Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: In this very full issue of CAFE, we present two clusters of articles. The first represents a special themed issue, guest edited by Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels and Trinidad Rico. This collection of stimulating articles examines the role that heritage, construed and deployed in various ways, can play as a potent source of ideas and resources for building a future placed at risk by climate change. The collection's contributors come to the topic from a variety of backgrounds, from members of a Peruvian, non-governmental organization supporting indigenous development models, to specialists in archaeology, zooarchaeology, and heritage and preservation studies. Drawing on this diversity, contributors approach the theme from various angles, offering descriptions, analyses, and reviews of heritage-in-service-to-the-future as both practice and theory. Please read Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels’ detailed introduction to the special issue in “New Challenges for Cultural Heritage: Supporting Biodiversity in the Face of Climate Change.” Following the special issue, our second cluster of articles reflects in different ways on questions of local practice as potentially adaptive and/or future-building responses to systemic social and environmental conditions. In “Challenging Current Knowledge on Amazonian Dark Earths: Indigenous Manioc Cultivation on Different Soils of the Colombian Amazon,” authors Clara P. Peña-Venegas, Gerard Verschoor, Tjeerd Jan Stomph, and Paul C. Struik consider indigenous farmers’ motivations for using various soil types available to them. The authors use a mixed-methods approach to better understand both social and environmental factors that drive farmers’ agricultural practices. These farmers, they conclude, are driven more by labor organization and culinary preferences than by environmental influences and soil types. Next, in the research report, “Toxicity Reduction in Bamboo Shoots: Field Survey and Scientific Validation of a Traditional Knowledge System,” the primary focus of authors Poonam Singhal, Ranjay K. Singh, Santosh Satya, and S.N. Naik is to record a variety of specialized, indigenous techniques used in India to ferment bamboo shoots, a process they confirm detoxifies the shoots to make them usable as an important source of nutrition. They note that both environmental and social changes have resulted in decreasing use of these old techniques, and question whether this may pose a risk to these communities’ future food and health security. Finally, our second research report examines an example of how U.S. communities are developing responses to sources of systemic risk. Christina Mello, Lisa Oliver King, and Inez Adams describe a locally empowering organization in “Growing Food, Growing Consciousness: Gardening and Social Justice in Grand Rapids, Michigan.” They profile Our Kitchen Table, a grassroots, female-led organization that advocates for those affected by food insecurity and environmental inequality. The authors show how educational and political organizing around food and gardening can mobilize citizens to respond to systemic racism and environmental injustice.
DOI: 10.1111/cuag.12102
Authors: Stephanie Paladino, Brandi Janssen
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Climate action
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2771600671