Uprooted when settled: Koonj and Kuku in the changing migrating identity of Gujjars and Bakerwals, the transhumant pastoralist of Jammu and Kashmir

Quilting Voices

Conflict on Mount Lebanon: The Druze, the Maronites, and Collective Memory

Animal movement is the mechanism connecting landscapes to fitness, and understanding variation in seasonal animal movements has benefited from the analysis and categorization of animal displacement. However, seasonal movement patterns can defy classification when movements are highly variable. Hidden Markov movement models (HMMs) are a class of latent-state models well-suited to modeling movement data. Here, we used HMMs to assess seasonal patterns of variation in the movement of pronghorn (Antilocapra americana), a species known for variable seasonal movements that challenge analytical approaches, while using a population of mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), for whom seasonal movements are well-documented, as a comparison. We used population-level HMMs in a Bayesian framework to estimate a seasonal trend in the daily probability of transitioning between a short-distance local movement state and a long-distance movement state. The estimated seasonal patterns of movements in mule deer closely aligned with prior work based on indices of animal displacement: a short period of long-distance movements in the fall season and again in the spring, consistent with migrations to and from seasonal ranges. We found seasonal movement patterns for pronghorn were more variable, as a period of long-distance movements in the fall was followed by a winter period in which pronghorn were much more likely to further initiate and remain in a long-distance movement pattern compared with the movement patterns of mule deer. Overall, pronghorn were simply more likely to be in a long-distance movement pattern throughout the year. Hidden Markov movement models provide inference on seasonal movements similar to other methods, while providing a robust framework to understand movement patterns on shorter timescales and for more challenging movement patterns. Hidden Markov movement models can allow a rigorous assessment of the drivers of changes in movement patterns such as extreme weather events and land development, important for management and conservation.

Animal movements can determine the population dynamics of wildlife. We used telemetry data to provide insight into the causes and consequences of local and long-distance movements of multiple age classes of conservation-reliant golden eagles (Aquila chrysaetos) in the foothills and mountains near Tehachapi, California. We estimated size and habitat-related correlates of 324 monthly 95 % home ranges and 317 monthly 50 % core areas for 25 birds moving locally over 2.5 years. We also calculated daily, hourly, and total distances traveled for the five of these birds that engaged in long-distance movements. Mean (±SD) monthly home-range size was 253.6 ± 429.4 km2 and core-area size was 26.4 ± 49.7 km2. Consistent with expectations, space used by pre-adults increased with age and was season-dependent but, unexpectedly, was not sex-dependent. For all ages and sexes, home ranges and core areas were dominated by both forest & woodland and shrubland & grassland habitat types. When moving long distances, eagles traveled up to 1588.4 km (1-way) in a season at highly variable speeds (63.7 ± 69.0 km/day and 5.2 ± 10.4 km/h) that were dependent on time of day. Patterns of long-distance movements by eagles were determined by age, yet these movements had characteristics of more than one previously described movement category (migration, dispersal, etc.). Our results provide a context for differentiating among types of movement behaviors and their population-level consequences and, thus, have implications for management and conservation of golden eagle populations.

Conservation of wide‐ranging species and their movement is a major challenge in an increasingly fragmented world. Long‐distance movement, such as dispersal, is a key factor for the persistence of population, enabling the movement of animals within and between populations. Here, we describe one of the longest dispersal journeys by a sub‐adult male tiger (Panthera tigris) through GPS telemetry in Central India. We analyzed movement metrics, directionality, and space use during three behavioral stages of dispersal. We also used the clustering method to identify resting and kill sites (n = 89). T1‐C1 dispersed a straight‐line distance of 315 km over 225 days, moving an average of 8.38 km/day and covering a cumulative displacement of ~3000 km. Movement rate during post‐dispersal was faster (mean = 0.47 km/h) than during dispersal (mean = 0.38 km/h) and pre‐dispersal (mean = 0.13 km/h), respectively. The overall movement rate during the night (0.44 km/h) was significantly faster than during the day (0.21 km/h). Likewise, during dispersal, the movement was faster (mean = 0.52 km/h) at night than day (0.24 km/h). The average size of clusters, signifying resting and kill sites, was 1.68 ha and primarily away from human habitation (mean = 1.89 km). The individual crossed roads faster (mean = 2.00 km/h) than it traveled during other times. During the post‐dispersal phase, T1‐C1 had a space use of 319.48 km2 (95% dBBMM) in the Dnyanganga Wildlife Sanctuary. The dispersal event highlights the long‐distance and multiscale movement behavior in a heterogeneous landscape. Moreover, small forest patches play a key role in maintaining large carnivore connectivity while dispersing through a human‐dominated landscape. Our study underlines how documenting the long‐distance movement and integrating it with modern technology can improve conservation management decisions.

