In this conversation, Luisa Maffi, PhD (UC Berkeley, 1994), a pioneering voice for Biocultural Diversity shares her career path and experiences with Nishanth Gurav, SEB Student committee member.
How do you identify yourself and your work in the academic or research field, do you think it’s a need of the hour and why?
Well, I guess I identify myself by a string of fields that I have studied and worked in. I’m Italian I grew up in Italy, and my BA, is from the University of Rome, and it was in linguistics. So I am, first of all, a linguist or trained in linguistics. Although I no longer practice as a linguistic researcher. But I did work for many years as a linguist on a project to develop a dictionary and a grammar of the Somali language. I spent after my BA eight years on this project working part of the time in Somalia and East Africa and part of the time back in Italy contributing to the dictionary of the Somali Language.
That experience, which included a lot of field experience, really is what awakened me to the links between language and culture and specifically the cultural focus of a people as then reflected in their language. Somalis are nomadic pastoralists or traditionally were, and many of them still are, and their focus is nomadic life, and particularly the camel. And so it was, for instance, coming across dozens, maybe hundreds of words that had to do with camels and living with camels, working with camels and herding camels and and so on. I realized that, really, language is a vehicle for cultural traditions, cultural knowledge which little by little made me interested in anthropology.
When that project ended, I decided that I was ready to study anthropology for a PhD, and I was lucky enough to be accepted at University of California, Berkeley to do my PhD there. That’s where my graduate advisor was Professor Brent Berlin. The famed ethnobiologist, so, of course, ethnobiology became an important focus for me. I decided, in fact, to do my doctoral field work in Mexico, in southern Mexico, the state of Chiapas, where he had his project. So that was another experience in which, from the indigenous people that I was working with, I learned more and more about their relationship with the natural world and the way they’re thinking about and relating to the natural world was reflected in their language. I guess that really primed me to once I was finished with my PhD and suddenly had to think, what am I going to do next? That’s when the light bulb went on in my head that, you know, from my linguistics background, I was hearing the linguists talk about endangered languages. From my anthropological background, I was hearing anthropologists talk about vanishing cultures. To the extent that I had studied biology as a part of studying ethnobiology, I was of course aware of the loss of biodiversity. And all of a sudden, I connected the dots somehow, and all these things came together in my mind. But those are all aspects of the diversity of life on Earth. Diversity in nature, diversity in culture. They are interrelated, as I had learned from my field work in Africa and in Mexico. And they’re probably being threatened by the same forces, economic forces, political forces, that are leading to homogenization of cultures and languages and impoverishment of the natural world through overexploitation. The consequences are also the same because it’s all interlinked, that was the nugget, basically the idea of biocultural diversity that soon enough I was beginning to develop together with a small group of colleagues that I discovered were interested in. And it was, of course a very pressing issue. But we realized that it would be really difficult to study it from within academia.
We’re talking 30 years ago, 1996. And if there are silos today, it was even more so, 30 years ago. So, you couldn’t really find a niche where you could do this kind of very interdisciplinary, even transdisciplinary kind of study. So, on a whim, we decided that we would create a nonprofit organization and do the work from there. We had no idea what we were doing, you know, how do you how to run a non-profit organization? We didn’t have any money, but we did it anyway. We just set up a small website and we started doing our research. Luckily, we all had other jobs. I had a postdoc by then, so I didn’t have to worry, at least for a while, how I was going to support myself. We started doing the research and it must have been an idea that was in the air, so to speak. By three years or two years after we started, we were being contacted by the World Wildlife Fund to work with them on this map of the world’s ecosystems that they had created as a part of a new conservation strategy. There were all these areas that were priority for conservation that were exactly where most of the world’s diverse peoples, indigenous peoples are located. There was no indication of that on the map. There was an anthropologist working at WWF who wasn’t happy about that, and he found out about Terralingua. He heard that we were mapping the distribution of the world’s languages, and he asked us whether we would work with them to overlap the distribution of ecosystems, as done by WWF, with the distribution of the world’s languages. And there was the world’s very first map of biocultural diversity, where languages stood imperfectly as it may be, as a proxy for diverse cultures. Then we co-wrote a report, and the report of course went out through WWF channels. That’s how we started and indeed with an issue that was so pressing, we started immediately working at the international level to put it out among conservation organizations, international organizations, the UN agencies etc.
