Climate and Culture

Climate and Culture
Author: Giuseppe Feola
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2019-10-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1108422500

Discusses how culture both facilitates and inhibits our ability to address, live with, and make sense of climate change.

Indigenous knowledge for climate change assessment and adaptation

Indigenous knowledge for climate change assessment and adaptation
Author: Nakashima, Douglas
Publisher: UNESCO Publishing
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2018-12-31
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9231002767

This unique transdisciplinary publication is the result of collaboration between UNESCO's Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (LINKS) programme, the United Nations University's Traditional Knowledge Initiative, the IPCC, and other organisations

A Critical Approach to Climate Change Adaptation

A Critical Approach to Climate Change Adaptation
Author: Silja Klepp
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2018-05-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1351677136

This edited volume brings together critical research on climate change adaptation discourses, policies, and practices from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Drawing on examples from countries including Colombia, Mexico, Canada, Germany, Russia, Tanzania, Indonesia, and the Pacific Islands, the chapters describe how adaptation measures are interpreted, transformed, and implemented at grassroots level and how these measures are changing or interfering with power relations, legal pluralismm and local (ecological) knowledge. As a whole, the book challenges established perspectives of climate change adaptation by taking into account issues of cultural diversity, environmental justicem and human rights, as well as feminist or intersectional approaches. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Instituting Nature

Instituting Nature
Author: Andrew S. Mathews
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 0262016524

A study of how encounters between forestry bureaucrats and indigenous forest managers in Mexico produced official knowledge about forests and the state.

Res

Res
Author: Francesco Pellizzi
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2015-08-03
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0873658663

RES 65/66 includes Francesco Pellizzi, “Editorial: RES at 35”; Remo Bodei, “A constellation of words”; Mary Weismantel, “Encounters with dragons”; Z. S. Strother, “A terrifying mimesis”; Wyatt MacGaffey, “Franchising minkisi in Loango”; Karen Overbey, “Seeing through stone”; Noam Andrews, “The space of knowledge”; and other papers.

Advancing Cultural Astronomy

Advancing Cultural Astronomy
Author: Efrosyni Boutsikas
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2021-04-08
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3030646068

This collection of essays on cultural astronomy celebrates the life and work of Clive Ruggles, Emeritus Professor of Archaeoastronomy at Leicester University. Taking their lead from Ruggles’ work, the papers present new research focused on three core themes in cultural astronomy: methodology, case studies, and heritage. Through this framework, they show how the study of cultural astronomy has evolved over time and share new ideas to continue advancing the field. Ruggles’ work in these areas has had a profound impact on the way that scholars approach evidence of the role of sky in both ancient and modern cultures. While the papers span many time periods and regions, they are closely connected by these three major themes, presenting methodological investigations of how we can approach archaeological, textual, and ethnographic evidence; describing detailed archaeoastronomical case studies; or stressing the importance of global heritage management. This work will appeal to researchers and scholars interested in the history and development of cultural astronomy.

Reshaping the World

Reshaping the World
Author: Ana Díaz
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2020-04-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1607329530

Reshaping the World is a nuanced exploration of the plurality, complexity, and adaptability of Precolumbian and colonial-era Mesoamerican cosmological models and the ways in which anthropologists and historians have used colonial and indigenous texts to understand these models in the past. Since the early twentieth century, it has been popularly accepted that the Precolumbian Mesoamerican cosmological model comprised nine fixed layers of underworld and thirteen fixed layers of heavens. This layered model, which bears a close structural resemblance to a number of Eurasian cosmological models, derived in large part from scholars’ reliance on colonial texts, such as the post–Spanish Conquest Codex Vaticanus A and Florentine Codex. By reanalyzing and recontextualizing both indigenous and colonial texts and imagery in nine case studies examining Maya, Zapotec, Nahua, and Huichol cultures, the contributors discuss and challenge the commonly accepted notion that the cosmos was a static structure of superimposed levels unrelated to and unaffected by historical events and human actions. Instead, Mesoamerican cosmology consisted of a multitude of cosmographic repertoires that operated simultaneously as a result of historical circumstances and regional variations. These spaces were, and are, dynamic elements shaped, defined, and redefined throughout the course of human history. Indigenous cosmographies could be subdivided and organized in complex and diverse arrangements—as components in a dynamic interplay, which cannot be adequately understood if the cosmological discourse is reduced to a superposition of nine and thirteen levels. Unlike previous studies, which focus on the reconstruction of a pan-Mesoamerican cosmological model, Reshaping the World shows how the movement of people, ideas, and objects in New Spain and neighboring regions produced a deep reconfiguration of Prehispanic cosmological and social structures, enriching them with new conceptions of space and time. The volume exposes the reciprocal influences of Mesoamerican and European theologies during the colonial era, offering expansive new ways of understanding Mesoamerican models of the cosmos. Contributors: Sergio Botta, Ana Díaz, Kerry Hull, Katarzyna Mikulska, Johannes Neurath, Jesper Nielsen, Toke Sellner Reunert†, David Tavárez, Alexander Tokovinine, Gabrielle Vail

In Praise of the Ancestors

In Praise of the Ancestors
Author: Susan Elizabeth Ramirez
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2022-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1496232070

Apart from collective memories of lived experiences, much of the modern world’s historical sense comes from written sources stored in the archives of the world, and some scholars in the not-so-distant past have described unlettered civilizations as “peoples without history.” In Praise of the Ancestors is a revisionist interpretation of early colonial accounts that reveal incongruities in accepted knowledge about three Native groups. Susan Elizabeth Ramírez reevaluates three case studies of oral traditions using positional inheritance—a system in which names and titles are inherited from one generation by another and thereby contribute to the formation of collective memories and a group identity. Ramírez begins by examining positional inheritance and perpetual kinship among the Kazembes in central Africa from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Next, her analysis moves to the Native groups of the Iroquois Confederation and their practice of using names to memorialize remarkable leaders in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Finally, Ramírez surveys naming practices of the Andeans, based on sixteenth-century manuscript sources and later testimonies found in Spanish and Andean archives, questioning colonial narratives by documenting the use of this alternative system of memory perpetuation, which was initially unrecognized by the Spaniards. In the process of reexamining the histories of Native peoples on three continents, Ramírez broaches a wider issue: namely, understanding of the nature of knowledge as fundamental to understanding and evaluating the knowledge itself.