Incorporating Cultures' Role in the Food and Agricultural Sciences

By Florence V. Dunkel

Incorporating Cultures' Role in the Food and Agricultural Sciences addresses the practical needs of the professors, administrators and students who often face challenges of working together with Indigenous peoples with whom they have no prior experience. Missed communication, failed projects and unrealistic goals are daily realities. Academia and industry often encounter frustration in recruiting and retaining Native American students and other ethnicities.

This text is a guide for anyone working in the food or agriculture disciplines or industries, particularly for those working with people of a culture different from one’s own. Comprehensive, full awareness of one’s own culture is a prerequisite for effective teaching and learning within another culture. This book is replete with stories, examples and peer-refereed journal articles to help build awareness. These stories, examples and articles from multiple voices are placed over a basic underlying framework that is summed up in the title of the book itself.

• Provides compelling, well-referenced practical ways to understand the cultural component of behavior related to food and agriculture
• Explores behavior in setting policy, developing curricula, interacting with communities and in making choices as a consumer
• Connects the dots between food deserts, the disgust factor and the world’s grand challenges
• Includes lessons learned and new approaches in food and agricultural sciences using transdisciplinary, experiential action research methods
• Contains practical, state-of-the-art methodologies and diagrams to get started improving intercultural competency, inclusivity and internationalization of food and agricultural sciences

• Language: English
• Publisher: Academic Press
• Release date: Aug 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9780128039823

Florence V. Dunkel

Editor-in-chief of The Food Insects Newsletter since 1995; recipient of 1981 US National Academy of Sciences Visiting Scholar Award to People’s Republic of China; member of design team for state-of-the-art pre-departure training for US faculty, graduate students, and families to work on USAID food, storage, marketing project and live in Rwanda; author of 50 peer-refereed journal articles, 4 books and monographs, 2 patents; recipient of national and campus-wide awards for research, teaching, and service; principal investigator of numerous USDA and USAID, food, health, and agriculture related grants; presented 11 invited, food-related keynote addresses in US (e.g.,World Bank), Korea, Italy (FAO), Canada, Morocco, and the People’s Republic of China and a TEDx talk. Dunkel has worked with subsistence farmers in Asia, Africa, and Native American reservations for the past 33 years. She has also prepared and served insect feasts throughout the US including for more than 200 guests each at events in: San Francisco, California; Bozeman, Montana; and Charleston, South Carolina. Cultural aspects of food have been the topic of many TV appearances by Dunkel including PBS Evening News, Discovery Channel World of Wonder as well as radio interviews throughout the US, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Dr. Dunkel has initiated a pedagogy for food and agricultural sciences, the Expansive Collaborative Model, which she implemented in 2000 and taught every semester since. Dunkel has helped faculty adapt this pedagogy in several colleges at MSU and in other land grant institutions including a tribal college, and at a private urban university.

Book preview

heart.

Part I

Fundamentals of the Culture and Agriculture Relationship

Outline

Chapter 1 The Quiet Revolution

Chapter 2 Failures

Chapter 3 Decolonization and the Holistic Process

Chapter 4 Immersion

Chapter 1

The Quiet Revolution

Where Did You Come From?

Florence V. Dunkel,    Department of Plant Sciences and Plant Pathology, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT, United States

Abstract

Through stories we explore the term culture and what is meant by the term indigenous. The author is an agricultural scientist devoted to production and preservation of food, and interested in the intersection of food, health, and culture. She introduces herself in an atypical manner for an academician trained in Western science and in so doing illustrates how one should answer the question: Where are you from? The author explains the importance of sharing one’s cultural origins and recognizing the origins of one’s colleagues, students, share with those with whom one works and interacts. The terms ethnocentric and ethno-relative are introduced and illustrated. The book is divided into three parts for reader’s ease: Fundamentals of the Culture and Agriculture Relationship; Listening in and Between Communities; and Bridging the Gap Between Food and Agricultural Sciences and the Humanities and Social Sciences. After explaining her origins, the author summarizes her experience and shares her advice as follows for fellow scientists, administrators, policy makers, and anyone working in the food and agricultural sciences. Into my classrooms and interactions with students, I bring a strong dose of African sense. Thirty-three years I have struggled as a person of Western culture origins to understand sub-Saharan Africa while building long-term relationships with Africans and helping other outsiders understand the wealth of Africa. A quarter century ago, I began a similar learning odyssey with the Native American Plains people of the Northern Rockies. Some of these students took my courses and some were awarded assistantships to work in my research laboratory at Montana State University (MSU). Some of these Native Americans traveled with me and other faculty to Africa. Seven of the Africans moved to Bozeman, Montana, for 2 years. During those years, from both African and Native American colleagues, students, and other friends from these cultures, I learned a similar lesson: know where you have come from and listen to hear where your students, colleagues, administrators, and policy makers you interact with have come from.

