Reading - Citizen Science and Indigenous Local Knowledge

• Nature as part of culture

Words for worlds beyond humans

• Non-human (historical)
• Other-than-human (1960)
• More-than-human (not exactly)

Recommended reading - "Nature and Society"

Traditional Ecological Knowledge

• Has some difficulties as a term - an attempt to give more value to Indigenous knowledge and also knowledge of other local groups
• "tradition" maybe not the best word - it is evolving
• "ecological" can include more than just ecological relationships

Kinhary palm

• A dance records knowledge of this plant and its ecosystem function
• keystone species
• Its importance to the broader ecosystem

Indigenous Knowledge

• Land based or plant based ways of knowledge
• Holistic (not split into history, biology etc)
• Recorded in ways of communication, crafts, arts, knowledge
  • You can't always just ask someone to tell you about something, it just appears through practice
• There is often a moral aspect related to protocols of behaviour
• Collective (the community and specific relations in which it was produced)
  • Can include more-than-humans in the collective
  • This is relevant for questions of ownership - you need to get consent from a larger group to use specific knowledge

Origin of TEK

• Came from studies in ethnobiology in the 80s and 90s
  • Virtanen doesn't like the term "etho-" since some Indigenous peoples don't like to be referred as ethnicities
  • Also it might be demeaning to Indigenous peoples to refer things as ethno-science

Scientific knowledge vs Indigenous knowledge

• Indigenous knowledge was criticized as too context-dependent in contrast to universal scientific knowledge
  • The core of IK is the processes of knowledge production, even if the content isn't universal
• Today focus is on how scientific and Indigenous knowledge can complement each other (rather than contrast)
• Criteria of evidence differs
  • In western knowledge the idea of truth

Evaluations of Indigenous knowledge

• How knowledge is decided to be regarded as true
• Practical experience in managing the land is seen as a prerequisite for knowledge in this category
• Sometimes regulated by elders - knowledge is "approved" by elders, or by young people with specific knowledge (who decides this?), sort of a peer review process
  • Often works written by Indigenous scholars are evaluated by their own community
  • Pirjo makes sure that her research on the Amazonian communities is translated to accessible language so they can review it