This thesis is an ethnography of how people live with recurring disaster threats in Far North Queensland, a region in the north east of Australia where cyclones are part of the annual cycle of weather. For the people who inhabit this region, cyclones occur amidst a landscape of natural beauty and thus living with cyclones is described as “living in paradise” where hell happens intermittently. In the past two decades, the interest in understanding how people live with hazards and disasters has grown significantly and a large volume of literature now exists addressing the social dimensions of hazards and disasters from a wide variety of disciplines. However, the majority of this literature focuses on single catastrophic events. This thesis seeks to provide new insights into the study of hazards and disasters by focusing on a region that experiences disaster threats as regular, annual occurrences that are anticipated. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with coastal dwelling communities in Far North Queensland this thesis argues that living with cyclones is a process that involves a variety of different activities, decisions and strategies, many of which are so intertwined and manifested in the mundane practices of everyday life that they cease to be acknowledged. Developing this argument involves a reflection on how the weather and climate are perceived, the way that uncertainty and risk is dealt with and negotiated, and ultimately how such negotiations lead to the choice to stay in a cyclone-prone place. By tracing how people live with cyclones in Far North Queensland, this thesis suggests that cyclones are known in multiple ways and their meanings are subject to change with time. Thus, cyclones are both catastrophic disasters and events that become a normal part of life.

Every deaf person, whether they sign or do not, considers, works through, embodies, and performs the different elements of her deafness via the vessel of her own deaf body. Therefore, deaf perspectives on ‘reality’ are necessarily dominated by the visual-tactile ways that each deaf person uniquely connects with her interior self, with others, and with her surroundings. Because each deaf person’s experience of her own body is unambiguously hers alone, so too are the ways she uniquely calibrates the physical degrees of her specific deaf condition with her particular socio-cultural understandings of her own life and those of other people; and finally will determine how (and to what extent) she cultivates her ever-evolving habits of visual-tactility. I argue that she performs this calibration continuously, and that her performances of this process give rise to externalised material shapes – both literal and figurative – via the ways these adjustments are made witnessable via her flesh. Given this, ‘DEAF space’ (Gulliver 2009), the physical space delineated by deaf-specific modes of visual-tactile authority, can be shown to be created not only by groups of deaf people, but by each individual deaf person as she conducts this work of authoring her own being. As such, this thesis examines the outward and witnessable shapes exerted by performances of each deaf interlocutor’s view on her own DEAF way of being onto her surroundings. In so doing, I mobilise some of these external evidences to make a crucial claim about DEAF ontology: completely reversing the position that deafness is a reductive condition of an otherwise hearing body, DEAFness is reframed to be a productive condition of being, a creative and essential quality inherent to all deaf people.

Time is finite and no organism can avoid the allocation dilemma that this necessarily entails. A quintessential trade-off is that between parental investment and reproduction, otherwise known as the quality-quantity trade-off. However, humans may be exceptional among apes given our high quantity production of high quality offspring. This success has been argued only to be possible by breeding communally. In this thesis I explore questions surrounding trade-offs, communal breeding and their fitness consequences in a small-scale foraging society, the Agta. The first analysis examines the composition of Agta childcare using an innovative form of data collection to maximise sample sizes, previously a major limitation in hunter-gatherer research. The Agta, like many small-scale societies are prolific communal breeders. However, contra previous conclusions, juveniles and non-kin appeared to provide more allocare than grandmothers. Interactions with non-kin were associated with significant decreases in maternal workload, while interactions with siblings and grandmothers were not. The next analysis explores why both kin and non-kin behave cooperatively, finding support for kin selection among close kin and reciprocity for distant kin and non-kin allocare. Communal breeding appears to be an important mechanism to ensure enough childcare was received in the absence of other strategies to counter shortfalls in household energy budgets. The next analysis asks, what are the fitness consequences of maternal social networks and allocare? Mothers’ network centrality positively correlated with non-kin allocare as well as reproductive success, revealing the adaptive value of communal breeding. These results highlight the optimising nature of hunter-gatherer cooperation and life history strategies.

Kaloleni estate in Nairobi was built in the 1940s by British colonial authorities. It was designed as a model garden suburb for African families, and intended to produce a new type of urban colonial subject. Today the estate is rundown and dilapidated, but still home to many descendants of the original residents. It is now marked for 'regeneration' as part of Vision 2030, a radical planning project that promises to kickstart Nairobi's urban renewal. This thesis lies at the intersection of the anthropology of material culture and the anthropology of history and time. It considers the legacies of a colonial housing scheme, and the way place is produced over time. It explores how the estate has been imaginatively and materially reconfigured by residents’ own ambitions and agendas as they negotiate an uncertain future. In particular, it highlights the generative relationship between people and architecture, and the way the accumulated traces of decades leave their mark, shaping ideas about the past and about how the future city should be. Fieldwork was primarily conducted in Kaloleni estate, Nairobi. A short research period followed ex-residents of Kaloleni ‘upcountry’, back to their rural homelands. The thesis also incorporates archival sources, contemporary documents and visualisations of urban planning, as well as observations of online interactions taking place on social media.

