All societies have their own systems of knowledge through which they seek to understand the natural environment and their relationship to it. Thus we may be better able to understand a society by going beyond the categories of Western science and begin to consider the interrelationship of a society with its environment from the viewpoint of the members of that society. It is this attempt to understand how members of a society, themselves, conceive of their environment that has come to be known as ethnoecology (Casiño 1967). Ethnoastronomy, the subject of this article, may be seen as a branch of ethnoecology wherein the interrelationship of human populations with their celestial environment is the focus of interest.
The modern nation states of Indonesia and Malaysia have a combined population of approximately 260 million and encompass the homelands of well over 500 distinct ethno‐linguistic groups whose cultures and languages form part of a common Austronesian heritage, a heritage they...
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Notes
- 1.
In addition, there are at least 100 Papuan languages spoken in the Indonesian province of West Papua on the western half of the island of New Guinea.
- 2.
I use the term “asterism” to refer to a commonly recognized patterned grouping of stars. While these groupings are often referred to generically as “constellations,” I reserve the latter term to refer to the 88 bounded regions of the sky generally accepted by international scientific astronomers, these regions often named for asterisms found within their borders. Note, however, in Western starlore, there may be two or more asterisms within one constellation (e.g., the “Big Dipper” and the “Great Bear” in Ursa Majoris).
- 3.
For an exceptionally thorough historical and comparative discussion of concepts of orientation is several South Sulawesian languages, see Liebner (2005).
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Ammarell, G. (2008). Astronomy in the Indo‐Malay Archipelago. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4425-0_8462
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