Although ethnobiology has been criticized for having a preoccupation with list making and lacking theoretical rigor, a surprising number of methodological advances have come from research on human knowledge and use of, and interactions with, plants and animals. Even more, descriptive studies have been valuable to the field in that these basic inventories have provided the foundation for more theoretical studies (Davis 1991). Advances in ethnobiological methods have had the largest impacts in the social sciences within the anthropological subfields of cognitive anthropology and, to a lesser extent, medical anthropology and ecological anthropology. Of course, the borrowing of research techniques is seldom unidirectional from one field to another. Also, researchers often draw from several subfields at once, further complicating an attempt to trace the origin of a technique to a particular subfield. Rather than engage in the task of determining whether a contribution comes from the field of ethnobiology proper, I provide a few examples of how ethnobiologically oriented studies by anthropologists and other social scientists have led to advances in our ability to conduct rigorous fieldwork leading to theoretical insights. Thus, this brief review is not meant to be comprehensive but instead will illustrate some general trends and themes in ethnobiology related to research techniques and methods. Prior to the mid-1950s, research in ethnobiology was primarily descriptive. A large amount of data was collected regarding traditional names and uses of plants and animals for a number of sociolinguistic groups. Within anthropology, researchers were increasingly becoming concerned with understanding emic perceptions of the world. This approach, known as ethnoscience, dated back to the ethnographic approaches of Boas and his students but was relatively obscure until the 1950s. A detailed account of this fascinating history is provided inD’Andrade (1995). With a newfound popularity, anthropologists working in an ethnoscientific framework began looking at domains of cross-cultural importance, most notably kinship, through a nexus of ethnographic, psychological, and linguistic frameworks. A search for other domains of widespread cross-cultural significance led ethnographers to investigate the nomenclature and classification of plants and animals. Harold Conklin’s (1954) exhaustive doctoral dissertation research on Hanunóo ethnobotany was highly influential at the time and demonstrated the detailed knowledge that indigenous peoples have of their flora.Adecade later, Brent Berlin began his researchwith the Tzeltal Maya and found striking similarities to Conklin’s findings regarding ethnobiological classification (Berlin, Breedlove, and Raven 1974). A deceptively simple questioning frame based on the question, “What are the names of each kind ofXin the world?” was developed that led to the elicitation of native taxonomies. An early use of this was by Metzger and Williams (1966) in their study of Tzeltal Maya categories of firewood. Despite the significance of firewood as a crucial element of survival for the Tzeltal Maya (an importance that continues to this day), this and other ethnoscientific studies were criticized for their focus on supposedly trivial aspects of culture (Berreman 1966). This type of criticism possibly helped prolong the obscurity of ethnobiology as an academic discipline and may have led to many of its contributions to research methods being ignored or overlooked. However, important work continued and ultimately led to the formulation of general principles of ethnobiological classification (Berlin 1992).
Along the way, ethnobiologists found that classification, while patterned, also contained a great deal of variation, depending on a number of contexts related to both the cultural significance of the domain and cognitive variation from informants. Boster’s (1985, 1986) work on Aguaruna classification of manioc varieties was instrumental in demonstrating that the more an informant agrees with others about a particular domain, the more knowledge that informant will have. This insight soon led to the development of cultural consensus analysis, a research technique that has proven to have a broad range of application throughout the social sciences (Romney, Weller, and Batchelder 1986). A different take on identifying consensus in ethnobiology was concurrently developed by Trotter and Logan (1986). Rather than reduce variation, some researchers have sought to measure and quantify it in relation to ethnobiological knowledge. The Shannon-Weiner index, derived from information theory in 1940s, is a measure that takes into account the number of different responses (richness) combined with the distribution of those responses (evenness). Begossi (1996) suggested a novel application for this index with ethnobotanical data on use categories of plants. Ethnobiologists have been at the forefront of participatory methods, developing innovative strategies for training indigenous collaborators (Berlin 1984) and conservation of local resources (Ticktin et al. 2002).Methodological advances have also come from the innovative use of visual stimuli in ethnobiology (Boster and Johnson 1989; Johnson and Griffith 1998). Although there are relatively few ethnobiologists, ethnobiological studies have made many contributions to research methods in the social sciences.
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