Humans

This study examines social media communication in Kenya to assess how dryland pastoral concerns are represented in national climate policy dialogues. Approximately 80% of Kenya’s land area consists of drylands that support pastoral livelihoods, yet recurring droughts and increasingly variable rainfall threaten these social-ecological systems. Although Sustainable Development Goal 13 (Climate Action) emphasizes adaptation, progress is typically measured using national indicators that may overlook local priorities. We analyzed digital communications from pastoral nongovernmental organizations, civil society organizations, newspapers, and government agencies using an adaptation pathways framework to examine links among climate risks, governance, and decision-making. Five themes emerged: water security, rangeland degradation and mobility, climate communication, gender and social inclusion, and climate finance. Kenya has developed relatively strong national climate policies, but social media reveals a persistent implementation gap between national policy and local pastoral priorities. Pastoral communities consistently emphasize Indigenous and local knowledge, women’s leadership, community participation, and locally appropriate adaptation strategies. Social media provides a novel source of evidence for identifying these local priorities and informing more participatory, place-based climate adaptation.

This paper examines how the designation of coracle net fishing in southwest Wales as intangible cultural heritage is reshaping the ontology of the fishery. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research with the Carmarthen Coracle and Netsmen Association, the study approaches river fishing not simply as an economic activity but as a culturally embedded practice through which relationships with river environments, kinship, ecological memory, and seasonal time are enacted and sustained. Coracle fishers on the River Towy possess detailed ecological knowledge developed through repeated engagement with water conditions, fish behaviour, and shifting river rhythms across generations. In the context of salmonid decline, polluted catchments, and regulatory tightening, heritage licensing now permits continued practice while restricting the sale and retention of migratory fish. The paper argues that this shift operates as an indirect form of displacement. While affirming cultural value, it reclassifies a working fishery as heritage display and constrains the material rights and adaptive capacity that sustain it as livelihood practice. By analysing how fishers interpret and respond to this reclassification, the paper shows how bureaucratic heritage frameworks transform what the fishery is understood to be, from reciprocal labour and livelihood to curated cultural artefact. The Welsh case contributes to anthropological debates on heritage governance, bureaucratic classification, and the regulation of small scale resource practices under environmental change.

Pastoral imagery in Han dynasty mural tombs of China’s northern frontier may offer unique visual evidence for examining subsistence patterns, ethnic interactions, and the processes of elite identity construction in imperial borderlands. Existing scholarship has predominantly interpreted this motif through three frameworks—livelihood reflection, Hu-Han ethnic integration, and the origins of Chinese landscape painting—yet has not fully addressed its functional transformation within mortuary contexts and the underlying spatial logic of identity construction. Drawing on seven systematically documented mural tombs from the Ordos Plateau and Hetao Plain, this study combines archaeological typology, formal iconographic analysis, and spatial contextual analysis to trace the full evolutionary trajectory of pastoral imagery. This study suggests that the motif may be interpreted as undergoing a transition away from explicitly sacred contexts toward a closer association with material representation from the late Western Han to the late Eastern Han: early stylized renditions, derived from the Central Plains xian (immortal) mountain iconographic paradigm, appear to have served the construction of a sacred cosmic space for post-mortem ascension, while later realistic depictions were increasingly repositioned in storage side chambers, potentially functioning as visual representations of manorial livestock assets. Spatially, pastoral imagery gradually formed a stable “Inner Manor/Outer Wilderness” sequential narrative, which visually domesticated the heterogeneous frontier wilderness and enabled local magnates to construct a transcultural elite identity integrating Han ritual orthodoxy and control over diverse frontier resources. This study recalibrates the regional position of pastoral imagery in the secularization of Han mortuary art, and is consistent with a perspective for understanding the northern frontier as a dynamic transcultural frontier zone of cultural negotiation and integration.