Volume 62, No. 2, Summer 2003
Is Sustainability for Development Anthropologists?
M. Priscilla Stone
In 1987, the Bruntland Report defined the goal of sustainability as “the ability to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations…to meet their own needs.” This definition while stimulating considerable debate and research, leaves unresolved a number of problems for anthropologists, including dilemmas of measurement, boundaries, and agency. This paper suggests that a more direct engagement with the concept of sustainability could be helpful to anthropological analyses of economic systems and development options and draws on the three papers that follow to illustrate its potential. The paper then discusses three issues central to an anthropological sustainability—persistence, innovation, and responses to stresses and shocks. It concludes with a discussion of common property resources, as discussed in the papers in this collection, as an example of these anthropological issues at work within a sustainability framework.
Key words: sustainability, common property resources, innovation, persistence, livelihood identities
Sustainability and Livelihood Diversification among the Maasai of Northern Tanzania
J. Terrence McCabe
Maasai people in East Africa are attempting to craft new sustainable livelihoods in response to increasing population pressure, a fluctuating livestock population, reductions in grazing areas, and a modernization process that places increased emphasis on a monetary economy. The adoption of cultivation by pastoral Maasai living in northern Tanzania over the last 40 years has been the most significant step in this livelihood diversification. The rapid social and economic changes that have accompanied diversification have challenged current attempts to integrate people into conservation efforts, especially in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and the newly proposed Wildlife Management Areas of Tanzania. This paper examines the addition of agriculture to the livestock-based economy of Maasai people in northern Tanzania, how this relates to the literature on sustainable livelihoods, and the implications for conservation policy.
Key words: sustainability, livelihoods, pastoralism, cultivation, conservation, Maasai, Tanzania
Sustainability and Pastoral Livelihoods: Lessons from East African Maasai and Mongolia
Elliot Fratkin and Robin Mearns
“Sustainable development” currently has a firm grip on the lexicon of development agencies from the World Bank to small nongovernmental organizations, but it offers little practical guidance for tackling diverse problems in specific places. The concept is of particular importance to pastoral populations throughout the world—those people dependent on livestock raising in arid or semiarid lands whose survival depends on their ability physically and politically to maintain access to their pastures. This paper compares two pastoralist populations—East African Maasai and pastoralists of Mongolia—to discuss recent changes in the pastoral way of life and to describe what sustainability has meant in the past and what sustainability needs to mean in the future for pastoralist populations.
Key words: pastoralism, risk management, commons, Kenya, Tanzania, Inner Asia, Khalkh
Moving Toward Sustainability in the Local Management of Floodplain Lake Fisheries in the Brazilian Amazon
Fabio de Castro and David G. McGrath
Local management systems are generally regarded as traditional systems developed over generations. However, in the Brazilian Amazon, as in many other regions, community or collective management is a response to more recent changes in the exploitation of local fisheries and other common-pool resources. Greeted with optimism initially as a potentially effective way of reconciling social and conservation objectives in rural development, experience with community management over the last decade has shown that achieving this potential can be elusive. This paper examines the process of forming community agreements for the floodplain lake fisheries of the Lower Amazon through the analysis of 77 written fishing documents produced from 1981 to 1997. We examine approaches to resource management revealed in the accords, the institutional arrangements for implementing them, and evaluate the performance of these accords over this 15-year period. The paper focuses on the strengths and limitations of this institution in its social and ecological characteristics, institutional robustness, and evolving relations with parallel changes in formal government management policy for regional fisheries.
Key words: community-based management, fishing, Lower Amazon, Brazil
Shelterization Revisited: Some Methodological Dangers of Institutional Studies of the Homeless
Anthony Marcus
This article revisits one of the key discussions that emerged during the homeless crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s, that of “shelterization,” or the potentially demoralizing and desocializing effects of congregate emergency housing. Many of the fundamental assumptions underlying Goffman’s “total institution” model that drove the shelterization discussion continue to influence research and policy. This model’s tendency to abstract shelter life from the surrounding environment, overemphasize the impact of shelters on the behavior of residents, and explain the persistence of homelessness through reference to the psychosocial effects of shelter norms is examined and situated within the confluence of the growth of a shelter system in New York City in the 1980s, the expansion of federal funding through the 1987 McKinney Act, and the shared experience of researchers projecting and generalizing on their own experiences working in shelters. Examination of some of the methodological, theoretical, and political problems connected to institutional studies of the homeless during the 1980s and early 1990s will contribute to contemporary homeless policy and research that avoids overemphasizing the importance of the psychosocial and behavioral impact of shelters.