From small-scale food-sharing among hunter-gatherers to large-scale institutions in modern industrial societies, cooperation is central to human success. This thesis focuses on the former, exploring cooperative dynamics among the Agta, a Filipino hunter-gatherer population. I develop a novel experimental approach to exploring hunter-gatherer cooperative behaviour which simultaneously assesses the amount individuals cooperate and who they cooperate with. In contrast to much previous experimental literature, this non-anonymous design permits tests of specific theories for the evolution of cooperation, including: kin selection (cooperating with related individuals); reciprocity (cooperating with others who cooperate in return); and tolerated theft/demand sharing (taking from those with more resources), among other adaptive hypotheses. Using two experimental games – one exploring giving behaviour (donating resources to others) and another exploring demand sharing behaviour (taking resources from others) – I find that individuals from camps with a greater probability of repeated interactions give more to and take less from others. When individuals give to others it is directed towards kin and reciprocating partners, while when individuals take they do so from those with more resources, regardless of kinship or reciprocity. As predicted by theoretical models, this suggests that reciprocal transfers occur when interactions are repeated, while demand sharing occurs when repeated interactions are less likely. Differences in the frequency of repeated interactions may therefore explain some cross-cultural variation in forager food-sharing practices. This thesis also explores the effects of reputation on cooperative and interaction networks, finding that many aspects of forager social networks may reflect the trade of commodities in biological markets. Additionally, assessment of the ontogenetic roots of Agta cooperative behaviour suggests that 3 who children cooperate with, but not overall levels of cooperation, change over childhood in ways which are consistent with adaptive evolutionary hypotheses. These findings provide an insight into the evolutionary and ecological roots of hunter-gatherer cooperation.

Museums house collections of miniature objects produced by the indigenous peoples of the American Pacific Northwest. Overlooked and subjected to academic seriation which categorised them as expressions of transcultural inauthenticity, they have never previously been the subject of systematic study. This project develops a new methodology for the study of these miniatures, viewing miniaturisation as an imaginative agent of communication in human social relations, which uses combinations of affordances and semiotics to distribute ideological information to knowledgeable audiences. Through a detailed affordance study in combination with fieldwork in four indigenous communities, miniaturisation becomes understood as an effective method of communicating threatened cultural information across long distances and time spans, incorporating diverse commercial, pedagogical, cultural and magical motivations. By understanding miniaturisation in this way, this project can fundamentally change how museums approach imaginative material culture, generate substantial new insights into the ideological aspects of Native Northwest Coast material production and provide tantalising glimpses of emotion and motivation among historic carving traditions.

How people survive and behave in different environment are some questions that Human Behavior Ecology seeks to answer. The choices that humans make in such conditions can either be considering parental and economical investments, or the pursuit of self or group interest. Using a Tibetan Pastoralist Society as a case study, this thesis explores how Tibetans adapt their behaviour to different contexts, from an evolutionary ecological, anthropological and demographic perspective. I start the thesis with a brief history and demographical presentation of how these Tibetan herders behave within and outside domestic life. The main analysis part starts from which gender get more parental care, by looking at duration of breastfeeding and the interbirth intervals. I find female-biased parental investment. Possible reasons are the high female workloads and the improved social status of women derived from the high economical contribution made by them. The next analysis focusing on how wealth flows, the fertility and the length of the trial time affects the stability of marriages. Then I examine the effects of kin on child well-being. Within domestic life, concepts like ‘Grandmother Hypothesis’ and ‘Mother Hypothesis’ are well-documented. While this research makes a contrary finding that it is the older male family members who are invested more in child caring than the females. The next analysis considers questions beyond domestic life by examining herders’ social networks. I investigate the motivations behind Tibetans who choose to herd in groups, and others who prefer to herd alone. Economic gift games are used to explore the cooperation strategy within villages, whether pastoralist prefer to share limited resources with their genetic relatives over others. The analysis concluded that stated social norms are slow to change, while actual individual behaviours appear to evolve faster, responding to recent social and political changes in the region.

