I Vaccaro
Biographic Data
| ID | 5086 |
|---|---|
| NAME | I Vaccaro |
| GIVEN NAMES | I |
| FAMILY NAME | Vaccaro |
| SIGNATURE | VACCARO I |
| AFFILIATIONS | McGill University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7551-4845 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 201 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Genealogías de las biomovilidades científicamente inducidas: Ecología de la restauración ante la emergencia climática
El cambio climático ha transformado los principios de la biología de la conservación, especialmente en torno a la translocación de especies. Ante la previsión de que muchas plantas y animales no podrán desplazarse lo suficientemente rápido para adaptarse a nuevos escenarios ambientales, la ecología de la restauración busca alternativas a los enfoques retrospectivos centrados en recuperar estados ecológicos pasados. En su lugar, emergen estrategia…
Commoning of open access resources through urban foraging stewardship
Urban wild plant foragers employ stewardship practices to urban vegetation and habitats, although they do not have jurisdiction over the land they forage. This goes against the predictions of Collective Action Theory, which suggests that natural resources are prone to degradation in the absence of clear ownership and user groups. In this article, we explore this phenomenon and the mechanisms that may explain the concerted collective action of urb…
Human–nature relationships through the lens of reciprocity: Insights from Indigenous and local knowledge systems
In the context of climate change, biodiversity decline and social injustice, reciprocity emerges as a way of living and being in this world that holds transformative potential. Concepts of reciprocity vary and are enacted in specific cultural practices grounded in Indigenous and local knowledge systems. This editorial synthesises first‐hand evidence of how practising reciprocity can result in positive reciprocal contributions between people and n…
Defining socioecological reciprocity: Intentionality, mutualism or collateral effect
This perspective piece discusses the history of the use of the term ‘reciprocity’ across environmental social sciences in the analysis of the interactions between the social and the natural systems. Reciprocity, as a concept, these days, seems to be used in a rather uncritical fashion. These pages do not intend to be exhaustive, instead they focus on the role that the idea of explicit intentionality (or its absence) has had on the different ways …
Climate change as landscape ruination: Exposed dams, empty reservoirs, and ecological anxiety in Catalonia
By the end of 2023, Catalonia entered its fourth year of drought, leading to a water crisis characterized by depleted dams and widespread water restrictions. Dams, as quintessential modern infrastructures, shape landscapes and territories. This article explores their historical contribution to Western modernization and examines how their role is changing in an era overshadowed by the certainty of climate change. This shift is influenced by emergi…
Invisible Landscapes, Invisible People: Juniper Picking at the End of the Line
This article documents the activities of two of the last juniper berry pickers of the Catalan Pyrenees. We describe how their work has been affected by rural depopulation, hyperregulation, and climate change. Junipers mostly grow in open pastures that are being colonized by bushes and trees. Their berries are sold to one of the main Catalan gin-making companies. Juniper berry pickers, thus, conduct their work in transitional areas: pastures in th…
Genealogies of scientifically induced biomobilities: Restoration ecology under climate emergency
Climate change is transforming restoration ecology, particularly regarding species translocations. Many species may be unable to keep pace with rapidly shifting climatic conditions, risking extinction. As a result, restoration ecology has had to move beyond its traditional, nostalgic focus on returning ecosystems to past states. In response to this new reality, future-oriented strategies have emerged - chief among them, assisted migration. This a…
Resistance and conservation in the Maestrazgo-Els Ports initiative: The complexities behind failed conservation
At the end of 2019, the Maestrazgo-Els Ports initiative was presented publicly with the aim of creating an international ecotourism destination of 550,000 hectares located between the provinces of Castellón, Teruel, and Tarragona, Spain. In less than seven months, the proposal was withdrawn due to the high level of conflict it unleashed. Resistance to the project was led by different agents who defended cultural and linguistic diversity, traditio…
La ecología política del esquí en el Pirineo catalán: Entre La Iniciativa Privada Y El Rescate Público
The interactions between private economic interests and public institutions have played a fundamental role in the historical deployment of the ski tourism industry in the Catalan Pyrenees. Most ski resorts have endured significant economic crises that have forced their closure or that have been resolved thanks to the contributions from the State until they ended up in the hands of the autonomic government. The importance that the public Administr…
Paisatges antropocènics, paisatges enrunats: Expectatives de passat i de futur a les muntanyes catalanes