How was your childhood like? Your school days and your family atmosphere?
Yeah, it’s a good question, because I honestly feel that that I owe everything to my family and to the way my parents brought me up. Again, I was born and grew up in Italy, in Rome. I grew up, first of all, in a multilingual environment. Both of my parents spoke Italian, but my father also spoke English and French. My mother spoke French and German. My father was an expert in African studies. So, the house was always full of his colleagues from Africa and I played with their children. For me it was absolutely natural as it is always for children when they grow up in a situation, you feel that that’s how it is.
To hear different languages and to see people from different cultures, it was almost in my DNA. So much so that when after finishing my BA, I was offered a job in Africa, in Somalia. I didn’t have to think of it twice. I packed my bags and went. So that’s one aspect that I really feel primed me to then become who I am today. The other thing was the concern with social justice and I guess that that was also very strong in my family. I absorbed that with my mother’s milk, so to speak, and so I see all of the components. Finally, my parents were really outdoorsy. We would go camping and to the mountains. From the earliest age, I remember myself running around in the forest and jumping into icy cold streams and stuff like that. So, all the elements were there, when I started thinking back, how did I get where I am? It was really all already there in the way that I grew up. It was it was absolutely crucial for me and then going beyond that, I think that at University of Rome, I also got a really good basis for the kind of work that I would do later in my studies in linguistics. I got to work with some of the most outstanding linguists in Italy. I began to learn also the basics of anthropology and I found myself naturally interested in the natural sciences and especially, the philosophy and history of science. There you go and then that experience in the field, in Somalia, it all came together. When I went to the US to study, I was already all ripe for what happened then.
Yeah. That sounds so much fun. Somebody who did also grow up in a multilingual atmosphere I can relate to that. But this sounds really fun.
That’s another fun thing because if we are talking about the influences of childhood, another important influence as you may know, in addition to directing Terralingua, I’m also the editor of its magazine called the Landscape magazine, which has published so many stories, including many written by indigenous persons from India. I really love editing, but that’s again another thing that I learned directly from my father, because in his work he was editing a journal of African studies. When I was maybe 5 or 6, he started taking me to the printing house where the journal was being printed and taught me copy editing. He would give me ten lira, the Italian currency was called lira at the time, which would be like $0.10 for every typo that I would find. And boy did I take to the job. I wanted to get my prize. I learned copy editing and I learned the principles of editing. And there you are and now I’m editing the magazine and enjoying it very much. And I owe that to my father.
I love this aspect of when your life teaches you these lessons, especially through family. That somehow plays a role, such a crucial role when you get into future responsibilities or something like that. Just shows how connected it is. Since you’re from Italy, I was in Italy just for two months, and I absolutely love the food there. Did you, especially when you were living there, did you have any favourite foods you had or any hobbies you had as a child? Also, any memories of interacting with, you did mention about camping, but any other biocultural practices that you were a part of during your growing up?
Yeah, two things that are very much related to the natural world. My father taught me somehow, how to make herbarium specimens. During our walks, I would gather something, and then we would press the plant and I had this whole collection of dried plant specimens. The other thing that I loved to do, I loved insects. I love to look at them. But in my childhood cruelty or something, I also liked to pick them up, and I hadn’t learned in that case how to preserve insects. You know how to pin them down on somewhere. I had a box, a metal box, and I threw them in the box, it was full of bugs and I was very proud of it. I would open the box when my parents had guests and they would be horrified. But anyway, that shows you that I definitely had an early interest in the natural world.
I was pretty much an omnivore, so I wasn’t fixated on anything in particular. But it is interesting that that unlike most kids, I really did like vegetables. Except for beets. I think my mother had trouble making me eat beets, but other than that, I really liked my vegetables and our diet was certainly rich in that. Of course, you had the usual pastas and so on. I really liked variety and I really liked my vegetables.
What was your PhD topic and why did you choose it? And if you can describe the journey of your PhD and including any difficulties you faced.
