Week 3

1
Week 3

• Concepts continued - Humans as models, ecological
  adaptive perspective, ecological paradigms

2
Ecology of Mind?
3
Gabra concept of Finn

• The desert is proud of us, we cannot stand
  outside of the desert. It must be respected and
  learned. No outsider can see. We tell each other
  things we need to know down the years exactly. We
  tell exactly because it is the difference netween
  living and dieing. We tell our stories of the
  past and that is Finn.

4

• Sociability emerges from production.
• Production is a philosophy of people and place.
  An Ethnoecology
• Production requires sociability and the specific
  forms this takes could be considered culture.
• Heather Apples work with seeds is ultimately
  about reshaping sociability
• Comments re culture and agriculture important
• Landscapes are not passive stages. They are
  actively engaged in social life.

5
Anthropology and the foundations of western
worldview

• Society Culture
• Baun

6
Martin Heiddeger
7
Kotak - The New Ecological Anthropology

• Old - Optimization, isolation, negative feedback,
  stasis, political naïveté
• New - Continual growth in population
  consumption, environmental degradation,
  technological innovation, transnationalism.
  Policy and solution oriented

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Old

• Ecological population/ecosytem where
  geographically limited and bounded. Groups of
  people were seen to be living the same limits.
• Groups were seen as relatively self supporting
  and with limited or insignificant relationships
  with other groups.
• Focused on small groups.
• Core features of culture important-edges and
  boundaries were not considered.
• Cognized (emic) Operationalized (etic) models

9
New

• Reflects a changing discipline and understanding
  of culture
• Cultures under contact
• Environments are shared and power is exerted in
  their transformation into resources
• Its not just about subsistence anymore
• Scale of study is larger, more complex and
  multi-sited (national, international)
• Still rooted in the traditional methods and
  perspectives of the discipline

10

• Applied - solution oriented
• Policy and analytically focused
• Various sources of control over lands and
  resources often disputed
• Colonial and post-colonial issues
• Rights and abuses are of concern
• Individual and collective survival is a twin
  issue
• Flows of people between and within countries have
  huge ecological effects

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3 issues for the N.E.A.

• Ethnoecological clashes Developmentalism and
  Environmentalism
• Biodiversity conservation
• Ecological Awareness and Environmental Risk
  Percpetion

12
Methods

• Linkages methodology
• Team and multi-sited
• New tools (Sattelite imagery, maping)

13
Romers Rule

• Return to the culture - evolution analogy
• innovation that evolves to maintain a system can
  play a major role in changing that system (p.33)

14

• Adaptation is the process by which organisms or
  groups of organisms maintain homeostasis in the
  face of both short-term environmental
  fluctuations and long-term changes in the
  composition and structure of their environments

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Stasis vs Chaos
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Bates - Chapter 2
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Evolutionary Theory Darwin and Mendel

• Darwins process
• Mendels mechanism
• Goulds 3 features of evolution
• Creativity
• Redundancy
• Flexibility

19
Human evolution Unique characteristics of H.
Sapiens

• Language/learning
• Bipedalism
• Transformative abilities
• Culture
• Dispersion

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Relationship between brain as evolved organ and
culture as a feature of human life

• Is culture a feature of redundancy or
  flexibility, an accident of evolution?
• Can models of evolution transcend the requirement
  of culture to produce them?

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Slow march or explosion?

• Different theoretical perspectives
• Multi-sited evolution (africa, asia, europe)
• Regional variation
• Displacement from Africa
• Novelty and interbreeding

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Why walk on 2 legs?

• Heat management
• Tool manipulation
• Gender strategies/specialization
• Feedback loops in brain case development
• Disadvantages are numerous but the capacity to
  manipulate the world outweighs these.

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The ecosystem perspective

• A relational perspective
• Place in the ecosystem
• How behaviours relate to the place
• Interactions between organisms and space
• Places humans within a much broader arrangement
  of the animate and inanimate
• The one-two punch

24
Resilience Stability in ecological and social
systems

• Habitats and niches
• Social structures underpin ecological
  arrangements
• Social stability (even with entrenched inequity)
  serves to bolster resilience
• Maladaptive cultural practices (genital
  mutilation, for example) may serve to bolster
  stability in social systems, even if they are
  counter to evolutionary logic

25
Genetic and Cultural Endowments

• Parallel and intertwined systems
• Diversity within and between groups
• Innovation within stable systems
• Flexibility in the face of change
• Ecological and social tipping points

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Slobodkins 4 patterns of change

• Novelty
• Frequency
• Magnitude
• Duration
• Perfect adaptation to a niche undermines the
  ability to respond to change

27
Food Procurement Systems

• Behaviour strategies of specific groups employed
  in interacting with ecosystems in order to secure
  food
• Foraging
• Subsistence agriculture (Horticulture)
• Pastoralism
• Intensive agriculture
• Industrial agriculture

28
Innovation in FPS

• Over time (do different systems evolve?)
• Within societies (cultural conservatism vs
  invention)
• Between societies (modernization/industrialization
  )
• Cultural politics of worldview and practice (box
  2.1)

29
Political Ecology

• Type and distribution of resources relations
  with other groups.
• A third dimension The organization and
  expression of human authority over resources.
• Variability in access to resources is constantly
  negotiated. Social systems need cultivation and
  management like ecological ones.

30
Greenberg Park

• Political ecology does not amount to a new
  program for intellectual deforestation, rather it
  is a historical outgrowth of the central
  questions asked by the social sciences about the
  relations between human society, viewed in its
  bio-cultural-political complexity, and a
  significantly humanized nature

31
Science of ecology

• Shifting of ideas from individual level to
  population to interacts between populations
• Evolutionary vs processual view
• No place for people
• Linearity to chaos

32
Social Science approaches

• Cultural ecology
• Energy flows
• Limited to small scale societies
• Limited explanatory powers
• Deterministic
• Hunter-Gatherer studies as analogues for human
  evolution

33

• Political Ecology of Disease
• Shift from a disease focus to a context of
  disease focus
• Social determinants
• Ecology of underdevelopment
• Provides intellectual support for broadening the
  view of ecology and politics

34

• Political Economy
• Emerges at same time as cultural ecology
• A critical view on economic processes between
  states
• Distribution of capital and labour
• Modernization theory vs Dependency theory
• World systems theory

35
Political Ecology

• Merges the critical perspective of Pol. Econ.
  with the ecosystem view of cultural ecology.
• An interdisciplinary field of study that seeks to
  merge different scales and fields of action.

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Point Pleasant Park
Stanley Park