After the fairy tale ends: towards an ecological account of the translation of Traditional Ecological Knowledge

In her 2007 ‘fairy tale’ about ‘epistemicide’, Karen Bennett charged scientific discourse with attempted murder. Despite recently employing the notion of ‘knowledge ecology’ in the EPISTRANS project, Bennett remains suspicious of science. This article argues, to the contrary, that scientific discourses can complement humanistic discourses, including the Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of Indigenous minorities. Although proselytising religions and illiberal states may have tried to suppress TEK in the past in the name of science, ‘epistemicidal’ may not be the best way of characterising the knowledge ecologies in certain settler states today. In Taiwan, academics and officials are supporting efforts by pastors to translate TEK. One such effort yielded a book of ‘autoethnobotanical’ translation that explicitated one kind of TEK. Entitled Seediq Ethnic Plants, the book also involved bidirectional interlingual translation: TEK in Seediq was translated into Chinese, and Modern Ecological Knowledge in Chinese was translated into Seediq. Textual analysis showed how culturally sensitive the interlingual translators of TEK had to be, while fieldwork revealed how difficult it was to translate tactile, tacit TEK discursively. It also suggested that the motivation behind inter-epistemic translation in this case was not resistance to epistemicide but rather linguistic and cultural development.