Kalland Arne - Nature across cultures: views of nature and the environment in non-western cultures

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ISSN 1568-2145

ISBN 978-90-481-6271-0 ISBN 978-94-017-0149-5 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-0149-5

Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2003

All rights reserved

Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2003

No part of the material protected by this copyright may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owners.

www.springer.com

INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES

SCIENCE ACROSS CULTURES: THE HISTORY OF NON-WESTERN SCIENCE

In 1997, Kluwer Academic Publishers published the Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures . The encyclopedia, a collection of almost 600 articles by almost 300 contributors, covered a range of topics from Aztec science and Chinese medicine to Tibetan astronomy and Indian ethnobotany. For some cultures, specific individuals could be identified, and their biographies were included. Since the study of non-Western science is not just a study of facts, but a study of culture and philosophy, we included essays on subjects such as Colonialism and Science, Magic and Science, The Transmission of Knowledge from East to West, Technology and Culture, Science as a Western Phenomenon, Values and Science, and Rationality, Objectivity, and Method.

Because the encyclopedia was received with critical acclaim, and because the nature of an encyclopedia is such that articles must be concise and compact, the editors at Kluwer and I felt that there was a need to expand on its success. We thought that the breadth of the encyclopedia could be complemented by a series of books that explored the topics in greater depth. We had an opportunity, without such space limitations, to include more illustrations and much longer bibliographies. We shifted the focus from the general educated audience that the encyclopedia targeted to a more scholarly one, although we have been careful to keep the articles readable and keep jargon to a minimum.

Before we can talk about the field of non-Western science, we have to define both non-Western and science. The term non-Western is not a geographical designation; it is a cultural one. We use it to describe people outside of the Euro-American sphere, including the native cultures of the Americas. The power of European and American colonialism is evident in the fact that the majority of the worlds population is defined by what they are not. And in fact, for most of our recorded history the flow of knowledge, art, and power went the other way. In this series, we hope to rectify the lack of scholarly attention paid to most of the worlds science.

As for defining science, if we wish to study science in non-Western cultures, we need to take several intellectual steps. First, we must accept that every culture has a science, that is, a way of defining, controlling, and predicting events in the natural world. Then we must accept that every science is legitimate in terms of the culture from which it grew. The transformation of the word science as a distinct rationality valued above magic is uniquely European. It is not common to most non-Western societies, where magic and science and religion can easily co-exist. The empirical, scientific realm of understanding and inquiry is not readily separable from a more abstract, religious realm.

Nature Across Cultures is the fourth book in the series. It includes 23 chapters. Most deal with views of the environment as they are perceived by different cultures: Australian Aboriginal people, Native Americans, Polynesians, Indians, etc. The book also contains a variety of essays on broader issues, such as Images of the Other, Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Indigenous Knowledge, and The Global Mobilization of Environmental Concepts: Re-Thinking the Western/Non-Western Divide. The final section contains articles on views of nature and the environment from the points of view of Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism.

We hope the series will be used to provide both factual information about the practices and practitioners of the sciences as well as insights into the worldviews and philosophies of the cultures that produced them. We hope that readers will achieve a new respect for the accomplishments of ancient civilizations and a deeper understanding of the relationship between science and culture.

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the contributors to this volume; I am so impressed with how committed they are to their subjects while at the same time keeping their academic distance. It was a pleasure to read and work with their writing. Thanks especially to Arne Kalland, the Advisory Editor, who read and commented on all the articles in addition to writing his own piece. He is the best editor I have worked with; you can send him an article on Monday and have it back by Wednesday with ten pages of comments and a bibliography. Thanks to my Kluwer family: Maja de Keijzer and Andrea Janga in Dordrecht, and Phil Johnstone in England, who does such a lovely job of making the books beautiful. And thanks, always and again, to my loving family, Bob and Lisa and Lisa and Tim.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

HELAINE SELIN (Editor) is the editor of the Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997) and Science Librarian and Faculty Associate at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, USA. In addition to editing the new series, Science Across Cultures , she has been teaching a course on the Science and History of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. She has also begun work on a revised electronic version of the encyclopaedia.

ARNE KALLAND (Advisory Editor, Environmentalism and Images of the Other) is professor in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, Norway. His main fields of interest are maritime resource management, peoples perceptions of nature, and the environmental movement, with a particular focus on Japan. Among his books are Rice or Opium? An Introduction to the Golden Triangle (in Norwegian, Universitetsforlaget, 1985), Fishing Villages in Tokugawa Japan (University of Hawaii, 1995) and Marine Mammals in Northern Cultures (with Frank Sejersen, in press). He is the co-editor of Asian Perceptions of Nature: A Critical Approach (with Ole Bruun, Curzon, 1995), Japanese Images of Nature: Cultural Perspectives (with Pamela Asquith, Curzon, 1997), and Environmental Movements in Asia (with Gerard Persoon, Curzon, 1998).

WILLIAM BALE (Native Views of the Environment in Amazonia) is Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A. He chaired the department from 19982001. He is the author of Footprints of the Forest: Ka apor Ethnobotany (Columbia University Press, 1994), which won the Klinger Award from the Society for Economic Botany. He edited Advances in Historical Ecology (Columbia University Press, 1998) and was coeditor of Resource Management in Amazonia: Indigenous and Folk Strategies (New York Botanical Garden, 1989). He edited the Journal of Ethnobiology from 19992002. His current research focuses on the historical ecology of Amazonian landscapes that are occupied and utilized today by diverse societies associated with the Tupi-Guarani branch of the Tupi language family.

FIKRET BERKES (Local Understandings of the Land: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Indigenous Knowledge) is Professor of Natural Resources at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. He holds a Ph.D. degree from McGill University, Montreal, in applied ecology, and he has done postdoctoral studies in anthropology. Working at the interface of natural and social sciences, Dr. Berkes has devoted most of his professional life to investigating the interrelations between societies and their resources. His main area of expertise is common-property resources, community-based resource management, and traditional ecological knowledge. He teaches in these fields, contributes to theory, and applies his experience in a range of geographical areas. His recent publications include three books: Linking Social and Ecological Systems (co-edited with Carl Folke; Cambridge University Press, 1998), Sacred Ecology (Taylor & Francis, 1999), and Managing Small-Scale Fisheries (co-authored with R. Mahon, P. McConney, R. Pollnac and R. Pomeroy; International Development Research Centre, 2001).

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