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.
The Napo River basin, which is situated within the Upper Amazon archaeological region, is one of the most speciose forests in Greater Amazonia. Standard thinking in scholarship and science holds that these forests are essentially pristine because any Indigenous impacts in the past would have been minimal, seedbanks would have been nearby, and natural forests would have reappeared after the humans left, died out, or dispersed. Inventory research in 2019 on three ridgetop forests in Waorani territory inside the Curaray basin (which drains to the right margin of the Napo River) and a comparable inventory on one control site forest along the Nushiño River (also in the Curaray basin) show human impacts from about the late nineteenth century to about 1960; they occurred during the period of wartime among Waorani themselves and between Wao people and outsiders. The human impacts resulted in the high basal-area presence of two long-lived species with important Waorani cultural uses: cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) and ungurahua palm (Oenocarpus bataua Mart.). These species have high frequency and dominance values and do not occur in the control site, which is comparable in terms of elevation above the flood zone of the rivers in the sample. These findings mean that alpha diversity in the right margin sector (or south) of the Napo River basin cannot a priori be explained by reference to traditionally, biologically accepted patterns of ecological succession but may require knowledge of historical patterns of Indigenous land use and secondary landscape transformation over time due to human (specifically Waorani) impacts of the past.
It is argued in this chapter, on the basis of evidence from grammar, discourse, and verbal art, that for Amazonian Quichua speakers, there is a cultural preference for expressing uncertainty, which is linked with animistic perspectivism. Animistic perspectivism endows nonhumans with subjectivity and implies that there is an infinite multiplicity of perspectives, thereby making a single, totalizing truth impossible. Respectable uncertainty is also apparent in the system of evidentiality, in speech reports, echo questions, and verbal art, all of which emphasize perspective over certainty. A type of certainty that Runa do value, however, and which would not be valid within a rational framework of inquiry, is that of emotional truth, involving feelings of empathy for others, including nonhumans. Emotional truth, then, provides an exception to the preference for uncertainty, and may lead people to confidently reason about ethical matters.
Entre marzo – agosto de 2020, hubo un contagio muy generalizado de covid-19 en las comunidades indígenas Kichwa en la Amazonía ecuatoriana. Mostramos que el pico de contagio ya ha pasado y la mortalidad total ha sido notablemente baja. El pueblo Kichwa identifica su éxito en resistir la pandemia al uso generalizado de plantas medicinales.
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