Laura Rival

Domestication and diversity in Manioc ("Manihot esculenta" Crantz ssp. "esculenta", Euphorbiaceae)

Recent work reviewed here offers new insights into the evolution of manioc (Manihot esculenta) under domestication and contributes to current scientific efforts aimed at documenting forms of environmental management, local knowledge systems, and cultural practices that enhance genetic diversity. This work shows that human and natural selection jointly shape manioc diversity through (1) the overall cultivation system, which is highly adapted to environmental pressures; (2) the knowledge, categorization, and valorization of phenotypically expressed varietal differences; and (3) the incorporation, in this clonally propagated crop, of sexually reproduced plants, which encourages intravarietal diversity and occasionally leads to the creation of new varieties, that is, new categories that are phenotypically distinct and receive a new name before being multiplied. We conclude that genetic research, when placed in an interdisciplinary context, generates new questions for anthropologists working with manioc cultivators and with tropical forest horticulturalists whose subsistence depends on other clonally propagated crops.

The attachment of the soul to the body among the Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador

Abstract Despite their general acceptance of pacific coexistence and village life, the Huaorani are still living in a social world structured by the continuous efforts they need to deploy to contain homicidal rage and to mitigate the ravages of violent death. Death is generally interpreted as having been caused by some raptorial agency which may in turn drive men to kill blindly. This article shows that it is because men are particularly susceptible to the predatory call of supernature that society works at embedding them within matrifocal house-groups. I discuss death and the desire to kill in relation to cultural constructions of sex and gender, especially in the context of funerary rites. Huaorani perspectivism, which articulates the point of view of the prey, not of the predator, associates the soul, maleness and conquering predation, to which it opposes the body, femaleness and resisting victimhood.

The meanings of forest governance in Esmeraldas, Ecuador

Participatory forestry has become the most accepted way of exploiting timber resources in tropical rain forests. This paper shows the links between participatory forestry, sustainable forest management and the continuing objective of reconciling conservation with commercial development in the province of Esmeraldas, one of the poorest and most rapidly deforested regions of South America. I describe and contextualize the evolving logging programme of a leading Ecuadorian wood-processing group to show that the decentralization of the development process, the recognition of local communities as legal entities in the management of natural resources, and the active involvement of profit-oriented firms in biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation all contribute to the emergence of new alliances between the Ecuadorian government, the logging companies, conservation and human rights organizations, and local Black and indigenous communities. My central argument is that devolution in this context leads to conflictive interpretations of regulation. I end with a discussion of the multi-scalar nature of “forest governance”, and highlight the contribution it makes to our understanding of control, regulation and management in new contexts of privatization and decentralization.

From Carbon Projects to Better Land-Use Planning: Three Latin American Initiatives

I start with a discussion of the limits of the United Nations’ Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation and cobenefits (REDD+) program and the need to embed forest carbon within integrated ecosystem services on a landscape scale. By comparing a REDD+ project with two non-REDD+ projects, I show that there are diverse ways of applying the Earth system governance lens to address the continuing deterioration of goods and services provided by ecological systems. I then compare the valuation of ecosystem services and the governance of their provision in the three projects under review: Bolsa Floresta in the state of Amazonas, Brazil; Aracuai Sustentavel in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil; and the Yasuni–Ishpingo Tambococha Tiputini Initiative in Ecuador. I show how each project has given birth to innovative mixed policies based on citizen mobilization. These dynamic hybrid policies are uniquely fitted to the particular ecological, historical, sociocultural, and political contexts in which they took root, contexts they help to transform. I conclude that result-based payment systems such as those envisaged for REDD+ have the potential to increase the production of additional carbon absorption capacity. However, they are not always appropriate or cost effective, nor do they substitute for command-and-control instruments, or for popular mobilization.

