acase@tulane.edu / 1 / Nicole Katin

(Agro)pastoralism in Sahelian Niger, as elsewhere, operates through household enterprises. Katsinen-ko’en (Fulбe) households, interconnected within kin and community networks, utilize a range of flexible strategies to manage a variety of ecological and economic risks. This dissertation argues that (agro)pastoralist households and communities maintain or improve viability in risky environments first by employing various mobility patterns, among other strategies, and relying on the tightly knit interdependence between household and herd. Secondly, households that most successfully sustain a cooperative integrity (i.e. partnerships between husband and wife, or wives, and parents and children) to negotiate decisions and strategies best withstand adversities such as droughts. The continuance of vital links between household and herd helps the household enterprise more easily weather difficult times and profit during advantageous times. Thirdly, the transfer of endowments from parents to children of ecological, economic and political knowledges and socio-economic networks ensures the continuity of family livelihoods. This dissertation analyzes a range of household/herd mobility patterns on a livelihood continuum from sedentary agropastoralism to exclusive pastoralism, and the household decisions that lead to those mobilities. In this way, it adds to a growing body of literature that examines household strategies employed in very uncertain natural environments, contributing to pastoral studies and environmental anthropology. By folding household economics and political ecology into household ecology, it analyses resource and asset transfers within and between households, all under the influence of the natural and political-economic environments. Contributing to development anthropology, I argue that the most important buffer against the risks of unpredictable environments is a stable, undivided household, migrating with and managing its own herd. I conclude by showing how development research and projects should support household/herd integrity to enhance livelihood security. When government or development agencies institute policies and projects that remove children from the household, or separate households and herds, they endanger the integrity of the household and the reproduction of livelihoods that make essential contributions to national economies. Rather than urging pastoralists to modify their livelihoods to fit images held by ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION administrators, these organizations and agencies should help pastoralists to build on adaptations that already facilitate their management of risky environments.

Two markets located in Bamako, Mali, West Africa specialize in the commodification of wildlife, and in so doing contest western-centric notions of globalization. Founded in traditional medicine, the Marabagaw Yoro sells wildlife to serve the needs of the local community, while the Artisana, a state sponsored institution, manufactures fashion accoutrements from wildlife and is oriented towards meeting the demands of tourists. Actors in both markets effectively curb the impact of national and international forces and demonstrate the necessity of putting local-global relations at the heart of transnational studies. Malians are not weak and reactive, but potent and proactive. They become so by engaging in networks that move out from the two markets and that intersect to a degree. Through these networks, local actors negotiate and/or manipulate national and international forces for personal benefit for example, using wildlife for profit, despite national and international sanctions. As such, these markets are sites of articulation, where local resource users engage the world at large and actively negotiate a myriad of values as well as mediate political and economic pressures. Investigating these networks helps us understand the actual, empirical complexities of globalization while allowing for the agency of local actors. Supplemental File: Wild Species of the APT and their Conservation Status This file is an Excel spreadsheet of all wild species recorded in association with the Animal Parts Trade (APT) of Mali. It includes the following classes of vertebrates: Pisces, Aves, Reptilia, and Mammalia, as well as provides their conservation status and additional details.