Resum Les runes perviuen en el temps i l’espai, com el temps i l’espai semblen perviure en les runes. No es tracta, però, d’una pervivència estàtica ni unívoca. La presència de runes sempre evoca transformacions paisatgístiques, percebudes, representades i valorades de manera canviant segons les vivències i els records que n’emanen. Centrant-se en les restes d’una infraestructura d’explotació forestal massiva de principis del segle XX (la Matussi…
Reimagining modern politics in the European mountains: Confronting the traditional commons with the neo-rural conception of the common good
Since at least the 1970s, the countryside of Western Europe has been the site of a myriad of “new” communal initiatives. Rural areas that were abandoned during the last century have witnessed the arrival of new inhabitants. These newcomers often flock to the mountains escaping urban lifestyles characterized by individualism, mass-oriented livelihoods, and isolation. Many of these individuals move to areas like the Catalan Pyrenees, where common p…
Techno-herds and cyborg-shepherds in the age of spectacularized bucolism: What lies behind the postcard
This paper focuses on what shepherds must do to ensure that their herds can peacefully graze on the upper meadows of the Catalan Pyrenees. These days, this image, a classic icon of bucolic traditional rurality, cannot happen unless the shepherds are in permanent contact with public administration officials to confirm their compliance with a plethora of strict policies relating to their animals. These policies span a number of fields, including sa…
When the State Imposes the “Commons”: Pastoralism After the Reintroduction of the Brown Bear in the Pyrenees
After the brown bear reintroduction program was launched in the Pyrenees in 1996, the French and Spanish States fostered and funded a regrouping policy to protect the sheep flocks from the bear attacks. Drawing on a comparative analysis between two Catalan districts in north-eastern Spain (Val d'Aran and Pallars Sobirà) and the Ariège district in south-western France, this article scrutinises the extent to which the transformation of shepherding …
The Effects of Migration on Peasant Agricultural Systems: Oaxacan Villages, Between Remittances and Market Integration
Contemporary indigenous Zapotec rural villages of the northern sierra region of Oaxaca state exhibit profound transformations in their agricultural strategies. Since the mid-twentieth century, its agricultural lands have suffered a gradual process of abandonment. As a consequence, forest transition is occurring around the villages, and the cultivar portfolio seems to be dominated by cash crops. This article examines these landscape transformation…
New extractivism in European rural areas: How twentieth first century mining returned to disturb the rural transition
Élevage et écotourisme dans les Pyrénées: La conservation du patrimoine naturel à la suite de la crise économique de 2008
Dans cet article, nous étudions les utilisations locales du territoire associées aux formes alternatives de conservation des valeurs naturelles dans les Pyrénées catalanes, dans le nord-est de l'Espagne. Dans les Pyrénées, région où de nombreuses aires protégées ont été créées, la conservation de l'environnement ne se limite pas aux projets et actions sanctionnés par l'État et délimités territorialement. Dans ces pages, nous proposons d'analyser …
The emergence of the global debt society
As a result of the financialization of household and national economies, indebtedness has become a system of domination shaping the making of contemporary subjects. This sort of governmentality through debt is a multifaceted phenomenon affecting people's economic and political behavior in both the North and the South. Disguised and legitimized by the moral obligation to repay debts, and by promises of upward social mobility (for the working class…
What Do We Mean by “the Commons?” An Examination of Conceptual Blurring Over Time
Over the last 20 years the theoretical concept of the commons has come to be used not only in the field of natural resources management, but also as a key notion in domains as diverse as the digital economy and alternative politics. The wide use of the term has, however, led to a loss of specificity in the way it is used. Across several disciplines the commons is often used almost interchangeably with terms such as open access, common property, p…
Présentation: Repenser la conservation de la nature. Vers une anthropologie de l’engagement environnemental
Présentation : repenser la conservation de la nature. Vers une anthropologie de l’engagement environnemental ?. An article from journal Anthropologie et Sociétés (Repenser la conservation de la nature), on Érudit
Socio-economic transitions and everyday life changes in the rural world: Pyrenean households and their contemporary economic history
This article focuses on understanding rural life and how agrarian everyday life changes as a consequence of the radical socio-economic transformations that, across the world, have accompanied rural communities in their transition from economies of subsistence to industrial production, and, in some areas, from there to providers of service to the tourism-oriented leisure economy. In the last century in the Alt Urgell District (Spanish Pyrenees), m…
Microeconomic relationships between and among fishers and traders influence the ability to respond to social-ecological changes in a small-scale fishery
Kininmonth, S., B. Crona, Ö. Bodin, I. Vaccaro, L. J. Chapman, and C. A. Chapman. 2016. Microeconomic relationships between and among fishers and traders influence the ability to respond to social-ecological changes in a small-scale fishery. Ecology and Society 22(2):26. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-08833-220226
