The prefix ethno (‘other’) might be considered one of the unfortunate flaws associated with the origins of our (inter-)discipline that has pervasively shaped the history of ethnobiology. Since the late 19th century, when John William Harshberger (1896) first coined the term ‘‘ethnobotany,’’ the prevailing strategy of most fieldworkers trained in ethnobiology has been to go and bear witness to some other culture’s knowledge of plants and animals. We would be remiss to ignore the blatantly colonial or imperialistic tone of some of the earliest ethnobotanical studies. They were explicitly undertaken to either a) learn what of value could be extracted from another culture’s natural resource base as export crops, or b) learn how immigrants could take cues from native residents on how to make a living on their shared home ground, even as some of those immigrants usurped water and harvested native plants and wildlife from the homelands of the people that they were studying. As my fellow Arab-American Edward Said (1993:5) once wrote, ‘‘We are at a point in our work when we can no longer ignore empires and the imperial context in our studies.’’ Readers of Said’s Orientalism (1978) will remember his contention that portrayals of Arabs and Persians as ‘‘the other’’ –whether those portrayals represent them as primitives or as exotic sophisticates– historically served as implicit justifications for both European and North American political and colonial ambitions. The same can be said of English-, Spanish-, French- and Portuguese-speaking immigrants to the ‘‘New World,’’ who may have either villified or romanticized indigenous peoples of the Americas as being in some timeless homeostatic balance with the natural world. It both trivializes and simplifies their more nuanced knowledge and their complex interactions –positive and negative– with the biota of the Americas. One way out of this intellectual trap that many ethnobiologists have discussed and practiced is to devote time to encouraging (and in some cases, assisting) members of a particular cultural community to describe their own traditions from an emic view anchored in local language, belief, behavior and custom. Perhaps there is no better example of this in 20th-century ethnobiology than Ian Saen Majnep’s (Majnep et al. 1977) collaboration with ethnobiologists Ralph Bulmer and Christopher Healey, Birds of My Kalam Country. And yet, there is another pathway that ethnobiologists can and should take, and that is the investigation of the terms and underlying principles of ethnobiological classification and resource management which can be found