Format: ORAL

Alberto Betancourt Posada, Efran Cruz Marn

1 Department of Intercultural Development and Managament, Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, Mexico City, Mexico 2 Master Degree in Environmental Education, Autonomous University of Mexico City, Mexico city, Mexico

Capitalism and colonization systematically persecuted and destroyed the knowledge of indigenous peoples. Currently, numerous authors argue the need for a new paradigm based on the dialogue of knowledge, which reverses positivist reification, vindicates traditional knowledge, decolonizes knowledge and establishes epistemic justice. In this article we maintain that since Nikolai Vavlov postulated the theory of the centers of origin of cultivated plants, these have become an important space for dialogue of knowledge between various scientific disciplines and the traditional knowledge of numerous cultures on topics such as the conservation of wild and domesticated biodiversity. The beginning of this dialogue sparked a scientific revolution, transformed the organization of knowledge and contributed significantly to the birth of multiple ethnosciences. In this text we ask ourselves: what importance does it have for the history of science that the centers of origin have become a space for dialogue between scientific disciplines and traditional knowledge? And what benefits has this dialogue brought to the various scientific fields? What are the main threats to the continuity of the centers of origin? And finally, how could they protect themselves? To answer these questions we follow bibliographically in the footsteps of Nikolai Vavlov, we integrate a large corpus of authors from very diverse disciplines who recognize contributions of traditional knowledge; the factors that threaten them and the proposals to protect them. In our conclusions we agree with Casas and Parra (2016) who point out that farmers in the centers of origin constitute an evolutionary force, since of the total of 7000 species and hundreds of thousands of varieties of current agricultural and horticultural systems: “it is the result of evolutionary processes shaped by domestication, faster and more dynamic than those that occur in nature” (Casas and Parra, 2016).