to address the continuing deterioration of goods and services provided by ecological systems. I then compare the valuation of ecosystem services and the governance of their provision in the three projects under review: Bolsa Floresta in the state of Amazonas, Brazil; Araçuaí Sustentável in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil; and the Yasuní-Ishpingo Tambococha Tiputini Initiative in Ecuador. I show how each project has given birth to innovative mixed policies based on citizen mobilization. These dynamic hybrid policies are uniquely fitted to the particular ecological, historical, sociocultural, and political contexts in which they took root, contexts they help to transform. I conclude that result-based payment systems such as those envisaged for REDD+ have the potential to increase the production of additional carbon absorption capacity. However, they are not always appropriate or cost effective, nor do they substitute for command-and-control instruments, or for popular mobilization

Sex and sociality : comparative ethnographies of sexual objectification

This paper is intended as a critique of recent theorisations of sexuality and desire, which have led performative theorists to contend that gender is an effect of discourse, and sex an effect of gender. It results from informal discussions between the three authors on the mechanisms through which sexuality gets objectified in modernity. The ideas of influential Western thinkers (in particular Georges Bataille) are confronted with field data on sexuality – as lived and imagined – that the authors have been gathering in Amazonian societies, Trinidad, and on the internet. Ethnographic data and Western theories about the nature of eroticism are used to argue that the utopian definition of sexuality as sexual desire and will to identity is too divorced from the mundane, love, domesticity and reproduction in a broad sense and based on a too limited sphere of social experience. Consequently, to apply this definition to how and why humans engage in sexual activity leads to erroneous generalisations. For when encountered ethnographically, sexuality consists of practices deeply embedded in relational contexts. The paper concludes with the proposition that debates about the possibilities of human sexuality and of its political intervention will make no significant progress unless we stop repeating that “sexuality is socially constructed”, and start looking at the ways in which it is lived as part of everyday social life

Seed and clone. A preliminary note on manioc domestication, and its implication for symbolic and social analysis

The full-text of this book chapter is not available in ORA. Citation: Rival, L. M. (2001). Seed and Clone. A preliminary note on manoic domestication, and its implication for symbolic and social analysis. In: Rival, L. M. & Whitehead, N. L. (ed.) Beyond the visible and the material: the Amerindianization of society in the work of Peter Rivière. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 57-80