Malinowski Award Lecture, 2007
Taking Care of Children: Applying Anthropology in Maternal and Child Nutrition and Health
Gretel H. Pelto
Bringing anthropology to bear on programs and policies in nutrition and health requires the application of both theory and method. This paper describes several examples, drawing from my experiences related to infant and young child feeding and management of infectious disease in children. Part of the task is reframing the dominant biomedical and economic models to encompass the sociocultural contexts in which caregiving behaviors are embedded and elucidate their implications for the design and implementation of interventions. Another aspect is the development of tools that facilitate the use of anthropological methods in public health and nutrition. Thirdly, applying anthropological theories and methods to explicate the systems that deliver services and meaningful engagement with these systems so that the results can be used to improve nutrition and health interventions is another key focus. Finally, it is essential that we remain grounded in our anthropological roots and critically appraise and reappraise our working assumptions.
Key words: nutrition, parenting, intervention programs and policies, actionable knowledge
Through a New Mirror: Reflections on Tourism and Identity in the Amazon
Amanda Stronza
Interactions between locals and tourists entail more than simple transactions of money for goods or services. They also involve the exchange of expectations, stereotypes, and expressions of ethnicity and culture. In this study, an ecotourism lodge in Peru was the setting for an ethnographic analysis of tourists’ expectant gazes and locals’ reactions to them. Interview data and observations reveal that over several years, locals began to alter their perceptions of what it meant to be, sound, and look “native.” The lodge in the study is co-owned and managed by a mixed ethnic community of 150 families. Since opening in 1998, the lodge has received 5,000-6,000 tourists a year. Partly in response to the expectations of tourists, people have begun to show new (or renewed) pride in indigenous culture. Four indicators were: (1) increased efforts to learn indigenous language, stories, and songs from elders; (2) heightened interest in presenting indigenous culture to tourists, coupled with debates over intellectual property rights; (3) the adoption of native identity by some non-native members of the community; and (4) discussions about dividing the community along ethnic lines.
Key words: ethnicity, ecotourism, cultural revalorization, mestizo, indigenous
We Want To Be Equal to Them: Fair-trade Coffee Certification and Gender Equity within Organizations
Sarah Lyon
This paper analyzes the understudied gendered dimensions of fair-trade coffee networks and certification practices. It combines data collected during 14 months of fieldwork among the members of a Guatemalan coffee cooperative with a survey of the existing literature on fair-trade coffee cooperatives to demonstrate that the current fair-trade network is falling far short of its goal to promote gender equity, particularly in three important realms: voting and democratic participation, the promotion of non-agricultural income generating programs, and support for female coffee producers. In consideration of the fact that international donors are increasingly funding certification-based poverty solutions, such as fair trade, this paper argues that the promotion of gender equity through certification standards and practices needs to be a vital component of the fair-trade mission, lest the promotion of gender equity in agricultural communities be neglected. It concludes that a participatory certification process would help address two central concerns: (1) the effectiveness of the certification process (in terms of identifying and correcting problems associated with gender equity within groups) and (2) the adequacy of current fair-trade certification standards in light of producer diversity.
Key words: fair trade, coffee, gender, Maya, certification
Modes of Incorporation, Social Exclusion, and Transnationalism: Salvadoran’s Adaptation to the Washington, DC Metropolitan Area
Raúl Sánchez Molina
Capital globalization affects traditional production models, displacing the most vulnerable population from less industrialized countries. The Salvadoran migratory flow to the Washington D.C. metropolitan area constitutes a case study for analyzing how globalization is affecting not only the current migratory patterns, but the different ways immigrants adapt to the host society. Developing a transnational multi-sited ethnography, this paper addresses how Salvadoran modes of incorporation to the Nation´s Capital explain transnationalism as a new pattern of immigrant adaptation.
Key words: Globalization, transnationalism, Salvadorans, Washington, DC
Survival, Drugs and Social Suffering during the Argentine Neoliberal Collapse
María Epele
This article analyzes changes in young drug users’ income-producing strategies as a way of understanding how neoliberal structural transformations have combined to change drug use micropractices and morbidity-mortality patterns in Greater Buenos Aires shantytowns. Mirroring transformations experienced in the labor system in the late nineties, younger drug users now question street drug dealing because of changes in the activity. The lack of stable payment agreements in both the legal and illegal contexts created a generalized feeling of being cheated and abused, modifying exchanges in local economies and forging a new social identity built around stealing. This trend cannot entirely be explained by the growing poverty, indigence, and social exclusion that structural economic policies have engendered. It is also linked to changing relationships between law and legitimacy, legality and illegality that supported these structural reforms, which have have modified the everyday experience of law, informal rules, and legitimacy within impoverished populations. In particular, the progressive blurring of the boundaries between legality and illegality in the workplace and police repression has engendered an economy of violence that changed the local status of drug dealing and affected the basis of exchanges among drug users. The article ends with a discussion of how these changes in drug users’ everyday lives have modified modes of drug use, the logic of HIV risk, and mortality patterns. A consideration of local views about local violence shows that the criminalization of poverty and police abuse subject young drug users to lethal paradoxes that expose them to early, violent death.
