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Ethnobiology for A Diverse World: Autobiology? TheTraditional Ecological, Agricultural and Culinary Knowledgeof US!Author(s): Gary Paul NabhanSource: Journal of Ethnobiology, 33(1):2-6. 2013.Published By: Society of EthnobiologyDOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2993/0278-0771-33.1.2URL: http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.2993/0278-0771-33.1.2

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ETHNOBIOLOGY FOR A DIVERSE WORLD:AUTOBIOLOGY? THE TRADITIONAL ECOLOGICAL,

AGRICULTURAL AND CULINARY KNOWLEDGE OF US!

Gary Paul Nabhan

The prefix ethno (‘other’) might be considered one of the unfortunate flawsassociated with the origins of our (inter-)discipline that has pervasively shapedthe history of ethnobiology. Since the late 19th century, when John WilliamHarshberger (1896) first coined the term ‘‘ethnobotany,’’ the prevailing strategyof most fieldworkers trained in ethnobiology has been to go and bear witness tosome other culture’s knowledge of plants and animals. We would be remiss toignore the blatantly colonial or imperialistic tone of some of the earliestethnobotanical studies. They were explicitly undertaken to either a) learn what ofvalue could be extracted from another culture’s natural resource base as exportcrops, or b) learn how immigrants could take cues from native residents on howto make a living on their shared home ground, even as some of those immigrantsusurped water and harvested native plants and wildlife from the homelands ofthe people that they were studying.

As my fellow Arab-American Edward Said (1993:5) once wrote, ‘‘We are at apoint in our work when we can no longer ignore empires and the imperialcontext in our studies.’’ Readers of Said’s Orientalism (1978) will remember hiscontention that portrayals of Arabs and Persians as ‘‘the other’’ –whether thoseportrayals represent them as primitives or as exotic sophisticates– historicallyserved as implicit justifications for both European and North American politicaland colonial ambitions. The same can be said of English-, Spanish-, French- andPortuguese-speaking immigrants to the ‘‘New World,’’ who may have eithervillified or romanticized indigenous peoples of the Americas as being in sometimeless homeostatic balance with the natural world. It both trivializes andsimplifies their more nuanced knowledge and their complex interactions–positive and negative– with the biota of the Americas.

One way out of this intellectual trap that many ethnobiologists havediscussed and practiced is to devote time to encouraging (and in some cases,assisting) members of a particular cultural community to describe their owntraditions from an emic view anchored in local language, belief, behavior andcustom. Perhaps there is no better example of this in 20th-century ethnobiologythan Ian Saen Majnep’s (Majnep et al. 1977) collaboration with ethnobiologistsRalph Bulmer and Christopher Healey, Birds of My Kalam Country.

And yet, there is another pathway that ethnobiologists can and should take,and that is the investigation of the terms and underlying principles ofethnobiological classification and resource management which can be found

Gary Paul Nabhan, Southwest Center, University of Arizona, Tucson (gpnabhan@email.arizona.edu)

Journal of Ethnobiology 33(1): 2–6 Spring/Summer 2013

within their own cultures –what we might call ‘‘autobiology.’’ Autobiology iswhat one of the former editors of this journal, Willard Van Asdall, called the‘‘ethnobiology of us.’’ Van Asdall suggested that if only as a heuristic tool, it iswell worth teaching students to inquire within their own ethnic, class, gender orlanguage communities to discern and document what kinds of orally-transmittedecological, agricultural and culinary knowledge remain in currency. Althoughthis exercise in and of itself does not erase past imperialistic pursuits, norguarantee that our (inter-)discipline will be free of them in the future, it does offerus much underexplored intellectual as well as pragmatic territory to explorewithin our own linguistic and cultural communities.

There are many examples of such autobiological inquiries already, includingJames Veteto’s excellent work on the agrobiodiversity of American English-speaking farming communities in Appalachia (see Veteto 2011). So that thepotential of this approach can be made more apparent, I have recently begun tocompile an ethnobiological lexicon for regional borderlands Spanish and Englishstill used in the six Mexican and four U.S. border states which include much ofthe desert habitats in North America. I have been prompted to do so out of thebelated recognition that I have more than 500 relatives of Lebanese descent livingin the border states whose ancestors immigrated to this region through Mexico tothe U.S., and many of them are at least bilingual (American English, MexicanSpanish) and some trilingual (with Levantine Arabic retained). With 40 years ofmy own work in all 8 border states, I had accumulated a vocabulary of regionalterms that do not appear in either the Oxford English Dictionary nor in the RealAcademia Espanola’s lexicon of ‘‘official’’ terms accepted by royal decree.

