Indigenous Knowledge Systems : Towards a Holistic Inclusive Conservation /
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Although there has been, in recent times, a widespread interest in preservation and promotion of Indigenous Heritage or Knowledge Systems from a variety of disciplines and sectors, from across the globe - the design principles or modalities of a holistic conservation remains largely unexplored. This volume explores this lacunae and proposes the concept of Ecosemiotic Community Museuology (ECM), and a road map for it, through theory and practice. Based on the trajectories of conservation - natural, cultural and museological - down time, and indigenous epistemological premises brought forth from previous research, the treatise proposes the concept of ECM as a paradigm for successful community-based conservation of indigenous knowledge systems or indigenous biocultural heritage in its holistic wholeness. While taking into cognizance the issues of interfacing - namely, cross-cultural knowledge integration, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), the volume attempts to add value to its basic ecosemiotic museological proposition, and strengthen its case, through presentation of, and comments on, a diverse range of secondary case studies of ongoing conservational initiatives from across the globe that highlight the ingredients of success as well as non-performance of such efforts. The ultimate goal of the historical surveys, intellectual exercises and the case studies in this volume are to capture the nuances that can help decolonize not just 'museology' or 'conservation' but 'development' and 'sustainability' itself. And, hopefully, help make advances towards a decentralized museological governance for the invaluable indigenous biocultural heritage that still lies strewn across the globe, in various stages of decimation.
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1 online resource (768 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004753525
Epistemology and the social /
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Epistemology had to come to terms with "the social" on two different occasions. The first was represented by the dispute about the epistemological status of the "social" sciences, and in this case the already well established epistemology of the natural sciences seemed to have the right to dictate the conditions for a discipline to be a science. But the social sciences could successfully vindicate the legitimacy of their specific criteria for scientificity. More recently, the impact of social factors on the construction of our knowledge (including scientific knowledge) has reversed, in a certain sense, the old position and promoted social inquiry to the role of a criterion for evaluating the purport of cognitive (including scientific) statements. But this has undermined the traditional characteristics of objectivity and rigor that seem constitutive of science. Moreover, in order to establish the real extent to which social conditionings have an impact on scientific knowledge one must credit sociology with a sound ground of reliability, and this is not possible without a preliminary "epistemological" assessment. These are some of the topics discussed in this book, both theoretically and with reference to concrete cases.
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Papers presented at a meeting of the International Academy of Philosophy of Science, held Sept. 22-25, 2005, in Tenerife, Canary Islands. :
1 online resource (231 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references. :
9789401206037 :
0303-8157 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.