Search

Methods of field work include (among others) frame elicitation, semistructured interviews, questionnaires, short interviews, depth interviews, walks, and visual documentation. These are discussed and evaluated here, with field experiences nuancing practice.

Hamilton, Sarah R. 2018.Cultivating Nature: The Conservation of a Valencian Working Landscape. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 312 pp. ISBN 978-0-295-74331-8.Besky, Sarah, and Alex Blanchette, eds. 2019.How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 272 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8263-6085-4.Lora-Wainwright, Anna. 2017.Resigned Activism: Living with Pollution in Rural China. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 272 pp. ISBN: 978-0-2620-3632-0.Symons, Jonathan. 2019.Ecomodernism: Technology, Politics and the Climate Crisis. Cambridge: Polity. 232 pp. ISBN: 978-1-5095-3120-2.Miller, Theresa L. 2019.Plant Kin: A Multispecies Ethnography in Indigenous Brazil. Austin: University of Texas Press. 328 pp. ISBN 978-1-4773-1740-2.Aistara, Guntra. 2018.Organic Sovereignties: Struggles Over Farming in an Age of Free Trade. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 272 pp. ISBN 978-0-295-74311-0.Drew, Georgina. 2017.River Dialogues: Hindu Faith and the Political Ecology of Dams on the Sacred Ganga. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 264 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8165-4098-3.Folch, Christine. 2019.Hydropolitics: The Itaipú Dam, Sovereignty, and the Engineering of Modern South America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 272 pp. ISBN: 978-0-6911-8659-7.

Author(s): Anderson, Eugene N. | Abstract: A Review of "Understanding Collapse: Ancient History and Modern Myths" by Guy D. Middleton (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

The knowledge systems and practices of Indigenous Peoples and local communities play critical roles in safeguarding the biological and cultural diversity of our planet. Globalization, government policies, capitalism, colonialism, and other rapid social-ecological changes threaten the relationships between Indigenous Peoples and local communities and their environments, thereby challenging the continuity and dynamism of Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK). In this article, we contribute to the “World Scientists' Warning to Humanity,” issued by the Alliance of World Scientists, by exploring opportunities for sustaining ILK systems on behalf of the future stewardship of our planet. Our warning raises the alarm about the pervasive and ubiquitous erosion of knowledge and practice and the social and ecological consequences of this erosion. While ILK systems can be adaptable and resilient, the foundations of these knowledge systems are compromised by ongoing suppression, misrepresentation, appropriation, assimilation, disconnection, and destruction of biocultural heritage. Three case studies illustrate these processes and how protecting ILK is central to biocultural conservation. We conclude with 15 recommendations that call for the recognition and support of Indigenous Peoples and local communities and their knowledge systems. Enacting these recommendations will entail a transformative and sustained shift in how ILK systems, their knowledge holders, and their multiple expressions in lands and waters are recognized, affirmed, and valued. We appeal for urgent action to support the efforts of Indigenous Peoples and local communities around the world to maintain their knowledge systems, languages, stewardship rights, ties to lands and waters, and the biocultural integrity of their territories—on which we all depend. Introduction - Continuity, Change, and Resilience in Indigenous and Local Knowledge Systems - The Multidimensionality of Threats to ILK Systems - Interwoven Challenges and Consequences: Three Case Studies - Case Study 1. Indigenous Conservation of a Threatened cultural Keystone Species: Pacific Herring - Case Study 2. Ethnobotanical Knowledge is Essential for Tsimane’ Health and Nutrition - Case Study 3. Ma¯ ori ILK and Customary Practices Support the Conservation and Sustainable Use of a Burrowing Seabird - Addressing Challenges Faced by Indigenous and Local Knowledge Systems - Moving Forward

The Qin Empire united China but soon fell, being replaced by the Han Empire, which lasted over 400 years to become China’s longest-lived dynasty. Han consolidated Chinese governmental strategy, uniting Ru (Confucian) and Legalist ideas, with some Daoist influence. The Xiongnu Empire rose as a competitor and was largely defeated, but at enormous cost. This set a pattern for later wars on the northern Central Asian frontiers. Meanwhile, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan moved toward civilization, but were still isolated, small powers. This took place in a time of warm, moist climate, which greatly helped both China and the Xiongnu, but did not deeply affect the other regions. The Roman Empire was also benefited; Han and Rome had enough distant and indirect contact to give the Romans some idea of the “silk people” (the Chinese).

The back story to historical change is summed up by Bruce Campbell (2016: 22) as “climate, ecosystems, microbes, humans, biology, society.” One could also list them as climate, ecological factors, disease, demography, and secular economic change. Human-caused but longue duree matters such as soil erosion, deforestation, desertification, watercourse management, irrigation works, medical science, developing technology, and entrenched moral systems affect all these, nowhere more than in East Asia, where they came over time to be as much as part of the environment as mountains and rivers.

The world-system shows signs of decline similar to those seen in dynastic collapses in imperial East Asia. Averting collapse will require new leadership that can bring back Ibn Khaldun’s ’asabiyah, or equivalent commitment and solidarity.

