Ecological Calendars for Climate Adaptation in Savnob and Roshorv, Bartang Valley, Tajikistan

Abstract

This thesis presents elements of ecological calendars and perspectives of climate change in the villages of Savnob and Roshorv, in the Bartang valley of Tajikistan in the Pamir Mountains. This body of work serves as preliminary research for the Ecological Calendars for Climate Adaptation in the Pamirs project, led by Dr. Karim-Aly Kassam at Cornell University and funded by the National Science Foundation and the Belmont Forum. Fundamentally, this research addresses issues of food security in subsistence communities in the context of climate change, while acknowledging the critical role of ecological knowledge holders in building adaptive capacity for future change. Past scholarship on traditional ecological knowledge, feminist political ecology, decolonial methodologies, indigenous feminisms, and critical ethnography have informed the research methodologies and analysis. I use Kassam’s (2009) Human Ecological Lens as a tool in analyzing areas of complexity and nuance in this research: diversity of knowledges, microclimate and biological diversity, contexts of Soviet history, and embodied knowledge. I look towards a Decolonial Feminist Political Ecology framework (Rocheleau and Nirmal 2015) in situating future research.