This ambitious interdisciplinary volume places population processes in their social, political, and economic contexts while it considers their environmental impacts. Examining the multi-faceted patterns of human relationships that overlay, alter, and distort our ties to urban and rural landscapes, the book focuses especially on the essential experi

This ambitious interdisciplinary volume places population processes in their social, political, and economic contexts while it considers their environmental impacts.Examining the multi-faceted patterns of human relationships the book focuses especially on the essential experiences and perspectives of poor.

This book presents a selection of major research texts by Prof. Dr. Lourdes Arizpe Schlosser, a Mexican Pioneer in Anthropology. A global intellectual leader on culture, social development, sustainability, women's studies and indigenous groups, her texts provide both an outlook on the evolution of specific social scientific concepts and historical debates and a long-term and meta-analytical perspective integrating academic and policy discussions. By linking debates from different fields, the book helps readers to understand why people and groups make the choices they make and how the principles of social life must change to meet the challenges that new generations face in building social sustainability and effective environmental management in the twenty-first century.

This book presents major texts by Prof. Dr. Lourdes Arizpe Schlosser, a pioneering Mexican anthropologist, on the occasion of her 70th birthday. She is a leading researcher into indigenous peoples, an innovator in women's studies and a global scientific leader who has inspired the international research and policy communities. Throughout her distinguished career she has analysed ethnicism and indigenous peoples, women in migratory flows, cultural and social sustainability and intangible cultural heritage as social capital, placing these issues on the world agenda for research and policy. Several of the 12 major texts in this volume have been published since 1972 in the US, Europe, Latin America and India; some were first published in Spanish and are available in English for the first time. This anthology also includes recent unpublished texts on culture, development and international cultural policy delivered at high-level international meetings.

A decade after the approval of the UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), the concept has gained wide acceptance at the local, national and international levels. Communities are recognizing and celebrating their Intangible Heritage; governments are devoting important efforts to the construction of national inventories; and anthropologists and professionals from different disciplines are forming a new field of study. The ten chapters of this book include the peer-reviewed papers of the First Planning Meeting of the International Social Science Council's Commission on Research on ICH, which was held at the Centro Regional de Investigaciones Multidisciplinarias (UNAM) in Cuernavaca, Mexico in 2012. The papers are based on fieldwork and direct involvement in assessing and reconceptualizing the outcomes of the UNESCO Convention. The report in Appendix 1 highlights the main points raised during the sessions.

This book analyses how global transactions have been progressively conducted and negotiated in the last 25 years. Achieving a new understanding of sustainability transition in the Anthropocene requires a deeper analysis on culture. The development of new positions of international institutions, national governments, scientific organizations, private fora and civil society movements on culture and nature shows how global transactions must take place in a rapidly transforming world. In her book the author provides a multi-situated ethnography of live debates on culture, global environmental change, development and diversity directly recorded by the author as a participating and decision-making anthropologist from 1988 to 2016. She examines the politicization and internationalization of culture by recognizing, negotiating and diversifying views on cultures and re-thinking culture in the Anthropocene. The merging of science and policy in taking up cultural and natural challenges in the Anthropocene is discussed.

The texts presented in this book trace the rise of culture as a major concern for development, international diplomacy, sustainability and national politics over the past two decades. As a major participant in anthropological field research, advocate for cultural freedom and decision-maker in international programs on culture, the author gives a firsthand account of the trade-offs, the contradictions and the management of consensus in these fields. She argues that the constitutive, functional and instrumental aspects of cultural narratives call for a more in-depth understanding of knowledge, leading to cultural and social sustainability in the framework of a "new worlding". Many of the texts gathered here were presented at the United Nations General Assembly and other high-level international meetings. Most of the texts are unpublished; some were first published in Spanish and are now available in English for the first time.

Never before in history have humans had such power over the environment as we have today, and never before have we been so close to the end of nature. With the destruction of the earth a realistic possibility, global change is the point on which theoretical discussions and practical challenges must converge.
The authors of this compelling book argue that before suitable solutions can be found to pressing environmental problems, we need a way to gather information on the human dimensions of global changes. How do small and everyday individual actions add up to the intricate networks of global interactions? What are our rights and responsibilities as humans toward the planet and its natural resources?
The Lacandon rain forest in Mexico provides a vivid example of an environmental challenge that will demand the concerted efforts of many different groups, and not only technical solutions, to resolve successfully. Using data taken largely from in-depth interviews with landowners, farm workers, cattle raisers, housewives, professionals, and civil servants, the authors draw a rich portrait of the varied perceptions and positions these groups and individuals hold. At issue are the social, rather than psychological, bases of their perspectives.
"Culture and Global Change" offers a model for how the social sciences, and anthropology in particular, can lead the way in developing comprehensive understandings of the interrelationships between groups at the local, regional, and international levels that affect perceptions of the environment and thus the viability of solutions. It is required reading for anthropologists and environmental activists alike.
Lourdes Arizpe is AssistantDirector-General for Culture, UNESCO. Fernanda Paz and Margarita Velzquez work for the Centro Regional de Investigaciones Multidisciplinarias, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico.