Linking Ethnography to Place: GIS Training for Anthropological Research on Migration in a Zambian Frontier.

University Of Kentucky Research Foundation, Lexington KY

Investigators

Abstract

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) refers to a collection of software, hardware, geographical data, and the people using those technologies and data. The term Remote Sensing (RS) means the sensing of the Earth's surface from space (using satellite images or aerial photos), most often for the purpose of improving natural resources management, land use and the protection of the environment. GIS and Remote Sensing are techniques for examining spatial information, but methods do not reside outside of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives. The intellectual process of giving meaning to spatial data remains shaped by disciplinary backgrounds. This Scholars Award in Methodological Training for Cultural Anthropology provides support for a mid career academic anthropologist to gain skills in these methodologies, under the guidance of senior colleagues in the Earth Sciences GIS Laboratories at California State University, Domiguez Hills. The training will enhance the PI's interdisciplinary research on the social context of environmental change in central Africa (Zambia) and provide the necessary background for incorporating a truly anthropological perspective with these highly technical methods. During the training period the PI will work with two datasets emerging directly from on going social science research in Zambia, Central Africa. A collection of aerial photos of the current field site in central Zambia, from two time periods will provide the basis for examining links between intergenerational relations and inheritance of land, and the resulting land use and land cover change. This analysis will speak to issues of livelihood diversification and economic change over time. Another data set from the Zambia field site includes spatial data on local infrastructure in the field site - such as water sources, markets, health resources, schools and residential units - as linked to the ethnographic context of nutrition and food security. GIS / Remote Sensing analysis of this data set will provide understanding on the relationship between local populations' access to these resources and other indicators of well being (including anthropometric measures of growth and development). Following training, the PI will continue to use her GIS / RS skills by working with other data sets, developing new research agendas that incorporate these methodologies, and for broader impacts by formally integrating these methodologies into training of graduate and undergraduate students in anthropology and the social sciences (through methods courses, a field school, and mentoring students).