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Concept
Ethnobiology
Summary
Ethnobiology is the scientific study of the way living things are treated or used by different human cultures. It studies the dynamic relationships between people, biota, and environments, from the distant past to the immediate present.
"People-biota-environment" interactions around the world are documented and studied through time, across cultures, and across disciplines in a search for valid, reliable answers to two 'defining' questions: "How and in what ways do human societies use nature, and how and in what ways do human societies view nature?"
Biologists have been interested in local biological knowledge since the time Europeans started colonising the world, from the 15th century onwards. Paul Sillitoe wrote that:
Europeans not only sought to understand the new regions they intruded into but also were on the look-out for resources that they might profitably exploit, engaging in practices that today we should consider tantamount to biopiracy. Many new crops .. entered into Europe during this period, such as the potato, tomato, pumpkin, maize, and tobacco. (Page 121)
Local biological knowledge, collected and sampled over these early centuries significantly informed the early development of modern biology:
during the 17th century Georg Eberhard Rumphius benefited from local biological knowledge in producing his catalogue, "Herbarium Amboinense", covering more than 1,200 species of the plants in Indonesia;
during the 18th century, Carl Linnaeus relied upon Rumphius's work, and also corresponded with other people all around the world when developing the biological classification scheme that now underlies the arrangement of much of the accumulated knowledge of the biological sciences.
during the 19th century, Charles Darwin, the 'father' of evolutionary theory, on his Voyage of the Beagle took interest in the local biological knowledge of peoples he encountered.
Ethnobiology itself, as a distinctive practice, only emerged during the 20th century as part of the records then being made about other peoples, and other cultures.
Official source
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