• 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 7: Signaling theory and symbolic capital

Class agenda

  • Sustainability Game: Pens
  • Grant discussion: Data management plan and budget
  • Lectures
  • Reading discussion

Reading

  • Bliege Bird, R. and Smith, E., 2005. Signaling theory, strategic interaction, and symbolic capital. Current anthropology, 46(2), pp.221-248.
  • Burt, R.S., 1992. Structural Holes. Chapter 2: The Social Structure of Competition
  • Nolin, D.A., 2012. Food-sharing networks in Lamalera, Indonesia: status, sharing, and signaling. Evolution and Human Behavior, 33(4), pp.334-345.
  • Fitchett, J., Lindberg, F. and Martin, D.M., 2021. Accumulation by symbolic dispossession: Tourism development in advanced capitalism. Annals of Tourism Research, 86, p.103072.
  • Wolf, Eric R. “Distinguished lecture: Facing power-old insights, new questions.” American anthropologist (1990): 586-596.

Media

  • BBC Thinking Allowed: Pierre Bourdieu
  • BBC In Our Time: The Theory of the Leisure Class
  • Planet Money: The habitat banker

Recommended

  • Borgerhoff Mulder et al. 2009; Bourdieu 1984; Lin 2000

Assignments due for class discussion

  • Data management plan and budget