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Creators/Authors contains: "Ember, Carol R."

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  1. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; et al ( , Journal of Biogeography)
    Abstract Aim

    Land ownership norms are well documented and play a central role in social–ecological systems. Yet only recently has the spatial and temporal distribution of land ownership been examined using biogeographical and evolutionary approaches. We incorporate biogeographical and evolutionary modelling to test associations between land ownership and environmental, subsistence and cultural contact predictors.

     Location

    Africa.

     Taxon

    Bantu and Bantoid ethnolinguistic groups (73 societies).

     Methods

    Based on ethnographies for 73 societies, we coded land ownership norms as none, group, kin or individual. We paired these data with language phylogenies, and measured phylogenetic and geographical signal and modelled alternative evolutionary trajectories using maximum likelihood methods. We tested the influence of environmental, subsistence and cultural predictors on spatial variation in land ownership, using a multi‐model inference approach based on logistic regression.

     Results

    Bantu land ownership norms likely evolved on a unilinear trajectory (i.e. societies progress or regress along a series of ownership types), but not one requiring consistent increase in exclusivity (i.e. restrictions towards ownership by smaller groups) as suggested by prior theory. Our biogeographical analyses suggest land ownership is more likely where neighbours also own land and resource productivity is predictable. Reliance on agriculture has relatively small effect sizes and low importance in the model.

     Main Conclusions

    We find support for multiple evolutionary pathways. Lack of resolution may be due to localized horizontal transfer of norms consistent with the influence of neighbours we find from biogeographical analyses. We cannot rule out other untested mechanisms. Although long‐standing theories propose links between subsistence practices and land ownership, our results suggest subsistence plays only a modest role. Our results also support resource defensibility theory (i.e. land ownership is more likely where environmental productivity is predictable). Overall, we demonstrate the value of combining analytical approaches from evolution and biogeography to test hypotheses on the spatial and temporal variation of human cultural traits.

     
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  2. ; ; ; ( , American Anthropologist)
    ABSTRACT

    We have known for some time that complex societies are more likely to have land tenure systems based on private rights and less likely to have communal ownership. Less understood is why. More specifically, what are the mechanisms to explain why complex societies have more private property? What are the adaptive advantages of one system rather than the other? Conceptualizing and coding land tenure systems as a “bundle of rights,” this worldwide cross‐cultural study suggests that Acheson's (2015) economic defendability theory in conjunction with some environmental stressors, such as drought, may help us understand cross‐cultural variation in land tenure systems. Our results have evolutionary implications. They suggest that if property rights were claimed, communal property systems would have been the default system for any society having substantial degrees of hunting, gathering, or herdable animals. Agriculture by itself is not a strong predictor of private land rights, although irrigation agriculture is. [land tenure systems, defendability, resource stress, cross‐cultural]

     
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  3. ; ; ; ( , Weather, Climate, and Society)
    Abstract

    Our broad research goal is to understand how human societies adapt to natural hazards, such as droughts and floods, and how their social and cultural structures are shaped by these events. Here we develop meteorological data of extreme dry, wet, cold, and warm indices relative to 96 largely nonindustrial societies in the worldwide Standard Cross-Cultural Sample to explore how well the meteorological data can be used to hindcast ethnographically reported drought and flood events and the global patterns of extremes. We find that the drought indices that are best at hindcasting ethnographically reported droughts [precipitation minus evaporation (P − E) measures] also tend to overpredict the number of droughts, and therefore we propose a combination of these two indices plus the PDSI as an optimal approach. Some wet precipitation indices (R10S and R20S) are more effective at hindcasting ethnographically reported floods than others. We also calculate the predictability of those extreme indices and use factor analysis to reduce the number of variables so as to discern global patterns. This work highlights the ability to use extreme meteorological indices to fill in gaps in ethnographic records; in the future, this may help us to determine relationships between extreme events and societal response over longer time scales than are otherwise available.

     
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