Journal ArticleDOI
Legitimizing local knowledge: From displacement to empowerment for third world people
TLDR
In this article, the authors discuss socio-political, institutional, and ethical issues that need to be considered in order to understand the actual limitations and contributions of such knowledge systems, and suggest the need to recognize its unique values yet avoid romanticized views of its potential.Abstract:
Increasing attention has been given to “indigenous” knowledge in Third World rural societies as a potential basis for sustainable agricultural development. It has been found that many people have functional knowledge systems pertaining to their resources and environment, which are based on experience and experimentation, and which are sometimes based on unique epistemologies. Efforts have been made to include such knowledge in participatory research and projects. This paper discusses socio-political, institutional, and ethical issues that need to be considered in order to understand the actual limitations and contributions of such knowledge systems. It reviews the nature of local knowledge and suggests the need to recognize its unique values yet avoid romanticized views of its potential. Local knowledge and alternative bottom-up projects continue to be marginalized because of the dominance of conventional top-down Ra instead, people need to establish legitimacy of their knowledge for themselves, as a form of empowerment.read more
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Working with Indigenous Knowledge: A Guide for Researchers
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present Connaissances indigenes et recherche : un guide a l'intention des chercheurs, a guide to the creation of knowledge.
Book
Alternative Food Networks: Knowledge, Practice, and Politics
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors introduce Alternative Food Networks, Fair Trade Circuits and the Politics of Food, and the shifting cultural politics of Fair Trade. But they do not discuss the role of food re-localization in the transition from transparent to virtual living.
Journal ArticleDOI
Social Theory and the De/Reconstruction of Agricultural Science: Local Knowledge for an Alternative Agriculture1
TL;DR: In this paper, rural sociologists can be active agents in the reconstruction of the alternative science that must emerge from "actually existing" science and that must be developed if there is to be a truly alternative agriculture.
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Reading the Rains: Local Knowledge and Rainfall Forecasting in Burkina Faso
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors describe how farmers of Burkina Faso predict seasonal rainfall and examine how their forecasts relate to those produced by meteorological science, concluding that significant discordance remains between scientific and local forecasts.
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Indigenous climate knowledge in southern Uganda: the multiple components of a dynamic regional system
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the social contexts in which this information is perceived, evaluated, discussed and applied, and consider the cultural frameworks that support the use of this information, leading farmers to participate as agents as well as consumers in programs that use modern climate science to plan for and adapt to climate variability and climate change.
References
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Rural development : putting the last first
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that researchers, scientists, administrators, and fieldworkers rarely appreciate the richness and validity of rural people's knowledge or the hidden nature of rural poverty.
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Farmer First: Farmer Innovation and Agricultural Research
TL;DR: This article argued that farmers in resource-poor areas are innovators and adaptors, and that agricultural research must take farmers' own agendas and priorities into account, arguing that they are adaptors and innovators.
Journal ArticleDOI
General Principles of Classification and Nomenclature in Folk Biology
TL;DR: In this paper, it has been shown that several important and far reaching generalizations can be formulated which promise to throw considerable light on prescientific man's understanding of his biological universe.
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Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the religious behavior among the natives of New Guinea, discuss the economic and ecological factors affecting their culture, and discuss the effectiveness of functional analysis, and conclude that functional analysis can be used to understand the native culture.