ABSTRACT
Cultural-social anthropologists, responding to ambient conditions, question the epistemological moorings, conceptual and procedural guardrails, and political relevance of their pathways to and from knowledge. Practitioners of “old” social science disciplines and “new” interdisciplinary fields do ethnography, appropriating the cultural-social anthropologist’s traditional turf. Indicators are supposed to facilitate the collection, analysis, and dissemination of reliable, statistically representative data on agroecological, socioeconomic, and nutritional conditions in a given area. State-of-the-art reviews in the early 1990s maintained that baseline indicators anchored a wide-ranging set of concepts, methods, and objectives in livelihood security and food security research. A direct indicator represents a single phenomenon or points to a set of phenomena either closely related in theory or so related by the analysis of empirical data.
