Historical analogies as tools in understanding transformation     

《Global Environmental Change》2016

Historical analogies of environmental change and stress are a well-established method of examining vulnerability to the impacts of climate change. In our view historical analogies of social transformations can similarly illuminate what factors are conducive to transformation. In this paper we draw on the historical example of the environmental transformation of Aotearoa New Zealand from predominately woodlands into farmlands; a transformation which was inextricably linked with the social transformation of indigenous Māori society following European colonisation. The Aotearoa New Zealand case study illustrates how both incidental and purposeful transformations can be instigated by small groups of committed individuals working in formal or informal networks, but can also be imposed by outside experts who instituted widespread changes under notions of progress and improvement without local support or consent. Such transformations involved widespread changes to Indigenous governance regimes, agricultural systems, production and consumption patterns, lifestyles, values and worldviews, and inevitably involved both beneficial and negative outcomes for local peoples. We argue that thinking historically about transformational change provides an opportunity to assess the processes that shape both vulnerability and resilience, and the circumstances under which transformational change occurs, as well as the potential dangers of irreversible changes.  相似文献   

Political Ecology and Cultural Change: Impacts on Swidden-fallow Agroforestry Practices among the Mopan Maya in Southern Belize     

Michael K. Steinberg 《The Professional geographer》1998,50(4):407-417

Little agroecological research examines indigenous agroforestry practices that appear to be unsustainable, and how such practices devolved from more environmentally sound land use strategies that have been documented by geographers and others. This paper discusses the political ecological factors that led the Mopan Maya to reject a diverse swidden-fallow management strategy for a system where an abandoned milpa provides few forest products. In doing so, this paper explains the process whereby cultural change, in this case rejection of certain agricultural traditions, leads to a less diverse agricultural landscape and ultimately a less diverse biological landscape.  相似文献   

A failed green future: Navajo Green Jobs and energy “transition” in the Navajo Nation     

《Geoforum》2018

This article considers the Navajo Green Jobs effort of 2009, an attempt to “transition” energy production from coal to wind and solar for the largest tribe in the United States, the Navajo Nation. Through ethnographic “revisits,” in 2008 and 2013, I argue that Navajo Green Jobs contained two problematic hybrid neoliberal assumptions about governance and development: (1) it decentered governing authority from the tribe to “the community” while undermining the legitimacy of the tribal government, and (2) it promoted private entrepreneurship over public investment as the vehicle for energy transition. Ultimately, the Navajo Nation rejected Navajo Green Jobs and re-appropriated its temporal language in order to justify a reinvestment in coal in the form of a new energy company, NTEC. This article concludes that consideration of the spatial and social embedded nature of energy production is vital for understanding energy transitions today.  相似文献   

Raw hides: Hegemony and cattle in Guatemala’s northern lowlands     

Liza Grandia 《Geoforum》2009,40(5):720-731

As a microcosm of the global livestock-climate problem, this tale of two hegemonies explores how and why two critical constituencies—development planners and conservation professionals—have failed to see the “raw hides” of cattle’s impact on the Maya Biosphere Reserve in northern Guatemala. Based on ethnographic research carried out between 1993 and 2007, this paper seeks to explain the idealization, persistence, and normalization of cattle as a land use in Petén from the colonial period to the present. Framed with a Gramscian analysis of the critical role of organic intellectuals in catalyzing social change, I explore the mental feedback loops reinforcing other social and environmental causes of land degradation in this region. After presenting data on the historical expansion of cattle into the Guatemalan lowlands through government colonization programs, I describe how multilateral lending agencies like the World Bank continue to corral development plans in the region. The next part of the paper explores the complex and ambiguous relations between conservation professionals and the ranching sector. I then conclude with a discussion of how global trade and infrastructure projects such as the Puebla to Panama Plan and the Central America Free Trade Agreement will further mask the hegemonic hides of cattle.  相似文献   

The archaeoastronomy of Tikal: A reanalysis     

Christopher A. Layser  Steven R. Gullberg 《Astronomische Nachrichten》2024,345(2-3):e230099

At the great city of Tikal, the ancient Maya placed and oriented their ceremonial architecture and monuments in accordance with cosmological principles. Its earliest ceremonial plaza, the Mundo Perdido, is one of the oldest pre-Classic E-Groups of the Petén, the astronomical utility of which has been a topic of debate by archeologists and archaeoastronomers alike over the past century. In 1988, Aveni and Hartung surveyed the great temples of Tikal and revealed the relationship between their astronomical and dynastic aspects. Yet, over the intervening decades breakthroughs in the decipherment of the Maya glyphs have greatly increased our understanding of Tikal's dynastic history while interpretations in the field of archaeoastronomy have become more rigorous. For instance, more recent surveys and interpretations by Ŝprajc (2021a, 2021b) have demonstrated the importance of the Maya ritual calendar in the placement and orientation of ceremonial public architecture. The aim of this paper is to reassess this earlier fieldwork in archaeoastronomy, provide recent corroborative measurements of the orientation of key buildings, and provide a cohesive summation of the cosmological principles found in the design and construction of the city of Tikal.  相似文献   

