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Traditional Ecological Knowledge - Website for the ...

Negotiation. In recent decades, environmentalists and NewAge spiritualists have been on steep learning curves inrelation to totemic sensibilities in indigenous com-munities; but, equally, indigenous peoples have been keento discover what the West s disenchanted have to offer intheir struggle against neo-colonial L vi-Strauss penned Le Tot misme Aujourd huihis intention was to dissolve the phenomenon into some-thing different and far broader. While his intention hasbeen supported by examination of the fuller content oftotemic systems, the core problematic relationshipsbetween nature and culture (animality and humanity, primitive thought and modern thought ) haveremained ideologically to the fore. Indeed, the Britishanthropologist Roy Willis recently observed that, thanksto the ongoing twinning of primitivism and ecologicalconcern, the period after Le Tot misme Aujourd hui hasbeen marked by a kind of totemic revival (1990: 5). TheChippewa situation described above can be taken as symp-tomatic of this neo-totemic environment in which the con-trast between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples hasbecome synonymous with the opposition between humannature ( the soul ) and its corruption by technocraticrationality.

Traditional ecological knowledge may be considered as a sub-set of indigenous knowledge, defined as local know-ledge held by indigenous peoples or local knowledge

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Transcription of Traditional Ecological Knowledge - Website for the ...

1 Negotiation. In recent decades, environmentalists and NewAge spiritualists have been on steep learning curves inrelation to totemic sensibilities in indigenous com-munities; but, equally, indigenous peoples have been keento discover what the West s disenchanted have to offer intheir struggle against neo-colonial L vi-Strauss penned Le Tot misme Aujourd huihis intention was to dissolve the phenomenon into some-thing different and far broader. While his intention hasbeen supported by examination of the fuller content oftotemic systems, the core problematic relationshipsbetween nature and culture (animality and humanity, primitive thought and modern thought ) haveremained ideologically to the fore. Indeed, the Britishanthropologist Roy Willis recently observed that, thanksto the ongoing twinning of primitivism and ecologicalconcern, the period after Le Tot misme Aujourd hui hasbeen marked by a kind of totemic revival (1990: 5). TheChippewa situation described above can be taken as symp-tomatic of this neo-totemic environment in which the con-trast between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples hasbecome synonymous with the opposition between humannature ( the soul ) and its corruption by technocraticrationality.

2 But L vi-Strauss s words still strike a note ofcaution; totemic emblems have never been restricted tonatural species, any more than they have been exclusivelyreligious in the conventional sense. We live in a worlddense with personal and corporate emblems, only some ofwhich resonate with the juxtaposition of religion MortonFurther ReadingEst s, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run with the Wolves:Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman. London:Rider, , Freeman. Totem Salmon. Boston: Beacon Press, , Peter and David Suzuki. Wisdom of the : Allen and Unwin, vi-Strauss, Claude. Le Tot misme Aujourd hui. Paris:Presses Universitaires de France, , James. Voyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreterand Trader, Describing the Manners and Customs of theNorth American Indians. Toronto: Coles, , White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays1938 1973. Canberra: ANU Press, , Roy, ed. Signifying Animals: Human Meaning inthe Natural World. London: Routledge, , Roy. Man and Beast.

3 St. Albans: Paladin, also: Anthropology as a Source of Nature Religion;Ecology and Religion; Est s, Clarissa Pinkola; IndigenousReligions and Cultural Borrowing; Religious Environ-mentalist Paradigm; Totemic Practices in Borgu (WestAfrica). Traditional Ecological KnowledgeThe theme of Traditional Ecological Knowledge is import-ant for the consideration of a broad range of questionsrelated to nature human relations. Different groups ofpeople in various parts of the world perceive and interactwith nature differently, and have different traditions ofenvironmental Knowledge . Their perceptions and know-ledge are in part shaped by their values, worldviews, andenvironmental ethics religion in the broader sense. In theexploration of environmental ethics and religion towardan ecologically sustainable society, indigenous peoplesand Traditional Ecological Knowledge have attracted con-siderable attention from both scholars and popular move-ments. Traditional Ecological Knowledge may be definedas a cumulative body of Knowledge , practice and belief,evolving by adaptive processes and handed down throughgenerations by cultural transmission, about the relation-ship of living beings (including humans) with one anotherand with their environment.

4 As a Knowledge -practice-belief complex, Traditional Ecological Knowledge includesthe worldview or religious traditions of a society. It is bothcumulative and dynamic, building on experience andadapting to change, as societies constantly redefine whatis considered Traditional . It is an attribute of societieswith historical continuity in making a living in a particu-lar discussions of Traditional Ecological knowledgeand indigenous Knowledge focus on North AmericanIndian peoples. However, there are traditions of ecologicalknowledge in various indigenous societies in SouthAmerica, Australia, and parts of Africa and Asia. Cultur-ally transmitted, cumulative, multigenerational know-ledge is held also by some groups that have Europeanbackgrounds, such as Newfoundland fishers and SwissAlpine in Our Common FutureTribal and indigenous peoples .. lifestyles canoffer modern societies many lessons in the man-agement of resources in complex forest, mountainand dryland ecosystems.

