Citizens, Experts, and Anthropologists: Finding Paths in Environmental Policy
Nora Haenn and David G. Casagrande
The papers in this special section address anthropology’s relationship to the creation and implementation of environmental policy. The authors describe anthropologists attempting to flatten hierarchical decision making by acting as cultural brokers who must navigate public advocacy, multidisciplinary research and collaborations with environmental managers, natural resource exploiters, or government agencies. The essay describes how an anthropology that builds trust via holistic ethnography, ethics, and credibility contributes to policy success and allows for policy collaboration to enhance anthropology as a discipline. Involving students in policy will help them build skills and confidence necessary to engage policy throughout their careers.
Key words: environmental anthropology, policy, advocacy, politics, ethnography
An Anthropological Research Protocol for Marine Protected Areas: Creating a Niche in a Multidisciplinary Cultural Hierarchy
Ben G. Blount and Ariana Pitchon
Anthropologists who venture into planned multidisciplinary research in marine systems become enmeshed in a social and cultural system of disciplinary hierarchy that constrains the nature and type of expected research. The hierarchical system that favors biology, ecology, and economics before other social sciences is deeply ingrained in U.S. cultural models and enacted managerially in multidisciplinary research agendas. Within that framework, anthropology is one of the social sciences that modifies economics in the form of socioeconomics. Anthropology as socioeconomics is challenged to carve out research questions within the hierarchical framework. A meta-analysis of the design, implementation, and evaluation of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) shows that questions of social and economic equity are in the forefront of fishers’ concerns about MPAs, providing a topic of immediate and practical concern for socioeconomic and anthropological research.
Key words: Marine Protected Areas, marine systems, multidisciplinary research, socioeconomics
“But I Know It’s True”: Environmental Risk Assessment, Justice, and Anthropology
Melissa Checker
Few social issues depend as heavily on scientific information as environmental problems. Yet activists, governmental officials, corporate entities, and even scientists agree that much of the science behind environmental risk assessments is controversial and uncertain. Using a low-income African-American neighborhood as a primary case example, this paper illustrates in concrete terms how environmental risk assessments can exclude the experiences of the poor and people of color. Further, race and class experiences intensify a community’s susceptibility to, and perceptions of, risk. These experiences and perceptions underpin the ways that communities contest scientific biases in everyday practice. After discussing alternative approaches to contemporary risk assessment that combine ethnographic research with other kinds of scientific expertise, I conclude by offering a four-fold model for resolving some of the problems raised by this essay. This model draws upon multiple kinds of knowledge bases and includes research, advocacy, policy recommendations, and theoretical innovation.
Key words: environmental justice, science and culture, racism, United States
Problem and Opportunity: Integrating Anthropology, Ecology, and Policy through Adaptive Experimentation in the Urban U.S. Southwest
David G. Casagrande, Diane Hope, Elizabeth Farley-Metzger, William Cook,
Scott Yabiku, and Charles Redman
Natural resource management agencies and governmental programs that fund research are increasingly calling for interdisciplinary research that integrates biological ecology and the social sciences in a way that can inform policy. One fundamental impediment to collaboration derives from the emphasis that biological scientists place on experimentation, which is generally not considered a viable option for anthropologists. We suggest that anthropologists could have additional influence on policy by collaborating with biological ecologists in manipulative experiments that include human subjects. Critical to this approach are the participation of research subjects in research planning and willingness on the part of social and biological scientists to rapidly adopt new hypotheses and control scenarios that may emerge from shifting political and ethical contexts—what we call “adaptive experimentation.” We provide an example of an adaptive experiment being conducted at Arizona State University, which situates urban landscaping, water conservation, and human behavior within the context of problem definition in water management policy.
Key words: urban anthropology, policy, research methods, ecosystem ecology, water
It’s about Water: Anthropological Perspectives on Water and Policy
Inga Treitler and Douglas Midgett
This paper summarizes research issues and approaches contained in eight papers presented at the Conference on Environment, Resources, and Sustainability, held in fall 2002 in Athens, Georgia. These papers were part of sessions devoted to “Water, Agriculture, and the Environment,” one of five working groups at the conference. The papers addressed issues including: contested uses of water and watercourses, water for agriculture, management of watersheds, and allocation of water rights. Cultural understandings of water was foregrounded in all of the papers. In this paper, the contributions are considered in a broader global context and implications for policy determinations are explored. The role of anthropology and anthropologists in delineating problems concerned with water and human use is elaborated. The working group papers constitute a contribution to growing dialogue on the importance of anthropological input to the formation of policy in diverse decision-making arenas.
Key words: water use and allocation, cultural understandings of water, agriculture, dispute management, watershed regulation
Conflict and Confluence in Advertising Meetings
Robert J. Morais
American manufacturers often employ specialized agencies to create and produce advertising campaigns. This paper focuses on a critical juncture in the creation of American advertising: the meeting between the manufacturer (client) and the advertising agency, where advertising ideas are presented, discussed, and selected. Although the participants enter these meetings with the common goal of reaching agreement on the ideas that will be advanced to the next step in the creative development process, the attendees have additional, sometimes conflicting, professional and personal objectives. To achieve their objectives, meeting participants must have a command of unwritten rules, understand subtle verbal and nonverbal behavior, comprehend and navigate the delicate client-agency balance of power, demonstrate the craft of negotiation, and impress their superiors. American advertising creative meetings contain the defining attitudes, behaviors, and symbols of the client-agency relationship.
