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This paper extends the behavioral ecology framework to predict how individuals perceive and evaluate risks. The perceptions of health and safety hazards for females, and how those perceptions relate to resource security and resource acquisition are examined. Poverty and inequality affect the constraints and opportunities available for Hispanic women working in apple packing warehouses in Eastern Washington. Warehouse workers see the health and safety risks inherent in their work and view the hazards from their positions of relative vulnerability with respect to resources. They are active agents who evaluate their situations and work to provide secure resources for themselves and their offspring within the local political and socioeconomic context.

The purpose of this paper is return to some findings and approaches typical of behavioral sciences and evolutionary anthropology that will allow us to link the process of self-domestication that can be seen in our evolutionary past, the primate tendency to enter into conflicts through patterns of signal exchange rather than direct aggressions, and the development of the persuasive dimension of language, with the possible evolutionary origin of both cultural violence and structural violence.

The approach has been, at all times, multidisciplinary insofar as it has sought to elucidate how the inquiries made from the behavioral sciences can help to understand human violence.

What was found is the possibility of understanding conflicts as a mechanism of evolutionary pressure that has been involved not only in social restructuring but also in the evolutionary origin of the human being.

More empirical evidence should be found in this regard.

This study is a multidisciplinary approach that seeks to understand both the phenomenon of violence and peace from an evolutionary perspective.

Altruism has long been a fundamental question motivating evolutionary approaches to behavior. Altruistic behavior is ultimately costly to the actor yet beneficial to the recipient and as such is not expected to be favored by natural selection. Its apparent commonness has led evolutionary thinkers into a wide variety of interesting areas of research, many of which are represented in this volume. Resource sharing ranks among the most basic of potentially altruistic acts. Notably absent among most other primates, humans have honed sharing to a fine art in behaviors as apparently simple as meat distributions from prey carcasses to elaborate feast making and gift giving (Mauss, 1924). Issues related to food sharing are at the center of much of the current research being done in HBE. In this volume, Frank Marlowe, Michael Gurven et al., and Bram Tucker each examine aspects of this problem.

This chapter will examine ideological debates currently taking place in academics. Anthropologists – and all academic workers – are at a crossroads. They must determine what it means to “green the academy” in an era of permanent war, “green capitalism,” and the neoliberal university (Sullivan, 2010). As Victor Wallis makes clear, “no serious observer now denies the severity of the environmental crisis, but it is still not widely recognized as a capitalist crisis, that is, as a crisis arising from and perpetuated by the rule of capital, and hence incapable of resolution within the capitalist framework.”

This paper aims to o review understandings of complexity in anthropology.

A number of works in the field of anthropology are discussed.

Anthropologists generally agree that human behavior is complex, although they differ about the meaning of complexity. For many in this era of postmodernism, it involves emphasizing cultural differences and social contexts. Earlier interests in underlying cultural meanings and structures, meanwhile, have become somewhat passé. Nonetheless, some social anthropologists, encouraged by chaos science, continue to explore hidden meanings and structures. While there is much to like in their attention to ethnographic detail, one concern is their metaphorical use of the science of chaos. Another is failure to deal with intention and agency.

Lévi‐Strauss doubts that psychoanalysis has anything substantial to contribute to anthropology. This conclusion helped to set the stage for postmodernist anthropology, and its consequences are evident in the works under review here.

Purpose – This chapter contributes to comparative biopolitics and reviews primatological literature, especially about our nearest relatives, the Great Apes.

Design/methodology/approach – Biopolitics in this chapter means evolutionarily informed political science, with emphasis on power relations. I review the literature on intrasexual and intersexual dominance interactions among individuals and competitive and/or agonistic interactions among groups in the Great Apes (Hominidae, formerly Pongidae): orangutan (Pongo with two species and three subspecies), gorilla (Gorilla with four subspecies), bonobo (Pan paniscus), and common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes with four subspecies). In the final section I present some (speculative) thoughts on Pan prior or the modern human ancestor.

Findings – Not only Man is a political animal.

Originality/value – Impartial, objective, and as complete as possible review of the literature for the students of (comparative) politics, ethology, and psychology.

