Flora Lu

Risk-Sensitive Adaptive Tactics: Models and Evidence from Subsistence Studies in Biology and Anthropology

Risk-sensitive analysis of subsistence adaptations is warranted when (i) outcomes are to some degree unpredictable and (ii) they have nonlinear consequences for fitness and/or utility. Both conditions are likely to be common among peoples studied by ecologicll anthropologists and archaeologists. We develop a general conceptual model of risk. We then review and summarize the extensive empirical literatures from biology and anthropology for methodological insights and for their comparative potential. Risk-sensitive adaptive tactics are diverse and they are taxonomically widespread. However, the anthropological literature rarely makes use of formal models of risk-sensitive adaptation, while the biological literature lacks naturalistic observations of risk-sensitive behavior. Both anthropology and biology could benefit from greater interdisciplinary exchange.

The Common Property Regime of the Huaorani Indians of Ecuador: Implications and Challenges to Conservation

This paper shows that the Huaorani Indians of the Ecuadorian Amazon possess a long-standing common property management regime fostered by secure ownership status of the land, the small size and kinship ties of residence groups, the existence of mutual trust and reciprocity, and culturally sanctioned rules of behavior. This regime, however, was focused on maintaining harmonious relationships between residents of the nanicabo and not on resource conservation (although it may have fostered epiphenomenal conservation). It cannot be presumed that communal management of resources invariably leads to conservation; other factors need to be present, such as a perception of resource scarcity. The common property regime was designed for a situation of plentiful resources, low population density, clear membership, and behaviors held in check by respect for kin and the desire for good standing. It was a sufficient and simple system for delimiting common property resources from private property, based on implicit social boundaries and cultural understandings. Now, confronted by powerful external forces, population growth, and intermarriage with non-Huaorani, the system is faltering. Conservationist practices, however, can be encouraged by adapting the earlier system to reflect current conditions.

Integration into the Market among Indigenous Peoples

The integration of indigenous peoples into the market economy has received attention in the literature because of its implications for both human well‐being and ecological viability. Previous studies that have examined the impacts of market participation on variables such as forest clearance, health, and ecological knowledge vary greatly in their measures of market involvement and often use only one or a few measures. Examination of data from five indigenous populations in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon shows little correlation between various measures of integration into the market and points to the importance of using a diversity of measures of both household production and consumption.

Contrasting Colonist and Indigenous Impacts on Amazonian Forests

To examine differences in land use and environmental impacts between colonist and indigenous populations in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon, we combined data from household surveys and remotely sensed imagery that was collected from 778 colonist households in 64 colonization sectors, and 499 households from five indigenous groups in 36 communities. Overall, measures of deforestation and forest fragmentation were significantly greater for colonists than indigenous peoples. On average, colonist households had approximately double the area in agriculture and cash crops and 5.5 times the area in pasture as indigenous households. Nevertheless, substantial variation in land-use patterns existed among the five indigenous groups in measures such as cattle ownership and use of hired agricultural labor. These findings support the potential conservation value of indigenous lands while cautioning against uniform policies that homogenize indigenous ethnic groups.

Equitable water governance: future directions in the understanding and analysis of water inequities in the global South

Today, 20% of the world’s 7 billion people lack easy access to water for basic subsistence needs and a variety of economic and household activities. The lack of access to water exacerbates time and...

The effects of market integration on childhood growth and nutritional status: the dual burden of under- and over-nutrition in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon.

Market integration is an important source of cultural change exposing indigenous populations to epidemiologic and nutrition transitions. As children and adolescents are biologically sensitive to the health effects of market integration, we examine community variation of anthropometric indicators of nutritional status and growth among a cross‐cultural sample of Kichwa, Shuar, Huaorani, and Cofán indigenous groups in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon.

