The lack of data on subsistence and land-use patterns often impedes the design of ecologically sustainable, culturally appropriate, socially acceptable and politically feasible approaches to the legalisation of land tenure among indigenous peoples. With specific reference to Amerindians of the Gran Chaco, this thesis shows the extent to which a participatory research methodology can empower indigenous peoples in generating, articulating and communicating data which are vital to the support of their land claims. Fieldwork was conducted with Angaite Indians of the Paraguayan Chaco between 1994 and 1996. Participatory research methods included a census of ten villages (pop. 1,005), drawings of subsistence activities, a survey of material possessions, a time-allocation study, self-kept records of food intake, anthropometric measurements of children, self-kept records on wildlife use (in ten villages), and Indian-made maps of land-use. Satellite imagery provided the basis for the geographic analysis of landuse patterns at local and regional scales. The Angaite own some land but are surrounded by privately owned cattle ranches. Their actual land and resource-use patterns extend over an area ten times greater than that to which they are legally entitled. Although horticulture and paid labour are now the mainstay of the Indian subsistence economy, hunting and fishing continue to provide over 90% of their meat consumption. Hunting patterns are shown to affect a large number of animals but only a small number of species. Land-use is focused on the communal exploitation of resources at key sites spread over broad areas of land. This concept is not catered for in the current Paraguayan legislation, which is based on the principle of giving families a plot of land to farm. On the basis of data generated by the Angaite, this study underlines the need for a radical rethinking of how Indian land-rights might be legalised in a manner which enhances the ecological sustainability of their respective lifestyles. Fundamental to that rethinking is the empowerment of indigenous peoples to express and communicate their own views on their own needs for land.

LA-UR-09-02500A wide range of theories - resilience theory and the study of complex adaptive systems, for example - are advancing our understanding of anthropological systems. Recently, anthropologists have applied the panarchy framework to study socionatural systems. This framework allows researchers to assess growth, conservation, release, and reorganization in this nested-cycle model that operates simultaneously at multiple spatio-temporal scales. The long time-depth of the archaeological record is a critical factor in our ability to investigate human behavior within the panarchy's set of nested adaptive cycles.Archaeological investigation in the US Southwest has focused on processes of aggregation and culture change due to varying environmental and social conditions; the Pajarito Plateau, NM, has been the subject of archaeological research since the late 1800s. The Los Alamos National Laboratory portion of the Plateau has been thoroughly surveyed for cultural resources, but has received less attention by scholars than surrounding areas, including Bandelier National Monument. I use the panarchy framework to build a model of Puebloan settlement, land use, demography, and adaptation to assess the utility of the panarchy model for anthropological systems and fill a void in archaeologists' understanding of the Puebloan Southwest.I analyze patterns of residential and agricultural land use during the Rio Grande Coalition and Classic periods (A.D. 1150-1600) for the Pajarito Plateau. I conclude that there is no major change in the use of various landscape ranges between these periods. I reconstruct regional Puebloan momentary population and investigate recent evidence that supports a San Juan Basin source of the dramatic population increase during the Late Coalition. I also investigate aggregation into large plaza pueblos, the development of craft specialization, agricultural intensification, architectural change, and increased participation in the wider Rio Grande marketplace economy as responses of households, clans, villages, and the entire Pajarito population to the highly fluctuating climate of the local landscape. I address these results within the panarchy framework. Further, I argue that the Pajarito Plateau system continued after the population dispersed into the Rio Grande Valley below, to be closer to reliable sources of water and the growing Rio Grande economy.

The objective of this dissertation is to investigate the occurrence, determinants and consequences of obesity among the Inuit people in the central Canadian Arctic, based on the Keewatin Health Assessment Study (KHAS), conducted during 1990/91 in 8 Inuit communities in the Northwest Territories (n=434 adults aged 18yr+). Data from three other surveys are included for comparison: (1) the 1190 Manitoba Heart Health Survey among 2200 predominantly Caucasian residents of the province of Manitoba; (2) the 1986-87 Northern Indian Chronic Disease Study among 704 Cree-Ojibwa Indians from Northern Ontario and Manitoba; and (3) the 1990-91 Chukotka Chronic Disease Survey among 362 Chuckchi and Inuit in coastal Chukotka in the Russian Far North. Judged by both body mass index and two skinfold thicknesses, obesity among the Inuit in the Keewatin region is as prevalent as it is in the general North American population. This is a new development over the past two or three decades, the result of rapidly changing physical activity, diet and other lifestyles. Obesity is more prevalent among women, among whom there is also a higher prevalence of central fat patterning. Age, education and non-smoking status (females only) are consistently identified as independent predictors of various obesity indices on multivariate analysis. While better educated men are more likely to be obese, the relationship is reversed in women, possibly due to the different sex roles and their associated stress levels in a rapidly acculturating and modernizing society. When different categories of obesity indices are compared, there is a consistent pattern of an increasing trend in blood pressure and one or more of the lipids but no significant change in glucose or insulin level. This observation distinguishes the Inuit and Chukchi from Caucasians and Amerindians. Even where a relationship exists, as with triglycerides and HDL-cholesterol, the magnitude of response is also lower among the Inuit. The differential effect of obesity on glucose, blood pressure and lipids in Inuit compared to non-Inuit suggests a type of selective insulin resistance, the underlying mechanism of obesity and several chronic diseases. The Inuit metabolism reflects their almost exclusive diet of fat and proteins. Apart from its public health importance, the study of Inuit obesity can shed some light into issues related to the peopling of the Americas: are the Inuit "exempt" from the "New World syndrome", and can the "thrifty genotype" explain the differential occurrence of diabetes among Arctic and Subarctic hunter-gatherers? It provides an opportunity to elucidate fundamental questions relating to the interaction of genetic and environmental factors in disease causation and distribution.

