Ethnoecology

There are numerous analytical tools that explain the social structure of human interaction with the ecosystem itself which include ideologies like cultural ecology and ecological anthropology. But the most significant tool that explains the fundamental principles of the interactions is the idea of ethnoecology. The ethnoecological approach explains the fact that what people know about the environment and how they categorize that information will effect what they do in that particular environment (Moran 50). In addition, how people categorize the information is due to strong cognitive skills, not behavior. In Skinner’s “rat box” for example, a rat is in a box and pushes the button for food (Wiki). The behavior learned is to press the bar, but on the other hand the cognitive idea learned is that pressing it produces food. The formation of mental representation in cognition instead of associating between stimuli in behavior is crucial to ethnoecology in terms of taxonomies, or the study of classifications.

Anthropologist Linda Whiteford’s work focused on how the Dominican people living in one barrio in the capital city of Santo Domingo perceive the threats to their ability to prevent dengue fever and their responses to those threats. More than 90 percent of the indigenous people interviewed accurately described how it was transmitted, where the mosquitoes interacted, and how to prevent it without any medical intervention (Whiteford 14-15). Their mental representation, or cognitive skills, created an accurate taxonomie of the mosquito-spread fever, which in return helped them react to their environment in ways to prevent or treat it.

Although the knowledge drawn from these taxonomies were accurate, the knowledge itself is not synonymous with the behavior in some occasions. The indigenous people understood that mosquitoes form around open areas with water, and therefore close all containers with water left outside in order to prevent dengue fever. But in more than a few instances, Whiteford discovered that the containers were left open for long periods of time while the people knew mosquitoes could contaminate it (Whiteford 12,17). This kind of behavior does not abide by the ethnoecological principle, and therefore more research would need to be implemented to encode this opposing behavior. Ethnoecology is crucial to researching the relationship between the ecosystem and humans, and therefore is a key tool to the explanation of our behavior.


Linda M. Whiteford, The Ethnoecology of Dengue Fever
Medical Anthropology Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 11, No. 2,
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 7 Oct. 2009

Moran, Emilio. "Human Adaptability: An Introduction to Ecological Anthropology." W.W.
Norton: New York. 2001. Print.


"Operant Conditioning Chamber." Wikipedia. Wikipedia, 2009. Web. 04 Oct. 2009.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber