Agustin Fuentes | Princeton University (original) (raw)

Papers by Agustin Fuentes

Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2021

From climate change to toxic pollution and the interactive effects of multiple pollution streams,... more From climate change to toxic pollution and the interactive effects of multiple pollution streams, human health is under siege. Human-produced environmental risks to health and wellbeing are high and contributing to patterns of global morbidity, mortality, economic inequality, displacement, and insecurity. The implications of human-produced environmental harms to global health are complex just as are their causes. The concept of environmental violence offers a potentially robust frame for engaging this issue. We argue that a more specified and structured framework and definition of environmental violence-focusing on human-produced harms by way of pollution emissions-is both timely and beneficial for engaging the complexities of global public health. To clarify why and how this is the case, we review the literature for publications that use the term environmental violence and we subsequently propose a specific definition focused on human-produced pollution along with a framework for tracking and analysing environmental violence and its constituent components. Finally, we discuss the potential value of our framework for research and policy making regarding human health.

PLOS ONE, 2021

Previous research demonstrates that low-income countries face higher risks than high-income count... more Previous research demonstrates that low-income countries face higher risks than high-income countries from toxic pollution and climate change. However, the relationship between these two risks is little explored or tested, and efforts to address the risks are often independent and uncoordinated. We argue that the global risks from toxic pollution and climate change are highly correlated and should be jointly analyzed in order to inform and better target efforts to reduce or mitigate both risks. We provide such analysis for 176 countries and found a strong (rs = -0.798;95%CI -0.852, -0.727) and significant (p<0.0001) relationship between the distribution of climate risk and toxic pollution. We also found that inequities in pollution production, economic status, and institutional readiness are interconnected and exacerbate risk for countries already in the highest risk categories for both toxic and non-toxic (greenhouse gas) pollution. The findings have policy implications, includi...

A major contribution of anthropological work has been to challenge a unitary theory of the human.... more A major contribution of anthropological work has been to challenge a unitary theory of the human. In this American Anthropologist vital topics forum, a range of prominent anthropologists contribute to this challenge and provide musings on the human. The essays in this forum reflect diversity and unity of anthropological thought on human nature. Some note humans’ connection to other primates, and others emphasize our distinction from ancestral patterns. Several reflect on cultural change, globally and locally, while others problematize what we might mean by, and who we include in, a “human” nature. The perception of humans constructing and being constructed by the world and the warning to be cognizant of our approaches to defining ourselves are central themes here. Our goal is to initiate a discussion that might reshape, or at least influence, academic and public debates.

Current Anthropology, 2021

An anthropological approach is needed to counter a rising chorus of biobabble about masculinities... more An anthropological approach is needed to counter a rising chorus of biobabble about masculinities, maleness, and violence. Anthropological lenses enable us to examine what we know and what we do not know about issues like testosterone, male primate aggression, and "pink and blue" brains and their relation to masculinities. Pseudoscientific concepts about masculinities and maleness act to justify, bolster, and provoke types of violence against many humans. Anthropologists should take the lead in engaging, untangling, and where necessary refuting narratives that naturalize this kind of violence. For humans, imagination, perceptions, and ideology matter as much as bone, muscle, and chromosomes. We provide here an introduction to a collection of essays offering insights into these issues by scholars across the diverse branches of anthropology and beyond, in order to spur dialogue across the all-too-familiar disciplinary and subdisciplinary divides. We do not wish to remain segregated by different vantage points, ideologies, and methodologies. We disregard traditional boundaries and absorb a full range of ideas, to identify and facilitate connectivities across approaches to men, maleness, and violence. If ever a topic cried out for integrated, borderless scholarship by anthropology in the broadest sense, maleness and violence, and their relations to masculinities, is certainly one example.

Land, 2020

The impacts of human activities on ecosystems are significantly increasing the rate of environmen... more The impacts of human activities on ecosystems are significantly increasing the rate of environmental change in the earth system, reshaping the global landscape. The rapid rate of environmental change is disrupting the ability of millions of people around the globe to live their everyday lives and maintain their human niche. Evidence suggests that we have entered (or created) a new epoch, the Anthropocene, which is defined as the period in which humans and human activities are the primary drivers of planetary change. The Anthropocene denotes a global shift, but it is the collective of local processes. This is our frame for investigating local accounts of human-caused disruptive environmental change in the Pampana River in Tonkolili District, Northern Province, Sierra Leone. Since the end of the Sierra Leonean civil war in 2002, the country has experienced a rapid increase in extractive industries, namely mining. We explored the effects of this development by working with communities ...

Primates, 2020

The version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users ar... more The version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. Users should always cite the published version of record.

