The Emergence of Indigenous Environmental Knowledge: Cognition, Perception and Social Labor in Indonesian Society

Abstract

The processes by which individuals learn how to perceive, interpret and think about their environment are not completely understood. Sixty years of anthropological studies of indigenous environmental knowledge have largely focused on language-like classification systems. These studies typically revolve around (a) conceptual knowledge such as categories, taxonomies and the functionality of certain flora and fauna and (b) the social mechanisms such as language through which they are transmitted. These approaches have been successful in highlighting variation and continuity between cultures, but more recent studies have shown that environmental knowledge varies within cultures and communities. Research conducted in Bali, Indonesia demonstrates how social labor and symbolic systems may influence several aspects of environmental knowledge, such as perceptual skills, interpretive metaphors and emic models of ecological interactions. The findings in this study address gaps in the literature on how indigenous environmental knowledge emerges, and also supplements the largely theoretical literature on the phenomenology and epistemology of labor.