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

format employed allows analysis to address the issues of the distribution of
knowledge among individuals and the reconciliation of contradictory information
among informants. Such would not be possible had group interviews alone been
employed. The enquiry would be improved, however, by following up individual
interviews with group interviews. In particular, comparison of patterns evident among
individual interviews and the debates and any consensus emerging from them within
the group interview context would be most instructive. A further methodological
improvement would be to employ local interviewers to conduct interviews in a setting
in which interviewees might feel more fully relaxed (Huntington 1998: 299), and in
the context of the present study, in the Wapishana language. This would raise the
possibility, however, of interviewees not mentioning information they assumed would
already be known to a local person.
Interviews were conducted in English, and the majority were ostensibly focused
on a single named category in the animal kingdom. In the early stages of the study,
the choice of subject was determined by a certainty on my part that I had an
accurate understanding of the biological referent of the lexeme, in Wapishana or
Creolese, employed to denote it. At first, this depended on my having elicited the
name from the interviewee on an occasion when we had jointly observed its referent
and I had been able to assign it a definite scientific identification. As time passed and
my familiarity with local usage of animal names grew, I felt able to proceed with less
thorough adherence to this aspect of methodological rigour. In particular, I became
confident that the biological lexicon was widely shared and consistently employed
among different people, and that interviewees were able to offer reliable
identifications based on all but the most misleading of the illustrations in Eisenberg
(1989) or Emmons and Feer (1997). The freedom from these initial constraints
allowed me to determine the choice of interview subject on the basis of the overall
aims of the study.
Most subject species were mammals, this group combining familiarity to
interviewees, ease of reliable identification in the field, the availability of scientific
data on ecology to employ as a basis for comparison of ethnoecological data, and in
many cases economic and ecological importance. Some interviews were also
conducted on species of subsistence importance from other vertebrate classes: birds,
reptiles and fish, and a small number of interviews employed botanical categories as
their focus. Two major goals defined the profile of interview subjects over the course
of the study. One was to conduct at least one interview on each terminal category
among the mammals named within the Wapishana language, and on other vertebrate