Ethnoecology
Encyclopedia
Ethnoecology is the scientific
study of the way different groups of people in different locations understand ecosystem
s around them; the environments in which they live; and their relationship with these.
It seeks valid, reliable understanding of how we as humans have interacted with the environment and how these intricate relationships have been sustained over time.
The “ethno” (see ethnology
) prefix in ethnoecology indicates a localized study of a people, and in conjunction with ecology
, signifies people’s understanding and experience of ecologies around them.
, a cognitive anthropologists who did extensive linguistic and ethnoecological research in Southeast Asia. In his 1954 dissertation “The Relation of the Hanunoo Culture of the Plant World” he coined the term ethnoecology when he described his approach as “ethnoecological”.
After earning his PhD he began teaching at Columbia University and continued his research among the Hanunoo. In 1955, Conklin published one of his first ethnoecological studies. His “Hanunoo Color Categories” study helped scholars understand the relationship between classification systems and conceptualization of the world within cultures. In this experiment, Conklin soon realized that people in various cultures recognized colors differently because of their unique classification system. Within his results he found that the Hanunoo uses two levels of colors. The first level consists of four basic terms of colors; darkness, lightness, redness, and greenness. The second level was more abstract and consisted of hundreds of color classifications; texture, shininess, and moisture of objects also were used to classify objects.
Other anthropologists had a hard time understanding this color classification system because they often applied their own idea of color criteria the Hanunoo’s color classifications. Conklin’s studies were not only the breakthrough of ethnoecology, but they also helped develop the idea that other cultures conceptualize the world in their own terms, and helped to reduce ethnocentric views of those in western cultures. Other scholars such as Berlin, Breedlove, and Raven endeavored to learn more about other systems of environment classifications and to compare them to Western scientific taxonomies.
emphasizes the importance of how societies make sense of their own reality, and not the ethnographers. Ethnoecology borrows methods from linguistics and cultural anthropology, and seeks to understand how cultures perceive the world around them through their classifications and organization of their environment. Ethnoecology’s strength lies in the fact that it helps researchers understand how the society conceptualizes that environment in which they depend on for living, and that it can determine what a society considers “worth attending to” in their ecological system. This information can ultimately be useful for other approaches used in environmental anthropology
.
As a field of environmental anthropology
, ethnoecology has derived much of its characteristics from classic theorists and more modern theorists of that time. Franz Boas
was one of the first anthropologists to question unilineal evolution
, the belief that all societies follow the same, unavoidable path towards Western civilization. Boas strongly urged anthropologists to gather detailed ethnographic data from an emic standpoint in order to understand different cultures. Julian Steward was another anthropologist whose ideas and theories influenced the use ethnoecology. Steward coined the term cultural ecology
, and instead of focusing on global trends in evolution, he focused on how evolutionary paths in similar societies result in different trajectories; this was named multilineal evolution
. He took ideas from Boas and applied it to classical theories of cultural evolution. Both Boas and Steward contributed to the framework of ethnoecology in that they both believed that a researcher must use an emic standpoint, and that cultural adaptation to an environment is not the same for each society. Furthermore, Steward's cultural ecology provides an important theoretical antecedent and framework for ethnoecology. Another contributor was anthropologist Leslie White
, who emphasized the interpretation of cultures as systems
and laid the foundations for interpreting the intersection of cultural systems
with ecosystems
as well as their integration into a coherent whole.
(TEK), also known as Indigenous Knowledge, “refers to tacit knowledge in embodied in life experiences and reproduced in everyday behavior and speech” . In this context, TEK is a set of ideas including how the uses of plants and animals, how to best utilize the land for the greatest number of possibilities, the social institutions in which members of society are expected to navigate, and holistically, their worldview .
