This essay in the “anthropology of science” is about how cognition constrains culture in
producing science. The example is folk biology, whose cultural recurrence issues from the …

We define the concept of a common-pool resource based on two attributes: the difficulty of
excluding beneficiaries and the subtractability of use. We present similarities and differences …

For decades, conservation and research initiatives in tropical forests have focused almost
exclusively on old-growth forests because scientists believed that these “pristine” …

Food security has always been a key resilience facet for people living in cities. This paper
discusses lessons for food security from historic and prehistoric cities. The Chicago school of …

This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our
knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott …

The relationship between private property and common property has engaged both legal
and economic scholars in a long series of controversies over the meaning, the sequence of …

The conventional wisdom says that the devolution of Classic Maya civilization occurred
because its population grew too large and dense to be supported by primitive neotropical …

This contemporary introduction to the principles and research base of cultural ecology is the
ideal textbook for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate courses that deal with …

This article describes cross-cultural and developmental research on folk biology: that is, the
study of how people conceptualize living kinds. The combination of a conceptual module for …

This article describes cross-cultural research on the relation between how people
conceptualize nature and how they act in it. Mental models of nature differ dramatically …