ABSTRACT
This chapter returns to discourses or knowledges to consider articulations between Western (global) and indigenous (local) environmental knowledges, articulations that reveal the play of power between these knowledges. In all three cases, Western or state power ends up dominating the articulation in some way, but the three cases differ in how this occurs. In Richard Grove’s work, a past nearly forgotten by history demonstrates that Western botany, medicine, trade, and even conservation owe a lot to indigenous knowledge. In Paul Nadasdy’s ethnography, a project to integrate scientific and traditional environmental knowledge for environmental co-management in the Yukon fails. Using Latour, Nadasdy argues that a mandated integration of traditional ecological knowledge and science is actually reinforcing science, and reinforcing the actual power that science has over First Nations’ natural resources in the real world. In Tania Li’s ethnography, local people and NGOs in Sulawesi, Indonesia, deliberately created “a reified body of ‘indigenous environmental knowledge’ from the pool of everyday local knowledge and practice,” in order to claim land rights. Such claims can succeed, but they force people to articulate their identity in terms recognized by government agencies, which will constrain how they can exercise their rights.
