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The fundamental preoccupations of this research align with emergent literature on neoliberal conservation—understood as an amalgamation of ideology and techniques informed by the premise that natures can only be 'saved' through their submission to capital and its subsequent revaluation in capitalist terms. This literature shift attention "from how nature is used in and through the expansion of capitalism to how nature is conserved in and through the expansion of capitalism" (Büscher et al. 2012:6), thus opening up a new set of anthropological interrogations. To investigate this phenomenon this work centers on the use of sport trophy-hunting as a neoliberal conservation strategy in the Americas, where recent changes in policy and practice mark the creation of wildlife enclosures in the hands of private capital. Despite the fact that these neoliberal reforms in conservation have the capacity "of repositioning community resources within a new system of meaning, altering the material realities of social relations within the community, modifying human-ecological interactions, and introducing new forms of governance" (MacDonald 2005), little systematic research and social analysis has been conducted exploring this phenomenon. Responding to this gap, this doctoral dissertation examines the social effects of market-oriented conservation through extended ethnographic research among the Comcaac (Seri), a former hunting and gathering society living along the coast of the Gulf of California in the Sonoran desert of Northern Mexico. The research documents the bighorn sheep sport trophy-hunting program taking place in Comcaac territory, in order to better understand the processes contributing to the production and performance of indigenous environmental expertise; in turn, this work produces new insights into how morality, individualism and collective effort are affected by neoliberal logics involved in the management of wildlife, while documenting concomitant local renegotiation of power, knowledge and wealth.

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Alloparenting has played a pivotal role in every society throughout human history in ensuring the survival and healthy development of children. A large amount of theory (e.g. kin-selection) and evidence exists to support this claim, and though alloparenting is certainly not unique to humans, it is difficult to suggest that any other species benefits from it more, and certainly not one as ubiquitous as Homo sapiens. However, there is a surprising dearth of empirical research examining the causes of individual variation in the amount and type of alloparental behavior that a child receives, and what effect this variation has on previously validated measures of child well-being. We propose how different measures of familial relatedness and the spatial distribution of relatives might be used to predict the amount and type of alloparental care a child receives, and how these variables may interact to affect a child’s health. We employed a variety of different methods; genealogical modeling, genetic analysis, geospatial mapping, ethological behavioral observations, and anthropometric measurements in order to generate objective data to test these predictions. As members of a relatively isolated native people in Sonora, Mexico, our study population (the Comca'ac) is uniquely suited to help us test our hypotheses. From just this pilot study, we have made many methodological developments and found strong support for many of our hypotheses. There are many new questions to answer as well, which together suggest the future directions for an intensive study of a broader sample of this population, and alloparental behavior in humans in general.