In _Biocultural Creatures_, Samantha Frost brings feminist and political theory together with findings in the life sciences to recuperate the category of the human for politics. Challenging the idea of human exceptionalism as well as other theories of subjectivity that rest on a distinction between biology and culture, Frost proposes that humans are biocultural creatures who quite literally are cultured within the material, social, and symbolic worlds they inhabit. Through discussions about carbon, the functions of cell membranes, the activity (...) of genes and proteins, the work of oxygen, and the passage of time, Frost recasts questions about the nature of matter, identity, and embodiment. In doing so, she elucidates the imbrication of the biological and cultural within the corporeal self. In remapping the relation of humans to their habitats and arriving at the idea that humans are biocultural creatures, Frost provides new theoretical resources for responding to political and environmental crises and for thinking about how to transform the ways we live. (shrink)

Valorising the biocultural heritage of common goods could enable peasant farmers to achieve socially and economically inclusive sustainability. Increasingly appreciated by consumers, peasant heritage products offer small farmers promising opportunities for economic, social and territorial development. Identifying the obstacles and levers of this complex, multi-scale and multi-stakeholder objective requires an integrative framework. We applied the panarchy conceptual framework to two cases of participatory research with small quinoa producers: a local fair in Chile and quinoa export production in Bolivia. In (...) both cases, the “commoning” process was crucial both to bring stakeholders together inside their communities and to gain outside recognition for their production and thus achieve social and economic inclusion. Despite the differences in scale, the local fair and the export market shared a similar marketing strategy based on short value chains promoting quality products with high identity value. In these dynamics of biocultural heritage valorisation, the panarchical approach revealed the central place as well as the vulnerability of the community territory. As a place of both anchoring and opening, the community territory is the privileged space where autonomous and consensual control over the governance of common biocultural resources can be exercised. (shrink)

This paper emerges from and aims to contribute to conversations on agricultural biodiversity loss, value, and renewal. Standard international responses to the crisis of agrobiodiversity erosion focus mostly on ex situ preservation of germplasm, with little financial and strategic support for in situ cultivation. Yet, one agrarian collective in the Peruvian Andes—the Parque de la Papa (Parque)—has repatriated a thousand native potatoes from the gene bank in Lima so as to catalyze in situ regeneration of lost agricultural biodiversity in the (...) region. Drawing on participant action research and observation, this paper engages with the projects underway at the Parque—as well as “indigenous biocultural heritage” (IBCH), the original action-framework guiding the Parque’s work. IBCH grounds the ecology of successful crop diversity within the Andean cosmovisión, or worldview—which is included, but marginalized, in mainstream agrobiodiversity conservation policies. The IBCH concept counters apolitical renderings of agrobiodiversity erosion, arguing that this disregard of biocultural heritage perpetuates colonialist devaluations of efficacious “traditional ecological knowledge” and epistemologies. Accordingly, this paper discerns here an on-site, or in situ, political ecology of agricultural biodiversity conservation. (shrink)

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization recently declared transhumance pastoralism as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The notion of heritage seeks to recognize the culture behind the seasonal grazing movements along herding routes, between distant and dissimilar ecosystems. The pastoral families move with their herds from pasturelands used during the winter (winter-lands) to areas pastured during the summer (summer-lands). Whereas this is a key step towards the recognition of the cultural dimension associated to this ancient practice, a (...) relevant feature of transhumance pastoralism is its strong linkage with environmental dynamics. This activity developed in a spatiotemporal and co-evolutionary trajectory, which gave rise to a pastoral territory. A territory is the union or linkage of a meaning with a specific place, that is, the space that is appropriated and valued, both symbolically and instrumentally, by human groups. Hence, the pastoral territory represents the socio-ecological system that integrates a pastoral-based community with the natural environment that it inhabits. We propose a co-evolutionary approach to analyzing some key attributes of transhumant pastoralism, which modulate the socio-ecological interdependence. Based on a study case from Northwest Patagonia, Argentina, we identified and characterized seven attributes: (I) mobility, (II) connectivity, (III) temporal synchrony, (IV) local interdependence, (V) local ecological knowledge, (VI) adaptive capacity legacy, and (VII) mixture of land tenure. We discuss these features as examples that represent keystone socio-ecological attributes for the recognition of transhumant pastoral territories as a biocultural heritage. (shrink)

