Ethnoecology

Ethnoecology is the study of human knowledge, perception, classification, and management of natural environments. Work in ethnoecology synthesizes the ecologist's understanding of the relationships between biological and physical components in ecosystems with the cognitive anthropologist's focus on the acquisition and expression of cultural information. For ethnoecologists, culture is seen as the knowledge necessary for ecologically adaptive behavior. Accordingly, culture is understood as an evolutionary process transmitted and replicated through language. Ethnoecologists emphasize the symbolic and functional roles of language, the analysis of which allows access to ecological knowledge. Research in ethnoecology integrates the empiricism of ethno-science with the functionalist perspective of ecological anthropology to understand fully the adaptive significance of cultural knowledge and the ecological relevance of human behaviors.

The term “ethnoecology” was first coined in 1954 by Harold Conklin, who conducted a systematic study of plant-naming strategies among the Hanunóo, a small-scale horticulture society in the Philippines. By examining the content and structure of Hanunóo plant nomenclature, Conklin demonstrated the hierarchical nature of ethnobotanical classification. Conklin's dissertation, though never published, was the first of its kind to adopt an empirical approach to understanding traditional ecological knowledge. While previous ethnobiological studies were concerned primarily with documenting human uses for living things, Conklin's research provided the first real insight into human conceptualization of a natural resource.

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, efforts to examine human ecological interactions proceeded within the rubric of ethnobotany, the study of relationships between people and plants, and to a lesser [Page 847]extent, ethnozoology, the study of human-animal relationships. Much of this early work was descriptive in nature and utilitarian in scope, devoted largely to building lists of plant and animal names and their corresponding cultural uses. Although these studies lacked a theoretical framework, they yielded essential discoveries about the common features used in traditional systems of plant and animal nomenclature.

By the mid-1960s and 1970s, ethnoecological research came under the influence of the cognitive theory of culture as a shared system of knowledge. Anthropologists interested in traditional environmental knowledge turned to the ethnoscientific approach, which regards the individual as the culture bearer and language as the medium in which information is encoded. Ecological resources were envisioned as semantic domains, constructed and categorized with reference to the shared similarity between constituent items. This approach, also called the particle model of cultural knowledge, focused on the construction of semantic domains according to imagistic associations. This process of “mapping” knowledge and classification of cultural categories ultimately resulted in folk taxonomies of numerous ecological domains, such as firewood in rural Mexico, birds of the Indonesian forests, soils in the Peruvian Andes, and ice in the Canadian Arctic. Subsequent cross-cultural research into folk classification has largely confirmed the existence of a finite set of principles governing human categorization of the living world.

More recently, the analysis of ecological domains has demonstrated how environmental knowledge is distributed among members of a cultural group. Studies of traditional ecological knowledge have found that some individuals know more than others about various plants, animals, and other natural resources, which is the result of intracultural factors such as age, gender, occupation, interest, education, and experience. For example, in societies where women control the cultivation and management of food crops, women are more likely to hold more detailed knowledge of cultivars. Conversely, where men participate as hunters in local subsistence, men generally control and communicate information about wild animals. Ethnoecologists have benefited from these discoveries by learning to identify those respondents who are most knowledgeable about specific resources. Variation in ecological knowledge may also stem from intercultural differences, such as religion, subsistence, acculturation, and species diversity in local habitats. Understanding cultural variation is crucial for ethnographers interested in devising strategies for protecting endangered biota from disappearing altogether from local ecosystems and from the cognitive inventory of a society's natural resources.

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