Lexical and cognitive issues for mountain research: A need to understand Andean landscape?

Abstract:

Lexical and cognitive issues for mountain research: A need to understand Andean landscape? Mountains scientific and vernacular perceptions are very different. Scientific data gathering has helped to better comprehend the dynamics of mountain environments and has served to develop natural resources management plans. Where appropriate, local ethnobiological knowledge about mountain systems were incorporated into the dominant scientific venue, either as anecdotal, mythical or irrelevant. Scientific perceptions are frequently organized accordingly to conceptual models, often very specialized, most of them being elaborated in Europe and North America. This paper promotes a reflexion about the words, the concepts and the models we use for describing latin American mountains, the necessity of taking in account specificities of regional areas such as tropical Andes. It suggest also that scientific knowledge should give up a conventional, descriptive, morphological approaches to mountains for a new analytic, holistic, and dynamic view of mountains, a view hold by the paradigm of Montology.

Año de publicación:

2001

Keywords:

Fuente:

scopus