The Harvey Lecture Series. In Good Years and in Bad: Food Strategies of Self-Reliant Societies

Colson, Elizabeth

doi:10.1086/jar.35.1.3629494

Cited by 201 publications

(77 citation statements)

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“…Another conclusion is that national systems of social welfare may occlude the individual perceptions of scarcity needed to trigger appropriate cultural responses, and so interfere with natural homeostatic responses. Colson (1979) makes the same point, although I suspect many anthropologists might disagree. Abernethy's practical policy recommendation is that mass education be aimed at clearing up "horn of plenty" misconceptions.…”

Section: Perceived Scarcity and Population Reductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…But these tendencies have more often been taken for granted than explained. And what appears to be "cultural conservatism" frequently consists, in fact, of rational (but verbally unexplained) practical decisions to reject innovations because the anticipated results do not fit with indigenous values (Boehm 1978;Colson 1979). When such actions are veiled by rationalizations alluding solely to the need to continue traditional usage, as they so frequently are, it is easy to ascribe them to "cultural conservatism."…”

Section: (1980:117)mentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Fresh Outlook on Cultural Selection

Boehm

1982

American Anthropologist

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By making vague but correct assumptions about heritability of morphological and behavioral characteristics, Darwin was able to build the simple notion of indirect competition among varying individuals into a grand explanation. His parsimonious characterization of natural (and sexual) selection operating randomly upon otherwise expanding populations has remained valuable for a modern biology based on genetics. And at present, many specific mechanisms of Darwinian selection have been observed and explained, sometimes with exact identification of behavioral genes involved. Such welldocumented insights have been applied to the modeling of entire ecosystems.Arrival of synthetic theory eventually stimulated careful analogy building by cultural anthropologists, but our success in identifying spec@'c mechanisms of cultural evolution has been limited. If cultural adaptive processes were nothing more than blind variationand-selective-retention involving culture pools highly similar to gene pools, the analogical dependency might not be unhealthy. But I believe most anthropologists realize, uneasily, that cultural evolution is too different from biological evolution for us to operate so heavily in terms of biological concepts. It is true that several well-developed subfields (cultural ecology, and a portion of political anthropology) do borrow effectively, from the biologists' traditions of cypologizing or looking to environment as the crucial independent variable, or from ecosystems approaches developed in studying plants and animals. But we still fail to understand the essential mechanics of cultural adaptive process in a way which compares with the precise understandings geneticists and ethologists presently have attained xn their own spheres.Two recent books advance the cause of understanding cultural selection in its own right. In Programmed to Learn, a pair of biologists treat processes of cultural selection by trying to specify mechanisms more exactly than cultural anthropologists have been wont to do. Pulliam and Dunford first chronicle the evolution of learning capacity in general, then show how cultural selection could work by dual processes of biological and cultural "subtraction." The approach is both global and highly anthropological. In Population Pressure and Cultural Adjustment, Virginia Abernethy focuses upon one particular problem from the perspective of a member of our own discipline. Acknowledging biological mechanisms which preclude fully Malthusian expansion of populations in other animals, for humans she identifies a specific psychological mechanism that triggers the various cultural responses which can limit population expansion before it becomes dangerous to survival. GENETICS, LEARNING, AND CULTUREI shall treat first the general programmatic work by Pulliam and Dunford. At the start, they reject the view that the structure of the human psyche must be derived from relevant cross-cultural studies. Rather, one must first understand the mind, then derive general anthropological principles. The problem ...

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Section: Perceived Scarcity and Population Reductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Section: (1980:117)mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Fresh Outlook on Cultural Selection

Boehm

1982

American Anthropologist

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“…Risk, or the effect of variation on foraging returns over a given period, may mean that people employ coping strategies that minimize variance rather than strictly following a utility increase strategy, especially if food storage is ineffective or costly and temporal variation in resources is substantial (Colson 1979;Minc and Smith 1989;Smith 1983). Risk can result from stochastic variation in such variables as the frequency, predictability or duration of resource availability (and can be associated with severe resource depression and climatic variability), or the spatial extent or spatial homogeneity of resources (Halstead and O'Shea 1989:2.3).…”

Section: Oft and Risk Reductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lithics in the land of the lightning brothers : The Archaeology of Wardaman Country, Northern Territory

Clarkson¹

2007

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terra australis 25Terra Australis reports the results of archaeological and related research within the south and east of Asia, though mainly Australia, New Guinea and island Melanesia -lands that remained terra australis incognita to generations of prehistorians. Its subject is the settlement of the diverse environments in this isolated quarter of the globe by peoples who have maintained their discrete and traditional ways of life into the recent recorded or remembered past and at times into the observable present.Since the beginning of the series, the basic colour on the spine and cover has distinguished the regional distribution of topics as follows: ochre for Australia, green for New Guinea, red for South-East Asia and blue for the Pacific Islands. From 2001, issues with a gold spine will include conference proceedings, edited papers and monographs which in topic or desired format do not fit easily within the original arrangements. All volumes are numbered within the same series. List of volumes in Terra AustralisVolume 1: Burrill Lake and Currarong: Coastal Sites in Southern New South Wales. R.J. Lampert (1971) Volume 2: Ol Tumbuna: Archaeological Excavations in the Eastern Central Highlands, Papua New Guinea. J.P. White (1972) Volume 3 6.7. Cores found at quarries associated with lancet flakes. Note the large amounts of cortex on both cores, the cortical platform on one (A) and the single conchoidal scar on the platform of the other (B). 92 6.8. Conjoined quartzite cores and lancet flakes from A: a quarry near Wynbarr waterhole (Site 17), B and C: a quarry near Garnawala 2. Illustration C shows the actual conjoined core, while A and B show reconstructions of the original nodules and the series of flake removals taken as a slice through the centre of the platform. 93 6.9. Graphs showing the mean and standard deviations for changes in various aspects of scraper morphology as reduction intensity increases, as measured using Kuhn's GIUR or % perimeter retouched. A: mean retouched edge angle, B: % step terminated retouch, C: % perimeter retouched, D: curvature of the retouched edge, and E: % with notches. 96 6.10. Graphic depiction of changes to the frequency and evenness with which retouch is distributed across eight segments as retouch increases. 97 6.11. A reduction model for scrapers from Wardaman Country. A-C: increasing reduction. 98 6.12. Graphs showing the selection of a restricted range of flake shapes for scraper manufacture. A: marginal angle and elongation, and B: marginal angle and cross-section. 100 6.13. Changes in the morphology of points over the reduction sequence. A and B: changes in weight, and C: changes in the % of perimeter retouched. 103 6.14. Changes in point cross-section measured in two ways. A: lateral cross-section (width:thickness ratio), and B: longitudinal cross-section (length:thickness ratio). ForewordAlthough Chris Clarkson journeyed to the remote Victoria River region of the Northern Territory to investigate the prehistoric past, it is not the exotic location of the s...

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“…It would be useful to have historical information about all the varieties ever planted in Apau Ping. A relevant article (Colson 1979) stressed the importance of the time dimension with respect to knowledge. In the case of famine, occurring at long intervals, knowledge of appropriate food-collecting strategies may be limited to older members of a society, because only they have previously experienced famine (on knowledge of migration, see Eghenter in Eghenter and Sellato 1999).…”

Section: Age and Expertisementioning

confidence: 99%