Encountering nature through fieldwork: expert knowledge, modes of reasoning, and local creativity

The concept of ‘relation’ has been central to the anthropological reworking of the nature/culture and nature/society dichotomies. However, ecology is relational in a way that has often been ignored or dismissed in contemporary socio-cultural anthropology. This article shows that there is more to ethnoecology than an ethnocentric form of analysis representing other peoples understandings of the natural world through the prejudiced lens of Western scientific classifications. Three ‘fieldwork on fieldwork’ experiments involving encounters between natural scientists and indigenous communities in Amazonian Ecuador and Southern Guyana are discussed to illustrate the heterogeneity of human knowledge, the role of expert knowledge in intercultural communication, and the need to differentiate ecological reasoning from moral reasoning.

Ecosystem Services and Environmental Governance: Some Concluding Remarks

This conclusive chapter of the book entitled “Governing the Provision of Ecosystem Services” attempts to summarize the main overall issues addressed by the different contributions that compose this volume. The insights gained through the broad range of case studies and conceptual chapters in the book are in line with the proposition that rules and rule-making autonomy and participation, how rules are designed and enforced and how they evolve over time, matter more than the property regime or the generic type of coordination between transacting parties in the management of natural resources. We argue that the contemporary overemphasis on market-based instruments for the management of natural ecosystems is misleading. It is true that these tools may, under specific circumstances, contribute to improving the governance regimes of natural ecosystems, but we must nevertheless put the necessary attention to their particular fit within specific socio-economic contexts and their capacity to modify rule-making structures. At the end of the day, we will always come back to the old concern for the suitability of rules, including by whom and for whom they are made.

Huaorani Peace: Cultural Continuity and Negotiated Alterity in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Twenty “uncontacted” Taromenani were slaughtered and two female children kidnapped in retaliation for the spearing of a couple of “civilized” Huaorani in March 2013. After months of indecision, the government of Ecuador decided to abduct the two little captives and send six warriors to jail for genocide. Each of these actions caused a moral outrage locally, nationally, and internationally. This article explores the complex constructions through which these violent events have come to be understood, both by the Huaorani and by Ecuadorian nationals, and it shows how two broad concerns—“territoriality” and “compensation”—have structured both the violent conflicts discussed and subsequent attempts at peace restoration. The essay concludes with a brief anthropological discussion of the relationship between ontology and politics. Whereas recent theorizations of Amazonian cosmic economies of alterity sharpen our understanding of “the assimilation of the Other as a mode of reproduction,” they tend to obscure the whys and the hows of intra- and intercultural disagreements, as well as the nature of the resort to violence as a way of asserting one’s will.

Introduction: Governing the Provision of Ecosystem Services

This chapter is an introduction to the book ‘Governing the Provision of Ecosystem Services’. It aims to create a common analytical framework to the different contributions that compose the book. The call to value nature when making development decisions and to treat the world’s ecosystems as capital assets in order to prevent their continued degradation and depletion is at the origin of current concern with ‘greening’ the economy. The associated rise in the policy agenda of market-based mechanisms for environmental governance has shifted the emphasis from getting the right governmental regulation for conservation to getting the right price for ecosystem services. Our book, however, calls for moving away from this false dichotomy and to pay attention to getting the right set of rules and instruments, along multiple governance layers. Nested (polycentric) institutions have had a role to play in all the complex environmental governance systems discussed in this book, and central governments have been shown to be increasingly called upon to engage with other social actors to ensure the provision of ecosystem services.

Attention to infrastructure offers a welcome reconfiguration of anthropological approaches to the political

This constitutes the edited proceedings of the 2015 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory held at Manchester.

Anthropology and the Nature-Society-Development Nexus

This chapter follows the tribulations of a socio-ecological project at the periphery of one of the world’s megalopolises, Sao Paulo. It investigates the circumstances under which the agroecologists involved in such projects create meaningful worlds through the cultivation of ecological awareness. I show how sustainability comes to figure as a central value in the agroecological movement, which is widespread throughout Latin America.