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This paper describes a course on Anthropology and Museums offered at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. The interface between anthropology and museums is of great relevance for the elaboration of an effective pedagogical strategy in teaching anthropology. The course described here included both theoretical and practical activities aimed at covering contemporary debates about anthropology, museums, and material culture as well as at offering direct first-hand experiences for students. The development and results of the course highlight the usefulness of adopting this theoretical-practical mixture for the effective engagement of students in the educational process.

Abstract Background Traditional fishing communities are strongholds of ethnobiological knowledge but establishing to what degree they harbor cultural consensus about different aspects of this knowledge has been a challenge in many ethnobiological studies. Methods We conducted an ethnobiological study in an artisanal fishing community in northeast Brazil, where we interviewed 91 community members (49 men and 42 women) with different type of activities (fishers and non-fishers), in order to obtain free lists and salience indices of the fish they know. To establish whether there is cultural consensus in their traditional knowledge on fish, we engaged a smaller subset of 45 participants in triad tasks where they chose the most different fish out of 30 triads. We used the similarity matrices generated from the task results to detect if there is cultural consensus in the way fish were classified by them. Results The findings show how large is the community’s knowledge of fish, with 197 ethnospecies registered, of which 33 species were detected as salient or important to the community. In general, men cited more fish than women. We also found that there was no cultural consensus in the ways fish were classified. Conclusions Both free-listing and triad task methods revealed little cultural consensus in the way knowledge is structured and how fish were classified by community members. Our results suggest that it is prudent not to make assumptions that a given local community has a single cultural consensus model in classifying the organisms in their environment.

Sustainable fishing is one of the most pressing challenges for mankind and requires insightful knowledge of the drivers that may foster or hinder predatory exploitation. It has been widely recognized that Indigenous and local knowledge can contribute to biodiversity conservation and sustainable use of resources, such as fisheries, worldwide. Nevertheless such knowledge continues to be marginalized and unacknowledged by a range of academic scientists and policy makers. In the present paper, we tackle this issue by discussing laws regarding closed fishing seasons, which are part of the Brazilian environmental policies for protecting marine fauna, from the perspective of artisanal fishers’ knowledge. In Brazil, these laws are typically based on governmental decisions (i.e., by administrative organizations and researchers acting as consultants) without taking fishers’ knowledge into account. Through semi-structured interviews with traditional experts of fishing villages situated along the northeast coast of Brazil, we aimed to investigate their knowledge of fish reproductive periods and analyze how it is related to the closed seasons at work in their region. We found an exact agreement between fishers’ knowledge and closed season regulations on the reproductive period of the mangrove crab (Ucides cordatus), but a conflict regarding the reproductive period of two snook species and four species of shrimps. We highlight the potential of fishers’ knowledge contributions to environmental regulations and we also explore three challenges of incorporating epistemic diversity in environmental policy. We conclude by advocating for a reflexive transdisciplinarity that highlights the potential of Indigenous and local knowledge while critically reflecting on the methodological and political challenges of transdisciplinary practices.

The authors examined, among all treated cases of benign pain (3662) from 1982 to the first half of 2006 with reflex therapy method, the cases with unsatisfactory results and with other successive successful treatments. This group is made up of 28 cases (with 25 patients, because in 3 cases the patients had more diseases). Between the 25 patients, 8 improved with surgery, 4 with steroid injections, 2 with chiropraxis and/or “manipulations”, 2 with laser therapy, 2 with neuraltherapy of Huneke, and 1 each with acupuncture, auriculotherapy, NSAID, phytotherapy, connectival massage, ultrasounds and TENS plus ultrasounds. In conclusion, there is not an only therapy always successful, when a reflex therapy is ineffective, but the therapheutic options can be numerous. Sometimes, the surgical option can therefore be effective; sometimes (3 in this study) it can be effective to change reflex therapy (for example from acupuncture to neural therapy and vice versa).

Le narrazioni mitiche, nella loro accezione amerindia, hanno intrigato il pensiero antropologico in molteplici direzioni. Un punto di partenza classico proposto da Lévi-Strauss ha individuato in tali narrazioni il riconoscimento dell’indissolubilità dell’esperienza interspecifica come caratteristica del vissuto umano. Questo testo descrive le molteplici forme attraverso cui i Mebengokré dell’Amazzonia orientale entrano in relazione con le tartarughe. Prendendo come punto di partenza una narrazione mitica, saranno poi introdotte le modalità di caccia a questi chelonidi, una musica appresa da loro e le pratiche ritualistiche ad essa associate. La descrizione di queste relazioni, tanto a livello pratico quanto semiotico, nel processo di produzione reciproca tra umani e animali evidenzierà l’emergere di una complessa rete di influenze interspecifiche. Tale descrizione sarà quindi contestualizzata nell’ambito del dibattito contemporaneo sulle relazioni tra umani e non-umani nella produzione di mondi condivisi. Infine, il testo discuterà le specifiche forme in cui le diverse soggettività costruiscono un divenire comune. Questo si configura come risonanza di mondi condivisi, come dissoluzione di frontiere interspecifiche e dicotomie epistemologiche. Così, il mito Amerindio descritto emergerà come una riflessione su relazioni interspecifiche. Parole chiave: mito; amerindiani; multispecie; tartarughe; divenire

Book review of Luisa Faldini, Biylú. È nato per la vita: Creazione dello spazio e della persona in un terreiro nagô di Juquitiba (Brasile), Roma, CISU, 2009, pp. 207.