David Griffith

David Griffith
East Carolina University | ECU · Coastal Studies

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89
Publications
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise

Publications

Publications (89)
Article
Full-text available
The emergence of conflict is a complex issue with numerous drivers and interactions playing a role. Exploratory dimension-reduction techniques can reveal patterns of association in such complex data. In this study, an existing dataset was reanalyzed using factor analysis for mixed data to visualize the data in two-dimensional space to explore the c...
Article
Full-text available
Estuaries and coastal forests, including the coastal fisheries they support, are among the most biodiverse and productive ecosystems on Earth. In Southern Puerto Rico (SPR), there is a culturally significant emic category of estuarine/coastal forest resource utilization known as “Pesca de monte” (tropical coastal forest fisheries, TCF fisheries her...
Article
This study examines the knowledge, perceptions, and compliance of fisheries stakeholders with the seasonal fishery closure implemented in the Visayan Sea, Philippines. We interviewed 235 municipal fisheries stakeholders composed of municipal fishers, fish dryers, fish traders/fish brokers (regulated group) and local government units, Philippine Nat...
Article
Full-text available
Research on migration has become more challenging due to at least four factors: (1) more complex migration traditions; (2) the development of migration economies that engage many types of migrants from ever more social and cultural backgrounds; (3) increasing likelihood of climate change‐driven environmental migration; and (4) increasing likelihood...
Book
Traditional wage labor has experienced a significant decline in industrialized countries over the past few decades. The spread of temporary work, the proliferation of subcontracting arrangements, the use of artificial intelligence (AI), the shipment of manufacturing jobs overseas, and the employment of foreign contract workers are among the key fac...
Article
Coastal plain economies are dependent on seasonal, low‐wage labor for tourism, fisheries, construction, and other sectors. Historically, labor in these sectors has come from multiple social and cultural backgrounds: natives, legal and undocumented immigrants, visiting mariners, students, guestworkers, etc. Anti‐immigration sentiments around the wor...
Preprint
Full-text available
Ciguatoxin fish poisoning (CFP) is caused by the consumption of tropical and subtropical fishes and other marine species with high levels of ciguatoxin (CTX) in their tissues. CTX is a polycyclic neurotoxin produced by single-celled, photosynthetic dinoflagellates in the Gambierdiscus and Fukuyoa genera which are found in close association with ben...
Article
Full-text available
One goal of ecosystem-based management is studying an ecosystem and its people, the socio-ecological system, in a qualitative and quantitative modeling approach that can provide management agencies with possible outcomes of their actions using scenario forecasting. Ecosystem-based fisheries management strives to use the socio-ecological system appr...
Article
Disasters, such as hurricanes, often stimulate moral economic sentiments and behaviors in line with those practiced by artisanal fishers, peasant farmers, and others whom economic anthropologists have been interested in for decades. In some cases, these behaviors are not new following a disaster, but merely more visible, as if they lay dormant betw...
Article
Full-text available
Prior to Hurricane Mitch at the end of the 20th century, migration from Honduras to the United States was confined to a few sending and receiving areas linking, for example, the Caribbean coast of Honduras to New Orleans and parts of the interior to California. By contrast, migration to the U.S. mainland from Puerto Rico had a long and complex hist...
Article
Full-text available
In the US South and Midwest, early immigrant populations consisted primarily of young, Latinos recruited to work in low-wage jobs. After six or seven years, family members from Mexico and Central America began joining early arrivals, changing the character of immigrant interactions with host residents and institutions. While many natives viewed the...
Article
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This brief piece is a response to Lee Binford’s work on the Canadian guestworker program.
Article
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A rapid ethnographic assessment conducted in 2016 engaged fishermen, their communities, and fisheries along the Gulf of Mexico coast five years after the Deepwater Horizon blowout of 2010. Interviews with fishermen in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana elicited information on individual and collective experiences with the disaster, includ...
Article
Individual Fishery Quota (IFQ) programs allocate shares of an established quota of specific species of fish to individual fishermen based on their history of participation in the fishery, effectively privatizing the fishery even though government agencies maintain the right to alter the shares, species covered, or other attributes of the program. F...
Article
Based on research in four communities in Veracruz, Mexico, this article traces the cultural biography of economic change from an economy based primarily on coffee production to one based on migration, bamboo furniture manufacturing, and other livelihoods. In line with other studies, the declining importance of coffee in peasant livelihoods came abo...
Article
Large scale labor migration from Olancho, Honduras to the United States, accelerated after 1998, when Hurricane Mitch devastated the region and resulted in the United States offering Temporary Protective Status (TPS) to affected Hondurans. As growing numbers left for the United States, the loss of productive youth to migration and the development o...
Article
Full-text available
Fishing communities in many places around the world are facing significant challenges due to new policies and environmental developments. While it is imperative to ensure sustainability of natural resources, many policies may overlook the contribution of fisheries to the sociocultural well-being of coastal communities. Authors address the problem o...
Article
Full-text available