PeerJ, 2018

Primates occur in 90 countries, but four-Brazil, Madagascar, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republ... more Primates occur in 90 countries, but four-Brazil, Madagascar, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)-harbor 65% of the world's primate species (439) and 60% of these primates are Threatened, Endangered, or Critically Endangered (IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2017-3). Considering their importance for global primate conservation, we examine the anthropogenic pressures each country is facing that place their primate populations at risk. Habitat loss and fragmentation are main threats to primates in Brazil, Madagascar, and Indonesia. However, in DRC hunting for the commercial bushmeat trade is the primary threat. Encroachment on primate habitats driven by local and global market demands for food and non-food commodities hunting, illegal trade, the proliferation of invasive species, and human and domestic-animal borne infectious diseases cause habitat loss, population declines, and extirpation. Modeling agricultural expansion in the 21st century for the four c...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Dec 26, 2017

The proportions of individuals involved in intergroup coalitional conflict, measured by war group... more The proportions of individuals involved in intergroup coalitional conflict, measured by war group size (W), conflict casualties (C), and overall group conflict deaths (G), have declined with respect to growing populations, implying that states are less violent than small-scale societies. We argue that these trends are better explained by scaling laws shared by both past and contemporary societies regardless of social organization, where group population (P) directly determines W and indirectly determines C and G. W is shown to be a power law function of P with scaling exponent X [demographic conflict investment (DCI)]. C is shown to be a power law function of W with scaling exponent Y [conflict lethality (CL)]. G is shown to be a power law function of P with scaling exponent Z [group conflict mortality (GCM)]. Results show that, while W/P and G/P decrease as expected with increasing P, C/W increases with growing W. Small-scale societies show higher but more variance in DCI and CL th...

Primates; journal of primatology, Jan 17, 2017

Robbing and bartering (RB) is a behavioral practice anecdotally reported in free-ranging commensa... more Robbing and bartering (RB) is a behavioral practice anecdotally reported in free-ranging commensal macaques. It usually occurs in two steps: after taking inedible objects (e.g., glasses) from humans, the macaques appear to use them as tokens, returning them to humans in exchange for food. While extensively studied in captivity, our research is the first to investigate the object/food exchange between humans and primates in a natural setting. During a 4-month study in 2010, we used both focal and event sampling to record 201 RB events in a population of long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis), including four neighboring groups ranging freely around Uluwatu Temple, Bali (Indonesia). In each group, we documented the RB frequency, prevalence and outcome, and tested the underpinning anthropogenic and demographic determinants. In line with the environmental opportunity hypothesis, we found a positive qualitative relation at the group level between time spent in tourist zones and RB fre...

Science advances, 2017

Nonhuman primates, our closest biological relatives, play important roles in the livelihoods, cul... more Nonhuman primates, our closest biological relatives, play important roles in the livelihoods, cultures, and religions of many societies and offer unique insights into human evolution, biology, behavior, and the threat of emerging diseases. They are an essential component of tropical biodiversity, contributing to forest regeneration and ecosystem health. Current information shows the existence of 504 species in 79 genera distributed in the Neotropics, mainland Africa, Madagascar, and Asia. Alarmingly, ~60% of primate species are now threatened with extinction and ~75% have declining populations. This situation is the result of escalating anthropogenic pressures on primates and their habitats-mainly global and local market demands, leading to extensive habitat loss through the expansion of industrial agriculture, large-scale cattle ranching, logging, oil and gas drilling, mining, dam building, and the construction of new road networks in primate range regions. Other important drivers ...

International Journal of Primatology, 2015

Little is known regarding behavioral and social responses of free-ranging primates to demographic... more Little is known regarding behavioral and social responses of free-ranging primates to demographic changes emerging from significant mortality events. Here, we report on the activity patterns and intergroup sociospatial relationships in a commensal population of long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) in Bali, Indonesia, that underwent a significant mortality event in summer 2012. During the period of interest, we noted heightened mortality in three of the five social groups present in this population, with adult females and juveniles experiencing higher mortality rates than adult and subadult males. Limited diagnostic data regarding pathogen identification and a lack of any conclusive etiology of the deaths prevent our ascertainment of the agent(s) responsible for the observed mortality, but given the characteristics of the event we assume it was caused by a transmissible disease outbreak. Comparing the pre-and postmortality event periods, we found significant differences in activity patterns, including a decreased proportion of affiliation in adult females. This result is likely indicative of enhanced social instability induced by the high mortality of adult females that constitute the stable core of macaque social structure. A higher social tension between groups after the mortality event was indicated by more frequent and intense agonistic

The Gibbons, 2009

Page 1. Chapter 12 The Ecology and Evolution of Hylobatid Communities: Causal and Contextual Fact... more Page 1. Chapter 12 The Ecology and Evolution of Hylobatid Communities: Causal and Contextual Factors Underlying Inter-and Intraspecific Variation Nicholas Malone and Agustin Fuentes Introduction The following quotations ...

