Investigating Local Knowledge: New Directions, New Approaches

This book provides a timely overview of new directions and new approaches to investigating the role of rural communities in generating knowledge founded on their sophisticated understandings of their environments, devising mechanisms to conserve and sustain their natural resources, and establishing community-based organizations that serve as forums for identifying problems and dealing with them through local-level experimentation, innovation, and exchange of information with other societies. These studies show that development activities that work with and through local knowledge and organizations have several important advantages over projects that operate outside them. Local knowledge informs grassroots decision-making, much of which takes place through indigenous organizations and associations at the community level as people seek to identify and determine solutions to their problems.

Table of Contents:
Local knowledge theory and methods: an urban model from Indonesia, Christoph Antweiler; Doing and knowing: questions about studies of local knowledge, Andrew P. Vayda, Bradley B. Walters and Indah Setyawati; A decision model for the incorporation of indigenous knowledge into development projects, Paul Sillitoe and Julian Barr; Triangulation with tecnicos: a method for rapid assessment of local knowledge, Jeffery W. Bentley, Eric Boa, Percy Vilca and John Stonehouse; Local history as 'indigenous knowledge': aeroplanes, conservation and development in Haia and Maimafu, Papua New Guinea, David Ellis and Paige West; The INGO, the project and the investigation of 'indigenous knowledge': the case of non-timber forest product (NTFP), Sebastian Taylor; Indigenous views on the terms of participation in the development of biodiversity conservation in Nepal, Ben Campbell; Negotiating change, maintaining continuity: science education and indigenous knowledge in Eastern Canada, Trudy Sable; The re-emergence of traditional medicine and health care in post-colonial India and national identity, Subhadra Mitra Channa; In dialogue with indigenous knowledge: sharing research to promote empowerment of rural communities in India, R. Baumgartner, G.K. Karanth, G.S. Aurora and V. Ramaswamy; Index.

About the Author :
Alan Bicker has qualifications in both agricultural and anthropology with research interests in the dynamics of migrant integration and the cognitive systems involved. His current work focuses on Eastern European migration and its participation in Western European farming, and researching its significance for our understanding of agricultural knowledge. Paul Sillitoe has qualifications in both agricultural science and anthropology with research interests in tropical farming systems and indigenous natural resource management strategies. He specialises in development and social change, livelihood and technology, human ecology and ethnoscience. He has worked in Papua New Guinea, where he first championed the competitive sociability of institutionalised corporate exchange individualism, and Bangladesh, researching local agricultural knowledge and development programmes. Johan Pottier is a senior anthropologist who has researched extensively in Central Africa. He has published on local-level perceptions of food security; anthropology and food policy; post-drought and post-famine recovery; refugee perceptions of humanitarian aid; war, displacement and ethnicity; and the impact of migration on rural livelihoods. He is currently Head of the Anthropology Department at SOAS, University of London.