East Asia, like the rest of the world, faced the Medieval Warm Period from the early 900s through the 1200s. At its height, this period was the warmest in history until the human-caused warming of today. In East Asia, the greatest beneficiaries, in relative terms, were the steppe and boreal forest societies. They changed from poor peripheral societies to powerful regional ones, and eventually to all-conquering world powers. China, Japan, and Vietnam, by contrast, were often devastated by floods. This produced the clearest signature of climate directly influencing East Asian history, since weakened China could not withstand the invigorated Central and North Asian powers, while Japan was wracked by wars that destroyed the old society and eventually created a new one.

East Asia was finally united and usually peaceful for a very long time. The Little Ice Age kept the colder parts of the region in difficult straits. In China, the Ming Dynasty consolidated control, sent out huge exploring expeditions but abandoned them, and settled down to a dull rule. Korea, inspired by China, threw off the Mongol yoke and unified under the Yi Dynasty, which was to rule until the end of the nineteenth century. Japan suffered more violent times, with catastrophic civil war in the sixteenth century, resolved by unification under the powerful and efficient Tokugawa shogunate. Vietnam dealt with Ming invasion and brief conquest, then had to deal with uncertain and contested rule. Particularly cold and harsh conditions in the early seventeenth century did not stop the northern Manchu armies from conquering China in 1644. Japan and Vietnam, buffered by geography from the cold, consolidated and flourished.

The final burst of global warming enabled the Mongols to rise from subarctic obscurity to world-conquerors. They quickly subdued Korea, went on to take China, and unsuccessfully invaded Japan and Vietnam. The end of the Medieval Warm Period and the beginning of the Little Ice Age proved fatal to Mongol rule in the east. Meanwhile, the Mongol Empire in the west fell apart, as grandsons of Chinggis Khan fought each other and adjusted to new homes in Russia, Mesopotamia, and Central Asia. Nativist rebellions in China and Korea restored Ruist ideals and traditional forms, but the absolutist rule of the Mongols proved too attractive to resist. The Mongols, with their world empire, created a society extremely open to new ideas, especially from the western world via Central Asia. New foods, medicines, and political ideas poured into China and eventually spread throughout East Asia. Trade flourished.

East Asia entered the modern world and joined the new and literally worldwide system with stable, peaceful, but highly conservative dynasties in place. The Manchu conquest of China led to the Qing Dynasty, driven to repression by Ming loyalist rebellions. Korea’s Yi Dynasty became ever more faction-ridden and narrowly Neo-Confucian. Japan’s Tokugawa shogunate flourished, making Japan possibly the most educated and most agriculturally productive per acre of any nation in the world by 1800, but the shoguns could not handle the coming of the industrial west. Vietnam was taken over by France in a colonial occupation. The Little Ice Age reached its worst years in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, following which it ameliorated. This amelioration allowed production to keep up with population increase for a while, allowing conservatism to block modernization and thus produce famines in China and hardship elsewhere.

This chapter summarizes what has gone before, with special reference to hypothesized effects of climate on history. Climate has an unpredictable and usually indirect effect on events on the ground. In general, climatic events that produce famine also produce unrest and war, but the correlation is far from perfect. As the East Asian world-system developed, events in one empire—especially China, by far the biggest and most powerful—tended to be more and more influential on neighbors, while climate became less influential overall.

This is a study of the growth and decline of cities for the purpose of identifying those events in which they significantly increased in size. Significant changes in the scale of cities are important for understanding the long-term trend toward more complex and hierarchical human societies. We report the results of an inventory of cycles, upsweeps, and collapses of settlements in five separate interpolity systems. Upsweeps are instances in which the largest settlement in a world system significantly increases in size. Collapses occur when the size of the largest settlement greatly decreases and stays down for a significant period of time rather than rebounding. We use regional interpolity systems (world systems) rather than single polities or settlements as our unit of analysis. Because the accurate designation of sweeps requires interval scale measures, we are limited to those regions and time periods for which quantitative estimates of largest settlement sizes are regularly available. We find a total of 18 upsweeps and five downsweeps, and only two instances of prolonged systemwide settlement collapse. We also investigate whether or not the rate of cycles has increased over the long run, and we find that cycles of city growth and decline have not accelerated. We also find a greater rate of urban cycles in the Western (Central) System than in the East Asian System, which supports the usual notion that the Western city system was less stable than the Eastern city system.

The Mongol Empire, the largest contiguous empire the world has ever known, had, among other things, a goodly number of falconers, poultry raisers, birdcatchers, cooks, and other experts on various aspects of birding. We have records of this, largely in the Yinshan Zhengyao, the court nutrition manual of the Mongol empire in China (the Yuan Dynasty). It discusses in some detail 22 bird taxa, from swans to chickens. The Huihui Yaofang, a medical encyclopedia, lists ten taxa used medicinally. Marco Polo also made notes on Mongol bird use. There are a few other records. This allows us to draw conclusions about Mongol ornithology, which apparently was sophisticated and detailed.