Assuntos

Conservação dos Recursos Naturais , Florestas , Povos Indígenas , Humanos , Brasil , Clima Tropical

RESUMO

The social and environmental failure of successive Western development models imposed on the global South has led local communities to pursue alternatives to development. Such alternatives seek radical societal transformations that require the production of new knowledge, practices, technologies, and institutions that are effective to achieve more just and sustainable societies. We may think of such a production as innovation driven by social movements, organizations, collectives, indigenous peoples, and local communities. Innovation that is driven by such grassroots groups has been theorized in the academic literature as "grassroots innovation". However, research on alternatives to development has rarely examined innovation using grassroots innovation as an analytical framework. Here, we assess how grassroots innovation may contribute to building alternatives to development using Zapatismo in Chiapas (Mexico) as a case study. We focus on grassroots innovation in autonomous Zapatista education because this alternative to formal education plays a vital role in knowledge generation and the production of new social practices within Zapatista communities, which underpin the radical societal transformation being built by Zapatismo. We reviewed the academic literature on grassroots innovation as well as gray literature and audiovisual media on Zapatismo and autonomous Zapatista education. We also conducted ethnographic fieldwork in a Zapatista community and its school. We found innovative educational, pedagogical, and teaching-learning practices based on the (re)production of knowledge and learning, which are not limited to the classroom but linked to all the activities of Zapatistas. Our findings suggest that innovation self-realized by Zapatistas plays a key role on the everyday construction of Zapatismo. Therefore, we argue that a specific theoretical framework of grassroots innovation for the pluriverse, based on empirical work carried out in different alternatives to development, is an urgent task that will contribute to a better understanding of how such alternatives grassroots groups imagine, design, and build, particularly across the global South.

RESUMO

It has been suggested that traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) may play a key role in forest conservation. However, empirical studies assessing to what extent TEK is associated with forest conservation compared with other variables are rare. Furthermore, to our knowledge, the spatial overlap of TEK and forest conservation has not been evaluated at fine scales. In this paper, we address both issues through a case study with Tsimane' Amerindians in the Bolivian Amazon. We sampled 624 households across 59 villages to estimate TEK and used remote sensing data to assess forest conservation. We ran statistical and spatial analyses to evaluate whether TEK was associated and spatially overlapped with forest conservation at the village level. We find that Tsimane' TEK is significantly and positively associated with forest conservation although acculturation variables bear stronger and negative associations with forest conservation. We also find a very significant spatial overlap between levels of Tsimane' TEK and forest conservation. We discuss the potential reasons underpinning our results, which provide insights that may be useful for informing policies in the realms of development, conservation, and climate. We posit that the protection of indigenous cultural systems is vital and urgent to create more effective policies in such realms.

Assuntos

Conservação dos Recursos Naturais/estatística & dados numéricos , Ecologia/educação , Florestas , Aculturação , Biodiversidade , Bolívia , Estudos Transversais , Meio Ambiente , Características da Família , Humanos , Conhecimento , Análise de Regressão , Análise Espacial

RESUMO

Understanding how indigenous peoples' management practices relate to biological diversity requires addressing contemporary changes in indigenous peoples' way of life. This study explores the association between cultural change among a Bolivian Amazonian indigenous group, the Tsimane', and tree diversity in forests surrounding their villages. We interviewed 86 informants in six villages about their level of attachment to traditional Tsimane' values, our proxy for cultural change. We estimated tree diversity (Fisher's Alpha index) by inventorying trees in 48 0.1-ha plots in old-growth forests distributed in the territory of the same villages. We used multivariate models to assess the relation between cultural change and alpha tree diversity. Cultural change was associated with alpha tree diversity and the relation showed an inverted U-shape, thus suggesting that tree alpha diversity peaked in villages undergoing intermediate cultural change. Although the results do not allow for testing the direction of the relation, we propose that cultural change relates to tree diversity through the changes in practices and behaviors that affect the traditional ecological knowledge of Tsimane' communities; further research is needed to determine the causality. Our results also find support in the intermediate disturbance hypothesis, and suggest that indigenous management can be seen as an intermediate form of anthropogenic disturbance affecting forest communities in a subtle, non-destructive way.

RESUMO

Decisions on landscape management are often dictated by government officials based on their own understandings of how landscape should be used and managed, but rarely considering local peoples' understandings of the landscape they inhabit. We use data collected through free listings, field transects, and interviews to describe how an Amazonian group of hunter-horticulturalists, the Tsimane', classify and perceive the importance of different elements of the landscape across the ecological, socioeconomic, and spiritual dimensions. The Tsimane' recognize nine folk ecotopes (i.e., culturally-recognized landscape units) and use a variety of criteria (including geomorphological features and landscape uses) to differentiate ecotopes from one another. The Tsimane' rank different folk ecotopes in accordance with their perceived ecological, socioeconomic, and spiritual importance. Understanding how local people perceive their landscape contributes towards a landscape management planning paradigm that acknowledges the continuing contributions to management of landscape inhabitants, as well as their cultural and land use rights.

RESUMO

Among the different factors associated to change in traditional ecological knowledge, the study of the relations between cultural change and traditional ecological knowledge has received scan and inadequate scholarly attention. Using data from indigenous peoples of an Amazonian society facing increasing exposure to the mainstream Bolivian society, we analyzed the relation between traditional ecological knowledge, proxied with individual plant use knowledge (n=484), and cultural change, proxied with individual- and village-level (n=47) measures of attachment to traditional beliefs and values. We found that both the individual level of detachment to traditional values and the village level of agreement in detachment to traditional values were associated with individual levels of plant use knowledge, irrespective of other proxy measures for cultural change. Because both the individual- and the village-level variables bear statistically significant associations with plant use knowledge, our results suggest that both the individual- and the supra-individual level processes of cultural change are related to the erosion of plant use knowledge. Results from our work highlight the importance of analyzing processes that happen at intermediary social units -the village in our case study- to explain changes in traditional ecological knowledge.

RESUMO

Researchers have argued that indigenous peoples preferably use the most apparent plant species, particularly for medicinal uses. However, the association between the ecological importance of a species and its usefulness remains unclear. In this paper we quantify such association for six use categories (firewood, construction, materials, food, medicines and other uses). We collected data on the uses of 58 tree species, as reported by 93 informants in 22 villages in the Tsimane' territory (Bolivian Amazon). We calculated the ecological importance of the same species by deriving their importance value index (IVI) in 48 0.1-ha old-growth forest plots. Matching both data sets, we found a positive relation between the IVI of a species and its overall use value (UV) as well as with its UV for construction and materials. We found a negative relation between IVI and UV for species that were reportedly used for medicine and food uses, and no clear pattern for the other categories. We hypothesize that species used for construction or crafting purposes because of their physical properties are more easily substitutable than species used for medicinal or edible purposes because of their chemical properties.