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

博士生Yancey Orr(亚利桑那大学)将在J.Stephen Lansing博士的指导下，研究环境知识在印度尼西亚高地巴厘岛社区中如何出现差异。这项研究将侧重于人们如何与他们的环境相关和互动的多个层面，并在这样做的过程中解决关于从经验中产生知识的基本人类学问题。研究将涉及诸如个人如何理解生态相互作用、解释动物行为和视觉感知风景等主题。研究人员将使用从认知科学实验和对湿稻农场主和手工生产者进行的采访中收集的数据。这些信息将被用来研究通过劳动和观察直接体验环境如何影响知识和技能。这项研究之所以重要，是因为它与现有的环境知识研究不同，现有的环境知识研究通常侧重于以语言群体为分析单位的分类方案。相反，这项拟议的研究旨在揭示社区内环境知识的差异以及人们如何获得这些知识。本研究将有助于认知科学对心理模型及其发展的研究。除了解决人类学中的问题，这项研究对巴厘岛也有实际应用，因为巴厘岛的高地曾经是该岛的农业中心，在许多地区，已经通过手工艺品生产转变为为游客服务。劳工环境的这种变化对巴厘岛人环境知识的影响是这项研究的一个组成部分。

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.