Folkbiology: The Importance of How People Understand Nature

Abstract

Keywords Folkbiology.Folktaxonomy.Folkecology.Biology education.Environment.Anthropology.Cognitive psychologyAlthough this is a long review, I only cover perhaps twothirds of the contents of The Native Mind and the CulturalConstruction of Nature, and very briefly indeed. As thepress release informs us, this book draws on two decades ofresearchandcontainsahugeyieldofdata,analyses,researchprotocols, and theoretical background. Folkbiology is theinterdisciplinary perspective on how people ordinarilyunderstand the biological world (Medin and Atran 1999).In The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction ofNature, we appreciate how far the implications of this fieldcan go. In this overview, I choose a geographical approach:we fly from Guatemala, to Wisconsin, then to the MiddleEast. We then land in university classes and end up inschool classrooms. This tour gives me a minimum basis fora tentative critical summary of the book. In the tour, Iinclude not only findings but also research methods that Ihope will be stimulating for readers of this journal.Guatemala: A “Common Garden Experiment”In a municipality in El Peten, Guatemala, three culturalgroups live mostly by agriculture, hunting, and extractingforest products for sale. What happens when a land, lackingoverall institutional regulation, is shared by three culturalgroups with different histories? Traditional models indecision and game theory predict a “tragedy of thecommons,” i.e. an initial, plausibly cooperative situationsoon subverted by individuals belonging to one of thegroups. These individuals will begin to overexploit com-mon resources, triggering a cascade of people switching tonon-cooperative behaviors. The result will be tragic: therapid depletion of common-pool resources. Remarkably, thesame models predict that common resources will instead bepreserved if—for whatever reason—all individuals of allgroups maintain a resource-saving behavior. But the pointis that saving up or even protecting resources is not at all arational choice when you know that some or many othersare not doing the same (or when you have good reasons tosuspect so). The three groups living in Peten—native Itza’Maya, Spanish-speaking Ladinos, and immigrant Q’eqchi’Maya—seem to defy such theoretical predictions: theyexhibit different patterns of common-pool resources use.Atran, Medin and their group wanted to study thisintercultural scenario, exploring in particular the relationbetween patterns of use of the forest and ways ofunderstanding it. In Chapter 7, “Folkecology and the Spiritof the Commons,” we find an interesting description ofprotocols and results of this research.A series of probes, for example, was used to reveal howpeople understand the forest ecology. Each informant wasshown pictures of local plants and animals and was askedquestions about their relations. For each plant, all animalpictures were laid out and “the informant was asked if anyof the animals ‘search for,’‘go with,’ or ‘are companion of’the target plant, and whether the plant helped or hurt theanimal” (p. 185). The same was done for each animal