Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Emergence of Indigenous Environmental Knowledge: Cognition, Interpretation, Perception and Social Labor in an Indonesian Society

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Doctoral student Yancey Orr (University of Arizona), under the supervision of Dr. J. Stephen Lansing, will research how differences in environmental knowledge emerge within highland Balinese communities in Indonesia. This research will focus on multiple levels of how people relate to and interact with their environment and in so doing address basic anthropological questions about the generation of knowledge from experience. Research will address topics such as how individuals understand ecological interactions, interpret the behavior of animals and visually perceive landscapes. The researcher will use data collected from cognitive science experiments and interviews conducted among wet rice agriculturalists and craft producers. This information will be used to see how directly experiencing the environment through labor and observation affects knowledge and skill.This research is important because it is a departure from existing studies of environmental knowledge which have typically focused on classification schemes which take linguistic groups as the unit of analysis. Instead, the proposed research is aimed at uncovering the difference in environmental knowledge within communities and how people come to have such knowledge. The research will contribute to cognitive science research on mental models and their development. Beyond addressing questions within anthropology, this research has practical application for Bali as its highlands, once the agricultural center of the island, have, in many areas, been transformed by craft production into servicing tourists. The effect that this change in the labor landscape has on Balinese knowledge of the environment is a component of this study.