Culture and tradition have long been the domains of social science, particularly social/cultural anthropology and various forms of heritage studies. However, many environmental scientists whose research addresses environmental management, conservation, and restoration are also interested in traditional ecological knowledge, indigenous and local knowledge, and local environmental knowledge (hereafter TEK), not least because policymakers and international institutions promote the incorporation of TEK in environmental work. In this article, we examine TEK usage in peer-reviewed articles by environmental scientists published in 2020. This snapshot of environmental science scholarship includes both critical discussions of how to incorporate TEK in research and management and efforts to do so for various scholarly and applied purposes. Drawing on anthropological discussions of culture, we identify two related patterns within this literature: a tendency toward essentialism and a tendency to minimize power relationships. We argue that scientists whose work reflects these trends might productively engage with knowledge from the scientific fields that study culture and tradition. We suggest productive complicity as a reflexive mode of partnering, and a set of questions that facilitate natural scientists adopting this approach: What and/or who is this TEK for? Who and what will benefit from this TEK deployment? How is compensation/credit shared? Does this work give back and/or forward to all those involved?

Eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jingdezhen between 2003 and 2006 revealed that copying and counterfeiting dominated porcelain production. Ideas about markets and the organization of production encouraged ceramists to copy and counterfeit in search of profit. At the same time, producers responded to others’ fraudulent acts by personalizing their market participation. Their network building was motivated by the belief that individuals with whom you shared a personal connection would not cheat you. Ideas about atomized individuals and dishonest markets, on the one hand, and strategies to personalize market activity, on the other, characterized contemporary capitalism in Jingdezhen (and perhaps China more broadly). This contradiction exemplifies a dual process by which capitalism affects how people think and what they do, while at the same time preexisting ideas and practices inform how capitalism operates in a particular setting.

Fisheries' supply of ecosystem services depends on recruiting, maintaining and-in cases of overfishing-preventing fishers' participation. Participation is influenced by fishers' levels of job satisfaction and a variety of motivations that cannot be reduced to income size. Previous research on fishers' job satisfaction has applied Maslow's hierarchy of basic, socio-psychological and self-actualization needs. Using these as three categories of co-existing rather than hierarchical needs, we investigate Swedish fishers' motivations for considering fisheries exit. Our results suggest that more than half of fishers are considering exiting and that they identify conflicts with seals (31%), environmental policies (17%) and performance of government agencies (16%) as their main reasons. These motivations, we argue, impact simultaneously basic, socio-psychological and self-actualization needs. Accordingly, fishers' motivations for participation-exit decisions are not solely, and may not be primarily, monetary. A better understanding of fishers' motivations, particularly non-monetary ones, would improve fisheries management.

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