This volume explores some of the diverse niches created by humans in different times and places. The essays span the globe, from Texas to China, from Scandinavia to Papua New Guinea, exploring agricultural spaces and indoor biomes, human aesthetics, and Anthropocentric perspectives.
Content
Portera posits that human niche construction can provide insight into how aesthetic standards develop within human societies and cultures. Standards of beauty tend to evolve through cultural niche construction behavior and biological evolution.
This episode of a four-part documentary series reveals the struggles of indigenous Papua New Guineans and Canada’s First Nations people against industrial threats on their health, livelihoods and cultural survival.
This film, narrated by Tilda Swinton, documents environmental projects and actions by ordinary people around the world.
Through a series of ethnographic studies that range from Papua New Guinea to Siberia, Brazil to Namibia, Ethnographies of Conservation argues that the problem is not the disappearance of “pristine nature” or even the land-use practices of uneducated people. Rather, critical attention would be better turned on discourses of “primitiveness” and “pristine nature,” so prevalent within conservation ideology.
