Chp 6 Environmental Anthropology: Relating to the Natural World

Ecological footprint

Ecological footprint

________- a quantitative tool that measures what people consume and the waste they produce.

Obesity

________- having excess body fat to the point of impairing bodily health and function.

discipline of biology

The ________ uses the Linnaen classification system to classify all living organisms into species.

Horticulturalists

________ are sedentary, living in one place to regularly tend to crops.

Environmental anthropologists

________ recognize that all systems of knowledge about nature are culturally biaed.

Bronislaw Malinowski

________ described how so-called primitive Trobriand Islanders (1915-1918) were aware of natural laws and processes (what we would call "science) "but understood that all cultures include domains of magic, science, and religion.

global environmental justice movement

The ________ is organized around peoples livelihoods and social justice concerns, including the Mashall Islanders discussed in the beginning of the chapter, who frame their situation in terms of outside control and domination that undermine local communities.Key Terms.

Swidden agriculture

________- a farming method in tropical regions in which the farmer slashes and burns a small area of forest to release plant nutrients into the soil.

Maasai

________ pastoralists of southern Kenya and northern Tanzania have extensively modified their environment to support cattle.

Horticulture

________- the cultivation of gardens or small fields to meet the basic needs of a household.

conceptual models

During the 1960s, ethnoscientists aimed to describe and understand the ________ and rules with which a society operates.

cultural landscapes

A key to ________ is the concept that humans perceive their natural environments through the lens of metaphor, and metaphors are connected to actions, thought, and organization.

Modes of subsistence

________- the social relationships and practices necessary for procuring, producing, and distributing food.

Green Revolution

________- the transformation of agriculture in the Third World, beginning in the 1940s, through agricultural research, technology transfer, and infrastructure development.

weather machines

Individuals known as "________" are experts on long-term weather patterns and help shape community responses.

Foragers

________ (hunting and gathering) subsist on edible plant and animal foods without domesticating them.

Anthropogenic landscapes

________ - landscapes modified by human action in the past or present.

Taste

________- a concept that refers to the sense that gives humans the ability to detect flavors, as well as the social distinction associated with certain foodstuffs.

Thomas Malthus

In the 1700s,________ argued that human populations grow exponentially, rapidly overexploiting available resources and "crashing "the environment.

Yellowstone

Since the founding of ________, the worlds first national park, in 1972, hundreds of acres of wilderness and ocean have formally protected.

Humans

________ have tended to adapt to a landscapes carrying capacity: the population an area can support by developing new technologies and intensifying agriculture.

Political ecology

________- the field of study that focuses on the linkages between politcal- economic power, social inequality, and ecological destruction.

Pastoralists

________ typically occupy landscapes where agriculture is difficult or impossible.

Anthropologists

________ study cultural approaches to natures protection and fight against the stereotype that native peoples are "natural environmentalists ..

Intensification

________- process that increase agricultural yields.

Environmental anthropology

________, the subfield that studies how different societies understand, interact with, and make changes to nature, insists that its important to understand peoples ideas about landscapes to understand their behavior in those landscapes.

Indigenous peoples

________ have been shown to possess knowledge of ecological relations unknown to Western science.

Itaz Maya

The ________ view nature as an extension of the social world (rather than the other way around), including the spirits that regulate ecological choices.

Slash and burn agriculture

________ works best with low-density populations, as a farmer might not return to a fallow field for several decades.

Nutrition transition

________- the combination of changes in diet toward energy- dense foods (high in calories, fat, and sugar) and declines in physical activity.

Ethnobiology

________- the subfield of ethnoscience that studies how people in non- Western societies name and codify living things.

Foodways

________ are culturally constructed, and these cultural processes have implications for human sustainability.

Traditional ecological knowledge

________ is ideal for managing resources because it is customized specifically for particular local environments.

Carrying capacity

________- the population an area can support.

Brent Berlin

________ (1973) used the ethnobiology (indigenous ways of naming and codifying living things) of the Tzeltal Maya to argue that all human classification systems basically categorize organisms in ways comparable to Linnaean taxonomy (based on shared morphological characteristics)

Ethnoscience

________- the study of how people classify things in the world, usually by considering some range or set in meanings.

Human groups

________ exist within cultural landscapes: the culturally specific images, knowledge, and concepts of the physical landscape that help shape human relations with that landscape.

Small-scale farms

________, which produce locally grown and nutrient- rich food, can not compete with the low- cost foods of transnational agribusinesses.

Industrial agriculture

________- the application of industrial principles to farming.

Animal husbandry

________ - the breeding, care, and use of domesticated herding animals such as cattle, camels, goats, horses, llamas, reindeer, and yaks.

herd of livestock

Because a(n) ________ can decimate to vegetation quickly, pastoralists must constantly move their herds.

Intensive agriculture

________ has furnished most people with most of their food supplies for several thousand years.

Third World

The Green Revolution, the transformation in agriculture in the ________ through agricultural research, technology transfer, and infrastructure development, has pressured rural communities to adopt industrial agriculture, enhancing profitability and generating foreign revenue.

Classification systems

________ are reference systems that group things or ideas with similar features, such as plant and animal taxonomies.

global nutrition transition

Social factors play a role in the rise of obesity and overweight as does ________: the combination of changes in diet toward energy- dense foods (high in calories, fat, and sugar) and declines in physical activity.

Western science

Unlike ________, which attempts to understand nature, Zapotec knowledge of nature is not a distinct sphere of knowledge but is integrated into daily life.

cultural context

Even science is ultimately a method developed within ________.

consumer capitalism

The ________ of the United States, and many other nations, promotes the norm that people must continually buy more and more things in the pursuit of happiness.

Horticulturalists

________ use relatively simple technologies (hand tools like knives, axes, and digging sticks) that have low impacts on landscape.

Horticulture

________ emerged around 12, 000 years ago and gave humans selective control over plants and animals, which increased food reliability.