So, I'm very, very happy to be here, and as Italian, of course, I have to say that my
talk probably will be again about grannies.
I don't know why, as Italians, we love grannies, but this is part also of my story, of my biography
as a scholar, as an ethnobiologist, and that's why, actually, when Rene invited me here,
I thought I had to be really true, and I will try to explain what nine friends I love them,
and I have loved them, a few of them passed away, taught me, because at the end of the
day, as an ethnobiologist, we have not put much salt on our own in the soup, but we have
met people, they have taught us, and they have really had a remarkable role in teaching
the amount of salt and, of course, the variety of salt to be put in the soup.
So, basically, nine friends.
You see strange names from different parts of the world.
I would like to begin with two very important fadas and madas of the ethnobiology, Deril
Posi and Nina Etkin, passed away a few years ago, but these two persons were very important
in bringing me to this idea that science has to make a step down.
Science has to establish a dialogue with the local communities, because the local communities
and their traditional knowledge may be no much more than we know.
And in Deril's idea, there was this wonderful expression to say that culture and nature
are very linked.
There is an extra cable link, a mysterious link between culture and nature.
And of course, Deril was very important in my life for letting me appreciate the spiritual
value of biodiversity.
Diversity is not about plants and animals only, it's about the ways we look at them.
And these ways we look at them, the way we perceive plants and animals and the environment
is sometimes very, very important, much more important than probably our sisters and brothers
in the biodiversity world.
And of course, the need for a transdisciplinary and human science.
We will come back to this, and I wanted just to begin to say thank you to these two persons,
they are not more among us, but they gave me a lot.
And as I told you, as Italian, Granny's again.
These are three marvelous old women from a very tiny little village in southern Italy
inhabited by Arbres, the Arbres are descendants of Albanians.
And these three women in different ways have changed the way how I had in my mind the botany.
When I began to do this work, I thought there is a plant kingdom, of course, and this plant
kingdom, as it is taught in many university classes, is classified, is categorized according
to families.
These two, three old ladies told me instead for many, many days that their idea of classifying
plants is very different.
And actually they had a category for a specific group of plants, which included the idea of
edibility, Iacra.
Iacra cannot be translated in the scientific language.
They are the plants, they grow in environment, they are pretty disturbed by the human beings,
and they can be eaten.
And they were eaten.
They were gathered, they were blanched, they were generally, and they are still fried with
olive oil and chilies.
So the category of Iacra is something we do not know in the science.
And that brought me to this strong feeling that the Weltanschauungen we have in the science
are not enough.
To establish this dialogue between science and traditional knowledge is not an easy job.
And for all of us, ethnobiologists, the first important and difficult story is to try to
translate what a specific vernacular term means, a term referred to a plant.
And the first important problem we have is that the one-to-one correspondence never exists.
Many times people may name different plants with the same vernacular term.
Is that wrong?
No, it's very right, because according to their idea of plants, they may exist plants,
they have similar taste, or they have pungent taste, or they may be used in similar ways.
For example, in southern Italy, in this village, Marshworth, which is a wild plant, which test
is very close to the test of celery and watercress, are named with the same term.
Is that wrong?
No, it makes perfectly sense.
And even the mental map of plants that people have in traditional cultures is very different
from what we have in the books of Botany.
For example, Amaranth and Fethen, they are generally named in the same kind of label,
because they are used in similar ways.
And much more interesting is that these mental maps of plants depend very heavily from where
the plants are gathered.
They are, in other words, mental maps, they consider the ecology of these plants.
The Botany is not so far yet.
And that's why I think we need to learn, we need to listen, to listen.
Botanists and probably many scientists around the world, too much time, in the past they
went in different places in the world and they pretend to know things.
But actually what we should do is to listen, and then listen again.
This is a very interesting feature of the ethnogastronomy in this village.
People according to the bitterness of plants classify plants as food or medicine.
And there is a very interesting stuff which is in between different species of tasseliacent.
They are consumed because they are believed to be very healthy.
Nowadays, we know from the pharmacologists that these plants are the most antioxidative
plants we have in Europe.
And they are still consumed according to these folk knowledge systems.
Traditional knowledge systems, then, are profoundly embedded in the local landscape, in the language,
in the history.
We cannot really divide this culture, this nature.
