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Silenced Knowdleges and Memories in the Tropics (01)

Where Knowledge Has Many Names

Tropical Knowledge Systems Beyond Western Science

The Landscape That Remembers

Walk deep enough into the rainforest, and the air itself thickens with memory. The scent of damp earth, rotting leaves, and fungal mycelia expanding and connecting everything clings to your skin. A sudden downpour, so brief it barely pools in the undergrowth, releases an extra scent of something ancient — something that knows. Something that remembers itself.

The trees here have names you won't find in scientific journals or in your worn-out botanical guide. They are often called what they do — the reasons they exist. The ones whose roots and stalks embrace other trees. The ones that whisper old songs when the wind shuffles their broad leaves. Even the ones that heal burns, silence fevers, or call the rains.

These names are not written, but they endure. They are passed from voice to voice, hand to hand, generation to generation, through fingers tracing the veins of branches, through feet pressing into the ground, through new voices honoring the old, gone ones.

Somehow, science has always been here. It simply wasn't written in academic terms.

The Myth of Discovery

A story sits in libraries, archives and museums, about the great age of discovery — how the tropics were found, recognized and studied. How their secrets were unlocked and stored in printed leaves, filling kilometers of shelves somewhere far away. It is a story of Western science arriving to illuminate, understand and explain an unknown world.

But the tropics were never unknown.

Before the first naturalist set foot in the Amazon, the Orinoquia or the islands in Guna Yala, and before the first librarian or archivist started cataloging what those naturalists produced, people had already mapped and described their rivers, mountains and coasts — not on paper, but in oral narratives, in graphic documents, in tridimensional artifacts. There they carefully collected and transmitted the taste and the movement of the waters, the infinite colours of the forests, the shapes of the stones, the voices of the animals. They charted the flights of birds and butterflies, the smell of ferns and mosses, the deep logic of the soils...

Yet, when these landscapes entered scientific archives, libraries, and herbarium collections, they arrived stripped of their original context. Pressed leaves labeled with academic names bore no mention of the hands that first identified them. Zoological descriptions cited the expeditions that collected specimens, but not the guides who led them to the beetles, the shells or the orchids. The written record remained, but the original knowledge keepers vanished — misclassified, untranslated, overlooked. Ninguneados.

To call this original knowledge "primitive" was a common habit back then — perhaps a mistake, perhaps even an insult. These were not "myths"; they were methodologies. These were not mere "traditions"; they were experiments repeated over generations. If these systems had been housed in universities, written in the formal language of science, they would be celebrated as some of humanity's greatest intellectual achievements.

But they were spoken. And so, they were ignored.

Tropical Science Before the Scientists

We can trace the fingerprints of these lost narratives in the very landscape itself.

The Amazon (or the Congo, or Borneo), long assumed by Western ecologists to be a pristine, untouched wilderness, bears the marks of human hands. Pockets of unusually fertile soil —terra preta, or Amazonian dark earths— reveal the remnants of an ancient, engineered ecology. Indigenous communities transformed the land through controlled burning, organic composting, and microbe-rich amendments, creating some of the most resilient soils in the world. The forest, far from being wild and untouched, is in many ways a human-made ecosystem.

In Mesoamerica, the milpa system of maize, beans, and squash was not just a farming method, but a form of agroecological engineering. Until today, these crops support and protect one another, maintaining soil fertility while minimizing pests. This was not subsistence farming — it was an intelligent, self-renewing system designed for sustainability.

Across the Caribbean (but also in Polynesia and Melanesia), coastal communities developed intricate governance systems for coral reef management. Fishing restrictions were not imposed by governments but woven into chants, ceremonies, and taboos that ensured the long-term survival of marine ecosystems. It was scientific conservation, encoded in culture.

Each of these systems was rooted in deep observation, trial and error, and adaptation over time. They were empirical, data-driven, and designed for resilience. They were based on a deep knowledge of biodiversity — and on the rhythms of its music and the identity of its performers.

What Happens When Knowledge is Erased?

The failure to recognize these systems as what they actually were was not, in general terms, an accident. It was an assertion of power. For to name something is to claim it. And to erase the names that came before is to make the people who spoke them invisible.

For centuries, explorers documented biodiversity with no mention of the people who first knew them. Western medicine extracted cures from forests without crediting the healers who first unlocked their chemistry. Colonial cartographers traced rivers they had been guided through, and stamped them with names of their own choosing.

This isn't just a historical footnote. It still happens today.

Pharmaceutical companies patent plant-based medicines that have been used for centuries, with scarce or no recognition of the communities that preserved them. Conservationists create protected areas that sometimes end up displacing the very people who maintained biodiversity there for generations. Scientific publications rely on local guides, interpreters, and field assistants whose contributions usually remain invisible in the final citation, in an intolerable exercise of academic extractivism.

The records of this erasure exist. In libraries, archives, museums... In mislabeled specimens. In footnotes that mention "a native informant" without a name. In field notes where knowledge was extracted but never acknowledged.

The paper trails of academic extractivism remain, buried in the margins of history. But libraries, archives and museums do not just document loss — they may be capable of restoring it as well. If we look closely enough, if we are willing to read beyond the quote, beyond the catalog entry, beyond the Latin name, we may find the names that were silenced, the knowledge that was never truly lost — only waiting to be recognized.

This is not just an issue of fairness. It is an issue of accuracy. How much knowledge have we lost because we failed to recognize it when it wasn't written in a familiar form?

A Future Where Science is a Dialogue, Not a Monologue

Recognizing these knowledge systems does not mean rejecting Western science — it means expanding it. It means understanding that scientific knowledge is not something that was introduced to the tropics, but something that has always existed there.

The future of conservation, climate resilience, and biodiversity research depends on listening to the archives that are stored not just in books, but in landscapes, languages, and living memory. Documents, all of them — no matter their form, no matter their material.

It also depends on how we read those documents. The role of libraries and archives is not just to store knowledge and memory, but to interrogate it. To examine their own silences. To revisit the maps, the manuscripts, the specimens, and ask: What is missing? Whose names were left out? What knowledge has been waiting to be heard?

Science should not be a monologue. It should be a dialogue between worlds, between histories, between ways of knowing.

The tropics were never discovered. But maybe it is time we rediscover how to listen.

About this post

Text: Edgardo Civallero.
Publication date: 27.02.2025.
Picture: Flower of ceibo barrigón (Pseudobombax septenatum) fallen in the forest of Barro Colorado Island Natural Monument, Panama. @ Edgardo Civallero 2025.