Pretend your audience is nekkid

I have three presentations coming up in April and a fourth is scheduled for July. Two concern my Fulbright/NSF research in Mozambique for the past year - a preliminary summary of my results - and will be given at the US Public Affairs Office and Reserva Especial de Maputo (for reserve staff and the community). These will be the most stressful as I really feel uncomfortable giving preliminary results. Data analysis will be really rough. You would think that having taught high school, college, and given several presentations to colleagues, peers, and the Induna I would stop being nervous about this sort of thing. Ha!

Public speaking has gotten easier, but it will always be a struggle for me. I am at my most whacked-out nervous when I am presenting my own research. I think it is because I know where the flaws are, where I could have done better, where the gaping holes exist... I get nervous anticipating the aggressive questioning that could ensue. Most people will not be cruel or mean, but occasionally an audience has one person who just likes to make other people look bad. Being told that one's research is worthless and ideas stupid is probably every speaker's worst nightmare. And every time I step to the front of the room I confront it head on.

At least, I don't feel the need to puke before presentations anymore. Now I just get sweaty palms and a build up of nervous energy. After the first couple of minutes I'm usually fine and if the presentation is short enough, I can even get through the Q & A without problems.

toothpastefordinner.com
DO NOT DO THIS IN A PRESENTATION

At least one of my presentations next month will be a tag-team effort with my friend Jessica. She is an interdisciplinary doctoral student working in Mozambique's Limpopo National Park on a project looking at the effects of community relocation. From the program schedule, it looks like we will be the only social scientists at the Kruger Science Meetings. It will be interesting.

A New Look at the Landscape Consequences of Population Resettlement from Protected Areas

Many conservationists promote relocation of residents of protected areas to foster the conservation of biodiversity. Historical and archaeological evidence shows that what we consider to be savanna wilderness has been shaped in part by human activities over time. Using a landscape approach, we question the principles behind relocation of people to improve conservation efforts, using examples from Kruger NP, Reserva Especial de Maputo (REM), and Limpopo NP. Following the Yellowstone Park model, South Africa relocated permanent settlements when creating protected areas, whereas people continue to inhabit all of Mozambique’s protected areas. In the absence of historical human disturbance, the Kruger experience demonstrates that the maintenance of a savanna landscape requires careful conservation management planning. In contrast, residents around REM maintain certain landscape functions and features in pursuit of livelihood activities using tools such as fire. These examples suggest that what protected area managers see as conservation problems could in fact contain opportunities for landscape management. Today, there is increasing pressure to relocate Mozambicans living in parks and reserves, including current resettlement efforts in the Limpopo NP. Without romanticizing an ecologically noble savage, we examine the difficulties of people living in protected areas, the role of human activity on the savanna, and potential landscape management consequences of relocation in the Limpopo NP.

Lastly, I will be presenting at the Society for Conservation Biology meetings again in Chattanooga, TN in July. I'll have a bit more time to get a full analysis of my data and hopefully a strong paper draft before the meetings.

Burning the savanna: fire ethnoecology on coastal savanna in Southern Mozambique

Landscape managers in southern Africa use fire as a tool to maintain and conserve savanna. Many of these prescribed burn regimes are based on modeling using historic information and onsite experimentation. The long history of anthropogenic fire disturbance in southern Africa suggests that indigenous ecological knowledge could provide further insight into location-specific fire ecology and disturbance cycles. This study investigates the ethnoecology of fire and burn practices in two Ronga communities in southeastern Mozambique. Local knowledge of fire ecology and disturbance cycles, techniques for controlled burns, reasons for burning, and community fire policies were explored through oral histories, conversations with livelihood activity specialists, and targeted interviews about fire. Small, regular controlled burns, used to clear agricultural fields and improve animal forage, produce a patchy mosaic of grass and wooded habitat across the coastal savanna landscape. Oral histories indicate that fire was also used in the past for hunting. Prescribed burn regimes under development in South Africa for the southern end of this region parallel traditional burn practices used just over the border in Mozambique.

If anyone has any comments or questions or suggestions about either abstract I'd love to hear from you.

Desperation

I check my mail at the US Public Affairs Office once a week. Because I am on a Fulbright, I get diplomatic pouch privileges within certain limits. I can order a book now and again from Amazon, and my mom and dad can send letters.

