Ethnoecology
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Ethnoecology is the scientific study of the way different groups of people in different locations understand ecosystems 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 ethology) 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.
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[edit] History
Harold Conklin’s 1954 dissertation “The Relation of the Hanunuo Culture of the Plant World” used the term “the ethnoecological approach”.
Finding that other people, particularly non-literate societies, had wide and detailed systems of knowledge of their environment stimulated the thoughts of Westerner scholars.
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.
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 ethnoecological scholars feel other peoples have ways of thinking that differ from Western science but are just as valid. This view sees each local knowledge as being tied into its particular socio-cultural environment, with individual variation among local knowledges. Categories are seen as coming from the particular needs of a people. 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] Principles
Ethnoecology encourages a greater appreciation of the multiple ways other people have 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.
[edit] Discipline
During the 1980's[1], people documenting indigenous knowledge systems found the objects of each of ethnobiology's subdisciplines often overlap; are often difficult to separate out from each other; and are so interconnected that it made no practical sense to distinguish between them[2].
This experience shared by many people doing ethnobiology (especially within ecological anthropology) led to an increasing preference by practioners to refer to their various ethnobiological endeavours as ethnoecology[2]
Some now consider ethnoecology to be such an appropriately broad and encompassing term that they prefer it to ethnobiology when naming and referring to the overarching discipline they practice[3].
[edit] Bibliography
- ELLEN, Roy (2006) "Introduction" to Special Edition of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. S1-S22.
- MARTIN, Gary J (2004) Ethnobotany: A Methods Manual. Earthscan.
- NAZAREA, Virginia D. (2006) "A View from a Point: Ethnoecology as Situated Knowledge" in Nora Haenn and Richard Wilk (Eds) The Environment in Anthropology: A Reader in Ecology, Culture, and Sustainable Living. New York University Press. New York. Pages 34-39.
- POSEY, D. (1984). "Ethnoecology as applied anthropology in Amazonian development." Human Organization. No. 43. Pages 95-107.
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