“…Ethnobotanical research conducted by ethnographers often focuses on medicinal and wild food plants. However, more research on traditional and local knowledge of livestock-animal relations to forage and fodder plants will be needed in the future (Sharifian et al 2022a, 2022b). We raise the hypothesis that early ethnographic data were most probably collected during in-door interviews, as indicators relevant on pastures (e.g.…”
“…Ethnobotanical research conducted by ethnographers often focuses on medicinal and wild food plants. However, more research on traditional and local knowledge of livestock-animal relations to forage and fodder plants will be needed in the future (Sharifian et al 2022a, 2022b). We raise the hypothesis that early ethnographic data were most probably collected during in-door interviews, as indicators relevant on pastures (e.g.…”
“…emic) The identification of common principles blurred by cultural and ecological diversities of pastoralism across different regions Limited understanding of most traditional knowledge holders of the regional and global level situation, because information sources available to them (e.g. TV, radio) rarely share information of forage-related pastoral knowledge Scaling up pathways employed * 1, 2, 3 1, 2, 4 2, 1, 3 Sources [ 97 – 99 ] [ 100 , 101 ] [ 102 ] Note that conversations that crosscut communities are foundational to scaling up in all cases (see Fig. 1 and Additional file 1 for further details on each of these projects) * See text for a discussion of the four pathways for scaling up from local to global Fig.…”
Section: Challenges In Global Ethnobiological Endeavoursmentioning
While ethnobiology is a discipline that focuses on the local, it has an outstanding, but not yet fully realized potential to address global issues. Part of this unrealized potential is that universalistic approaches often do not fully recognize culturally grounded perspectives and there are multiple challenges with scaling up place-based research. However, scalability is paramount to ensure that the intimate and context-specific diversity of human–environmental relationships and understandings are recognized in global-scale planning and policy development. Here, we identify four pathways to enable the scalability of place-based ethnobiological research from the ground up: local-to-global dialogues, aggregation of published data, multi-sited studies, and geospatial analyses. We also discuss some major challenges and consideration to encourage continuous reflexivity in these endeavours and to ensure that scalability does not contribute to unnecessarily decontextualizing, co-opting, or overwriting the epistemologies of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. As ethnobiology navigates multiple scales of time and space and seeks to increase its breadth, this study shows that the use of deliberately global approaches, when carefully nested within rich field-based and ecological and ethnographically grounded data, can contribute to: (1) upscaling case-specific insights to unveil global patterns and dynamics in the biocultural contexts of Indigenous Peoples and local communities; (2) bringing ethnobiological knowledge into resolutions that can influence global environmental research and policy agendas; and (3) enriching ethnobiology’s field-based ethos with a deliberate global analytical focus.
“…Pastoral systems all over the world are highly diverse, but they all share the same adaptive approach: working closely with livestock interacting with rangelands, and making decisions based on learning from such interaction (Sharifian et al, 2022). From the Sahel to the Arctic, pastoral systems developed as an integral part of their natural environment, not by trying to separate from it.…”
Concerns for the disappearance of local breeds go back to the beginning of scientific breeding and the early national policies of agriculture intensification in Europe at the time of the industrial revolution. That initial Eurocentric framing of domestic animal diversity as ‘local’ breeds, largely the result of natural selection and potentially a useful source of ‘raw’ genetic material, remains dominant. Today, however, the debate around domestic animal diversity has been globalized, and so includes livestock breeding populations and livestock systems that developed outside the European experience. This paper looks at domestic animal diversity from the vantage point of one of such cases: cattle breeding among the Wodaabe pastoralists in Niger. The research is based on a combination of qualitative methodologies standard in social anthropology and quantitative analysis of memorized herd genealogies over a 20-year period. Results show that a competent herder can control cattle mating in over 90 percent of cases. Complex learned behaviour in cattle, particularly related to feeding competence, is a major selection criterion. The Wodaabe specialize in using the short-lived and unpredictable grazing opportunities, which is characteristic of Sahelian rangelands. To successfully interface the unpredictable variability in potential inputs, they breed herds with exceptional levels of within-breed diversity, crucially including epigenetic traits. The common practice of conflating Domestic Animal Diversity (DAD) with Animal Genetic Resources (AnGR), therefore, falls short of adequately representing the relationship between ‘local breeds’ and livelihood in pastoral systems.
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