Case Studies in Human Ecology

by Bates, Daniel G.; Lees, Sarah H.; Lees, Susan H.

• ISBN13: 9780306452468
• ISBN10: 0306452464
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-07-01
• Publisher: Plenum Pub Corp

Summary

This practical text responds to renewed interest in environmental issues by providing accessible case study material for courses in human ecology, cultural ecology, and cultural geography. Carefully selected from the journal Human Ecology, these published case studies represent a broad cross-section of contemporary research in the application of human ecology to a wide variety of problems worldwide. Articles present original data and utilize various methodologies while offering new insights into foraging or hunting and gathering, pastoralism, and agriculture.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(13)
I. FORAGING	13	(140)
Australian Abriginal Subsistence in the Western Desert	17	(38)
Scott Cane
The Ecological Basis of Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence in African Rain Forests: The Mbuti of Eastern Zaire	55	(30)
Terese B. Hart
John A. Hart
Batak Foraging Camps Today: A Window to the History of a Hunting-Gathering Economy	85	(18)
James F.Eder
Northern Islands, Human Error, and Environmental Degradation	103	(50)
Thomas H. McGovern
Gerald F. Bigelow
Thomas Amorosi
Daniel Russell
II. PASTORALISM	153	(80)
Who Survives Drought? Measuring Winners and Losers among the Ariaal Rendille Pastoralists of Kenya	159	(16)
Elliot Fratkin
Eric Abella Roth
Coping with Drought: Responses of Herders and Livestock in Contrasting Savanna Environments in Southern Zimbabwe	175	(20)
Ian Scoones
From Zomo to Yak: Change in a Sherpa Village	195	(24)
Naomi H. Bishop
What Alpine Peasants Have in Common: Observations on a Communal Tenure in a Swiss Village	219	(14)
Robert McC. Netting
III. SUBSISTENCE AND INTENSIVE AGRICULTURE	233	(160)
Changing Household Composition, Labor Patterns, and Fertility in a Highland New Guinea Population	237	(14)
Patricia Lyons Johnson
Variation and Change in Fertility in West Central Nepal	251	(20)
Steven Folmar
Land Use, Soil Loss, and Sustainable Agriculture in Rwanda	271	(18)
Daniel C. Clay
Laurence A. Lewis
Agricultural Intensification in a Philippine Frontier Community: Impact on Labor Efficiency and Farm Diversity	289	(22)
W. Thomas Conelly
Seventeenth-Century Organic Agriculture in China	311	(16)
Wen Dazhong
David Pimentel
Kofyar Cash-Cropping: Choice and Change in Indigenous Agricultural Development	327	(22)
Robert McC. Netting
M. Priscilla Stone
Glenn Davis Stone
Time, Space, and Transnational Flows: Critical Historical Conjunctures and Explaining Change in Northern Nigerian Agriculture	349	(16)
Louise D. Lennihan
Ecology and Mormon Settlement in Northeastern Arizona	365	(28)
William S. Abruzzi
Index	393