National Standard 8 of the reauthorized Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Management Act mandates that fisheries managers consider a community's dependence on fisheries when crafting regulations. This article compares findings regarding dependence on commercial and recreational fisheries from direct observations and interviews in 21 U.S. South Atlantic co...
Article
Full-text available
Humans who interact directly with local ecosystems possess traditional ecological knowledge that enables them to detect and predict ecosystem changes. Humans who use scientific ecological methods can use species such as mollusks that lay down annual growth rings to detect past environmental variation and use statistical models to make predictions a...
Article
Puerto Rican artisanal fishers, like artisanal food producers around the world, emphasize the quality of their products to compete with industrial food producer-distributors. In this article, we trace the cultural biographies of three important fish species, focusing on their roles in creating social relationships and, through this process, creatin...
Article
In June 2009, the Association of Mexicans in North Carolina (AMEXCAN), a leading Latino grassroots organization based in Pitt County, North Carolina, received funding from the Pitt Memorial Hospital Foundation to implement the project "Community Health Advisors Promoting Healthy Nutrition and Physical Activity in the Latino Community" (henceforth t...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Humans have caused significant impacts to ecological networks because of their fishing in coastal food webs – they are “keystone” species. Intensive fishing by humans often causes a trophic cascade (indirect effect), disproportionately affecting other species not the target of the fishery. To examine the potential for such indirect effects in both...
Article
For the past two decades, women have been migrating from Mexico to the United States on temporary work visas to pick meat from blue crabs in small coastal factories. Within a theoretical framework that argues for the relevance of a moral economic perspective to gendered migration, we examine the how participating in this migration influences migran...
Article
This article discusses the experience of the Nuevo South Action-Research Collaborative, a university–community collaborative involving an interdisciplinary group of faculty and students from East Carolina University and Latino community organizations. The article describes the collaborative formation process and places it within the context of the...
Article
This chapter examines the methods employed in research exploring the relationships between systems of human relations, or social networks, and people's interactions with various elements of natural ecosystems. Social networks are fundamental to understanding cultural systems of resource sharing; cooperation in hunting, fishing, and agricultural pro...
Article
Full-text available
Population growth in U.S. coastal areas has spawned conflicts due to increasing competition between commercial and leisure uses of coastal resources. Organizations representing different user groups routinely misrepresent the causes and severity of environmental stresses to further their political and economic agendas, often predicting extinctions...
Article
ABSTRACT Even faced with overwhelming evidence that tobacco threatens human health, along with economic developments undermining their status as independent producers, North Carolina tobacco farmers view tobacco production in ways congruent with a moral economy. A shift from independent to contract production of tobacco and the dismantling of gover...
Article
Reproduction has become a central issue in the analysis of peasant households that supply migrant labor to capitalist enterprises. Many have argued that the physiological reproduction of peasantries in underdeveloped countries has been accompanied by the reproduction of their social and economic conditions. When peasant households finance reproduct...
Article
Human victimizations-whether taking the form of civil war, terrorism, or domestic violence-often force those seeking refuge into neighborhoods characterized by high crime rates, poverty, and ethnic diversity, leading to culture shock and crises of identity. The author recalls such a context after describing the responses of families of murder victi...
Article
Farm workers pose special problems for union organizing due to their legal status, their high rates of turnover, their employment through subcontracts, and the temporary and seasonal dimensions of farm work. Yet by organizing farm workers, unions have developed and refined strategies that point to methods of meeting the challenges of contemporary w...
Article
Recent assaults on the tobacco industry have led to a decline in tobacco production across North Carolina, the largest tobacco producing state in the nation. Although a great deal of attention has been focused on tobacco farmers, considerably less work has been aimed at determining the effects of these changes on tobacco farmworkers, many of whom a...
Article
The source of a problem influences the source of information we use to address the problem. However, the source of information we use can also influence our conceptualization of the problem. Just such a paradox faces fishermen in the Gulf and South Atlantic trap fisheries. Competition and conflict among commercial trap fishermen, other types of fis...
Article
Changes taking place in the rural South create opportunities for remembering that encourage pride and power among the downtrodden and dispossessed. Comparing the cultural context of the murder of an African American schoolteacher in 1921 and the suffering that led to the murder of a Mayan farmworker in 1992, this essay explores the question of how...
Article
Since the late 1980s, the midwestern and southern United States have witnessed high levels of immigration from Mexico, Central America, Asia, and Africa; census figures on immigration in some regions display increases of several hundred percent from 1990 to 2000. During the 1990s, research generally focused on changes taking place in new receiving...
Article
Advocates of recent proposals to expand guestworker programs in the United States, whether concerned for the rights of workers or employers, tend to assume that guestworkers are preferable to undocumented workers. Compared to undocumented workers, guestworkers are granted protection under the law, can be recruited without fear of employer sanctions...
