327 p., "This research is in response to the general academic need to examine how black histories have been conceived and written. Instead of folklore, I look to the Osainistas (healers and herbalists initiated into the secrets of Osain) in Cuba as possible partners in a conversation in collaborative conservation. My study of Lucumí (Yorùbá-derived) religion and Osain (deity of the sacred forests, herbs and healings) reveals an embodied understanding of nature through which the boundaries of subject as well as material and spiritual become collapsed and traversed through specialized communication techniques. Ways of knowing through invocations, praise poetry, music and dance are essential to nearly all Yorùbá ritual in which spiritual forces are actualized-evoking and thus invoking spirit into physical form. Yorùbá employ these embodied techniques to transcend boundaries and open communication among spirit, material, temporal and spatial worlds, particularly to understand and work with natural resources. This embodied knowledge is, as Yvonne Daniel argues in her book Dancing Wisdom , "rich and viable and should be referenced among other kinds of knowledge" (2005:4). This intermittently conducted 2003-06 ethnographic study, relies on what I am calling evocative ethnography, which is organized around ethnography using visual and cognitive techniques along with archival research to explore how Lucumí conceptualize nature and how I can translate these embodied perceptions." --The Author.
The countries of the Wider Caribbean Region (WCR) are linked economically by their trans-boundary living marine resources. The region is facing a continued decline of these resources. Science is improving our understanding of the human contributions to this decline, but national policies and programmes have not kept pace with this understanding. The Caribbean Regional Seas Programme and its Cartagena Convention and Protocols provide the regional legal framework for protection and sustainable management of the WCR's living marine and coastal resources. This article focuses on the Cartagena Convention's Protocol for biodiversity conservation, the Protocol Concerning Specially Protected Areas and Wildlife, arguing that governments and organizations need to significantly increase participation in this regional treaty regime to effectively address transboundary environmental challenges.
