9 Ethnoecology: An Approach to Understanding Traditional Agricultural Knowledge

Abstract

The large and varied body of knowledge that farmers possess and employ is an important, yet often overlooked, element in the analysis of traditional agriculture. This information is extremely varied, ranging from detailed knowledge of specific plants to broader patterns of categorization that tell much about how a particular cultural group views the world it inhabits and how this helps to shape the group's interactions with the environment. Broadly speaking, such indigenous knowledge falls into two categories. On the one hand, there is knowledge that is inherited from generation to generation and is generally shared by most of the members of the society. This cultural information is often passed on as folk wisdom in the context of folktales or is preserved and transmitted in the context of rituals and various religious ceremonies. The second category includes information gained through individual experience-empirical observations made by in.. dividual farmers during the course of agricultural activities. The two categories of indigenous knowledge are not mutually exclusive. Information collected by an individual may become knowledge that is shared by members of the group through time. The larger pattern of shared social knowledge also provides a contextual framework in which an individual's empirical obser.. vations can be interpreted and translated into knowledge. The existence of the common conceptual framework further allows farmers to communicate their observations and perceptions to other members of the local community with greater ease and with greater assurance that such communication will be understood. Most anthropological studies of traditional knowledge have been conducted within the general framework of ethnoscience, which can be defined as "the study of systems of knowledge developed by a given culture to classify the objectives, activities, and events of its universe " (Hardesty 1977). A subset of ethnoscience, ethnoecology, refers to the study of how traditional groups organize and classify their knowledge of the environment and