Ethnoecology
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ethnoecology is the study of the way different groups of people in different locations understand their environment and their relationship within it. It seeks to understand how we as humans have interacted with the environment and how these intricate relationships have been sustained over time.
It encourages the understanding that there are multiple ways of understanding the world, and that the Western scientific understanding of the world is but one way of viewing the environment. Different outlooks are influenced by different, varying factors, such as the local environment, the historical context, and the objectives of the people. Knowledge of an environment is situated in a particular context, and depending on what that context calls for, different knowledges will be made present or absent.
Ethnoecology not only studies what these local knowledges are but also how they affect action, as a knowledge can lead to certain behaviours. It is an understanding of other people’s understandings. This helps give insight on why certain actions are taken, how they are motivated, and why other actions are not accepted or rebelled against.
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[edit] History of ethnoecology
Harold Conklin’s 1954 dissertation “The Relation of the Hanunuo Culture of the Plant World” used the term “the ethnoecological approach”. The “ethno” prefix in ethnoecology indicates a localized study of a people, and in conjunction with ecology, that people’s understanding and experience of the world around them.
This finding that other people, particularly non-literate societies, had wide and detailed systems of knowledge of their environment stimulated thoughts in Westerner scholars.
Scholars, such as Berlin, Breedlove, and Raven pursued the endeavor to learn more about other systems of environment classifications and to compare them to Western scientific taxonomies. This sees an universality to all patterns of classifications, as if all things can be seen the same way in all cultures, given that different organization systems seem to match the Western systems. A sense of Western superiority can be detected in the pratice of comparing all other systems to the Western classification categories. Berlin believes that all biological features and organisms have inherent categories that people are able to perceive, regardless of their own cultural influence, as if there is a biological reality that is the same for everyone. The environmental categories that exist arise because they are real and cannot be arbitrarily created by culture.
Other scholars, like Conklin, felt that this showed other societies had ways of thinking that differed from Western science but were just as valid, dispelling the notion that native knowledge is simple and ignorant. This viewpoint relates to the idea that each local knowledge is tied into its particular socio-cultural environment and so there is individual variation among local knowledges. Categories can be seen as coming from the particular needs and utilities of a people to live. A group that depends specifically on a particular kind of animal for subsistence will develop more precise and refined categories for that animal compared to the more general categories for an animal that does not strongly factor into their lives.
[edit] Current ethnoecology
Now it is more common to understand that there is a multitude of ways to view the world, and that despite the fact that we all may see the same landscape, and objectively agree that there are features that exist in that landscape, how we interpret and understand this landscape can greatly differ. What is picked out and highlighted as areas of significance, or overlooked and ignored can vary depending on a person’s particular understanding of the world. This particular viewpoint will inform how that person behaves, in motivation, action, or relation to the environment before him or her.
The application of systems of ecological knowledge is now the focus of ethnoecology. Now that the period of data-gathering for the sake of data is largely over, it is the connection of information to action that is worth studying.
[edit] References
- Nazarea, Virginia D. (2006). "A View from a Point: Ethnoecology as Situated Knowledge", in Nora Haenn and Richard Wilk: The Environment in Anthropology: A Reader in Ecology, Culture, and Sustainable Living. New York: New York University Press, 34-39.
