Abstract
Indigenous systems of recognition and classification of plants and arthropods are based on local criteria of relationship and contrast. Both inherent intellectual interest and utility considerations play a part in the choice of distinguishing features emphasized. In distinguishing among non-cultivated plants informants display awareness of life habits and morphological features that have little direct bearing on agronomic properties. In discriminating among harmless arthropods, physiological/behavioral attributes are emphasized. When the tasks include cultivated plants and harmful arthropods, functional criteria tend to dominate with respect to plant discrimination while negative human-directed effects are emphasized with respect to arthropods. Focusing on rice varieties, the discrimination criteria used are significantly gastronomic.
One implication is that there is a need to broaden our perspective on farmers to admit a view of them as consumers rather than just as producers and to take their gastronomic preferences into account in breeding cultivars that have improved agronomic and market performance. In terms of integrated pest management, there is a need for taking stock of indigenous knowledge before any attempt to supplant it with “scientific” information is initiated. In sum, more serious attention needs to be paid to “ethnoagronomy” and “ethnogastronomy” — cognized models in the spheres of production and consumption — in order to design and promote agricultural recommendations that have a better chance of passing through the preattentive filters and being deliberately considered by farmers for their possible merits.
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Virginia D. Nazarea-Sandoval is an Assistant Professor at the College of Human Ecology and an Affiliate Faculty member of the Institute of Environmental Science and Management, University of the Philippines, Los Banos. Currently, she is on special detail at the International Potato Center where she is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Science and Assistant Coordinator of User's Perspective in Agricultural Research and Development (UPWARD) Network. Her research interests include agricultural decision making, indigenous knowledge systems, and variations in coping strategies as a function of class and gender.
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Nazarea-Sandoval, V.D. Ethnoagronomy and ethnogastronomy: On indigenous typology and use of biological resources. Agric Hum Values 8, 121–131 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01579665
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01579665