Depopulation of the rural world jeopardises the continuity of many communities and the socioecosystems they support. In response to this situation, diverse strategies are activated to ensure the continuity of these socioecosystems. All these initiatives seek, directly or indirectly, to strengthen community resilience, with a view to making the changes required to reverse the population trend. One of the most obvious, but least studied, effects of depopulation is the abandonment of housing, which initially implies urban deterioration and collapse but which can also become an opportunity if these abandoned houses are turned into a resource at different levels and in different arenas. An ethnographic case study conducted in the Sierra de Aracena Mountains (South West Spain) allows us to explore the link between housing and community resilience, helping us understand how the use and management of redundant housing can be a fundamental component of resilience in rural settings marked by depopulation.

The development of tourism in Peru has generated a new social phenomenon: the bricheros. This new term applies to Andean men who regularly seek to engage in sexual intercourse with foreign female tourists. In this paper, we examine the relationship between sex and tourism different case studies. We are particularly interested in studying the discourse dimension of bricherismo and its transformations in relation in both the tourist scene and the national context. Our analysis of the different meanings of sexual and affective relations between tourists and the local population will permit us to unveil the domination and subversion strategies brought into play in tourist contexts, which are usually in close connection with racial and gender issues.

To enhance our understanding of processes of environment naturalization, we must go beyond the discursive, political and perceptive dimensions. Nature is also praxis: a specific form of bond and relationship established between humans and the environments they inhabit, closely related to processes of naturalization. To analyse these practices that substantiate nature, this article examines kitchen gardens in Alájar, a locality set within a natural park in the south west of Spain. This specific ethnography is used in order to shed light on the meaning and significance of nature for those living in a ‘naturalized space’, how it translates from the perspective of praxis and, more precisely, how the natural character attributed to the environment from a human–environment relational perspective is substantiated. More generally, the aim is to ascertain the utility of this methodological strategy in understanding processes of naturalization and the meaning of nature in the Western world.

The meaning of sexual practices between humans and animals cannot be understood exclusively as an identity category, a pathology, or the expression of uncontrolled sexuality. Up until now, medical-psychiatric approaches have dominated the study of these sexual practices. In the cases from south Spain that we analysed here, sexual relations with animals are, for certain males, framed within their process of learning about normative sexuality, being therefore inextricably linked with the construction of masculinity.