Objectives: The overall aim of this research was to describe the health-seeking behaviours (HSBs) of people in rural Makwanpur, Nepal, and to analyse the patient, household, community, health-system, knowledge and illness factors, and the psychological, social and cultural processes which explain these behaviours. Background: Much about the health status of populations and individuals can be understood by studying how people utilise their health services and the factors associated with this utilisation. HSB studies act as a starting point for the planning of health programmes and the structuring of health systems. Nepal, with its shortage of health providers and funding, its low service usage and its pluralistic medical landscape provides an interesting setting in which to examine HSBs. Most health policies in this context have been devised without taking into account the perspectives of the system users. Moreover, limited formal research on this topic has been carried out in this context. Methods: This study involved a mixed-methods, explanatory sequential design consisting of two phases – quantitative data collection followed by qualitative data collection. Quantitative data was collected using a cross-sectional household survey carried out in 2,334 households across ten VDCs in Makwanpur district between April 2011 and August 2011. Households were selected using a random sampling method. The survey asked about care-seeking in response to an acute episode of illness in the previous one month. Qualitative data was collected after the quantitative data using semi-structured household interviews (n=90) in three VDCs between November and December 2012. The Qualitative interviews were designed to compliment the quantitative findings and to determine the explicit factors associated with care decisions. Results: Of the 2,334 households surveyed,46% had at least one episode of illness in the month prior. The majority of illnesses were infectious or parasitic diseases (42%). Of those households experiencing illnesses, 69% chose to seek care outside of the home; 22% used traditional healers, 37% used allopathic providers and 12% opted for pharmacies as a first option. Sixteen did nothing to address their illnesses, sighting geography, finances, workload and lack of severity as the reasons. Regression models revealed that a host of different patient, household, community, illness, health facility and knowledge factors were associated with care decisions depending on the decision, but illness factors had the greatest impact overall on whether or not a household sought some care or care outside of the home, while household level factors had the greatest impact on the type of care sought outside of the home and the length of delays before seeking care. Patient gender had an impact on whether or not allopathic care was used at least once. Qualitative results revealed that health facility factors were also equally important in determining households’ conscious decision-making about specific providers. Conclusions: Overall it appears that people in Makwanpur are not underutilising health services as suspected. Households use certified government providers most frequently to address their illnesses, and do not rely too heavily on traditional healers or informal providers exclusively. The results indicate that while illness and household factors are important, in order to improve HSBs and increase allopathic care utilisation, a focus should be on improving health service delivery rather than on changing HSBs. However, in order to decrease delays in care-seeking, a focus should be made to reduce household-level barriers to care as well.

Despite the fact that swidden agriculture has been the subject of decades of research, questions remain about the extent to which it is constrained by demographic growth and if it can adapt to environmental limits. In this dissertation I analyze ethnographic and ethnohistorical evidence from the Toledo District, Belize, and suggest that Q'eqchi' Maya swidden agriculture may be more ecologically adaptive than previously thought. I use social network analysis to examine farmer labor exchange networks from a chronosequence of five villages where swidden is used. Results suggest that changes in land-use patterns, network structure, and reciprocity rates may increase the system's resilience to changes in the forest's agricultural productivity. I develop a novel interpretation of labor reciprocity that highlights how unreciprocated exchanges, when they occur within the context of a social network, may limit overexploitation of a common property resource. These results are then interpreted in the context of panarchy theory; I suggest that the structural variability observed in labor exchange networks may explain how Q'eqchi' swidden maintains its identity under changing environmental conditions - a definition of resilience. Thus, the resulting picture of Q'eqchi' swidden is one of socioecological resilience rather than homeostasis; dynamic labor exchange networks help maintain a village's social cohesion, ultimately limiting pioneer settlements and slowing overall rates of deforestation. A historical and demographic analysis of market incursions into southern Belize supports this conclusion.

