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"In 2007, a tsunami slammed a small island in the western Solomon Islands, wreaking havoc on its coastal communities and ecosystems. Drawing on over ten years of ethnographic and environmental science research, Matthew Lauer provides an intimate account of this catastrophic event that explores how a century of colonization, Christianity, and increasing entanglement with capitalism prefigured the local response and the tumultuous recovery process. Despite near total destruction of several villages, few people lost their lives, as nearly everyone fled to high ground before the tsunami struck. To understand their astonishing, lifesaving response, Lauer argues that we need to rethink the popular portrayals of indigenous ecological knowledge that inform environmental research and contemporary disaster mitigation strategies so as to avoid displacing those aspects of indigenous knowing and being that tend to be overlooked. In an increasingly disaster-prone era of ecological crises, this important study challenges readers to expand their thinking about the causes and consequences of calamities, the effects of disaster relief and recovery efforts, and the nature of local knowledge"--

This dissertation engages two separate lines of inquiry simultaneously. The first of these involves a series of close readings of a text from the Namwŏn region in 1730s Chosŏn Korea (1392-1910) called the Collected Volume of Administrative Reports and Inter-agency Communications of Namwŏn County [K. Namwŏn-hyŏn ch'ŏppo imun sŏngch'aek]. Each of these close readings asks how specific aspects of society, politics, law, and culture in Chosŏn might be re-thought in light of the content of the cases—specifically, in light of the processes of negotiation that drove the unfolding of those cases. Each body chapter presents a stand-alone argument. Chapter 1 re-examines established understandings of the relationship between the state's ritual and legal codes. Previously, law was considered to play a supplementary or complementary role to ritual. In this case, however, an argument emerged concerning the possibility that legal codes might occasionally frustrate the execution of ritual. Chapter 2 examines the position of slaves in late-Chosŏn law. The analysis focuses on the Namwŏn magistrate's strategic use of rhetoric to resolve a lawsuit concerning a brutal assault on a slave. His intricate rhetorical strategy (one that contained many contradictory messages) reveals the complicated position of slaves in the legal system, which in turn allowed magistrates to develop such creative strategies if necessary. Chapter 3 argues for a re-evaluation of the position of Buddhist temple communities in the state corv�e system. Though the state undoubtedly extracted from the Buddhists, at the same time the system itself created an interdependent relationship between the state and the temples, thus providing the Buddhists an opportunity to articulate their interests and problems. Chapter 4 examines a local conspiracy by several men to install a friend and distant relative as the head of the Local Elite Bureau and concludes that the group grossly miscalculated the degree to which local elite interests guarded that appointment process. Finally, Chapter 5 examines the nature of inter-magistrate relationships through the lens of the illicit movement of people. It concludes that disparities in rank played little role in determining negotiations between magistrates, that rank seems to have been "empty," merely a reflection of the scope of duties within local boundaries. The second investigation concerns the scope of the power of magistrates in local society. Previous scholarship often portrays the 18th- and 19th-century magistrates as strongly empowered and exploitative—for these reasons, the misrule of magistrates formed a core grievance of Korea's noted 19th-century rebellions. However, the cases above show that the Namwŏn magistrate actually operated with variable levels of power. The degree to which the magistrate influenced local actors depended heavily on the institutions and interests implicated in his negotiations. None of this is to deny the reality that magistrates mistreated local populations during this period; however, the dissertation does argue that, when one moves from moments of dramatic action and resistance to moments of everyday life and negotiation, the power of magistrates seems much more variable and contingent, a fact that local populations recognized and knew how to exploit. In short, the dissertation proposes a gradated understanding of magistrate power.

ABSTRACT  In this article, we draw on research among fisherfolk of Roviana Lagoon, Solomon Islands, to examine certain epistemological assumptions of the "indigenous knowledge" concept. We describe how approaches to knowledge in Roviana differ from prevailing models of knowledge that distinguish between cognitive aspects and other modalities of knowing. For many Roviana fishers, ecological knowledge is not analytically separated from the changing contexts of everyday activities such as navigating and fishing. Inspired by Roviana epistemologies, we argue that a practice‐oriented approach provides a more sympathetic and informative theoretical framework for understanding knowledge and its role in contemporary marine‐resource conservation efforts. The theoretical and methodological implications of the perspective are illustrated with examples from an ongoing marine conservation project in the western Solomon Islands that integrates indigenous knowledge, remote‐sensing techniques, and Geographic Information System (GIS) technologies.

The 1998 El Niño significantly reduced garden productivity in the Upper Orinoco region in Venezuela. Consequently, parents were forced to allocate food carefully to their children. Nutrition data collected from village children combined with genealogical data allowed the determination of which children suffered most, and whether the patterns of food distribution accorded with predictions from parental investment theory. For boys, three social variables accounted for over 70% of the variance in subcutaneous fat after controlling for age: number of siblings, age of the mother's youngest child, and whether the mother was the senior or junior co-wife, or was married monogamously. These results accord well with parental investment theory. Parents experiencing food stress faced a trade-off between quantity and quality, and between investing in younger versus older offspring. In addition, boys with access to more paternal investment (i.e. no stepmother) were better nourished. These variables did not account for any of the variance in female nutrition. Girls' nutrition was associated with the size of their patrilineage and the number of non-relatives in the village, suggesting that lineage politics may have played a role. An apparent lack of relationship between orphan status and nutrition is also interesting, given that orphans suffered high rates of skin flea infections. The large number of orphans being cared for by only two grandparents suggests that grooming time may have been the resource in short supply.

Climate change is a slowly advancing crisis sweeping over the planet and affecting different habitats in strikingly diverse ways. While nations have signed treaties and implemented policies, most actual climate change assessments, adaptations, and countermeasures take place at the local level. People are responding by adjusting their practices, livelihoods, and cultures, protesting and migrating. This book portrays the diversity of explanations and remedies as expressed at the community level and its emphasis on the crucial importance of ethnographic detail in demonstrating how people in different parts of the world are scaling down the phenomenon of global warming