Abstract
That which we assume to be a distinct scholarly discipline today may not be so tomorrow; boundaries shift, and territories become redefined in academia just as they do in geopolitics. And so, it would not be surprising to see within just a few decades the methodological pretexts of ethnobiological inquiries once again overhauled as they have been several times already. We anticipate and in fact welcome the re-delineation of the boundaries of this discipline as a result of advances made in political ecology and in other fields as well.
Although the term “political ecology” was first used in print more than 80 years ago (Thone 1935), it has been more widely used over the last 30 years in a particular manner by cultural ecologists and human geographers. Since anthropologist Eric R. Wolf published his seminal article entitled “Ownership and Political Ecology,” social scientists have used the concept of political ecology to balance their understanding of “the pressures emanating from the larger society and the exigencies of the local ecosystem” (Wolf 1972:202). As noted a quarter century ago by applied anthropologist Thomas Sheridan (1988:xvi), this is because it has become increasingly necessary to “wed the approaches of political economy, which focus upon society's place in a region, nation, or “world sphere,” with those of cultural ecology, which examine adaptations to local environmental and demographic factors.”
We are of the opinion that there is also a need to wed insights from political ecology with ethnobiology, which has largely ignored the global and macro-economic pressures on the so-called “traditional” agricultural, fishing, hunting and foraging cultures with which ethnobiologists have characteristically been engaged. Despite the broad use of both the concepts and methodologies of political ecology in geography, anthropology and history, articles in the Journal of Ethnobiology have seldom used this term, and it is even in less currency in Economic Botany, the Journal of Ethnopharmacology and the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine. Indeed, a survey of scientific citations of the term “political ecology” in these four journals found only a dozen research articles since 1972 that discuss the precepts of political ecology, relative to the 943 research articles about political ecology from all sources noted on the Web of Science over the same period. With few exceptions such as Anderson et al. (2005), most ethnobiological monographs, books, dissertations and refereed journal articles have side-stepped the examination of the political, economic, cross-cultural and media-driven “external” pressures which have affected not only the natural resources themselves, but the cultural perceptions and uses of them. Early cultural geography was heavily critiqued in the last 40 years for treating culture as some monolithic “super-organism,” stuck in some idyllic “ethnographic present” that never existed (Duncan 1980). Nevertheless, many ethnobiologists have continued to describe the communities in which they work in some harmonious “ethno-ecological present” that may also be considered a highly contested construct today. It takes young ethnobiologists but one reading of a book such as Peluso and Watts’ (2001) Violent Environments to be challenged to leave such simplistic paradigms behind, for it is ever more difficult to remain as politically and economically naïve as our field once was. To use Peluso's (1992) argument in a paraphrase of Wendell Berry, eating, foraging and extracting resources are always political and moral acts.
While our commentary up until now may sound as if we are implying that ethnobiology has become irrelevant or obsolete in addressing larger issues in cultural ecology, nothing could be further from the truth. To be sure, ethnobiologists have generally served the larger domains of cultural ecology, landscape ecology and conservation biology well in documenting the internal community dynamics and orally-transmitted knowledge about the use of local natural resources, and may in fact be getting better at describing heterogeneity within communities in a political ecological context (Chambers and Momsen 2007; Perramond 2005). At the same time, the weakness of some scholars of political ecology is that they appear to be ignorant of or dismissive toward understanding the internal community dynamics of how members gain access to natural resources, and their processing and distribution networks (Vayda and Walters 1999). While there remain a few scholars in anthropology and geography who may assume that all ethnographic or ecological fieldwork is inherently imperialistic, most of us recognize that if we are truly concerned about the fate of peoples, their resources and lands, we must have direct interaction with them. The practice of ethnobiology can offer to political ecology and other less field-oriented disciplines something that they desperately need: a kind of direct and protracted contact with the diverse faces, voices, values and behaviors still active on this planet, as well as with the equally diverse and quixotic other-than-human world. In fact, ethnobiologists tend to practice an integrative form of science that cares as much (or more) about the peoples with which it is engaged as it cares about the plants, animals, microbes and habitats with which they interact. In short, ethnobiology is inherently an ecological science because its focus is on “relationships” more than on “things.” As such, ethnobiology and ethnoecology in particular have immediate relevance to conservation biology as it is practiced in culturally-managed landscapes (Berkes 1999; Johnson and Hunn 2010).
Ultimately, we offer these commentaries not merely to encourage ethnobiologists to brush up on one of the many fine texts regarding political ecology (Biersack and Greenberg 2006; Robbins 2004; Zimmerer and Bassett 2003). In addition, we encourage ethnobiologists to think more deeply about what we can offer to other disciplines in terms of novel theories, values and methodologies that can emerge directly from our practice. Rather than thinking of ethnobiology as a field which will simply borrow its approaches and skill sets from evolutionary biology, ethnology, comparative linguistics, critical theory, Marxist history, paleoecology or cultural geography, it is time we offer cutting-edge theoretical paradigms and principles to the other disciplines with which we interact. If we cannot do this, then ethnobiology risks remaining the poor stepchild of ethnology, descriptive archaeology and natural history. We are confident that it can and will accomplish far more than that, given the inspiring work that young field ethnobiologists, cross-trained among many disciplines, are currently accomplishing. No other field, perhaps, is in such a strategic position to integrate knowledge regarding the interactions between cultural diversity and biodiversity at a time when both entities are facing unprecedented challenges. If ethnobiologists intend to be in service to sustaining such diversity, we need to set our sights high and intellectually cast our nets broadly.