This study focuses on intergenerational changes to environmental knowledge, reasoning, valuation, and practice in Sacha Loma, an indigenous Kichwa community on the banks of the Napo River in the Ecuadorian Amazon. While Sacha Loma persists as a community of rural smallholders, it has undergone a continually-evolving relationship to the exigencies of the global economy since its founding. Recent structural evolutions have included land privatization, the advent of state-sponsored formal schooling, the arrival of an eco-tourism NGO, and a rapid uptick in mobility and access to urban centers. The dissertation asserts that such structural change has co-evolved with patterns of environmental knowledge, reasoning, and valuation in a mutually-constitutive manner that reflects changing notions of personal and familial desire. Based on a cultural epidemiological perspective positing cultural forms to be evolving, emergent distributions of understanding within a population, the study uses both ethnographic methods and the formal elicitation of environmental knowledge, reasoning, and valuations to infer intergenerational changes to epistemological frameworks of the local forest. I find that while relational modes of understanding the forest have been in tension with utilitarian understandings based on cash cropping since Sacha Lomas founding, the production of new practice-based logics based on the school calendar has also, for young people, rendered legible understandings of the forest based on various environmentalist ideas (propounded through the NGO and the state-run oil company). The concomitants of this legibility are a decreasing knowledge base related to forest species and their interactions, in turn related to a wholly-new utilitarian valuation of the local forest. The consequence of this literal and conceptual distancing from the forest is a valuation on moralistic but fungible terms that links forest conservation to the possibility of tourist dollars. To expand the relationship of these shifts in environmental understandings to the problem of culture change more generally, I develop the notion of epistemological practice, meant to account for evolving, reciprocal connections between behavior, ideation, and structure within a community of practice.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-11212014-170644 |
| Date | 25 November 2014 |
| Creators | Shenton, Jeffrey Thomas |
| Contributors | Norbert Ross, Beth Conklin, Edward Fischer, Douglas Medin |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-11212014-170644/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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