Books by Cynthia T Fowler
Fire Otherwise: Ethnobiology of Burning for a Changing World
Fire Otherwise: Ethnobiology of Burning for a Changing World, 2018
Biosocial Synchrony on Sumba: Multispecies Interactions and Environmental Variations in Indonesia
Biosocial Synchrony on Sumba: Multispecies Relationships and Environmental Variations in Indonesi... more Biosocial Synchrony on Sumba: Multispecies Relationships and Environmental Variations in Indonesia examines biosocial change in the Austronesian community of the Kodi by examining multispecies interactions between select biota and abiota. Cynthia T. Fowler describes how the Kodi people coordinate their mundane and ritual practices with polychaetes and celestial bodies, and how this synchrony encourages and is encouraged by social and ecological variations. Fowler grounds her anthropogenic environmental research with information from geospatial science, marine ecology, astronomy, physics, and astrophysics.
Ignition Stories: Indigenous Fire Ecology in the Indo-Australian Monsoon Zone
Papers by Cynthia T Fowler
A global expert elicitation on present-day human-fire interactions, Written by Smith, Perkins, Mistry, Bilbao, Bird, Christianson, Freitas, Dressler, Ellis, Eloy, Fowler, Haberle, Kaplan, Laris, Millington, Monzón-Alvarado Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2025
Human fire use contributes to fire regimes and benefits societies worldwideyet is poorly understo... more Human fire use contributes to fire regimes and benefits societies worldwideyet is poorly understood at the global scale. We present the Global FireUse Survey (GFUS), an effort to elicit and systematize knowledge about fireuse from experts, including academics and practitioners. The GFUS datacover the stakeholders using fire, reasons for and seasonality of burning,recent trends in anthropogenic ignitions and burned area and the presence/absence and effectiveness of different policy interventions targeting fireuse. The survey garnered 311 responses for regions covering over 50% ofthe Earth’s ice-free land, improving on the coverage of literature syntheseson fire use. Here, we analyse the data on the distribution of fire use andpolicy interventions. The survey suggests that the most widespread fireusers are Indigenous and local people burning to meet objectives associatedwith small-scale livelihoods and cultural priorities, whereas burning bycommercial land users, state agencies and non-governmental organizationsis less widespread. Regulatory restrictions are the most common policyinterventions targeting fire use but are ineffective in achieving their aimsin regions with higher burned area. While community-led governanceof burning is rarer, it was deemed more effective than restrictive policyinterventions, particularly in regions with higher burned area.
Ethnobiology Letters, 2023
Perspectives were established from the 1860s into the 1950s to offer sharecroppers the opportunit... more Perspectives were established from the 1860s into the 1950s to offer sharecroppers the opportunity to manage parcels as a cohort and were places to get financial assistance and credit to buy and maintain farmland (Seals 1991; Siby, 2013). Black people rebuilt their communities decimated by the Civil War, and by 1910 there were approximately 240,000 or more Blackowned farms in the states of Alabama, Florida, and Georgia alone (USDA Census 1910). Many property owners possessed lands on former plantations. Eighty-nine years later in 1999, a USDA Agricultural Economics and Land Ownership Survey stated that African American landowners accounted for approximately 68,000 farms covering 7.8 million acres, approximately 2% of all private landowners in the United States (USDA ERS 1999). In 2017, these already dismal figures had dropped further: there were only 28,000 Black landowners, and these individuals
Ethnobiology Letters, 2018
Research Communications Special Issue on Ethics in Ethnobiology recreational sites. Disturbance m... more Research Communications Special Issue on Ethics in Ethnobiology recreational sites. Disturbance management regimes in this region include the concrete actions performed by a succession of societies beginning with huntergatherers and horticulturalists in the Prehistoric era, followed by Euro-American settlers in Colonial times, and then settler descendants as well as public and private land managers in the current era (Fowler and Konopik 2007). Disturbance management regimes intervene in species composition and spatial structure (Cox et al. 2016) in ways that influence ecosystem processes-such as succession, water circulation, carbon storage, and soil erosion-and functionincluding their protective, productive, and social roles. This article focuses on anthropogenic fire as a form of disturbance that, in the fall of 2016, had an unusually strong influence on landscapes in the Blue Ridge Physiographic Province of the Southern Appalachian Mountains. The fall 2016 wildfire season caused immediate environmental changes and will likely have long-term effects as well. A spatially and temporally dense cluster of wildfires called the "Blue
Environment and Society , 2023
