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

4.3). Tapirs represent a unique case, owing to the apparent existence of special
mechanisms regulating their hunting (chapters 5.3, 5.5). The others are the largest
species of primate found in the area, which I chose partly out of personal interest, but
also because they are generally more amenable to direct observation than other, non-
arboreal species of neotropical mammal and, for the larger species at least, relatively
good ecological data sets are available for comparison.
For the purpose of analysis, interview data was separated into two categories:
specific dietary information, and information on all other aspects of ecology. Dietary
information was encoded into spreadsheet on a species-by-species basis thus: the
text of each interview was examined and all food items mentioned listed. The data
from all interviews about a particular species was aggregated into a single
spreadsheet with a single column for each interviewee, a row for each different food
item mentioned: each cell was given the value '1' if that food item was mentioned by
that interviewee, '0' if not. The matrix thus created for each species was used as the
basis for analysis. The majority of the data on other aspects of synecology could not
easily be encoded in this binary format. Each interview on a particular animal species
was read and the information therein assigned to topics in a flexible, open-ended
fashion. Similar spreadsheets were constructed for each species, each column again
representing one interviewee and each row one topic, or related theme. The nature of
the topics was determined by a pragmatic consideration of the information contained
in interviews, for the purpose of uniting related information given by different
interviewees in a single row of the spreadsheet in order that the latter gave a clear
overview of the sum of the information elicited. No topics were fixed a priori
(although some, such as group size, invariably occurred) and as many topics as were
necessary to accommodate all the information were employed in each case. Each of
these second set of spreadsheets was examined and used as the basis of a written
summary of the interview data for each particular species.
6.3 Results
This section summarises the ethnoecological data set for each species in turn. It
indicates how a consensus was (or was not) determined from the ethnoecological
data, prior to the comparison with ecological data presented in chapter 7. In all cases,
I attempted to be as objective as possible in determining consensus. Although in
most cases a clear answer emerged from the combined responses of all those
interviewed on a particular species, there is no method which allowed for the
reconciliation of qualitative responses while totally eliminating personal judgement on