Perception and Interpretation of Climate Change among Quechua Farmers of Bolivia: Indigenous Knowledge as a Resource for Adaptive Capacity
By S. Boillat, Fikret Berkes. 2013
213 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We aim to explore how indigenous peoples observe and ascribe meaning to change. The case study involves two Quechua-speaking farmer communities from mountainous areas near Cochabamba, Bolivia. Taking climate change as a starting point, we found that, first, farmers often associate their observations of climate change with other social and environmental changes, such as value change in the community, population growth, out-migration, urbanization, and land degradation. Second, some of the people interpret change as part of a cycle, which includes a belief in the return of some characteristics of ancient or mythological times. Third, environmental change is also perceived as the expression of "extra-human intentionalities," a reaction of natural or spiritual entities that people consider living beings. On the basis of these interpretations of change and their adaptive strategies, we discuss the importance of indigenous knowledge as a component of adaptive capacity. Even in the context of living with modern science and mass media, indigenous patterns of interpreting phenomena tend to be persistent. Our results support the view that indigenous knowledge must be acknowledged as process, emphasizing ways of observing, discussing, and interpreting new information. In this case, indigenous knowledge can help address complex relationships between phenomena, and help design adaptation strategies based on experimentation and knowledge coproduction.
Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f80730d6ad0356ccdfe83a1c53980e816ece6940
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
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Citations in the corpus
- Research, part of a Special Feature on Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Global Environmental Change Biocultural Refugia: Combating the Erosion of Diversity in Landscapes of Food Production (2013, background): “The remedy for such climatic variability is diversity of species, knowledge, and practice (Crumley 2000, Boillat and Berkes 2013).”
- An indicator framework for assessing livelihood resilience in the context of social–ecological dynamics (2014, background): “The site-specificity of knowledge; e.g. through the level of experience a land user has in a specific environment (cf. Atran et al., 2002; Boillat and Berkes, 2013) can help ensure that livelihood strategies are adapted to the SES.”