Ethnobiology of San Pedro Mixtepec, a Zapotec-Speaking Community of the Sierra de Miahuatlan, Oaxaca

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Oaxaca, Mexico Zapotec Ethnobiology This award to the University of Washington will support a linguistic anthropologist's documentation of the indigenous knowledge of plants and animals known in a traditional Zapotec-speaking community in Oaxaca, Mexico. Using standard techniques of ethnography and ethnobotany the investigator will establish the precise correspondence of each local name to the names categories of Western scientific botanical and zoological taxonomies. The similarities between local and Western scientific classifications provide evidence of universal mental processes by which humans comprehend the diversity of the natural world, while the differences reflect contrasts of cultural meaning between indigenous peasant and Western industrial societies. The project will analyze the within-community distribution of knowledge by age, sex, schooling, and occupation in order to establish the cultural consensus of the local knowledge structure. Focusing on local conceptions of forest management through fire, the project will analyze how local indigenous knowledge impacts on environmental change. This research is important because traditional indigenous knowledge systems are fast disappearing. Careful case studies such as this allow us to further our understanding of fundamental processes of human variation in cognitive structure. The fine-grained analysis of local variation in knowledge will advance our understanding of how natural knowledge systems are instated and how they change.