Darrell Addison Posey (1947-2001) was director of the Traditional
Resource Rights Programme, Oxford Centre for the Environment, Ethics,
and Society, and of the University of Oxford Centre for Brazilian
Studies.
He is the author of several books, including Beyond Intellectual Property: Toward Traditional Resource Rights for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities and Indigenous Knowledge and Ethics: A Darrell Posey Reader.Michael J. Balick is vice president for research and training and director and philecology curator at the Institute of Economic Botany, The New York Botanical Garden. He is the author or editor of sixteen books, including Plants, People, and Culture: The Science of Ethnobotany (with Paul Alan Cox); Useful Palms of the World (with Hans T. Beck); Rainforest Remedies: One Hundred Healing Herbs of Belize (with Rosita Arvigo); and The Subsidy from Nature: Palm Forests, Peasantry, and Development on an Amazon Frontier (with Anthony B. Anderson and Peter H. May).
Fonte: Columbia Press
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Resenha
From the pre-Columbian era to the present, native Amazonians have shaped the land around them, emphasizing utilization, conservation, and sustainability. These priorities stand in stark contrast to colonial and contemporary exploitation of Amazonia by outside interests. With essays from environmental scientists, botanists, and anthropologists, this volume explores the various effects of human development on Amazonia. The contributors argue that by protecting and drawing on local knowledge and values, further environmental ruin can be avoided.
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Biography (by Wikipedia - Darel Posey )
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Agosto de 2014
He is the author of several books, including Beyond Intellectual Property: Toward Traditional Resource Rights for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities and Indigenous Knowledge and Ethics: A Darrell Posey Reader.Michael J. Balick is vice president for research and training and director and philecology curator at the Institute of Economic Botany, The New York Botanical Garden. He is the author or editor of sixteen books, including Plants, People, and Culture: The Science of Ethnobotany (with Paul Alan Cox); Useful Palms of the World (with Hans T. Beck); Rainforest Remedies: One Hundred Healing Herbs of Belize (with Rosita Arvigo); and The Subsidy from Nature: Palm Forests, Peasantry, and Development on an Amazon Frontier (with Anthony B. Anderson and Peter H. May).
Fonte: Columbia Press
________________
 |
Darrel Addison Posey and Michael J Balick. Human Impacts on Amazonia: The Role of Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Conservation and Development. Columbia University Press. 2006. 392 p. ISBN 978-0-232-10589-7 |
From the pre-Columbian era to the present, native Amazonians have shaped the land around them, emphasizing utilization, conservation, and sustainability. These priorities stand in stark contrast to colonial and contemporary exploitation of Amazonia by outside interests. With essays from environmental scientists, botanists, and anthropologists, this volume explores the various effects of human development on Amazonia. The contributors argue that by protecting and drawing on local knowledge and values, further environmental ruin can be avoided.
____________________________________
Biography (by Wikipedia - Darel Posey )
Darrell Addison Posey
(March 14, 1947-March 6, 2001) was an American anthropologist and
biologist who vitalized the study of traditional knowledge of
indigenous and folk populations in Brazil and other countries. He
called his approach ethnobiology and combined research with respect
for other cultures, especially indigenous intellectual property
rights.
An obituary described
him as an "anthropologist who gave up scholarly detachment to
fight for the rights of native peoples."[1] He never married and
was survived by his parents and brother. He died of a brain tumor, at
53 years of age, in Oxford, England, where he made his home after
1992.
Biografie
Darrell A. Posey was
born on March 14, 1947, son of Henry and Pearl Posey, in rural
Henderson, Kentucky. From an early age he was a member of the
Anglican Church. Educated at Henderson County High School, he had a
biology teacher, Mr. Ned Barra, who encouraged his interest in
insects. In 1970, Posey was graduated with a B.Sc. in Entomology, by
the Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He obtained a
M.A. in Anthropology, in 1974, also at the Louisiana State
University, with the thesis The Fifth Ward Settlement: A Tri Racial
Marginal Group. He obtained a Ph.D. in Anthropology, in 1979, at the
University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, with the thesis
Ethnoentomology of the Gorotire Kayapó of Central Brazil.
Posey's switch from
entomology to anthropology was due to his friendship with
anthropology professor William G. Haag at Louisiana State University.
This is explained in a memorial by Posey.]
Even after his move to
anthropology, Posey did not cut his ties with entomology. At the
University of Georgia, he was a close associate of entomology
professor Murray S. Blum. Years afterward, he continued to research
the ethnobiology of insects, a field he termed "ethnoentomology"
in his 1979 doctoral thesis.
Kayapó studies
Arriving in Brazil in
1976, Posey made lasting friendships with researchers at the Museu
Paraense Emílio Goeldi, in Belém, and the Instituto Nacional de
Pesquisas da Amazônia, in Manaus.
After his graduate
studies, Posey returned to Brazil in 1982, as a professor in the
Department of Biology at the Federal University of Maranhão in São
Luís, then reorganized under the chairmanship of geneticist Dr.
Warwick E. Kerr. He mounted an interdisciplinary ethnobiological
research project, called the Kayapó Project, that would eventually
involve over 30 specialists in fields such as agronomy, botany,
entomology, plant genetics, astronomy, soil sciences, human
geography, anthropology, and linguistics. To document the extensive
traditional biological knowledge of the Kayapó Indians, Posey and
collaborators spent months in the field with Kayapó specialists such
as chiefs Uté, Toto-i, Kanhunk, and Paiakan. Pajés Beptopup and
Kwyre-ka also offered their experience. Many conferences with
scientific and indigenous project participants served to disseminate
project results, especially at Brazilian scientific conclaves.
