Date of Award

2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Natural Sciences

First Advisor

Diaz Almeyda, Erika

Area of Concentration

Environmental Studies with Philosophy Secondary Field

Abstract

The indigenous Maya people of the Yucatán cultivate milpa, a complex agroecosystem. The milpa system involves maize, beans, and squash in a polyculture along with a wide array of other plants and animals in a shifting cultivation style in which patches of forest are periodically cleared, cultivated for a few years, and then allowed to grow back into the surrounding forest. The milpa is integrated into both the community of Mayan society and the forest ecosystem, guided by an epistemic value system based on a respect for the interdependent animacy of the land and the life in the ecology. In this thesis, I engage in a dialogic conversation with Pedro Uc Be, a Mayan poet, writer, and activist. I use an epistemologically-plural inclusive dialog framework to investigate the different epistemic orientations both Western science and Mayan indigenous philosophy bring to understanding the milpa. Western science has described the ecological, environmental benefits of plants and animals involved in the milpa, providing critically valuable data and detailed mechanisms behind these relationships. Although this is powerful, western science can bring an incomplete viewview to conceptualizing the milpa and the nature/culture dichotomy. The Mayan perspective emphasizes an interdependent, animate and holistic system-based orientation to the milpa and nature. I investigate how each orientation approaches the value of the milpa, human-nonhuman and nonhuman-nonhuman ecological interactions in the milpa, and the question of conceptualizing "Nature" and its relationship to human culture in this context. I explore the complementarity between these two different ways of understanding this agricultural system, the ecological relationships in such a system, and ultimately the relationship between the human community and the rest of the natural world. Cultivating a more interdependent and animate worldview and relationship to the natural world, complementing ways of knowing, can help heal the crises of climate change and colonialism.

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