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

华盛顿大学获得的这一奖项将支持一位语言人类学家对墨西哥瓦哈卡州一个讲萨波特克语的传统社区中已知的植物和动物的土著知识进行记录。使用民族志和民族植物学的标准技术，研究者将建立每个地方名称与西方科学植物和动物分类的名称类别的精确对应关系。当地和西方科学分类之间的相似性为人类理解自然世界多样性的普遍心理过程提供了证据，而差异则反映了土著农民和西方工业社会之间文化意义的对比。该项目将分析社区内按年龄、性别、学校教育和职业划分的知识分布，以建立当地知识结构的文化共识。该项目将重点关注当地通过火灾管理森林的概念，分析当地土著知识如何影响环境变化。这项研究很重要，因为传统的本土知识系统正在迅速消失。像这样仔细的案例研究使我们能够进一步了解人类认知结构变化的基本过程。对知识局部变化的细粒度分析将促进我们对自然知识系统如何建立以及如何变化的理解。

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.