Environmental Social Sciences: Methods and Research Design

by Edited by Ismael Vaccaro , Eric Alden Smith , Shankar Aswani

• ISBN13: 9780521125710
• ISBN10: 0521125715
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-12-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The relationship between human communities and the environment is extremely complex. In order to resolve the issues involved with this relationship, interdisciplinary research combining natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities is necessary. Here, specialists summarise methods and research strategies for various aspects of social research devoted to environmental issues. Each chapter is illustrated with ethnographic and environmental examples, ranging from Australia to Amazonia, from Madagascar to the United States, and from prehistoric and historic cases to contemporary rural and urban ones. It deals with climate change, deforestation, environmental knowledge, natural reserves, politics and ownership of natural resources, and the effect of differing spatial and temporal scales. Contributing to the intellectual project of interdisciplinary environmental social science, this book shows the possibilities social science can provide to environmental studies and to larger global problems and thus will be of equal interest to social and natural scientists and policy makers.

Author Biography

Ismael Vaccaro is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the School of Environment at McGill University, Montral. Eric Alden Smith is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington. Shankar Aswani is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	p. vii
Foreword	p. x
Preface	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
People, numbers, and natural resources: demography in environmental research	p. 11
Production decisions and time allocation: a guide to data collection	p. 35
Analyzing the politics of natural resources: from theories of property rights to institutional analysis and beyond	p. 57
Extreme events, tipping points, and vulnerability: methods in the political economy of environment	p. 80
Local communities and natural resources: ethnobiology in practice	p. 110
Mapping histories: cultural landscapes and walkabout methods	p. 132
Metaphors and myths in news reports of an Amazonian "Lost Tribe": society, environment and literary analysis	p. 157
Water decision-makers in a desert city: text analysis and environmental social science	p. 188
Linking human and natural systems: social networks, environment, and ecology	p. 212
Khat commodity chains in Madagascar: multi-sited ethnography at multiple scales	p. 238
Spatiotemporal methodologies in environmental anthropology: geographic information systems, remote sensing, landscape changes, and local knowledge	p. 266
Deep time, diachronic change, and the integration of multi-scalar data: archaeological methods for exploring human-environment dynamics	p. 299
Comparing trajectories of climate, class, and production: an historical ecology of American yeomen	p. 322
Socioecological methods for designing marine conservation programs: a Solomon Islands example	p. 349
Index	p. 377
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