Performing Pisgah: Endurance Mountain Bikers Generating the National Forest

In Western North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest, the extraordinary performances of endurance athletes imbue public lands with multivocality and sculpt spaces into idealized natures. Endurance mountain bikers generate Pisgah as a meaningful place grounded to specific spaces and particular identities as they perform challenging rides on difficult terrain

Why is Maize a Sacred Plant? Social History and Agrarian Change on Sumba

Why has maize, a plant with origins in the New World, become ritually important in an indigenous Southeast Asian religion? While environmental conditions and agricultural economics are key determinants of everyday resource management practices in insular Southeast Asia, it is necessary to consider ethnic identity, political economy, and social structure in order to understand the religious significance of natural resources in contemporary society. Linguistic, cosmological, and horticultural data are combined with an analysis of local perceptions of culture and environment. This information is used to explain the transformation of an introduced plant into an indigenous sacrament. Ethnographic data, including a brief case study of the role of maize in marapu ‘ancestor worship’ and the cultural history of the Kodi people who live on the Indonesian island of Sumba, are the basis for a discussion of agrarian change and social history in Kodi. The data are also used to explore the possibility of using information about contemporary Sumbanese society to gain a better understanding of historical processes in eastern Indonesia

The State in pursuit of thanatopolitics: Accounting and the citizenry

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to contribute to the research literature on the role of accounting in the Holocaust. This study provides a novel but robust theoretical structure to help us understand the role that accounting played in the death of over 6 million people. It draws on the work of Giorgio Agamben (1995, 2002, 2005, 2011, 2015) and, to a lesser extent, Michel Foucault (1978, 2003, 2008), presented in the form of a thanatopolitical lens from which to view the successive losses of life of the Jews of Nazi Germany. Particular focus is on the financial depravation of the Jews, or the loss of their financial life, enacted through accounting. This structure can be used to explore other events, both historically and of the present. The study also aims to bring the theorising of Agamben to the accounting literature

Culture first, customers second : the case of an organizational learning culture in a successful small business.

This dissertation is a case study of a learning culture in a successful small business. It begins with a discussion of the importance of small business to the U.S. economy. The high rate of small business failure is highlighted, along with several factors known to contribute to failure. Of those factors, the limited resource environment within which most small businesses operate is discussed. The reality of limited resources influences small business owner-managers to adopt a risk-averse and conservative approach to business operations. This risk-averse and conservative approach often impacts owner-managers’ attitude toward employee learning. A historical overview of the field of human resource development (HRD) is presented next, including a critical contention that HRD achieves maximum effectiveness when applied with a focus on organizational learning. The conceptual framework used to guide this study suggests that when organizational learning is embraced by a small business, through its central tenets of improving effectiveness, striving for continual learning, and detecting and correcting error, a learning culture can emerge. It is at this point that HRD is viewed as a support mechanism for the learning culture. Instead of being viewed as a tool or something to be done, HRD – formal or informal, intentional or incidental – exists as an outward manifestation of the learning culture. Several findings from this study are helpful to small business, HRD, and organizational learning scholars and practitioners. First, the organization’s learning culture was identified as the greatest contributing factor to business growth. Second, the learning culture was initially established by the owner-manager exclusively. Subsequent recruiting and hiring practices helped identify employees with whom the culture’s values resonated, thus creating greater support for the culture. Over time the culture became self-sustaining. At this point, less leadership influence was required to keep the culture alive. Finally, leadership and employee commitment to learning was instrumental to sustaining the culture long-term

Drawing education in junior secondary schools (11-14)

This thesis aims to explore the values and knowledge expressed in, and underlying, present secondary school curricula, which contain the , direct and indirect experiences of drawing. Initially, this will be a personal statement of my approach and appraisal of planning principles and strategies for drawing in secondary school curricula. However, it will be necessary to consider many other points of view, especially to place in a wider context the idiosyncrasies of my values and judgements. The identification of various assumptions and beliefs about drawing • education is the essential philosophical basis of this study. This is intended to be a practical working statement of ideas, rather than an abstraction of ideas from their working context, forming theory alone. The thesis will explore and reveal assumptions about 'what counts as drawing knowledge' in junior secondary schools. How drawing knowledge is selected and structured is of crucial importance in answering most of the questions about drawing education. A valuable way in which to look at the curriculum is to regard it as a 'selection from the culture of a society'. I should also suggest that there is a real need today to look at the curriculum more rationally and from basic principles. This is essentially a question of clarification of educational principles. Questions about how we regard 'the nature of education', or what are our aims for education, as well as questions about 'our society' do influence our decisions about what should be taught, the technical changes, social changes and changes in values and beliefs also, inevitably, influence schooling generally. [Continues.

