A systematic review of resource habitat taboos and human health outcomes in the context of global environmental change

Abstract

The dependence of humans on the ecosystem services that natural resources provide is absolute. The need for social taboos as frameworks for governing natural resource abstraction is gaining widespread recognition especially within the context of climate change. However, the complex relationship between resource and habitat taboos (RHTs) and human health is not entirely understood. We conducted a systematic review of existing studies of the association between RHTs and human health outcomes, focusing on the best evidence available. We searched JSTOR, SocINDEX, Greenfile and Academic Search Complete databases from 1970 to July 2015; and also searched the reference lists of reviews and relevant articles. About 779 studies and data from 26 studies were eligible for the analysis. Only 9 out of 26 studies clearly linked RHTs to human health. Overall, nine taboos, spatial, temporal, gear, method, effort, catch, species-specific, life history and segment, were covered by the empirical studies. This systematic review provides new evidence of relationships between RHTs and human health outcomes. Several methodological limitations were identified in the empirical material. The findings suggest the need for context-specific conservation policies to reduce erosion of RHTs in order to sustain human health in the face of climate change.

Appealing to the minds of gods: religious beliefs and appeals correspond to features of local social ecologies

“…While the present work shows that appeals to gods and spirits point to threats to coordination and cooperation in the local socioecological landscape, we have not demonstrated that these beliefs and appeals actually motivate corresponding behaviors that mitigate such threats. Even though particular religious systems exhibit clear features of adaptive self-organization (e.g., Bird et al, 2013;Lansing et al, 2017;Sosis and Bressler, 2003) and many other cases are interpreted as such (e.g., Angsongna et al, 2016;Connors, 2000;Leeson and Suarez, 2015;Rossano, 2007;Rappaport, 1968;Reynolds and Tanner, 1995;Strassmann et al, 2012), it remains unclear if appeals to deities actually motivate such systems (Purzycki and Sosis, 2022). 7 There is experimental evidence across 15 field sites showing that higher individual ratings of gods' general monitoring and punitive tendencies predict fairer and more generous behavior towards co-religionists in behavioral economic games (Lang et al, 2019).…”

Appealing to the minds of gods: Religious beliefs and appeals correspond to features of local social ecologies

“…While we have argued that the present work shows that appeals to gods and spirits reflect threats to coordination and cooperation in the local socioecological landscape, we have not demonstrated that these beliefs and appeals actually motivate corresponding behaviors that mitigate such threats. Even though particular religious systems exhibit clear features of adaptive self-organization (e.g., Bird et al, 2013;Lansing et al, 2017;Sosis and Bressler, 2003) and many other cases are interpreted as such (e.g., Angsongna et al, 2016;Connors, 2000;Leeson and Suarez, 2015;Rossano, 2007;Rappaport, 1968;Reynolds and Tanner, 1995;Strassmann et al, 2012), it remains unclear exactly how beliefs about and appeals to deities are implicated in such systems (Purzycki and Sosis, 2022). 7 There is experimental evidence across 15 diverse field sites showing that higher individual ratings of gods' general monitoring and punitive tendencies predict fairer and more generous behavior towards co-religionists in behavioral economic games (Lang et al, 2019).…”

Gods, Games, and the Socioecological Landscape

“…While one must remain careful not to romanticize indigenous people's ways of life when evaluating such ethnographic reports (e.g., Alvard, 1994;Smith & Wishnie, 2000), the ethnographic record is brimming with similar instances of spiritually sanctioned conservation systems (e.g., Angsongna et al, 2016;Hartberg et al, 2016), at least hinting at causal implications to be tested in future research. For instance, a strikingly similar case to the Batak can be found in Atran et al's (2002) work among three neighboring rain-forest groups in the Maya lowlands of Guatemala.…”