‘This is not the jungle, this is mybarbecho’: semantics of ethnoecological landscape categories in the Bolivian Amazon

Abstract

Through a case study with Spanish-speaking Takana indigenous people in the Bolivian Amazon, we explored ethnoecological landscape categories, including their ecological underpinnings, cultural significance and hierarchical organisation. Using field walks and interviews with consultants, we elicited 156 ethnoecological landscape categories, 60 of which related to vegetation types. However, sorting exercises with landscape photographs revealed that vegetation was not a guiding organisation principle. Takana consultants organised ethnoecological landscape categories into geographical regions that contained different landscape features, including vegetation units, topographical or hydrological features. Comparing the documented ethnoecological landscape categorisation with a published scientific botanical classification of vegetation units, we observed some important conceptual differences, which in turn have implications for the management of such landscapes.

What’s (Not) on the Map: Landscape Features from Participatory Sketch Mapping Differ from Local Categories Used in Language

“…Consequently, what is not on the map is often also not considered in decision-making, which, if failing to adapt to local understandings can have tangible detrimental impact on the lives of people affected [8]. Although the general belief is that land use maps created through participatory processes better reflect local perceptions and priorities, our results showed that important landscape categories associated with informal land rights and certain behavioral rules [55], for example, mineral salt licks, old fallow plots, or patches of economically important plants, were not represented on sketch maps, and would therefore have been overlooked in a planning process. In fact, a community mapping project in the study area implemented by WCS in collaboration with CIPTA (WCS report, unpublished) resulted in maps that did not contain information on the existence or location of mineral salt licks or other culturally important sites and local land uses.…”

“…The methodology and elicited landscape terms are presented elsewhere in more detail [55]. For comprehensibility, we include here a brief description of the method used.…”

“…Sketch mapping took place either in community workshops or at people's homes in three different communities. We selected these communities based on our previous work in the area, where we obtained consent from the community as well as the Takana council CIPTA to conduct this research [29,55]. We recruited participants by informing the community in Villa Alcira about the workshop at village meetings and the workshops conducted in Rurrenabaque and Tumupasa were advertised through the CIPTA council by inviting two people from each Takana community to join.…”

“…We grouped the resulting categories into the same classes we used to organize the feature types from sketch maps. It is important to note that these classes were introduced to organize results, and do not follow participants' categorization principles [55]. Respecting time-constraints of participants as a principle of ethical research [58] and, for pragmatic reasons such as the geographic mobility of participants, it was often not possible for the same participant to conduct both an interview and a sketch mapping exercise.…”

Peatland and wetland ecosystems in Peruvian Amazonia: indigenous classifications and perspectives

“…These knowledge systems express themselves not just in the information that indigenous people hold, for example, about traditional medicinal plants, game species, or climate patterns, but also in their daily practices and in their wider beliefs and worldviews, often termed cosmovision, cosmology, or "kosmos" (Toledo 1992, Toledo andBarrera-Bassols 2009). One important element of indigenous environmental knowledge systems is the classification of habitats, ecosystems, or landscapes (Berkes et al 1998, Omotayo and Musa 1999, Shepard et al 2001, Davidson-Hunt and Berkes 2003, Duvall 2008, Levinson 2008, Johnson and Davidson-Hunt 2011, Molnár 2013, Wartmann and Purves 2018. Such classification systems rely on various indicators to delimit boundaries between spatial units.…”