ABSTRACT. After the Mexican Revolution of 1910 the Mexican federal government created a communal resource‐holding institution, the ejido, to redress long‐standing land‐tenure inequality. Between the 1930s and the late 1970s, the period of active redistribution of federalized and previously private resources, half of Mexico's entire area was transferred to the ejido sector. Local ejidos became the driving political and economic force at the municipio level for agrarian reform, redistributing local power and affirming the national stamp of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the dominant national party of the twentieth century. Although the 1992–1993 reforms to Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution prohibited any future expansion of communal lands and allowed privatization of communal resources, few widespread privatization schemes have taken hold in the vast majority of ejidos. In this article I provide examples of this new communal framework and its implications, with illustrations based on fieldwork in the states of Guanajuato and Sonora.

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That which we assume to be a distinct scholarly discipline today may not be so tomorrow; boundaries shift, and territories become redefined in academia just as they do in geopolitics. And so, it would not be surprising to see within just a few decades the methodological pretexts of ethnobiological inquiries once again overhauled as they have been several times already. We anticipate and in fact welcome the re-delineation of the boundaries of this discipline as a result of advances made in political ecology and in other fields as well.Although the term ''political ecology'' was first used in print more than 80 years ago (Thone 1935), it has been more widely used over the last 30 years in a particular manner by cultural ecologists and human geographers. Since anthropologist Eric R. Wolf published his seminal article entitled ''Ownership and Political Ecology,'' social scientists have used the concept of political ecology to balance their understanding of ''the pressures emanating from the larger society and the exigencies of the local ecosystem'' (Wolf 1972:202). As noted a quarter century ago by applied anthropologist Thomas Sheridan (1988:xvi), this is because it has become increasingly necessary to ''wed the approaches of political economy, which focus upon society's place in a region, nation, or ''world sphere,'' with those of cultural ecology, which examine adaptations to local environmental and demographic factors.''We are of the opinion that there is also a need to wed insights from political ecology with ethnobiology, which has largely ignored the global and macroeconomic pressures on the so-called ''traditional'' agricultural, fishing, hunting and foraging cultures with which ethnobiologists have characteristically been engaged. Despite the broad use of both the concepts and methodologies of political ecology in geography, anthropology and history, articles in the Journal of Ethnobiology have seldom used this term, and it is even in less currency in

This article examines static-data assumptions trapped in water rights and, separately, in larger interstate river compacts in the American West. These reflect assumptions of scalar stationarity embedded in water codes in western states. State water adjudications sort how much water is being used, but the resulting data are often publicly unavailable and unchanged. Interstate river compacts often divide fixed, erroneous river flow data. River compact data, based on early 20th century optimistic estimates of river flow, have not changed in policy language. At both the micro-and the macro-scale, these separate data remain fixed, complicating water management in the American West.