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While women play a central role in agriculture throughout Africa, it does not follow that all rural-dwelling women subsist primarily on agricultural activities. In the Ankarana region of northern Madagascar, for example, many rural women earn their living through a combination of agricultural day labor, petty buying and selling, and remunerated sexual and domestic relations with men. Their situation encourages an analysis of the multiple ways that woman participate in shaping patterns of resource use and access. These include contributions to the productive process, participation in decision-making, and finally, social reproduction of the labor force and of gender ideologies. This piece explores the complex relationships between gender and local resource use, concluding that attention to the gendered dynamics of resource use, access and management not only accounts for a frequently overlooked segment of the population, but it also contributes to more sophisticated understandings of the ways that humans gain access to, manage, and interact with material environment around them by engaging in relationships that are at once complementary and competitive.

I present a case of ntual innovation and spirit possession in northern Madagascar that builds on Rappaport's interests in the systemic nature of human‐environmental interactions, the relationship between the various levels of political scale, and the interaction between meaning and material relations. I go beyond his formulations in questioning concepts of homeostasis and dynamic equilibrium, and instead propose to understand perturbations as inherent in a system and a source of systemic transformation. In this analysis, I place ecological relations and ritual within an explicitly political framework and examine the processes of social and material change. In drawing on the concept of cognized models, I also illustrate how historical memory and ritual enactments provide ideological frameworks for negotiating control over the use and management of the environment, [ecosystem, political ecology. Madagascar, spirit possession, ritual]

Environmental issues have become increasingly prominent in local struggles, national debates, and international policies. In response, scholars are paying more attention to conventional politics and to more broadly defined relations of power and difference in the interactions between human groups and their biophysical environments. Such issues are at the heart of the relatively new interdisciplinary field of political ecology, forged at the intersection of political economy and cultural ecology. This volume provides a toolkit of vital concepts and a set of research models and analytic

What is anthropology? -- Culture -- Doing anthropology -- Language and communication -- Making a living -- Political systems -- Families, kinship, and marriage -- Gender -- Religion -- the world system and colonialism -- Ethnicity and race -- Applying anthropology -- Anthropology's role in a globalizing world

Environmental issues have become increasingly prominent in local struggles, national debates, and international policies. In response, scholars are paying more attention to conventional politics and to more broadly defined relations of power and difference in the interactions between human groups and their biophysical environments. Such issues are at the heart of the relatively new interdisciplinary field of political ecology, forged at the intersection of political economy and cultural ecology. This volume provides a toolkit of vital concepts and a set of research models and analytic

Drawing on a broad range of case studies, the contributors to Terrestrial Transformations explore the political and economic forces entangled in environmental and ecological problems and look at humanity's future in light of climate change and existing environmental problems.