Article
The H-2 program, originally based in Florida, is the longest running labor-importation program in the country. Over the course of a quarter-century of research, Griffith studied rural labor processes and their national and international effects. In this book, he examines the socioeconomic effects of the H-2 program on both the areas where the labor...
Article
"Fishers at Work, Workers at Sea makes a major contribution to the literature on the anthropology and sociology of fisheries by providing an intelligent analysis of Puerto Rican fishermen which extends beyond a description of their fishing techniques and strategies and, more recently, the implications for public policy. The authors present a wealth...
Article
Full-text available
Since its identification in 1996, the marine dinoflagellate Pfiesteria piscicida Steidinger & Burkholder has been the focus of intense scientific inquiry in disciplines ranging from estuarine ecology to epidemiology and from molecular biology to public health. Despite these research efforts, the extent of human exposure and the degree of human illn...
Article
Roberts, Glenda S. Staying on the Line: Blue‐Collar Women in Contemporary Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994. x + 198 pp. including appendix, notes, references, and index. $17.00 paper.de Groot, Gertan and Marlou Schrover, eds. Women Workers and Technological Change in Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. London: Taylor...
Article
The increasing value of coastal regions as sources of capital investment, primarily for construction and tourism, has stimulated demand for low-wage labor at the same time prices of housing and coastal vacations have risen beyond the economics reach of most workers in coastal industries. Many workers live miles from the coast, while others live in...
Article
Oyster Wars and the Public Trust: Property, Law, and Ecology in New Jersey History. Bonnie J. McCay. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998. 246 pp.
Article
Despite mounting evidence that Pfiesteria picicida, a marine organism that releases a neurotoxin, poses no serious threat to public health, its threat continues to be exaggerated by journalists, popular writers, politicians, and scientists. After presenting evidence against the public health threat that the organism poses, the author discusses four...
Article
MacDonald, Jeffery L. and Amy Zaharlick, eds. Selected Papers on Refugee Issues: III. Arlington, VA: Committee on Refugee Issues, General Anthropological Division, American Anthropological Association, 1994. ii +188 pp. $10.00 paper ($8.00 for AAA Members).Donnelly, Nancy D. Changing Lives of Refugee Hmong Women. Seattle: University of Washington P...
Article
The Bay Shrimpers of Texas: Rural Fishermen in. Global Economy. Robert Lee Maril. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995. $35.00 hardcover, $17.95 paperback. Gulf Coast Soundings: People and Policy in the Mississippi Shrimp Industry. E. Paul Durrenberger. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996. $29.95 hardcover, $17.95 paperback
Article
Full-text available
Human perceptions of the relationship between pollution and food safety are often haphazard and contradictory, based on a variety of sources of information. Recent media events concerning seafood and coastal pollution have generated concern that an otherwise healthy food— fish and shellfish—has become dangerous. We assess consumer knowledge about s...
Article
Based on Work Conducted in Accordance with the Proposal Entitled Identifying and Defining Fishers and Gear in North Carolina to Develop Licensing as an Effective Management Tool. ICMR Tech Report 96-06. Research Assistance By: Fiona Abarno, John Brown, Brian Ellis, Douglas Hobbs, Vernon Kelley, and Patrick Stanforth; Special Contributions from: J....
Article
Full-text available
Funding support, and the realization by fishery managers that social science research has much to offer in the management process, have combined to create a framework for important research activity in recent years. This paper describes three projects of varying breadth, depth, and scope in which social scientific scholarship has both theoretical a...
Article
Full-text available
Peasant fishers throughout Latin America and the Caribbean typically combine fishing with wage labor to varying degrees. Certain scholars have interpreted this as a reflection of incomplete incorporation into capitalist spheres of influence, where contradictions emerge as groups attempt to maintain economic and cultural autonomy while being subordi...
Article
In advanced capitalist economies, the treatment of labor as a commodity suggests that labor's cost and availability depend on market mechanisms. Although neoclassical economic thought recognizes the influence of collective bargaining and labor legislation on the cost and availability of labor, economists generally pay scant attention to the ways in...
Article
In the past ten years, the British West Indies Temporary Alien Labor Program has received widespread judicial and legislative support and criticism. While sugar and apple producers who import West Indians argue that domestic labor is insufficient to harvest their crops, labor organizations and their supporters maintain that domestic labor is adequa...
Article
Recent research on return migration has undermined the idea that international labor migration serves as a vehicle for economic development in labor-sending countries. This has led to the ascendance of a view of international labor migration as yet another form of exploitation of poor nations by wealthy nations, as migrants fail to accumulate capit...
Article
In the past 10 years, the British West Indies Temporary Alien Labor Program has received widespread judicial and legislative support and criticism. While sugar and apple producers who import West Indians argue that domestic labor is insufficient to harvest their crops, labor organizations and their supporters maintain that domestic labor is adequat...
Article
The food industry has been responsible for much of the immigration into North Carolina, with fruit and vegetable agriculture and factories for pro-cessing poultry, pickles, pork, and seafood central to the economies of the state's eastern coastal corridor. Different sectors of the food industry, however, influence communities of the region differen...

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