Ancestral Landscapes in Human Evolution, 2014

With lenses from multiple disciplines, contributors to this volume examine culture and parenting ... more With lenses from multiple disciplines, contributors to this volume examine culture and parenting effects on child development and individual and cultural wellbeing. The contributions examine in more detail what might be considered baselines for social mammalian and human development. The volume includes examinations of specific cultures, reviews of hunter-gatherer cultures on particular topics, evolutionary views of offspring in evolution, as well as mammalian and human developmental needs. The emphasis is on caregiving and offspring, their interaction, and how family and community cultures influence and are affected by children.

American Journal of Primatology, 2014

When choosing their sleeping sites, primates make adaptive trade‐offs between various biotic and ... more When choosing their sleeping sites, primates make adaptive trade‐offs between various biotic and abiotic constraints. In human‐modified environments, anthropic factors may play a role. We assessed the influence of ecological (predation), social (intergroup competition), and anthropic (proximity to human settlements) factors in sleeping site choice by long‐tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) occupying a habitat at the interface of natural forests and human‐modified zones in Bali Barat National Park, Indonesia. Over the course of 56 nights, we collected data relating to physical features of sleeping trees, patterns of the use of sleeping sites within the home range, pre‐sleep behavior, diurnal ranging patterns and availability of natural and human food. Overall, the macaques used 17 sleeping sites with 37 sleeping trees. When the monkeys slept in forest zones, they selected sleeping trees that had larger trunks but were not significantly taller than surrounding trees. Though the mac...

Primates, 2002

Chimpanzee research plays a central role in the discussions of conflict negotiation. Reconciliati... more Chimpanzee research plays a central role in the discussions of conflict negotiation. Reconciliation, or the attraction and affiliation of former opponents following conflict, has been proposed as a central element of conflict negotiation in chimpanzees and various other taxa. In an attempt to expand the database of chimpanzee conflict resolution, conflict and post-conflict behavior were recorded for a small group of socially housed chimpanzees at the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute, at Central Washington University, Data were collected over six 6-week periods between 1997 and 2000, for a total of 840 hours of observation, resulting in a substantial post-conflict (PC) and matched control (MC) data set. The data demonstrate this group's tendencies to maintain visual contact and closer proximity after conflicts. Dyadic corrected conciliatory tendencies ranged between 0-37.5% and averaged 17.25% across all dyads. Individual corrected conciliatory tendencies ranged between 5.8 and 32%. The results of this study combined with recent publications on captive and free-ranging chimpanzee post-conflict behavior suggest that variation in post-conflict behavior may be important to our understanding of chimpanzee conflict negotiation, and may also have implications for the design and management of captive chimpanzee enclosures and social groups, respectively.

International Journal of Primatology, 2012

The observed social systems of extant apes and humans suggest that the common ancestral state for... more The observed social systems of extant apes and humans suggest that the common ancestral state for Miocene hominoids was living in multimalemultifemale groups that exhibited a tendency to fission and fusion in response to ecological and/or social variables. The Hominoidea share a set of social commonalities, notably a social niche that extends beyond kin and beyond the immediate social group, as well as extensive intraspecific flexibility in social organization. We propose that an essential feature of hominoid evolution is the shift from limited plasticity in a generalized social ape to expanded behavioral plasticity as an adaptive niche. Whereas in most nonhominoid primates variability and flexibility take the shape of specific patterns of demographic flux and interindividual relationships, we can consider behavioral flexibility and plasticity as a means to an end in hominoid socioecological landscapes. In addition, the potential for innovation, spread, and inheritance of behavioral patterns and social traditions is much higher in the hominoids, especially the great apes, than in other anthropoid primates. We further suggest that this pattern forms a basis for the substantial expansion of social complexity and adaptive behavioral plasticity in the hominins, especially the genus Homo. Our objectives in this article are threefold: 1) summarize the variation in the social systems of extant hominoid taxa; 2) consider the evolutionary processes underlying these variations; and 3) expand upon the traditional socioecological model, especially with respect to reconstructions of early hominin social behavior. We emphasize a central role for both ecological and social niche construction, as well as behavioral plasticity, as basal hominoid characteristics. Over evolutionary time these Int J Primatol

Current Anthropology, 2010