Geographical Areas of Specialization: Latin
America, Brazil
Topical Interests: Ecological Anthropology; Research Methods; Tropical Ecology and Resource Management, Land Use and Land Cover Change, and DemographyE620 Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change
Profile:
Contemporary society problems cannot be understood with methods
designed for studying largely sedentary populations. Populations
across the world today are on the move physically, as a result of
loss of control over local resources over which they had no legal
documents, as a result of war and famine, as a result of the shifting
international demand for labor, and as a result of environmental
degradation. How to study these populations' role in environmental
change is a major challenge.
My research has focused on the study
of populations in the Amazon Basin experiencing dislocation through resettlement. Traditional methods
do not apply because of the transitoriness of settlement in forested
frontiers with up to 85% of the population moving within the first
decade of settlement but replaced with others immediately. These
populations experience rapid shifts: from shifting cultivators to
extensive annual cropping to intensive cultivators of grains to intensive
managers of permanent crops or irrigated areas - - all this while
dividing their household labor between the farm and the non-farm
sector, between mining and farming, and other options available in
local ecosystems.
My current research combines remote sensing methods and ground-level
methods of data gathering and analysis that permit a continual checking
of macro and micro levels of analysis. They aim to permit inferences
from one level to be tested with data at another; and to discover
the indices that may best serve to understand the linkages between
global, regional and local-level processes. Students working with
me would have the opportunity to become familiar with remote sensing
methods and to relate satellite images at a number of sites to social
processes at a micro-level. The goals of the current research are
to develop a multi-level, multi-site, longitudinal, and comparative
approach to the study of how people impact forests, how they organize
to manage their resources, and what role population plays in their
shifting actions. Currently this research is supported by grants
from the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration (NASA), the National Institutes of Health (NICHD)
and the National Oceanic and Atomospheric Administration (NOAA). Students are routinely incorporated into these large-scale projects where they learn how to collaborate across disciplines.
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Recent books: |
| 2010 |
Environmental Social Science: Human Environment Interactions and Sustainability. Oxford, UK: Wiley/Blackwell Publ. |
| 2010 |
Meio Ambiente & Florestas (Environment and Forests, published in Portuguese). Sao Paulo: Editora SENAC |
| 2007 |
Human Adaptability, Third Edition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press |
| 2006 |
People and Nature. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publ. |
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Other selected publications: |
| 2004 |
Inferring the Behavior of Households from Remotely Sensed
Changes in Land Cover: Current Methods and Future Directions.
In Spatially Integrated Social Science. Oxford University
Press, pages 23-47 |
| 2003 |
Settlement Design. Forest Fragmentation, and Landscape
Change in Rondonia, Amazonia. In Photogrammetric Engineering
& Remote Sensing 69 (7), pages 805-812 |
| 2002 |
Trajectories of Land Use: Soils, Succession, and Crop
Choice. In Deforestation and Land Use in the Amazon.
University of Florida Press, pages 193-217 |
| 2002 |
Spatial Integration of Social and Biophysical Factors Related
to Land Cover Change. In Population and Development
Review. Supplement to Vol. 28, pages 165-186 |
| 2002 |
Agent-based simulations of household decision making and
land use change in Altamira, Brazil. In Integrating
Geographic Information Systems and Agent-based Modeling Techniques
for Understanding Social and Ecological Processess. Oxford
University Press and the Santa Fe Institute, pages 277-310 |
| 2002 |
Deforestation Trajectories in a Frontier Region of
the Brazilian Amazon. In Linking People, Place, and
Policy: A GIScience Approach, pages 215-234 |
| 2000 |
Deforestation and Cattle Ranching in the Brazilian Amazon:
external Capital and Household Processes. In World
Development 28 (4), pages 683-699 |
| 1999 |
Remote Sensing and GIS at Farm Property Level: Demography
and Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. In Photogrammetric
Engineering and Remote Sensing 65 (11), pages 1311-1320 |
| 1994 |
Editor, The Comparative Analysis of Human Societies: Toward
Common Standards for Data Collection and Reporting. Rienner
Publishers. |
| 1993 |
The Human Ecology of Amazonian Populations. University
of Iowa Press. |
| 1991 |
Ed. The Ecosystem Approach in Anthropology: From Concept
to Practice , University of Michigan Press. |
| 1990 |
Human Adaptive Strategies in Amazonian Blackwater Ecosystems,
American Anthropologist 93:261-382. |
| 1981 |
Developing the Amazon: The Social and Ecological Impact
of Settlement Along the Transamazon Highway. Indiana
University Press |
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Student Building 130, 701 E. Kirkwood Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47405-7100 | Phone: (812) 855-1041 | Fax: (812) 855-4358 |
anthro@indiana.edu