Animais selvagens convertidos em sujeitos políticos: A gestão pública da fauna nos Pirineus
Os montes Pirineus contemporâneos foram convertidos em uma reserva ambiental. O agudo processo de despovoamento experimentado durante o século XX, e a apropriação progressiva de grande parte de seu território por parte do Estado para implementar políticas de conservação, favoreceram o reaparecimento, através da reintrodução, da promoção ou da recuperação espontânea, de diversas espécies de grandes predadores, aves de rapina, ungulados e outros ma…
Changing Ruralities: Between Abandonment and Redefinition in the Catalan Pyrenees
In this article we discuss the process by which the upper areas of the Alt Urgell, in Northern Spain, are redefining themselves in order to survive in the new postindustrial order. These communities, during the twentieth century, witnessed a steady demographic and economic collapse that resulted in a progressive decline of agricultural activities and the abandonment of mid-mountain villages. In the sixties, the area deepened its milk production s…
Islands of Governmentality: Rainforest Conservation, Indigenous Rights, and the Territorial Reconfiguration of Guyanese Sovereignty
Contemporary scholarship increasingly emphasizes that modern state sovereignty does not depend on the control of a strictly bounded and uniformly governed territory. Rather, authority now stems from a variety of different actors, within and external to states, who enact shared forms of power over different areas of national territory for different objectives. In Guyana, contemporary expressions of neoliberal governmentality, environmental conserv…
The Power of Uncertainty: The Neoliberal Quest for Profit in Spain
Using as a case study the consequences of the recent generalized economic crisis in Spain and Europe (2008-14), I propose to analyze the role of uncertainty as a key and recurrent ingredient needed by market economies to generate high levels of profitability at the cost of extremely high levels of social inequality. The present article examines the relationships between crises and uncertainty as socially constructed realities that have been instr…
Political ecology and conservation policies: Some Theoretical Genealogies
This article explicitly connects a growing body of specific literature, the political ecology of conservation, to some of the often overlooked, main conceptual components emerging from political anthropology and geography (sources of legitimacy, governmentality, territoriality, or state making), political economy (commoditization, market integration, niche markets, or gentrification), and cultural studies of the environment (cultural transformati…
Consuming Space, Nature and Culture: Patrimonial Discussions in the Hyper-Modern Era
In this paper we reflect on what we call the process of 'patrimonialization' of culture and nature currently taking place in the Western mountainous inlands of the Spanish Eastern Pyrenees. Landscapes, as cultural and historical formations, are presently being commodified and connected to global networks of consumption dominated by urban and 'postmaterialistic' values. Conservation policies, ski resorts and cultural museums are mushrooming in pre…
New extractivism in European rural areas: How twentieth first century mining returned to disturb the rural transition
"Livestock Versus "Wild Beasts: Contradictions In The Natural Patrimonialization Of The Pyrenees
The Pyrenees are becoming an environmental reservoir. The acute human depopulation experienced during the twentieth century and the progressive appropriation of large parts of the mountainous territory by the state in order to implement conservation policies have resulted in the return, via reintroduction or natural regeneration, of bears, wolves, beavers, river otters, marmots, mouflon, feral goats, and deer, among other species. This developmen…
Introduction. Postindustrial natures: Hyper‐mobility and place‐attachments
[EN] The current globalization of the world is resulting on entire regions suffering sudden structural reconfigurations through the re-organization of economic activities of industrial towns and agrarian landscapes. Contemporary Western societies have seen industries and its associated values move away to cheaper locales, replaced by a services economy focused on providing leisure to these urban dominated societies. Postindustrial landscapes, cha…
Property Mosaic and State-making: Governmentality, Expropriation and Conservation in the Pyrenees
This article identifies the current explosion of conservation policies in the Pyrenees as the most recent wave of a long-standing tradition of state-driven territorial policies. The very existence of these policies cannot be understood without taking into account the consequences of two hundred years of territorial rationalization, land expropriation and natural resource control. Depopulation, agricultural involution and forest recovery are parti…
The New Pyrenees: Contemporary Conflicts around Patrimony, Resources and Urbanization
In the last twenty years the Pyrenean social landscape has experienced a significant change associated with shifts on the uses of its natural resources. Communities previously characterized by their high rates of depopulation are now in a process of relative demographic recovery. This change is associated to a shift from primary economic activities such as ranching, timber extraction or agriculture to an economic model based on leisure and servic…
