IK Monitor Publications (8-3)

Indigenous Knowledge and Development Monitor, November 2000

Contents IK Monitor (8-3) | IKDM Homepage | Suggestions to: ikdm@nuffic.nl | © copyright Nuffic-CIRAN and contributors 2000.

Preview

IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS

The appearance of important new publications is reported here, and the books are briefly described. We have requested review copies, which will be sent to experts for their opinions regarding the books' practical usefulness. The reviewers' comments will be published in a subsequent issue of the Indigenous Knowledge and Development Monitor.

IIRR, PLAN and SCF (2000) Indigenous knowledge and practices in mother and child care: experiences from Southeast Asia and China. 355 pp. ISBN 0-942717-87-2. PHP 300; USD 15 excluding postage. Published by International Institute of Rural Reconstruction, PLAN International, and Save the Children Federation, Inc. For orders, contact: IIRR Bookstore, IIRR, Y.C. James Yen Center, Silang, Cavite 4118 Philippines.
Fax: +63-46-414 2420.
E-mail: publications@iirr.org

After four years of preparation, a workshop on indigenous knowledge and practices related to mother and child care was conducted at the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction (IIRR), Silang, Cavite, Philippines, 3-16 April 2000. The workshop was guided by a multi-disciplinary steering committee whose members are committed to the recording, preservation, adaptation and promotion of beneficial indigenous knowledge (IK), beliefs and practices. Fifty-one participants from seven countries worked closely with a production team of editors, artists and desktop publishers to produce a reference book for use by extension workers, field staff and middle-level managers of community development projects.

The book features practices, strategies and issues with programmatic implications. (It is not just an anthropological documentation of practices.) Each paper describes a set of indigenous knowledge, beliefs and practices and examines several topics from a development perspective. It is intended to help development practitioners to understand and appreciate indigenous practices in the context of Southeast Asia and China and to develop IK sensitivity: in other words, to affirm the value accorded to IK across cultures in Southeast Asia.

There are ten major chapters. The second chapter is the longest. It features ideas and practices regarding maternal and newborn care in various cultural settings. The editors say that the papers were difficult to group as they tend to overlap. This made the steering committee decide to narrow them down to maternal and newborn care and otherwise to cluster them by country. The book offers 18 papers from six countries: China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines and Thailand. Among the topics dealt with in the other chapters are child-feeding practices; child-protection practices; traditional toys and games; circumcision, marriage and sex rituals, and (in Chapter 10) methods, approaches and strategies for the retrieval, documentation and use of indigenous knowledge. The papers in this chapter were written by external development workers and not by the IK practitioners themselves. Thus they are based on the programme implementor's perspective and focus on how IK can be integrated into community work.

The book ends with a call for feedback and help in order to improve the present book and to provide material for a new volume featuring other cultures and geographical areas.