Costa Rican Traditional Knowledge According to Local Experiences Plants, Animals, Medicine and Music

This book offers ten chapters dealing with Costa Rican traditional knowledge. Each chapter presents a transcription from a talk given to an interdisciplinary audience at Universidad de Costa Rica.  The chapters address the links between knowledge and culture in a variety of cases, including black, indigenous and "white" knowledge in both rural and city contexts, with an emphasis on gender issues.

This book is the first of its class and its transcriptions have been annotated for easier reading.

All social scientists interested in Latin American culture or in cognitive topics in general will benefit from reading it.

Everyday and Ceremonial Bribri Songs.- Percussion Music of the Atlantic Coast.- Botanical Knowledge and Ethnomedicine Among the Bribri.- Zoological Classification in the Bribri Culture.- Ethnoagriculture: What Can we Learn from Farmers?.- Abortion, Sterilization and Medical Necessity in Costa Rica.- Lunar Ethnoastronomy of the Bribri.- Gender Relations in Costa Rican Traditional Knowledge.

Manuel Ortega-Rodríguez is Professor of Physics at Universidad de Costa Rica, where he has also held courtesy appointments in the Music, Literature and Architecture Departments.  He lectures on History of Science, Ethnoastronomy, the Physics of Music and Language, Visual Intelligence for Physicists, and Complexity. He has co-authored a novel that explores the intersections of Art and Physics.

Hugo Solis is an assistant professor in the Physics Department at University of Costa Rica where he teaches the course in History of Science. His current research interests are computational cosmology, complexity and the cultural studies of scientific knowledge. He is a member of the Free Software Foundation where he has contributed code to some free software projects and is the author of the Kivy Cookbook from Packt Publishing. Currently, He is in charge of the IFT, a Costa Rican scientific non-profit organization for the multidisciplinary practice of physics.