Zapotec Science

2003 — Julian Steward Award – Anthropology & Environment Section, American Anthropological Association 2002 — A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book How Zapotec agricultural and dietary theories and practices constitute a valid local science. Zapotec farmers in the northern sierra of Oaxaca, Mexico, are highly successful in providing their families with abundant, nutritious food in an ecologically sustainable fashion, although the premises that guide their agricultural practices would be considered erroneous by the standards of most agronomists and botanists in the United States and Europe. In this book, Roberto González convincingly argues that in fact Zapotec agricultural and dietary theories and practices constitute a valid local science, which has had a reciprocally beneficial relationship with European and United States farming and food systems since the sixteenth century. González bases his analysis upon direct participant observation in the farms and fields of a Zapotec village. By using the ethnographic fieldwork approach, he is able to describe and analyze the rich meanings that campesino families attach to their crops, lands, and animals. González also reviews the history of maize, sugarcane, and coffee cultivation in the Zapotec region to show how campesino farmers have intelligently and scientifically adapted their farming practices to local conditions over the course of centuries. By setting his ethnographic study of the Talea de Castro community within a historical world systems perspective, he also skillfully weighs the local impact of national and global currents ranging from Spanish colonialism to the 1910 Mexican Revolution to NAFTA. At the same time, he shows how, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the sustainable practices of "traditional" subsistence agriculture are beginning to replace the failed, unsustainable techniques of modern industrial farming in some parts of the United States and Europe.

When most people think about Catholicism and science, they will automatically think of one of the famous events in the history of science - the condemnation of Galileo by the Roman Catholic Church. But the interaction of Catholics with science has been - and is - far more complex and positive than that depicted in the legend of the Galileo affair. Understanding the natural world has always been a strength of Catholic thought and research - from the great theologians of the Middle Ages to the present day - and science has been a hallmark of Catholic education for centuries. Catholicism and Science, a volume in the Greenwood Guides to Science and Religion series, covers all aspects of the relationship of science and the Church: How Catholics interacted with the profound changes in the physical sciences (natural philosophy) and biological sciences (natural history) during the Scientific Revolution; how Catholic scientists reacted to the theory of evolution and their attempts to make evolution compatible with Catholic theology; and the implications of Roman Catholic doctrinal and moral teachings for neuroscientific research, and for investigation into genetics and cloning. The volume includes primary source documents, a glossary and timeline of important events, and an annotated bibliography of the most useful works for further research

Many students and members of the public who follow news reports on science and religion may think that Protestantism and science are in conflict. But while evangelical attacks on evolution may make the headlines, many mainstream Protestant groups have long embraced science and the scientific worldview. This volume in the Greenwood Guides to Science and Religion covers those Protestant thinkers who seek to use the insights of science to further their understanding of religion and faith. In addition, the volume will also discuss such trends at the liberal protestant acceptance of evolution, the advent of ecotheology, and the Social Gospel. The volume includes a selection of primary source documents, a glossary and a timeline, and an annotated bibliography of the most useful resources for further research.

This is a book about how Nahuas—native⁠ speakers of Nahuatl, the common language of the Aztec Empire and of more than 2.5 million Indigenous people today—have explored, understood, and explained the world around them in pre-invasion, colonial, and contemporary time periods. It is a deep dive into Nahua theoretical and practical inquiry related to the environment, as well as the dynamic networks in which Nahuas create, build upon, and share knowledges, practices, tools, and objects to meet social, political, and economic needs. In this work, author Kelly S. McDonough addresses Nahua understanding of plants and animals, medicine and ways of healing, water and water control, alphabetic writing, and cartography. Interludes between the chapters offer short biographical sketches and interviews with contemporary Nahua scientists, artists, historians, and writers, accompanied by their photos. The book also includes more than twenty full-color images from sources including the Florentine Codex, a sixteenth-century collaboration between Indigenous and Spanish scholars considered the most comprehensive extant source on the pre-Hispanic and early colonial Aztec (Mexica) world. In Mexico today, the terms “Indigenous” and “science and technology” are rarely paired together. When they are, the latter tend to be framed as unrecoverable or irreparably damaged pre-Hispanic traditions⁠, relics confined to a static past. In Indigenous Science and Technology, McDonough works against such erroneous and racialized discourses with a focus on Nahua environmental engagements and relationalities, systems of communication, and cultural preservation and revitalization. Attention to these overlooked or obscured knowledges provides a better understanding of Nahua culture, past and present, as well as the entangled local and global histories in which they were—and are—vital actors.

Science and Islam provides a detailed account of the relationship between Islam and science from the emergence of the Islamic scientific tradition in the eighth century to the present time. This relationship has gone through three distinct phases. The first phase began with the emergence of science in the Islamic civilization in the eighth century and ended with the rise of modern science in the West; the second period is characterized by the arrival of modern science in the Muslim world, most of which at that time was under colonial occupation; and the third period, which began around 1950, is characterized by a more mature approach to the major questions that modern science has posed for all religious traditions. Based on primary sources, the book presents a panorama of Islamic views on some of the major issues in the current science and religion discourse. Written in accessible language, Science and Islam is an authentic account of the multi-faceted and complex issues that arise at the interface of Islamic intellectual tradition and science. Rich in historical details, the book is a fascinating survey of the interaction of Islamic beliefs with the enterprise of science.

Galileo. Newton. Darwin. These giants are remembered for their great contributions to science. Often forgotten, however, is the profound influence that Christianity had on their lives and work. This study explores the many ways in which religion—its ideas, attitudes, practices, and institutions—interacted with science from the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution to the end of the nineteenth century. Both scientists and persons of faith sometimes characterize the relationship between science and religion as confrontational. Historian Richard G. Olson finds instead that the interactions between science and religion in Western Christendom have been complex, often mutually supportive, even transformative. This book explores those interactions by focusing on a sequence of major religious and intellectual movements—from Christian Humanist efforts to turn science from a primarily contemplative exercise to an activity aimed at improving the quality of human life, to the widely varied Christian responses to Darwinian ideas in both Europe and North America during the second half of the nineteenth century.

While science has achieved a remarkable understanding of nature, affording humans an astonishing technological capability, it has led, through Euro-American global domination, to the muting of other cultural views and values, even threatening their continued existence. There is a growing realization that the diversity of knowledge systems demand respect, some refer to them in a conservation idiom as alternative information banks. The scientific perspective is only one. We now have many examples of the soundness of local science and practices, some previously considered “primitive” and in need of change, but this book goes beyond demonstrating the soundness of local science and arguing for the incorporation of others’ knowledge in development, to argue that we need to look quizzically at the foundations of science itself and further challenge its hegemony, not only over local communities in Africa, Asia, the Pacific or wherever, but also the global community. The issues are large and the challenges are exciting, as addressed in this book, in a range of ethnographic and institutional contexts.