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

The above methods did not allow for complete coverage as despite efforts to
observe as many of the species named in the Wapishana language, not all could be
seen over the course of the study. A small number of informants were provided with
notebooks and requested to make lists, in their own time, of all animal species known
to them. On completion, this was followed up with interviews in which attempts were
made to obtain provisional translations via verbal description and indicating pictures
in the works named above.
Informants would also provide names of species illustrated in various field guides
to local mammals and birds (Emmons and Feer 1997; Eisenberg 1989; Schaunsee and
Phelps 1978). In most cases these works were used with apparently high accuracy:
different people's identifications were generally consistent with eachother, and those
made in the field, and corresponded with biogeographical reality. On occasion, I made
field identifications using these guides which disagreed with those of my Wapishana
colleagues. When the opportunity arose to resolve the dispute, in the form of a
repeat sighting, I almost invariably found it was I who was in error, and it appears that
the people I was working with were readily able to accommodate themselves to the
limitations of pictorial representations of these animals. Given the low frequency of
observation of most species in the wild, this provided a useful indication of the
referents of Wapishana terms when the former were not seen over the course of the
study, and a valuable corroboration among different individuals of names elicited in
the field.
A preliminary investigation of classification was also made by this method:
informants were asked to indicate the existence and composition of any named
groups of which they were aware. During the subsequent interview, I also asked
people whether the referent of any particular term had 'any partners', as a means of
identifying covert categories. This question was also asked during some
ethnoecological interviews on particular species: 'Does.....have any partners?'. The
term ‘partner’ employed was that that I considered best to express the notion of
affiliation in Guyanese Creole. In most cases, people responded by naming those folk
categories, if any, they regarded as most similar to that under discussion. The
question frame employed was deliberately vague and ambiguous, in order that
answers might also be given on other bases upon which people might consider
categories to be connected, for example ecological associations. I was also able to
gather some information on covert categories from observation of use in
conversation: in particular, people would often use different terms to refer to the
same animal when telling me about it, from those they used in conversation among