The study of Traditional Ecological Knowledge frequently includes critiques of the theoretical division between cultural systems and ecosystems, interpreting humans as an integral part of the whole. The supposed distinction between culture
and nature
is often claimed to be nonexistent. Humans, for example, can represent a keystone species
in a given ecosystem and can play critical roles in creating, maintaining, and sustaining it. They can contribute to processes such as pedogenesis
, seed dispersal
, and either increases or decreases in biodiversity
. They can also modify and condition animal behavior in either wild or domesticated species.
,” “traditional,” or “savage
,” a common trend in anthropological pursuits through the 20th century
. However, societies exist within a wide range of biomes, and have needs to know and understand clear and present dangers beyond those of harmful plants or how to get the best crop . Cruikshank contends that this may because many see Traditional Ecological Knowledge as a “static, timeless, and hermetically sealed” notion . Locked within time and space, there is no opportunity to innovate, and is therefore not found within the very new structures of a post-industrial society, such as that of the United States.
In this way, ethnoecologies may exist without the bounded notion of the Other. For example, social scientists have attempted to understand the markers inner-city youth use to identify a threat to their livelihood, including the wearing of gang colors, tattoos, or protrusions through clothes that may represent or be a weapon . Likewise, concepts are spread about the health and needs of the community as they are related to the area around them. Instilled with recognizing dangers at an early age, and who these threats come from, a set of beliefs are held by the members of the society on how to live in their country, city, or neighborhood. This broadening of the discipline (bordering on human ecology
) is important because it identifies the environment as not just the plants and animals, but also the humans and technologies a group of people have access to.
Similarly, social scientists have begun to use ethnoecological surveys in ethnographic studies in attempts to understand and address topics relevant in Western society as well as prevalent around the world . This includes researching the ways in which people view their choices and abilities in manipulating the world around them, especially in their ability to subsist.
This is especially relevant due to the role in which scientists have long understood how humans have worked for and against their environmental surroundings as a whole . In this way, the idea of a corresponding, but not adversarial, relationship between society and culture was once in itself baffling and defiant to the generally accepted modes of understanding in the earlier half of the twentieth century . As time went on, the understood dichotomy of nature and culture continued to be challenged by ethnographers such as Darrell A. Posey
, John Eddins, Peter Macbeth and Debbie Myers .
Also present in the recognition of indigenous knowledge in the intersection of Western science is the way in which it is incorporated, if at all. Dove and Carpenter contend that some anthropologists have sought to reconcile the two through a “translation,” bringing the ethnological understandings and framing them in a modern dialogue . In opposition to this paradigm is an attribution to the linguistic and ideological distinctiveness found in the nomenclature and epistemologies . This alone has created a subfield, mostly in recognition of the philosophies in ethnotaxonomy . To define ethnotaxonomy as new or different though, is inaccurate. It is simply placing a different understanding of a long-held tradition in ethnology, discovering the terms in which different peoples use to describe their world and worldviews .
It is worth noting that those who seek to use and understand this knowledge have actively worked to both enfranchise and disenfranchise the societies in which the information was held . Haenn has noted that in several instances of working with conservationists and developers, there was a concerted effort to change the ideas of environment and ecology held by the native groups to the land, while plundering any and all texts and information on the resources found there, therefore enabling a resettlement of the land and redistribution of the knowledge, favoring the outsiders .
Scientific method
Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of...
study of the way different groups of people in different locations understand ecosystem
Ecosystem
An ecosystem is a biological environment consisting of all the organisms living in a particular area, as well as all the nonliving , physical components of the environment with which the organisms interact, such as air, soil, water and sunlight....
s around them; the environments in which they live; and their relationship with these.
It seeks valid, reliable understanding of how we as humans have interacted with the environment and how these intricate relationships have been sustained over time.
The “ethno” (see ethnology
Ethnology
Ethnology is the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the origins, distribution, technology, religion, language, and social structure of the ethnic, racial, and/or national divisions of humanity.-Scientific discipline:Compared to ethnography, the study of single groups through direct...
