Suchergebnisse

Presented by Mr. Owen. Referred to the Committee on printing February 13, 1915. ; Mode of access: Internet.

Mbendjele forest hunter‐gatherers in northern Congo refer to a confusing body of seemingly unconnected and diverse practices and beliefs as 'ekila'. Ethnographically, ekila has many meanings. I suggest a number of possible ways to understand what connects these different practices, but argue that it is only when considering learning in this egalitarian environment that ekila really begins to make sense. The ethnography demonstrates how formulaic and counter‐intuitive explanations of specific taboos and related behaviour stimulate a learner‐motivated pedagogic process – one devoid of an individual or institutional focus – through which Mbendjele learn important knowledge. Ekila anchors key areas of cosmological knowledge, gender and political ideology in the physical and biological experiences of human growth and maturation so that gendered practices and cultural values take on a natural, inevitable quality.RésuméLes chasseurs‐cueilleurs Mbendjele des forêts du nord du Congo font référence sous le nom d'ekilaà un corpus apparemment confus de pratiques et de croyances diverses et sans rapport entre elles. Du point de vue ethnographique, l'ekila a de nombreuses significations. L'auteur suggère plusieurs manières possibles de comprendre ce qui relie ces différentes pratiques, mais avance que ce n'est qu'en considérant l'apprentissage dans cet environnement égalitaire que l'ekila commence vraiment à prendre un sens. L'ethnographie démontre comment les explications toutes faites et contre‐intuitives de certains tabous et des comportements y afférents ont suscité un processus pédagogique motivé par les destinataires de l'enseignement, vide de toute attention individuelle ou institutionnelle, par lequel les Mbendjele acquièrent des connaissances importantes. L'ekila ancre des notions essentielles de connaissances cosmologiques, de genre et d'idéologie politique dans l'expérience physique et biologique de la croissance et de la maturation humaines, de sorte que les pratiques sexuées et les valeurs culturelles prennent une qualité naturelle et inévitable.

"Preface" -- "Contents" -- "Note on Contributors" -- "List of Figures" -- "Chapter 1: Introduction: The Anthropology of Sustainability: Beyond Development and Progress" -- "The Origins of Sustainability" -- "Sustainability Today" -- "Sustainability Tomorrow" -- "The Anthropocene" -- "What Sort of World Favours `Sustainability´?" -- "What Sustainability Does for Anthropology" -- "Making Anthropology Contemporary Again" -- "What Is an Anthropology of Sustainability?" -- "Conclusion" -- "Notes" -- "References" -- "Chapter 2: Anthropology at the Time of the Anthropocene: A Personal View of What Is to Be Studied" -- "References" -- "Chapter 3: A Threat to Holocene Resurgence Is a Threat to Livability" -- "What Is Resurgence?" -- "Holocene and Anthropocene: Indicators for the Human Condition" -- "Matsutake Enables Holocene Resurgence" -- "Ash Dieback and Anthropocene Ecologies of Extinction" -- "A Time for Anthropology" -- "Notes" -- "References" -- "Chapter 4: What Can Sustainability Do for Anthropology?" -- "Why Thinking About Sustainability Is Good for Anthropology" -- "What Is It That We Should Sustain?" -- "The Challenges of Space and Time" -- "Misconceived Alterities" -- "Conclusion" -- "References" -- "Chapter 5: Interlude: Perceiving Human Nature Through Imagined Non-human Situations" -- "Chapter 6: ``They Call It Shangri-La´´: Sustainable Conservation, or African Enclosures?" -- "Sustainability: The Global View" -- "East African Rangelands: From Global to Local Understandings of Sustainability" -- "Tanzania´s Wildlife Management Areas" -- "Enduimet Wildlife Management Area" -- "Participation" -- "Local Voices: Participation" -- "Benefits" -- "Makame WMA" -- "Ecological Outcomes of WMA" -- "Local Visions of Sustainability" -- "Discussion" -- "Notes" -- "References" -- "Chapter 7: Conservation from Above: Globalising Care for Nature".

This book compiles research from leading experts in the social, behavioral, and cultural dimensions of sustainability, as well as local and global understandings of the concept, and on lived practices around the world. It contains studies focusing on ways of living, acting, and thinking which claim to favor the local and global ecological systems of which we are a part, and on which we depend for survival. The concept of sustainability as a product of concern about global environmental degradation, rising social inequalities, and dispossession is presented as a key concept. The contributors explore the opportunities to engage with questions of sustainability and to redefine the concept of sustainability in anthropological terms.

This book offers an exciting new perspective on the origins of language. Language is conceptualized as a collective invention, on the model of writing or the wheel, and the book places social and cultural dynamics at the centre of its evolution: language emerged and further developed in human communities already suffused with meaning and communication, mimesis, ritual, song and dance, alloparenting, new divisions of labour and revolutionary changes in social relations. The book thus challenges assumptions about the causal relations between genes, capacities, social communication and innovation: the biological capacities are taken to evolve incrementally on the basis of cognitive plasticity, in a process that recruits previous adaptations and fine-tunes them to serve novel communicative ends. Topics include the ability brought about by language to tell lies, that must have confronted our ancestors with new problems of public trust; the dynamics of social-cognitive co-evolution; the role of gesture and mimesis in linguistic communication; studies of how monkeys and apes express their feelings or thoughts; play, laughter, dance, song, ritual and other social displays among extant hunter-gatherers; the social nature of language acquisition and innovation; normativity and the emergence of linguistic norms; the interaction of language and emotions; and novel perspectives on the time-frame for language evolution. The contributors are leading international scholars from linguistics, anthropology, palaeontology, primatology, psychology, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, archaeology, and cognitive science.