Harry’s is my favourite bar in my neighbourhood. It is a small wine bar, owned by three men in their late thirties and targeted at people like them; my gentrifying inner city neighbourhood’s 20 to 40 something urban middle class. Harry’s has seats along the bar, booths inside, and a courtyard out the back. The seating arrangements mean that larger groups tend to gather outside, groups of two to four spread around the location, and people by themselves, or in groups of two, tend to sit at the bar. I usually sit at the bar....

Afro-Puerto Rican Oral Histories:A Disruptive Collaboration Jocelyn A. Géliga Vargas (bio) We are a Western people in the manner of our own roots. We are Americans of the United States and Americans of America and Westerners of the West. And we are all this as Puerto Ricans from Puerto Rico. —Former Governor Luis Muñoz Marín, 1953 The contribution of the black race to Puerto Rico is irrelevant, it is a merely rhetorical addition. —Former Governor Rafael Hernández Colón, 1988 Puerto Rico is a work in progress where the wealth of our history does not dictate our fate, the strength of our roots does not tie us to the past and the affirmation of our Hispanicity goes hand in hand with our participation in a nation [United States] whose multicultural vocation increases daily. —Governor Luis Fortuño Burset, 2011 Testimonios afropuertorriqueños: Un proyecto de historia oral en el oeste de Puerto Rico (Afro-Puerto Rican testimonies: An oral history project in western Puerto Rico) is a collaborative research project launched in September 2006. Its purpose is recording the voices, memories, and histories of contemporary Afro-Puerto Ricans in order to fertilize debates about racial constructions and discourses in Puerto Rico and democratize the forum of discussion, representation, and analysis of Afro-Puerto Rican history and identities. In its first year the project was funded by the Otros Saberes Initiative of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), which supported five other Latin American collaborative [End Page 90] research initiatives focused on either Afro-descendents or indigenous communities. During the course of that year we composed a diverse research collective of nearly two dozen members, including academics; community members from the western towns of Aguadilla and Hormigueros, where the oral history project was conducted; and students from the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez. At the onset of the project we were guided by the following objectives: 1. To employ oral history to ignite profound and self-reflective discussions about contemporary Afro-Puerto Rican identity and experience. 2. To carve out a space for the production and circulation of Afro-Puerto Rican self-representations. 3. To debunk prevalent myths and stereotypes about Afro-Puerto Ricans and the "African heritage" in Puerto Rico. 4. To challenge the circumscription of Afro-Puerto Rican culture, history, and experience to ever-shrinking regions in the east and south of Puerto Rico. 5. To record the life stories of local actors in order to challenge the reduction of Afro-Puerto Rican history to chapters on eminent blacks or "mulattos" or on particular, marginal "communities" so as to demonstrate that this history is written, narrated, and constructed "from below" in everyday struggles to define, negotiate, and assert individual and collective identities. 6. To develop a collaborative research methodology that contributes to building a diverse project community dedicated to research and education about the Afro-Puerto Rican experience in Puerto Rico. By the end of the first year the project had generated an unprecedented Afro-Puerto Rican oral history collection that included thirty-three interviews and a parallel archive of photographic and video material. Thereafter a smaller but equally diverse collective has continued collaborating in the dissemination of the project in publications and presentations as well as in the analysis of the testimonial material collected. In this essay I reflect on the first year of the project, which I have coordinated since its inception, focusing primarily on its evolution in the town of Aguadilla, to argue that the collaborative oral history methodology employed forcefully disrupts the tenets of racial discourse in Puerto Rico as well as dominant saberes (lore) about [End Page 91] contemporary Afro-Puerto Rican subjectivities.1 To contextualize my argument I begin with a necessarily abridged discussion of race and identity in Puerto Rico, followed by a characterization of the field of Afro-Puerto Rican studies, which provided the point of departure for our project. Against these backdrops I discuss how the conjunction of intimacy and identity in the search for alternative saberes about Afro-Puerto Ricanness enabled our collaborative research project to transcend firmly entrenched confines in both social science research and race and identity discourses in Puerto...

