Traditional knowledge

About: Traditional knowledge is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 10825 publications have been published within this topic receiving 202790 citations. The topic is also known as: indigenous knowledge & indigenous knowledge system.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge of Swiss Alpine Farmers and their Resilience to Socioecological Change

Abstract: The cultural landscape of the European Alps was formed over centuries through human agricultural activities. Smallholder family farms, made famous in the cultural ecological literature by Robert Netting (1993), are still the predominant socioeconomic unit of agriculture. This study assesses the resilience of farm households in relation to climate change in the village of Vals, Switzerland. Using ethnographic methods, farming households’ resilience to environmental change was investigated from two perspectives: 1) an assessment of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) in the household and its social networks; and 2) the assets of the various livelihood strategies of the farms. TEK was found to be of vital significance for management of the local environment, despite its reduced integrity due to contraction of farmland holdings, mechanization of certain tasks, and fragmentation of the agricultural ecosystem into different jurisdictions. Today the strongest and most critical areas of TEK are centered on production of agricultural goods and hazard management. Households’ TEK, in combination with their flexible structure, gives them a high degree of adaptive capacity that nevertheless must be viewed in the context of an environment including not only significant natural constraints and variability, but also local and non-local sociopolitical factors, including state subsidies, which constitute a significant share of farmers’ income, and political directives to maintain biodiversity. TEK must also be responsive to these constraints and the premises of biodiversity conservation and landscape and livelihood maintenance that underlie them.

Indigenous Making and Sharing: Claywork in an Indigenous STEAM Program

Abstract: In this article we expand on ideas of making and maker spaces to develop Indigenous making and sharing. We draw from an ArtScience participatory design project that involved Indigenous youth, famil...

Justifying Intellectual Property in Traditional Knowledge

Abstract: The article questions the relevance of recent proposals on intellectual property (IP) for traditional knowledge (TK) in current trade talks. It examines issues of definition for TK and suggests modalitiesinwhichtounderstandcollectiverights.Anumberofproposalsarereviewedincluding administrative and IPR modes of protection to identify the inherent problems associated with their effective use in the area of TK. Case studies on current national experiences with TK protection and promotion are presented for Australia, South Africa, India and China. WIPO’s fact-finding missions for identifying existing gaps in the needs and expectations of TK holders are reviewed for West Africa, Eastern and Southern Africa, and the Caribbean Region. The paper concludes that raising IP issues for TK at the WTO prematurely without having reached prior evidence-based clarity and consensus on how to equitably resolve these issues can only undermine the legitimacy and relevance of achievable outcomes.