Ecosystem Crises Interactions. Merrill Singer
material culture (including housing, clothing, and handicraft), and belief system.
In the early days of his expedition, Linnaeus met a schoolteacher, Per Fjellström, who had learned the Sami language and gave him a long list of Sami names for plants, mammals, birds, and fish, a clear indicator that the Sami were quite acquainted with the other species with which they shared their environment, garnered from their past and ongoing empirical observations. Based on his time among them, Linnaeus was able to describe elements of the technologies the Sami constructed from their environment and used to survive in it. His writings provided systematic information about their sewn boats (used in fishing by forest‐dwelling communities), their clothing, some of the traps they used to catch squirrels and forest birds, the harnesses they used with their reindeer when traveling with sledges, and their huts, tents, and storage structures. Moreover,
he had ample opportunity to study the reindeer. He saw whole herds; saw how scared the animals were of the gadfly and what these insects did to their skins. He saw the milking of reindeer cows and the castration of bulls and watched one or two slaughterings … He also noted down different Sami words to denote the reindeer according to their age. He [also] got information about the tanning of leather [using tree bark].
(Zorgdrager 2008, p. 62)
While not a rigorous ethnography by today’s standards, Linnaeus’ account of the ecology of the Sami suggests both Sami ken awareness of their surroundings and their diverse interactions with the biotic and abiotic components therein. Lacking, however, is a textured holistic picture of Sami understanding of their world and its biotic and abiotic makeup; that is, their indigenous, norm‐ and value‐laden map of reality.
The earliest (and most of the subsequent) systematic research on indigenous environmental knowledge was conducted by anthropologists. This occurred because of the turn toward a field‐based orientation in the disciple. Anthropologists began adopting an extended fieldwork approach in the early 20th century. This development is generally credited to the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who advocated that to understand another society it was necessary to live among its people in their traditional setting, learn their language, engage them in constant dialogue and increasingly informed interviewing, and participate to the degree possible in their everyday activities. While other anthropologists had spent time in the field before him, as Wax (1972, p. 3) asserts, Malinowski’s research among the Trobriand Islanders of the western Pacific during the years 1916–1918 “yielded a series of epochal volumes which revolutionized the content and practice of anthropology.”
As part of this transition, anthropologists came to distinguish inside and outsider viewpoints, labeling them the emic and etic points of view, respectively. These terms were introduced by the linguist Pike (1967), who derived them from the suffixes of the linguistic concepts “phonemic” and “phonetic,” the former referring to any sound unit of significance in a particular language and the latter to the system of notations scholars use to represent these vocal sounds (McCutcheon 1999). An earlier but related advance by anthropology was the embrace of cultural relativism as a foundational axiom. This is the idea that the beliefs, values, norms, and behaviors of the people anthropologists study in the field should be understood in terms of their own culture, rather than be judged against criteria developed by another, different culture—a position often attributed to the writings of Franz Boaz (1887).
Concerned with understanding the emic perspective, and aware of the critical role of language in this endeavor, some anthropologists began to inquire about indigenous labeling and classification of plants and animals in the local environment, and discovered extensive assemblages of environment knowledge among indigenous people. Exemplary is the work of the British/Australian social anthropologist Ralph Bulmer. Based on his ethnographic research among the Karam, a horticultural tribe living in Kaironk Valley in highland New Guinea, Bulmer (1974, p. 12) found “a vast knowledge concerning the integration of the plant and animal communities—of the topographic, soil and climatic conditions required by wild as well as cultivated plants, of the kinds of plants and their parts which provide food or refuge for different kinds of animals, of which animals prey upon which other animals, of the role of birds and mammals in the propagation and dispersal of certain plants.” Similarly, the American anthropologist Douglas Oliver (1989, pp. 275–276), writing in detail about the food and food‐getting activities of indigenous island‐dwellers in the Pacific, concluded that:
behind their various practices of gardening, gathering, fishing, and hunting were rich accumulations of factual knowledge about the plants and animals they produced or otherwise obtained—knowledge not just about the individual items they produced or obtained, [but] necessarily, about the ways those items were interrelated with other aspects of the physical environment … [Moreover] it would be a mistake to conclude that Islanders’ knowledge of their plant and animal universe was limited to it relevance to eating, or to apparel, or shelter, or ornamentation, or medicine, or to other practical uses alone … [They] did not close their eyes and ears to the living things around them simply if the latter served no practical value.
The latter point is also emphasized by Van Der Ploeg & Van Weerd (2010, p. 127) in noting that in their research among the Agta of the Northern Sierra Madre Natural Park area of the Philippines, they found that “[i]ndigenous knowledge of birds is not limited to economically important species, as is often assumed. Agta hunters are familiar with most discernible species.”
While anthropologists like these recognized that the cultures of different societies label and group the elements of nature differently, as exemplified by the many more words for types of snow among the Inuit people of Canada than are to found in standard English, as asserted by Boaz (1911), they took it for granted that material components of the environment existed independent of culture. In short, “‘[c]ultures’ may differ, but nature does not … People see the world in different ways, but the world is still the world” (Heywood 2017). At the turn of the 21st century, however, some anthropologists began to question this bedrock assumption—a shift in perspective that has been labeled the “ontological turn” (Viveiros de Castro 2004; Pedersen 2011; Holbraad 2012). This approach, while critiquing the etic perspective (which subordinates the insider perspective to the conceptions of the outside observer), and asserting that anthropology has not been sufficiently culturally relativist in its accounts of other peoples, “proposes that worlds, as well as worldviews, may vary” (Heywood 2017). Heywood (2017) provides a clarifying example. If, during fieldwork, a member of the group an anthropologist is studying says that that the tree they are pointing to is really a spirit, should the anthropologist record this as a cultural belief? To do so, Heywood maintains, violates the individual’s view that the object in question is a spirit, not that they believe it to be a spirit: “Calling it a belief, as a number of anthropologists writing before the ontological turn have pointed out, is both to mislabel it and to call it mistaken without actually saying so” (Heywood 2017). I encountered this problem during research in Haiti when a man I was talking to, a houngan sur pwen (lower‐level male priest) in the Vodun tradition, told me that at night he turns into a bicycle and spies on his enemies. To interpret this statement as a belief, from the vantage of the ontological turn, when to my interlocker it was a statement of fact, could only be achieved by imposing my understanding of reality on to his understanding of reality.
The ontological turn, if it gained wide adherence within the discipline, would constitute a radical paradigm shift on the scale of a scientific revolution, including with regard to how we think about nature, interspecies interaction, and the human place in the world. But, as a fair number of anthropologists have pointed out, there are grave problems with it. Bessire & Bond (2014, p. 446) argue that:
ontological anthropology is incapable of accounting for those disruptive beings [e.g., mining, petroleum, and logging company executives and other polluting elites] and things [e.g., industrial toxins, rising sea levels and planetary temperatures, disease vectors] that travel between ontologies. Today, it is not only pollution but also logging, mining, agriculture, and oil extraction that routinely impinge on the premier sites of ontology. Ontological anthropology avoids recognizing such confrontations, in part, by pressing all analysis of materiality ever further into sacred materials
An indigenous interlocutor