Biocultural Anthropology

Social science has positioned climate change at the centre of its research agenda. The limited success of hegemonic responses and the advance of impacts have strengthened the emergence of non-state actors. However, their role remains underexplored, especially in Latin America. In this article, we explore three central dimensions to consider for addressing climate change challenges and policies, which are still incipient areas of research in Latin America: Indigenous Peoples' demands for participation, civil society organisation, and collaboration between local communities, academia and other social actors through transdisciplinarity. Non-State actors' responses must be taken into more significant consideration. In addition to strengthening democracy, the participation of non-State actors has the potential to promote the transformations needed to respond justly to climate change.

Biocultural theory is an integrative research program designed to investigate the causal interactions between biological adaptations and cultural constructions. From the bi-ocultural perspective, cultural processes are rooted in the biological necessities of the human life cycle: specifically human forms of birth, growth, survival, mating, parent-ing, and sociality. Conversely, from the biocultural perspective, human biological processes are constrained, organized, and developed by culture, which includes technology , culturally specific socioeconomic and political structures, religious and ideological beliefs, and artistic practices such as music, dance, painting, and storytelling. Establishing biocultural theory as a program that self-consciously encompasses the different particular forms of human evolutionary research could help scholars and scientists envision their own specialized areas of research as contributions to a coherent , collective research program. This article argues that a mature biocultural paradigm needs to be informed by at least 7 major research clusters: (a) gene-culture coevolution; (b) human life history theory; (c) evolutionary social psychology; (d) anthropological research on contemporary hunter-gatherers; (e) biocultural socioeconomic and political history; (f) evolutionary aesthetics; and (g) biocultural research in the humanities (religions, ideologies, the history of ideas, and the arts). This article explains the way these research clusters are integrated in biocultural theory, evaluates the level of development in each cluster, and locates current biocultural theory within the historical trajectory of the social sciences and the humanities.

Preface We begin with an observation and a particular point of view. American anthropology emerged as an integrative discipline, one which has espoused holism and engaged in a " four-field " conversation since its inception (Boas1940). There have been challenges to this holistic framing of the discipline as more " myth " than reality (Borofsky 2002; Segal and Yanagisako 2005; see also Calcagno 2003), and equally strong concerns over fragmentation and fissioning of disciplinary subfields that advocate for a holistic anthropology (Peacock 1995; Brown and Yoffee 1992). We come to this essay as anthropologists committed to the vision of anthropology's unique ability for the integration of multiple perspectives on humans and humanity that is the promise of a four-field, holistic, approach. By 'four-field', however, we do not mean four, five or six silos of expertise that can somehow, if uncomfortably, inhabit the single space of a department or discipline. Departments that 'cover' and 'represent' anthropological breadth, but without integration, are hardly more holistic than those units that eschew one or more perspective (usually from biological anthropology) or that have split into separate departments or programs over seemingly irreconcilable differences in approaches to anthropological sciences. Rather, we are talking about the sort of anthropology that blurs divisions among the subfields, that occupies hybrid spaces at the margins of normative approaches, that bleed into and demand input from other perspectives within and out of anthropology, and that allow for and even privilege the anthro-pological promise of integration of natural and social sciences and humanities. These are also often uncomfortable spaces – perhaps more so the more integration one seeks. We live and work within a political economy of specialization and expert knowledge, especially within universities, granting agencies, and publishers, that promotes and rewards depth over breadth, and believes that success is better ensured by developing more narrowly conceived and specialized academic departments with a comparative advantage of particular " expert knowledge " in the global exchange of knowledge production. Thus, as 'common sense' and seemingly necessary as holism might be to anthropology, and a biocultural approach might be for the studies that include human biology, intra-disciplinary integration is not always rewarded and indeed not frequently used to frame research and publications (Calcagno 2003; Goodman 2013). Nevertheless, we argue here for an anthropology that seeks integration across historically traditional subfields to make 'anthropological connections' (Wolf 1982) – in this case between

Relationships between people and trees are continually unfolding in the contexts of situated social-ecological systems, in which properties of the system emerge from localized interactions among complex fabrics of biological, social, and cultural actors. In current studies on social-ecological systems linked with trees, we commonly find two approaches: the first focuses on biological entities, examining the ecological dynamics of tree species and associated biodiversity. The second approach focuses on people, analyzing human agency along with historical and contemporary political or other forces shaping human-tree relationships. In this chapter, we explore social-ecological systems associated with the Pewen (Araucaria araucana), one of the most iconic and sacred trees from the southern Andes. We first describe some of our own research findings on Pewen for both of the approaches described above. We then develop a third perspective, which highlights social-ecological relations and has the potential to overcome both the ecological/social and the biological entity/human agency spheres. Our relational approach allows a closer enquiry on how actors (trees and their seeds, wildlife, and people) interact in complex and sympoietic social-ecological fabrics. This approach also allows us to identify the social-ecological memory of the system that emerges as an on-going complex of relations that are never stable, that must be enacted, performed on a daily basis within this specific context of South America. Furthermore, it stresses that people-pewen fabrics are continuously built and rebuilt, putting an emphasis on the openness and future of social-ecological systems subjected to historical and contemporary drivers of change.

A  journal dedicated to evolutionary studies in imaginative culture--literature and the arts,  popular culture, religion, ideology, politics. Two volumes per year. Double-blind peer review. Regularly publishes multiple book reviews in the evolutionary social sciences and humanities.

En términos conceptuales, hablar de cultura (o de biocultura) no implica forzosamente que exista un consenso, ni que esté cerca de ser unánime, como se puede ver, por ejemplo, en el trabajo de Alfred Kroeber y Clyde . Por el contrario, aunque su uso es común, tanto en términos coloquiales como académicos, se suele entender "as a packaged, unexamined variable" (Rohner, 1984: 111), por lo menos en el entendido de un conjunto de ideas más o menos generales, aplicables a diferentes grupos sociales. Dada su complejidad, podemos más bien considerar