Ethnoecology, Resource Use, Conservation And Development In A ...

construction, in particular areas of the reservation. The possible effects of human
harvesting of particular tree species on the local ecology are explored in chapter 8.2.
4.8 Summary and Conclusion
Overall, Wapishana people in Maruranau make extensive use of the biodiversity of
both forest and savannah for subsistence purposes. There is evidence of the
conscious application of ethnoecological knowledge in hunting, fishing and the
gathering of animals in particular (see chapter 8.1). There is also evidence that
utilitarian factors are encoded in the Wapishana biological lexicon, in which the
treatment of several categories of non-cultivated plants and animals of utilitarian
importance is atypical. The overall subsistence strategy is dominated by agriculture,
but the employment of ethnoecological knowledge in this field of activity was not
investigated to any meaningful extent in this study.
The possibility that the effects of agriculture on the forest ecosystem
complement hunting by raising the availability of game animals was raised in chapter
4.2.6. The emergent properties of the agro-ecosystem are further discussed in
chapter 9.2. Along with the factors mentioned in the current chapter, regulation of
human exploitation of natural resources as a result of symbolically-encoded
restrictions on subsistence activities appears to be an important component of this.
Chapter five introduces this subject, and is concerned with Wapishana symbolism and
its ecological consequences.