Local Knowledge in Disaster Situations: Toward a Notion of Cultural and Ecological Legacy

Abstract

Contemporary ecological policy has shown a growing interest in the relation between local knowledge and cultural transmission in various crisis scenarios. The aim of this paper is to show that local knowledge in the face of disasters includes strategies whose social reproduction is not a result of the influence of tradition, or adaptive schemas, but is transmitted in terms of cultural and ecological legacy. On the one hand we will critique the concept of resilience and on the other, we will point out that typological perspectives on disasters at the level of communities fail to do justice to the capacity of the latter to deal with catastrophic events. Drawing on the anthropological notion of culture as practice, we will establish an approach to local knowledge through the coordination of the perception of the environment and risk perception. We will argue that the genesis of this local knowledge is based on the notion of ecological and cultural legacy as a mechanism of intergenerational transfer. This characterization of teaching-learning dynamics not only has implications for understanding conservationist perspectives but also for understanding how processes of innovation arise in terms of cultural change.