Patterns of Indigenous Resilience in the Amazon: A Case Study of Huaorani Hunting in Ecuador

This paper takes a resilience approach to examining human forager-prey dynamics using as a case study Huaorani hunting in the Ecuadorian Amazon. I compare methodologically similar datasets collected in the same Huaorani villages in 1996-1997 and 2001. Rather than assuming that human hunters simply act on prey species and linearly drive them to depletion, a resilience approach views this dynamic as a complex social and ecological system characterized by feedbacks, nonlinearities, uncertainty, unpredictability, and non-equilibrium dynamics. Using a computer simulation of human foragers and prey (published previously), I highlight how even using relatively simple assumptions, the human forager-prey relationship exhibits patterns of nonlinearity and feedbacks. I then address one key aspect of a resilience approach: the focus on issues of scale. I note the surprising persistence of primates and cracid birds in the Huaorani harvest—both prey types vulnerable to overexploitation especially by hunters with a relatively long settlement history and use of firearms. I assert that this finding reflects a source-sink dynamic that stems from a distinct Huaorani social history and requires larger spatial scales of analyses to evaluate hunting sustainability. The literature on indigenous neotropical hunting and conservation could benefit greatly from a resilience framework recognizing that human hunter-faunal prey dynamics in the Amazon are complex and require multifaceted and interdisciplinary approaches that are cross-scale and take into account the sociocultural and political as well as the ecological context. articlEs Journal of Ecological Anthropology Vol. 14 No. 1 010 The controversy around indigenous Amazonian hunting and over-harvesting of game has been largely focused on studies which were in essence “snapshots” in time of a certain human population in a certain area for a few years (e.g., Jorgenson 2000; Townsend 2000; but see Hill and Padwe 2000 and Peres 2000 for examples of longer-term studies), for which data are collected on variables such as harvest rates (or catch-per-unit-effort, Puertas and Bodmer 2004), game biomass and density, age structure, and intrinsic rate of natural increase. Such studies are concerned with certain aspects of hunter behavior, such as prey choice (Alvard 1993, 1995) and the taking of individuals of high reproductive value, use of certain technologies (Hames 1979; Kaplan and Kopischke 1992; Yost and Kelley 1983), time allocation (Hames 1989), and hunting in depleted zones (Hames 1980). It appears that a typical assumption of these approaches is that the human-faunal dynamic is linear, one in which human hunting pressure is one of the main factors controlling prey population dynamics, though mediated by parameters of prey life history. In other words, game availability is posited as an inverse function of human density, especially for large terrestrial animals (Vickers 1988). Furthermore, the assumption is that we can use approaches such as stock recruitment, age structure, and unified harvest models (Bodmer and Robinson 2004) to evaluate the sustainability of neotropical hunting. An alternative approach characterizes these social and ecological systems as complex, nonlinear, adaptive1 and closely interconnected. In particular, a resilience framework can be a productive approach to understanding hunter and prey dynamics within a larger socio-political and ecological context. But what is the evidence that such a framework would be applicable to an indigenous Amazonian hunting context, and what would be the value added? In this paper, my goals are three-fold: first, to review key concepts and definitions within a resilience framework. Second, using a computer simulation model of human forager-prey dynamics, I provide evidence for the complexity of these relationships and support for the applicability of a resilience approach, as a system with few components and relatively simple rules exhibits, feedbacks, oscillations and non-linearities. Finally, through examining hunting patterns of two Huaorani communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon, I show how attention to issues of scale can illuminate one potential source of faunal resilience in this social and ecological system: source-sink dynamics. Some caveats and clarifications are in order. I am not setting out specific hypotheses leading from a resilience framework per se (which at this stage is premature as I did not collect data with this issue in mind). Also, the application of resilience theory to anthropological studies is an emerging but relatively recent endeavor (Berkes and Folke 1998; Berkes et al. 2003), and no one, to my knowledge, has done so with indigenous Amazonian hunting (although Begossi 1998 has examined caboclo management in Amazonian Brazil). RESILIENCE IN COMPLEX SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS Holling et al. (2000) characterize two streams of science relevant to understanding issues of conservation and resource management. The first called a “science of the parts,” exemplified by the maximum sustainable yield concept from stock recruitment models which treats resource stocks as discrete elements in time and space, makes predictions about them in isolation from other elements in the ecosystem, and tries to limit the effects of natural variability. At the risk of presenting a straw man, the science of the parts generates unambiguous data, but does so at the cost of being fragmentary. This existing science appears to have contributed to a crisis of resource management as it seems unable to prescribe sustainable outcomes or explain resource collapses. The other stream is characterized as a “science of the integration of the parts” in which the coupled natural and human system is recognized for being highly complex, unpredictable, non-linear, crossscale, evolutionary, and characterized by feedbacks and surprise (Holling et al. 2000). Holling (1973) defined two distinct properties characterizing ecoLu / Huaorani Hunting and Resilience logical systems: resilience and stability. Resilience “determines the persistence of relationships within a system and is a measure of the ability of these systems to absorb changes of state variables, driving variables, and parameters, and still persist...Stability, on the other hand, is the ability of a system to return to an equilibrium state after a temporary disturbance” (Holling 1973:17). So systems can be very resilient and still fluctuate greatly (i.e., have low stability). Resilient natural systems with high species diversity and spatial patchiness, for instance, may have more than one domain of attraction and may move between them. The concept of resilience, further discussed below, is especially applicable to social and ecological systems which can be characterized as complex adaptive systems. Complex patterns can arise from disorder through simple but powerful rules that guide change (Folke 2006). These systems possess certain properties, such as the sustained diversity and individuality of components and an autonomous selection process that chooses from among these components. The former is the source of perpetual novelty, and the latter results in continual adaptation and the emergence of a cross-level organizational structure. Moreover, the local rules of interaction change as the system evolves, demonstrating what is called path dependency. There is an absence of a global controller of the system, and the dynamics are far from a state of equilibrium (i.e., a globally stable system with one basin of attraction); the system instead possesses multiple basins of attraction where feedbacks and thresholds are important and the potential exists for surprise (i.e., shifts from one basin of attraction to another).

