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16 - Indigenous Knowledge and the Coloniality of Reality: Climate Change Otherwise in the Bolivian Andes

from Part III - Global Change and Indigenous Responses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2022

By
Anders Burman
Edited by
Marie Roué ,
Douglas Nakashima  and
Igor Krupnik
Marie Roué
Affiliation:
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris
Douglas Nakashima
Affiliation:
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), France
Igor Krupnik
Affiliation:
Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC
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Summary

Several studies have shown that indigenous peoples are among the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and attention has been drawn to indigenous knowledge as an important component of climate change adaptation strategies. This paper argues, however, that in order to take indigenous knowledge seriously, indigenous realities and understandings of climate change need to be taken seriously. This is because knowledge is not produced in an ontological void. Rather, knowledge is produced in relation to notions concerning the nature of reality and being. Moreover, in order not to make a mere instrumentalist use of Indigenous knowledge, this paper argues that the practical outcomes of Indigenous knowledge ought to be acknowledged, along with the ontological lifeworlds within which such knowledge is generated.

This paper is based on many years of ethnographic fieldwork with and among Aymara people in the Bolivian Andes and poses questions about how the partial connections between different ways of producing knowledge, of experiencing and explaining climate change, and of experiencing and generating realities are transformed into spaces of conflict, domination and resistance.

Keywords

Indigenous knowledgetraditional ecological knowledgeclimate change adaptationepistemologyontologycoloniality of knowledgecoloniality of realitythe AndesAymaraBolivia
Type
Chapter
Information
Resilience through Knowledge Co-Production
Indigenous Knowledge, Science, and Global Environmental Change
 , pp. 261 - 274
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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