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Indigenous Cultures: Environmental Knowledge, Practice, and Rights. Chapter 18. Culture. All the ideas, practices, and material objects that people in a particular social group create to deal with their real-life problems.
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Indigenous Cultures:Environmental Knowledge, Practice, and Rights Chapter 18
Culture • All the ideas, practices, and material objects that people in a particular social group create to deal with their real-life problems. • Cultural practices, then, are ways of doing things that societies or social groups have developed over time to survive and prosper. • Culture is • Learned • Associated with notions of resources (knowledge, language, skills) • A good thing
Cultural Approaches to Water • State-centered approaches to water • Market-centered approaches to water • Indigenous approaches to water
Questions • Compare Western culture about nature with Indigenous culture? • How is nature conceptualized by different societies? • How are flora, fauna, terrain, and energy of the physical environment utilized in practice?
Some Characteristics of Indigenous Peoples • Mobile • Communal ownership of valuable resources • Kinship based social structure –reduces the need to consume and to work to make money • Egalitarian—equality in social relations • Indigenous peoples tend to control resources or occupy land desired by members of the capitalist nation-state.
Indigenous Environmental Ideas and Knowledge • A set of ideas and practices that people have developed in relation to their natural, sociopolitical, and symbolic surroundings • “the environment” is not merely a setting or a complex of material circumstances or natural resources. • Indigenous forms of environmental knowledge and practice are not “poor substitutes” for Western culture and environmental relations
Indigenous Ecological Practice • Indigenous peoples have typically been successful in adapting sustainably to their local environmental (and societal) conditions. • “Long term success story” • Impacts of climate change and globalization and development?
Enduring Questions • Does this mean that Indigenous cultures leave smaller “ecological footprints” by consuming and waster less of the environment’s bounty? • Are societies who members seek to control and dominate nature more likely to experience greater social inequalities and cyclical shortages in access to material resources? • As well as greater frequency of competition and conflict over material access both within their own societies and with other societies?
