Indigenous Knowledge System: Towards a Holistic Inclusive Conservation

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 book hopes to fill up 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 book 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.