Key words: advertising, marketing, meetings, work, creative
A Dedicated Storytelling Organization: Advertising Talk in Japan
Brian Moeran
This paper looks at different kinds of stories told in a Japanese advertising agency and argues that, like organizations in other creative industries, an advertising agency may be seen as a dedicated storytelling organization. Based on long-term anthropological fieldwork, it makes use of three indigenous classifications—tales of the past, tales of the now, and tales of repetition—to see to what extent a non-western organization confirms, contradicts, or adds to previous analyses of storytelling organizations. Findings suggest that storytelling in a Japanese advertising agency generally conforms to what is already known, but that in certain cultural specifics connected with strategic positioning, management, employment relations, and other Japanese corporate practices, it is rather different.
Key words: storytelling organization, advertising agency, creative industries, Japan
Closing the Gaps: The Need to Improve Identification and Services to Child Victims of Trafficking
Elzbieta M. Gozdziak and Margaret MacDonnell
Human trafficking for sexual exploitation and forced labor is believed to be one of the fastest growing areas of criminal activity. The vast majority of victims of severe forms of trafficking are women and children. The particular vulnerability of child victims, related to biophysiological, social, behavioral, and cognitive phases of the maturity process, distinguishes them from adult victims and underscores the necessity of special attention to their particular needs. In the United States, most trafficking victims, but particularly child victims, go unidentified and even fewer gain access to the services developed to help them break free from their traffickers and reintegrate into the wider society. This paper uses a case study approach to examine the inadequacies and service gaps in the system established in the United States to care for child victims of trafficking. The case study is discussed within a broader context of the evolution of the system of care available to child victims of trafficking, including the transfer of care of undocumented children in federal custody from the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).
Key words: human trafficking, child victims, policy, services
Embodied Decisions: Reversible and Irreversible Contraceptive Methods among Rural Women in the Brazilian Amazon
Andréa D. Siqueira, Álvaro O. D’Antona, Maria Fernanda D’Antona,
and Emilio F. Moran
In the past 40 years, Brazil has experienced rapid fertility decline, where the number of children per woman (i.e., total fertility rate) has dropped sharply from 6.0 in the 1960s to 2.3 in the late 1990s.What makes Brazil’s fertility decline particularly interesting is its strong reliance on a nonreversible method of contraception: tubal ligation, here referred to as female sterilization. As recently as 1996, the country led the world in recorded rates of female sterilization. This practice is so pervasive and dominant that among some Brazilian scholars it has come to be called the surgical transition rather than the fertility transition. In this paper, we discuss the prevalence of female sterilization and other contraceptive methods among rural women of the Lower Amazon. The use of reversible (e.g., the pill, condoms) and irreversible (sterilization) methods is analyzed in terms of women’s birth cohorts and in terms of their individual characteristics. We argue that to understand contraceptive choices we need to consider the social and cultural context, particularly the availability of local health services, the influence of doctors and politicians, as well as women’s own goals for themselves and their children.
Key words: Brazilian Amazon, rural area, contraceptive use, women’s sterilization, contraceptive choices
Bureaucratic Strategies of Exclusion: Land Use Ideology and Images of Mexican Farmworkers in Housing Policy
Kathryn Forbes
This article examines how land use ideology and popular images of farmworkers contribute to the housing crisis for Mexican farmworkers in Fresno County, California. Despite the desperate need for affordable housing in the rural areas of Fresno County, local policy makers either have failed to aid or have actively discouraged attempts to increase the stock of affordable housing. Through an ethnographic examination of public policy decision making about residential construction on the west side of Fresno County, I document how public officials make policy decisions based on both a land use ideology that rationalizes governmental failure to serve Mexicans working in the agriculture industry and portraits of farmworkers and farmworker families that reflect stereotypes and nationally relevant population characteristics rather than regionally specific realities. This ideology and these stereotypical profiles operate to render invisible portions of the Mexican farmworker population who have been working in the area for decades and diminish affordable housing opportunities.
Key words: agricultural work, bureaucracy, zoning, affordable housing, public policy, Mexican farmworkers
The Best-Laid Plans: Limited Entry Permits and Limited Entry Systems in Eastern Aleut Culture
Katherine Reedy-Maschner
Alaska has continually restructured its fisheries to prevent or delay overfishing and increase market share by limiting numbers of fishermen and boats. As restricted access programs become more prevalent, the lasting effects of programs already in place can serve as a useful means for predicting future effects of new fisheries restructuring plans. The Limited Entry Permit Plan of 1973 for Alaska’s salmon fisheries was a defining moment for modern social relations among the predominantly fishing society of the Eastern Aleut, although its future impact was not well understood. The plan resulted in more than one limited entry system and exaggerated existing status differences, by conferring not only the right to fish but also a suite of social and political advantages. In the Aleut village of King Cove, Alaska, permit ownership has cemented differences between men in their ability to fulfill subsistence obligations, in leadership roles, in family structure, and in prosperity. The transfer of physical and intellectual property from fathers to sons has linked generations. Now, however, the system is limited in such a way that the knowledge and practices are being handed down, but the property is more difficult to obtain.
Key words: Aleut, limited entry permits, fisheries management, salmon
