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Anthropology and the Environment

December 1996

(C.J.Stevens, contributing editor)

Mission Statement from Carole L. Crumley
While factors unrelated to human activity have long been known to effect environmental change, it is only in recent decades that the public has been made aware of the inverse: intentionally or not, our species has been modifying its surroundings for several million years. Unique to anthropology is the charge to engage this dialectic. As architects of a bridge between the physical/biotic sciences and the humanities, anthropologists integrate diverse forms of knowledge about the world; however, inasmuch as scholarly activity is itself cultural, we must also critically examine how such knowledge is obtained. The Anthropology and Environment Section, adopting a broad definition of the term environment, encourages exploration of the complex relations among physical/biotic, built, and cognitive environments.

Anthropology's persistent claim that both the physical and mental world matter, however difficult at times that assertion has been to maintain, confers on anthropologists a certain authority; we are in an excellent position to propose guidelines, facilitate interaction, and offer examples for the conduct of interdisciplinary research. Anthropologists have the expertise to increase scholarly, public and governmental understanding of the complex and fragile relation between our species and its biocultural environment.

The mission of the new Anthropology and Environment Section is to coordinate a discipline-wide collaborative effort that would validate anthropology's pretensions to holism; to reach beyond our own field to incorporate scholarly research and practitioners from other disciplines; to join forces with indigenous peoples to explain the utility of traditional environmental knowledge; to search history for successful and unsuccessful lessons in environmental management; to make our findings available to local, regional, and global policy makers and to the communities their decisions affect.

The Section asserts that the diversity of practice and the wealth of expertise within anthropology is both advantageous and necessary, if complex environmental issues at every scale are to be addressed, their historical interconnectivity demonstrated, and equitable future courses charted. Anthropologists must enter current debates over environmental issues by as many avenues as possible, on our own behalf as well as that of indigenous peoples and ways of life we study. We extend a warm invitation to join this new Section to all colleagues who share our goals.

Training Opportunities on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change. Summer Faculty Fellowships.

The Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change (CIPEC)--a two campus consortium consisting of Indiana University and the University of Arizona--announces the availability of summer faculty fellowships. CIPEC is an NFS funded center aimed at promoting education, training, and research on the human dimensions of global and environmental change. CIPEC is concerned with three broad questions:

How is human behavior at household and community levels linked to the regional and global change phenomena?

How can macro-scale physical processes observed and modeled at a global level be linked to meso and micro human organizational decision-making processes?

How do institutional arrangements influence the direction and size of the impact of human driving forces such as population and transportation networks on forest ecosystems and global change?

Up to 5 fellowships will be awarded per year to currently employed tenure-track faculty who have not yet experienced the full range of fieldwork related to the Human Dimensions of Global Change (HDGC) or image analysis processing. Each fellow is expected to join one of several CIPEC field research teams to learn on-site methods of HDGC used by CIPEC. Each fellow will be provided with readings and manuals that provide access to these methods. Each fellow is expected to spend the full season with one of the teams. A list of projects will be sent to each fellow with suggestions of which may be the most useful to their objectives. Fellows will receive a $5000.00 stipends and funds to travel and per diem field expenses.

Each applicant should send a letter explaining their past research interests and how HDGC methods fit into their current and future work. A curriculum vitae, two letters of recommendation, and two examples of recent relevant research should also be sent. Deadline for applications: February 1, 1997.

Notification of outcome will be sent no later than March 15.

Application should be sent to:

Emilio Moran, Co-Director
CIPEC Arizona
800 E. University, Suite 350B
Geronimo Building
Tucson AZ 85719

Graduate Research Assistantships for Fall 1997

The Center for the Study of Institutions, Populations, and Environmental Change (CIPEC) (see above notification of faculty fellowships) announces the availability of graduate research assistantships in support of environmental social sciences. Doctoral students will be expected to pursue a graduate minor in global change that will provide them with theoretical and methodological tools to address these issues. Among the tools will be GIS, remote sensing, institutional analysis, household surveys, group interviews, and the analysis of archival data, forest mensuration, and demographic data. Field research will be team-based and multi-disciplinary in nature. The scope of the work is forest ecosystems of the America (North, Middle and South) and the role of institutions and demographic process in their use and management.

Applicants will need to be admitted to the Ph.D. program in a relevant social science discipline (e.g., anthropology, geography, history, economics, political science, or sociology) at either Indiana University or the University of Arizona. Applicants need to decide at the time of application which university would better serve their needs in their discipline of choice and obtain materials from the department and graduate school at the appropriate university. CIPEC awards equivalent to graduate research assistantships on each campus cannot be made until admission is obtained from the academic department. Funds for summer research will be provided to each graduate assistant as part of the team-based work. Graduates will have the opportunity to spend one semester at the alternate CIPEC center during their appointment.

Applicants should send a copy of their graduate school application, official transcripts, official GRE scores, at least three letters of reference, and a statement of interest in the human dimension of global environmental change to the CIPEC Co-director at the university of application. The co-directors are: Elinor Ostrum, CIPEC, 408 N. Indiana, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405 and Emilio Moran, CIPEC, 800 E. University, Suite 350 B, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721. Materials must be received no later than January 15, 1997. (Deadlines to academic departments may vary.)

