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Ethnobiology
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Ethnobiology
Ethnobiology is the multidisciplinary field of study of relationships among peoples, biota, and environments integrating many perspectives, from the social, biological, and medical sciences; along with application to conservation and sustainable development. The diversity of perspectives in ethnobiology allows for examining complex, dynamic interactions between human and natural systems.
Biologists have been interested in local biological knowledge since the time Europeans started colonising the world, from the 15th century onwards. Paul Sillitoe wrote that:
Europeans not only sought to understand the new regions they intruded into but also were on the look-out for resources that they might profitably exploit, engaging in practices that today we should consider tantamount to biopiracy. Many new crops ... entered into Europe during this period, such as the potato, tomato, pumpkin, maize, and tobacco.
Local biological knowledge, collected and sampled over these early centuries significantly informed the early development of modern biology:
Ethnobiology itself, as a distinctive practice, only emerged during the 20th century as part of the records then being made about other peoples, and other cultures. As a practice, it was nearly always ancillary to other pursuits when documenting others' languages, folklore, and natural resource use. Roy Ellen commented that:
At its earliest and most rudimentary, this comprised listing the names and uses of plants and animals in native non-Western or 'traditional' populations often in the context of salvage ethnography ...[ie] ethno-biology as the descriptive biological knowledge of 'primitive' peoples.
This 'first phase' in the development of ethnobiology as a practice has been described as still having an essentially utilitarian purpose, often focusing on identifying those 'native' plants, animals and technologies of some potential use and value within increasingly dominant western economic systems
Arising out of practices in Phase I (above) came a 'second phase' in the development of 'ethnobiology', with researchers now striving to better document and better understand how other peoples' themselves "conceptualize and categorize" the natural world around them. In Sillitoe's words:
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Ethnobiology
Ethnobiology is the multidisciplinary field of study of relationships among peoples, biota, and environments integrating many perspectives, from the social, biological, and medical sciences; along with application to conservation and sustainable development. The diversity of perspectives in ethnobiology allows for examining complex, dynamic interactions between human and natural systems.
Biologists have been interested in local biological knowledge since the time Europeans started colonising the world, from the 15th century onwards. Paul Sillitoe wrote that:
Europeans not only sought to understand the new regions they intruded into but also were on the look-out for resources that they might profitably exploit, engaging in practices that today we should consider tantamount to biopiracy. Many new crops ... entered into Europe during this period, such as the potato, tomato, pumpkin, maize, and tobacco.
Local biological knowledge, collected and sampled over these early centuries significantly informed the early development of modern biology:
Ethnobiology itself, as a distinctive practice, only emerged during the 20th century as part of the records then being made about other peoples, and other cultures. As a practice, it was nearly always ancillary to other pursuits when documenting others' languages, folklore, and natural resource use. Roy Ellen commented that:
At its earliest and most rudimentary, this comprised listing the names and uses of plants and animals in native non-Western or 'traditional' populations often in the context of salvage ethnography ...[ie] ethno-biology as the descriptive biological knowledge of 'primitive' peoples.
This 'first phase' in the development of ethnobiology as a practice has been described as still having an essentially utilitarian purpose, often focusing on identifying those 'native' plants, animals and technologies of some potential use and value within increasingly dominant western economic systems
Arising out of practices in Phase I (above) came a 'second phase' in the development of 'ethnobiology', with researchers now striving to better document and better understand how other peoples' themselves "conceptualize and categorize" the natural world around them. In Sillitoe's words: