Ethnoecology

'Ethnoecology" emerged as that branch of the new ethnography which describes people's conceptual models of their environment. It is distinguished primarily by its subject matter, which includes classifications of plants (Berlin et al. 1974, Friedberg 1979), animals (Blumer 1957, 1967, Kesby 1979), land forms (Conklin 1967), and so on, and shares its methods and underlying premises with the broader field of 'cognitive anthropology' (Tyler 1969) to which it belong.

Source: https://inamuse.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/peralatan-sehari-hari-suku-wana-di-cagar-alam-morowali-1/ 

The frefix 'ethno-' is used to denote a field of knowledge defined from the viewpoint of the people being studied (Fowler 1977:216) and is similar in meaning to the term 'folk' (as in 'folk knowledge', 'folk model', 'folk medicine'). Thus, ethnoecology is a branch of 'ethnomedicine', 'ethnobiology' and so on. The use of the frefix 'ethno-' is essentially 'ethnocentric'; it impies that those bodies of knowledge not labelled 'ethno-', usually those generated by academic study in the 'western' tradition, are somehow privileged: 'Scientific knowledge, as we conceive it, has cross-cultural validity; ethnoscience, on the other hand, refers to knowledeg that is indigeneous to a particular language an culture' (Glick 1964:273).


Through its early development, cognitive anthropology was dominated by formal methods of data collection. It was understood that, in the course of everyday life, people's knowledge of the world is exposed in piecemeal fashion and that, however long an anthropologist might spend enganged in participant observation, they would never learn everything that was known on a particular subject (Milton 1981:138). Formal methods were designed to elicit large amount of knowledge quickly. Informants were asked, among other things, to compile exhaustive list of term, to sort written statements into piles according to their similarity (Cancian 1975), or to complete sentence by supplying missing words (D'Andrade 1976). Some formal methods involved systematic questioning of the kind anthropologists had developed for recording genealogies (Black 1969).

All such techniques require the analyst to exercise a considerable degree of control over the way in which knowledge is revealed. The everyday purpose and contexts in which people use knowledge were ignored in favour of what Ellen called 'naive mechanical exercises in elicitation' (1982:233). As anthropologists became more aware of the importance of context  in understanding people's knowledge, they turned to more informal methods which anthropologists most often employ: interviews (Agar and Hobbs 1985), direct observation and participation.

These methods enabled them to study knowledge in use (Dougherty and Keller 1985, Hunt 1985), and to participate in its learning and invocation (Gatewood 1985). It would probably be fair to say that, in this transition, cognitive anthropologist largely lost its distinctive character. The description of people's cultural perspective on the world has simply become a part, perhaps the main part, of what ethnographers do, and whether or not such descriptions include a society's 'ethnoecology' depends on whether ecology itself is a particular interest of the analyst.

At the same time, the theoretical concern with how knowledge is elicited and described evolved into a broader interest in the process whereby knowledge, including ethnographic knowledge, is produced (Crick 1982). This interest is reflected in debates on ethnographic writing (Clifford 1986), and in the recent emergence of a processual concept of culture.

This article from: Milton, K. (1996). Environmentalism and Cultural Theory: Exploring the Role of Anthropology in Environmental Discourse. London and New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. P. 49-50.