The inspiration for The Voices of the Ocean Decade: A Tour of the World, is Ocean Decade Challenge 10, which is focused around the idea of “Changing humanity's relationship with the ocean.” Oral Histories are open ended interviews that are used to promote effective and emotional storytelling of an individual's life history and lived experiences. Oral Histories capture and preserve knowledge for future generations and be used as baseline data to document local and ecological knowledge. The project will amplify the personal testimonies and stories of identified experts, or “narrators,” who will be asked to share their embodied experiences, life stories and pass down their industrial, local or community knowledge. Through these interviews we will be able to assess scientific and structural gaps, challenges, identify opportunities of growth and collaboration and share success stories within the framework of the Ocean Decade. By collecting the Oral Histories of individuals working within the Ocean Decade, this project illuminates an individual’s experience in the Ocean Decade, including any concerns for the future. Additionally, as living archived documents, these Oral Histories will be available far beyond the end of the Ocean Decade in 2030. These interviews encompass a global and multi-disciplinary perspective that is reflective of the Ocean Decade including interviewing narrators that span regional boundaries, narrators who can offer a global perspective on ocean issues and narrators from the indigenous communities, Global South and Small Island Developing States. Since the Ocean Decade has a strong emphasis on early career and youth participation, we plan on expanding our pool of potential narrators to include those from different generations. Additionally, narrators will come from different scientific fields and will work at varying levels within the Ocean Decade. Perspectives from an international audience will create dialogue around some of the most pressing topics in the Ocean Decade. Interviews will include a minimum of three to five individuals from each identified region: North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Pacific and Oceania Islands, and Europe, as well as folks working in the Polar regions. By capturing individuals' embodied experiences through adapted Oral Histories, we can shine light on how to ensure the preservation and availability of stories in order to successfully complete the Ocean Decades’ outcomes. The listeners to these stories take away three main points: 1. Understand the role of Oral History in advancing the narratives of the Ocean Decade, 2. Understand the gaps, challenges, and success stories of the Ocean Decade, and 3. Have a better understanding of the role of Oral Histories in capturing the unique experiences and dialogue around the Ocean Decade. These interviews will be publicly available on the NOAA Voices Archives. The interviews will be used to develop visual aids detailing the challenges, gaps, needs, partnerships, and opportunities within the Ocean Decade. Additionally, these products will be used for educational purposes, policy development, and further research, ultimately providing valuable insights and humanizing the people in the Ocean Decade.

Korean and Korean American Life Writing in Hawai'i examines such self-representing genres as lyric poems, oral history, autobiography, and memoirs written by Korean and Korean Americans from the early twentieth century to the present, in order to explore how these people have shaped their individual or collective identities. Their representations, produced in different periods by successive generations, reveal how Koreans in their diaspora to Hawai‘i came to terms with their ethnic and local selves, and also how the sense of who and what they are changed over the years, both within and beyond the initial generation. Looking into their individual and collective identities in lyric poems, oral history, autobiography, and memoirs reveals how the earliest arrivals, their children, and their grandchildren have come to terms with their national, ethnic, and local selves, and how their sense of identity changes over the course of time, both within and beyond the initial generation. In the lyric poems found in Korean-language periodicals of the native-born generation, we can trace the significance of the motherland and Hawai‘i for these writers’ sense of identity. The oral histories of first-generation women, most of whom arrived as picture brides, also represent another “us”: often vulnerable Koreans who define themselves in relation to both the present culture and to Korean men. The self developed by the second-, third-, and in-between-generation Koreans diversifies because their identity is not defined exclusively by their ancestral land, extending to Hawai‘i and to America. This study focuses on three main areas of emphasis: Hawai‘i; Korean language and culture; and life writing. By tracing how identity changes with each generation, this study reveals how identity formation for Hawai‘i diasporic Koreans has evolved.