Lagoon Ecology and Social Strategies: Habitat Diversity and Ethnobiology
Islands of Governmentality: Rainforest Conservation, Indigenous Rights, and the Territorial Reconfiguration of Guyanese Sovereignty
Contemporary scholarship increasingly emphasizes that modern state sovereignty does not depend on the control of a strictly bounded and uniformly governed territory. Rather, authority now stems from a variety of different actors, within and external to states, who enact shared forms of power over different areas of national territory for different objectives. In Guyana, contemporary expressions of neoliberal governmentality, environmental conserv…
Theorizing Impending Peripheries: Postindustrial Landscapes at the Edge of Hyper-modernity’s Collapse
This article discusses the ways in which the predominant economic mechanisms of capitalism, characterized by a hyper-mobility of flows, affect actual places and people. The rationality informing these mechanisms is the quest for a reduction of costs and the increase of potential benefit, and this can only be achieved by jumping from locale to locale searching for a cheaper labor force, new pools of resources, or an absence of environmental regula…
The mountainous space as a commodity: The Pyrenees at the age of globalization
In these pages we reflect on the process of transformation of the Catalan Pyrenees from a peripheral and economically decaying area to a first-rate tourism center. Real estate speculation has replaced depopulation. The economic and social value of the territory has dramatically shifted as it has gone from supporting low profitability ranching activities to become the space where resorts and parks are built. The paper analyzes the process of commo…
Changing Ruralities: Between Abandonment and Redefinition in the Catalan Pyrenees
In this article we discuss the process by which the upper areas of the Alt Urgell, in Northern Spain, are redefining themselves in order to survive in the new postindustrial order. These communities, during the twentieth century, witnessed a steady demographic and economic collapse that resulted in a progressive decline of agricultural activities and the abandonment of mid-mountain villages. In the sixties, the area deepened its milk production s…
Présentation: Repenser la conservation de la nature. Vers une anthropologie de l’engagement environnemental
Présentation : repenser la conservation de la nature. Vers une anthropologie de l’engagement environnemental ?. An article from journal Anthropologie et Sociétés (Repenser la conservation de la nature), on Érudit
Commons and markets: Opportunities for Development of Local Sustainability
Development studies have often evolved amidst a tension between the tendency to declare all forms of communal management archaic and in need of modernisation via privatisation and market integration, and the temptation to essentialise indigenous management with nostalgia while vilifying market impacts. Closer examination suggests that common property systems will not simply collapse under market pressure, or create defensive bulwarks to maintain …
Conservationist governmental technologies in the Western European mountains: The unfinished transformation of the Pyrenees
In this paper, using a political ecology framework, we examine the impacts of statemaking technologies in several areas of the Pyrenean mountain range, Spain. We describe processes of governmental territorialization in a European, non-colonial setting, stressing their effect on the conceptualization and management of natural resources. Conservation policies are a traditional locus of political ecology: as public policies devoted to natural resour…
Techno-herds and cyborg-shepherds in the age of spectacularized bucolism: What lies behind the postcard
This paper focuses on what shepherds must do to ensure that their herds can peacefully graze on the upper meadows of the Catalan Pyrenees. These days, this image, a classic icon of bucolic traditional rurality, cannot happen unless the shepherds are in permanent contact with public administration officials to confirm their compliance with a plethora of strict policies relating to their animals. These policies span a number of fields, including sa…
The Effects of Migration on Peasant Agricultural Systems: Oaxacan Villages, Between Remittances and Market Integration
Contemporary indigenous Zapotec rural villages of the northern sierra region of Oaxaca state exhibit profound transformations in their agricultural strategies. Since the mid-twentieth century, its agricultural lands have suffered a gradual process of abandonment. As a consequence, forest transition is occurring around the villages, and the cultivar portfolio seems to be dominated by cash crops. This article examines these landscape transformation…
Socio-economic transitions and everyday life changes in the rural world: Pyrenean households and their contemporary economic history
This article focuses on understanding rural life and how agrarian everyday life changes as a consequence of the radical socio-economic transformations that, across the world, have accompanied rural communities in their transition from economies of subsistence to industrial production, and, in some areas, from there to providers of service to the tourism-oriented leisure economy. In the last century in the Alt Urgell District (Spanish Pyrenees), m…
Challenges in Building Insect Ethnobiological Classifications in Roviana, Solomon Islands