) prefix in ethnoecology indicates a localized study of a people, and in conjunction with ecology
Ecology
Ecology is the scientific study of the relations that living organisms have with respect to each other and their natural environment. Variables of interest to ecologists include the composition, distribution, amount , number, and changing states of organisms within and among ecosystems...
, signifies people’s understanding and experience of ecologies around them.
History
Ethnoecology began with some of the early works of Harold ConklinHarold Conklin
Professor Emeritus Harold C. Conklin is an anthropologist who has conducted extensive ethnoecological and linguistic field research in Southeast Asia and is a pioneer of ethnoscience, documenting indigenous ways of understanding and knowing the world...
, a cognitive anthropologists who did extensive linguistic and ethnoecological research in Southeast Asia. In his 1954 dissertation “The Relation of the Hanunoo Culture of the Plant World” he coined the term ethnoecology when he described his approach as “ethnoecological”.
After earning his PhD he began teaching at Columbia University and continued his research among the Hanunoo. In 1955, Conklin published one of his first ethnoecological studies. His “Hanunoo Color Categories” study helped scholars understand the relationship between classification systems and conceptualization of the world within cultures. In this experiment, Conklin soon realized that people in various cultures recognized colors differently because of their unique classification system. Within his results he found that the Hanunoo uses two levels of colors. The first level consists of four basic terms of colors; darkness, lightness, redness, and greenness. The second level was more abstract and consisted of hundreds of color classifications; texture, shininess, and moisture of objects also were used to classify objects.
Other anthropologists had a hard time understanding this color classification system because they often applied their own idea of color criteria the Hanunoo’s color classifications. Conklin’s studies were not only the breakthrough of ethnoecology, but they also helped develop the idea that other cultures conceptualize the world in their own terms, and helped to reduce ethnocentric views of those in western cultures. Other scholars such as Berlin, Breedlove, and Raven endeavored to learn more about other systems of environment classifications and to compare them to Western scientific taxonomies.
Principles
EthnoscienceEthnoscience
Ethnoscience has been defined as an attempt "to reconstitute what serves as science for others, their practices of looking after themselves and their bodies, their botanical knowledge, but also their forms of classification, of making connections, etc." .-Origins of Ethnoscience:Ethnoscience’s...
emphasizes the importance of how societies make sense of their own reality, and not the ethnographers. Ethnoecology borrows methods from linguistics and cultural anthropology, and seeks to understand how cultures perceive the world around them through their classifications and organization of their environment. Ethnoecology’s strength lies in the fact that it helps researchers understand how the society conceptualizes that environment in which they depend on for living, and that it can determine what a society considers “worth attending to” in their ecological system. This information can ultimately be useful for other approaches used in environmental anthropology
Environmental Anthropology
Environmental anthropology is a sub-specialty within the field of anthropology that takes an active role in examining the relationships between humans and their environment across space and time.-Adaptation: environment over culture:...
.
As a field of environmental anthropology
Environmental Anthropology
Environmental anthropology is a sub-specialty within the field of anthropology that takes an active role in examining the relationships between humans and their environment across space and time.-Adaptation: environment over culture:...
, ethnoecology has derived much of its characteristics from classic theorists and more modern theorists of that time. Franz Boas
Franz Boas
Franz Boas was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology" and "the Father of Modern Anthropology." Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did...
was one of the first anthropologists to question unilineal evolution
Unilineal evolution
Unilineal evolution is a 19th century social theory about the evolution of societies and cultures. It was composed of many competing theories by various sociologists and anthropologists, who believed that Western culture is the contemporary pinnacle of social evolution...
, the belief that all societies follow the same, unavoidable path towards Western civilization. Boas strongly urged anthropologists to gather detailed ethnographic data from an emic standpoint in order to understand different cultures. Julian Steward was another anthropologist whose ideas and theories influenced the use ethnoecology. Steward coined the term cultural ecology
Cultural ecology
Cultural ecology studies the relationship between a given society and its natural environment as well as the life-forms and ecosystems that support its lifeways . This may be carried out diachronically , or synchronically...
