Ecologies Of The Heart

Equally important, he offers much insight into why our own environmental policies have failed and what we can do to better manage our resources.

There is much we can learn about conservation from native peoples, says Gene Anderson. While the advanced nations of the West have failed to control overfishing, deforestation, soil erosion, pollution, and a host of other environmental problems, many traditional peoples manage their natural resources quite successfully. And if some traditional peoples mismanage the environment--the irrational value some place on rhino horn, for instance, has left this species endangered--the fact remains that most have found ways to introduce sound ecological management into their daily lives. Why have they succeeded while we have failed? In Ecologies of the Heart, Gene Anderson reveals how religion and other folk beliefs help pre-industrial peoples control and protect their resources. Equally important, he offers much insight into why our own environmental policies have failed and what we can do to better manage our resources. A cultural ecologist, Gene Anderson has spent his life exploring the ways in which different groups of people manage the environment, and he has lived for years in fishing communities in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Tahiti, and British Columbia--as well as in a Mayan farmtown in south Mexico--where he has studied fisheries, farming, and forest management. He has concluded that all traditional societies that have managed resources well over time have done so in part through religion--by the use of emotionally powerful cultural symbols that reinforce particular resource management strategies. Moreover, he argues that these religious beliefs, while seeming unscientific, if not irrational, at first glance, are actually based on long observation of nature. To illustrate this insight, he includes many fascinating portraits of native life. He offers, for instance, an intriguing discussion of the Chinese belief system known as Feng-Shui (wind and water) and tells of meeting villagers in remote areas of Hong Kong's New Territories who assert that dragons live in the mountains, and that to disturb them by cutting too sharply into the rock surface would cause floods and landslides (which in fact it does). He describes the Tlingit Indians of the Pacific Northwest, who, before they strip bark from the great cedar trees, make elaborate apologies to spirits they believe live inside the trees, assuring the spirits that they take only what is necessary. And we read of the Maya of southern Mexico, who speak of the lords of the Forest and the Animals, who punish those who take more from the land or the rivers than they need. These beliefs work in part because they are based on long observation of nature, but also, and equally important, because they are incorporated into a larger cosmology, so that people have a strong emotional investment in them. And conversely, Anderson argues that our environmental programs often fail because we have not found a way to engage our emotions in conservation practices. Folk beliefs are often dismissed as irrational superstitions. Yet as Anderson shows, these beliefs do more to protect the environment than modern science does in the West. Full of insights, Ecologies of the Heart mixes anthropology with ecology and psychology, traditional myth and folklore with informed discussions of conservation efforts in industrial society, to reveal a strikingly new approach to our current environmental crises.

In Ecologies of the Heart, Anderson reveals how religion and other folk beliefs helped pre-industrial peoples control and protect their resources. He also presents a coherent view of long-term, sustainable policies for the environment.

A call for informed, responsible engagement with information technology at the local level. The common rhetoric about technology falls into two extreme categories: uncritical acceptance or blanket rejection. Claiming a middle ground, Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day call for responsible, informed engagement with technology in local settings, which they call information ecologies. An information ecology is a system of people, practices, technologies, and values in a local environment. Nardi and O'Day encourage the reader to become more aware of the ways people and technology are interrelated. They draw on their empirical research in offices, libraries, schools, and hospitals to show how people can engage their own values and commitments while using technology.

Archaeological practice is currently shifting in response to feminist, indigenous, activist, community-based, and anarchic critiques of how archaeology is practiced and how science is used to interpret the past lives of people. Inspired by the calls for a different way of doing archaeology, this volume presents a case here for a heart-centered archaeological practice. Heart-centered practice emerged in care-based disciplines, such as nursing and various forms of therapy, as a way to recognize the importance of caring for those on whom we work, and as an avenue to explore how our interactions with others impacts our own emotions and heart. Archaeologists are disciplined to separate mind and heart, a division which harkens back to the origins of western thought. The dualism between the mental and the physical is fundamental to the concept that humans can objectively study the world without being immersed in it. Scientific approaches to understanding the world assume there is an objective world to be studied and that humans must remove themselves from that world in order to find the truth. An archaeology of the heart rejects this dualism; rather, we see mind, body, heart, and spirit as inextricable. An archaeology of the heart provides a new space for thinking through an integrated, responsible, and grounded archaeology, where there is care for the living and the dead, acknowledges the need to build responsible relationships with communities, and with the archaeological record, and emphasize the role of rigor in how work and research is conducted. The contributions bring together archaeological practitioners from across the globe in different contexts to explore how heart-centered practice can impact archaeological theory, methodology, and research throughout the discipline.

Places That Count offers professionals within the field of cultural resource management (CRM) valuable practical advice on dealing with traditional cultural properties (TCPs). Responsible for coining the term to describe places of community-based cultural importance, Thomas King now revisits this subject to instruct readers in TCP site identification, documentation, and management. With more than 30 years of experience at working with communities on such sites, he identifies common issues of contention and methods of resolving them through consultation and other means. Through the extensive use of examples, from urban ghettos to Polynesian ponds to Mount Shasta, TCPs are shown not to be limited simply to American Indian burial and religious sites, but include a wide array of valued locations and landscapes—the United States and worldwide. This is a must-read for anyone involved in historical preservation, cultural resource management, or community development.

This book offers the first systematic study of how elite conservation schemes and policies define once customary and vernacular forms of managing common resources as banditry—and how the ‘bandits’ fight back. Drawing inspiration from Karl Jacoby’s seminal Crimes against Nature, this book takes Jacoby’s moral ecology and extends the concept beyond the founding of American national parks. From eighteenth-century Europe, through settler colonialism in Africa, Australia and the Americas, to postcolonial Asia and Australia, Moral Ecologies takes a global stance and a deep temporal perspective, examining how the language and practices of conservation often dispossess Indigenous peoples and settlers, and how those groups resist in everyday ways. Drawing together archaeologists, anthropologists, geographers and historians, this is a methodologically diverse and conceptually innovative study that will appeal to anyone interested in the politics of conservation, protest and environmental history.