Under-differentiating classificatory systems pose methodological problems for cultural domain analysis in particular, and ethnobiology in general. Our analysis suggests the Roviana people from the Western Solomon Islands do not have a word for the category "insects" and their classification scheme for little terrestrial animals is rather generic and undifferentiated in comparison to scientific taxonomy. In most cases the accuracy of cultural doma…
Animais selvagens convertidos em sujeitos políticos: A gestão pública da fauna nos Pirineus
Os montes Pirineus contemporâneos foram convertidos em uma reserva ambiental. O agudo processo de despovoamento experimentado durante o século XX, e a apropriação progressiva de grande parte de seu território por parte do Estado para implementar políticas de conservação, favoreceram o reaparecimento, através da reintrodução, da promoção ou da recuperação espontânea, de diversas espécies de grandes predadores, aves de rapina, ungulados e outros ma…
Sovereignty, Collective Ingenuity and Moral Economies: The Confluence of Transnational Trends, States and Local Strategies in the Pyrenees
The expansion and consolidation of the state's sovereignty and the market economy in the Pyrenees, in northeast Spain, took place through the implementation of a series of territorialisation policies designed to reorganise the territory, its natural resources and its population. This process was supposed to introduce state-driven modernity into these valleys. These governmental technologies also specifically targeted common property. The explicit…
Los comunales en el Pirineo Central. Idealizando el pasado y reelaborando el presente
El debate en torno a los comunales ha estado a menudo protagonizado por posiciones ideológicas acerca de sus implicaciones sociales, económicas, ambientales y políticas. Las comarcas del Alto Pirineo en Cataluña, donde la propiedad comunal ha tenido una gran representación territorial y una larga continuidad en el tiempo, ofrecen numerosos argumentos para situar esta discusión en unos parámetros más realistas. En el contexto de los cambios regist…
Los comunales en el Pirineo Central. Idealizando el pasado y reelaborando el presente
El debate en torno a los comunales ha estado a menudo protagonizado por posiciones ideológicas acerca de sus implicaciones sociales, económicas, ambientales y políticas. Las comarcas del Alto Pirineo en Cataluña, donde la propiedad comunal ha tenido una gran representación territorial y una larga continuidad en el tiempo, ofrecen numerosos argumentos para situar esta discusión en unos parámetros más realistas. En el contexto de los cambios regist…
Property Mosaic and State-making: Governmentality, Expropriation and Conservation in the Pyrenees
This article identifies the current explosion of conservation policies in the Pyrenees as the most recent wave of a long-standing tradition of state-driven territorial policies. The very existence of these policies cannot be understood without taking into account the consequences of two hundred years of territorial rationalization, land expropriation and natural resource control. Depopulation, agricultural involution and forest recovery are parti…
Postindustrial valleys: The Pyrenees as a reinvented landscape
[EN] At the dawn of the twenty first century, nature, in the valley of Lillet, is represented by luxuriant forests, the return of charismatic animal species and dramatic landscapes. The valley of Lillet is located in the Catalan Pyrenees in Northeast Spain. Its complex recent history has left deep tracks on its landscape. The wilderness that currently characterizes this area is a direct result of this history. In the last two centuries this valle…
Introduction. Postindustrial natures: Hyper‐mobility and place‐attachments
[EN] The current globalization of the world is resulting on entire regions suffering sudden structural reconfigurations through the re-organization of economic activities of industrial towns and agrarian landscapes. Contemporary Western societies have seen industries and its associated values move away to cheaper locales, replaced by a services economy focused on providing leisure to these urban dominated societies. Postindustrial landscapes, cha…
Sovereignty, Collective Ingenuity and Moral Economies: The Confluence of Transnational Trends, States and Local Strategies in the Pyrenees
The expansion and consolidation of the state's sovereignty and the market economy in the Pyrenees, in northeast Spain, took place through the implementation of a series of territorialisation policies designed to reorganise the territory, its natural resources and its population. This process was supposed to introduce state-driven modernity into these valleys. These governmental technologies also specifically targeted common property. The explicit…
Consuming Space, Nature and Culture: Patrimonial Discussions in the Hyper-Modern Era
In this paper we reflect on what we call the process of 'patrimonialization' of culture and nature currently taking place in the Western mountainous inlands of the Spanish Eastern Pyrenees. Landscapes, as cultural and historical formations, are presently being commodified and connected to global networks of consumption dominated by urban and 'postmaterialistic' values. Conservation policies, ski resorts and cultural museums are mushrooming in pre…
Mauro Peressini et Ratiba Hadj-Moussa (dir.), The Mediterranean Reconsidered. Representations, Emergences, Recompositions. Gatineau, Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation, 2005, 270 p., réf.
