Class Readings and Plans for Tuesday, October 20
Case Study Part 2: Knowledge

Class Plan
Today's material covers the role of two kinds of knowledge in historical ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK, also called Traditional Environmental Knowledge, Local Knowledge, Indigenous Knowledge, Local Science, etc) and Cosmopolitan (our preferred term) or "Western" scientific knowledge.

We will look at the contrast and the commonalities of these two kinds of knowledge in three steps:

• First, before class we will divide into groups to consider two sets of class readings:
  • One group , Group TEK, will read the following material
    • Roberto J. Gonzalez. 2001. Chapter 1, The Conceptual Bases of Zapotec Farming and Foodways, in Zapotec Science, University of Texas Press.
    • Barrera-Bassols, N., and J.A. Zinck. 2003. Ethnopedology: a worldwide view on the soil knowledge of local people, Geoderma 111: 171-195.
    • [optional] Aldasoro M., E. M. 2012 Colecciones Etnoentomologicas Comunitarias: Una Propuesta Conceptual y Metodologica."
  • The second group, Group Communist, will read
    • James C. Scott. 1998. Authoritarian High Modernism, from Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, on High Modernism
    • Shapiro, Judith. 2001. Introduction, in Mao's War Against Nature, pp. 1-20. Cambridge University Press.
  When you are finished reading, but before 9:00 p.m. on Monday, October 19, post a comment on the question of whether and how you think TEK and Cosmopolitan Science can be combined to understand the history of ecosystems.
• Second, in the first part of class, Steve will give a presentation on the traditional knowledge of the Nuosu people of the Liangshan region in Southwest China.
• Third, for the second part of class, we will divide into four groups for discussion, dividing the TEK group and the Communist group into two groups each, to discuss a series of questions posed at the end of the lecture in the light of what you have read about "your" system of knowledge, TEK or Communist. We will come back to a final plenary discussion of the issues covered.