While involved in borderlands fieldwork with bilingual Spanish, English,Seri, Piman, Navajo and Hopi ethnobiology students over the last quartercentury, I have recorded many terms that have ‘‘jumped the border’’ and are nowused in this region on both sides of the international boundary, but notnecessarily the same way they might be used in the rest of Mexico or the rest ofthe U.S. Undoubtedly, some of these terms were used in or across this entire aridlandscape prior to the current placement of the U.S.-Mexico border after theTreaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo around 1850, and before current economicdominance of American English and Spanish, when Native American nationswere the primary populations dwelling in the region. While a significantpercentage of terms diffused from indigenous languages into Spanish or Englishbefore the present construction of the borderlands emerged, other terms havetheir ultimate roots in Persian, Arabic, Greek, Roman, Hebrew, and Sanskrit, notjust in Spanish and English.

Whatever the case, these ‘‘endemic’’ terms and special regional uses of morewidespread terms harbor an extraordinary amount of knowledge about how tofeed oneself in the arid and semi-arid landscapes of southwestern NorthAmerica, and in the waters of the adjacent Gulf of California and Gulf of Mexico.And so, I consulted Spanish and English farmers, ranchers, foragers, hunters,fishers, home cooks, bootleggers and chefs living in the region. I also verified theWestern scientific equivalents of regional folk taxa and expanded the lexicalrange using linguists’ and folklorists’ collections of agrarian terms such as thosefound in the recently completed Dictionary of American English (Cassidy 1985;

Spring/Summer 2013 JOURNAL OF ETHNOBIOLOGY 3

Hall 2012) and A Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish (Cobos2003). Finally, I reviewed and updated terms and their linguistic transcriptions inolder compilations such as Sobarzo’s (1966) Vocabulario Sonorense.

Of a 16% sample of the 1800 word borderlands lexicon compiled to date, 77%of the terms currently used in the bi-national region are recognizable to mostresidents as being Spanish in origin, and 23% as English in origin, although theiretymologies reflect much more nuanced trajectories of origin and diffusion. Theethnobiology of ‘‘us,’’ when defined by words used by Spanish and Englishspeakers in the region, inevitably directs us to broader historic and linguisticconsiderations. (In other words, we remain indebted to those who came before usin this landscape and in others; we could hardly live here on ‘‘pure’’ Spanish or‘‘pure’’ English alone.) This 3 to 1 ratio does not reflect current demographics,but rather demonstrates the greater antiquity of Spanish in this region, andperhaps its greater capacity to absorb terms and concepts borrowed fromindigenous languages than American English. About 15% of the terms in thesample can be traced back to Native American languages, with Algonkian,Southern Athabaskan, Cahitan, Cahuilla, Costanoan, Guayacura, Opata, Nahuatl,Piman, Tanoan and Tarahumara terms being directly traceable into Spanish. Byfar the most terms in the current regional lexicon diffused from contact withand/or multilingualism among the Aztec or Puchtecan traders, Navajo herdersand foragers, and O’odham, Opata, Tarahumara, Tewa and Yaqui farmers. Lessthan 2% are currently traceable to Arabic, Farsi, French, Hebrew, Latin, Greek,Portuguese and Turkic languages, and nearly all of these diffused into Spanishwell before European colonization of the region began around 1540.

One upshot of this autobiological exercise is to remind us that multilingual-ism and multiculturalism have been the norm, not the exception in mostAmerican landscapes. Early historic records suggest that desert nomads such asthe Hia c-ed O’odham (‘Sand Papago’ or ‘Papagos Arenenos’) spent much oftheir yearly cycle in multicultural encampments or Rancheria with the Seri, theTohono O’odham, the Cucupa, the Mohave and the Southern Yavapai. Theseasonal residents in these encampments spoke three, maybe four indigenouslanguages, and possibly used some rudimentary Nahuatl and later, Spanish, as ameans of trade as well. Perhaps certain kinds of traditional ecological knowledgewere exchanged for centuries across languages in such encampments, and wereseldom kept within an exclusively strongly monolingual context.

Since the Indian boarding school era in the United States and theintroduction of horses and automobiles in Mexico, there has been a resurgenceof cross-cultural marriages among young people that have exposed them to thelanguages and traditional knowledge of neighboring cultures early enough intheir lives for this knowledge to guide some of their behaviors and landstewardship practices.