A comienzos del siglo XXI, América del Sur alberga la mayor biodiversidad del mundo para la mayoría de los grupos de plantas y animales, como también una variedad de movimientos en defensa del medio ambiente, que incluyen comunidades urbanas y rurales. La filosofía académica sudamericana, sin embargo, ha prestado escasa atención a este rico contexto biocultural. Para nutrir una filosofía ambiental regional emergente, identifico tres fuentes principales. Primero, una variedad de cosmovisiones y prácticas ecológicas, ancestrales y contemporáneas ofrecen un (...) rico espectro biocultural de pensamiento ambiental de América del Sur que puede ser examinado y valorado a través del trabajo de la antropología cultural, la filosofía de la liberación, la pedagogía de la liberación, la teología de la liberación, el ecofeminismo y la conservación biocultural. En segundo lugar, en las universidades de América del Sur se han formado recientemente algunos grupos interdisciplinarios académicos en la investigación y enseñanza de la filosofía ambiental, con el apoyo del Programa de las Naciones Unidas del Medio Ambiente, o gracias a los intereses individuales de algunos investigadores. En tercer lugar, expresiones artisticas y movimientos sociales han demandado cada vez más la incorporación de valores ambientales en las políticas regionales y en los procesos de toma de decisiones. Estas tres fuentes pueden fomentar el diálogo intercultural, internacional y transdisciplinario para seguir desarrollando una filosofía ambiental sudamericana que brote desde su extraordinaria diversidad biocultural. (shrink)

Film studies has largely avoided the biocultural turn that has swept through other areas of the humanities. This resistance may be understood in terms of the field’s recent distaste for grand theory—and in terms of the loose, social-constructionist thinking that is one residue of that distaste. Fortunately, a biocultural approach to cinema can offer film studies a necessary and defensible set of assumptions. It can also offer interpretive tools and potential ways of conceptualizing perennial concerns like authorship and (...) genre. This essay demonstrates the last two points through an evolutionary reading of Howard Hawks’s musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and through proposals for new ways of approaching auteurism and pornography. (shrink)

This book project intends to serve as a course adoption book unpacking theories of biopolitical life-making and death-making, with chapters dedicated to specific objects that ostensibly affirm life (and argue for life's inextricable links to capital), but that ultimately reify a politics of death and erasure. Specific objects, such as the pink Kommen Foundation-branded handgun, the 'super user' of health care resources, and fat cells allow the authors to discuss the political junctures at which determinations of healthy and unhealthy, life (...) and death, are made. (shrink)

Understanding the pervasiveness of sin is central to Christian theology. The question of why humans are so sinful given an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God presents a challenge and a puzzle. Here, we investigate Friedrich Schleiermacher’s biocultural evolutionary account of sin. We look at empirical evidence to support it and use the cultural Price equation to provide a naturalistic model of the transmission of sin. This model can help us understand how sin can be ubiquitous and unavoidable, even though (...) it is not biologically transmitted, and even if there is no historical Fall that precipitated the tendency to sin. (shrink)

Richard Matheson seeded several weird fish in the deep and dark waters of the American myth pool, not least as a prominent screenwriter for the legendary 1960s TV series The Twilight Zone. I Am Legend, a post-apocalyptic science fiction/horror novel, published in 1954 and set in 1976, remains one of his best known works.1 It shows up persistently on "Best of Horror" lists and is generally regarded as a milestone in modern Gothic fiction. What is it about this novel that (...) has invested it with canonical status? It tells a surpassingly bleak story, one that seems to encode very specific and largely outdated cultural anxieties. And as prophecy, it falls rather flat: Matheson depicts a vampire holocaust, and the .. (shrink)

