Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 18:14:24 EST
From: SHnSASSY1@aol.com
To: SHnSASSY1@aol.com
Subject: [SO] Now the Ancient Ways Are Less Mysterious

From: SHnSASSY1@aol.com

http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/013000traditions-science-review.html
January 30, 2000


Now the Ancient Ways Are Less Mysterious
By HENRY FOUNTAIN

ach June for at least the last four centuries, farmers in 12 mountain 
villages in Peru and Bolivia follow a ritual that Westerners might think odd, 
if not crazy. Late each night for about a week, the farmers observe the stars 
in the Pleiades constellation, which is low on the horizon to the northeast. 
If they appear big and bright, the farmers know to plant their potato crop at 
the usual time four months later. But if the stars are dim, the usual 
planting will be delayed for several weeks. 


 
The Associated Press  
Men dancing during the five-day feast celebrating the end of the harvest 
season at Cachilaya, Bolivia, near the shores of Lake Titicaca. 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
 


Now Western researchers have applied the scientific method to this seeming 
madness. Poring over reams of satellite data on cloud cover and water vapor, 
Professor Benjamin Orlove, an anthropologist at the University of California 
at Davis, and colleagues have discovered that these star-gazing farmers are 
accurate long-range weather forecasters. High wisps of cirrus clouds dim the 
stars in El Nino years, which brings reduced rainfall to that part of the 
Andes. In such drought conditions, it makes sense to plant potatoes as late 
as possible. 

Orlove's work, which was reported in January in the British journal Nature, 
is just the latest example of indigenous or traditional knowledge that has 
been found to have a sound scientific basis. In agriculture, nutrition, 
medicine and other fields, modern research is showing why people maintain 
their traditions. 

Take the Masai of East Africa, who are famous for the kind of high-fat diet, 
rich in meat and milk, that would make a cardiologist swoon. Timothy Johns, a 
professor at McGill University in Montreal and director of the Center for 
Indigenous Peoples' Nutrition and Environment, has long studied the Masai to 
determine how they stay healthy. 

The Masai add the roots and barks of certain plants, including a species of 
acacia high in antioxidants, Johns said. They also chew a natural gum, 
related to myrrh, that helps to break down fats. 

"It's not a magic bullet protecting the Masai against heart disease," he 
said. "But there is a benefit from what they are doing." 

In a 1998 study, two Cornell University researchers analyzed the spices used 
in 36 countries and found a correlation between average temperature and 
cooking with spices like cumin, turmeric, ginger and chili peppers, all of 
which have antimicrobial properties. The hotter the climate, the hotter the 
food -- in part, at least, to keep it from spoiling. 

Sometimes, however, the benefits of traditional knowledge are not so obvious 
to those outside the culture. In Bali in the 1970s, the Indonesian 
government, persuaded by international advocates of the "green revolution," 
forced rice farmers adopt new growing schemes. Among other things, the 
farmers were made to stop their centuries-old ritual of meeting in small 
groups at a series of water temples set at the forks of rivers, to negotiate 
seasonal schedules for flooding their paddies. 

The new techniques resulted in disaster. Farmers were pressured to plant as 
often as possible. With little coordination of irrigation, water shortages 
and pest infestation were the norm. 

At about this time, J. Stephen Lansing, an American anthropologist, began to 
study the water temples. What he found, which was supported later by computer 
modeling, was that the old system was quite sophisticated and efficient, 
encouraging cooperation among thousands of farmers. Water was shared and 
controlled through a process involving reciprocal altruism. 

"Everybody gets more rice and variation in harvest disappears, so there's no 
reason to be envious of your neighbors," said Lansing, who now teaches at the 
University of Arizona. "It's a bottom-up system of management that's worked 
very well." The green revolution, he added, "was very much top down." The 
traditional system has been re-established. 

Orlove has studied similar traditional resource management around Lake 
Titicaca, on the border between Bolivia and Peru. A distinctive feature of 
the lake is the reeds growing in its shallows. The people around the lake use 
them for rafts and livestock feed, among other things. 

"They are a major component of the household economy," said Orlove. The 
residents replant the reeds, which also serve as a spawning ground for some 
of the 22 species of fish that are unique to the lake. 

But indigenous knowledge can be faulty. "Traditional people sometimes get 
things right, and sometimes get them wrong," said Alan Fiske, a psychological 
anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. "Some things 
people do are bad for them." Other anthropologists have challenged the notion 
that all indigenous groups have somehow developed a blissful oneness with 
their world. 

The problem, Fiske noted, is that verifying traditional knowledge is not 
easy. The scientific method can be expensive, and data can be difficult to 
obtain. Orlove's research on the potato farmers would have been impossible 
even 10 years ago, because the type of satellite data he needed did not 
exist. 

There may be a shortage of data, but there's no shortage of traditional 
knowledge that awaits possible confirmation by science. James Lynch, an 
American scientist who has spent the past two decades helping Costa Rican 
farmers, said he has learned from them the importance of timing. A tree cut 
down during a new moon, he said, will quickly be ravaged by the insects, 
while one felled several days before a full moon will stay free of termites 
for years. 

Lynch now follows the practice. "But I've never seen any scientific study to 
back it up," he said. 

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