Book review : "The perception of the environment: Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill"

3 page(s

Rethinking the building blocks : ontological pluralism and the idea of 'management'

The persistence of indigenous ontologies rooted in human systems that pre-date the creation of colonial property rights and assertions of frontier conquest and dispossession unsettles the dominant idea that ‘management’ is an unproblematic and universally endorsed goal for communities, regions and nations in their environmental and development discourses. This paper argues that conceptual building blocks which render management, be it of environments, economies or people, as unquestionably good, need to be reconsidered. Drawing on diverse indigenous knowledges in Australia, particularly in relation to wildlife management, the paper examines the hidden cultural specificity of management, planning, institutional strengthening and capacity building as well as their implicit silencing of alternative narratives of the economic, environmental and cultural dimensions of social life.13 page(s

Rethinking the building blocks : management and indigenous epistemologies

1 page(s

Changing country, telling stories : research ethics, methods and empowerment in working with Aboriginal women

15 page(s

Ontological pluralism in contested cultural landscapes

13 page(s

Reframing Indigenous water rights in ‘modern’ Taiwan: reflecting on Tayal experience of colonized common property

There is a widely accepted stereotype that Indigenous Taiwanese have lost their connection to country as a result of colonization and thus the Indigenous presence is often omitted in representations of ‘modern’ Taiwan. By asserting a modern/traditional binary that privileges the colonizer as modern these representations demean Indigenous cultures as ‘primitive’ or ‘traditional’. This paper challenges those biased dichotomies by exploring the experience of Tayal people in northern Taiwan, drawing on both field and archival research to demonstrate the resistant and persistent Indigenous presence in common property resource governance, specifically water governance. The research found that Tayal systems for common property governance persist in the management of water. It also demonstrates that in those governance systems, non-human agencies such as water have active agency in Tayal culture. By recognizing water as actively engaged in the common property governance, the paper argues that governing common property in the Tayal context is about contemporary and adaptive governance relations among non-human and human agencies in a more-than-human world, as well as communally sharing the custodianship. It is misguided to understand these governance systems as primitive, traditional or inauthentic – all common representations within dominant Taiwanese discourses. The paper also argues that recognizing and engaging Tayal people’s communal custodianship offers a foundation for building culturally appropriate, just and resilient common property governance frameworks in Taiwan’s contested cultural landscapes

Framework for integrating indigenous and scientific knowledge for disaster risk reduction

A growing awareness of the value of indigenous knowledge has prompted calls for its use within disaster risk reduction. The use of indigenous knowledge alongside scientific knowledge is increasingly advocated but there is as yet no clearly developed framework demonstrating how the two may be integrated to reduce community vulnerability to environmental hazards. This paper presents such a framework, using a participatory approach in which relevant indigenous and scientific knowledge may be integrated to reduce a community's vulnerability to environmental hazards. Focusing on small island developing states it presents an analysis of the need for such a framework alongside the difficulties of incorporating indigenous knowledge. This is followed by an explanation of the various processes within the framework, drawing on research completed in Papua New Guinea. This framework is an important first step in identifying how indigenous and scientific knowledge may be integrated to reduce community vulnerability to environmental hazards.26 page(s

Weaving lives together : collaborative fieldwork in North East Arnhem Land, Australia

Weaving lives together at Bawaka, North-East Arnhem Land is a book about basket weaving and culture. In this paper, some of the co-authors of the text, non-Indigenous academics and an Indigenous woman from northern Australia, reflect on the process of creating the book. We argue that jointly authoring a book about weaving lives has in fact interwoven all our lives in a manner which confronts many traditional academic accounts of research and fieldwork. Through the process of researching and writing the book we have experienced a sharing of knowledge and a sharing of family. In particular, we have learnt that relationships cannot be planned and that uncertainty can lead to creative transformations.12 page(s