So I believed myself out of the reach of junk mail for a year. Ha! Visa must be really desperate to be sending me a credit card application in Mozambique. What a waste of taxpayer money and trees. I'm really surprised this was forwarded.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Thanks again to everyone who has dropped me a line. My Dad is doing okay. He had to rescedule his appointment for 1 June, so no more news until then. :(

NSF Funding

May Day had a pretty exciting start for me. The first thing I do in the morning is read my email as I eat breakfast. I have been expecting a rejection letter from NSF (National Science Foundation) for my dissertation proposal now for over a month, but to my surprise my proposal was sent on by my cultural anthropology reviewers for finally approval by the head of NSF (or whoever it is that approves these things). Let's just say I didn't need a cup of coffee to get going that morning.

Holding back my excitement was really difficult. I can't just randomly shout for joy in a city. Srs. Pedro, Jaime, and Sergio, my building guards, would probably take issue for the false alarm. Instead, I did a silent Snoopy dance; taking care not to stomp too loudly because of my downstairs neighbors since it was pretty early. It might seem silly to get so excited, but I felt the same when I received word that I had been awarded a Fulbright. In fact, I had Ted Gragson, my faculty advisor, read my Fulbright acceptance email just to make sure that I wasn't hallucinating. I actually turned cartwheels that time.

I wasn't going to post about it until I had a confirmation letter in hand (but I got scooped), because there is still the off chance that the US Congress will completely lose it and NSF will lose its funding budget. You might find that a bit unbelievable, but only the day after I found out that I would most likely be awarded NSF funding for my dissertation, there was a vote in the House to stop funding certain anthropological research. Two congressmen, Campbell (CA-R) and Garrett (NJ-R), decided that some of the titles were too ridiculous to fund, regardless of what they might tell us about humanity and human history. Some of them had funny titles like "the accuracy in the cross-cultural understanding of others' emotions" or "cognitive model of superstitious belief" or "bison hunting on the late prehistoric Great Plains" or "social relationships and reproductive strategies of Phayre's Leaf Monkeys" The House representatives also proposed to limit NSF funding in general.

This is just typical of the anti-intellectualist and over-the-top fundie religious bullshit that has been directing my country for at least the past decade. Fortunately, H.R. 1867 got voted down. If people wonder why the US is slipping in science and math, or why more native-born US citizens don't become scientists, this might be a clue. I seriously doubt that if these studies contributed to building better bombs or killing people more efficiently that they would have ever been considered for funding restrictions. [sarcasm] Understanding how emotions work in other cultures could only contribute to greater understanding between people working in cross-cultural situations, so lets screw that project over. What a complete and utter waste of Americans' tax dollars. [/sarcasm]

In the interests of full disclosure of where your tax dollars are going, here is the abstract I submitted to NSF for public review. A silly title is attached. Thank you everyone (including my advisor and the anonymous NSF reviewers) for contributing to my education, a greater understanding of the relationship between culture and landscape, and the advancement of science. Seriously. In the words of one of my reviewers, "It is not flashy or very exciting but it may be a useful contribution, and it has a practical side as well."

Ronga Wild Plant Harvest and the Conservation of Coastal Savanna Landscape in Southern Mozambique

ABSTRACT
Social and ecological factors, as well as, the spatial and temporal patchiness of resource distribution, direct resource user behavior in a landscape. Southern Mozambique's coastal savanna landscape is rich in flora and faunal species due to the highly diverse range of available habitats like forest, grasslands, and wetlands. This landscape’s spatial and temporal heterogeneity offers Ronga horticulturists a high diversity of wild plants to harvest for various subsistence needs. Preliminary fieldwork shows a high dependence on plant resources by Ronga communities in the region. This dissertation project proposes to (1) analyze the importance of various social and ecological factors in directing the spatial and temporal patch choice and use of Ronga wild plant harvest, and (2) investigate the specific effects of Rongan wild plant harvests on coastal savanna vegetation diversity, abundance, and distribution.

The proposed research combines ethnographic and ecological approaches to gather information about current and historic Rongan use of wild plant resources and landscape in two coastal savanna communities over a 16-month period. Incorporation of user spatial behavior, and the factors directing it, is critical for developing realistic landscape conservation management plans that meet locally specific needs for both humans and wild species. The proposed research will be used to develop a management plan recognizing Ronga resource use and needs for the Futi Transfrontier Conservation Area (TFCA). It will also serve as a methodological model for documenting the community resource use information needed to create conservation plans at Great Limpopo and Gorongoza TFCAs in Mozambique, and potentially elsewhere.