Mauro Peressini et Ratiba Hadj-Moussa (dir.), The Mediterranean Reconsidered. Representations, Emergences, Recompositions. Gatineau, Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation, 2005, 270 p., réf.. Un article de la revue Anthropologie et Sociétés (Passions politiques) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.
Cornellà through the Looking Glass: Stories, Knowledge, Society, Ecology and Change
This article reflects on the changing relationships between productive activities, social relations and ethnobiological knowledge in Cornellà de Llobregat. Cornellà is a town located near the city of Barcelona, Spain, which experienced a rapid process of urbanization during the twentieth century. The article explores the transformation of this city from a small agricultural village to a large town that is now a part industrial and part dormitory …
The New Pyrenees: Contemporary Conflicts around Patrimony, Resources and Urbanization
In the last twenty years the Pyrenean social landscape has experienced a significant change associated with shifts on the uses of its natural resources. Communities previously characterized by their high rates of depopulation are now in a process of relative demographic recovery. This change is associated to a shift from primary economic activities such as ranching, timber extraction or agriculture to an economic model based on leisure and servic…
Lagoon Ecology and Social Strategies: Habitat Diversity and Ethnobiology
L'espace montagnard comme objet de consommation. Les Pyrénées à l'époque globale
Au fil de ces pages, nous réfléchissons au processus de transformation des Pyrénées catalanes de zone périphérique et en déclin économique en centre touristique de qualité. La spéculation immobilière a remplacé le dépeuplement. La valeur économique et sociale du territoire a radicalement changé, la promotion des activités d’élevage peu rentables ayant cédé la place aux stations touristiques et aux parcs. Cet article analyse le processus de marcha…
The mountainous space as a commodity: The Pyrenees at the age of globalization
In these pages we reflect on the process of transformation of the Catalan Pyrenees from a peripheral and economically decaying area to a first-rate tourism center. Real estate speculation has replaced depopulation. The economic and social value of the territory has dramatically shifted as it has gone from supporting low profitability ranching activities to become the space where resorts and parks are built. The paper analyzes the process of commo…
"Livestock Versus "Wild Beasts: Contradictions In The Natural Patrimonialization Of The Pyrenees
The Pyrenees are becoming an environmental reservoir. The acute human depopulation experienced during the twentieth century and the progressive appropriation of large parts of the mountainous territory by the state in order to implement conservation policies have resulted in the return, via reintroduction or natural regeneration, of bears, wolves, beavers, river otters, marmots, mouflon, feral goats, and deer, among other species. This developmen…
Commons and markets: Opportunities for Development of Local Sustainability
Development studies have often evolved amidst a tension between the tendency to declare all forms of communal management archaic and in need of modernisation via privatisation and market integration, and the temptation to essentialise indigenous management with nostalgia while vilifying market impacts. Closer examination suggests that common property systems will not simply collapse under market pressure, or create defensive bulwarks to maintain …
Theorizing Impending Peripheries: Postindustrial Landscapes at the Edge of Hyper-modernity’s Collapse
This article discusses the ways in which the predominant economic mechanisms of capitalism, characterized by a hyper-mobility of flows, affect actual places and people. The rationality informing these mechanisms is the quest for a reduction of costs and the increase of potential benefit, and this can only be achieved by jumping from locale to locale searching for a cheaper labor force, new pools of resources, or an absence of environmental regula…
Conservationist governmental technologies in the Western European mountains: The unfinished transformation of the Pyrenees
In this paper, using a political ecology framework, we examine the impacts of statemaking technologies in several areas of the Pyrenean mountain range, Spain. We describe processes of governmental territorialization in a European, non-colonial setting, stressing their effect on the conceptualization and management of natural resources. Conservation policies are a traditional locus of political ecology: as public policies devoted to natural resour…
Challenges in Building Insect Ethnobiological Classifications in Roviana, Solomon Islands
