Indigenous Knowledge

About this book

The third volume in the reader series, Themes in Environmental History. Comprising essays selected from the journals Environment and History and Environmental Values, these collections address important aspects of environmental history, by means of theoretical essays and case studies. Indigenous Knowledge investigates how indigenous peoples from various cultures interact with and conceptualise their environments, past and present; it offers accounts of indigenous conservation practice and traditional environmental knowledge alongside challenging explorations of how 'knowledge' is filtered through ideologies and subjectivities, from the Western scientific worldview to individual memory.

Contents

I. Defining Indigeneity
- 'Representations of Tropical Forests and Tropical Forest-Dwellers in Travel Accounts of National Geographic'. Anja Nygren
- 'When 'The Environment' Comes to Visit: Local Environmental Knowledge in the Far North of Russia'. Timo Pauli Karjalainen and Joachim Otto Habeck
- 'Riding the Tide: Indigenous Knowledge, History and Water in a Changing Australia'. Heather Goodall

II. Indigenous Conservation: Beliefs and practices
- 'Sacred Groves and Conservation: The Comparative History of Traditional Reserves in the Mediterranean Area and in South India'. M. D. Subash Chandran and J. Donald Hughes
- 'The Role of Customary Institutions in the Conservation of Biodiversity: Sacred Forests in Mozambique'. Pekka Virtanen
- 'Local Environmental Conservation Strategies: Karanga Religion, Politics and Environmental Control'. B.B. Mukamuri
- 'From Myths to Rules: The Evolution of Local Management in the Amazonian Floodplain'. Fabio de Castro
- 'Reflexive Water Management in Arid Regions: The Case of Iran'. Mohammad Reza Balali, Jozef Keulartz and Michiel Korthals

III. Indigenous Subjectivities: Perception, myth, memory
- 'Deforestation, Erosion, and Fire: Degradation Myths in the Environmental History of Madagascar'. Christian A. Kull
- 'Renarrating a Biological Invasion: Historical Memory, Local Communities, and Ecologists'. Karen Middleton
- 'Environment, Ethnicity and History in Chotanagpur, India, 1850-1970'. Vinita Damodaran

IV. Cultural Collisions and Competing Knowledges
- 'Different Histories of Buchu: Euro-American Appropriation of San and Khoekhoe Knowledge of Buchu Plants'. Christopher H. Low
- 'Changes in Landscape or in Interpretation? Reflections Based on the Environmental and Socio-economic History of a Village in NE Botswana'. Annika C. Dahlberg and Piers M. Blaikie
- 'Bamboo, Rats and Famines: Famine Relief and Perceptions of British Paternalism in the Mizo Hills (India)'. Sajal Nag
- 'Swidden farming as an agent of environmental change: ecological myth and historical reality in Indonesia'. David Henley

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