When I went to Berkeley for my PhD in anthropology, my graduate advisor was Brent Berlin. I had met Brent, serendipitously, when I was still at University of Rome. He came to give some lectures, and it was just the time that I was starting to think of going for a PhD. I shyly made an appointment to talk with him. He was very friendly and encouraged me to visit Berkeley and see whether I might like to do my PhD there. So I went, I really liked it and I applied to Berkeley and only to Berkeley. You know how you are told generally you should apply to ten different Universities?
I didn’t know anything, I applied only there. Maybe because he thought I had promised and recommended me and I got in. The summer of the first year that I was there Brent already invited me to go to the field in southern Mexico. So off I went, and I started learning. Well, I had to learn Spanish in addition to the languages that I already knew, so I did that, and then I started learning, at least gaining working knowledge of the local Mayan language. I guess all that came fairly easy to me. The language part, at least. Once I got into the field, I really found it congenial. We were in this Spanish colonial town in the highland of Chiapas. Then I went to the villages where Brent was working, and I started familiarizing myself with the with the people and the place. I was lucky enough that the Brent already had this big medical ethnobiology project where they were studying medicinal plants. Because my specialty was linguistic anthropology, specifically more than ethnobiology, per se but related to this medical ethnobiology project. I ended up choosing, again in discussion with Brent and with plenty of input and suggestions from him, a specific aspect which was concepts of health and illness from the perspective of the Tzeltal Maya people.
How they thought of health and what was health and what was illness, and the classification of diseases in their medical system and their knowledge system. And then how do they identify signs and symptoms of those different conditions and describe them in their language. I did a very detailed study of that, interviewing a number of men and women of different ages in the community of Tenejapa. I returned every summer for several years. Then I spent a whole year in the community in 1990-1991. Then was back at Berkeley and did the write up and somehow, I guess that immersion really had been enough to give me the understanding that I needed to write up my dissertation. I sat down, I analysed the data, and then I have this feeling I was in a tunnel, and I never left until I got to the other end. I did a year of writing and pretty much nothing else was happening and at the end of that year I had written 500 plus pages!
And that was my dissertation. I did, talking about the literature, before doing the fieldwork and while writing, I really gathered up everything that I could possibly find that had been written by anthropologists and linguists on the highland Maya and specifically the Maya in that particular community and their language Tzotzil Maya. I kind of digested the whole thing and if I look back, I don’t know that I would be capable today of doing something with the kind of complete and uninterrupted concentration that I had at that time. But I did, and I can’t explain it. But that’s what happened. I was fortunate, maybe it was a reasonably well studied area of the world and that certainly helped. There had been many anthropologists and linguists who had gone there. Unlike, I’m sure, many other parts of the world, including many parts of India and so on. I had good background to base myself on, that’s for sure.
Yeah, the Tzeltal plant classification has been like the Bible for my PhD and I feel like I’m completing the circle with you who has personally worked, because I haven’t had any personal interactions with Professor Berlin. I admire his passion and the commitment that he had with this community. I really have made so much of literature review on folk taxonomy, I cannot see anything as detailed as someone like Berlin did.
Yeah, he was absolutely admirable in that. He spoke the language fluently, which I never learned to do. He could really speak the language and he was in really good communication with people in the community. He was very dedicated and I admired the way he worked. He had this team, speaking about herbarium specimens. He had created this herbarium in the main town where the Mayan taxonomists brought in the plants they had gathered and prepared the specimens and classified them. They even learned all these techniques and so on. It was also an excellent example for me of a partnership really with the communities. He really cared and that was another big lesson that I learned for sure.
Yeah, it’s an inspiration for me to understand the perspective of folk taxonomy. Speaking of your journey further and during your postdoc, in your early research days, you mentioned about something like silos. Do you think that the researchers in those days were ready for collaborations or mostly worked in silos? And how has it changed now, if you see any change?
Yeah, it was very much silos then. You know, maybe not so much between linguistics and anthropology. You had these crossover disciplines like ethnolinguistics and so on and so forth. To some extent, there were bridges between anthropology and biology with ethnobiology. But by and large, the bulk of those disciplines was very much separate and especially something as cross-cutting as thinking of biodiversity, cultural diversity and linguistic diversity as part of a whole was very alien. In fact, even at the beginning, when we were bringing those ideas out, many linguists for instance, reacted very negatively.