5 These communitiesare the repositories of vast accumulations of trad-itional Knowledge and experience that linkhumanity with its ancient origins. Their disap-pearance is a loss for the larger society, whichcould learn a great deal from their traditionalskills in sustainably managing very complex eco-logical systems (Our Common Future 1987: 12,114 15).Fikret Berkes1646 Traditional Ecological KnowledgeTraditional Ecological Knowledge may be considered asa sub-set of indigenous Knowledge , defined as local know-ledge held by indigenous peoples or local knowledgeunique to a given culture or society. There is controversyover the term, Traditional . Some scholars consider that theterm implies backwardness, and instead favor indige-nous or local. Others point out that many indigenouspeoples themselves see tradition in a positive light. Theydo not take it to mean inflexible adherence to the past butrather to mean time-tested and considerations make it difficult to generalizeabout Traditional Ecological Knowledge .

6 But in any case,one cannot generalize about the Amerindian (or African)view of nature. Every cultural group has within it a rangeof environmental values and ethics, and a range of prac-tices. Environmental relations of a group are not uniform;they are shaped by the day-to-day contingencies, as wellas their worldview and ethics. Environmental ethics do notdescribe how people actually behave, but indicate howthey ought to behave. Human nature relations tend to beambivalent; there often is a discrepancy between beliefand of Traditional Ecological Knowledge and itsDevelopment as a FieldThe intellectual roots of Traditional Ecological knowledgeare in ethnoscience (mainly ethnobotany) and humanecology. The field started with the documentation of listsof species used by different indigenous groups, and elabo-rated a science of folk taxonomies of plants and animals,and later, of other environmental features such as ethnobotany goes back at least to Barrows 1900work on Coahuila Indians of southern California whomade a living in a seemingly barren desert environmentby harvesting no less than 60 kinds of edible plants and 28kinds of medicinal plants.

7 The science of folk taxonomiesis often associated with the name of Harold Conklin whodocumented in the 1950s the extensive plant knowledgeand classification systems of Traditional groups such as theHanunoo of the is a technical literature on various kinds ofindigenous environmental Knowledge . For example, tradi-tional agricultural practice is a major field of indigenousknowledge; others include Traditional medicine and archi-tecture. Much of the indigenous Knowledge literatureis not about Ecological relationships but about other kindsof ethnoscience, including agriculture, ethnobiology,ethnopharmacology, ethnoveterinary medicine, andethnopedology (soils). Some of these areas, for example, Traditional practices of water conservation and erosioncontrol, are directly related to Ecological Knowledge , butothers ( , ethnoastronomy) are less shift of emphasis from the documentation of spe-cies used by indigenous groups and their taxonomy, to aconsideration of functional relationships and mechan-isms, gave rise to the field of Traditional ecologicalknowledge.

8 The field borrows from the cultural ecologytradition of the anthropologist Julian Steward whoemphasized the study of adaptive processes, and arguedthat social organization itself may be considered an eco-logical adaptation of a group to its local environment. Thisemphasis on adaptive processes in human nature rela-tions may be seen in some of the key volumes on tradi-tional Ecological Knowledge . As defined in this literature, Traditional Ecological literature overlaps with culturalecology, Ecological anthropology or anthropological ecol-ogy but is not a sub-set of these fields because it often goesbeyond the discipline of rapid development of Traditional Ecological know-ledge as a field in its own right started with the documen-tation of a tremendously rich body of environmentalknowledge, not just of species but also their ecologicalrelations, among a diversity of groups outside the main-stream Western world. These included studies of shiftingcultivation and biodiversity conservation in tropical eco-systems, and Traditional Knowledge and management sys-tems in coastal fisheries and lagoons, semi-arid areas, andthe Arctic.

9 These studies showed that a variety of tradi-tional peoples, in diverse geographical areas from theArctic to the Amazon, had their own understandings ofecological relationships and distinct traditions of the mid-1980s, the rapidly growing literature ontraditional Ecological Knowledge led to a recognition inthe international arena of its potential applications to con-temporary resource and environmental problems. Thisrecognition is reflected in Our Common Future, the 1987report of the World Commission on Environment andDevelopment. The report pointed out that indigenouspeoples hold a wealth of Knowledge based on thousands ofyears of experience, and that their practices can offermodern societies lessons in the management of resourcesin complex forest, mountain and arid land Ecological Knowledge and ScienceEven though the importance of Traditional ecologicalknowledge is recognized in the international arena and thenumber of publications has grown rapidly since the 1980s,the relationship between Western science and traditionalknowledge has remained controversial.

10 There are bothsimilarities and differences between Traditional scienceand Western science. Both kinds of Knowledge are ulti-mately based on observations of the environment, and bothresult from the same intellectual process of creating orderout of disorder. But they are different in a number of sub-stantive ways. Traditional Ecological Knowledge is oftenan integral part of a culture, and tends to have a largesocial context. Different kinds of Traditional knowledgehave their own rules, but they are different from scienceregarding rules of evidence and Ecological Knowledge 1647 Some of the conflict between science and traditionalknowledge is related to claims of authority over know-ledge. In the modernist tradition, Western science is seenas having a monopoly on truth. Hence, Knowledge andinsights that originate outside institutionalized Westernscience are not easily accepted. Scientists tend to dismissunderstandings that do not fit their own (and this oftenincludes understandings of other scientists using differentparadigms).


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