Abstract
Ethnobiology and the Science of Humankind is a highly emblematic work on a number of levels. Representing the inaugural special issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, this eight-chapter volume conveys progression and evolvement in ethnobiological scholarship, and accords a new period of growth in anthropological thought. Framed as a science with a substantially overlooked humanistic orientation, ethnobiology is revealed, at last, as a discipline replete with historic depth, deserving of deliberation, and imminently worthy of this benchmark tribute. Ethnobiology, when understood in its intellectual entirety, is capable of generating and synthesizing diverse perspectives on human conditions and experiences vis-à-vis the biological world. This potential can be seen in the scope of topics assembled here, which convey multiple textures of ethnobiology, layer by layer, step by step. Linkages between culture, cognition, language, subsistence, and evolution are gradually illuminated by an ensemble of British anthropologists, whose concepts are disseminated with ethereal refinement, and American anthropologists, whose voices add depth and harmony to the collection.
Ellen's introduction is both inspired and inspiring in its appreciation for the disciplinary juxtapositions implicit in ethnobiological research. Biology encourages methodological rigor and careful observation by strengthening protocols in the field, which consequently enhance the quality of data collected by anthropologists. As surveyors of human culture, anthropologists offer qualitative understandings to biologists, while admonishing them to consider, for example, matters of ambiguity when taxonomies are constructed, why discrepancies and anomalies warrant a special look, and indeed, how variation is patterned socially. Ellen recognizes something akin to mana in ethnobiology, which delivers social and ecological experience as immediate, perceptible, and measurable. Language is the signalizing link in the chain, although for Ellen, linguistics is one of many distinctive timbres in the symphony of ethnobiology.
Indeed, these are fertile grounds for discussion, particularly with regard to the pertinence of ethnobiology to anthropological theory. Ellen sounds notes rarely heard in American ethnobiological circles, reverberating all the way to the hinterlands of middle-range theory and meta-narratives. The effects are startlingly luminous. At the denouement of his introduction, Ellen wisely implores the reader to earnestly consider the strategic “nodal” position occupied by ethnobiologists, even as he urges caution to those working early in their careers: emergent theories in ethnobiology may ultimately unveil powerful synergies amalgamating human minds and ecosystems, but the direction and impact of these forces have yet to be realized fully in experience or practice.
In Chapter 2, Berlin dons his whimsy hat and invites the reader to follow along a delightful, kaleidoscopic journey through this “First Congress of Ethnozoological Nomenclature.” Animal names, Berlin elucidates, represent intricate psychological processes of association. Combinations of sounds interact with other modalities including sight, touch, smell, and taste. This connection, called synaesthetic sound symbolism, entails consideration of the more subtle, but no less revealing, layers of meaning variegated and encoded symbolically in animal nomenclature, and moreover, their adaptive significance in human linguistic and cultural evolution.
Enter Mithen, and the spotlight shifts to evolutionary psychology and hominid development. The majority of our cognitive histories, Mithen explains, have been constrained by limitations imposed by evolutionary forces on the human mind. Biological interactions between humans and biota have occurred for millions of years, but only through the relatively recent emergence of language is the universality of these relationships made explicit. As David Harris asserts in Chapter 4, archaeologists and ethnobiologists work in highly complementary domains. Each collects fragments of data from human societies and reconfigures them, deliberately, into meaningful arrangements. Drawing from archaeological examples of subsistence patterns in tropical zones, Harris compares the limitations and benefits of methods used traditionally by archaeologists and ethnohistorians to the very foundations of ethnographic writing. The concept of landscape is showcased in Chapter 5, where Rival traces the directionality of human choices that have shaped, and continue to shape the natural world, and how nature in turn interpenetrates human decision-making.
A thought-provoking turn is found in Waldstein and Adams’ “The interface between medical anthropology and medical ethnobiology.” Through a lively retrospective of medical anthropology, Waldstein and Adams illustrate a significant shift from the expressive, symbolic, and magical dimensions of medicine to the empirical rigor of medical ethnobotany and its close relative, ethnomedicine. The latter are informed inter alia by naturalistic theories of illness causation, and by approaches developed through formal ethnobiological inquiry. By integrating chemical ecology, biomedicine, and cultural constructions of efficacy, researchers can extend and advance existing models of traditional health belief systems. The intersection of ethnobiology and applied anthropology is keenly explored by Sillitoe, who candidly illustrates the conflict between idealists and pragmatists, and how these oppositions might be reconfigured if not resolved through strategic role-shifting and collaboration.
The volume concludes with Hunn's triumphant return to traditional ecological knowledge and its beneficent influence on ethnographic praxis and description. Replicating natural learning processes effectively is a formidable challenge for ethnobiological research, which Hunn asseverates here by way of creative illustrations, multi-media techniques, and finally, an approach more familiar to cultural relativists—the written narrative. Accordingly, Hunn envisions three layers, a master narrative, a technical narrative, and a monographic narrative, which collectively render ethnobiological information with perspicuity and imagination. Hunn offers approbation to ethnobiological efforts to engage diverse audiences through didactic applications that are both comprehensible and purposeful.
The essays in this auspicious volume constitute a sentient portrait of ethnobiology as a discipline on a heedful journey, possibly leading toward the very core of anthropological thought and practice. Perhaps the most revealing intimation to be found is the relevance of the human mind to ethnobiology, and the powerful, organic triangulation between nature, culture, and cognition. This model is amenable to the intellectual progression of a field whose history is well-established but whose trajectory has been obfuscated, if only temporarily, by the turbulence so apparent in academic anthropology. While theories of mind are copacetic for British anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists, they have yet to surface fully in ethnobiological inquiry. Much like anthropology, ethnobiology is arriving, swiftly and inevitably, face-to-face with what appear to be its own design dilemmas. But, as these authors reveal so persuasively in this guidepost volume, such dilemmas do not necessarily hinder momentum. They accelerate scientific and creative thinking in progressive new directions.