C.
Atran, S., and Douglas Medin (2008). The native mind and the cultural construction of nature. Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press.
pg 1- "There is an increasing sense of diminished human contact with nature, a phenomenon some refer to as the "extinction of experience" (Nabhan and St. Antoine 1993) and others as "Nature-deficit disorder" (Louv, 2006).
pg 3 - "We will argue that biology represents a distinct module of mind that is associated with universal patterns of categorization and reasoning"
- "robustly universal
- "more that modest contact with nature
- "Yet others are highly dependent on particulars of cultural models and associated values.
"evidence demonstrating that cultural support for attention to nature has been diminishing since the onset of the industrial revolution
"In technological oriented cultures, contact with biological kinds may be so minimal that researchers can demonstrate significant differences in children's biological reasoning as a function of whether they do or do not have goldfish as pets (....)."
The Devolution Hypothesis
"reduced contact could lead to declines in knowledge, but not necessarily" the effects of reduced exposure may be offset by sufficient amounts of indirect experience with the natural world, through a culture's media, talk, and values." they refer to this as cultural support
pg 67 - "Standard populations (e.g., undergraduates) may use impoverished default categorization and reasoning strategies (e.g., abstract similarity judgment) relative to those used by most of humanity (e.g., content-rich strategies). <eel> <stuff-trumps-process>
pg 111 - "We believe that people who have serious commerce in a domain rarely approach it in a content-neutral manner.."
"Consequently, models of categorization need to be sensitive to the likelihood that the most relevant and best examples of a category will tend to be learned first, and that later learning will be affected by and build on earlier learning (...)."
Examples:
ask different groups about whether a disease of pine species will spread in Grand Canyon
undergraduates - species of pine are genetically similar, of course it will spread
park foresters - these species are in such different habitats that they won't be near each other or exposed to same stresses
ask different groups about fish
pg 240 - Menominee fishermen tend to take an ecological orientation to conceptualizing fish. They also commonly express the attitude that every fish has a role to play and are less likely that majority-culture fishermen to think of fish in terms of positive (gamefish) or negative ("garbage fish")
Menominee have a strong "do not waste"
Majority-culture experts focus on catch-and-release
pg 248 - "these data indicate that majority-culture fishermen hold strong, incorrect expectations concerning Menominee attitudes and values
even though actual values are very similar - this different sets of framing of the issues leads to conflict
Chapter 7: Folkecology and the spirit of the commons: Garden experiments in Mesoamerica
pg 162 - "The Lowland Maya region faces environmental disaster, owing in part to a host of nonnative actors having access to the forest resources (...). A central problem concerns differential use of common-pool resources, ... we will analyze what is know as the "tragedy of the commons".
"Itza' Maya informants consistently appealed to ecological relations on category-based induction tasks. That observation, coupled with the Itza' Maya record of sustainable agroforestry, suggested to us that there may be a connection between folkecological models and behaviors. In preliminary studies we also found that Spanish-speaking Ladino and Q'eqchi' Maya immigrant populations in the area practice agroforestry in a much less sustainable manner (Atrans and Medin 1997).
pg 172 - "The "tragedy of the commons" and other similar social and ecological dilemmas are basically variants of a deep problem in decision and game theories known as the "prisoner's dilemma"
"field and laboratory studies
"indicate that individual calculations of a rational self-interest collectively lead to a breakdown of a society's common resource base unless institutional or other normative mechanisms are established to restrict access to cooperators: it is irrational to continue to act to sustain a diminishing resource that other increasingly deplete.
pg 174 - "Difference in burn frequency produces differences in destructiveness, independently of need for income
"by this measure, Q'eqchi' destroy more than five times as much forest, but Ladinos less than twice as much, as Itza'
details of the use of the plots
Q'eqchi' clear contiguous plots leaving little untouched
Ladinos leave some trees between plots
Itza' ring plots with trees, clear firebreaks, change plots in non-contiguous patterns - in part because they want to have the birds help the forest regenerate
pg 180 - "Itza' practices encourage a better balance between human productivity and forest maintenance"
"In this context, Itza' appear to behave "irrationally" insofar as their restraint subsidizes another group's profligacy: the more cooperators produce for free-riders, the more the free-riding population is able to expand and lay waste.
pg 190 - "These findings suggest a complex Itza' folkecological model of the forest, wherein different animals affect different plants, and relations among plants and animals are reciprocal.
"In sum, Itza' show awareness of ecological complexity and reciprocity between animals, plants, and people, and Itza' agroforestry favors forest regeneration. Q'eqchi' acknowledge few ecological dependencies and Q'eqchi' agriculture is insensitive to forest survival.
pg 195 - "Our tentative line of reasoning is that Itza', and perhaps other native peoples with a long history of ecological maintenance, might not treat resources as traditional decision and game theory suggests - that is, as objects of a payoff matrix (extensional items substitutable along some metric, such as one that assigns monetary value to every object). Instead, some people may treat resources, such as species, as intentional, relational entities, like friends or enemies. |
