Luisa Maffi

Luisa Maffi
Co-founder and Director of Terralingua

Luisa Maffi, Ph.D., is co-founder and Director of Terralingua, and spearheads Terralingua’s program of work. Luisa is a linguist, anthropologist, and ethnobiologist. She is one of the developers and proponents of the concept of biocultural diversity. In 1996, her interest in the relationships between language, knowledge, and the environment, and between linguistic, cultural, and biological diversity prompted her to co-found Terralingua and to launch its activities with the interdisciplinary conference “Endangered Languages, Endangered Knowledge, Endangered Environments” (Berkeley, California, U.S.A.). She was President of Terralingua from 1996 to 2006. Luisa conducted linguistic fieldwork in Somalia (1979-85), leading to the co-authoring of a dictionary of the Somali language, and anthropological fieldwork in Chiapas, Mexico (1988-93), leading to her doctoral dissertation on Tzeltal Maya concepts of health and illness (University of California, Berkeley, 1994). She is currently involved in Terralingua’s field project with the Rarámuri people in the Sierra Tarahumara of northern Mexico. She has published extensively on Somali and Mayan linguistics, color categorization, ethnomedicine, traditional ecological knowledge, language maintenance and revitalization, indigenous peoples’ linguistic and cultural rights, culture and conservation, and the relationships between linguistic, cultural, and biological diversity. Among her key publications are the edited book On Biocultural Diversity: Linking Language, Knowledge, and the Environment (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), the coauthored booklet Sharing a World of Difference: The Earth’s Linguistic, Cultural, and Biological Diversity (UNESCO,WWF, and Terralingua, 2003), the coedited volume Ethnobotany and Conservation of Biocultural Diversity (New York Botanical Garden Press, 2004), the coedited issue no. 13 of IUCN’s journal Policy Matters devoted to culture and conservation (2004), a review of the field of biocultural diversity published in Annual Review of Anthropology (2005), and the co-authored section on biodiversity and culture in the Global Environment Outlook: Environment for Development (GEO 4) Report (United Nations Environment Programme, 2007); and the co-authored book Biocultural Diversity Conservation: A Global Sourcebook (Earthscan, 2010), the outcome of one of Terralingua’s projects.