ABSTRACT
Local Environmental Knowledge This chapter describes local knowledge of Aruese sea cucumber harvesting practices, including their significance for more sustainable exploitation.1 It is based on the following assumptions. First, I draw upon Geertz’s understanding of local knowledge: ‘local not just as to place, time, class, and variety of issues, but as to accent-vernacular characterizations of what happens connected to vernacular imaginings of what can’ (Geertz 1983:215). The pertinence of this way of regarding local knowledge is ‘in drawing attention to the need to treat what happens contextually in terms of ideas and beliefs in the culture in question’ (Hobart 1993:18). It implies that local knowledge need not be identical with indigenous knowledge, but rather entails a dialogue of indigenous knowledge interlocked with exogenous knowledge. Indigenous knowledge can rarely be treated as an insulated domain, especially where local subsistence interacts with commercial markets and preferences, whose ‘exogenous knowledge’ therefore needs to be apprehended within indigenous knowledge. Secondly, I draw upon Ingold’s (1992) heuristic distinction between perception and understanding: respectively, between the way people practically conceive of the natural environment and what it ‘affords’ them, and the more metaphysical or non-apparent interpretation of such empirical observations, including cosmological ideas of the natural environment and its social reciprocities. In everyday life, such perceptions and under-standings-or practical and metaphysical kinds of knowledge-are, of course, likely to be interconnected and mutually influential. Yet Ingold’s analytical distinction proves useful in understanding observed discrepancies between people’s practical perceptions and their imaginative understandings of
natural resources, as appears to be the case in Aruese trepang harvesting.
