Ivan Brady

Social Responses During Severe Food Shortages and Famine [and Comments and Reply]

Although emergency food shortages and famines have been a prominent part of human experience for thousands of years and recur somewhere on our planet almost annually, data describing behavioral and organizational responses are few and scattered. Generalizations, when not speculative, tend to be vague and frequently contradictory. Practical, humanistic, and scientific concern with how people respond when overtaken by nutritional catastrophe provide compelling reason for development of a systematic, empirically based understanding of how social life changes amidst severe, protracted starvation. This paper surveys literature from several fields. By piecing together diverse observations and findings and paying close attention to the chronology of response, it is possible to infer the existence of a series of social transformation in which distinctive patterns of social interaction emerge as starvation progresses from stage to stage. Behavioral adaptations appearing in concert with the physiological alterations entailed by starvation lie at the root of this sequence. The degree of physiological stress and behavioral change experienced by individuals and groups depends on external (e.g., famine-causing events, relief-giving agencies, etc.) and internal (e.g., biological traits, social structures, etc.) factors. The latter are discussed in both intra- and interpopulational contexts. Sociocultural adaptations to famine consist of progressive and recursive traits. Progressive adaptations are selected as precautionary or preventive measures. Recursive adaptations unfold as a synchronous response to increasing scarcity. Recursive social adaptations seem to possess the same basic structure regardless of culture. This structure consists of a triphasic response pattern in which the rate of activity and the extent and frequency of positive reciprocities at first increase, later decreasing to near zero if the starving population remains unrelieved. The effects of this curvilinear pattern are examined in the context of household and interpersonal relations, political organization, and religious and ritual life. Existing images of famine-stricken people are summarized and found wanting. An alternative conception is developed with special emphasis on linking quantitative changes in behavior with qualitative changes in the organization of institutions.

In Defense of the Sensual: Meaning Construction in Ethnography and Poetics:

Lack of closure in ethnography is less a problem of unknowables than plural “knowabilities” and the frustrations of choosing among them. Human beings are sensual and intellectual creatures who experience the world through that combination and whose corporeal existences are appropriated and molded by culture—the system of signs and meanings that defines for us the nature of the world and our place in it. Carving science or poetry out of this “made”universe requires heigh tenedsensitivity to its properties. Yet mostly, only poets write about experience consistently from a sensual perspective. Poetry is another way to encode and share the foundations of such experience; poetry can ground theories of the world that actually involve our interactions with it, not just abstractions from it. Thus, a more robust entrance point for modern ethnography may be best centered on some combination of humanistic and scientific design as artful-science, not on either extreme.

Some Thoughts on Sharing Science.

Sustaining and upgrading the national interest in science requires breaking through some of the barriers that separate science from the academys other disciplines and interests, and from society as a whole. This article reviews some of the difficulties and prospects of sharing science within the academy and the ripple effect that such activities may have on the larger social context of attitudes toward science. We recognize that crossing into other disciplines for any purpose raises special communication problems. We also argue that much of the apprehension concerning such discourse rests on a fallacy. Some relief is anticipated through an ongoing critical and reflexive examination of ourselves and our activities with respect to the ways science touches our collective lives, and by conscientiously developing new relationships for teaching scientific thinking and values on the premise that science is inherently a form of public knowledge that relies heavily on cultural values and society.

Other Places and the Anthropology of Ourselves: Early Fieldwork in Tuvalu

Asking for personal accounts of fieldwork forces a consideration of two important issues in anthropology: author-presence in ethnographic and analytic accounts and forms of ethnographic representation. Addressing both, I offer here an historical overview of my 1960s and 1970s fieldwork in the Pacific Islands country of Tuvalu in relation to (a) what I tried to accomplish at the time; (b) what actually worked out, what did not, and why; (c) what I have learned in the long run about the prospects of succeeding in those pursuits, including a sample of principles governing such narratives and how attention to them might facilitate the development of more robust and satisfying ethnographic accounts, especially when bound up in a mixed genre form I describe as an analytic memoir; and (d) comparisons with the fieldwork of Mariko Toshida, an award-winning current-generation researcher in the area.

Review Essay: Ritual as Cognitive Process, Performance as History

Ritual studies are multidisciplinary. They run the gamut from the ontology of ritual consciousness and the emergence of meaning to the externalization of abstract ideas in culture and behavior and their absorption into social structures and religion over time. This mix makes analytic closure on the subject precious, in part for lack of agreement on what ritual is and does. Richard Schechner (university professor and a theater director at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University) says that the upshot of ritual is artificially heightened behavior, normally displayed publicly, that marks ‘‘the startling ability of human beings to create themselves, to change, to become—for better or for worse—what they ordinarily are not’’ (p. 1). That makes it performative and transformative. Ritual is also restorative in the sense that it recalls, retrieves, and reenacts living behavior before it. It is ‘‘twice-behaved behavior’’ (p. 1). So conceived, ritual can be myth in action, a Malinowskian frame for enactment, and a charter for the present assignment of meaning to something important from the past. With his genius for history’s anthropology, Greg Dening (formerly Max Crawford Professor of History at the University of Melbourne) might say that there is history in that, for the history he identifies is grounded in personal knowledge and has mythic and performative qualities, perhaps especially in its ‘‘re-call’’ and ‘‘re-presentation’’ in texts. Caroline Hum-

Show Me a Sign

There is hope in believing that the bottom line of human nature is ultimately one of sociability, not social pathology. We know that resource sharing contracts in scope with prolonged deprivation and that human relationships which might be maintained in less troubled times tend to get sloughed off under such conditions. Accordion-like, the overall pattern includes and excludes people and groups variously in expanding and contracting ranges of cooperation and solidarity, and it is driven by perceptions of relative resource advantage, if not by an interest in survival itself. We’ve seen this kind of movement in fine grain in our villages and towns and in relations between nations as private interests and political economies slip from good to bad, rich to poor, and back again. We’ve also seen a reaction to changing environmental circumstances that seeks to expand against cultural difference in wars of ideological and territorial aggrandizement, all of which are fueled by intolerance by definition. But what does this say about us as a species? About our prospects for living up to the name “human” in the process of managing our relations with others? Looking a little closer at ourselves under extreme conditions can provide some answers. What happens in the individual extreme when all the strategic resource chips are down, when people know in their deprivations that they are past the point of no return, when they believe that they have no chance of resurrecting a life path that would sustain them? There is evidence to suggest that what happens is not a Hobbesian war of all against all, every man (and woman) for himself in an all out grasp for the last bread crumbs, as fearful folklore and underinformed social science would have it. In the end, we are social animals. We know that the grisly facts revealed to the liberators of Auschwitz and other concentration camps at the end of World War II included human beings gassed to death in ovens—victims of hate and cruelty beyond any sense of credibility. We also know that some of them climbed on each other’s backs in an effort to escape the confines of their murderous smotherings and that some of them clawed hard enough on the walls to embed their fingernails in the concrete. But that wasn’t the end of it. At some point, resignation to their horrible fate set in and a sign emerged, a generalizable item, I think, a symbol of triumph of the human spirit drawn out of the psyche in desperation and left

Whence History?Remembrance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History. Edited by Robert Borofsky. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000. xvi +557 pp.

There are writings, memories, chants, artifacts, and landscapes waiting to be discovered (and rediscovered). Yet a major complication exists: how to organize and prioritize what one reads, what one hears, what one discovers? The past—in our ambiguous knowing of it—does not proclaim its meaning in a single voice. There are multiple voices. Which ones deserve primary attention—in what ways, for which contexts? How does one weave a coherent narrative out of the many materials without denying their differences, ambiguities, and complexities?