Throughout human history and around the world, co-sleeping was the context for human evolutionary development. Currently, most of the world’s peoples continue to practice co-sleeping with infants, but there is increasing pressure on families in the West not to co-sleep. Research from anthropology, family studies, medicine, pediatrics, psychology, and public health is reviewed through the lens of a developmental theory to place co-sleeping within a developmental, theoretical context for understanding it. Viewing co-sleeping as a family choice and a normative, human developmental context changes how experts may provide advice and support to families choosing co-sleeping, especially in families making the transition to parenthood. During this transition, many decisions are made by parents “intuitively” (Ball, Hooker, & Kelly, 1999), making understanding the developmental consequences of some of those choices even more important. In Western culture, families are making “intuitive” decisions that research has shown to be beneficial, but families are not receiving complete messages about benefits and risks of co-sleeping. Co-sleeping can be an important choice for families as they make the life-changing transition to parenthood, if individualized messages about safe infant sleep practices (directed toward their individual family circumstances) are shared with them.

Aristotle's Politics provides an example of what a biopolitical science might look like. Three key elements stand out: (1) an account of political structure as a multilevel society including kin and non-kin relationships; (2) an account of the human species that includes comparison with other social species that are capable of coordinated action; and (3) an emphasis on the human capacity to understand and communicate moral rules. Over the last 50 years, a number of research programs in evolutionary anthropology have provided the basis for a biopolitical science that maps onto the elements above. Schultz, Opie, and Atkinson describe the trajectory of human evolution from solitary to a pair bonded, familial species. Michael Tomasello's two-step account of the evolution of human cooperation shows how the ancestral humans went from merely gregarious to genuinely political animals. Christopher Boehm shows how the human capacity for moral emotions and decision making by consensus developed. Richard Wrangham provides evidence that the suppression of reactive aggression by ancestral human societies resulted in a self-domesticated species, a process that enhanced the human capacity for cooperation and communication. Bernard Chapais argued that the emergence of pair bonding among ancestral humans laid the foundation for both consanguineal and affinal kinship structures. That these bodies of research hold together can best be seen when they are viewed in light of Aristotle's biopolitical science.

The purpose of this paper is to document the integration of sustainability into the accounting curriculum. Compared to many disciplines in the social and administrative sciences, the greening of the curriculum in accounting is a recent phenomenon. Nevertheless, there has been a remarkable growth in both the content and the coverage of sustainability topics integrated into the accounting curriculum.

The approach to the paper is multidisciplinary. It has combined organizational sociology and ecological anthropology approaches in the integration of sustainability into the accounting curriculum. In accounting, there is an increasing emphasis on the application of social science perspectives, particularly sociology and anthropology in curriculum development and pedagogical issues. This paper demonstrates that the influence of these two disciplines in accounting education is substantial.

Sustainability in accounting has both theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, sustainability has integrated social and environmental dimensions into accounting education and research. Sustainability reporting contains information on the economic, social, and environmental activities of business organizations. In practice, sustainability has influenced the accounting standard-setting organizations in developing guidelines on how to integrate sustainability into corporate reports so that the information can be verified and certified by public accounting and regulatory organizations.

The paper is among the first to demonstrate the importance of organizational sociology and ecological anthropology for the integration of sustainability into the accounting curriculum. Both sociology and anthropology have been in the forefront of the study of ecology and natural resources management and conservation in sustainability development. The paper approaches have important implications for sustainability education and framework in accounting theory and research.

This chapter is about the theories explaining the transition from foraging to farming. It aims to establish which links exist between the traditional theories – based on push/pull models – and the micro-founded approaches developed since the 1980s. More precisely, it asks how the latter may contribute, as the former did, to defining a macro-narrative of the transition to farming.

While they were providing a global narrative of the Neolithic revolution, the push and pull models have been progressively dismissed. Recent research is diverse, but it is all based upon human behaviour or micro-founded. We critically examine three of these approaches which focus either on foraging behaviour, or on the initial domestication of plants and animals, or on the evolution of social institutions related to ownership.

We demonstrate that these recent micro-founded approaches only provide a partial vision of the transition to farming. Despite this limit, they conciliate push and pull explanations in a single framework. Moreover, they confirm a conclusion held by tenants of pull models: the transition to farming is more likely to have occurred in a resource-rich environment such as the one associated with complex hunter-gatherers. Some archaeological evidence from the Levant is provided to support our claim.

This research chapter provides a useful overview of the differing approaches to the behavioural, environmental and economic factors that led to the shift to farming from foraging. Its value lies in the way it presents and evaluates differing positions derived from differing scales of analysis and types of evidence.