Over the course of 30 years of academic work, the late educational anthropologist John Ogbu had an enormous influence on educational research, and on educational anthropology in particular. In this paper, I lay out the tenets of his cultural-ecological (CE) theory of minority student responses to schooling. I also offer critical commentary and point out ways in which CE theory can be sharpened ...

Cultural ecology is today at a place of rapidly expanding interconnections with the growing number of human-environment approaches in geography and other fields. Productive interconnections are evidenced, for example, in the extensive debate and discussion within geography that surround the varied relations (e.g., theory, methods, roles of science and representation, scale and subject matter) o...

Human groups with no culture or communication cannot exist. this essay addresses changes in the concept of development, as it relates to culture and communication, as a new reference point for practical applications of development and cooperation among nations. the idea of development has changed. economic development has evolved to mean sustainable human development. this shift in meaning repr...

For the human species, adaptability has been the key to success in a wide variety of different ecologies. From the icy coasts and plains of the arctic to the jungles and savannahs of the equator, we encounter families and communities of people living recognizably human, yet strikingly different, lifestyles. Nowhere is this plasticity more evident than in social development, as children grow and...

Boivin et al.’s (1) article profoundly deepens scientific understanding of anthropogenic global ecological change from Pleistocene to present by offering robust new evidence of early human transformation of the biosphere that should influence discussions on Anthropocene formalization (2, 3). As ecologists and evolutionary theorists, we applaud this work. However, we are also concerned that this...

1. Organism and Environment 1.1 Man-environment interactions 1.2 Ecology and human evolution 2. Ecological Constraints of Human Cultural Evolution 2.1 The meaning of natural resources 2.2 Ecology and life style 2.3 The cultural value of plants and animals 2.4 Ethnoecology 3. The Human Impact 3.1 Changing the “ecological order” 3.2 Ecological knowledge and survival 4. Applied Ecology, Culture, a...

Cultural evolutionary theory and human behavioural ecology offer different, but compatible approaches to understanding human demographic behaviour. For much of their 30 history, these approaches have been deployed in parallel, with few explicit attempts to integrate them empirically. In this paper, we test hypotheses drawn from both approaches to explore how reproductive behaviour responds to c...

Small-scale human societies are a leap in size and complexity from those of our primate ancestors. We propose that the behavioral predispositions which allowed the evolution of small-scale societies were also those that allowed the cultural evolution of largescale sociality, in the form of multiple transitions to large-scale societies. Although suffi cient, the cultural evolutionary processes t...