Ethnobiology

E. N. Anderson, Deborah Pearsall, Eugene Hunn, Nancy Turner, E. N. Anderson, Deborah Pearsall, Eugene Hunn, Nancy Turner

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780470547854
• eBook ISBN: 9781118015865
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Biology
• Index: Biological Sciences

The single comprehensive treatment of the field, from the leading members of the Society of Ethnobiology

The field of ethnobiology—the study of relationships between particular ethnic groups and their native plants and animals—has grown very rapidly in recent years, spawning numerous subfields. Ethnobiological research has produced a wide range of medicines, natural products, and new crops, as well as striking insights into human cognition, language, and environmental management behavior from prehistory to the present.

This is the single authoritative source on ethnobiology, covering all aspects of the field as it is currently defined. Featuring contributions from experienced scholars and sanctioned by the Society of Ethnobiology, this concise, readable volume provides extensive coverage of ethical issues and practices as well as archaeological, ethnological, and linguistic approaches.

Emphasizing basic principles and methodology, this unique textbook offers a balanced treatment of all the major subfields within ethnobiology, allowing students to begin guided research in any related area—from archaeoethnozoology to ethnomycology to agroecology. Each chapter includes a basic introduction to each topic, is written by a leading specialist in the specific area addressed, and comes with a full bibliography citing major works in the area. All chapters cover recent research, and many are new in approach; most chapters present unpublished or very recently published new research. Featured are clear, distinctive treatments of areas such as ethnozoology, linguistic ethnobiology, traditional education, ethnoecology, and indigenous perspectives. Methodology and ethical action are also covered up to current practice.

Ethnobiology is a specialized textbook for advanced undergraduates and graduate students; it is suitable for advanced-level ethnobotany, ethnobiology, cultural and political ecology, and archaeologically related courses. Research institutes will also find this work valuable, as will any reader with an interest in ethnobiological fields.

Chapter 1

Ethnobiology: Overview of a Growing Field

E. N. ANDERSON

Department of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside, CA

DEFINITION OF A FIELD

AN INTERDISCIPLINARY FIELD

LOCAL BIOLOGY AS SCIENCE

ETHNOBIOLOGY SPREADS OUT

ETHNOBIOLOGY GOES INTERNATIONAL

“TEK” AND ITS SORROWS

MOVING TOWARD MORE LOCAL PARTICIPATION

INTERFACING WITH POLITICAL ECOLOGY

ETHNOBIOLOGY AS FUTURE

A NOTE ON USAGE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

REFERENCES

God put the fever in Europe and the quinine in America in order to teach us the solidarity that should prevail among all the peoples of the earth.

—Bolivian folk botanist (quoted Whitaker 1954, p. 58)

DEFINITION OF A FIELD

Ethnobiology is the study of the biological knowledge of particular ethnic groups—cultural knowledge about plants and animals and their interrelationships. This textbook documents in summary form the progress and current status of ethnobiology. Ethnobiology remains a small, compact, and rather specialized field, developing from earlier work in ethnobotany and ethnozoology (Ford 2001, 2011; Hunn 2007). However, it covers a broad range of approaches, from strictly cultural and linguistic studies to strictly biological ones. Toward the former end are studies that focus on semantics: vocabulary, linguistic concepts, meaning and symbol, and art and religion. In the middle zone, where anthropology and biology fuse, are studies of how people actually think about their use and management of plants: ethnomedicine, food production and consumption, and ethnoecology. Further toward biology, but still using anthropological approaches, are the archaeological fields of archaeozoology and archaeobotany, in which we reconstruct past lifeways from biotic data. Studies of natural products chemistry, field agronomy, genetics, and crop evolution verge on purely botanical approaches, and as such are not included in the present book.

In this volume the field is divided into archaeological and ethnographic researches, and within that by major biological units: plants, animals, fungi, and aquatic life-forms. Special topics include food and foodways (a research area with a vast and often specialized literature), landscape, and traditional resource management. Since many chapters deal primarily with hunting-gathering peoples, a chapter on particular problems of agricultural studies has been added. Very important, indeed basic to our entire project, are chapters on the history of the field and on ethics.

AN INTERDISCIPLINARY FIELD

These various studies blend imperceptibly into their related (or parent) fields. Economic botany, once largely confined to prospecting for new crops and medicines, has moved close to ethnobotany. The “archaeo” fields have close ties with archaeology. Linguistic anthropologists link studies of native categories to linguistic and semantic theories. Major contributions to our knowledge of how people think about nonhuman lives have been made by anthropologists like Claude Lévi-Strauss (e.g., 1962), psychologists like Douglas Medin (Ross, 2011), and social thinkers like Bruno Latour (2004, 2005). Conversely, ethnoscience has contributed important understandings to linguistics and communication studies (Sanga and Ortalli 2003). Cognitivists draw on this work for studies of human cognition (e.g., Kronenfeld 1996).