This dissertation explores why Puerto Rico’s primary stakeholders’ participation in fisheries management is tokenistic at best. While participation discourses are present in Puerto Rico’s fisheries management, a parallel discourse about ‘overfishing’ and the ‘tragedy of the commons’ has created an irreconcilable gap between primary stakeholders and the management institutions. As part of this study I collected data in an arena where various key actors (commercial fishermen, recreational fishermen and agency experts) face each other in the consultation processes, i.e. scoping meetings and public hearings. These encounters proved to occur on an (un)common ground where participation in fisheries policy-making was nearly impossible due to: 1) knowledge conflicts between users and institutional experts/scientists, where each party claimed to possess a more reliable body of knowledge about the marine resource, and 2) a generalised distrust based on different conceptualisations about marine resources and different views of whom, how and why it should (or should not) be managed. I argue that the tensions between the actors involved have led to at least two mechanisms to give the fisheries management apparatus an appearance of stability: 1) the institutionalisation of ignorance and 2) the use of fisheries regulations as a ‘boundary object’ to align the actors, and to fix their identities and responsibilities. In short, participation praxis has been reduced to a minimum given the fissures between scientific knowledge and the primary stakeholders’ knowledge and between marine resource conservation and fishing activity. But above all, participation has been restricted because primary stakeholders distrust institutions that restrict small-scale/artisanal fishing while at the same endorsing construction development in vital coastal habitats. Such development, as understood by the fishermen, is against sound environmental management, given that it impacts negatively on essential ecosystems that are crucial to the fisheries well-being.The majority of the ethnographic research was done in a fishing community in Fajardo, Puerto Rico, over an eleven-month period. I collected qualitative data about commercial fishermen’s views on the marine resource and its management. I also documented how these fishermen negotiated ‘space to manoeuvre’ in the non-participatory environmental management scenario outlined above. The ‘greening’ of commercial fishermen’s discourses is a formidable example.Three months of ethnographic research were also conducted on nearby Culebra Island in an attempt to understand the Marine Protected Area (MPA) of El Canal Luis Peña (CLP) that is ‘marketed’ as a community-based natural reserve and a no-take zone. Although the MPA does not necessarily fulfil all the requirements to be considered a community-based environmental management programme, its creation was definitely a breakthrough in marine resource management participation processes when compared to the main island. Culebra’s MPA is an interesting and challenging case-study that not only contributes to the understanding of how environmental management and policy-making is done and transformed, but also contributes to the question of how, if at all, to put together the pieces when informants disagree.

This research, conducted in 2006-2008, examines the ways in which various groups involved with the marine resources of Seward, Alaska construct attitudes towards the environment. Participant observation and semi-structured interviews are used to assess how commercial halibut fishers, tour boat operators, local residents and government officials understand the marine environment based on their previous experiences. This study also explores how ideologies relate to the current practices of each group. Two theories orient the analyses: The first, cultural modeling provided a theoretical and methodological framework for pursuing a more comprehensive analysis of resource management. The second, Theory of Reasoned Action (Ajzen and Fishbein 1980), guided the analysis of the ways in which each participant’s ideology towards the marine environment relates to their practice. Aside from contributing to a better understanding of a coastal community’s ideologies and practices, this dissertation sought to better understand the role of ecological ideologies and behaviors in fisheries management. The research illustrates certain domains where ideologies and practices concerning Pacific halibut and the marine environment differ among commercial fishers, government, and management officials, tour boat operators and residents of Seward, AK. These differences offer insights into how future collaborative efforts between government officials, managers and local marine resource users might better incorporate local ideology into management, and provide ecological information to local marine resource users in culturally appropriate ways.

This thesis presents some articulations of environmentalism in Italy. Using the Italian environmental association Legambiente as entry point, it explores how the vision of a collective environmental conscience is constructed, represented, claimed and contested in the 2013 edition of the association’s principal campaign, Goletta Verde. The integration of theoretical tools [narrative-networks (Lejano et al. 2013), matters of concern (Latour 2008), imagined audiences (Litt 2012) and performance and impression management (Goffman 1959)], and research methods [fieldwork, interviews, participant observation, and the use of extensive literature], reveals analytical findings divided in three parts - how the campaign narrative is constructed, what are some of the discontinuities encountered, and what are implications of the associative vision for environmentalism and its study by anthropologists.

In the Temecula Valley, California, neoliberal development policies were implemented that had the potential to bring drastic changes to this semi-rural area, renowned for its wine production and idyllic setting as a wine tourism destination. In order to better understand the contested nature of these development plans, I conducted ethnographic and key informant interviews and public policy analysis research with policy-making officials, local residents and other stakeholding groups that formed in opposition to the planned expansion. This applied anthropology of policy was uniquely situated to explore the tensions between various stakeholders. This thesis serves to propose interventions that could have the intended impacts of the expansion plan, which included increasing tourism and bolstering the economy, while preserving the qualities that made the Temecula Valley marketable and consumable as a wine tourism destination. Bringing together diverse fields of study including economics, tourism and environmental anthropology, this thesis sheds light on policy making processes in the 21st century United States.