Key words: poverty, drug use, neoliberalism, social suffering, survival strategies
Destroying God’s Creation or Using What He Provided?: Cultural Models of a Mining Project in New Caledonia
Leah S. Horowitz
Large-scale surveys have identified a negative association between Christian fundamentalism and environmental concern. In contrast to this broad-brush approach, I used a cultural models framework, informed by political ecology, to examine the statements of a small sample of fundamentalist Kanak villagers about their reactions to a particular instance of potential environmental degradation in New Caledonia (South Pacific) in the form of a multinational mining project. Unlike previous studies, I did not find a clear association between fundamentalist beliefs and a lack of concern about environmental impacts. Instead, people’s expectations of ecological degradation were related to their perceptions of the project’s potential for changing the distribution of financial well-being and culturally-determined social status within the community. The arguments that they used to support their case, however, relied on cultural models largely informed by global Christian “stewardship” and “exploitation” discourses. Little research has heretofore explored the factors that influence which models individuals choose to adopt and how they adapt these to their needs. This paper’s findings suggest that not only can religious beliefs inform environmental attitudes; explanatory cultural models (religious or otherwise) may be influenced by environmental attitudes, which are in turn shaped by socioeconomic concerns.
Key words: Christianity, environmental attitudes, fundamentalism, Melanesia, political ecology
Transnational Corporations and Livelihood Transformations in the Peruvian Andes: An Actor-Oriented Political Ecology
Jeff Bury
This article argues for the use of an actor-oriented approach in political ecology studies that links the activities of transnational corporations with local human and environmental change. It argues for the use of sustainable livelihoods frameworks as one way of linking these actor-oriented approaches to local economic, social, and environmental change. Drawing on case study research of Newmont Mining Corporation’s activities in the Peruvian Andes as an example of corporate focused actor-oriented research, the article offers new insights into the role of corporations in shaping social and ecological change in the developing world. The case study illustrates how household access to resources in the region has been transformed since 1990 by the changing behavior and activities of the corporation through three different time periods.
Key words: Political ecology, transnational corporations, sustainable livelihoods, Peru, Cajamarca, mining
Nunavik Inuit Perspectives on Beluga Whale Management in the Canadian Arctic
Martina Tyrrell
In the Arctic, there has long been a strong relationship between Inuit and beluga whales. As well as being considered sentient creatures, Inuit value these small white toothed whales for nutritional, economic, social, and cultural reasons. They are a staple food for many Inuit, and in the complex set of social activities that surround the hunting, butchering, and sharing of belugas, Inuit knowledge, skill, identity, and kinship are enacted and reproduced. Since the mid-1980s the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) has endeavored to restore and maintain beluga populations in Nunavik, northern Quebec. In the past decade, these conservation practices have increasingly impinged on the hunting of belugas by Inuit and, by extension, the social and cultural practices within which beluga hunting is situated. While DFO regards the management of belugas as one of biological conservation, Inuit situate this management within narratives of cultural imperialism. To ensure greater involvement by Inuit in the formulation and enactment of management policy, government at all levels must become aware of the broader historical and political processes that Inuit perceive to be at the root of current management practices. As the co-management institutions of the fledgling Nunavik government take shape, can it take lessons from other more successful regimes across the North American Arctic?
Key words: beluga whales, Canada, co-management, conservation, Inuit
The Waning of Soqotra’s Pastoral Community: Political Incorporation as Social Transformation
Serge D. Elie
The Soqotra Archipelago is Yemen’s ultimate frontier, straddling the African Continent and the Arabian Peninsula. Its approximately 50,000 inhabitants occupy a hyphenated geographical place as well as an interstitial cultural space. Soqotra, the main island of the Archipelago, is a community of once predominantly non-nomadic transhumant pastoralists, who are now engaged in increasingly non-pastoralist livelihoods, with a unique language and a mixed ethnic composition undergoing an accelerated change process driven by a dual incorporation process: on the one hand, the Yemeni government’s modernization of its infrastructure and consolidation of its political incorporation into the national community; and, on the other, a United Nations led internationalization of its economy through the implementation of an environmental protection and ecotourism development program. This paper situates these recent initiatives, as the latest phase, within a historical process of change by retracing the genealogy of Soqotra’s engagement with a modernization process. It suggests that this process was primarily driven by a series of acts of political incorporation by mainland actors. These acts are seen as the crucible of the island’s history, as they set in motion the mechanism of change through the reconfiguration of its local institutions resulting in the transformation of its internal social structure as well as of the associated cultural practices. Accordingly, the paper, first, offers a historical periodization of the island’s transformation process through a description of the four administrative regimes introduced under the different phases of political incorporation. Second, it describes the internal adjustments engendered by each of these administrative regimes in terms of polity formation, economic strategy, and their sociocultural ramifications. Third, it concludes with the emerging dysfunctional aspects of this change process and recommends the prioritization of cultural diversity as a potential solution.
Key words: Soqotra, Yemen, political incorporation, pastoralism, modernization
Prevalence of Male Clients of Street Prostitute Women in the United States
Devon D. Brewer, John M. Roberts, Jr., Stephen Q. Muth, and John J. Potterat
Survey estimates of the prevalence of clients of prostitute women are biased because men underreport sex with prostitutes. We conducted capture-recapture analyses of prostitution arrest records in several United States metropolitan areas and found that about two to three percent of adult male residents patronized local street prostitutes during observation periods of two to five years. An estimate from Colorado Springs, based on the prevalence of local prostitutes, the mean number of their client sex partners, and clients’ mean number of prostitute sex partners, showed a client prevalence of 3.5 percent for a one-year period. These prevalence estimates were almost twice as large as those based on self-reports in the General Social Survey. There was no increasing or decreasing trend in client prevalence over time. Furthermore, almost three-quarters of clients identified in a Colorado Springs study patronized on the street, suggesting that off-street activity accounts for a fairly small portion of prostitution in that city.
Key words: prostitution, capture-recapture, measurement, self-report, survey
