Lunes, Enero 17, 2011

ATTENTION!!! ALL STUDENTS TAKING UP ANTHROPOLOGY

Please inform me ahead of time if you have schedule conflicts in the midterm examination. Failure to inform me and see me 24hours after the exam date means automatic forfeiture of taking the exam.

Huwebes, Enero 6, 2011

ATTENTION!!! JYRAH PRAISE BALZA and MAE FERNANDEZ

REQUIREMENTS:

1. READ CONRAD KOTTAK'S ANTHROPOLOGY 10th Edition,
CHECK THE COURSE SYLLABUS FOR THE COURSE OUTLINE

2. READ THE ARTICLE ON MALNUTRITION: A Diseases of Development (for Jyrah)and ECOCIDE: A Disease of Development (for Mae). ANSWER THE QUESTION AFTER THE ARTICLE. PLEASE CHECK ON IT FROM THE PREVIOUS POSTS. SUBMIT THROUGH MY EMAIL AD floriejane_tamon@yahoo.com. DEADLINE: January 10, 2011 till 12noon

3. MIDTERM AND FINAL EXAMS (On February)

4. ORAL RECITATION (on February)

5. FINAL PROJECT: MAKE AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY WHICH IS RELATED TO YOUR PRESENT ON THE JOB TRAINING. PRESENT YOUR PAPER WHEN YOU COME BACK ON FEBRUARY. DEADLINE OF WRITTEN OUTPUT: February 15, 2011.

PLEASE COMMUNICATE WITH ME FROM TIME TO TIME THROUGH MY EMAIL AD. IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS DON'T HESITATE TO ASK ME.

