Browsing by Autor "Julio C. Postigo"

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Community Resilience: A Perspective from Latin America and the Caribbean
(2021) Javier Gonzales-Iwanciw; Victoria-Eugenia Guáqueta-Solórzano; Edna Castañeda; Jean-François Le Coq; Julio C. Postigo
Community Resilience: A Perspective from Latin America and the Caribbean
(2021) Javier Gonzales-Iwanciw; Victoria-Eugenia Guáqueta-Solórzano; Edna Castañeda; Jean-François Le Coq; Julio C. Postigo
The Sociocultural Construction of Soil Among Communities of the Bolivian Altiplano: Potential for Supporting Transitions to Sustainability
(International Mountain Society, 2022) Julio C. Postigo; Sonia Laura Valdez
The health of soil, a fundamental resource for life on Earth, is severely compromised by global environmental change. Evidence shows that the knowledge of Indigenous Peoples and local communities influences sustainable land management, hence the importance of understanding Indigenous soil classification. Using a participatory approach, we conducted semistructured interviews, focus groups, and collective mapping of soils in 4 Aymara communities of the Bolivian Altiplano. We found that families in the 4 communities organize their territory in homogenous zones, based upon characteristics perceivable by sight, touch, smell, and taste. The description and meaning of the zones refer to characteristics such as location, soil color, preferred land use, and topography. We argue that homogenous zones are kaleidoscopic and polysemic units of spatial organization of the Aymara territory. Each meaning conveyed is like a face of a kaleidoscope and refers to different features of the zone. They are polysemic because the descriptions of the zones refer to multiple elements of different kinds (eg color and fertility). Indigenous and local knowledge of soils has coevolved with thousands of years of Altiplano farming, leading to prescriptive and flexible homogenous zones of sustainable land management. These knowledge systems and the cultures they belong to constitute crucial elements for generating knowledge supporting transitions to sustainability.
Understanding local knowledge production to address global environmental change: leveraging the case of Bolivian Aymara expert farmers
(Springer Science+Business Media, 2026) Julio C. Postigo; María Quispe Mamani
Abstract The failure of Western science-based solutions to address global environmental change has given credence to knowledge co-production that engages multiple knowledge systems, including local knowledge. Co-production—which is widely favored by Indigenous scholars—requires understanding how Indigenous populations produce their knowledge and who the knowledge producers are. To answer the how and who , we demonstrate how local knowledge is an open and dynamic way of knowing that synthesizes information from multiple sources, including Indigenous knowledge and, at times, positivist science. To do this, we analyze Aymara farmers’ process of knowledge production, which aims to support a regime shift in the science-based agronomic technical assistance that failed to effectively address local farming challenges on its own. We surveyed and interviewed expert farmers (i.e., yapuchiri ) in 46 Bolivian Aymara communities to understand how they produce knowledge (i.e., the yapuchiri process). Aymara farmers developed a rigorous system for producing “expert farmers” ( yapuchiri) , which is geographically, culturally, and socially situated. Yapuchiri establish their expertise through experimentation, rigor, replication, and dissemination, activities that are also part of the scientific process. Our study also reveals that inequality in yapuchiri knowledge production results from structural factors such as land tenure, status in the community, gender norms, and marital status. By examining how local knowledge is produced and who produces it, we can better understand power relations and inequalities in knowledge systems as well as drivers of innovation and collaboration, all of which are fundamental for co-producing knowledge to address global environmental change.