Conceptualising Biodiversity in Amazonia

Biodiversity is elemental for a sustainable future of humans and the planet. The Amazon is well-known for its biodiversity, but how is it conceptualised locally and in terms of time? Taking an Amazonian Indigenous ontological approach, this interdisciplinary project examines cultural views on diversity in places, landscapes, and different ecological systems; Amazonian Indigenous understandings of temporality in relation to notions of biodiversity and conservation over the long term; and Amazonian Indigenous cognitive and linguistic principles embedded in environmental diversity. In parallel with community-based methods, we work with ethnography, oral history, geospatial analysis, and linguistics. We will organize community workshops in Brazilian Amazonia that explore notions of biodiversity from the deep past, as well as their cultural time layers. This project offers pioneering research on the cultural valuation of biodiversity and it will have cross-disciplinary impact.

Academy of Finland project