Retracing ancestral Tsilhqot’in First Nation trails on the Chilcotin Plateau, British Columbia
When we were comparing languages and species because there had been an older and kind of then discarded analogy between languages and organisms, with the idea that languages are born, developed, die, etc. That analogy with something organic had been discredited. A number of linguists thought that we were trying to bring back that idea, and we were saying, no we’re not saying that language is the same thing as species, but that they are all systems and the sum total of languages around the world forms a web of diversity that is comparable to the web of diversity in the natural world. That there was no sense that anthropology of linguistics could have anything to do with what they were doing. So much so that when in 1996, Terralingua was just starting, we sort of officially inaugurated it with the conference that I organized.
I was still at Berkeley, and it was held there. It was a small, more than a conference it was really a working conference, let’s call it that way, with about 35 people. And it included linguists, anthropologists, biologists, a few other various scattered disciplines and members of indigenous communities. For several of those academics, it was probably the first time that they sat in the same room with one another first of all, and with indigenous persons. I remember it was a three-day conference at the first day, they were kind of looking around, saying “where am I and who are these people?”. At the end of the third day, after all the discussions that had taken place, I could hardly push them out of the door. They were so intrigued. I think it was a herpetologist told me, “I thought that I was being interdisciplinary if I talked to an entomologist, let alone talking to a linguist or an anthropologist etc..”. It really opened up the horizon for those people.
Of course, since then we continue to push in that direction while remaining outside of academia but little by little putting the ideas back in. I can’t say that the silos have gone down completely, far from that, 30 years later. But there’s a lot more interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work being done. The idea of biocultural diversity is now in dozens, maybe hundreds, I haven’t even tried to compute, of academic programs. It is in a lot of international processes; it is used on the ground. And just as we speak, I have become part of a network of universities in the US and Canada, where academics are interested in biocultural conservation and in really developing a paradigm and a program for true biocultural training for people interested in biocultural conservation. Training that is meant to include fundamentally two-way learning.
So, students, both non-Indigenous and indigenous or members of indigenous and local communities coming together with non-Indigenous students and really learning from one another, it’s not just incorporating indigenous knowledge. An expression that makes me hit the roof each time that I hear it because it’s not about incorporating. It’s about dialogue between knowledge systems and recognizing that, you know, Western science, has developed its own paradigm and has a lot to say about a lot of things, but it doesn’t have everything to say about everything. There are other worldviews and knowledge systems and ways of knowing and really the dialogue between these different systems is going to lead to a greater understanding. We’re just beginning to work on kind of exploring ideas for, and of course there’s a big transformation still to be made speaking about silos, how to make this happen and create opportunities for truly integrative programs of the kind that I describe possible. So, yeah, we’ve made a lot of progress, but there is still a lot of way to go and we’re working on that right now.
That’s really interesting. It’s the background actually for something that you are the pioneer of, which is ‘biocultural diversity’. I see it as an evolution of understanding and it’s revolutionary according to me. But do you have any suggestions for young researchers interested in inter and transdisciplinary concepts. Any suggestions for some people to learn this skill of connecting the dots and evolving and understanding concepts, especially transdisciplinary concepts.
Yeah, it’s true that, a lot of academic work, especially in the science, natural science and not to speak of physical sciences is very specialized. I would recommend that everyone, at least at the beginning, try to get a broader perspective. It happened to me kind of organically. I wasn’t even really thinking about it. As I said, I guess my family background primed me to be interested in languages and cultures and in the natural world.
I got lucky. I think it should be built in to the way teaching and learning is done, and not even just in university. It really needs to start a lot sooner, in grade school even. So that it becomes easier to see the interconnections. Then, of course, the push in society is towards specialization, because the sense is if you are a specialist, it’s easier to get a job and if you are a generalist, what do you do? And it’s true. You know, as a generalist, I had to create my own path. But I had the strength that that I had built through life experience to do that. I’m not going to say that everybody is going to be as lucky as that, but to have at least a general understanding of not only the sciences, but the humanities as well, and the social sciences, I think that that should be really a strong part of the curriculum in the initial years, so that people get a sense, can get a sense of how things are interconnected. Then we, you know, still choose a specialized path, but a specialized path that would be enriched by this broader understanding. Which would make it easier to cross over. Not everybody is going to become a trans disciplinarian or a generalist. But even within the specialty, I think it is really important to gain that broader perspective.
