Hunt Institute Archives Text Discovery Platform

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Brent Berlin 4

1) Given the array of potentially recognizable organisms in the plant world with which a society in the tropics must interact, which groupings are habitually segregated into culturally recognized conceptual classes?
2) Given a knowledge of the inventory of recognized plant classes, what are the taxonomic structures by which these classes are organized? Furthermore, what are the ethnobotanically relevant facts recognized by native speakers which allow them to classify, name, and identify plant taxa correctly?
3) How are the conceptually designated natural resources of the plant world exploited in ways of cultural significance as determined by their status in economic, social, and ritual activities?

The discovery of major conceptual groupings
One of the early, if not the first tasks, in any ethnobotanical description is to obtain an initial inventory of the standard and habitual linguistic designations of the locally recognized flora. Standard techniques developed for the elicitation of native taxonomies will be employed in this aspect of the research. Many of these techniques have been successfully used in similar studies in ethnobiology (Anderson 1968; Bulmer 1967; Bulmer and Tyler 1968; Conklin 1954, 1962; Fowler and Leland 1967; Frake 1962, 1964; Percheronck and Werner 1969; Wyman and Bailey 1965; Metzger and Williams 1966) and were quite productive in the Tzeltal ethnobotanical research described in Berlin, Breedlove and Raven 1966, 1968, in press.

Initial botanical collections
While no effort will be made to obtain complete coverage of the area botanically, collecting procedures of named classes will be such as to maximize the acquisition of information relating to the stability of named classes and informant variability. Named plants will be collected numerous times with different informants in different areas throughout the year. Such repeated collecting of recognized groupings should allow one to make fairly reliable statements as to the accurate botanical ranges of each Aguaruna plant taxon. A lack of broad-based botanical collections for recognized plant classes is a weakness of many early ethnobotanical studies where the botanical determinations were rarely based on more than one collection, taken at one time during the year, and identified by a single informant.

The applicant has worked closely with field botanists over the last six years and is competent to take botanical specimens which can be accurately determined by competent specialists when returned to the States for identification. Special attention will be made to the excellent collecting procedures suggested by Barrau (1967), Bailey (1946), Fosberg and Sachet (1965) for collecting usable botanical information on special groups (e.g., bananas, palms, aroids, etc.).

Discovering native principles of classification and identification
At the time of collection of all plants, information concerning native principles of classification are most readily elicited. Questions relating to the major life form of the plant, properties or characters used in recognizing it, and other plant taxa seen closely related to it will be asked. Attention will be given to eliciting those perceptual characteristics of plants which are recognized by Aguaruna ethnobotanist in identification, namely, stem habit, edibility, smell of leaf or bark, texture of stem, leaf shape, etc.

In addition to actual observations of Aguaruna naming and classifying plants in the field, information on native taxonomy will be elicited from informants in the form of detailed textual and graphic materials. Texts, written by informants or taped from interviews and later transcribed, will be collected on a variety of topics, especially as regards plant morphology and growth stages. These textual materials will provide an unlimited source of raw data for further eliciting. In addition, these linguistic materials will represent a permanent native language record of botanical knowledge available for only a small number of non-Western cultures.