• Course Overview
  • Course Resources
  • Week 1: Introduction and history of theory in Ecological Anthropology
  • Week 2: Collective action and cooperation
  • Week 3: Common pool resources
  • Week 4: Social-relational approaches
  • Week 5: Networks and Resource Management
  • Week 6: Historical Ecology and the Anthropocene
  • Week 7: Signaling theory and symbolic capital
  • Week 8: Ethnoecology
  • Week 9: Cultural domain analysis and Decolonizing ecological knowledge
  • Week 10: Human behavioral ecology
  • Week 11: Resource access: Territorality and Frontiers
  • Week 12: Resource access: Dispossession and Rights
  • Week 13: Political ecology - conservation and science
  • Week 14: Resilience and complex adaptive systems

ANTH722: Ecological Anthropology

Week 10: Human behavioral ecology

Class agenda

  • Grant discussion: Wenner-Gren Question 5
  • Lectures
  • Reading discussion

Reading

  • Alvard, M.S., 2003. Kinship, lineage, and an evolutionary perspective on cooperative hunting groups in Indonesia. Human Nature, 14, pp.129-163.
  • Bliege Bird, R. and Bird, D.W., 2008. Why women hunt: risk and contemporary foraging in a Western Desert aboriginal community. Current Anthropology, 49(4), pp.655-693.
  • Nolin, D.A., 2010. Food-sharing networks in Lamalera, Indonesia: reciprocity, kinship, and distance. Human Nature, 21, pp.243-268.
  • Smith, E.A., 1983. Anthropological applications of optimal foraging theory: A critical review. Current Anthropology, 24(5), pp.625-651.
  • Downey, S.S., Gerkey, D. and Scaggs, S.A., 2020. The Milpa game: a field experiment investigating the social and ecological dynamics of Q’eqchi’Maya swidden agriculture. Human Ecology, 48, pp.423-438.

Media

  • BBC In our time: Behavioral Ecology

Recommended

  • Hawkes et al. 1982; Charnov 1976; Winterhalder 2001; Cashdan 1985

Assignments due for class discussion

  • Wenner-Gren Question 5