Martes, Enero 4, 2011

ecocide: a disease of development

THE PRICE OF PROGRESS
ECOCIDE: A disease of development
“How is it,” asked a herdsman…“how is it that these hills can no longer give pasture to my cattle? In my father’s day they were green and cattle thrived there; today there is no grass and my cattle starve.” As one looked one saw that what had once been a green hill had become a raw red rock. Jones, 1934
Progress imposes new strains on the ecosystems upon which they must depend for their ultimate survival. The introduction of new technology, increased consumption, lowered mortality, and the eradication of all traditional controls have combined to replace what for most tribal peoples was a relatively stable balance between population and natural resources, with a new system that is imbalanced. Economic development is forcing ecocide on peoples who were once careful stewards of their resources. There is already a trend toward widespread environmental deterioration in tribal areas, involving resource depletion, erosion, plant and animal extinction, and a disturbing series of other previously unforeseen changes.
After the initial depopulation suffered by most tribal peoples during their engulfment by frontiers of national expansion, most tribal populations began to experience rapid growth. Authorities generally attribute this growth to the introduction of modern medicine and new health measures and the termination of intertribal warfare, which lowered mortality rates, as well as to new technology, which increased food production. Certainly all of these factors played a part, but merely lowering mortality rates would not have produced the rapid population growth that most tribal areas have experienced if traditional birth-spacing mechanisms had not been eliminated at the same time. Regardless of which factors were most important, it is clear that all of the natural and cultural checks on population growth have suddenly been pushed aside by culture change, while tribal lands have been steadily reduced and consumption levels have risen. In many tribal areas, environmental deterioration due to overuse of resources has set in, and in other areas such deteriorations is imminent as resources continue to dwindle relative to the expanding population and increased use. Of course, population expansion by tribal peoples may have positive political consequences, because where tribals can retain or regain their status as local majorities they may be in a more favorable position to defend their resources against intruders.
Swidden systems and pastoralism, both highly successful economic systems under traditional conditions, have proved particularly vulnerable to increased population pressures and outside efforts to raise productivity beyond its natural limits. Research in Amazonia demonstrates that population pressures and related resource depletion can be created indirectly by official policies that restrict swidden peoples to smaller territories. Resource depletion itself can then become a powerful means of forcing the tribal people into participating in the world-market economy—thus leading to further resource depletion. For example, Bodley and Benson (1979) showed how the Shipibo Indians in Peru were forced to further deplete their forest resources by cash cropping in the forest area to replace the resources that had been destroyed earlier by the intensive cash cropping necessitated by the narrow confines of their reserves. In this case, certain species of palm trees that had provided critical housing materials were destroyed by forest clearing and had to be replaced by costly purchased materials. Research by Gross (1979) and other showed similar processes at work among four tribal groups in Brazil and demonstrated that the degree of market involvement increases directly with increases in resource depletion.
The settling of nomadic herders and the removal of prior controls on herd size have often led to serious overgrazing and erosion problems where these had not previously occurred. There are indications that the desertification problem in the Sahel region of Africa was aggravated by programs designed to settle nomads. The first sign of imbalance in a swidden system appears when the planting cycles are shortened to the point that garden plots are reused before sufficient forest regrowth can occur. If reclearing and planting continue in the same area, the natural patterns of forest succession may be distiurbed irreversibly and the soil can be impaired permanently. An extensive tract of tropical rainforest in the lower Amazon of Brazil was reduced to a semiarid desert in just fifty years through such a process. The soils in the Azande area are also now seriously threatened with laterization and other problems as a result of the government-promoted cotton development scheme.
The dangers of overdevelopment and the vulnerability of local resource systems have long been recognized by both anthropologists and tribal peoples themselves. But the pressures for change have been overwhelming. In 1948 the Maya villagers of Chan Kom complained to Redfield (1962) about the shortening of the swidden cycles, which they correctly attributed to increasing population pressures. Redfield told them, however, that they had no choice but to go “forward with technology”. In Assam, swidden cycles were shortened from an average of twelve years to only two or three within just twenty years, and anthropologists warned that the limits of swiddening would soon be reached. In the Pacific, anthropologists warned of population pressures on limited resources as early as the 1930s. These warning seemed fully justified, considering the fact that the crowded Tikopians were prompted by population pressures on their tiny island to suggest that infanticide be legalized. The warnings have been dramatically reinforced since then by the doubling of Micronesia’s population in just the fourteen years between 1958 and 1972, from 70,600 to 114,645, while consumption levels have soared. By 1985 Micronesia’s population had reached 162,321.
The environmental hazards of economic development and rapid population growth have become generally recognized only since worldwide concerns over environmental issues began in the early 1970s. Unfortunately, there is as yet little indication that the leaders of the new developing nations are sufficiently concerned with environmental limitations. On the contrary, governments are forcing tribal peoples into a self-reinforcing spiral of population growth and intensified resource exploitation, which may be stopped only by environmental disaster or the total impoverishment of the tribals.
The reality of ecocide certainly focuses attention on the fundamental contrasts between tribal and industrial systems in their use of natural resources, who controls them, and how they are managed. Tribal peoples are victimized because they control resources that outsiders demand. The resources exist because tribals managed them conservatively. However, as with the issue of the health consequences of detribalization, some anthropologists minimize the adaptive achievements of tribal groups and seem unwilling to concede that ecocide might be a consequence of cultural change. Critics attack an exaggerated “noble savage” image of tribals living in perfect harmony with nature and having no visible impact on their surroundings. They then show that tribals do in fact modify the environment, and they conclude that there is no significant difference between how tribals and industrial societies treat their environments.
Anthropologist Terry Rambo demonstrated that the Semang of the Malaysian rain forests have a measurable impact on their environment. In his monograph Primitive Polluters, Rambo reported that the Semang live in smoke-filled houses. They sneeze and spread germs, breathe, and thus emit carbon dixide. The clear small gardens, contributing “particulate matter” to the air and disturbing the local climate because cleared areas proved measurably warmer and drier than the shady forest. Rambo concluded that his research “demonstrates the essential functional similarity of the environmental interactions of primitive and civilized societies” in contrast to a “noble savage” view which, according to Rambo mistakenly “claims that traditional peoples almost always live in essential harmony with their environment.”
This is surely a false issue. To stress, as I do, that tribals tend to manage their resources for sustained yield within relatively self-sufficient subsistence economies is not to make them either innocent children or natural men. Nor is it to deny that tribals “disrupt” their environment and may never be in absolute “balance” with nature.
The ecocide issue is perhaps most dramatically illustrated by two sets of satellite photos taken over the Brazilian rain forests of Rondonia. Photos taken in 1973, when Rondonia was still a tribal domain, show virtually unbroken rain forest. The 1987 satellite photos, taken after just fifteen years of highway construction and “development” by outsiders, show more than 20 percent of the forest destroyed. The surviving Indians were being concentrated by FUNAI (Brazil’s national Indian foundation) into what would soon become mere islands of forest in a ravaged landscape. It is irrelevant to quibble about whether tribals are noble, childlike, or innocent, or about the precise meaning of balance with nature, carrying capacity, or adaptation, to recognize that for the past 200 years rapid environmental deterioration on an unprecedented global scale has followed the wresting of control of vast areas of the world from tribal groups by resource-hungry industrial societies.