In the developing world, the dramatic male bias in tobacco use is usually ascribed to pronounced gender disparities in social, political, or economic power. This bias might also reflect under-reporting by woman and/or over-reporting by men. To test the role of gender inequality on gender differences in tobacco use we investigated tobacco use among the Aka, a Congo Basin foraging population noted for its exceptionally high degree of gender equality. We also tested a sexual selection hypothesis—that Aka men’s tobacco use (...) is related to risk taking. Tobacco use, income, tobacco purchases, tobacco sharing, reasons for using tobacco, risk taking, and other variables were measured using structured surveys and peer reports. Tobacco use was verified by testing for salivary cotinine, a nicotine metabolite. Contrary to expectations, we found a very large male bias in tobacco use. Low levels of use among females appeared to be explained by aversions to tobacco, concerns over its negative effects on fetal health, and a desire to attract husbands, who prefer nonsmoking wives. High male use appeared to be related to a desire to enhance hunting abilities and attract and/or retain wives, who prefer husbands that smoke. We conclude that low levels of smoking by Aka women are better explained by the hypothesis that women evolved to avoid plant toxins to protect their fetuses and nursing infants. High male use might be better explained by sexual selection. We also highlight the important role that recreational drugs appear to play in hunter-gatherer sharing relationships. (shrink)

Steven Pinker has said that one of the most important questions humans can ask of themselves is whether moral progress has occurred or is likely to occur. Buchanan and Powell here address that question, in order to provide the first naturalistic, empirically-informed and analytically sophisticated theory of moral progress--explaining the capacities in the human brain that allow for it, the role of the environment, and how contingent and fragile moral progress can be.

Global culture, forms of governance, economic and development models have become drastically dissociated from biological and cultural diversity and their interrelationships. Global society is exposed to globally homogeneously governed life habits that tend to build globally homogeneous technological and urban habitats in the heterogeneous regions of the planet. Concurrently, these globally homogeneous habitats reinforce globally homogeneous life habits. These feedbacks between globalized habits and habitats generate processes of biocultural homogenization, which represents an overlooked dimension of global changes in the (...) Anthropocene. Biocultural homogenization is both driver and product of complex and pervasive losses of biological and cultural diversity. We maintain that it is technically necessary and ethically imperative to reverse these losses. Toward this aim, we present the “3Hs” conceptual framework of the biocultural ethic, which values the vital links among the diversity of life habits of distinct co-in-habitants that share a common habitat. We offer this philosophical framework as a heuristic model for: better understanding multidimensional and multi-scale processes involved in global changes; designing policies that integrate biocultural diversity into ethical, political, and environmental dimensions of the contemporary technological world; and orienting decision-making processes that can better assess the consequences that development policies might have for the conservation or degradation of habitats, life habits, and welfare of co-inhabitants. In this way, the 3Hs “philosophical lens” of the biocultural ethic can contribute to re-orienting global society toward sustainable forms of co-inhabitation amidst the rapidly changing socio-environmental scenarios of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Crop genetic resources constitute a ‘new’ global commons, characterized by multiple layers of activities of farmers, genebanks, public and private research and development organizations, and regulatory agencies operating from local to global levels. This paper presents sui generis biocultural community protocols that were developed by four communities in Benin and Madagascar to improve their ability to contribute to, and benefit from, the crop commons. The communities were motivated in part by the fact that their national governments’ had recently ratified (...) the Plant Treaty and the Nagoya Protocol, which make commitments to promoting the rights of indigenous peoples, local communities and farmers, without being prescriptive as to how Contracting Parties should implement those commitments. The communities identified the protocols as useful means to advance their interests and/or rights under both the Plant Treaty and the Nagoya Protocol to be recognized as managers of local socio-ecological systems, to access genetic resources from outside the communities, and to control others’ access to resources managed by the community. (shrink)