Real-Time Mapping With Global Positioning Systems Devices in a Mixed Methods Toolkit for Studying Social and Environmental Change

To explore the process through which people develop knowledge about socioecological change, this article describes a mixed-methods toolkit containing a technique for making maps in real time while moving through landscapes. The quantitative component of the toolkit is grounded in ethnobiologists’ embeddedness in place-based communities and harnesses the power of global positioning systems (GPS). As GPS-wielding ethnobiologists engage in participatory mapping by moving through landscapes with their research collaborators, we can use handheld devices and simultaneously communicate with satellites in outer space to produce maps in real time. Within the existing, large inventory of ethnobiological methods, using handheld GPS devices can be combined with other types of data-collecting techniques to enhance studies of interactions in more-than-human landscapes. Moreover, mapmaking implements movement trace, a tactic for interpreting space-time cultures and documenting grounded experiences with socioecological change. By bringing together interests in the disciplines of ethnobiology and qualitative geographic information systems (GIS), this article describes methods that make it possible to explain the space-time culture that guides people to move through their homelands and to communicate about their experiences even as they work toward integrating and directing the changing circumstances of their lives

Book Review of The Nutmeg\u27s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis by Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh, a celebrated author of fiction and nonfiction, earned a doctorate in social anthropology from Oxford. In this iteration of his nonfiction oeuvre, Ghosh’s mapping of the historical entanglement of human rights abuses and environmental exploitation is framed upon the pillars of postcolonialism and posthumanism. Many of the processes he writes about in his acclaimed book The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis overlap with the interests of Human Ecology readers. Chapters 4 “Terraforming,” 5 “We Shall be Gone Shortly,” and 6 “Bonds of Earth” may feel familiar to students of environmental histories and aficionados of Alfred Crosby and William Cronon. In these chapters Ghosh shows how colonial violence occurred in parallel fashion in the Bandas and the Americas through variations on colonizers’ erroneous terra nullius misperceptions, the egotism of human exceptionalism, anthropogenic ecological change, biological warfare, usurpation and commodification of natural resources, hijacking of local trade networks, and more.Ghosh traces the history of the trade in nutmeg and other spices from the first Dutch contact with and subsequent brutal colonization of the Banda Islands of Indonesia in the first quarter of the seventeenth century and draws illuminating parallels with the contemporary social and environmental histories of the Americas

Bura Ura, Kendu Waiyo (Rain Falls, Water Rises): The Tyranny of Water Insecurity and an Agenda for Abolition in Kodi (Sumba Island, Indonesia)

This article explores the dynamic links between transformations in freshwater ecosystems and social changes in the Kodi region of Sumba (Indonesia). Insights into the politics surrounding changing hydrosocial systems are generated by using a feminist anthropology approach together with critical development studies and intersectionality theory. In aligning with fellow feminists whose advocacy sometimes takes the form of scholarship, I lay out a five-prong strategy for collecting empirical evidence from persons who are vulnerable when hydrological systems change and offer eight principles for future development interventions. The argument related to the five-prong toolkit is that by conducting intensive, extensive, opportunistic, and longitudinal research and by allying with grassroots interlocutors, interventions into water systems can be based on better evidence and can be socially just. Three stories about Kodinese interactions with water and experiences with change are at the heart of this article and lead to the formulation of consequential conclusions. In the first story, birth, death, and relocation intersect with changes in the type of reservoir and the tools and vehicles used to manage water. In the second story—the origin for “tyranny” in the subtitle—vulnerability to food and water scarcity emerges and is politicized when a river\u27s flow is altered. In the third story—the basis for “abolition” in the subtitle—hydrological interventions perpetrated by extrinsic governments correlate to surveillance and incarceration by the military and paramilitary. One research finding is that interventions by extrinsic agencies into the hydrology of four connected watersheds have altered hydrosocial relationships. Another finding is that as water\u27s routes shift, people adjust to new conditions with mixed outcomes. A third conclusion is water utilities have differential benefits within the Kodi community. Fourth, benefits from water development have dispersed along already existing lines within the social structure. Finally, intracultural differences related to intersectional identities coincide with variations in access to natural and developed sources of water