Transdisciplinarity involves knowledge co-production with non-academics. This co-production can be horizontal when equal consideration is given to the contributions from different knowledges and ways of knowing. However, asymmetric power relations and colonial patterns of behavior, which are deeply rooted in academic culture, may hinder horizontality. Using Icek Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behavior, we elicited and analyzed the attitudes, perceptions, and behavioral intentions towards knowledge co-production of a team of seven Ecuadorian biologists while they were conducting fieldwork in Indigenous communities. All biologists acknowledged the benefits of collaborating with indigenous people. However, researchers with less fieldwork experience held unfavorable attitudes towards knowledge co-production. While all criticized the colonial biases of Ecuadorian society, more experienced participants were the only ones who perceived colonial dynamics as intrinsic to dominant scientific practices, and who expressed favorable attitudes towards horizontal co-production. They also perceived lower social pressure against co-production and greater behavioral control (i. e., greater confidence in their ability to perform co-production) than their peers; all of which confirmed their stronger behavioral intention to perform transdisciplinary co-production. Our analysis identified three structural factors affecting researchers' intentions:(1) disciplinarity predispositions acquired through formal education, (2) lack of decolonial approaches in academic curricula, and (3) pressures in academia to do more in less time. Personal decisions by more experienced participants, such as voluntarily engaging with transdisciplinary training or cultivating personal connections with Indigenous culture, appeared to be key enablers of horizontal forms of co-production. Understanding researchers' behavioral intentions might be key to seize, or waste, the decolonization opportunities brought about by the rapid advance of transdisciplinarity that is taking place in fields like sustainability or conservation science.
This article examines Runa relations to plants in the Ecuadorian Amazon. By analyzing ritual songs to plants as well as gardening behaviour, it argues that plants are treated like dangerous lovers or difficult children. To find out why this should be the case, it then examines Quichua and Shuar language accounts of the origins of plant species. These accounts suggest that plant species evolve from a previously human state in which the plants were lovers or children who became estranged. The estrangement is triggered by a particular fault called quilla in Quichua. The meaning of this key term includes both 'laziness' and 'sexual looseness'. The resulting emotional estrangement then hardened into a physical transformation giving rise to a new species. Although the fault called quilla is overcome through the transformation, the resulting plants continue to be treated as though they were moody children or lovers prone to withdraw from the gardener. The article concludes by suggesting that treating plants as highmaintenance lovers leads to a kind of gardening that is more costly in terms of time and dedication than most women can afford under conditions of modernity.
Thea Riofrancos, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador. (Durham: Duke University Press 2020) xi + 252 pp., $26.95 (pbk), ISBN: 9781478008484.
We argue that a multimodal approach to defining a depictive class of words called ‘ideophones’ by linguists is essential for grasping their meanings. Our argument for this approach is based on the formal properties of Pastaza Quichua ideophones, which set them apart from the non-ideophonic lexicon, and on the cultural assumptions brought by speakers to their use. We analyze deficiencies in past attempts to define this language's ideophones, which have used only audio data. We offer, instead, an audiovisual corpus which we call an ‘antidictionary’, because it defines words not with other words, but with clips featuring actual contexts of use. The major discovery revealed by studying these clips is that ideophones’ meanings can be clarified by means of a distinction found in modality and American Sign Language studies. This distinction between speaker-internal and speaker-external perspective is evident in the intonational and gestural details of ideophones’ use.
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