Landscape, Process and Power: Re-evaluating Traditional Environmental Knowledge

✍ Scribed by Serena Heckler (editor)

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 306
• Series: Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology; 10
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In recent years, the field of study variously called local, indigenous or traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) has experienced a crisis brought about by the questioning of some of its basic assumptions. This has included reassessing notions that scientific methods can accurately elicit and describe TEK or that incorporating it into development projects will improve the physical, social or economic well-being of marginalized peoples. The contributors to this volume argue that to accurately and appropriately describe TEK, the historical and political forces that have shaped it, as well as people’s day-to-day engagement with the landscape around them must be taken into account. TEK thus emerges, not as an easily translatable tool for development experts, but as a rich and complex element of contemporary lives that should be defined and managed by indigenous and local peoples themselves.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
List of Figures and Tables
List of Contributors
Foreword
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 A Genealogy of Scientific Representations of Indigenous Knowledge
Chapter 3 The Cultural and Economic Globalisation of Traditional Environmental Knowledge Systems
Chapter 4 Competing and Coexisting with Cormorants Ambiguity and Change in European Wetlands
Chapter 5 Pathways To Developmen Identity, Landscape and Industry in Papua New Guinea
Chapter 6 How Do They See It? Traditional Resource Management, Distrubance and Biodiversity Conservation In Papua New Guinea
Chapter 7 Wild Plants as Agricultural Indicators Linking Ethnobotany with Traditional Ecological Knowledge
Chapter 8 How Does Migration Affect Ethnobotanical Knowledge and Social Organisation in a West Papuan Village?
Chapter 9 Reproduction and Development of Expertise Within Communities of Practice A Case Study of Fishing Activities in South Buton (Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia)
Chapter 10 Review of an Attempt to Apply the Carrying Capacity Concept in the New Guinea Highlands Cultural Practice Disconcerts Ecological Expectation
Chapter 11 Managing the Gabra Oromo Commons of Kenya, Past and Present
Index