Ethnoecology, Ecosemiosis And Integral Ecology In Salinas Grandes (Argentina)

The natural resources’ management in Salinas Grandes is based on popular knowledge, understanding and interpreting nature through signs, and acting over it. New sociopolitical conditions forced peasants to modify their traditional practices, restructuring their life strategies in order to achieve social reproduction. The objective of this paper is to describe, measure and analyze the perception on nature of the inhabitants of Salinas Grandes through an ethnoecological and ecosemiotical approach, and to establish the relationship between this perception and the use of natural resources. Local perceptions on climate, soil, geomorphology, water, environments, vegetation, fauna, technology and management practices of natural resources were surveyed. Popular knowledge and individual initiative boost a higher social resilience of the group to stresses. The resilience of the local semiosphere can be measured by the set of knowledge of the community measured as the entropy of the information about the behavior of the ecosystem. Protocols for construction of development programs should be reviewed, to adequate traditional technologies instead of applying new ones, learning and apprehending the keys in the perception of local communities, incorporating these together with scientific knowledge, into an Integral Ecology covering the four dimensions: Experience-Culture-Behavior-System.