In short, the essential message of this autobiological analysis is that thetraditional agricultural, culinary and ecological knowledge base of most residentsof this region has never been monocultural, and no doubt never will be.Neighboring cultures recognized that they had (or shared) equivalent terms forthe same species, management practice or culinary process. Because this sharedknowledge was not necessarily held in a monolingual context, it may pose

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challenges to the current thinking and emerging policies regarding intellectualproperty rights for the intangible heritage such as traditional ecologicalknowledge embedded in particular cultures. Current discourses largely assumethat such knowledge evolved internally within a single culture rather thanthrough protracted interaction with other cultures.

Of the relative richness within the various categories in the lexicon, wildplants foraged for food, found as weeds in fields, and used as indicators of soiland water offered the greatest number of terms (30%). This may be because therates of endemism in desert regions are so high that names for plants usedelsewhere on the continent did not adequately describe the many unique speciesin the borderlands, even in the eyes of farmers and ranchers, let alone foragers.Thus, a regional lexicon for wild plants is one key means through which nativesand immigrants adapted to the particular conditions of their locales. Other meansare through landscape terms for geomorphic, ecological and pedologicalconditions (9%), weather (1%), hunt-able terrestrial fauna (7%), and harvestablefish and shellfish (4%).

Agricultural terms such as crop varieties, soil management techniques andhorticultural practices unique to the region comprise 13% of the terms in thelexicon, but this grows to 19% if terms for water management through springdevelopment and irrigation (6%) are included. Ranching terms —aside fromthose exclusively dedicated to horsemanship, tack and horse colors— comprise7% of the lexicon.

One significant category in the lexicon is primarily contributed through worktraditionally accomplished by women –that of preserving, processing andpreparing foodstuffs for the table (18%). A category of terms primarilycontributed through men’s work has emerged through the past-time ofbootlegging, particularly of the various mescals distilled in the region. Roughly7% of the lexicon –the same as hunting terms– comes from the fermenting anddistillation of beverages. Finally, 2% of the lexicon refers to cooking utensils, aswell as farm and ranching tools or implements not commonly used in otherregions.

Of course, this autobiological lexicon is biased toward the traditionalknowledge held in rural communities of the borderlands, and has largely beencollected over the last half century. Today, the population of the Sun Belt ispredominantly urban on both sides of the border, and the average age ofresidents is under 25. These demographic indicators suggest that land-basedvocabularies may be less frequently relied upon by the majority of the region’sinhabitants than at any time in the past. It is likely that such time-tried traditionalecological knowledge embedded in regional Spanish and English must bequickly fading here, as it is among indigenous languages.

The documentation and renewed use of many of these terms seems worthyof our attention, time and passion as ethnobiologists. We certainly do not knowwhat the future holds, but forecasts of both our immediate climatic and economicfuture often seem bleak. These last 2 years, more than 14 U.S. states and 8Mexican states suffered from extreme drought and heat, triggering federalgovernments to declare drought disaster area status for more than 2200 countiesand hundreds of municipios on the North American continent. It just may be that

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to adapt to accelerated climate change and economic instability, such reservoirsof ecological knowledge have renewed significance to all of us, not just for desertdwellers alone. Interest in such lexicons of land-based knowledge should not bedismissed as ‘‘retro’’ or ‘‘nostalgic.’’ In a world where non-stationarity is boundto be the ‘‘new normal,’’ we will need all the help we can get.

References Cited

Cassidy, Frederic C.

1985 Dictionary of American Regional English,

Volume 1. Belnap Press of Harvard Univer-

sity Press, Cambridge.

Cobos, Ruben

2003 A Dictionary of New Mexico and South-

ern Colorado Spanish. Museum of New

Mexico Press, Santa Fe.

Hall, Joan Huston

2012 Dictionary of American Regional English,

Volume 5. Belnap Press of Harvard Univer-

sity Press, Cambridge.

Harshberger, John W.

1896 The Purpose of Ethnobotany. Botanical

Gazette 21:146–158.

Majnep, Ian Saen, Ralph N.H. Bulmer, and

Christopher Healey

1977 Birds of My Kalam Country. Oxford

University Press and Aukland University

Press, Auckland.Said, Edward W.

1978 Orientalism, 25th Anniversary Edition2003. Penguin, New York.

1993 Culture and Imperialism. Knopf/Ran-dom House, New York.

Sobarzo, Horacio1966 Vocabulario Sonorense. Editorial Por-

rua, Mexico, D.F.Veteto, James R.

2011 Apple-achia: The Most DiverseFoodshed in the U.S., Canada and NorthernMexico. In Place-Based Foods of Appalachia:From Rarity to Community Restoration andMarket Recovery, eds. James R. Veteto, GaryPaul Nabhan, Regina Fitzsimmons, KaninRoutson and DeJa Walker, pp. 2–4. Univer-sity of Arizona Southwest Center, Tucson.

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