In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois addressed the question "How does it feel to be a social problem?". In 2008, Moustafa Bayoumi answered the same question for Muslims in the United States. Both Du Bois and Bayoumi provide powerful critiques against any notion that racialized minorities are inherently problematic. Both men generally argue that one cannot blame racialized minorities for the ill treatment they endure under systematic oppression. Du Bois and Bayoumi are two of many voices fighting against the (...) popular stigmatization of racialized peoples that include public intellectuals, civil rights activists, politicians, community leaders, educators, and many others. One of the things that all these voices have in common... (shrink)

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has predominantly been read as a critique of patriarchy, a feminist dystopia. This article amends the feminist analysis by applying a biocultural approach to the novel, taking as its point of departure three problems that have troubled the feminist reading: Offred’s perceived passivity, the novel’s subtly critical stance towards its feminist characters, and the open ending. By taking into account the environmental context-a fertility crisis-the biocultural reading is able to analyze char­acter in terms (...) of survival and reproductive strategies. Recognizing that the characters are negotiating male and female mating strategies under extreme conditions leads to a deeper comprehension of the way the contrasting philosophies of radical feminism and sociobi­ology inform sexual politics in the Republic of Gilead. (shrink)

On 25 September 2015, the seventieth session of the General Assembly in the United Nations approved new Sustainable Development Goals building upon the vision of the original Millennium Development Goals. I argue that this post-2015 agenda still neglects fundamental qualities of cultural sovereignty that are key to maintaining sustainable practices, values and lifestyle habits. No single goal emphasises the need to protect local ecological knowledge, cultural heritage and alternative economic practices - nor their interrelation with biodiversity - as a pathway (...) to sustainability. The factors that threaten sustainable lifestyles remain a conspicuous absence in the goals. The article presents a thought experiment to provoke the addition of the 'inextricable link' of biological, cultural and linguistic diversity to the Sustainable Development Goals: the recognition and affirmation of biocultural heritage. (shrink)

"In the perspective of biocultural homogenization and the increasingly prominent use of technology, environmental ethics faces new challenges. Development policies, governance, and economic factors impose new ways of understanding and managing coexistence. Phenomena such as pandemics, global warming, migratory phenomena, the expansion of urban and rural areas, and the development of large-scale monocultures show us that human agency, resources, the environment, and surroundings are increasingly intertwined, both physically and metaphysically, in an increasingly encompassing organism where the dissociation between the (...) local and the global becomes difficult to achieve. With a wide range of actions and relationships, environmental psychology and ethics have the task of rethinking the relationship between cultural elements and the biosphere, in order to achieve a balance between sensibility, responsibility, and responsivity. In this article, I aim to illustrate that a biocultural ethical framework emphasizing socio-environmental justice, applied to geoengineering, not only promotes global socio-environmental sustainability but also recognizes the crucial significance of local ecosystems in climate regulation and biodiversity conservation. To do so, I will briefly present some theoretical elements related to the importance of environmental psychology in understanding the connection between individuals and the surrounding environment. Then, I will succinctly present the concept of the ”3Hs” and its implication on biocultural ethics, and subsequently integrate specific elements of biocultural ethics into the analysis of geoengineering ethics to illustrate the need for a perspective that takes this into account. Through this endeavor, I intend to emphasize the vital role of a holistic, multidimensional perspective that guides individual values and community policies towards sustainable practices, ensuring social cohesion and dialogue, respecting the coexistence of life forms, and protecting their habitats. Keywords: environmental ethics, geoengineering, sustainability, biocultural ethics, environmental psychology.". (shrink)

Establishing biotic borders was part and parcel of empire building. The question of which kinds of biological species were permitted to make their way into North American and West European territories shaped transregional border control in the imperial age. Biotic borders were intensely biocultural in that stereotypes around race and ethnic differences shaped them. Drawing on examples from the history of white ants (also known as termites) in the American and British empires, this essay argues that insects had a (...) sustained and global presence in modern imperial imaginations of borders and frontiers. (shrink)

Abstract.This article examines an orientation for thinking theologically and ethically about the cultural pattern of technology and a vision for living responsibly within it. Building upon and joining select insights of philosophers Hans Jonas and Albert Borgmann, I recommend the analytic and evaluative leverage to be gained through development of an integrative biocultural theological anthropology.

