NATURAL ENGAGEMENTS AND ECOLOGICAL AESTHETICS ...

I am quite ambivalent, in general, about the prospects of combining scientific with other
kinds of methodologies and this goes to the heart of my differences with many other anthropo-
logical approaches that focus squarely on people’s interactions with the environment. Without
wishing to detract in any way from the validity, sophistication, insight, or even impact on my own
research that the ethnobiological work of Bill Balée has had (see especially Balée 1989), it would
be impossible to carry out parts of my own research if I were to adopt certain programmatic state-
ments that guide his work. If, as Balée holds, ethnobotany is, “best regarded as a field of biocul-
tural inquiry, independent of any specific paradigm, yet rooted in a scientific epistemology”
(1994: 1) how can it hope to capture those native epistemologies –which are decidedly non-sci-
entific– that generate that knowledge in the first place?
This critique is also applicable to studies of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) (see
for example Moran 1993; Ventocilla 1995) as well as traditional resource management (e.g.,
Irvine’s 1987, 1989 important work on the San José de Payamino Runa). As Alf Hornborg notes,
the focus on TEK and traditional resource management is paradoxical because, “it hopes for an
appropriation of local knowledge by the very modernist framework by which such knowledge is
continually being eclipsed” (1996: 58, see also Nadasdy 1999: 13-14). That is, these approaches
define and frame the knowledge they seek to study, thereby ignoring the fact that knowledge is
not just about content but about the context in which knowing is produced. This, perhaps, is most
evident in the very use of the term “resource management.” Such a term automatically assumes
that locals view the forest as a resource that needs to be managed and ignores the possibilities of
other kinds of interactions and conceptualizations.
My interest is not in knowledge per se, but in the local generative processes that contribute
to knowing and how these emerge in ecological engagement. To this extent Hornborg’s concept
of ecosemiotics is fundamental to my work because it captures an important element of the way
in which the Runa see ecology and it also provides a plausible framework by which the study of
ecology might be situated within a western research tradition. It is my contention that native and
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