Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning of applications of GIS which grant legitimacy to indigenous geographical knowledge as well as to ‘offi cial’ spatial data. By incorporating various forms of community participation these newer framings of Geographical Information Systems as ‘Participatory GIS’ (PGIS) offer a response to the critiques of GIS which were prevalent in the 1990s. This paper r...

OBJECTIVE Himalayan mountain populations have been dependent upon indigenous plant resources for their health care for many years. Tribal women are interested in use of local herbs for cosmetic purposes. The present work is based on the results of research conducted on cosmetic uses of some important plants by the tribal women in District Poonch, Azad Kashmir Pakistan. MATERIALS AND METHODS A...

Researchers have a responsibility to cause no harm, but research has been a source of distress for indigenous people because of inappropriate methods and practices. The way researchers acquire knowledge in indigenous communities may be as critical for eliminating health disparities as the actual knowledge that is gained about a particular health problem. Researchers working with indigenous comm...

Certain forms of dental decay and periodontal disease appear to be due to specific bacterial infections following overgrowth of certain indigenous plaque bacteria, i.e., the specific plaque hypothesis. If so, then antimicrobial treatment based on a diagnosis of elevated levels or proportions of these organisms shiould be considered. Such treatment cannot be administered according to concepts of...

INTRODUCTION Indigenous elders have traditionally played an important role in maintaining social cohesion within their communities. Today, part of this role has been taken over by government social and healthcare services, but they are having limited success in addressing social challenges. Increasing elders' social participation and intergenerational solidarity might foster community developme...

In the society, science and technology are intimately linked to the studies and expansion in the general progression of the society. However, the Indigenous Knowledge (IK) which holds the same weight-age as the development of the society with science seems to be forgotten. IK is a knowledge that being used by the people in certain environments in making their living such as health, spiritual an...

Ethnogeology, the scientific study of geological knowledge of groups such as indigenous peoples, can be combined with mainstream geological sciences to enhance our understanding of Earth systems. The Amazon rain forest has been extensively studied by both mainstream scientists and indigenous researchers. We argue that knowledge of Amazonian geology and hydrology held by indigenous Uitoto expert...

Inter-ethnic botanical borrowing is usually deemed to be based on pragmatic efficiency. However, in the regional system we discovered between several indigenous groups from the Peruvian rainforest, the transfer of ethnomedicinal knowledge relies much more on relational factors than on any kind of strictly therapeutic efficacy. This is clearly substantiated by a detailed comparison between objec...

Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) has often been regarded as outdated, frozen in the past. For example, the anthropologist Paul Nadasdy (2004) found such attitudes in the Yukon, where government biologists, often with little field experience, dismissed and belittled local indigenous knowledge. They assumed it to be static and anecdotal, and often based on spiritual rather than empirical fo...

imagine you have traveled to an unfamiliar city. before you start your daily tour around the city, you need to know a good route. in network theory (nt), this is the traveling salesman problem (tsp). a dynamic programming algorithm is often used for solving this problem. however, when the road network of the city is very complicated and dense, which is usually the case, it will take too long fo...