Under-differentiating classificatory systems pose methodological problems for cultural domain analysis in particular, and ethnobiology in general. Our analysis suggests the Roviana people from the Western Solomon Islands do not have a word for the category "insects" and their classification scheme for little terrestrial animals is rather generic and undifferentiated in comparison to scientific taxonomy. In most cases the accuracy of cultural doma…
Political ecology and conservation policies: Some Theoretical Genealogies
This article explicitly connects a growing body of specific literature, the political ecology of conservation, to some of the often overlooked, main conceptual components emerging from political anthropology and geography (sources of legitimacy, governmentality, territoriality, or state making), political economy (commoditization, market integration, niche markets, or gentrification), and cultural studies of the environment (cultural transformati…
Islands of Governmentality: Rainforest Conservation, Indigenous Rights, and the Territorial Reconfiguration of Guyanese Sovereignty
Contemporary scholarship increasingly emphasizes that modern state sovereignty does not depend on the control of a strictly bounded and uniformly governed territory. Rather, authority now stems from a variety of different actors, within and external to states, who enact shared forms of power over different areas of national territory for different objectives. In Guyana, contemporary expressions of neoliberal governmentality, environmental conserv…
The Power of Uncertainty: The Neoliberal Quest for Profit in Spain
Using as a case study the consequences of the recent generalized economic crisis in Spain and Europe (2008-14), I propose to analyze the role of uncertainty as a key and recurrent ingredient needed by market economies to generate high levels of profitability at the cost of extremely high levels of social inequality. The present article examines the relationships between crises and uncertainty as socially constructed realities that have been instr…
Animais selvagens convertidos em sujeitos políticos: A gestão pública da fauna nos Pirineus
Os montes Pirineus contemporâneos foram convertidos em uma reserva ambiental. O agudo processo de despovoamento experimentado durante o século XX, e a apropriação progressiva de grande parte de seu território por parte do Estado para implementar políticas de conservação, favoreceram o reaparecimento, através da reintrodução, da promoção ou da recuperação espontânea, de diversas espécies de grandes predadores, aves de rapina, ungulados e outros ma…
Changing Ruralities: Between Abandonment and Redefinition in the Catalan Pyrenees
In this article we discuss the process by which the upper areas of the Alt Urgell, in Northern Spain, are redefining themselves in order to survive in the new postindustrial order. These communities, during the twentieth century, witnessed a steady demographic and economic collapse that resulted in a progressive decline of agricultural activities and the abandonment of mid-mountain villages. In the sixties, the area deepened its milk production s…
Microeconomic relationships between and among fishers and traders influence the ability to respond to social-ecological changes in a small-scale fishery
Kininmonth, S., B. Crona, Ö. Bodin, I. Vaccaro, L. J. Chapman, and C. A. Chapman. 2016. Microeconomic relationships between and among fishers and traders influence the ability to respond to social-ecological changes in a small-scale fishery. Ecology and Society 22(2):26. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-08833-220226
Socio-economic transitions and everyday life changes in the rural world: Pyrenean households and their contemporary economic history
This article focuses on understanding rural life and how agrarian everyday life changes as a consequence of the radical socio-economic transformations that, across the world, have accompanied rural communities in their transition from economies of subsistence to industrial production, and, in some areas, from there to providers of service to the tourism-oriented leisure economy. In the last century in the Alt Urgell District (Spanish Pyrenees), m…
What Do We Mean by “the Commons?” An Examination of Conceptual Blurring Over Time
Over the last 20 years the theoretical concept of the commons has come to be used not only in the field of natural resources management, but also as a key notion in domains as diverse as the digital economy and alternative politics. The wide use of the term has, however, led to a loss of specificity in the way it is used. Across several disciplines the commons is often used almost interchangeably with terms such as open access, common property, p…
Political science (23 works) · Geography (21 works) · Economics (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Law (13 works) · Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management (12 works) · French Urban and Social Studies (12 works) · Economy (11 works) · Ecology (9 works) · Archaeology (8 works)