Dissertation Research: Rescuing a Rare Endangered Body of Knowledge: A Field Study of Hoti Ethnobotany

本项目涉及乔治亚大学人类学专业的一名学生的学位论文研究。学生将学习委内瑞拉亚马逊森林居民群体的民族植物学知识，并记录该社区如何开发、认知和构建其环境中的蔬菜资源的象征意义和精神意义。需要检验的假设是，与完全园艺的人相比，以觅食为主的群落对其植物环境的了解较少。文献中提出的理由是，增加的知识起到了预防作物歉收的作用；更多的居住地允许更多的知识；人类干扰实际上增加了当地的生物多样性。该项目将通过这一测试案例来检验这些假设，并将这一群体的民族植物学知识程度与文献中其他亚马逊土著群体的知识程度进行比较。这个项目很重要，因为它将增加我们对该地区迅速消失的热带雨林的了解，并促进我们对人们如何构建文化形象和对自然世界的理解。此外，它还将为我国的知识基础增加对世界这一重要区域的了解。

This project involves the dissertation research of an anthropology student from the University of Georgia. The student will study the ethnobotanical knowledge of a forest-dwelling group in the Venezuelan Amazon, and will document the ways the community exploits, cognizes, and constructs symbolic and spiritual meanings for the vegetable resources in their environment. The hypothesis to be tested is that the predominantly foraging communities have a less developed knowledge of their botanical environment than do fully horticultural peoples. The reasons advanced in the literature are that the increased knowledge functions as insurance against crop failure; that more sedentary residence allows greater knowledge; and that human disturbance actually augments local biodiversity. The project will examine these hypotheses through this test case, and the degree of ethnobotanical knowledge of this group will be compared against that of other native Amazonian groups in the literature. This project is important because it will add to our knowledge about the rapidly disappearing tropical forest of this region, as well as advance our understanding of how people construct cultural images and understandings of the natural world. In addition it will add understanding of this important region of the world to our nation's knowledge base.