Pyrosociality is a framework for theorizing the simultaneous production of forests and fi res whi... more Pyrosociality is a framework for theorizing the simultaneous production of forests and fi res while discerning who is powerful and who is vulnerable in multispecies encounters mediated by fi re. Th is article reviews literature about fi re science and situates academic dialogue about the ecological consequences of social processes within real-world goings-on in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Pyrosocial theory draws from posthumanism, science and technology studies, and feminist anthropology to assess fi re management. Qualitative data from properties managed by the Nantahala-Pisgah National Forests, North Carolina Forest Service, and South Carolina Forestry Commission ground pyrosocial theory in shift ing ideas and practices related to excluding, suppressing, fostering, and igniting fi res. When centering fi re, what facts, truths, complexities, and subtleties come to light? Th e pyrosocial approach reveals pyropower, or individual variabilities and structural hierarchies related to controlling or infl uencing more-than-human communities. Focusing on power and vulnerability within habitats co-constructed by multispecies agents and biophysical forces accentuates meaningful relationships.
Journal of Ethnobiology, 2023
To explore the process through which people develop knowledge about socioecological change, this ... more To explore the process through which people develop knowledge about socioecological change, this article describes a mixedmethods toolkit containing a technique for making maps in real time while moving through landscapes. The quantitative component of the toolkit is grounded in ethnobiologists' embeddedness in place-based communities and harnesses the power of global positioning systems (GPS). As GPS-wielding ethnobiologists engage in participatory mapping by moving through landscapes with their research collaborators, we can use handheld devices and simultaneously communicate with satellites in outer space to produce maps in real time. Within the existing, large inventory of ethnobiological methods, using handheld GPS devices can be combined with other types of data-collecting techniques to enhance studies of interactions in more-than-human landscapes. Moreover, mapmaking implements movement trace, a tactic for interpreting space-time cultures and documenting grounded experiences with socioecological change. By bringing together interests in the disciplines of ethnobiology and qualitative geographic information systems (GIS), this article describes methods that make it possible to explain the space-time culture that guides people to move through their homelands and to communicate about their experiences even as they work toward integrating and directing the changing circumstances of their lives.
Frontiers in Human Dynamics, 2023
Fowler CT (2023) Bura ura, kendu waiyo (rain falls, water rises): the tyranny of water insecurity... more Fowler CT (2023) Bura ura, kendu waiyo (rain falls, water rises): the tyranny of water insecurity and an agenda for abolition in Kodi (Sumba Island, Indonesia).
). Frontiers in Environmental Sciences: Conservation Biology and Restoration Ecology, 2022
This article evaluates the ways water is made and unmade on Sumba Island when subjected to tensio... more This article evaluates the ways water is made and unmade on Sumba Island when subjected to tensions between Indigenous and off-island political ecologies. Located in the eastern Indian Ocean, Sumba has a semi-arid, monsoonal climate with an uplifted coral reef geological structure where a spatially and temporally dynamic hydrological system shapes people's access to freshwater. Customary adat societies on the island have histories of struggling to maintain the integrity of their own political ecologies, further increasing the precarity of their access to freshwater. The topic of the research reported on in this paper was determined through collaboration with members of the Kodi community in western Sumba who urged the author to study the problem of water. This article highlights ongoing threats to the further degradation of local societies' rights to control their customary territories and freshwater within them by summarizing the phenomena of water grabbing in Indonesia. Zooming in on three projects that manifest as water grabs, this article finds, respectively, that water grabbing occurs under the guise of forest protection and production, behind the veil of philanthropy, and for economic development with military backing. In all three cases, water grabs take place in the context of a decentralizing nation-state where the ways adat is understood and the ways laws regarding it have been interpreted and enacted have changed through time and have varied between communities, partly in relation to the societies' proximity to centers of colonial and postcolonial power as well as the development of activities in their territories. On Sumba the content of adat and relationships among distinct adat societies evolves on a bioculturally diverse island that is home to numerous Indigenous ethnolinguistic communities. Consequently, people's responses to interventions into their political ecologies vary. More broadly, the context for this study is the intersections of water grabbing and social change during the Reformasi, the post-Suharto era of decentralization in Indonesia.
