Virginia Nazarea

Professor
Director of the Ethnoecology and Biodiversity Lab
Ph.D. Anthropology, University of Kentucky, 1987
vnazarea@uga.edu

I am interested in the interface between the way people see the elements and interrelationships in their environment with the way they decide and act in that environment. Further, I am concerned with the way the lenses people carry around in their heads are structured by the messages they received over time as they were growing up (and continue to receive when they are grown-up!) as members of a particular class, gender, and ethnicity. This concern has led me to explore a variety of different problems such as the distribution of local knowledge and the patterning of agricultural decision making of different categories of farmers, the relationship between marginality of production systems and the persistence of cultural memory that supports conservation of biodiversity, and the connection between mental maps and resource management practices of different groups of actors in a watershed.

Drawing on ethnoecology and political ecology, my main goal has been to underline the connection between cognition (one might add ideology) and practice and to infuse the understanding of local knowledge with a sense of history and situationality, aspects that have not been given sufficient attention in earlier work in cultural ecology and ethnoscience.

With the Ethnoecology/Biodiversity Laboratory as our base, and support from the Southern Seed Legacy and the Comparative Ethnoecology projects, my students and I are currently undertaking research projects that explore marginality, memory, and resistance. Marginal spaces foster the persistence of alternatives that are otherwise sacrificed to modernity, leaving only a great sense of void. Women as homegardens are examples of such spaces and these are, not surprisingly, places where plant diversity thrives, eschewing the pull toward uniformity. Many members of so-called cultural minorities and people in "less developed" contexts retain a strong sense of place that incorporates knowledge of crops as well as cuisine. This knowledge tends to be swamped by monoculture and commercialization in the mainstream. Hence, our efforts have been directed toward analyzing the mechanisms that allow memories and varieties to persist given the powerful, destabilizing vortex of homogeneity and amnesia and to document, in an attempt to pass on and conserve, recalcitrance in cognitive frameworks and resource management systems.

Recent publications:

• Nazarea, Virginia D., ed. 1999. Ethnoecology: Situated Knowledge/Located Lives. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. ~300 pp.
• Nazarea, Virginia D. 1998. Cultural Memory and Biodiversity. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 189 pp.
• Nazarea, Virginia D., Robert Rhoades, Erla Bontoyan, and Gabriela Flora. 1998. Defining Indicators Which Make Sense to Local People: Intracultural Variation in Perceptions of Natural Resources. Human Organization 57(2):159-170.
• Nazarea, Virginia D., Eleanor Tison, Maricel Piniero, and Robert E. Rhoades. 1997. Yesterday's Ways, Tomorrow's Treasures: Heirloom Seeds and Memory Banking. Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt Publishing. 33 pp.
• Nazarea, Virginia D. 1996. Fields of Memories as Everyday Resistance. Cultural Survival Quarterly 20(1):61-66.
• Nazarea-Sandoval, Virginia D. 1995. Local Knowledge and Agricultural Decision Making in the Philippines: Class, Gender and Resistance. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 226 pp.
• Nazarea-Sandoval, Virginia D. 1995. Indigenous Agricultural Decision-Making Criteria as a Reflection of Socioeconomic Status and Gender in the Philippines. Indigenous Knowledge Systems: The Cultural Dimension of Development. M. D. Warren, D. Brokensha, and L. J. Slikkerveer, eds. Pp. 49-63. London: Intermediate Technology Press.