Water is an essential resource for human life. Even in the tropical environment of the Maya Lowlands, water scarcity is a concern, because the region cycles between abundant rainfall and seasonal droughts. To understand how societies flourished during periods of water scarcity, archaeologists have studied prehispanic water management in the Maya Lowlands. Yet, water management research has tended to focus predominantly on large urban Maya populations, excluding smaller-scale societies that face the same challenges associated with water scarcity. This study investigates the neighboring non-Maya society of Late Classic (A.D.650-900) Palmarejo in northwestern Honduras to explore how water management was organized in a rural setting. Utilizing GIS, soil science, and archaeological investigations, this study explores how Palmarejo's residents may have collected and stored water for certain sectors of the population. This investigation suggests that the elite may have legitimized their rights over water using monumental architecture and site planning.

In Canada, First Nations asserting authority over their lands are developing diverse strategies to overcome the state’s dogmatic insistence on jurisdictional sovereignty. This movement corresponds to the wider context of the challenges faced by indigenous people to use their own ways of knowing to resist or reformulate legal doctrines and political tenets based on colonial power. Interior Salish St’át’imc people identify themselves through a strong and ongoing social relationship with Satáqwa7, the Fraser River, and the “Valley of Plenty”— now known as the flooded Bridge River Valley – maintained through St’át’imc knowledge and cultural practice and demonstrated by talk of “the St’át’imc right to fish” and Tsuwalhkálh Ti Tmícwa (The Land is Ours). St’át’imc fishers are prepared to contest and resist any regulatory system that is understood to impact this right to fish while they advocate their own ways of sustainable fishing and water management. Based on ethnographic research in collaboration with St’át’imc people, this thesis explores some of these often successful contestations especially in the context of increasing territorial governance and by example of the rapidly transforming relationship between St’át’imc, BC Hydro and the Province of BC. Interior Salish St’át’imc people are currently navigating through a significant phase of increasing jurisdiction and authority and recognition of (unsettled) territorial property relationships. This very dynamic process is marked by strategic collaborations, compensation for ‘infringements’ on St’át’imc Title and Rights, and conservation efforts to protect their home. An important example is the changing relationship between St’át’imc people and BC Hydro – a relationship between two groups with radically different cultures and agendas: St’át’imc people in a struggle for self-determination, social justice and cultural survival and BC Hydro, a corporate culture, with the agenda to provide hydro-electric power to BC, maintain operation ‘certainty’ and to generate revenue. Exploring the different ways of relating to and acting on the land will allow for more holistic and shared cultural practices of co-governing land, working collectively, remembering history, co-existing in the present and sharing a common future according to the ethical ideals of reconciliation: accountability for wrongdoing, justice, sharing, respect, transcending of hegemonic silences and increased public knowledge. / Graduate

This dissertation critiques the nature-culture divide by examining the relationships between binaries in postcolonial wildlife research in Tanzania. I focus on the work of wildlife scientists, particularly scientists from Tanzania, who work in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park (SNP). Tanzanian scientists and their foreign counterparts are addressing the theoretical challenges of incorporating park neighbors into ecosystems shaped by the colonial inheritance of national parks as non-human places. I make three broad analytical moves in this endeavor. First, I develop a multi-dimensional method to compare the development of a people-park binary in the Serengeti context by analyzing ethnography, conservation science, and recent scientific debate on a proposed road through the northern part of SNP. Second, I explore connections between the people-park binary and other binaries in the broader Serengeti context using text analysis and ethnographic methods based on eighteen months of fieldwork. Last, I develop a future plan for theoretical and applied research that explores how and why binaries may or may not change concurrently. I conclude that the people-park binary is weakening through the process of “dilation:” a multi-dimensional and reversible process of change during which the borders, substance, and connectivity of dichotomized categories become less rigid. In the broader effort to understand how the people-park binary is dilating, I explore the preliminary conclusion that other binaries (visual-verbal, Tanzanian-foreign, women-men, Kiswahili-English, insect-charismatic wildlife) are also shifting as conservation science becomes more diverse. I propose future research to investigate inter-binary relationships as linked through thematic meaning, conceptual processes, and structural context. This research demonstrates that scientists are using multiple binaries and contexts to conceptually reimagine the colonial legacy of conservation. In essence, their work asks: can the park boundary be maintained as the detrimental social boundaries (national, gender, language, and, perhaps, discipline) that have been historically embedded in the park boundary are transformed? Through intellectual confrontations with dichotomies, knowledge production and reality-making in Africa can be understood as both universally and locally applicable.