Walking the line: Participatory mapping, indigenous rights, and neoliberalism     

Joe Bryan 《Geoforum》2011,42(1):40-50

Recent critiques of participatory mapping point out the degree to which, as a practice, it has become disciplined by legal prospects for recognition often adopted as part of neoliberal reforms. Yet while neoliberalism certainly disciplines the practice of mapping, they are not reducible to expressions of its dominance. Through a discussion of a participatory mapping project in the Mosquitia region of Honduras, I show how the practice of producing and using maps involves negotiating a spatially complex terrain shaped by multiple and overlapping forms of territory and authority. Insofar as mapping involves movement through this terrain, it engages multiple spatialities that inform assessments of the potential for legal recognition and critically awareness of its constraints. Questions of what to map and how to go about doing it are thus never merely technical concerns. Instead they are diagnostic of broader relations of power that position participants in mapping projects. Rather than producing an authoritative account of that process, my argument here is aimed at learning from it, developing the prospects for a critically-informed, collaborative approach to mapping.  相似文献   

Oil Extraction and Benefit Sharing in an Illiberal Context: The Nenets and Komi-Izhemtsi Indigenous Peoples in the Russian Arctic     

Maria Tysiachniouk  Laura A. Henry  Machiel Lamers  Jan P. M. van Tatenhove 《社会与自然资源》2018,31(5):556-579

ABSTRACT

How can indigenous communities in illiberal regimes benefit from oil production? This paper compares the experience of two indigenous peoples in the Russian Arctic, the Nenets and the Komi-Izhemtsi, in their quest for environmental protection and the development of benefit-sharing arrangements with Lukoil, a Russian oil company. The Nenets people, recognized by the Russian state as indigenous, are marginalized political actors who identified a route to receiving compensation for loss of land and damage to the environment as well as economic benefits under the auspices of Russian law and Lukoil’s corporate policies. In contrast, the Komi-Izhemtsi, despite indigenous status in global institutions including the United Nations and the Arctic Council, are unrecognized as indigenous domestically and initially received no compensation. Their path to benefit sharing was more challenging as they partnered with local nongovernmental organizations and global environmentalists to pressure Lukoil to sign a benefit-sharing agreement. Ultimately, the comparison illustrates how transnational partnerships can empower indigenous people to gain benefits from natural resource exploitation even in illiberal political systems.  相似文献   

The Spatial Knowledge of Indigenous People in Mountainous Environments: A Case Study of Three Taiwanese Indigenous Tribes     

Bor‐Wen Tsai  Yung‐Ching Lo 《Geographical review》2013,103(3):390-408

This article recounts information gleaned from a case study of three indigenous tribes in Taiwan regarding the origin and nature of their spatial knowledge. Sketched mental maps and GIS 3D virtual environment (VE) are used by indigenous elders and hunters to delineate their traditional territories. Spatial components representing the predominant spatial elements are identified. Spatial structures used for locational positioning are analyzed, as are spatial reference systems for orientation and movement. The results show that spatial components are used for daily activities, as well as having historical and cultural meaning; a quadrant structure is used for spatial positioning; and instead of using the directional reference system of east, south, west, and north, these indigenous people rely on the orientation analogies of uphill, downhill, upstream, and downstream for direction.  相似文献   

Toward an inclusive semantic interoperability: the case of Cree hydrographic features     

C.C. Wellen  R.E. Sieber 《International journal of geographical information science》2013,27(1):168-191

There has been ample work in GIScience on the formalization of ontologies but a relatively neglected area is the influence of language and culture on ontologies of geography. Although this subject has been investigated for conceptual ontologies using indigenous words denoting geographic features, this article represents the first attempt to develop a logical ontology with an indigenous group. The process of developing logical ontologies is here referred to as formalization. A methodology for formalizing ontologies with indigenous peoples is presented. A conceptual (human readable) ontology and a logical (axioms specified in mathematical logic) ontology were developed using this methodology. Research was conducted with the Cree, the largest indigenous language grouping in Canada. Results show that the geospatial ontology developed from Cree geographic concepts possesses unique design considerations: no superordinate classes were found from archival sources or Cree speakers so ontologies are structurally flat; the ontology contains some unique classes of water bodies; and the ontology challenges our notions of the generalizability of ontologies within indigenous groups. Whereas these difficulties are not insurmountable to the establishment of a cross-cultural Geospatial Semantic Web, the current plans of the World Wide Web Consortium do not adequately address them. We suggest future directions toward an inclusive semantic interoperability.  相似文献   

“Blind passes” and the production of green security through violence on the Guatemalan border     

《Geoforum》2016

Guatemalan protected areas have been sites for genocidal massacres, drug trafficking landing strips, and remilitarized “states of emergency,” but these activities are rarely considered in relation to conservation practices. This paper employs a political ecology approach to analyze interpellations of transboundary spaces as security threats, arguing that threat narratives produce insecurity in conservation spaces. Instead of assuming the primacy of neoliberalism in producing protected areas as sites of violence in the service of capitalism, the analysis traces the changing meanings of security in relation to Guatemala’s borderlands, from Cold War National Security Doctrine to discourses of citizen security in the twenty-first century Drug War. It is in the unmanned “blind passes” (pasos ciegos) of the Guatemalan–Mexican border, rendered as insecure spaces through the state’s putative absence, that policing paradoxically seeks to ensure “citizen security” through violence.  相似文献