Paul Nadasdy
Weatherhead Resident Scholar
1999-2000
Hunters and Bureaucrats
Power, Knowledge, and the Restructuring
of Aboriginal-State Relations in the Southwest Yukon, Canada
For the past fifteen years, efforts by the Canadian government to involve
aboriginal people in resource management and environmental assessment in
the circumpolar north have included attempts to integrate scientific knowledge
with "traditional ecological knowledge," or TEK-the wisdom and
accumulated experience that has helped local indigenous peoples survive
for thousands of years. While including indigenous concerns in these crucial
land matters is essential, resident scholar Paul Nadasdy is questioning
the way TEK is used in the process.
"The idea of integration contains the implicit
assumption that the cultural beliefs and practices referred to as 'traditional
knowledge' conform to western conceptions of knowledge," Nadasdy states.
His dissertation, "The Politics of 'Traditional Knowledge': Power and the
Integration of Knowledge Systems in the Yukon Territory, Canada," is drawn
from thirty-two months of fieldwork in the Yukon's southwest corner in Burwash
Landing, a village of about seventy people, most of whom are members of the Kluane
First Nation. Nadasdy participated in the daily life of the community, such as
trapping and hunting, and accompanied teams of villagers and local scientists
to gather information about environmental concerns, such as the diminishing population
of big-horned sheep.
"My fieldwork provided me with an understanding
of the social relations, values, and practices in which local 'environmental
knowledge' is embedded," says Nadasdy. Without such understanding, he asserts,
the governmental agencies addressing land issues and concerns can misconstrue
traditional knowledge or even dismiss it as being irrelevant.
To focus on how people in political arenas actually
use "environmental knowledge," Nadasdy examined a number of local political
struggles, including case studies drawn from resource management, aboriginal
land claim negotiations, and local environmental politics. "I show how the
process of integrating TEK and science takes place in a political context, and
further, that there are practical difficulties involved in translating native
beliefs and practices into forms that are understandable and acceptable to non-natives-even
those who have explicitly stated their willingness to 'use TEK,'" explains
Nadasdy.
Nadasdy concedes that great effort and expense have
gone into trying to understand and document TEK in the circumpolar north as part
of the co-management initiatives between government and indigenous peoples. However,
by treating TEK as "just another form of data," these efforts ignore
what the holders of this knowledge universally claim to be its most important
feature: its integration into a whole way of life. "I am hopeful this project
will be useful to scholars and aboriginal people throughout the world who are
concerned with indigenous-state relations and local knowledge," says Nadasdy.
Affiliation at time of award: Ph.D. Candidate, Department
of Anthropology, The Johns Hopkins University
Return to Resident Scholars
1999-2000.