Yeah, I completely agree. You did mention a little bit about establishing Terralingua. Do you want to add any other help you had while establishing Terralingua and some early challenges that you faced?
Yes, when we created Terralingua in 1996, we hardly knew how to run a non-profit organization. We didn’t have any money. We just had our ideas and our passion and we had luck along the way. For instance, a colleague at University of California at Davis offered to host our website. We didn’t even have the money to put up a website. We had our first website hosted by the University of California, Davis, and that was what actually was our first window to the world. And that’s how, for instance, the anthropologists at the World Wildlife Fund found out about us because they were doing a search and then came across Terralingua. We were still pretty much having no money at all when my final postdoc was ending. I was wondering, okay, maybe we need to start getting thinking of getting Terralingua funded. Otherwise, what are we going to do?
And you won’t believe this, but I was by then in Washington, D.C., I was finishing my postdoc at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington at the Natural History Museum, and I was sitting in my desk at home thinking of these things and the phone rings, at the other end of the phone is someone who claims to be calling from the Ford Foundation. Which is by all intents and purposes, the largest foundation in the world. I’m going, yeah, right, who’s pulling my leg here? But no, it was one of the program directors at the Ford Foundation by the name of Ken Wilson, and he also had found out about us on the web. He was, I guess, one of those rare visionaries in the world of philanthropy. He shared very much.
He was an anthropologist too and he shared very much our ideas. He came across our website and said, “wow, these guys really get it. Let me call them up”. So we had a conversation and he said, “do you want to come and visit us at the Ford Foundation and we can talk maybe about some funding” and I’m going “Really?” and in two weeks, you know, my colleagues, Dave Harmon, who’s the main co-founder of Terralingua, he’s a conservationist, and I put together a proposal of what we would do if we would have any funding. We didn’t know, what kind of funding he was talking about. Two weeks later, I went to New York and met Ken, and I didn’t even have to give him our pitch. He had already decided he had discretionary funding. He was giving us some money and see what we would do with it.
How do you explain this? So, all of a sudden, we went from having $800 to having $250,000 over three years. That’s how we developed our program and for a number of years, Ken, who later moved to the Christensen Fund, was our one and only funder. We worked a lot together to build up this field of biocultural diversity to talk to other funders. Ken was extremely active, so little by little, other funders began to buy in to this idea of biocultural diversity. That resulted also in Terralingua beginning to have more funding from different sources. It all kind of developed from there organically. But there are some totally unexplainable events in in Terralingua’s history that I can only understand by thinking this idea was an idea whose time had come. It was needed. We made this effort to put it out there and things started coming to us. There have been so many episodes of this, so that in the end, I developed this philosophy. You just do what you think is right, what you’re passionate about, and then things may happen often will happen. It’s been that way. So, it’s the only way that I can understand it because otherwise it’s really, really weird.
Yeah, it does sound like that. You just you put your passion into it and things happen. The other part of one question was about your writing, which I know you learned from your father and writing these days, especially scientific writing and writing for magazine is such an important aspect for any researcher. Do you have any suggestions for young researchers or researchers in general when it comes to writing about this concept? What skills they should be aware of.
Well, of course you need experience in immersion experience, so to speak, in biocultural diversity, which especially if you come from an indigenous background or a local community background that’s part of the culture of your people, of your community. To recognize that and to immerse oneself, of course, in indigenous communities, minorities, etc., have been suppressed and oppressed for so long that then often people internalize the sense of, we’re not worthy. Only the majority society is worthy, and the majority language is and that way of life and so on and so forth. But thanks to the indigenous movement from the late 80s, at the earliest on. Things have been changing dramatically and now we’re seeing a lot of indigenous resurgence around the world. I was especially impressed. And I really want to say this, given that you are from India yourself. In spite of a political situation that is not very favourable there right now, if I may say so.
The indigenous peoples of India, the Adivasis, and the local communities are really affirming themselves. I’m really in awe of that movement, I’ve been delighted to have a collaborator, from India, Kanna Siripurapu, who started contributing to the magazine in 2018 and repeatedly contributed really excellent articles about the situation, particularly of pastoralist communities from northern India and very passionate, working with them tirelessly.