Key words: fieldwork, homelessness, poverty, race, shelterization, New York City
Community-Based Collaborative Team Ethnography: A Community-University-Agency Partnership
Diane E. Austin
This paper describes an approach for building relationships and achieving effective community-university-agency collaboration that was developed to provide information about the issues faced by individuals and families involved in the exploration and production of oil and gas on the outer continental shelf in the Gulf of Mexico. Two university-affiliated ethnographers and a group of local schoolteachers followed the activities of selected workers and their families, tracked local social and economic trends, and identified and talked with workers and families with many different characteristics (e.g., job, age, stage in the family cycle, ethnicity). They were assisted by additional university researchers who spent from two to four weeks at a time in the study communities talking with civic leaders and business and industry representatives, helping to identify and talk with workers and families, conducting focus groups, and facilitating study group meetings for team members. The paper describes the evolution and application of the approach and examines its key attributes.
Key words: collaborative research, partnerships, methodology, offshore oil and gas, Minerals Management Service, Louisianae
Developing a Community-Based Definition of Needs for Persons Living with Chronic HIV
Andrea Sankar and Mark Luborsky
With the advent of antiretroviral therapy, HIV has become a chronic illness for those who have access to the medication. But unlike our understanding of acute disease experience which can be grasped within parameters defined by categories of medical diagnosis and treatment, understanding the experience of chronic illness requires that we expand our analytic frame to include variables and perspectives created by the beliefs, behaviors, context, and culture of the participants. Drawing on focus groups conducted among African American, Hispanic, and white people with HIV in Detroit, Michigan, we show that expressions of needs related to the lived experience of HIV vary among racial and ethnic groups and between genders, resulting in an experientially distinct set of needs.
Key words: HIV, community-based needs, stigma, ethnicity, gender, focus groups, Detroit
Women, Men, and Market Gardens: Gender Relations and Income Generation in Rural Mali
Stephen Wooten
As part of an ongoing process of socioeconomic transformation, commodity production is steadily becoming more common throughout rural Africa. However, research from a wide range of social and geographic settings indicates that factors such as ethnicity, class, age, and gender often play important roles in shaping specific patterns of participation in market production. This paper explores the relationship between gender and commodity production in central Mali. Drawing on the findings of a 14-month ethnographic study (1992-1994), I describe production dynamics in a rural Bamana farming community, paying particular attention to the organization of commercial activities. I use the gender relations of production framework to highlight the differential participation of men and women in commercial gardening activities. I argue that dominant Bamana social and cultural patterns lead to a gender-biased system of access to commercially viable productive resources, and I discuss the implications of these findings in terms of men’s and women’s economic standing and relative social power in their home communities and domestic groups. By providing a detailed study of gender relations in this setting, I aim to improve our understanding of the gendered nature of agricultural production in this region and our understanding of differential response to commercial agricultural opportunities in rural Africa at large.
Key words: commercialization, horticulture, intensification, livelihood, Bamana, Mali
The Tragedy of Property: Ecology and Land Tenure in Southeastern Zimbabwe
R. Michael O’Flaherty
The approach to land management taken by Zimbabwean government agencies in the Communal Areas (the former African Reserves) depends on social and ecological divisions in the landscape that prevent effective ecosystem management—as opposed to the management of discrete natural resources contained within units of land holding and land use. The commons systems maintained by rural Zimbabweans are important to understand both because they have supported people in the face of highly discriminatory legislation, notably in the colonial period, but also because they provide for access to a wider range of resources than would be possible under a freehold system. The commons system holds the potential for more effective ecosystem management, at least in southeastern Zimbabwe.
Key words: land tenure, common property, Zimbabwe
Anthropological Advocacy in Historical Perspective: The Case of Anthropologists and Virginia Indians
Samuel R. Cook
This article examines the historical emergence of anthropological advocacy as a conscious pursuit through an examination of the historical activities of anthropologists working with American Indians in Virginia. Although anthropologists working with these peoples have been relatively few—in part due to the small indigenous population in the state—their contributions have been, and continue to be, significant. On the one hand, anthropological work among Virginia Indians was cultivated in a climate of skewed race relations and politics, thereby inviting a tradition of advocacy among anthropologists working on behalf of indigenous rights in the state. Thus, while there has always been an anthropological tradition emphasizing local contexts among Virginia Indians, anthropologists working with these groups in recent years have combined applied anthropology and advocacy to form creative models for collaborative research and ethnography. In examining the demographic and political context in which anthropologists working with Virginia Indians have historically practiced their profession, it becomes clear that socially constructed boundaries, such as the state, can have a profound impact not only on the lives, histories, and realities of the indigenous peoples living within these limits, but on the professional conduct of anthropologists as well.
Key words: anthropological advocacy, collaborative ethnography, Virginia Indians