This thesis uses barkcloth artefacts as a methodological point of entry and fieldsite, to explore their material properties. It argues that the material properties of barkcloth artefacts are indexical of social relations, as it moves between contexts; exploring the nature of properties as inherently diverse or diversely exploited, rather than homogenously embedded. The thesis argues that properties are processual, and uses the operational sequence or chaîne opératoire as a route to beginning to unpack the attribution of these qualities. The thesis follows the material through two distinct contexts; beginning with a collection of barkcloth artefacts in the Economic Botany Collection, at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Here artefacts illustrate the relationship between people and plants through technical process; and are packed within the botanical episteme and a British history of material relations, exploitation and development. From within the collections store, laboratory, and herbarium at Kew, material origins and structure are foregrounded as inherent to material identity. From Kew, research relocates to Maluku in eastern Indonesia; to a region situated historically as foundational in the exploitation of plant ‘resources’ and botanical exploration. Thematically then, the region is congruous with the Kew context. Nuaulu barkcloth artefacts, as explored in Nua Nea village, on Seram island are efficacious in male life-transformation rituals, and clan constitution. Barkcloth properties are generative and contingent. The efficacy of these artefacts is inseparable from the proximal dynamics as managed through their ongoing coming into being: bodily, temporal and territorial. A processual approach to barkcloth artefacts’ material properties across contexts allows access to the nature and diversity of the relationships between humans and non-humans: in this case, with plants, and trees. This is in what plant materials are able to reflect back at us, as transformed living kinds.

This thesis explores the social and cultural context of breast cancer risk in Greece, with particular reference to the intersections between religious philanthropy and individualised medicine. Addressing the experiences of women with family history of the disease, it explores how scientific knowledge-practices that employ specific configurations of risk management and bring forth a demand for self-monitoring, are ‘coproduced’ with local cosmologies and social orders. The thesis draws on longterm ethnographic research in Halkidiki, Northern Greece, navigating between a prevention centre organised by an Orthodox Christian Convent, and local communities. A shorter part of fieldwork research in Athens to contextualise with broader developments in the capital. At the intersections of traditional Orthodox Christianity’s values of philanthropy and modern biomedical and genetic medicine projects of population screening, concepts of risk and heredity come in dialogue with notions of duty to and freedom of the body-self, fate and predestination, in various ways. These inform women’s perceptions of embodied risk as a domain of biosocial uncertainties, where knowledge and informed action are weighted against culturally-specific ways of living temporality. In effect, this thesis records the possibilities, paradoxes and constraints that emerge in situated contexts, as notions and practices associated with risk management and responsibility are conceptualised and acted upon in the face of uncertain futures.

This thesis is an interdisciplinary inquiry into the role of local norms and cultural institutions in the conservation of the endangered tiger, which is typically protected in exclusive areas by national governments and transnational NGOs. I do this by investigating the factors – ecological, cultural and socio-political - that have allowed a newly identified tiger population to exist in an unprotected setting in the Dibang Valley region of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, the traditional homeland of the Idu Mishmi people. As the research question spans social and natural science realms, the study was conducted empirically using a combination of qualitative approaches such as participant observation, in-depth interviews, and quantitative methods, notably camera traps and longitudinal hunting offtake surveys. Following the theoretical framework, study site and methods chapters, the first data chapter is an ethnographic account of the Idu including cosmology, land relations, old and newly emerging political and economic stratifications, and Idu-animal relations. I argue that Idu practices in relation to wildlife must be understood within the broader socio-cosmological context as Idu natural, spiritual and social worlds are deeply interwoven. In the second data chapter, I assess socio-cultural regulations on hunting and consumption of wild animals by exploring how Idu hunting taboos regulate human-nature and human-human relations, and their changing nature. Through statistical models and interviews I show that Idu taboos do act to reduce wild meat consumption, however rich Idus and rich outsiders consume the most meat, often with little regard to taboos, while poorer Idus hunt to supply meat to the rich while observing taboos strictly. In the third data chapter, I assess the impact of Idu hunting on tigers and their prey by comparing animal densities and habitat use, derived from camera trap data, in three sites with different levels of hunting pressure. I do not find evidence for hunting-induced depletion of wildlife in any of the sites suggesting hunting sustainability. In the final data chapter, I explore the factors that may promote or undermine sustainability of Idu hunting. In particular, I demonstrate the nuanced role of cosmology in ensuring that tigers are conserved even in the face of rapidly changing socio-economic circumstances. In response to the thesis question, I conclude that tigers have continued to thrive in Dibang Valley due to a multi-layered interaction of Idu land tenure and land-use, hunting ontology and taboos grounded in cosmology, species ecology, and the Indian government’s protectionist policies that have so far restricted large-scale outsider settlement in Dibang Valley. I reflect on the tiger’s future in Dibang Valley in light of forthcoming hydropower dams and proposals for the state takeover of tiger conservation. I argue for ‘place-based’ conservation focused on contextually-relevant approaches formulated with local people.