It is just the result of the co-evolution, the fact that in these gastronomies we use
certain things for reaching certain aims.
The fourth person I would like to talk about is another very important teacher for me.
One of the last has worn virgins living in a very isolated area in Albania, Giustina
Douni, in one of the most untouched, probably, place in Europe.
And they are the people that have been always pastoralists.
They use their plants according to very unique features.
For example, Giustina taught me that salep, the tubers from wild orchids, may be a wonderful
and delicious food in the winter when the people, and especially the kids, feel weak.
Giustina has taught me that even a nettle or beach soup has a dignity and has to be
respected, not only when other members of the family eat it, but when animals eat it.
This is, in fact, a soup which is prepared only for the cows, and then only in this way
the cows, according to the knowledge of Giustina, may produce a delicious milk which will then
fit in all magnificent dairy products for which these mountains are very famous.
But Giustina told me also another important story, that the traditional knowledge changes,
evolves, is not just static, is not just traditions.
Traditions are made by continuous evolutions, innovations, and actually after the communism
in Northern Albania, people went back to gather salep and other plants much more than they
were used to do during the communism.
So in a kind of magic way, traditional knowledge was revitalized.
Why?
Because, of course, during the post-communist in the mountains, many problems arises.
Public health problems arrived, and delivery of care was very, very difficult.
So that told me that traditional knowledge is the result of a continuous co-evolution
between human beings and what we call nature.
The last two friends in this session I would like to talk about are two friends.
They come from a very different world.
Olga is a Russian-German who migrated back to Germany a few years ago after the family
lived in Russia for more than 250 years, buck migration.
And Rosa Lysika is one of the last Venetians living in Eastern Romania in a wonderful,
lively landscape close to the Danube.
These two wonderful women taught me that even the representation of traditional knowledge
may change over time.
Of course, they could remember, and they still do, of course, the marmalade, the jam with
the flowers of the Andalian, wonderful sweets from sorrow leaves, and not to forget, of
course, the lactofermented vegetables.
They could be actually probably very useful this evening after the European Championship
match, because the water is considered very, very healthy against drunkenness.
But the relations I learned from these two ladies was that even traditional knowledge
is a fact, is experiential, is very much represented.
That means we talk probably about things we are attached to in different ways, depending
on the person we have in front of us.
So in one word, the traditional knowledge, and you, of course, as chefs know this better
than me, is a narrative, is a way of representing an experience, and then is a way through which
we negotiate our identity.
So where do you go from here?
I think, and that is actually funny, because I wrote this before coming here, and yesterday
evening I was thinking that what we have experienced so far, yesterday we had a wonderful day
with Renée and the other friends, is part of what I drafted as a dream.
What is important is to feed our appetite for bio-cultural diversities.
And to celebrate these diversities, we need platforms, like the ones we are now.
Thank you very much, Renée, for building such an essential platform.
Too often, scientists live in a tower, and, of course, many of other stakeholders live
in another world.
We need platforms where we can talk together, and I think it's so important that we can
share our experiences, we can share our knowledge.
Other important point, in my opinion, education.
We need, desperately, need platforms through which we can educate young people, and we
can re-educate each other.
We live in a time of crisis, of problems, and I think to build these networks will also
facilitate the building, the so-called resilience, which is very much needed in this time.
Resilience is a very nice word, but actually, in practice, is what local communities in
many parts of the world have really, have really generated every day.
And then, let me go back to the idea of the repository about the spiritual value of biodiversity.
When we talk about food, when we talk about knowing how to manage a natural environment,
at the end of the day, we talk about care.
Food providers, shepherds, farmers are care providers, and we need to care, I think, very
much each other, in order to appreciate this value, which is probably the most interesting
essence of biodiversity.
What this may mean in our society at large, for scientists, for chefs, for foodies, I
don't know, but I think we need to find space and times for these platforms, because these
are very, very important.
And then we come to my last friend, my last and probably most important and mysterious
friend, Levi, one of the wise elders of one of the first nations on the Vancouver Island
in Canada, I spent many, many days with him alone in the middle of the forest.
And talking about biocultural diversity, many, many times he told me, you know, at the end
of the day, Andrea, this is your concept, is the concept of the people, they come from
the Western culture, they think biology, nature, and culture were divided, and that's
why they need to build the new words.
