Kathleen Pickering

The politics of reintegrating Australian Aboriginal and American Indian indigenous knowledge into resource management: The dynamics of resource appropriation and cultural revival

As the United States and Australia struggle with contemporary crises over competing uses of rapidly depleting natural resources, there are striking parallels between American Indian and Australian Aboriginal communities demanding a place at the management table and offering culturally based understandings of and solutions for the ecosystems at risk. These efforts to integrate indigenous knowledge into mainstream natural resource management are part of larger legal and political debates over land tenure, the locus of control, indigenous self-governance, and holistic ecosystems management.

Inequality in Income Distributions: Does Culture Matter? an Analysis of Western Native American Tribes

Social theorists have postulated a relationship between the cultural characteristics of a society and resource distributions in its community [Flanagan and Rayner 1988, 2,13; Leacock 1978, 227]. For example, more hierarchical societies might be expected to exhibit greater income inequality [Britan and Cohen 1980, 26]. Despite these observations, standard economic analyses have ignored the impact of cultural characteristics on income inequality in a society. This paper combines data from the United States Census with measures of North American tribal cultural characteristics developed by Joseph Jorgensen [1980] to determine the impact of cultural factors on income inequality. Standard analyses of inequality in income distributions have ignored the social organization and cultural contexts from which income distributions arise. Some economists have long recognized that analyses should interpret economic transactions in light of the social organization and cultural context in which they arose [Neale 1957; Colin and Losch 1994, 332; Stanfield 1986, 56-58]. Indeed, they argue that analyses of economic transactions should start with an evaluation of the cultural context in which economic transactions take place [e.g., Mayhew 1987; Jennings and Waller 1995]. David Hamilton [1991] has argued that market interactions should be analyzed from a cultural perspective, as they are products of cultural

Community-Based Participatory Research, Ethics, and Institutional Review Boards: Untying a Gordian Knot

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) poses ethical challenges that are distinct from biomedical research. These arise from the epistemological differences between traditional biomedical research paradigms and CBPR, as the latter entails ongoing engagement of communities in research from development to dissemination. Biomedical research typically poses research questions and obtains ethics review before engaging with the population or community of interest. While institutional review board (IRB) practices seek to minimize harm in research conducted with human subjects, traditional IRB review can introduce new or exacerbate existing ethical challenges when reviewing non-traditional research protocols. In what follows, we seek to: define CBPR; identify unique ethical obligations in CBPR; pose potential solutions for amending the IRB process to support CBPR; and facilitate a research ethics framework that aims to reduce the exploitive and appropriational tendencies in research by inviting researchers, IRBs, and communities into a collaborative effort aimed at best practices.

Tourism-based development in Cusco, Peru: comparing national discourses with local realities

Article This article qualitatively compares national-level development discourses in Peru with local perceptions of poverty and tourism practice for four rural communities of the Valle Sagrado (Sacred Valley), located just outside the ancient Inca capital of Cusco, Peru. Copestakes global designs of development (income first, needs first, and rights first) provide the framework for this comparison, linked to local accounts and on-the-ground observations from six months of field work carried out in the region in 2013. Sources of data, which were collected and initially analyzed using Rapid Qualitative Inquiry (RQI), included semi-structured interviews (N = 93), field notes from participant observation, and documents and reports from government institutions, travel companies, and community associations. Results indicate that a strong degree of overlap exists between local perceptions and income first, needs first, and rights first development discourses. However, frustrations with tourism practice reveal an underlying struggle against neoliberal economism and the ever-increasing foreign presence in the region. Findings suggest that tourism-based development outcomes may be enhanced when policies consider both agreements and contradictions between broader discourses and local views and interests, uncovering issues of power linked to the putative common sense of promoting tourism as a principal component of national development strategies.

Chapter 4 Color-blind welfare reform or new cultural racism? Evidence from rural Mexican- and Native-American communities

Attention to the role of institutions in the construction of racial inequality suggests that the status of racial groups in society results not necessarily from the mobilization of racist ideology but from the normal workings of social and political arrangements. (Lieberman, 1998)In the Post-Civil Rights context, all politics are racial. (Omi & Winant, 1994)

Lakota Health Care Access and the Perpetuation of Poverty on Pine Ridge

Poor health conditions are a major factor in perpetuating poverty on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. This chapter explores the ways in which market-based health care delivery systems shirk health care costs of Lakota households on the periphery of the market economy. Furthermore, the economic value of health care services provided by these same marginal households is understated because market-based health care privileges commodified biomedicine. Examining economic activity beyond formal market integration reveals how households least able to bear the costs of health care subsidize the market economy at the expense of their own efforts to move out of poverty.