Disney’s animated villains have recently changed to show less conventionally villainous traits: They look and express themselves more like sympathetic characters, and they are usually only outed as villains late in the plot. This shift has prompted much academic com­mentary on the psychological and cultural significance of Disney’s new villains. We add to the existing literature on Disney’s new villains in two ways. First, we analyze shifts in the vocalizations of villains between the 1990s and 2010s. Second, we integrate this (...) analysis in a biocultural account of Disney’s shifting overall representations of villains. We argue that while Disney has long employed evolutionarily explicable cues to villainy, such as a foreign accent and an unappealing exterior, the company is now reacting to challenges to norms of social representation that proscribe the linking of such overt traits with immorality. Con­sequently, recent Disney films do not employ socially stigmatizing cues. However, Disney continues to employ nonstigmatizing cues, such as evil laughter and abiding anger, because these cues foster antipathy in audiences at no sociomoral risk. (shrink)

Every region of the world is confronted with ongoing ecosystem degradation, species extinctions, and the loss of cultural diversity and knowledge associated with indigenous peoples. We face a global biocultural extinction crisis. The proposition that traditional knowledge along with scientific understanding can inform approaches to solving practical conservation problems has been widely accepted in principle. Attempts to promote a more bilateral approach, however, are hampered by the lack of a common framework for integrating the two knowledge systems in a (...) way that is coherent and useful. This problem can be addressed by drawing upon, as a case study, the principle elements of traditional knowledge and their practical application to governance as articulated by the Kuuku I’yu Northern Kaanju people of Cape York Peninsula, Australia. Four points of contact can help bridge traditional and scientific knowledge in addressing the biocultural crisis: post-normal science; conservation values and goals; land management; and sustainable development. Key insights that emerge from these considerations include the propositions that holders of traditional knowledge can be validly seen as members of the extended peer community needed to address post-normal science problems; that traditional knowledge provide guideposts to the positive values being lost from view by an increasingly urban-based society; that there are practical conservation benefits to be derived from adopting a “two-tool box” approach; and that traditional knowledge provides the basis for criteria to help discern for a given community and landscape the kinds of economic activities which are ecologically and culturally compatible. There are multiple benefits for society that arise from appropriate recognition of biocultural resources in legislation and decision making. (shrink)