In this dissertation, I examine how biological data practices enable researchers to interact with and enact biological life in statistical ways, and how this poses challenges to the use and integration of biological knowledge with clinical practices. Instead of considering data as a pre-existing cognitive representation of the world, I combine scholarship on the anthropology of science with scholarship from science and technology studies to consider data as a form of material practice. I consider, in other words, how data is intertwined with technologies, people, and values, such that data is used to make normative and naturalized claims about biology and disease. To explore the generation, interpretation, and use of biological data, I focus on the field of “metabonomics”—the post-genomic study of metabolism—as it is carried out within the Biomolecular Medicine Laboratory (BMM) at Imperial College London. In doing so, I examine how metabonomics researchers use biochemical techniques and multivariate statistics to investigate metabolism and disease. After providing an overview of the literature, central questions, and methodology that frame this dissertation, I examine how multivariate statistical practices are central to the historical identity and epistemic culture of metabonomics research at the BMM. From there, I demonstrate how multivariate statistics require and enable metabonomics to enact metabolism as an inherently complex entity. Consequently, I examine how researchers struggle to assign the categories of “normal” and “abnormal” to dynamic notions of metabolism and health. I then explore how the translation of metabonomics knowledge into clinical practices places value on multivariate forms and large volumes of information, eclipsing the importance of human interpretation and judgment. Finally, I examine how metabonomics research is used to develop personalized medicine, but in ways that make it difficult to address the health of individual patients.

This thesis examines the experiences of people living with dystonia1 and the ways these are represented by people living with dystonia, the Dystonia Society, neurologists, quality of life (QOL) researchers and pharmaceutical companies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted within the Dystonia Society and on projects developing a disease-specific QOL measure, and investigating the impact of dystonia on people’s QOL, the thesis explores a series of questions about the conceptual and practical problems inherent in such measures. It asks: • How dystonia is defined and represented and its impact on people’s lives • Whether people’s experiences of living with dystonia can be adequately mapped by generic or disease-specific QOL measures and how the methodology used in their creation might affect such representations • How QOL measures are used to classify and compare and why it is now deemed necessary to represent people’s experiences in this form The thesis is contextualised within a historical account of the origins of QOL measurement and the social and economic context to its rapid expansion, including the pharmaceutical industry’s use of QOL to bring together diverse groups of actors. I address traditional anthropological questions about measuring and creating universal systems of classification and valuation, but go beyond this to link QOL measurement to the classification and hierarchisation of “audit culture”. I describe how attempts to articulate “the patient’s voice” through measures of QOL can silence the voices of people with limiting conditions and suggest we approach their experiences through narratives that embed their conditions in their lives and give them a meaning that is not wholly negative. I argue that even though the phrase “quality of life” promises an empowering and holistic vision of health, there are two main reasons why QOL measurement cannot fulfil this promise. Firstly, it is primarily a tool for audit, and secondly, new measures reproduce the assumptions of existing measures or clinical models and exclude the elements that people consider most important in maintaining quality of life. Paradoxically, the discourse can reduce people’s QOL when it is used to justify rationing in the UK and redirection of resources internationally. However, despite my criticisms of QOL, I conclude that it has benefited people living with dystonia by creating a discursive space for the discussion of health in non-clinical terms and a language to make claims for resources and the acknowledgement of their experiences. 1A chronic neurological condition involving involuntary muscle spasms in one or more body parts.

This thesis examines the experiences of people living with dystonia1 and the ways these are represented by people living with dystonia, the Dystonia Society, neurologists, quality of life (QOL) researchers and pharmaceutical companies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted within the Dystonia Society and on projects developing a disease-specific QOL measure, and investigating the impact of dystonia on people’s QOL, the thesis explores a series of questions about the conceptual and practical problems inherent in such measures. It asks: • How dystonia is defined and represented and its impact on people’s lives • Whether people’s experiences of living with dystonia can be adequately mapped by generic or disease-specific QOL measures and how the methodology used in their creation might affect such representations • How QOL measures are used to classify and compare and why it is now deemed necessary to represent people’s experiences in this form The thesis is contextualised within a historical account of the origins of QOL measurement and the social and economic context to its rapid expansion, including the pharmaceutical industry’s use of QOL to bring together diverse groups of actors. I address traditional anthropological questions about measuring and creating universal systems of classification and valuation, but go beyond this to link QOL measurement to the classification and hierarchisation of “audit culture”. I describe how attempts to articulate “the patient’s voice” through measures of QOL can silence the voices of people with limiting conditions and suggest we approach their experiences through narratives that embed their conditions in their lives and give them a meaning that is not wholly negative. I argue that even though the phrase “quality of life” promises an empowering and holistic vision of health, there are two main reasons why QOL measurement cannot fulfil this promise. Firstly, it is primarily a tool for audit, and secondly, new measures reproduce the assumptions of existing measures or clinical models and exclude the elements that people consider most important in maintaining quality of life. Paradoxically, the discourse can reduce people’s QOL when it is used to justify rationing in the UK and redirection of resources internationally. However, despite my criticisms of QOL, I conclude that it has benefited people living with dystonia by creating a discursive space for the discussion of health in non-clinical terms and a language to make claims for resources and the acknowledgement of their experiences. 1A chronic neurological condition involving involuntary muscle spasms in one or more body parts.

