Ethnobiology for A Diverse World Defining New Disciplinary Trajectories: Mixing Political Ecology with Ethnobiology

Abstract

That which we assume to be a distinct scholarly discipline today may not be so tomorrow; boundaries shift, and territories become redefined in academia just as they do in geopolitics. And so, it would not be surprising to see within just a few decades the methodological pretexts of ethnobiological inquiries once again overhauled as they have been several times already. We anticipate and in fact welcome the re-delineation of the boundaries of this discipline as a result of advances made in political ecology and in other fields as well. Although the term ‘‘political ecology’’ was first used in print more than 80 years ago (Thone 1935), it has been more widely used over the last 30 years in a particular manner by cultural ecologists and human geographers. Since anthropologist Eric R. Wolf published his seminal article entitled ‘‘Ownership and Political Ecology,’’ social scientists have used the concept of political ecology to balance their understanding of ‘‘the pressures emanating from the larger society and the exigencies of the local ecosystem’’ (Wolf 1972:202). As noted a quarter century ago by applied anthropologist Thomas Sheridan (1988:xvi), this is because it has become increasingly necessary to ‘‘wed the approaches of political economy, which focus upon society’s place in a region, nation, or ‘‘world sphere,’’ with those of cultural ecology, which examine adaptations to local environmental and demographic factors.’’ We are of the opinion that there is also a need to wed insights from political ecology with ethnobiology, which has largely ignored the global and macroeconomic pressures on the so-called ‘‘traditional’’ agricultural, fishing, hunting and foraging cultures with which ethnobiologists have characteristically been engaged. Despite the broad use of both the concepts and methodologies of political ecology in geography, anthropology and history, articles in the Journal of Ethnobiology have seldom used this term, and it is even in less currency in Economic Botany, the Journal of Ethnopharmacology and the Journal of Ethnobiology