Acknowledging Indigenous Knowledge: Voices of Tropical Forest People

This book explores how the landscapes in indigenous territories are rapidly changing due to increased global industrial demand. This deforestation and urbanization have isolated the indigenous people from practicing ’traditional ways of life.’ Portrayed in this book is the indigenous people’s perspective of their indigenous knowledge (IK) about the environment and why losing IK is a threat to humans, wildlife, and nature. Insight is shared into why acknowledging IK as a science can help solve climate change, food and nutrition insecurity, and increasing new types of pandemics through evidence-based stories from indigenous people.

Features:

- Bridges the fractured space between science and nature.

- Documents the perspectives of indigenous peoples about their ancestral knowledge.

- Provides ethnographic qualitative comparative case studies of forest-dwelling indigenous peoples over a 19-year period.

- Covers largely remote indigenous territories of ten tropical countries in the Global South.

- Provides evidence-based stories examining indigenous knowledge’s role in the tropics in preserving diverse landscapes and providing nature-based solutions.

Purabi Bose, a citizen of India and has Santhal tribe/ Adivasi ancestry, is a social anthropologist and environmental scientist with a research focus on forest tenure and land rights of Indigenous Peoples, climate adaptation, and food security in Asia, East Africa, and Latin America. Currently, she is a Senior Lecturer of Forest Policy at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), Sweden.