Tag: Generations

Learning Nature in the Amazon and Himalayas

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“I would suggest that young people in Sacha Loma–given their participation in routinized forms of practice that hinge on the aspiration to future participation in wage-work in the local eco-tourism and service economy–are applying a reasoning frame about local forest species styled on a basic assumption imported from Western-style environmentalism: that non-human environments are fundamentally fragile and in need of protection” (Shenton 2018).

Jeffrey Shenton makes an interesting point about ecological understandings in his article titled, “Going to School in the Forest.” His fieldwork took place in an Amazonian village in Peru. While many similar studies looking at the transmission of ecological knowledge focus on the amount of knowledge younger generations are learning (for example, they may be learning less than elder generations), Shenton looks instead at how children are learning, and how they evaluate the importance of ecological knowledge. He notes that even though children today are going to school during weekdays instead of working on farms as they would have in the past (this is what he calls a sort of habitual reorientation), they are still interacting with the natural world: “Though this community reorientation was far-reaching, it still took place in a context in which young people had consistent access to local biota. School standards, though, indexed a clear division between town activities and forest activities. Students traveling to school went to great lengths to stay meticulously free of the omnipresent rain forest mud, wearing a uniform that included a white polo shirt, dark blue dress pants for boys or skirt for girls, and black dress shoes” (Shenton 2018). Children still learn about the forest, but they do so with a different overarching mindset than their parents may have.

In a similar yet distant case, Jeremy Spoon in his article on tourism in the Himalayas, discusses how younger generations have grown up deeply embedded in a world of tourism, which affects how they perceive their environment: “Younger Sherpa experienced most if not all of their lives so far inside a tourist destination engaged in the host-guest drama. For these individuals, tourism may be causing the land to seem more as a tourism commodity and less spiritually endowed” (Spoon 2012: 52).

In both cases – Peruvian rain forest or Nepali mountains – children continue to interact with their natural worlds daily. For many of them, future jobs in tourism demand that they know their environments well. However, the way in which they are learning about their world has shifted, their daily rituals reoriented, and thus nature reinterpreted. While young Kichwa villagers think that the forest is in need of protection, elders believe it provides useful materials for everyday life. Young Sherpas believe nature should be preserved for tourism, while elders believe it should be protected because of intrinsic spiritual qualities. Neither is necessarily wrong, but as Spoon points out, Western concepts tend to create a human/nature divide, whereas indigenous ones commonly do not. Western environmentalism works well when its values align with local values, but we must also be aware of how it is changing people’s fundamental relationship to knowledge and the environment, creating fences where there use to be none.

References:

Shenton, J.T. 2018. “Going to School in the Forest: Changing Evaluations of Animal-Plant Interactions in the Kichwa Amazon.” Journal of Ecological Anthropology 20(1).

Spoon, J. 2012. “Tourism, Persistence and Change: Sherpa Spirituality and Place in Sagarmatha (Mount Everest) National Park and Buffer Zone, Nepal.” Journal of Ecological Anthropology, 15(1) pp. 41-57.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge

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“Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) represents experience acquired over thousands of years of direct human contact with the environment. Although the term TEK came into widespread use in the 1980s, the practice of TEK is as old as ancient hunter-gatherer cultures” (Berkes 1993: 1).

Traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK, is a common term used among anthropologists who study indigenous peoples. As Fikret Berkes has described, it is a system of human knowledge relating to the natural environment that has been passed down over many generations. This type of knowledge is gained through intimate experience and observation within the natural world, and is often strongest in places where people depend directly on natural resources. Hunters, fishers, gatherers, agriculturalists, pastoralists, all spend their lives outdoors in communion with the earth’s natural rhythms, and thus it is beneficial to their cultures and lineages to pass down knowledge learned about the environment from parent to child, grandparent to grandchild, aunt and uncle to niece and nephew, or even peer to peer.

Although TEK is essentially situated in time (all TEK is linked to the past), that does not mean it does not change. As Puri (2013) and Ingold (2011) note, knowledge is never copied directly from one person to another. Instead, it is dependent on the individual and how they understand it, experience it, and choose to pass it down.

TEK has important implications for biodiversity. Gagdil, Berkes and Folke (1993), among others, push for higher recognition of indigenous knowledge in fields such as ecology, biology and conservation. Indigenous peoples have been studying their environments for generations, and their observations of recent changes to the world provides vital information about how unpredictable forces such as climate change and pollution are affecting people and their natural environments. Thus, as these three scholars write, “Just as important as it is to conserve biodiversity for sustainability, it is as urgent to conserve the diversity of local cultures and the indigenous knowledge that they hold” (Gagdil, Berkes & Folke 1993: 156).

In Tanzania, as part of a biology class during my Study Abroad in 2013, a Maasai man guides us through the bush teaching us about animal tracks and the useful qualities of native plants.

References

Berkes, F. 1993. Traditional Ecological Knowledge In Perspective. In J.T. Inglis (ed.), Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Concepts and Cases (pp. 1-6). Ottowa, ON: International Program on Traditional Ecological Knowledge.

Gagdil, M., Berkes, F. & Folke, C. 1993. Indigenous Knowledge for Biodiversity Conservation. Ambio, 22(2/3) pp. 151-156.

Ingold, T. 2011. Stories against classification: transport, wayfaring and the integration of knowledge. In Being Alive: Essays on movement knowledge and description (pp. 156-179). London: Taylor and Francis.

Puri, Rajindra. 2013. “Transmitting Penan Basketry Knowledge and Practice.” In R. Ellen, S.J. Lycett, and S.E. Johns (eds), Understanding Cultural Transmission in Anthropology: A Critical Synthesis, pp. 266–99. New York, NY: Berghahn Books.