Indigenous Knowledge

The White Horse Press Full citation: Johnson, Sarah, ed. Indigenous Knowledge. Cambridge: The White Horse Press, 2012. http://www.environmentandsociety.org/node/3641. Rights: All rights reserved. © The White Horse Press 2012. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism or review, no part of this article may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, including photocopying or recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission from the publishers. For further information please see http://www.whpress.co.uk. Indigenous Knowledge compiled by Sarah Johnson Themes in Environmental History, 3 ‘Themes in Environmental History’ is a series of readers for students and researchers. Each volume aims to cover a prominent subject in the discipline, combining theoretical chapters and case studies. All chapters have been previ- ously published in the White Horse Press journals Environment and History and Environmental Values. 1. Bioinvaders (2010) ISBN 978-1-874267-55-3 2. Landscapes (2010) ISBN 978-1-874267-60-7 3. Indigenous Knowledge (2012) ISBN 978-1-874267-68-3 Copyright © The White Horse Press 2012 First published 2012 by The White Horse Press, 10 High Street, Knapwell, Cambridge, CB23 4NR, UK Set in 10 point Times All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism or review, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, including photocopying or recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-874267-68-3 (PB) Contents Publisher’s Introduction Sarah Johnson v I. Defining Indigeneity Representations of Tropical Forests and Tropical Forest-Dwellers in Travel Accounts of National Geographic Anja Nygren 1 When ‘The Environment’ Comes to Visit: Local Environmental Knowledge in the Far North of Russia Timo Pauli Karjalainen and Joachim Otto Habeck 21 Riding the Tide: Indigenous Knowledge, History and Water in a Changing Australia Heather Goodall 40 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 71 The Role of Customary Institutions in the Conservation of Biodiversity: Sacred Forests in Mozambique Pekka Virtanen 88 Local Environmental Conservation Strategies: Karanga Religion, Politics and Environmental Control B. B. Mukamuri 102 From Myths to Rules: The Evolution of Local Management in the Amazonian Floodplain Fabio de Castro 117 Reflexive Water Management in Arid Regions: The Case of Iran Mohammad Reza Balali, Jozef Keulartz and Michiel Korthals 136 III. Indigenous Subjectivities: Perception, Myth, Memory Deforestation, Erosion, and Fire: Degradation Myths in the Environmental History of Madagascar Christian A. Kull 157 Renarrating a Biological Invasion: Historical Memory, Local Communities, and Ecologists Karen Middleton 184 Environment, Ethnicity and History in Chotanagpur, India, 1850-1970 Vinita Damodaran 219 IV. Cultural Collisions and Competing Knowledges Different Histories of Buchu: Euro-American Appropriation of San and Khoekhoe Knowledge of Buchu Plants Christopher H. Low 247 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 275 Bamboo, Rats and Famines: Famine Relief and Perceptions of British Paternalism in the Mizo Hills (India) Sajal Nag 322 Swidden Farming as an Agent of Environmental Change: Ecological Myth and Historical Reality in Indonesia David Henley 330 Index 359 Publisher’s Introduction Sarah Johnson WHOSE INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE? The title of this volume immediately raises problems of definition. The exact meaning of ‘indigenous’ is contested – Nygren, for example, draws attention to the status of well-established but non-native settlers. Goodall locates the concept in the ‘interaction between the self-representation of the individuals and groups asserting their indigeneity on the one hand and, on the other, the pressures and goals of allies and enemies, whether within the nation state or internationally’. Even having established who is indigenous, it is far from straightforward to decide what constitutes indigenous knowledge and a wary eye must be kept on the differences between outsiders’ and insiders’ understandings of that knowledge or those knowledges. A seminal example of the reflexive nature of such understandings is provided by the war of words between anthropologists Sahlins and Obseyekere1 about whether, in fact, the Hawaians really perceived Captain Cook as the incarnation of their god Lono. The questions of how far outsiders can truly claim to understand indigenous knowledge, and how that knowledge is inevitably altered by contact with the outside, remain topics of vigorous contemporary debate. In the environmental domain, with global claims on resources and their conservation, the interaction of indigenous and outside knowledges and outlooks is both complex and consequential. Should the knowledge be taken to relate only to and derive only from the culture under study, or to be more global in its application and its sources? How might one indigenous person’s knowledge differ from another’s and to what extent are proponents – within and outside a culture – of indigenous views influenced by other interests, if indeed such interests are extricable from ‘knowledge’? Such questions are not idle since, as Goodall points out, Indigenous peopleʼs knowledge of their environments … is widely invoked today in many arenas of environmental analysis and natural resource management as a potential source of beneficial approaches to sustainability. 1. See Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (University of Chicago Press, 1985); Ga- nanath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific(Princeton University Press, 1992). vi Introduction However, such invocations can often be fuzzy or unthinking and in conservation politics it often arises that indigenous knowledge is celebrated but at the same time called on to carry the burden of finding solutions to major environmental crises, without allowing such reflection on how such knowledge might be constructed and transmitted. (Goodall) Outsiders’ perceptions of indigenous people and their knowledge inevitably mediate the application of such knowledge to issues constructed in or understood through global knowledge systems. As Nygren observes, post-imperialist Western observers are no longer generally guilty of defining indigenous peoples as savages ‘eking out a miserable hand-to-mouth existence through hunting and gathering and … doomed to give way to more progressive ways of exploiting the tropical resources’, but unnuanced essentialisms remain rife, often tending these days (as in the age of Rousseau) to idealism: indigenous peoples may be ‘depicted as guardians of the forest, blessed with inherent environmental wisdom’, as part of threatened Nature but also part of the solution, if only we would stop and listen to their simple, holistic wisdom. Nygren’s paper challenges at the outset of this volume the tendency to see through such a lens of idealism, to confuse indigenous peoples and their knowledges with ‘the imaginative spaces that the tropical peoples occupy in the travel writersʼ [or any observers’] minds’ and to fit the observed cultures into narratives arising from observers’ acquired ideas of moral hierarchies, environmental concern or yearning for fragile paradises. Later in the volume, Kull and Henley both challenge the tendency to allow myths – whether of indigenous people’s ‘virtue’ or ‘vice’ – to disproportionately inform forest conservation policy, in Madagascar and Indonesia respectively. Nygren, analysing the depiction of South American rainforest dwellers in travel accounts published in the National Geographic, argues that writers tend to represent such people in accordance with the dominant ideas of their time and milieu – the march of progress and Christian missionising in the Victorian era, environmental awareness and the ‘mission’ to save threatened ecosystems in the twentieth century – and, over and above this cultural currency, to inscribe ‘their own feelings and their own reactions’ onto what is encountered, eliding the feelings and motivations of the encountered. Nygren points out that, in the texts she has studied, native conceptions of nature rarely become an object of study and that definitions of indigenous people tend to be monolithic, to take little account of diversity between members of a culture. It is as spurious to say that ‘Amazonian Indians think’ as to say ‘Europeans think’: while true on many partial levels, generalisations about indigenous environmental knowledge are unsubtle at best, ignoring, for example, the dynamic nature of cultural systems in contact with history and the ability of every individual to interpret, besides which, as Mukamuri points out, ‘Though individuals share an environment, they compete for natural resources: they have well defined personal interests as well as group concerns’. Later essays demonstrate that crude generalisations are rife vii Introduction in the portrayal

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