To make a long story short, I had the good fortune of being able to help him come to Canada for a PhD at the University of Guelph. He’s here right now in Canada doing his PhD. But because of his passion in supporting pastoralist communities and especially the young members of those communities. We made him coordinator of a project that we have, that is called the Indigenous Youth Storytellers Circle, which is meant specifically to inspire young indigenous persons to tell their stories about their connection with their languages, cultures, relationship with the land and help boost their sense of pride in their identity and so on and so forth. This project is being very successful. We now have also four young indigenous persons from different parts of the world who proved to be, who contributed to their stories and who proved to be really passionate about inspiring other youth. So now that we have this group of indigenous youth ambassadors, coordinated by Kanna, and they are taking initiatives and really have increased awareness among indigenous youth about this possibility to have their voices heard.
We have heard so many stories of how contributing a story and seeing themselves represented has benefited not only them personally, like their studies, getting admitted to university or whatever, but their communities. The pride of their parents and their communities in some cases, even help them win battles in national and international context for the recognition of the rights of their communities. It’s like I am astonished. We started this just on a hunch, and it’s taken off in an amazing way. That kind of awareness and thinking of telling your story and the story of your community which has inspired so many of those youth, to learn more about the ways of life and the knowledge systems of their communities and traditional management, as well as all the challenges in continuing to steward their territories. Academic writing is another beast. I guess if you study and want to go for an academic career, you have to contend with that. But it’s not the only kind of writing. That’s why we thought that offering a platform, whether it is in landscape magazine or the Indigenous Youth Storytellers circle, was a way of contributing to creating greater understanding because nobody in the general public is going to go read an academic article, but they do read our stories.
We have 150,000 readers in more than 180 countries. It’s almost all countries in the world. How did that happen? Of course, you know, we painstakingly use communication, social media. But it’s been the people themselves that have come in contact with Terralingua then create a snowball effect and tell other people. It’s just been snowballing like crazy, especially in the last couple of years. It seems that after 30 years, the idea has really, settled in and people are beginning to see the importance of it. But I’m sure that it’s not just because of the academic work that we have done. It is also through this outreach and education that that we have been doing. And not only us, of course there’s by now hundreds of thousands, maybe of other people who are doing the same. It’s a little movement.
Link to the Langscape magazine: https://terralingua.org/langscape-magazine/
On the land with the W̱SÁNEĆ First Nation on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia
Yeah, but that’s so important to reach out to the general public. I just want to cover one more question that is about your early field work days, especially with, people who have family. I don’t know about your kids, you know, leaving them behind and also, apart from the personal problems. Also, what are your thoughts on ethical interaction with local communities?
Yeah. So those are two important questions. Starting with the first one, I guess both when I was working in Somalia in my early days as a linguist, and then when I worked in southern Mexico for my doctoral research and currently in our work with Indigenous communities and Indigenous persons from literally all over the world ethics has been and continues to be fundamental. The sense of being peers. I never felt like I was this authority coming into the field and extracting information. I always felt I was a learner and that people were teaching me, rather than the other way around. All those projects have been totally cooperative. I was lucky to kind of drop into projects that were just like that. When we were working in Somalia, we worked with Somali linguists, and a key part of our work was to provide training and sort of leave the resources right there. The dictionary was actually something that the Somali government had requested of the Italian government, it was a project for them. What we did in Chiapas, the entire repository of knowledge, was available to the community and the work that we do now all this, for instance, all the stories that we publish, are on the web for free, and people can access them. We engage ourselves to never share any of the information or the images or whatever, without the permission of the people who write those stories, and by and large, they’re more than happy to, as I said, be represented. So, the ethical component is absolutely crucial so that there is no database that is not accessible to everybody else. So that’s absolutely a mainstay of the way I have worked and the way that Terralingua works.
This conversation is part of the series ‘How I got here’ interviewing ethnobotanists on their career path and experiences.
Interviewer and writer: Nishanth Gurav, PhD student, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague and SEB Student committee member
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nishanth-gurav-200081113/
Instagram: @nishanthgurav
Email: nishanthgurav64@gmail.com
Edited by: Marco Zanghi, 2nd year Masters student, Columbia University and SEB Student committee member
Email: mzanghi55@gmail.com
Society for Ethnobotany // Student Blog 
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