Indigenous peoples possess enormously rich and articulated knowledge of the natural world. A major goal of research in anthropology and ethnobiology as well as ecology, conservation biology, and development studies is to find ways of integrating this knowledge with that produced by academic and other institutionalized scientific communities. Here I present a challenge to this integration project. I argue, by reference to ethnographic and cross-cultural psychological studies, that the models of the world developed within specialized academic disciplines do not map onto anything existing within traditional beliefs and practices for coping with nature. Traditional ecological knowledge is distributed across a heterogeneous array of overlapping practices within Indigenous cultures, including spiritual and ritual practices that invoke categories, properties, and causal-explanatory models that do not in general converge with those of the academic sciences. In light of this divergence I argue that we should abandon the integration project, and conclude by sketching a notion of knowledge coordination as a possible successor framework.

土著人民对自然世界拥有极为丰富和明确的知识。人类学和民族生物学以及生态学，保护生物学和发展研究的主要目标是寻找将这些知识与学术界和其他制度化科学界所产生的知识相结合的方法。在这里，我向这个集成项目提出了挑战。我认为，通过参考人种学和跨文化心理学研究，在专门的学术学科中发展起来的世界模型不会映射到传统观念和实践中存在的任何事物以应对自然。传统生态知识分布在土著文化内各种不同的重叠实践中，包括涉及类别的精神和仪式实践，属性和因果解释模型通常不会与学术科学的模型收敛。鉴于这种分歧，我认为我们应该放弃整合项目，并通过勾勒知识协调的概念作为可能的后继框架来结束。