Keywords

Traditional ecological knowledge; Apsaalooke; culture; Millennial Generation; Indigenous; intercultural development; ethnocentric world view; ethnorelative world view; Sicilian; Northern Cheyenne; Tlinget; Hull House; Jane Aadams; Native American; African; Malian; Rwandan; the holistic process; Native Science; Western Science; cultural filter

Contents

Definition of Culture 8

What Do We Mean by Indigenous? 10

Ethno-Relativity 13

Chapter-by-Chapter Summary 17

References 20

Further Reading 21

Into my classrooms and interactions with students, I bring a strong dose of African sense. Thirty-three years I have struggled as a person of Western culture origins to understand sub-Saharan Africa while building long-term relationships with Africans and helping other outsiders understand the wealth of Africa (Dunkel et al., 2013; Dunkel and Peterson, 2002; Dunkel, 2004; Dunkel et al., 1986, 1987; Lamb and Dunkel, 1987). A quarter century ago, I began a similar learning odyssey with the Native American Plains people of the Northern Rockies (Chaikin et al., 2010; Weaver et al., 1995). Some of these students took my courses and some were awarded assistantships to work in my research laboratory at Montana State University (MSU). Some of these Native Americans traveled with me and other faculty to Africa. Seven of the Africans moved to Bozeman, Montana, for 2 years. During those years, from both African and Native American colleagues, students, and other friends from these cultures, I learned a similar lesson: know where you have come from and listen to hear where your students, colleagues, administrators, and policy makers you interact with have come from.

The sub-Saharan Africans enjoy telling me the story of the African stork that reappears many times in literature and art in Africa. The basic image is an imposing bird with a huge wingspread. I have often imagined it was like the wings of pair of California condors I found in 1967 as I hiked in a canyon near my uncle and aunt’s cabin in the Sierra Madre Mountains. The condors were surprised and showed me their gigantic wings, 7 m wingspread, as they fled into the sky. The African image and story comes, I think, from a smaller bird, probably a Marabou stork. These Marabou storks frequented a place where we often stayed overnight while visiting the Akagera National Park during my work in Kibungo Prefecture in eastern Rwanda. It was not so much the wings of this African stork that impressed me, or its very large size (about the size of a goat). It was its huge eyes and enormous beak that caught my attention. A symbol that is often depicted in African art is of this majestic bird in flight going toward some future place with its egg (of course very large) in its beak. As it did this, carrying the fragile egg ever so gently, the stork is depicted looking backward! From the Africans’ use of this symbol we learn that the stork carries in that one egg all its future generations, but is depicted with its head looking backward. The symbol reminds us of the importance of being aware of from where one has come. In the Euro-American culture we still see a stork symbol used to signal caring for future generations or to bring the new generation somewhere, but the concept of simultaneously looking backward, of respecting Elders’ wisdom, is lost.

Listening for the wisdom of one’s Elders, for the stories of one’s culture, and knowing the cultural practices of your own people is important. Knowing the traditional wisdom and the traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) of one’s people and carrying it forward into the future with new challenges is a sound way to prepare to survive new challenges (Norberg-Hodge, 1991).

Each meeting of a Native American Elder for the first time begins, it seems, with the question: Where are you from? Sometimes this lesson is learned in an embarrassing process. I tell myself and others this story to remind myself of this important lesson and share it with others so that they might learn without the