, and instead of focusing on global trends in evolution, he focused on how evolutionary paths in similar societies result in different trajectories; this was named multilineal evolution
Multilineal evolution
Multilineal evolution is a 20th century social theory about the evolution of societies and cultures. It is composed of many competing theories by various sociologists and anthropologists...
. He took ideas from Boas and applied it to classical theories of cultural evolution. Both Boas and Steward contributed to the framework of ethnoecology in that they both believed that a researcher must use an emic standpoint, and that cultural adaptation to an environment is not the same for each society. Furthermore, Steward's cultural ecology provides an important theoretical antecedent and framework for ethnoecology. Another contributor was anthropologist Leslie White
Leslie White
Leslie Alvin White was an American anthropologist known for his advocacy of theories of cultural evolution, sociocultural evolution, and especially neoevolutionism, and for his role in creating the department of anthropology at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor...
, who emphasized the interpretation of cultures as systems
System
System is a set of interacting or interdependent components forming an integrated whole....
and laid the foundations for interpreting the intersection of cultural systems
Cultural system
A cultural system may be defined as the interaction of different elements of culture. While a cultural system is quite different from a social system, sometimes both systems together are referred to as the sociocultural system....
with ecosystems
Ecosystem
An ecosystem is a biological environment consisting of all the organisms living in a particular area, as well as all the nonliving , physical components of the environment with which the organisms interact, such as air, soil, water and sunlight....
as well as their integration into a coherent whole.
Traditional Ecological Knowledge
Traditional Ecological KnowledgeTraditional Ecological Knowledge
"Traditional Ecological Knowledge" is an academic term referring to aboriginal, indigenous, or other forms of traditional knowledges regarding local environmental resources. TEK can be defined as "a cumulative body of knowledge, practice, and belief, evolving by adaptive processes and handed down...
(TEK), also known as Indigenous Knowledge, “refers to tacit knowledge in embodied in life experiences and reproduced in everyday behavior and speech” . In this context, TEK is a set of ideas including how the uses of plants and animals, how to best utilize the land for the greatest number of possibilities, the social institutions in which members of society are expected to navigate, and holistically, their worldview .
The study of Traditional Ecological Knowledge frequently includes critiques of the theoretical division between cultural systems and ecosystems, interpreting humans as an integral part of the whole. The supposed distinction between culture
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
and nature
Nature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...
is often claimed to be nonexistent. Humans, for example, can represent a keystone species
Keystone species
A keystone species is a species that has a disproportionately large effect on its environment relative to its abundance. Such species play a critical role in maintaining the structure of an ecological community, affecting many other organisms in an ecosystem and helping to determine the types and...
in a given ecosystem and can play critical roles in creating, maintaining, and sustaining it. They can contribute to processes such as pedogenesis
Pedogenesis
Pedogenesis is the science and study of the processes that lead to the formation of soil ' and first explored by the Russian geologist Vasily Dokuchaev , the so called grandfather of soil science, who determined that soil formed over time as a consequence of...
, seed dispersal
Seed dispersal
Seed dispersal is the movement or transport of seeds away from the parent plant. Plants have limited mobility and consequently rely upon a variety of dispersal vectors to transport their propagules, including both abiotic and biotic vectors. Seeds can be dispersed away from the parent plant...
, and either increases or decreases in biodiversity
Biodiversity
Biodiversity is the degree of variation of life forms within a given ecosystem, biome, or an entire planet. Biodiversity is a measure of the health of ecosystems. Biodiversity is in part a function of climate. In terrestrial habitats, tropical regions are typically rich whereas polar regions...
. They can also modify and condition animal behavior in either wild or domesticated species.
Local Knowledge in Western Society
Within the discipline of Ethnoecology, there is a clear emphasis on those societies that are deemed “indigenousIndigenous peoples
Indigenous peoples are ethnic groups that are defined as indigenous according to one of the various definitions of the term, there is no universally accepted definition but most of which carry connotations of being the "original inhabitants" of a territory....
,” “traditional,” or “savage
Savage
- Places :Canada* Lower Savage Islands, Nunavut* Middle Savage Islands, NunavutSlovenia* Savage Lake, a karst lakeUnited States* Savage, Maryland* Savage, Minnesota...
,” a common trend in anthropological pursuits through the 20th century
. However, societies exist within a wide range of biomes, and have needs to know and understand clear and present dangers beyond those of harmful plants or how to get the best crop . Cruikshank contends that this may because many see Traditional Ecological Knowledge as a “static, timeless, and hermetically sealed” notion . Locked within time and space, there is no opportunity to innovate, and is therefore not found within the very new structures of a post-industrial society, such as that of the United States.
In this way, ethnoecologies may exist without the bounded notion of the Other. For example, social scientists have attempted to understand the markers inner-city youth use to identify a threat to their livelihood, including the wearing of gang colors, tattoos, or protrusions through clothes that may represent or be a weapon . Likewise, concepts are spread about the health and needs of the community as they are related to the area around them. Instilled with recognizing dangers at an early age, and who these threats come from, a set of beliefs are held by the members of the society on how to live in their country, city, or neighborhood. This broadening of the discipline (bordering on human ecology
Human ecology
Human ecology is the subdiscipline of ecology that focuses on humans. More broadly, it is an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary study of the relationship between humans and their natural, social, and built environments. The term 'human ecology' first appeared in a sociological study in 1921...
) is important because it identifies the environment as not just the plants and animals, but also the humans and technologies a group of people have access to.
Similarly, social scientists have begun to use ethnoecological surveys in ethnographic studies in attempts to understand and address topics relevant in Western society as well as prevalent around the world . This includes researching the ways in which people view their choices and abilities in manipulating the world around them, especially in their ability to subsist.
Epistemological Concerns
According to Dove and Carpenter, “environmental anthropology sits astride the dichotomy between nature and culture, a conceptual separation between categories of nature, like wilderness and parks, and those of culture, like farms and cities.” . It is inherent in this ideology that humans are a polluting factor violating a previously pristine locale .This is especially relevant due to the role in which scientists have long understood how humans have worked for and against their environmental surroundings as a whole . In this way, the idea of a corresponding, but not adversarial, relationship between society and culture was once in itself baffling and defiant to the generally accepted modes of understanding in the earlier half of the twentieth century . As time went on, the understood dichotomy of nature and culture continued to be challenged by ethnographers such as Darrell A. Posey
Darrell A. Posey
Darrell Addison Posey was an American anthropologist and biologist who vitalized the study of traditional knowledge of indigenous and folk populations in Brazil and other countries...
, John Eddins, Peter Macbeth and Debbie Myers .
Also present in the recognition of indigenous knowledge in the intersection of Western science is the way in which it is incorporated, if at all. Dove and Carpenter contend that some anthropologists have sought to reconcile the two through a “translation,” bringing the ethnological understandings and framing them in a modern dialogue . In opposition to this paradigm is an attribution to the linguistic and ideological distinctiveness found in the nomenclature and epistemologies . This alone has created a subfield, mostly in recognition of the philosophies in ethnotaxonomy . To define ethnotaxonomy as new or different though, is inaccurate. It is simply placing a different understanding of a long-held tradition in ethnology, discovering the terms in which different peoples use to describe their world and worldviews .
It is worth noting that those who seek to use and understand this knowledge have actively worked to both enfranchise and disenfranchise the societies in which the information was held . Haenn has noted that in several instances of working with conservationists and developers, there was a concerted effort to change the ideas of environment and ecology held by the native groups to the land, while plundering any and all texts and information on the resources found there, therefore enabling a resettlement of the land and redistribution of the knowledge, favoring the outsiders .