THE WATERFINDERS. A cultural history of the Australian dingo

Australian Zoologist ◽

10.7882/az.2020.034 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Justine Philip

Keyword(s):

Cultural History ◽

Belief Systems ◽

Keystone Species ◽

Human Society ◽

Arid Environments ◽

River Systems ◽

Great Cost ◽

Inland Lakes ◽

History Of ◽

Aboriginal Society

For thousands of years, the water-finding abilities of the Australian dingo ( Canis dingo), has assisted human survival in one of the most extreme, arid environments on earth. In addition to their contribution to Traditional Aboriginal society as a guardian, living blanket, hunting assistant and companion, the dingo’s role as intermediary between the earth’s surface and the river systems that flow beneath the continent is legendary. Both the ancestral/mythical dingo and the contemporary dingo are attributed with having assisted people in the location of aquifers, billabongs, inland lakes. They guided people safely across hundreds of kilometers of desert, locating the places where water sources reach up closest to the earth’s surface from the underground lakes and waterways that flow beneath the continent. The dingo’s status in Aboriginal culture is celebrated in the naming of waterholes, soaks, river systems and aquifers. This paper follows the path of the ancient dingo, tracing how, as a cultural keystone species, dingoes have shaped human society and belief systems, encouraging cultures of reciprocity and laws of protection for vital resources. Post-colonization, these traditions have not been recognized outside of Aboriginal communities, and this loss of cultural heritage comes at great cost to the Australian environment, biodiversity and the health and preservation of vital resources.

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Resilience and Adaptation: Yukon River Watershed Contaminant Risk Indicators

Scientifica ◽

10.1155/2018/8421513 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 2018 ◽

pp. 1-12

Author(s):

Lawrence Duffy ◽

La’Ona De Wilde ◽

Katie Spellman ◽

Kriya Dunlap ◽

Bonita Dainowski ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Management Practices ◽

Keystone Species ◽

Policy Formation ◽

Risk Indicators ◽

Ecosystem Functions ◽

Human Society ◽

Community Activities ◽

Yukon River ◽

Vulnerability Indicators ◽

History Of

River watersheds are among the most complex terrestrial features in Alaska, performing valuable ecosystem functions and providing services for human society. Rivers are vital to both estuarine and aquatic biota and play important roles in biogeochemical cycles and physical processes. The functions of watersheds have been used as vulnerability indicators for ecosystem and socioeconomic resilience. Despite a long history of human activity, the Yukon River has not received the holistic and interdisciplinary attention given to the other great American river systems. By using hypothesis-based monitoring of key watershed functions, we can gain insight to regime-shifting stresses such as fire, toxins, and invasive species development. Coupling adaptive risk management practices involving stakeholders with place-based education, especially contaminants and nutrition related, can maintain resilience within communities. The Yukon watershed provides a broadscale opportunity for communities to monitor the environment, manage resources, and contribute to stewardship policy formation. Monitoring keystone species and community activities, such as citizen science, are critical first steps to following changes to resiliency throughout the Yukon watershed. Creating a policy environment that encourages local experimentation and innovation contributes to resilience maintenance during development-imposed stress.

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Anti-Catholicism in the United States

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.316 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Mark S. Massa

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Cultural History ◽

North American ◽

The United States ◽

Human Society ◽

Boundary Maintenance ◽

Different Types ◽

History Of ◽

American Society ◽

American Catholic

Historian John Higham once referred to anti-Catholicism as “by far the oldest, and the most powerful of anti-foreign traditions” in North American intellectual and cultural history. But Higham’s famous observation actually elided three different types of anti-Catholic nativism that have enjoyed a long and quite vibrant life in North America: a cultural distrust of Catholics, based on an understanding of North American public culture rooted in a profoundly British and Protestant ordering of human society; an intellectual distrust of Catholics, based on a set of epistemological and philosophical ideas first elucidated in the English (Lockean) and Scottish (“Common Sense Realist”) Enlightenments and the British Whig tradition of political thought; and a nativist distrust of Catholics as deviant members of American society, a perception central to the Protestant mainstream’s duty of “boundary maintenance” (to utilize Emile Durkheim’s reading of how “outsiders” help “insiders” maintain social control). An examination of the long history of anti-Catholicism in the United States can be divided into three parts: first, an overview of the types of anti-Catholic animus utilizing the typology adumbrated above; second, a narrative history of the most important anti-Catholic events in U.S. culture (e.g., Harvard’s Dudleian Lectures, the Suffolk Resolves, the burning of the Charlestown convent, Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures); and finally, a discussion of American Catholic efforts to address the animus.

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Parrot Interpreter: Representation, Extinction and the Electronic Information Environment

Cultural Studies Review ◽

10.5130/csr.v12i1.3416 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 12 (1) ◽

pp. 89-103

Author(s):

Paul Carter

Keyword(s):

Cultural History ◽

Information Environment ◽

Human Society ◽

Electronic Information ◽

Apparent Contrast ◽

In The Wild ◽

History Of ◽

Imaginative Literature ◽

The One ◽

Scientific Collections

Humans, it seems, can’t get enough of parrots. Ethnography, folklore, psychology, and, of course, imaginative literature all offer copious evidence of our fantasy of living with, communicating with and even being parrots. The natural history of parrots and the cultural history of parrots present something of a conundrum: on the one hand, a massive destructiveness (illegal bird and feather trade, environment destruction, scientific collections); on the other, an often erotically inflected sympathetic identification leading to the production of new forms. It’s strange to realise that Europe is infested with a shadow population of captive and inbred budgerigars, whose numbers far exceed those remaining in the wild and who can never return to their origins. If, as our privileged other, our uncanny mimic and double, the parrot still fails to survive, what does this tell us about our economy of desire? It seems that to know is to consume and destroy; and that the apparent contrast between the operations of the rainforest loggers and bird-trappers and the sentimental representations and transformations parrot suffers in human society is overdrawn. How is this contradiction to be explained?

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