Suchergebnisse

This case study describes the experiences of an anthropologist currently conducting GIS-based ethnographic research in the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak, Malaysia, using the e-Bario Telecentre as a local collaborating institution, a base for the input and storage of hard and soft copies of data and reports, and as a nexus for training community members to use GIS technology. Grounded in discussion of current collaborative research trends in the fields of anthropology and geography, this paper elaborates on the challenges and benefits of using the technology, facilities, and personnel currently available at the e-Bario Telecentre. It also describes how this current project is laying the foundation for a larger project that will be owned, managed, and used by the local community. This article elaborates on the social, cultural, political, economic, and environmental context in which this project is developing, demonstrating how this research project, and the transfer of technological knowledge that is a key component of it, can be both beneficial and challenging to the Kelabit community. Finally, it offers suggestions for the improvement of e-Bario by suggesting both what e-Bario can do to better serve the needs of researchers in the Kelabit Highlands and what researchers can in turn do to assist e-Bario in meeting its goals to serve the community, visitors, and other researchers.

AbstractIssues with land ownership and engagement in forestry have been intractable problems that have long impeded wealth development among African Americans in the rural South. Over a 6‐year period, an integrated outreach and research program, the Sustainable Forestry and African American Land Retention Program, implemented community‐based projects, built networks among relevant organizations, changed policies, and developed new knowledge to address these critical issues of environmental justice. In this paper, we discuss how anthropological practice was integrated into a program of community‐based projects to create a platform for long‐term change in land ownership, forest management, outreach practice, and policy environments. The results provide an example of how anthropological methods can contribute to social and institutional change by listening and documenting stories and through long‐term engagement with a diverse coalition of researchers, practitioners, landowners, and funders.

"The essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity". Swiss historian Jacob BurckhardtThe biocultural perspective, a direct result of the crisis narrative regarding cultural and biological extinctions, overemphasises the homogenising effects of globalisation and fails to recognise processes that actively produce diversity. Cartographic visualisations depicting overlapping zones of biological and cultural diversity simplify complex realities and provide little guidance for policy and practice. Moving beyond this perspective requires problematisation of essentialist notions of culture, analysis of the politics surrounding the production of knowledge, and acknowledgement of the anthropogenic nature of landscapes often deemed "pristine". The biocultural perspective is reviewed within the context of recent trends in conservation, from community‐based conservation to the more recent "Strategic Turn" in conservation. To define a new perspective linking cultural diversity and conservation, the authors argue that we need a new politics of knowledge that: (a) moves beyond notions of TEK as the only valid form of local knowledge that can be integrated into conservation planning, (b) examines how local perspectives are translated between scales, and (c) creates new linkages between local knowledge and the policy domain. This new politics of knowledge can help make visible multiple actors, multiple forms of agency, and multiple regimes of credibility and can elucidate the ways in which knowledge about cultural diversity and biological diversity is produced, circulated, and incorporated into decision‐making.

At the 2010 negotiations of the Conference of the Parties (COP10) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) for a decision on biofuels and bio-diversity, biofuels were portrayed as holding many different, conflicting characteristics. Using Callon's (1986) concept of translation, we find that the COP10 biofuel negotiations failed to advance beyond the first moment of translation, problematization, when actors are defined in relation to each other. We trace attempts by various actors to fix the identity of biofuels throughout the negotiations, using strategies such as rendering political issues "technical," relying on formal text to stabilize contested identities, and restricting the sources of knowledge relied upon. We suggest that the CBD parties experiment with new strategies, taking advantage of the COP's legal flexibility and the CBD's institutional history of engaging with the political nature of scientific knowledge.

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