But actually, he was keeping me saying, what you express, we would express in another way.
We would just say, Ishukish savalik, everything is one, everything is connected.
And since everything is one, I think we can also say we are all one.
Thank you very much.
Okay, stand here, Andrea, stand here.
Some lights and some any questions for Andrea, we've got a question here, not about the football
hopefully.
Okay, hello, do you believe this is not kind of risky to try to melt science with this
knowledge?
I don't know if...
No.
As a scientist.
As a scientist, I think we need to be open-minded and to recognize that in specific domain,
I don't want to say in many things, but in many domain, the science has not given the
most final word.
We need to learn from the people they have lived together with the nature for centuries
and millennia, because without this kind of experiential knowledge, also our creativity
and innovation is very mutilate.
So in my opinion, that does not far mean the science should do another job.
Everybody has to continue to do its job, but we need a dialogue.
We need finally a dialogue.
Because let's be honest, all these delicious products you probably use in your cuisine
comes from farmers, comes from fishermen, as we have seen this morning.
They have the knowledge, and they have a knowledge which is probably not embedded in the agronomy
and botany books we have in our universities.
And that's why you have, I think, you folks have an amazing role in trying to build this
platform and to reconciliate this different kind of knowledge.
At the end of the day, probably, let me say, traditional knowledge and science, they are
fruits from the same tree.
This is beautiful, but they are different fruits, and we need to appreciate one fruit
and the other together.
Sorry, Dr. Kodor, but I believe that this kind of thought creates some kind of aberration.
When you think about to melt two different concepts, then you got something like is a
biodynamic, I go once again to this concept, but I think you cannot, in our time, you cannot
think that you can do science and grow vegetables and think that the stars can influence this
process.
I think it's very risky to give this message to the people.
Well, to begin a work that has been never done is challenging.
There are, of course, bottlenecks, we cannot go now in details, there are many bottlenecks,
but it's a work, in my opinion, that is urgently needed.
Okay, any more questions?
Andre talked about the importance of having a platform to share ideas and talk, so that's
what we should be doing.
Andre, ethnographers are often in a race to capture and record a culture and preserve
it before it disappears.
Can you give us your view on the cultures that you're looking at, their strength, their
ability to survive in an evolving world, and also how we pass on that knowledge so that
it doesn't get lost?
Well, this is also our responsibility, because we have built the wrong idea that we have
all answers.
We have built a fake idea in front of local communities they had historical, much less
power in the world that we can solve everything.
So I think we have also the responsibility to work together with the local knowledge
in addressing the problem of the transmission.
We need to re-instill this knowledge, we need, of course, to marry this knowledge with the
modern science, with innovation.
I think we cannot escape from this responsibility, and many communities all over the world I
think are more and more aware now of this kind of subtle, interstitial, but delicious
rich value they have.
Let's think about the languages.
Languages are music, and we are losing languages every day more than we lose plans.
But of course, since we are, what we are, who we are, especially in the past decades,
we tend to look at more at things, but not at music.
So I think we have a responsibility.
We cannot leave all in the hands of local communities, they are very often marginalized.
Okay, one last question, quick question, and a short answer.
Where's our question?
Okay.
Go to the top, and a short answer please, and right, thank you.
I'm not sure if it's a short answer.
Not long ago I sat in a meeting of chefs who were told that science needed to come into
the kitchen much more, that the kitchen was a place of wives' tales and false knowledge.
And so I'm wondering if it is really communication and not knowledge, the language that these
two different groups speak, that is the issue, and if so, how, if you could quickly suggest
a way to communicate better amongst ourselves, does that make any sense?
Yeah, I think that actually we need to go out from our towers, this is the main point.
Because it is true that, of course, science should enter into the kitchen.
I would like to say, and believe me, this is not just to make you happy, that I would
like to see more farmers and chefs within the universities.
I think that we need to go out from our towers.
Very strong, because at the end of the day, knowledge is not just a body of something
that is just theory.
Knowledge has to be embedded with practice.
And you are the real, let's say, expert of practice.
You are the heroes of practice.
So I think you can understand probably much more than me and then scholars how this dialogue
has to happen, but of course it is a very open task.
I don't have any exact recipe in my pocket.
