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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the almost invisible frictions that develop when different knowledges cultures attempt to work together and learn from each other. At a time when inter and trans disciplinary practice is championed, this paper considers the realities of these types of associations.

Paper long abstract:

Munekan Masha is a project initiated and devised by an indigenous group in Colombia called the Kogi. The project requires degraded ancestral territories be returned to the community after which it can be nursed back to health by Kogi practitioner experts. Simultaneously, conventionally trained environmental scientists will monitor and measure the environmental changes that the Kogi actions produce, and, in doing so, will encounter an alternative range of land management and conservation methods to their own.

This design will allow Kogi methods to be recorded for the first time. The Kogi apply different metrics to the landscape than conventional scientists and therefore, this project has the potential to provide an alternative approach to recognising, creating, and defining what constitutes, healthy or flourishing territories.

Recognising that these two fundamentally different knowledge cultures understand land health, land management and conservation very differently, anthropologists will work with both groups to record how each engages with and understands the other with a view to determine how, and if, dissimilar approaches must alter their worldviews to find synergies and determine if these differences can work together.