Ethnoecology

Ethnoecology is the scientific study of how different groups of people living in different locations understand the ecosystems around them, and their relationships with surrounding environments.

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 ethnology) prefix in ethnoecology indicates a localized study of a people, and in conjunction with ecology, signifies people’s understanding and experience of environments around them. Ecology is the study of the interactions between living organisms and their environment; enthnoecology applies a human focused approach to this subject. The development of the field of lies in applying indigenous knowledge of botany and placing it in a global context.

Ethnoecology began with some of the early works of Dr. Hugh Popenoe an agronomist and tropical soil scientist with the University of Florida and the National Science Foundation and National Research council and Drl Harold Conklin, a cognitive anthropologist who did extensive linguistic and ethnoecological research in Southeast Asia. In his 1954 dissertation “The Relation of the Hanunoo Culture of the Plant World” he coined the term ethnoecology when he described his approach as “ethnoecological”.

After earning his PhD he began teaching at Columbia University and continued his research among the Hanunoo. In 1955, Conklin published one of his first ethnoecological studies. His “Hanunoo Color Categories” study helped scholars understand the relationship between classification systems and conceptualization of the world within cultures. In this experiment, Conklin soon realized that people in various cultures recognized colors differently because of their unique classification system. Within his results he found that the Hanunoo uses two levels of colors. The first level consists of four basic terms of colors; darkness, lightness, redness, and greenness. The second level was more abstract and consisted of hundreds of color classifications; texture, shininess, and moisture of objects also were used to classify objects.

Other anthropologists had a hard time understanding this color classification system because they often applied their own idea of color criteria the Hanunoo’s color classifications. Conklin’s studies were not only the breakthrough of ethnoecology, but they also helped develop the idea that other cultures conceptualize the world in their own terms, and helped to reduce ethnocentric views of those in western cultures. Other 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.

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