Abstract
This chapter examines the acculturation of individuals to ethnobotanical knowledge in association with the effects of modernization. I examined the effect of modernity, which was measured as a first principal component; the variation in this principal component was tied to the cash economy, demographics, and contacts with Western materials. Complex intervillage differences in knowledge were correlated with modernity, in complex ways, as follows. The differences in knowledge were correlated with modernity when the villages were referenced to the least-modernized village. Contrary to our expectations, this did not occur when villages were referenced to the village with the highest modernity score. These results implicated that modern Western knowledge is easily integrated into the ethnobotanical knowledge system and is related to the loss of diverse botanical knowledge. An increase of Western knowledge may bring a more accurate level of biological knowledge to the villagers, but this new knowledge may not be adaptive to those living in the local environment. Even worse, Western knowledge may be biased in that villagers only gain knowledge related to how they can gain short-term for-profit-related benefits.
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Notes
- 1.
From July to November 2003.
- 2.
From December 2003 to February 2004.
- 3.
Note that at least one of the heads was born in the village, because, customarily, couples from outside the village do not hold rights to use the land and those people are not allowed to settle in the area.
- 4.
All cultural consensus analyses were performed using ANTHROPAC 4.0 (Analytic Technologies).
- 5.
In calculating the modernity score , categorical variables were quantified and then used as variables for principal component analysis. The first eigenvector was defined as the modernity score when the first eigenvector was large and positive to all modernization variables but negative to the distance to the nearest town. The PROC PRINQUAL procedure of SAS 9.1 (SAS Institute, Inc.) was used for quantification of categorical variables.
- 6.
First, the dates of births and marriage (beginning years of the household s) were obtained; official documents of birth and marriage were referred to during the interviews. Additionally, consumer unit (CU) was defined as the sum of each member’s energy requirements based on body weight (Chap. 4); the producer unit (PU) was defined as the number of adults (18 years of age or older) in the household. Every evening, participating households were visited, and all members were asked to report all cash income and its source for 24 h during a 28-day period. Net income was calculated based on the amounts earned and the amounts expended for necessities. Everyday for 14 days, the participating households were visited every 1–2 h from 6 AM to 10 PM, all crop yields brought to the households were measured, and the total energy obtained per day was calculated in MJ (Chap. 4 for detailed methods). During the same period, the garden s cultivated by each household were visited and measured using a tape measure and clinometer.
- 7.
This model is based on a model proposed by Reyes-Garcia et al. (2007).
- 8.
Both significant level of entry (SLE) and significant level of staying (SLS) were fixed at 0.15.
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Furusawa, T. (2016). Changing Ethnobotanical Knowledge. In: Living with Biodiversity in an Island Ecosystem. Ethnobiology. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-904-2_7
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