Ethnobiology Letters
The Society of Ethnobiology Board of Trustees initiated EBL in May 2010 to expand its publishing ... more The Society of Ethnobiology Board of Trustees initiated EBL in May 2010 to expand its publishing portfolio into the realm of open access. Our Society’s Board took that bold step because our flagship journal, the Journal of Ethnobiology, was discontinuing its book review section due to the costs of traditional print-based publishing, and because open access was a financially sustainable venue, thanks to the support of our then 450-individual membership base (we now have over 500 members). The purpose of this editorial for the fifth volume of EBL is to highlight several important issues related to the ethics of open access from the point of view of an editor of an up-and-coming journal and a board member of a 40-year-old-and-still-maturing professional organization.
National Public Health Initiatives that Integrate Traditional Medicine
An Editor’s Opinion on the Ethics of Open Access
Ethnobiology Letters, 2014
In the monsoonal archipelago of Eastern Indonesia, the seasonally arid island of Sumba is a very ... more In the monsoonal archipelago of Eastern Indonesia, the seasonally arid island of Sumba is a very challenging place to live. How do the islanders who live in this region endure the harsh conditions? What economic strategies do islanders pursue to ensure their survival? This paper seeks to gain a better understanding of exchange activities among indigenous women and girls on the island of Sumba in Eastern Indonesia. Women entrepreneurs on Sumba produce and process natural products and handicrafts. Women work together with their kin and allies — in groups composed, for instance, of mothers, daughters, nieces and sister-in-laws — to create value, to produce tradable goods and to generate income in a limited environment. Sumbanese women exchange products informally among one another, formally with buyers who pass through their hamlets on trading excursions, and as vendors in biweekly marketplaces. This paper discusses female entrepreneurship in open-air markets and describes the characteristics of the female driven natural products and craft trades on Sumba. Ethnographic data are presented about the locations where trade objects are produced, processed and exchanged and these data are used to map the movements of female entrepreneurs through the island landscape. Geographic maps of entrepreneurs’ movements are the basis for an evaluation of the connections between exchange-driven wayfinding and the production of identities, social networks and landscapes. Evaluations of the wayfinding practices of women entrepreneurs reveal the power women have to form economic systems and ethnic identities.
Anthropologists have been studying fire’s evolutionary and cultural significance for over a centu... more Anthropologists have been studying fire’s evolutionary and cultural significance for over a century (e.g., Burton 2009; Pausas and Keeley 2009; Wrangham 2009). For several decades ethnobiologists (e.g., Anderson 2005) have addressed why and how people use fire to manage resources and studied the effects of anthropogenic burning. Attention to fire ecology has blossomed during the last decade within anthropology and ecology, as well as in other academic disciplines such as history (e.g., Pyne 1998) and applied fields such as conservation science (Driscoll et al. 2010). This burgeoning interest in fire ecology coincides with explosive growth in climate change science (Oreskes 2004) and therefore presents a strategic opportunity for contributions by ethnobiologists.
This article tells the story of the sacred place named Mata Loko ("River's Source") in Karendi on... more This article tells the story of the sacred place named Mata Loko ("River's Source") in Karendi on the western end of the island of Sumba. This ethnographic case of an eastern Indonesian society where the traditional religion of Marapu persists sheds light on questions of how local belief systems are part of environmental adaptations. The use of sacred resources is restricted by the belief that marapu, the ancestors, are guardians of the forest and is enforced by supernatural sanctions. The ecological and religious processes that are described in this article illustrate that interactions between indigenous and world religions impact local cultural ecologies. In experimenting with their indigenous religion, Karendi people are simultaneously experimenting with traditional resource management. The Mata Loko case illustrates that the ritual management of scarce resources such as water and culturally/historically valuable resources such as bamboo is a form of conservation planning. Together cultural history, reciprocal exchange, and ancestral religion provide a framework for protecting valuable natural resources.
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Books by Cynthia T Fowler
Papers by Cynthia T Fowler