This dissertation challenges traditional interpretations that indigenous groups who settled the Grand Canyon during the Pueblo Period (AD 700 -1225) relied heavily on maize to meet their subsistence needs. Instead they are viewed as dynamic ecosystem engineers who employed fire and natural plant succession to engage in a wild plant subsistence strategy that was supplemented to varying degrees by maize. By examining the relationship between archaeological sites and the natural environment throughout the Canyon, new settlement pattern models were developed. These models attempt to account for the spatial distribution of Virgin people, as represented by Virgin Gray Ware ceramics, Kayenta as represented by Tusayan Gray Ware ceramics, and the Cohonina as represented by San Francisco Mountain Gray Ware ceramics, through an examination of the relationships of sites to various aspects of the natural environment (biotic communities, soils, physical geography, and hydrology). Inferences constructed from the results of geographic information system analyses of the Park’s legacy site data, indicate that Virgin groups were the first to arrive at the Canyon, around AD 700 and leaving around AD 1200. They practiced a split subsistence strategy, which included seasonal movements between maize agricultural areas in the western Inner Canyon and wild resource production areas in the pinyon-juniper forests on the western North Rim plateaus. The Kayenta occupied the North Rim, South Rim and Inner Canyon, throughout the entire Pueblo Period. Their subsistence system relied heavily on wild resource production on both rims supplemented by low-level maize agriculture practiced seasonally on the wide deltas in the eastern Inner Canyon. The Cohonina were the last to arrive and the first to leave, as they occupied the Canyon for about 300 years from AD 800–1100. They were the most prolific maize farmers, practicing it in the Inner Canyon near the mouth of Havasu Creek, but still seasonally exploiting wild resource on the western South Rim. Based on my interpretations, use of the Canyon from AD 700-1225, is viewed as a dynamic interplay between indigenous groups and their environment. As they settled into the Canyon and managed the diverse ecology to meet their subsistence needs.

In this thesis, I examine the politics, poetics, and logics of uneventful human harm in the United States by tracking the life and afterlife of a chemically contaminated emergency housing unit. In 2005, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) deployed 120,000 trailers to the US Gulf Coast to house those displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Chemical testing, spurred by reports of inhabitant illness, revealed elevated levels of formaldehyde emanating from the plywood walls of the trailers. After being reclaimed by the federal government and beginning in 2010, the FEMA trailers were resold at auction to every corner of the country. Resold trailers gravitated to precarious populations at the poles of rural capital accumulation—from oil patches in North Dakota to reservations in Washington. These trailers serve as an exceptional substrate for an investigation into the anatomy of the uneventful as they once approached the apex of eventfulness as a national controversy and now reside in the shadows of the everyday. This thesis apprehends and theorizes these dispersed and ordinary instruments of domestic harm across multiple registers: epistemological, material, spatial, and affective. I examine how failures of matter and meaning shaped and patterned the lives of those who inhabited the FEMA trailers as their lives became framed by chemical off-gassing, architectural insufficiency, material deterioration, and electrical short-circuiting. Crossing scales and venues, I interrogate the modalities of scientific incomprehension that erode the perception, admittance, or substantiation of mass chemical exposure. These technical processes, along with cultural horizons of eventfulness and the chronicity of disaster, foreclosed avenues of toxic harm accountability. These ‘economies of abandonment’ bring into relief the contemporary biopolitical priorities in which the FEMA trailer—an ostensible protection from harm that fosters illness—becomes possible. FEMA trailer residents attend to the minute, gradual, and ongoing symptoms of exposure to discern the reality and magnitude of residential contamination. The body of the exposed becomes both an epistemic instrument and, across time, the means of making low-level, chronic, and cruddy chemical exposures into eventful instances that drive individuals to action.