Serena Heckler received her Ph.D. in ethnobotany, environmental anthropology and sustainable development from Cornell University and is a research fellow at Durham University. She has lived and worked with the Wõthihã of the Venezuelan Amazon, studying the ways in which the market economy and demographic change have affected their environmental knowledge. She is currently undertaking participatory research on similar themes with the Shuar of Ecuador, in collaboration with the Intercultural University of Indigenous Peoples and Nations-Amawtay Wasi based in Quito, Ecuador.

List of figures, maps and tables
List of contributors

Preface
Roy Ellen

PART I: THE CURRENT STATE OF ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE RESEARCH

Chapter 1. Introduction
Serena Heckler

Chapter 2. A genealogy of scientific representations of indigenous knowledge
Stanford Zent

PART II: ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE AND POWER

Chapter 3. The cultural and economic globalisation of traditional environmental knowledge systems
Miguel Alexiades

Chapter 4. Competing and coexisting with cormorants: Ambiguity and change in European wetlands
David N. Carss and Mariella Marzano

Chapter 5. Pathways to developmen: Identity, landscape & industry in Papua New Guinea
Emma Gilberthorpe

PART III: PROCESS IN ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE

Chapter 6. How do they see it? Traditional resource management, disturbance and biodiversity conservation in Papua New Guinea
William Thomas

Chapter 7. Wild plants as agricultural indicators: Linking Ethnobotany with traditional ecological knowledge
Takeshi Fujimoto

Chapter 8. How does migration affect ethnobotanical knowledge and social organisation in a west Papuan village?
Manuel Boissière

PART IV: LANDSCAPE AND ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE

Chapter 9. Reproduction and development of expertise within communities of practice: A case study of fishing activities in south Buton
Daniel Vermonden

Chapter 10. Review of an attempt to apply the carrying capacity concept in the New Guinea highlands: Cultural practice disconcerts ecological expectation
Paul Sillitoe

Chapter 11. Managing the Gabra Oromo commons of Kenya, past and present
Aneesa Kassam and Francis Chachu Ganya

Notes on contributors
Index

In recent years, the field of study variously called local, indigenous or traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) has experienced a crisis brought about by the questioning of some of its basic assumptions. This has included reassessing notions that scientific methods can accurately elicit and describe TEK or that incorporating it into development projects will improve the physical, social or economic well-being of marginalized peoples. The contributors to this volume argue that to accurately and appropriately describe TEK, the historical and political forces that have shaped it, as well as people's day-to-day engagement with the landscape around them must be taken into account. TEK thus emerges, not as an easily translatable tool for development experts, but as a rich and complex element of contemporary lives that should be defined and managed by indigenous and local peoples themselves.