Ethnoecology
Ethnoecology is the scientific study of how people of a particular culture view the natural environment around them. It is regarded as one of the most important branches of Ecological Anthropology and it began with the early researches of Harold Conklin( 1926- ) who did pioneering works on the a tribe named Hanunoo in the Philippines. Conklin’s study on the colour categories of the Hanunoo has become famous in Cognitive Anthropology, a subfield of Anthropology which studies different systems of native classifications in a comparative framework. One of the most interesting studies done by Conklin dealt with the native categories of slash-and-burn cultivation practiced by the Hanunoo of the southeastern Mindoro Island in the Philippines. In this classic study which was first published in 1954, Harold Conklin contrasted the western view of slash and-burn cultivation with the native ideas of this traditional method of growing crops in the hill slopes. The field observations done by the author revealed that the knowledge of the Hanunoo is more intensive than the outside observers regarding the variety of crops grown in a plot, nature of forest cleared for cultivation, time interval between two successive plantation and the like(Conklin, 1954:133-42). We quote from the author: More than 450 animal types and over 1,600 plant types are distinguished. The floral components are more significant, especially in regard to swidden agriculture. Of some 1,500 “useful” plant types over 430 are cultigens (most of which are swidden grown), existing only by virtue of the conscious domestication of the Hanunoo. Partly as a result of this intensified interest in plant domestication and detailed knowledge of minute differences in vegetative structures, Hanunoo plant categories outnumber, by more than 400 types, the taxonomic species into which the same local flora is grouped by systematic botanists( Ibid).