Many students of traditional knowledge do not now call themselves ethnobiologists, although they usually use ethnobiological techniques. They have often gotten them from H. Russell Bernard’s text Research Methods in Anthropology (2006) or similar general works; ethnobiological methods have gone mainstream.

Ethnobiological knowledge is far too important to ignore. It is vitally important in the traditional cultures of the Indigenous and rural societies of the world, and these societies do not want to lose it. In many areas Indigenous people have now taken a leading role in recording, saving, and using this knowledge. Traditional knowledge is emerging as important, even necessary, for managing key resources and ecosystems. Ethnobiology continues to be a source for knowledge about medicines, crops, agricultural techniques, conservation and management, and much more.

Much of this knowledge is traditional, that is, learned long ago and passed on with varying degrees of faithfulness for at least two or three generations. However, ethnobiological knowledge can change rapidly. Every tradition had a beginning (cf. Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), and was itself a new creation in its time. Ecosystems change, new plants and animals arrive, and people learn new ways of thinking; ethnobiological systems change accordingly, and are typically flexible and dynamic. Field-workers have observed new knowledge being incorporated into systems around the world.

Ethnobiology has usually been concerned with small-scale, local, and Indigenous peoples. “Indigenous” originally meant “native to the place where they live”, as opposed to recent immigrants. Now, however, it has acquired a political meaning, never officially defined but generally accepted. (See, e.g., the United Nations in their Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, final version adopted in 2007, in which the definition is implicit but not explicit: http://www.cbc.ca/news/pdf/UN_declaration.pdf.) This restricts the term to colonized minorities, such as the Native peoples of the New World and Australia. It has become problematic in countries such as China, dominated by majorities that are Indigenous by the old standard and in which the minorities are not officially considered to be “colonized”. Such minorities are always referred to as “Indigenous” in the literature, however, and are treated as such by the United Nations. Much more problematic are Creole groups like those of Louisiana and the Caribbean. They have a rich ethnobiological tradition (Brussell 1997; Quinlan 2004). They developed where they now live, had no prior history, and often have a continuity reaching back hundreds of years. They are often minorities and are sometimes subjected to discrimination. They tend to arise from immigrant communities, and they remain hard to classify. Ethnobiologists have never restricted their studies to “Indigenous” groups (by any definition), but the question of indigeneity becomes serious in dealing with intellectual property rights and other ethical issues.

Some have contested the use of terms like “ethno-”, “folk”, and “traditional” for local knowledge, holding that such terms are pejorative. I find this attitude deplorable; the correct procedure should be to insist on the value of folk creations and traditional ideas and practices. Folk, ethnic, and traditional music, art, dance, drama, narrative, and food have certainly won full appreciation and acceptance from every sensitive observer. Folk knowledge deserves the same respect. Claiming that “folk”, “ethno-”, and “traditional” are pejorative terms is unacceptable snobbery.

LOCAL BIOLOGY AS SCIENCE

The extent to which local traditions are considered “science” depends on the definition of science used. The Latin word scientia covered cognitive knowledge in general, but certainly focused on knowledge of the wide outside world. The Latin historia naturalis more specifically covered the nonhuman environment, but could include humans in their relationship with nature. Both terms were brought into English fairly early. Other languages had similar words, not equivalent to modern “science” but comparable to scientia. The Chinese, for instance, had a rich and complex language for talking about knowledge of the “myriad things”, and had a thoroughly logical and scientifically analytic tradition (Harbsmeier 1998) including such things as case–control experiments as early as the second century BC (Anderson 1988). India and the Middle East had ancient and well established scientific traditions, in constant touch with and greatly inspired by the Greeks (see, e.g., Nasr 1976). Recently, arguments for viewing traditional Mesoamerican knowledge as science have been adduced very persuasively by Roberto Gonzalez (2001; Anderson 2000).

The broad consonance between folk and scientific systems around the world is devastating to the view that science is purely a cultural or social construction. People everywhere focus on inferred biological relationships, and see more or less the same (obvious) ones. Brent Berlin (1992) and Scott Atran (1990) pointed to striking similarities in cross-cultural naming as proof that humans have a natural tendency to see and classify the world in a particular way—among other things, inferring natural kinds (see also Hunn and Brown, 2011). Roy Ellen has criticized this view in a number of publications (notably Ellen 1993), but his critique stands more in the line of qualification than of refutation. “Bird” remains a universal concept even though cultures may differ on whether bats are birds or not. (The vast majority lumps them as birds; the Germanic world is quite unusual in having long grouped them with furry creatures, as zoologists do—German fledermaus, middle English reremouse, both meaning “flying mouse”.) The fact that some cultures class mushrooms with plants, some (correctly!) with animals (Lampman 2008), and some as totally separate (Yamin-Pasternak, 2011) is, again, less interesting than the fact that almost everybody recognizes them as a category.

