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This book is concerned with how people respond to unpredictable variation in environmental and economic conditions (risk) and lack of information (uncertainty) about those risks. The papers focus on tribal and peasant societies. These societies lack many of the formal institutions that we, in the industrialized West, rely on to buffer us against unpredictable resource fluctuations. As the papers in this volume show, people in these societies are directly and profoundly affected by such risks. The contributors to this volume are primarily ecological and economic anthropologists who have in common a familiarity with both the formal theory of behavioral ecology and/or economics and the anthropological literature on tribal and peasant societies.
This book is concerned with how people respond to unpredictable variation in environmental and economic conditions (risk) and lack of information (uncertainty) about those risks. The papers focus on tribal and peasant societies. These societies lack many of the formal institutions that we, in the industrialized West, rely on to buffer us against unpredictable resource fluctuations. As the papers in this volume show, people in these societies are directly and profoundly affected by such risks. The contributors to this volume are primarily ecological and economic anthropologists who have in common a familiarity with both the formal theory of behavioral ecology and/or economics and the anthropological literature on tribal and peasant societies.
In the late-19th-century, the main cash crop of Harerge, Ethiopia, shifted from coffee and food crops to khat, a quasi-legal psychoactive shrub. This text examines the demographic, market and political factors behind this change and explores the consequences. North America: Ohio U Press
In order for economic specialization to develop, it is important that well-defined property rights are established and that suspicion and fear of fraud do not pervade transactions. Such conditions cannot be created ex abrubto, but must somehow evolve. What needs to develop is not only suitable practices and rules themselves, but also the public agencies and moral environment without which generalized trust is difficult to establish. The cultural endowment of societies as they have developed over their particular histories is bound to play a major role in this regard, and the matter of cultual endowment is one of the central themes of this book. On the other hand, division of labour does not only require well-enforced property rights and trust in economic dealings. It is also critically conditioned by the thickness of economic space, itself dependent on population density. This provides the second major theme of the volume: market development, including the development of private property rights is not possible, or will remain very incomplete, if populations are thinly spread over large areas of land. The book makes special reference to sub-Saharan Africa.
Enormous changes affected the inhabitants of the Eastern Woodlands area during the eleventh through fifteenth centuries AD. At this time many groups across this area (known collectively to archaeologists as Oneota) were aggregating and adopting new forms of material culture and food technology. This same period also witnessed an increase in intergroup violence, as well as a rise in climatic volatility with the onset of the Little Ice Age. In Indigenous Life around the Great Lakes, Richard W. Edwards explores how the inhabitants of the western Great Lakes region responded to the challenges of climate change, social change, and the increasingly violent physical landscape. As a case study, Edwards focuses on a group living in the Koshkonong Locality in what is now southeastern Wisconsin. Edwards contextualizes Koshkonong within the larger Oneota framework and in relation to the other groups living in the western Great Lakes and surrounding regions. Making use of a canine surrogacy approach, which avoids the destruction of human remains, Edwards analyzes the nature of groups’ subsistence systems, the role of agriculture, and the risk-management strategies that were developed to face the challenges of their day. Based on this analysis, Edwards proposes how the inhabitants of this region organized themselves and how they interacted with neighboring groups. Edwards ultimately shows how the Oneota groups were far more agricultural than previously thought and also demonstrates how the maize agriculture of these groups was related to the structure of their societies. In bringing together multiple lines of archaeological evidence into a unique synthesis, Indigenous Life around the Great Lakes is an innovative book that will appeal to archaeologists who study the Midwest and surrounding regions, and it will also appeal to those who research risk management, agriculture, and the development of hierarchical societies more generally.
Many consider Lewis Binford to be the single most influential figure in archaeology in the last half-century. His contributions to the "New Archaeology" changed the course of the field, as he argued for the development of a scientifically rigorous framework to guide the excavation and interpretation of the archaeological record. This book, the culmination of Binford's intellectual legacy thus far, presents a detailed description of his methodology and its significance for understanding hunter-gatherer cultures on a global basis. This landmark publication will be an important step in understanding the great process of cultural evolution and will change the way archaeology proceeds as a scientific enterprise. This work provides a major synthesis of an enormous body of cultural and environmental information and offers many original insights into the past. Binford helped pioneer what is now called "ethnoarchaeology"—the study of living societies to help explain cultural patterns in the archaeological record—and this book is grounded on a detailed analysis of ethnographic data from about 340 historically known hunter-gatherer populations. The methodological framework based on this data will reshape the paradigms through which we understand human culture for years to come.
In the midst of global recession, angry citizens and media pundits often offer simplistic theories about how bad decisions lead to crises. Many economists, however, base their analyses on rational choice theory, which assumes that decisions are made by well-informed, intelligent people who weigh risks, costs, and benefits. Taking a more realistic approach, the field of anthropology carefully looks at the underlying causes of choices at different times and places. Using case studies of choices by farmers, artisans, and bureaucrats drawn from Michael Chibnik's research in Mexico, Peru, Belize, and the United States, Anthropology, Economics, and Choice presents a clear-eyed perspective on human actions and their economic consequences. Five key issues are explored in-depth: choices between paid and unpaid work; ways people deal with risk and uncertainty; how individuals decide whether to cooperate; the extent to which households can be regarded as decision-making units; and the "tragedy of the commons," the theory that social chaos may result from unrestricted access to commonly owned property. Both an accessible primer and an innovative exploration of economic anthropology, this interdisciplinary work brings fresh insight to a timely topic.
This comprehensive, fully illustrated Companion answers the need for an in-depth archaeology reference that provides authoritative coverage of this complex and interdisciplinary field. The work brings together the myriad strands and the great temporal and spatial breadth of the field into two thematically organized volumes. In twenty-six authoritative and clearly-written essays, this Companion explores the origins, aims, methods and problems of archaeology. Each essay is written by a scholar of international standing and illustrations complement the text.
While anthropologists and ecologists have carefully described the activities of the slash-and-burn cultivators, ranchers, and miners of tropical South America, they have largely overlooked the economic strategies and political struggles of riverine people who survive by flood-recession agriculture and fishing. These ribere_os, who constitute the majority of the inhabitants of the Amazonian floodplains of Peru, have developed ecologically sustainable resource management practices that enable them to cope with periodic inundations of their fields by "risky rivers." They have, however, suffered greatly from unpredictable crop prices and erratic state agricultural policies. Michael Chibnik here examines the household economies, cultural ecology, grassroots political organizations of ribere_os living in three floodplain villages near Iquitos, Peru. He describes the villagers' remarkable history, their participation in misconceived development programs, and their longstanding conflicts with regional elites. Chibnik discusses the political ecology of the region in the context of arguments about appropriate development policies in tropical lowlands. Although ribere_os practice intensive agriculture with low environmental impact, they have not been able to improve their economic circumstances in recent years. Chibnik's study is a significant and timely contribution to current debates about the possibility of sustainable, equitable development in Amazonia.