Abstract
While Claude Lévi-Strauss celebrated indigenous knowledge as early as 1962, it was not until thirty years later, in 1992, that the Rio Convention on Biological Diversity officially recognized, for the first time, the importance of indigenous knowledge in the face of major ecological challenges. What is the nature and multiple regimes of traditional knowledge? What worlds can they open up, by their very existence, to academic knowledge? These are the questions we must now ask ourselves.