“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).
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.
The Edited Jottings of an Amateur Anthropologist 