QUESTION: Does progress or economic development increase or decrease a given culture’s ability to satisfy the physical and psychological needs of its population or its stability?

malnutrition: a disease of development

THE PRICE OF PROGRESS
MALNUTRITION: A Disease of development
Malnutrition, particularly in the form of protein deficiency, has become a critical problem for tribal peoples who must adopt new economic patterns. Population pressures, cash cropping, and government programs all have tended to encourage the replacement of traditional crops and other food sources that were rich in protein with substitutes, high in calories but low in protein. In Africa, for example, protein-rich staples such as millet and sorghum are being replaced systematically by high-yielding manioc and plantains, which have insignificant amounts of protein. The problem is increased for cash croppers and wage laborers whose earnings are too low and unpredictable to allow purchase of adequate amounts of protein. In some rural areas, agricultural laborers have been forced systematically to deprive nonproductive members (principally children) of their households of their minimal nutritional requirements to satisfy the need of the productive members. This process has been documented in northeastern Brazil following the introduction of large-scale sisal plantations. In urban centers the difficulties of obtaining nutritionally adequate diets are even more serious for tribal immigrants, because costs are higher and poor quality foods are more tempting.
One of the most tragic, and largely overlooked, aspects of chronic malnutrition is that it can lead to abnormally undersized brain development and apparently irreversible brain damage; it has been associated with various forms of mental impairment or retardation. Malnutrition has been linked clinically with mental retardation in both Africa and Latin America, and this appears to be a worldwide phenomenon with serious implications.
Optimistic supporters of progress will surely say that all of these new health problems are being overstressed and that the introduction of hospitals, clinics, and the other modern health institutions will overcome or at least compensate for all of these difficulties. However, it appears uncontrolled population growth and economic impoverishment probably will keep most of these benefits out of reach for many tribal peoples, and the intervention of modern medicine has at least partly contributed to the problem in the first place.
The generalization that civilization frequently has a broad negative impact on tribal health has found broad empirical support, but these conclusions have gone unchallenged. Some critics argue that tribal health was often poor before modernization, and they point specifically to tribals’ low life expectancy and high infant mortality rates. Demographic statistics on tribal populations are often problematic because precise data are scarce, but they do show a less favorable profile than that enjoyed by many industrial societies. However, it should be remembered that our present life expectancy is a recent phenomenon that has been very costly in terms of medical research and technological advances. Furthermore, the benefits of our health system are not enjoyed equally by all members of our society. High infant mortality could be viewed as a relatively expensive and egalitarian tribal public health program that offered the reasonable expectation of a healthy and productive life for those surviving to age fifteen.
Some critics also suggest that certain tribal populations, such as the New Guinea highlanders, were “stunted” by nutritional deficiencies created by tribal culture and are “improved” by “acculturation” and cash cropping. Although this argument does suggest that the health question requires careful evaluation, t does not invalidate the empirical generalizations already established. Nutritional deficiencies undoubtedly occurred in densely populated zones in the central New Guinea highlands. However, the specific case cited above may not be widely representative of other tribal groups even in new Guinea, and it does not address the facts of outside intrusion or the inequities inherent in the contemporary development process.

QUESTION: Does progress or economic development increase or decrease a given culture’s ability to satisfy the physical and psychological needs of its population or its stability?