On the other hand, the real differences between cultures (Ellen 1993) and the strong influence of utilitarian reality on systems (Hunn 1982, 2011) shows that science, whether folk or contemporary, is indeed a cultural construction. The point is that it is constructed on the basis of continual interaction with an external biological reality, which must be accurately apprehended to allow survival in society.

Modern laboratory science has diverged somewhat from traditional classifications (as they have from one another). Thus Carol Kaesuk Yoon (2009) sees a “clash” because genetics has now showed us that birds and dinosaurs are closer than lizards and dinosaurs, and for that matter humans and carp are closer than carp and sharks. Indeed, this somewhat problematizes the classic life-form categories “bird” and “fish”. However, traditional taxonomies may be more accurate than European science. The Yucatec Maya, for instance, lump branchtip-nesting orioles (three species known to them) as yuyum and palm-crown-nesting ones (another three species) as jonxa’anil (literally, “palm dwellers”). Genetic research has just confirmed that these are two separate clades within the genus Icterus. The Sahaptin of Washington State correctly distinguished two plants that botanists had failed to separate (Hunn and Brown, 2011).

“Science”, in the broad sense that includes these traditions, means knowledge of the natural world that is not only more or less accurate but that is predictive, defined by certain key postulates, and able to incorporate new knowledge. Gonzalez points out that the postulates need not always be true; the Zapotec he studied believe in the Earth God and deduce much from this. More to the point, the Zapotec share with all the Old World traditions a belief in “hot” and “cold” qualities that go beyond temperature to include many phenomena. This belief lasted in European scientific thought until about the end of the nineteenth century, and attenuated forms of it continue (Anderson 1996). Indeed, much earlier Western science is now discredited, from astrology to static continents. Some current international science, such as string theory, is controversial enough that many serious experts would class it with the Earth God. Science need not be true. In fact, a science made up of proven facts is a dead science; science must explore and challenge. Modern laboratory science is not some sort of perfect, flawless enterprise of modeling and analysis, but as human as any other activity (Latour 2004, 2005; Merton 1973; Wimsatt 2007).

Various modern definitions of science are more restrictive. Positivist traditions insist on explicit deduction and verification or falsification procedures (Kitcher 1993; Martin and McIntyre 1994; Popper 1959). Some add requirements for predictive mathematical modeling or highly controlled experimentation (laboratory or very systematic field trials). The latter would, of course, rule out not only folk science but all field sciences, from geomorphology and astronomy to most of field biology and paleontology. It would also rule out all Western science before the late nineteenth century. This seems excessive; cutting off modern science from the Greek, Near Eastern, and Renaissance, and even from the “Scientific Revolution” of the seventeenth century, does not seem useful. If we are to recognize ancient Greek science as such, we cannot deny the label to comparably elaborate and rationalized non-Western traditions.

Traditional knowledge, however, is not always separated from other activities or given a name equivalent to “science”. Gonzalez (2001) had to separate, artificially, Zapotec “science” f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Ethnobiology: Overview of a Growing Field
• Chapter 2: History of Ethnobiology
• Chapter 3: Ethics in Ethnobiology: History, International Law and Policy, and Contemporary Issues
• Chapter 4: From Researcher to Partner: Ethical Challenges and Issues Facing the Ethnobiological Researcher
• Chapter 5: The World According to Is’a: Combining Empiricism and Spiritual Understanding in Indigenous Ways of Knowing
• Chapter 6: Ethnozoology
• Chapter 7: Ethnobiology, Historical Ecology, the Archaeofaunal Record, and Interpreting Human Landscapes
• Chapter 8: Ethnobiology as a Bridge between Science and Ethics: An Applied Paleozoological Perspective
• Chapter 9: Ethnobotany: The Study of People–Plant Relationships
• Chapter 10: Reconstructing Past Life-Ways with Plants I: Subsistence and Other Daily Needs
• Chapter 11: Reconstructing Past Life-Ways with Plants II: Human–Environment and Human–Human Interactions
• Chapter 12: History and Current Trends of Ethnobiological Research in Europe
• Chapter 13: Ethnomycology: Fungi and Mushrooms in Cultural Entanglements
• Chapter 14: Ethnoecological Approaches to Integrating Theory and Method in Ethnomedical Research
• Chapter 15: Assessments of Indigenous Peoples’ Traditional Food and Nutrition Systems
• Chapter 16: Ethnoecology and Landscapes
• Chapter 17: Traditional Resource and Environmental Management
• Chapter 18: Ethnobiology and Agroecology
• Chapter 19: Linguistic Ethnobiology
• Chapter 20: Cognitive Studies in Ethnobiology: What Can We Learn About the Mind as Well as Human Environmental Interaction?
• Chapter 21: The Symbolic Uses of Plants
• Chapter 22: Learning Ethnobiology: Creating Knowledge and Skills about the Living World
• Plates
• Index