The World-system and a Local System:  Maya Agriculture Meets International Agricultural Development 

E N Anderson

University of California, Riverside

In twenty years of research on the agriculture and forestry of the Yucatec Maya of southeast Mexico, I have seen many ideas come in from the great outside world.  Some succeed, many fail.  In spite of the anthropologists' litany of "community participation" and "cultural sensitivity," the predictor is usually supply and demand:  where there is a market, the Maya will work to develop supply capability; where there is no market, traditional subsistence methods are better than the introductions.  Government or international help is, however, needed to help develop markets and to provide expert knowledge of how to mobilize for them and connect to them.  When this has done, some important successes have followed.  Implications for realistic policies go beyond the obvious, and will be discussed.

The Gene Anderson Webpage

My major concern is saving the world's biotic environment. My life has been devoted to protecting our plant and animal heritage, partly for its own sake, but also for human use. I define "use" in the broadest sense. Aesthetic, religious, and recreational uses of plants and animals are important, and are closely tied to more "practical" or "materialist" uses. I am dedicated to the goal of improving human life, especially for the poor and ill, while also protecting other lives, and using the planet in a more or less "sustainable" manner (however defined).

To do this, I study cultural and political ecology, ethnobotany, and ethnozoology. My main focus is on traditional resource management and its transformations. I am primarily concerned with traditional ecological knowledge, traditional resource management, and the contributions these bring to modern life.

I am also interested in current moral controversies within the environmental field, such as the questions around indigenous rights to their knowledge and discoveries.

I will be regularly posting on this website various ideas on all these questions in the "Blog" section.

California ethnobotany: Yucca flowering, San Bernardino