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

as concrete stimuli for responses. Interviewees could be asked to pick out the plants
eaten by a particular animal, asked whether a particular animal eats the species
represented by each voucher specimen in turn, or asked to list the animals who feed
on each species in turn, depending on the aims and setting of the study and the time
available. It is clear that for ethnoecological information to be scientifically useful
requires translation of the local botanical and zoological lexicons, and for this as well
as the methodological use that can be made of voucher specimens, a study such as
this one would be most effectively conducted in conjunction with a thorough study of
ethnonomenclature, especially of plants.
The methodological improvements suggested would significantly increase the
research effort involved in recording ethnoecological knowledge. To what extent any
particular research project would incorporate them would depend on its exact aims
and the resources available. In the present study, a large and potentially valuable
ethnoecological data set was developed without employing such a rigorous
methodology. However, in a situation where an effort was being made to record
information on the local ecology, the advantages of implementing a full
ethnoecological research programme would easily justify the effort. The gathering of
a comparable set of baseline data on the local ecology by conventional methods
would require substantially more in the way of time, expense, and employment of
external technical expertise.
7.14.3 Conclusion
This analysis shows the ethnoecological data set to be accurate, but to exhibit
particular limitations. Dietary data is incomplete, and in certain subject areas it is
difficult to elicit reliable information. The latter may result from the occurrence of
contradictory responses that are hard to reconcile with each other, in which case
reliable observations given by some informants may be obscured by unreliable
answers on the part of others less competent in the subject area. In some subject
areas responses were incompatible with basic biological theory, reflecting domains of
thought structured on bases other than empiricism. The methodological
improvements suggested, and those that may be conceived and enacted by future
researchers in this field, hold the potential to address these limitations somewhat.
However, there is also an extent to which they appear inherent: not all subject areas
in the biological sciences are amenable to investigation by ethnoecological methods.
It is notable that the subject areas in which explicit ethnoecological knowledge
was found to be deficient are among those key to management programmes based