Natural Resource Anthropology

Abstract

Natural resource anthropology offers special promise as a field of applied anthropology. It integrates the theoretical perspectives of three subfields-cultural ecology, cognitive anthropology, and economic anthropology. We discuss the application of these theoretical paradigms to U.S. marine fisheries, arid lands pastoralism, and tropical forest agriculture. We suggest that anthropological training in natural resources should involve ethnographic field methods, multivariate statistics, and the subject matter of allied disciplines in the social and natural sciences.