Who is interdisciplinary? Two views, two goals, professionals and farmers

The notion of interdisciplinarity looks attractive on paper but remains poorly defined. This creates many difficulties in its application, especially when natural sciences are combined with social sciences, and even more so in applied research involving local communities. Taking a case study of fish farming in Tabasco, Mexico, this paper argues that a significant barrier to addressing farmers’ problems is that farmers think in interdisciplinary terms, while professionals are still ruled by disciplinary boundaries. Farmers address farming problems in the same way they face all other life situations, in other words not by labelling various components of a problem ‘ physical’ , ‘ social’ or ‘ economic’ , and by looking for links between them, but by conceiving of problems as a whole, to which solutions must be found by the analysis of total reality. This creates a communication gap between professionals and farmers, which results in failures when development programmes are implemented. The recognition of the interdisciplinary approach of farmers in analysing their reality is not the solution to the problem per se, since science has been constructed around separate disciplines and so adoption of the farmers’ approach looks unscientific. The challenge is thus to present farmers with ways of analysing farming problems in organised ways. This will require the creation of new research methodologies and will necessitate changes to the academic writing of interdisciplinary research.