As uncontrolled development forces crises in the natural world, deep and long-standing human connections with the Earth are changing. Understanding these shifting relationships is essential to framing our responses to issues of industrial development, population growth, and climate change. The use of oral history methodology in environmental research acknowledges and subjectively defines these human connections to the natural world, enriching our understanding of what the Earth means to us as well as what the Earth needs from us to find balance once again. Oral History and the Environment: Global Perspectives on Climate, Connection, and Catastrophe is the first book to provide a global perspective on the use of oral history in environmental research. It presents excerpts from interviews with environmental activists, victims of environmental catastrophe, and those whose life experiences give them special insights into the natural world, combined with commentary by oral historians who have been exploring how these commentaries can be used to better understand our relationship with the natural world. In this anthology, oral histories with farmers, wildlife rescue volunteers, activists, environmental disaster survivors, elders, water system managers, indigenous voices, tribal trustees, wilderness rangers, reindeer herders, fishers, and foresters help readers understand a wide range of issues related to our relationship with the environment. These stories and expert analysis touch on a wide range of topics including drought, chemical leaks, oil spills, nuclear disaster, indigenous control of resources, natural resource management, wilderness, and environmental protest.

During the twentieth century, the 20,000 hectares commons surrounding the village of Paulshoek as well as the neighbouring privately-owned farms have been significantly influenced by evolving land-use practices driven largely by socio-economic and political change in the broader Namaqualand and South African region. Land-use practices in the communal lands of Namaqualand were based initially on transhumant pastoralism, then on extensive dryland cropping associated with livestock production under restricted mobility, and more recently on a sedentarized labour reserve where agricultural production now forms a minor part of the local economy. For the first half of the twentieth century, farmers on communal and privately-owned farms shared similar transhumant pastoral practices and both moved across unfenced farm boundaries. By the middle of the century, however, fence-lines were established and commercial farming on privately-owned farms was increasingly managed according to rangeland science principles. As the population grew in the communal areas, families gravitated to new ‘service’ villages such as Paulshoek and became increasingly dependent on migrant labour and state welfare. While the majority of former croplands are now fallow, many of them for decades or more, communal livestock populations have remained relatively high, fluctuating with rainfall. The impact of this history of land use can be compared with that of neighbouring privately-owned farms where low stocking rates, coupled with a variety of state subsidies, have had a very different environmental outcome. This article charts the environmental transformations that have occurred in the area of Paulshoek as a direct result of the region's political history and the evolution of the regional economy. We present a variety of evidence drawn from archival sources, oral history, repeat aerial and ground photography, and detailed climate, cropping and livestock records to show that events far beyond the borders of Namaqualand's communal areas have had a profound influence on their environments.

Debates around Oral History have not ceased for the last years, in spite of having reached certain maturity in their methodological face. Some aspects which refer to professional ethics, to the truthfulness of testimonies, to the way in which oral history is produced and to the property of the historical accounts, still remain object of debate in every Oral History Convention. One of the issues which still needs to be deeply discussed is the time of the testimonies, as a result of the oral history interviews with the protagonists of recent history. Within the last problem referred to as a reflection on “history protagonists´ protagonism” when narrating their memories, we will be able to reconsider the significance of oral testimony as it makes the social actor return to a vivid past which is related to the present of the interview. When it comes to interviewing human rights movements´activists, we can think of a triple protagonism of the social actors, placing them in a permanent position which covers both past and present: 1) That initial protagonism of political activism which begins in the hard years of the last civic-military dictatorship or during the transition to democracy with the search for their disappeared relatives. 2. That protagonism they achieve one more time when they narrate their life experience during the oral history interviews, where building up the historical accounts can only be carried out by those who have experienced history and who have been their direct witnesses. 3. The participation as witnesses/claimants in the trials for crimes against humanity of the last years which, once again, turns Human Rights activists into main characters in a relevant historical deed. In this article, I thus aim at examining the temporal matter and the triple protagonism mentioned above, so as to contribute to the study field with new issues to think about when it comes to using that complex methodology proposed by oral history.

Oral history is the recording of unique life experience; it captures and preserves voices and participants are involved in the process of producing their own life histories. An oral history...

Another way in which two places may be related or interconnected is based on the sharing of the same individual organisms which move or migrate between them. No topic is more geographical in content and perspective than migration. Animal movement, especially long-distance movement, embodies all aspects of geographical phenomena such as navigation skills, and direction and distances of specific regions and places from each other.

Creating Legal Space for Animal-Indigenous Relationships