Multidisciplinary Research and Applied Project in Yucatan

Betty Faust reports from Merida, Yucatan where she is working on a multi-disciplinary research and applied program with the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Avanzados (CINVESTAV). The research team includes three socio-cultural anthropologists (two of whom are in the dissertation research and writing stage), a medical doctor with a doctorate in public health, a zoologist who consults on wildlife management, a soil scientist working in agricultural development, a hydrologist working on ecological restoration in Yucatan Maya coastal communities, an anthropologically trained neuropsychologist who works in mother/child relations and nutrition, and three human ecologists. All researchers are working on issues involving the interaction of the rural Mayan communities with their local environment. The problems faced by these communities include increased population pressure on agricultural resources, the degradation caused by shortened fallows and weed invasion, and the farmers' temptations to increase herbicide use to reduce labor costs. Rainfall is reported as less dependable than it used to be, droughts and floods appear more common, and hurricanes have done significant damage in the last several years. In some rural areas, villages have lost their crops two out of three years for the past twelve or fifteen years. The decrease in predictable rainfall, and the increases in droughts, floods, and violent storms may be due to both local deforestation and the regional effects of global warming.

Some of the complications which the project is struggling to include in their program include: Schooling for the Maya children is geared toward integrating the community into the national economy but the local knowledge held by the childrens' parents and grandparents are no longer being learned. Some rural people have relocated to coastal fishing communities but over exploitation of coastal resources has resulted in reduced catches. Many of the younger people have migrated to the cities looking for work and some of these people lose contact with their families and discard their cultural and ethnic associations. While some of these young people succeed in finding work, some turn to alcoholism, drug abuse, and prostitution or seek the shelter of Protestant religions that prohibit such activities but do not foster senses of ethnic identity. Although excellent family planning services are available through local health clinics, population momentum is a major problem as the cohort first benefiting from immunization programs and rural health services is now reaching reproductive years.

The project is struggling to determine how to work with these Mayan communities to help them find ways of protecting themselves and their resources from the more destructive aspects of increased incorporation into the global economy. The project is working to prevent overuse of resources and degradation of the local environment, to conserve traditional knowledge, to document the ecological wisdom built into traditional management practices, and to find ways of making those practices less labor intensive and their products more marketable.

As with other research centers in Mexico, CINVESTAV in Merida has sent a plan to the national CINVESTAV headquarters in Mexico City for approval of a planned graduate program to train research scientists. The training program is expected to begin in September of 1997. The Merida CINVESTAV is interested in exploring the possibility of exchange programs, including one or two intensive courses in Mayan cultural ecology and wildlife management taught in English. The program is also interested in establishing collaborative research with US programs interested in community participation in resource management, indigenous knowledge, plant medicines, intensification of traditional agricultural systems, archaeological research into ancient intensive systems, and tourist management initiatives.

Betty Faust has recently finished a summary of archaeological and ethnological English literature for part of the project funded by the United Nations Population Fund involving constructing models of the interactions between population density, local environment, and economic development based on use of local resources. This project was done in collaboration with the International Institute for Applies Systems Analysis in Vienna, Austria. A new project funded jointly by the Ford, Rockefeller, and McArthur Foundations has been started by Faust to study intensification of traditional swidden agriculture using leguminous plants. The goal of the project is to is to develop a set in indicators of cultural impact on resources that could be used in the future to present alternative forms of resource intensification to the chemical inputs now being adopted by most rural areas in Latin America. Betty Faust would appreciate any advice from members with experience in such manners. She can be reached at faust@kin.cieamer.conacyt.mx.

Call for Manuscripts from Harwood Academic Press

James Carrier (Durham) is the editor of the Studies in Anthropology and History of Harwood Academic Press. The series was established under the editorship of Nicholas Thomas, and James Carrier became the editor in 1996. The first volume was published in 1991 and the series now publishes 3-4 volumes per year, both monographs and edited works. While the series title refers to anthropology and history, there is a degree of latitude concerning how much of an historical orientation manuscripts must have. The overall concern is to attract manuscripts that will appeal to a broad anthropological audience and be accessible to those outside of any particular sub-discipline. A list of the series' recent publications is too extensive to reproduce here but the list included works by such noted scholars as Jonathan Friedman, Johannes Fabian, James Urry, Kajsa Elkholm-Friedman, Malcolm Crick, and Margaret Jolly. Interested scholars should contact James Carrier at James.Carrier@durham.ac.uk.

Anthropology and Environment at the 1997 AAA Meetings in Washington D.C.

Even though we all just got home from the last AAA meeting in San Francisco, the deadline for submitting abstracts for next years' sessions is less than four months away. Plans are already being formulated for the A&E sponsored sessions for the Washington meetings. Ideas about sessions, collaborative efforts, and calls for interested parties can be made through the newsletter but these notices need to be sent now in order to have them appear in the February AN. Send calls for interested members in possible sessions and other notices to:stevens@demog.berkely.edu.