The Kayapó Project
continued when Posey relocated in 1986 to the Goeldi Museum in Belém,
Brazil, at the invitation of museum director Dr. Guilherme M. de La
Penha. In 1988 he organized the First International Congress of
Ethnobiology, in Belém, during which the Kayapó Project and its
results were highlighted. Although the term "ethnobiology"
had been used in the past for a different idea, Posey adopted this
for his study of indigenous and folk knowledge about plants, animals,
and ecosystems. To designate other areas of indigenous and folk
knowledge, the term "ethnoscience" can be used in an
analogous manner. In the past, anthropology had been wed to biology
in the unholy union of biological determinism, in which Man is
treated wholly without culture or the ability to learn. Posey
reputiated this view and dared to see indigenous and folk societies
as the inheritors of a vast corpus of useful knowledge for the
sustainable utilization and management of natural resources. As can
be seen in his review of Diamond's best-seller Guns, Germs and Steel:
The Fates of Human Societies in 1999, Posey would have biological
determinism laid to rest. After all, where can one find human groups
without culture?
Posey's concept
For ethnobiology to be
scientific, testable hypotheses are generated from information
offered by indigenous and folk informants. The emic-etic filter has
to be respected, and a decoding of traditional knowledge is necessary
to bridge the two cultures. Field research methods
Participant-observation
in the field with indigenous and traditional communities was always
part of Posey's work plan. Interviews with informants were always
unstructured and conducted according to the generative method,
specifically designed not to elicit information offered in support of
researchers' perceived biases.
Examples from Posey's
work
Do the Kayapó Indians
manage their natural resources? Do they plant forest islands in the
savanna? Do they recognize eco-zones and know what resources are to
be found in each? Is their agriculture sustainable? Their hunting?
What about their medicine? Does what they know constitute a science?
In his activism, Posey
incurred opposition not only from those who would exploit natural
resources belonging to Indians but also from scientists and academics
who were callous in their disregard for indigenous intellectual
property rights. One Brazilian weekly news magazine, Veja, referred
to him as a "gigolo of the Indians" for his defense of
Indians' human and civil rights.
Indian lands
Posey's support for
indigenous peoples brought him into conflict with the Brazilian
government in 1987, when Paiakan and Kube-l, two young Kayapó
leaders he was accompanying in Washington, D.C., complained to World
Bank officials of a planned hydro-electric dam on the Xingu River
that would flood Indian lands. The threat of criminal prosecution
from the federal government against Posey and the Kayapó chiefs, for
interfering in Brazilian foreign affairs, caused a public outcry both
in Brazil and abroad.
In February 1989,
Darrell helped organize the "First Meeting of the Indigenous
Peoples of the Xingu", the first joint meeting of Amazonian
tribes to protest the destruction of the forest, in Altamira, Pará.
This event focussed on hydro-electric dams on the Xingu River and
caused these ecologically disastrous projects to be cancelled or at
least reformulated. In 2008, however, these once-discarded projects
are again being proposed by the Brazilian government, with slightly
different packaging.
In 1992, Posey was the
main organizer of the Earth Parliament, a parallel event at the
United Nations' Rio de Janeiro Conference on the Environment (Rio
Earth Summit), aimed at valuing indigenous knowledge and rights. The
Earth Parliament was a 15-day assembly of indigenous and minority
groups held during the 1992 Earth Summit.
Biodiversity
conservation For Posey, indigenous knowledge was a key to the
sustainable use of natural biotic resources. Major Indigenous
intellectual property rights
Like collective rights
to land, Indians and other traditional societies have collective
intellectual property rights (IPR) to their knowledge. Posey
championed the cause of indigenous and folk intellectual property
rights during the last decade of his life.
Bioethics of
ethnobiology
Western society has
appropriated indigenous and traditional knowledge without
recompensation or even recognition. Posey questioned whether
scientific research, even of the most disinterested sort, might not
lead to the violation of indigenous intellectual property rights or
bio-piracy.
Posey was a full
researcher ("Pesquisador Titular") for the Brazilian
National Council for Science and Technology at the Goeldi Museum,
Belém, Brazil. He was Director of the Programme for Traditional
Resource Rights of the Oxford Centre for the Environment, Ethics and
Society and a Fellow of Linacre College, at the University of Oxford.
He was Founding President of the International Society for
Ethnobiology and was President of the Global Coalition for
Bio-Cultural Diversity, under whose auspices he founded the Working
Group on Traditional Resource Rights which he coordinated. He was the
first recipient of the Sierra Club's "Chico Mendes Award for
Outstanding Bravery in Defense of the Environment", and in 1993
he received the United Nations Global 500 Award for "Outstanding
Achievement in Service to the Environment."
He had few formal
students in Brazil or elsewhere, but his impact as a teacher is
remembered by many who later became ethnobiologists. He presented
many talks in Brazil and other countries, and his work was featured
in several films and videos.
The International
Society of Ethnobiology (ISEB) created the "Darrel Posey
Fellowship" in order to "promote understanding of peoples'
complex and dynamic relationship with their environment, and supports
indigenous peoples and local communities working to sustainably
manage, and security rights to, their environments and resources. The
Darrell Posey fellowship for ethnoecology and traditional resource
rights was launched in 2004 with a grant from the Christensen Fund,
and is administrated by the International Society of Ethnobiology, of
which Darrell Posey was a founder."
The June 2008 11th
International Congress of Ethnobiology in Cusco, Peru, will
explicitly explore the Darrell A. Posey legacy in a session titled
"Ethnobiology and Traditional Resource Rights: Darrell Posey's
Legacy." This session will celebrate Darrell Posey's many
contributions and influences in the field of ethnobiology over the
past several decades, both direct and indirect.
When Western scientists
and other academics listen respectfully and learn at the feet of
indigenous and traditional leaders, Posey's legacy will become
reality.
Agosto de 2014
