Indigenous Enviromental Knowledge and its Transformations: Critical Anthropological Perspectives

This volume provides a critical examination of the uses and abuses of indigenous knowledge. The contributors focus on a series of interrelated issues in their interrogation of indigenous knowledge and its specific applications within the localized contexts of particular Asian societies and regional cultures.In particular they explore: the problems of translation and mistranslation in the local-global transference of traditional practices and representations of resource management; the match and mismatch of practical reasoning in indigenous subsistence regimes and their depictions by outsiders; and the developmental and political consequences of contemporary ethnic and regional claims rooted in an ideology of traditional indigenous knowledge.