Santa Cruz Declaration on the Global Water Crisis

At least one billion people around the world struggle with insufficient access to water. However, the global water crisis is not, as some suggest, primarily driven by water scarcity. Although limited water supply and inadequate institutions are indeed part of the problem, we assert that the global water crisis is fundamentally one of injustice and inequality. This declaration expresses our understanding of water injustice and how it can be addressed.

A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Human Impacts on the Rainforest Environment in Ecuador

Renowned for biological diversity, Amazonian rainforests are also regions of high cultural diversity. However, in recent decades, most indigenous rainforest people have become settled and acquired titles to large tropical forest areas, are increasingly integrating into the market economy, and are experiencing rapid sociocultural change. In this chapter, we examine five ethnic groups in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon and highlight the importance of sociocultural and economic contexts in understanding indigenous patterns of forest use. Using ethnographic and survey data collected in 2001, we compare and contrast these indigenous populations in terms of demographic characteristics, involvement in the market economy, and patterns of forest conversion and faunal exploitation, observing different degrees of external pressures and opportunities, cultural values, and historical constraints, which, taken together, influence their choices about resource use and market contact and their long-run prospects for cultural survival.

Crude, Cash and Culture Change: The Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador

In the Ecuadorian Amazon, the Huaorani are the indigenous group most recently assimilated into the country’s social, political, and economic order. With vast reserves of oil located under Huaorani land, this Native Amazonian population has quickly become integrated into national and international markets. The focus of this study is on one Huaorani community, Gareno, which is located along an oil road a few hours from the town of Tena, the capital of Napo Province. Community members were interviewed in order to better understand why they lived along the oil road and how they felt it impacted their daily lives. Responses showed that the residents have chosen to live and stay in Gareno specifically because of the health and education opportunities the road provides. The fact that they have chosen these benefits and economic opportunity over a pristine forest refutes the idea of the “noble savage,” which has been ingrained into Western society ever since Europeans first stepped on New World soil in the 15 th century. The image of the noble savage portrays indigenous people living in a so called “wilderness” as romanticized innocents in ecological harmony, isolated from the outside world, and uncorrupted by civilization. This view is inappropriate for groups like the Huaorani because it places them on an ecological pedestal and distorts their true condition. Rather than perpetuating this romanticized Western view of indigenous peoples, studies need to be conducted to better understand their contemporary challenges, responses, and opinions. As the people of Gareno look to further improve their quality of life through development, it is important to consider sustainable methods by which this can be completed as well as how national and international non-governmental organizations can facilitate such progress.