THE YAKHA: CULTURE, ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT IN ...

Rappaport thus argues for the need to prepare two accounts in human
ecology, the 'cognized model', "a description of a people's knowledge of
their environment and of their beliefs concerning it" and an
'operational model' describing "the same ecological system (including
the people and their activities) in accordance with the assumptions and
methods of the objective sciences, in particular the science of ecology"
(ibid:97>, The title of his collected essays, 'Ecology, Meaning and
Religion', is a far cry from the materialistic approach he is credited
with in his earlier work, and accords with Stewart's (1986) criticism
that "academic human eco!ogy has so far failed to give pattern and
meaning a central place".
Other approaches also seek to give cognition a more central place.
Johnson argues for ethnoecology (which includes sub-branches such as
ethno-biology, ethno-zoology, ethno-botany and, more broadly, ethno-
science) as holding "promise of rich rewards for the ecological ly-
oriented fieldworker. With an explicit theoretical framework and well-
operationalized methodology, ethnoecology provides a more scientifically
reliable field technique for discovering cognitive aspects of man-
environment relationships than has hitherto been available" (1976:87).
The subject has inspired further interest because of the suggestion that
there may be cognitive and evolutionary universals on the basis of
research in colour terminology (Berlin and Kay 1969) and life forms
(Brown 1984).
However, in the process of furthering scientific exactitude, meaning
may be lost. According to Ellen "the restricted check-list approach
exemplified by the work of Berlin and his associates cannot,,.cope with
the wider dimensions of variation between systems. It tends not only to