Biological and Cultural Anthropology of a Changing Tropical Forest: A Fruitful Collaboration across Subfields

In this article, we integrate approaches from biological and cultural anthropology to describe changing relationships between humans and animals in the Dzanga-Ndoki Park and Dzanga-Sangha Dense Forest Reserve (RDS), Central African Republic (CAR). Recent decades have seen a rapid proliferation of human activities, with striking tensions between logging and conservation economies. Our data suggest that certain animals and humans initially adapted successfully to these forest uses, and that local residents have crafted culturally rich new ways of living in the forest. However, our longitudinal data indicate animal declines and expanding frontiers of increasingly intensive human use. These trends are altering previous territorial arrangements and coming to undermine today’s remarkably rich spectrum of human–animal encounters there. Our combined approach offers an alternative to increasingly distinct method and theory between anthropology’s subfields. We sketch a research agenda for integrated anthropological attention to environmental change, especially to transformations in human–animal interactions and entanglements. [