Ethnoecology: A Post-Normal Science Studying The Traditional Knowledge and Wisdom

Abstract

The article reveals a way of evaluating millenary knowledge of indigenous and rural peoples’ views about nature. This type of inquiry is denominated ethnoecology, a novel hybrid, transdisciplinary, and post-normal discipline. Two intellectual traditions regarding how nature is perceived are defined: The Western thought based on Modern science and another—here denominated traditional experience- that encompasses diverse ways of conceiving the natural world. Thus, two types of ecology emerge and not just the one outlook based on Modern science, which eclipsed the ecological myriads of some 7,000 indigenous cultures that today resist the expansion of the industrialized world while sustaining ecosystems at planetary level. Making them visible requires the kind of critical thinking offered by an ethnoecological approach. This type of evaluation defines the characteristics of traditional knowledge, what kinds of social actors support it, how it is transmitted and practiced both on symbolic and practical levels. We show what ethnoecology has to teach and how nature’s complexity is revealed through the study of the k-c-p complex, which synthesizes the theorization, representation, and production of the socionatural worlds of the “others”. This double role permits a dialogue between types of knowledge, allowing the ethnoecologist to analyze the “others” worlds, offering an individual interpretation of them. It also leads to the reinvention of possible futures. Finally, the article discusses how it is that ethnoecology has the singular task of deciphering the “memory of our species,”, that is the biocultural memory, recognizing and re-evaluating those peoples who maintain it while bringing new depth to criticism of the Modern world and its intellectual rationality.