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WORLD ANTHROPOLOGICAL UNION

CONGRESS 2024​

SELECTED PANEL

( pn88 )

Reimagining Anthropological Knowledge for sustainable development -Easing tension between Local and Academic Knowledge Production.

organizers

    Ranju Hasini Sahoo

    Nationality: India

    Residence: India

    Indira Gandhi National Tribal University

    Presence:Online

    Lidia Julianna GUZY

    Nationality: Poland

    Residence: Ireland

    University College Cork (UCC), National University of Ireland

    Presence:Face to Face/ On Site

chairs

    IUAES Affiliation: Anthropology and Education

    IUAES Affiliation: Anthropology and the Environment

    IUAES Affiliation: Anthropology, Public Policy and Development Practice

    IUAES Affiliation: Documentation

    IUAES Affiliation: Indigenous Knowledge and Sustainable Development

    Keywords:

    TKS , Local knowedge production, Scientific validation, Informed Prior Consent ,ABS

    Abstract:

    The Panel intends to explore the possibility of easing tension between local/vernacular and academic knowledge production by explaining how Anthropological Knowledge can play a greater role in sustainable development. The local knowledge production is based on the technology of the Traditional Knowledge system related to agriculture, animal husbandry, ethnic veterinary medicine, use and management of natural resources, health care, community development and poverty alleviation, Worldviews, and Eco-cosmology. All these TKS are inextricably related to sustainable biodiversity conservation which is a local knowledge system. The local knowledge product should be a part of academic knowledge which should be a means of empowering local empowerment and community renewal( The Network economy: Manuel Castella,2000). Both Ethnography and New ethnography, with the mixed methodology of qualitative and quantitative approach, should bridge the traditional divide between natural, social, economic, and engineering sciences, and a competing discourse can be prepared by Reimagining Anthropology in Multidisciplinary and Transdisciplinary fields to empower the local community (Foucault, 1971). Scientific validation can be made not necessarily through academic knowledge of science but through other TKS of the local community ( Brouwer, 2007 ). Also, holism or the epistemology of Anthropology can offer scientific validation. From post post-modernist perspective there is no longer a totality from the outside but the human agents can construct, change, and deconstruct their social spaces ( Inden, 1990:1; Hastrup, 1993: 181 ). Economic Anthropology and Legal Anthropology have a greater role to play in shielding the community's Intellectual Property Rights through IPC ( Informed Prior Consent ) and Mutually Agreed Term( MAT) for Access and benefit sharing ( ABS ) and Anthropologists with their better understanding of the concept cultural relativism mediating among the agents of the International, national and local board for Biodiversity conservation. A legal construct is necessary to deal with the situation that would bring the International Law to Traditional Knowledge system as the local community has Customary rights to protect their genetic and cultural resources. Research policies should involve broad-based participatory approaches involving the holders of traditional knowledge and those in need of scientific knowledge. In the partnership, the issues of ownership of knowledge must be understood and acknowledged.TKS Holders should be fully recognized as the Rightful owners of their Intellectual heritage, so that sustainable development can be achieved for the local community in the era of globalization with the cooperation of academic knowledge engaged in applied research and holders of traditional knowledge of the local community. In 1999 UNESCO in the World Conference of Science also emphasized the engagement of scientific knowledge and TKS for sustainable development which needs to preserve, protect, research, and promote TKS associated with cultural heritage and empirical knowledge.