Spooner, Brian
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Publication Baluchistan: Geography, History, and Ethnography(1988) Spooner, BrianThis article is divided into the following sections: 1. introductory review of problems in the history and ethnography of the Baluch, i.e., the present-day inhabitants of Baluchistan; 2. geography; 3. the origins of the Balōč, i.e., the people who brought the name into the area; 4. the early history of the area between Iran and India (Baluchistan); 5. the eastward migrations of the Balōč; 6. the establishment of the khanate in Kalat; 7. the autonomous khanate, 1666-1839; 8. the period of British dominance, 1839-1947; 9. the Baluch in Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan since 1947; 10. the diaspora; 11. ethnography. [Note: place names in Pakistan have not been transliterated.]Publication The MAB Approach: Problems, Clarifications and a Proposal(1984) Spooner, BrianDespite MAB's general success in promoting research on ecological problems from various points of view, the goal of integration still seems beyond reach. To the degree that integration has worked it has invariably involved the domination of one scientific discipline over others that could be persuaded to cooperate - especially of natural over social sciences - both in definition of research design and in formulation of questions. This problem derives partly from the relative scarcity of social scientists professionally interested in ecological problems, but also from the fact that social science comprehends a variety of approaches, based on different assumptions, all equally valid, leading to different but complementary results. A closer look at the variety and complementarity of a selection of different social science approaches suggests a promising model for the future development of the MAB Programme in the 1980s, which would take it closer to the goals it had previously sought through integration, and also towards the goal of improved communication and application of research findings. Not only the various social science approaches and different natural science approaches, but also the approaches of the other relevant actors-planners, politicians, extension workers, and, especially private (i.e. local) people -must be seen as complementary from the initial stage of the definition of the research problem through to the synthesis and application of the results. In this way, not only will the social sciences be effectively integrated into MAB but the more important goal of communication and application will also be assured.Publication Population, Resources, and Technology: A Colloquium in General Anthropology(1971-04-01) Spooner, BrianThis is a summary of Population, Resources, and Technology: A Colloquium in General Anthropology, an academic conference which took place on March 11-14, 1970 in Philadelphia.Publication Ecology in Development: A Rationale for Three-Dimensional Policy(1984) Spooner, BrianThis combination of theoretical, topical and geographical focus integrates the social and natural science approaches to problems of ecology in development in South-west Asia. Permits coherent treatment, in an argument of reasonable length, of (1) some of the major areas of accumulation of ecological knowledge and insight in relation to development, (2) the changes of emphasis in ecological interests among planners, (3) the development and integration of theory (especially the efforts to straddle the boundaries of sociological and ecological understanding), (4) the changing perceptions of man's relation to nature, and (5) the underlying moral problems of management and welfare. The changes of orientation in each of these arenas over the last decade are treated below not simply as another stage of progress to confirm our faith in the perfectibility of man, but as a function of a larger historical process of increasing awareness and communication, the beginnings of which would have to be sought at least as far back as the Industrial Revolution.Publication Introduction to Savushun: A Novel About Modern Iran(1990) Spooner, BrianFirst published in 1969, Simin Daneshvar's Savushun has gone through sixteen printings and sold half a million copies -- a record for a work of literature in modern Iran. The reason is not obscure. Daneshvar's style is sensitive and imaginative. Her story follows basic cultural themes and metaphors. It goes straight to the hearts of a generation of Iranian readers, striking special chords of emotion and memory of the recent past. Savushun enriches a generation's understanding of itself. It encapsulates the experience of Iranians who have lived through the midcentury decades which led up to the 1979 revolution. They feel immediate identity with the major characters, each of whom struggles in their own day-to-day lives with the social and historical forces that gave pre-revolutionary Iran its characteristic hopelessness and emerging desperation -- so inadequately understood by outsiders.Publication Iranian Kinship and Marriage(1966) Spooner, BrianThis paper is an attempt to distinguish and discuss the Iranian (as distinct from the Turkish, Arabic and Islamic) elements in the present pattern of kinship and marriage practice in Persia in their historical context. This will entail also a discussion of what can be known of the pre-Islamic Iranian system.Publication Nomadism in Baluchistan(1975) Spooner, BrianBaluchistan as the Baluch define it includes most of West Pakistan west of the Indus, the southwest corner of Afghanistan, and the southeastern province of Persia, and Baluch minorities are also to be found scattered far to the north of this area as far as Soviet Turkmenistan. However, this vast area has never constituted any sort of unit, except in a vague cultural and linguistic sense.Publication Review of R.B. Thomas, Human Adaptation to a High Andean Energy Flow System(1976-09-01) Spooner, BrianThis is a review of R.B. Thomas' Human Adaptation to a High Andean Energy Flow System (1973).Publication The Iranian Deserts(1972) Spooner, BrianThis chapter marks a transition in the volume from agriculture to other subsistence bases. It is concerned particularly with the effects of environment-and the technologies used to exploit it-on the culture and identity of pastoral nomadic groups, mining colonies, and certain agricultural communities specializing in different ranges of crops. It deals with an arid region where these three occupational categories are closely linked and interdependent economically. It suggests that before agricultural technology reached a stage of development that would allow exploitation of such a marginal region, exploitation by other means (for example, pastoralism) was not possible either, and excess population from the lush peripheries was not able to overflow into the deserts.Publication Introduction to Cultural and Ecological Perspectives From the Turan Program, Iran(1980-08-01) Spooner, BrianA zone of arid and semi-arid country stretches from the Atlantic through northern Africa and the Middle East into Central Asia and India. Besides the Sahara and the Arabian and Iranian deserts it includes vast areas which although not totally barren are subject to low and unreliable rainfall. They include parts of the Fertile Crescent where economies based on the domestication of grains and animals first developed in the Middle East, and they have contained the sites of significant human activity since the earliest times. But as a result their appearance and composition have changed, and they have recently become the subject of serious controversy on a global scale: ecologists see a long-term trend towards the final desertification of these lands, but although they can formulate technical management programs to stem or reverse the trend, the local populations cannot always be persuaded to implement them.