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

themselves. Such a circumstance arose when people, aware of my interests, told me
the most specific name they had for an animal, but in conversation used a more
general name.
In the case of plants, many names for both trees and understorey plants were
recorded in the course of ethnobotanical plot surveys (see chapter 4.7.2). Woody
plants were identified, when possible, using available field guides (Roosmalen 1985a;
Gentry and Vasquez 1993). In many cases, especially of timber trees, were also
known to people by their Creolese or Arawak name, which although insubstantial
evidence for identification, was a possible indication in the absence of more
conclusive information. A large number of Creolese and Arawak names for trees are
reported in two reference texts on Guyanese botany (Mennega et al. 1988; Polak
1992). A small number of Wapishana names are also listed in the former work, which
provided a useful starting point for identification. However, many of the field
identifications I made contradicted the glosses provided in this work, which I suspect
is based upon data collected in the Wapishana villages of the Kanuku foothills. It may
be that there are regional differences in usage of the Wapishana names for trees,
reflecting regional variation in species composition at each site. For example, the
same name may be used for two closely related tree species, only one of which is
found at each site.
6.1.2 Results
A list of all Wapishana names recorded and their scientific glosses is presented in the
appendix. Here I will report key features of the Wapishana classification of animals.
Some information was collected on plant classification, but sufficient only to give a
very sketchy picture. The time and effort I was able to dedicate to the subject of
ethnozoological classification was also limited, and insufficient for comprehensive
documentation. The findings I present here are thus preliminary and somewhat
tentative. Further work on this subject may revise the picture given here
substantially, however, all the findings reported are correct in so far as my limited
investigations allowed me to ascertain.
The Wapishana language incompletely partitions the zoological domain. Among
the larger vertebrates, the most salient categories in the Wapishana language mostly
show a one to one correlation with scientific species, and closely satisfy Berlin's
definition of the folk generic (Berlin 1992). The concept of a natural kind appears to
be based on both Aristotelian and reproductive criteria. When called upon to justify a
terminological distinction of two perceptually similar species, informants would refer