Suchergebnisse

Abstract
This article explores the anthropological and social scientific literature on sea level rise and coastal erosion, examining questions of time, the human dimensions of seawalls, tensions over relocation and retreat, and the politics of finance. This includes insights from the author's research in Baja California Sur, Mexico, and along the California coast in the United States, where locally based experiences illustrate not only the challenges of rising seas and erosion, but also the importance of addressing these issues, sooner rather than later, through the critical lenses of anthropology. Overall, this article explores how anthropologists and other social scientists have critically examined the issues, processes, and tensions that shape global coastal responses, and points to directions for future research and engagement with sea level rise, eroding coasts, and humanity's future along the edge of the sea.

AbstractThis article employs a long‐term historical and anthropological perspective to examine questions of resilience through a case study of Cabo Pulmo, BCS, Mexico. Using the recent COVID‐19 crisis as a starting point, this article discusses the crises, shocks, booms, and busts that have affected and shaped the people, landscapes, and ecologies of the coastline that now includes Cabo Pulmo. While the community of Cabo Pulmo has been able to withstand several crises and disruptions, and could be considered "resilient" in many senses, I argue that this resilience is ongoing and conditional. Furthermore, the production of this resilience in Cabo Pulmo is highly contingent upon a strategic politics, enacted by the local community, that establishes, protects, and maintains claims to both land and place. Resilience, I argue, can be seen as an ongoing politics and strategic positionality, rooted in historical relations and connections to place, that people seek to create, maintain, and deploy at various scales to mediate and resist periodic shocks, threats, and disruptions.

Based upon twelve months of anthropological fieldwork in Cabo Pulmo, Baja California Sur, Mexico, this article uses political ecology and theoretical work on ideology to examine how local residents use the concept of sustainability to advocate for alternative visions of development. Conceptually, the idea of sustainability has a long, often conflicted history. As political ecologists have pointed out, sustainability can be everything from a tool of dominance and pacification to a strident defense of environment, place, and local rights. Between 2010 and 2012, the residents of Cabo Pulmo waged a campaign against a large-scale tourism development that was perceived as a threat to local livelihoods and environmental health. They deployed the concept of sustainability during this campaign, and afterwards, as a way to build local solidarity in the face of increasing development pressures. Sustainability works as a temporary ideological tool that transcends internal disputes during intense conflicts over the meaning of development.

Sarah Kendzior is a writer for Al Jazeera English. She has a PhD in cultural anthropology from Washington University and researches the political effects of digital media in the former USSR. You can find her work at sarahkendzior.com,and on Twitter: @sarahkendzior

Why do we publish anthropology? Do we publish to communicate our ideas, or to move up the ranks of academia? We all know the basic narrative: In order to land a job and move up the socio-economic ladder of academicanthropology, we all need to publish. As the saying goes: publish or perish. So everyone — from graduate students onward — joins in and perpetuates this particular academic habitus. But is the current system working? We may all be publishing (or working toward it), but that does not mean that we have really avoided the "perish" part of the equation. The problem, as Harry Wolcott pointed out almost two decades ago, is that we are stuck in an insular, closed system. Our current publication regime is primarily geared toward internal conversations and our own political economies. We are, in essence, talking to ourselves. We keep our conversations separated from wider audiences through habit, and also via a slew of self-imposed barriers (journal articles closed off through pay walls, writing style, overall use of media). This paper is about rethinking not only why we publish, but also how we publish. The goal is not to dismiss the importance of traditional venues for publication (books, journal articles, edited volumes), but instead to explore how we can start opening up and sharing our anthropological conversations with wider audiences through the creative use of a range of media-based tools and platforms.

This paper explores the historical background to a proposed study of political disputes over the value of large-scale tourism development in Baja California Sur. The paper starts with a review of anthropological discussions of value — focusing on the work of Kluckhohn, Graeber, Elyachar and Appadurai. The aim is to use an anthropological approach to value to place current conflicts over land and resources arising from recent developments within a historical perspective. The paper then investigates how actors in different time periods have contributed to collective and often contradictory constructions of the area as a place of subsistence, adventure, possibilities, salvation, investment, leisure and conflict. It is not a report on the contemporary situation, but rather it examines some of the key moments and events that have in the past created, reshaped, and defined Baja California Sur as a place of value, meaning, and importance. These episodes start with the Spanish contact period and focus primarily on the southern portion of the peninsula. [Value, tourism, development, Baja California Sur, Mexico]

While still largely ignored by many anthropologists, open access (OA) has been a confusing and volatile center around which a wide range of contentious debates and vexing leadership dilemmas orbit. Despite widespread misunderstandings and honest differences of perspective on how and why to move forward, OA frameworks for scholarly communication are now part of the publishing ecology in which all active anthropologists work. Cultural Anthropology is unambiguously a leading journal in the field. The move to transition it toward a gold OA model represents a milestone for the iterative transformation of how cultural anthropologists, along with diverse fellow travelers, communicate more ethically and sustainably with global and diverse publics. On the occasion of this significant shift, we build on the history of OA debates, position statements, and experiments taking place during the past decade to do three things. Using an interview format, we will offer a primer on OA practices in general and in cultural anthropology in particular. In doing so, we aim to highlight some of the special considerations that have animated arguments for OA in cultural anthropology and in neighboring fields built around ethnographic methods and representations. We then argue briefly for a critical anthropology of scholarly communication (including scholarly publishing), one that brings the kinds of engaged analysis for which Cultural Anthropology is particularly well known to bear on this vital aspect of knowledge production, circulation, and valuation. Our field's distinctive knowledge of social, cultural, political, and economic phenomena should also—but often has not—inform our choices as both global actors and publishing scholars.