User:Nabaan/Traditional knowledge

Indigenous knowledge and environment
misconceptions about complexity of the relationship between indigenous population and their natural habitat has informed Westerners view of California’s “wild Eden” which may have led to misguided ideas on policy designs to preserve this “wilderness”. Assuming that the natural habitat automatically provided food and nourishment for indigenous population placed practices toward the exploitative end of the spectrum of human interactions with nature as only “hunter-gatherers”. Anderson provides evidence that tells another story and describes this relationship as a “calculated tempered use of nature as active agents of environmental change and stewardship”. This distorted view of “wilderness” as uninhabited nature has resulted in removal of indigenous inhabitants to preserve “the wild”. In reality, depriving the land from indigenous people management such as controlled burning, harvesting, and seed scattering has yielded dense understory shrubbery or tickets of young trees which are inhospitable to life.

Tending the wild tries to present an unbiased view of indigenous population resource management practices instead of literature that often assumes their impact to be entirely negative or of little to no effect. Although, there is evidence of negative impacts, particularly, on large animals by over-exploitation, Anderson shows a plethora of evidence from historical literature, archaeological findings, ecological field studies, and native people’s culture that paints another picture in which indigenous land management practices were largely successful in promoting habitat heterogeneity, increasing biodiversity, and maintaining certain vegetation types. These findings show that indigenous practices sustain lives while conserving natural resources and may be prove essential in improving our own relationship with natural resources. Setting aside “wilderness” is still imperative given our continued population growth, however, that growth itself requires another way of thinking in “re-creating specific human-ecosystem associations”. Anderson argues that human-ecological history of land should inform resource management policies today. This history cannot be simplified into dichotomies of “hunter-gatherers” vs. “agriculturalists” and should entail more complex models. Indigenous practices are at the roots of this history, present a prime example of this complex relationship, and show how weaving their way of life into our culture allows us to meet our needs without destroying natural resources. It is really important that studying ethnoscience is not guarantee that every local societies and indigenous people must have special science to consider important.

Contradictory findings:
Recently, it has come to light that the deforestation rate of Indonesian rainforests has been far greater than estimated. Such a rate could not have been the product of globalization as understood before; rather, it seemed that ordinary local people dependent on these forests for their livelihoods are in fact “joining distant corporations in creating uninhabitable landscapes.” Popular theories of globalization cannot accommodate such phenomena. These conventions “package all cultural development into a single program” and assert that powerless minorities and communities have adjusted themselves according to global forces. However, in the case of Indonesian deforestation, global forces alone could not explain the rate of destruction. Therefore, Tsing motivates a new approach in which global forces are themselves “congeries of local/global interaction” with unexpected encounters across different populations and cultures. Then, destruction of forests in excess of market needs could be seen as an unexpected result of the encounter between global forces that feed the market needs and local livelihoods that depend on the same forests. Tsing tries to capture these unexpected encounters under the idea of “friction” where culture is “continually co-produced in interactions” that are made up of “creative qualities of interconnection across difference” and might seem awkward, unequal, or unstable. These “messy and surprising” features of such interactions across difference are exactly what should inform our models of cultural production. In this framework, friction makes global connection powerful and effective but at the same time, it has the capacity to disrupt and even cause cataclysms in its smooth operation as a well-oiled machine. A well-documented example of such process is the industrialization of rubber, which was made possible by European savage conquests, competitive passions of colonial botany, resistance strategies of peasants, wars, advancement of technology and science, and the struggle over industrial goals and hierarchies. Tsing believes that attention to friction provides a unique opportunity to create a theoretical framework under which developing an “ethnographic” account of globalization becomes a possibility. Within such an ethnographic account, Indonesian encounters can “shape the shared space in which Indonesian and non-Indonesian jointly experience fears, tensions, and uncertainties.”

References:

'''Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. 2005 Princeton University Press.'''

It is really important to be aware that studying indigenous knowledge and their relationship with nature doesn't make obligatory for indigenous people to have local knowledge to consider their rights. Brosius criticizes environmentalist accounts of indigenous populations that are typically motivated by trying to protect their landscape and surroundings from globalization forces. To do so requires a two-fold strategy where description of an indigenous society and their habitat must make a "narratable" story, and be of some "value" to westerners so that it can generate international support for preserving their culture and environment. Brosius uses Eastern Penan populations to demonstrate how environmentalists transform Penan's indigenous "knowledge" of their forest by pulling from ethnographies of other forest population, e.g., in Amazon forests. In doing so, they corrupt the cultural diversity of indigenous by framing them into a single narrative in the name of preserving the biodiversity of their habitat. In case of Easter Penan, Brosius identifies three categories of misrepresentation:The Molong concept is purely a stewardship notion of resource management. communities or individuals take ownership of specific trees and harvest them in such a way that allows them to exploit long-term. This notion has gained an etherealism in environmentalist writings according to western romantic notions of indigenous to tell a more connecting story. Landscape features and particularly their names in local languages provided geographical and historical information for Penan people; whereas in environmentalist accounts, it has turned into a spiritual practice where trees and rivers represent forest spirits that are sacred to the Penan people.A typical stereotype of some environmentalists' approach to ecological ethnography is to present indigenous "knowledge" of nature as "valuable" to the outside world because of its hidden medicinal benefits. In reality, Brosius accounts of Eastern Penan populations do not identify a medicinal stream of "knowledge". These misrepresentations in the "narrative" of indigeneity and "value" of indigenous knowledge might have been helpful for Penan's people in their struggle to protect their environment, but it might also have disastrous consequences. What happens if another case did not fit in this romantic narrative, or another indigenous knowledge did not seem beneficial to the outside world. Brosius points out these people were being uprooted in the first place because their communities did not fit well with the state's system of values.

References:

J. Peter Brosius, Endangered Forest, Endangered People Environmentalist Representations of Indigenous Knowledge, Human Ecology, vol. 25, no. 1 (1997): 47–69.