Los hábitats (dónde vivimos), los hábitos (cómo vivimos) y los habitantes (quiénes somos) constituyen una unidad ética a la vez que ecosistémica. Sin embargo, los hábitats son usualmente estudiados por ecólogos, en cambio, los hábitos por filósofos y otras disciplinas sociales. Con el fin de superar esta disociación, iniciamos un programa transdisciplinario de campo coordinado por ecólogos y filósofos ambientales, que ensaya una visión más integral de los habitantes embebidos en sus hábitats y hábitos en la ecorregión subantártica de Sudamérica. (...) La biosfera puede ser concebida como un reticulado mosaico de unidades hábitats-hábitos-habitantes, donde los humanos han co-evolucionado con sus lenguas indígenas, sus prácticas y conocimientos ecológicos. Este mosaico está siendo hoy destruido por la imposición de un único modelo económico-cultural globalizado. Un segundo objetivo de nuestro programa transdisciplinario es contribuir a la conservación de la diversidad bio-cultural, especialmente en la ecorregión subantártica. En Cabo de Hornos, en el extremo sur de América, encontramos que los educadores, las autoridades y los tomadores de decisiones conocen poco acerca de los hábitats, las lenguas y la flora nativa. En contraste, los miembros de la Comunidad Indígena Yagán y los residentes antiguos poseen un conocimiento detallado acerca de la diversidad biológica y cultural nativa; sin embargo, ellos participan poco en la toma de decisiones y en el sistema de educación formal. Para ayudar a superar esta disociación entre los hábitats-hábitos-habitantes de Cabo de Hornos y aquellos promovidos por la “sociedad global”, en 1999 comenzamos el programa de educación, investigación y conservación biocultural del Parque Etnobotánico Omora que involucra tres etapas críticas: (1) descubrimiento de la diversidad biocultural con una aproximación de “filtro fino” que permite la detección de niveles de diversidad cultural y biológica usualmente omitidos por conceptos generales universalizantes, tales como amerindio versus eurocéntrico o conocimiento ecológico local versus global; (2) encuentros directos “cara a cara” con los co-habitantes humanos y no-humanos en sus hábitats nativos, a través de los cuales la diversidad biocultural deja de ser sólo un concepto o indicador numérico y comienza a ser una experiencia de co-habitación; y (3) actividades de educación y conservación. Estos pasos han sido implementados a escala local, regional e internacional a través de la creación de la Reserva de Biosfera Cabo de Hornos, nominada por UNESCO el 2005, y el establecimiento del Programa de Conservación Biocultural Subantártica, coordinado por la Universidad de Magallanes, el Instituto de Ecología y Biodiversidad de Chile y la University of North Texas. (shrink)

The idea of moral progress played a central role in liberal political thought from the Enlightenment through the nineteenth century but is rarely encountered in moral and political philosophical discourse today. One reason for this is that traditional liberal theorists of moral progress, like their conservative detractors, tended to rely on under-evidenced assumptions about human psychology and society. For the first time, we are developing robust scientific knowledge about human nature, especially through empirical psychological theories of morality and culture that (...) are informed by evolutionary theory. On the surface, evolutionary accounts of morality paint a rather pessimistic picture of human moral nature, suggesting that certain types of moral progress are unrealistic or inappropriate for beings like us. Humans are said to be ‘hard-wired’ for tribalism. However, such a view overlooks the great plasticity of human morality as evidenced by our history of social and political moral achievements. To account for these changes while giving evolved moral psychology its due, we develop a dynamic, biocultural theory of moral progress that highlights the interaction between adaptive components of moral psychology and the cultural construction of moral norms and beliefs, and we explore how this interaction can advance, impede, and reverse moral progress. (shrink)

In the classical view of emotion, the basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise) are assumed to be natural kinds that are perceiver-independent. Correspondingly, each is thought to possess a distinct neural and physiological signature, accompanied by an expression that is universally recognized despite differences in culture, era, and language. An alternative, the theory of constructed emotion, emphasizes that, while the underlying interoceptive sensations are biological, emotional concepts are learned, socially constructed categories, characterized by many-to-many relationships among diverse (...) brain states, physiological signs, facial movements, and their emotional meanings. This biocultural view permits a greater degree of cultural-historical specificity when interpreting the emotions of others. In this article, I consider the implications of the theory of constructed emotion for cognitive film theory, especially regarding the interpretation of depicted facial expressions of emotion as one aspect of cinematic expression. Particular attention is given to recent work revisiting the Kuleshov effect, in which the meaning of a character’s facial expression is thought to change in the context of a montage. (shrink)

A recent scientifically and historically grounded theory on human genetic and cultural evolution suggests why the religious elements of culture became the primary source of both peaceful cooperation within societal ingroups and at the same time of destructive wars with outgroups. It also describes the role of religion in the evolution of ape‐men into humans. The theory indicates why human societal life is not long viable without the underpinning of a healthy, noncoercive, religious faith; why sound religious faith is weak (...) now; and why we may hope both for better morals and for worldwide cooperation in peace. (shrink)