Property, Kinship and Cultural Capital: The Ethics of Modelling Kinship in Sustainable Resource Management

Embedded in the land: Customary social relations and practices of resilience in an East Timorese community

“…Recognition of rights to use or claim land, moreover, is contingent upon specific relational contexts, a fact which causes much more confusion for researchers trying to make (abstract) sense of local happenings than it does for those who engage with these relational contexts at the level of the face‐to‐face. As Wiber and Lovell (2004: 87) note, the mutability of kinship systems is ‘a characteristic that frustrates anthropological attempts to plug examples into a typology of pure structural types’. While genealogical connections provide the basis for claim making, recognition of claims is invariably dependent on particular personal, ecological and political circumstances.…”

Viewing a world of disaster through the eyes of faith: The influence of religious worldviews on community adaptation in the context of disaster-related vulnerability in Indonesia

“…Cultural capital is difficult to operationalize and measure, suffers from fuzzy definitional boundaries between the cultural and non-cultural, and is prone to inexact attribution, meaning that everything or nothing could be defined as "culture" (Cochrane, 2006). Some anthropologists claim the concept of cultural capital justifies inequalities and power relationships that exclude certain minorities of a community and is filled with ethical pitfalls (Wiber & Lovell, 2004). Modernization scholars tend to posit culture and cultural values as internal barriers that contribute to a lack of societal development (Brahn, 2009;Liping, 2008).…”