Entirely Different Kinds of Beast: The Ontological Challenge to Knowledge Integration in Ethnobiology

1. Introduction

To check whether scientific and non-scientific taxonomies of birds differ in significant ways, Jared Diamond and K. David Bishop spent 3 weeks in 1993 walking for entire days and observing birds with expert Ketengban guides in the forests of New Guinea. People have occupied New Guinea for at least 40,000 years, making the local Ketengban heirs to some 1,600 generations of knowledge of this environment (Diamond and Bishop 1999, 41). Diamond and Bishop cataloged 169 Ketengban bird names and successfully mapped 143 that they encountered during the expedition onto species as recognized by ornithologists (Diamond and Bishop 1999, 31). Doing so at once documented a piece of Ketengban knowledge of nature and was taken to support the hypothesis motivating Diamond’s and Bishop’s study: that a correspondence between scientific and non-scientific classifications of birds would be best explained by species realism, the view that biological species are not arbitrary conventions but refer to real categories in nature (Diamond and Bishop 1999, 17).

Diamond’s and Bishop’s study of Ketengban ornithology is one in a series of ethnobiological studies emphasizing similarities between categories across relevantly different communities (Berlin, Breedlove, and Raven 1973; Diamond 1966; Hunn 2007). ¹ Beyond the mere documentation of similarities and differences, ethnobiologists also increasingly seek to integrate scientific and ethnoscientific knowledge of the natural world toward various scientific, conservatory, and industrial purposes (Rist and Dahdouh-Guebas 2006). In its most basic form, integration means that scientific communities draw on the knowledge and insights acquired by ethnoscientific communities in their extensive observation of an area or species (Huntington 2000, 1270). ² Working across different communities and making good use of ethnographic material involves methods from various social and natural sciences. This makes ethnobiology today a multidisciplinary field that studies the dynamic processes by which humans in all communities interact with, perceive, and conceptualize plants, animals, and whole ecosystems (Ellen 2006, 2).

Recently, however, a series of anthropological studies of Amerindian communities, as well as communities on New Guinea, has posed a challenge to the integration of scientific and ethnoscientific knowledge of nature. Rather than emphasizing the stability of categories across communities, this approach focuses on cases of radical difference. For example, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics (2009 [2014]) and Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think (2013), feature accounts of shamanistic transformations of humans into non-human animals and animistic ascriptions of subjectivity to trees, respectively. Labeled the “ontological turn,” this movement proposes a fundamental methodological revision according to which anthropologists are not in the business of documenting other peoples’ representations of the world (Holbraad 2010; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017). Instead, it holds that people can be found to inhabit different worlds, populated by specific entities and social relations, some of which may be simply inaccessible to outsiders. The prospect of a new radical relativism already sparked a philosophical discussion of the ontological turn in terms of anti-representationalism or the metaphysics of social kinds (Paleček and Risjord 2013; Risjord 2020; Sivado 2015, 2020).

Aside from attempts to integrate the ontological turn into analytic metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language, philosophers of ethnobiology consider the existence community-specific entities, processes, and relations to pose a hard limit to the integration of scientific and ethnoscientific knowledge of nature (Ludwig 2016; Ludwig and Weiskopf 2019; Ludwig and El-Hani 2020). To meet this challenge, they propose to find a nuanced middle ground between the similarities hitherto emphasized in ethnobiology and the differences emphasized by the ontological turn. This is achieved by focusing on successful cases of knowledge integration in ethnobiology, which are in turn modeled as partial overlaps between the ontologies of different communities (Ludwig 2016; Ludwig and El-Hani 2020; Ludwig and Weiskopf 2019). These ontological overlaps in terms of co-reference to natural kinds and their properties are intended to provide a framework for the discussion of differences across communities in ethnobiology while the radical metaphysical claims of the ontological turn are said to “often remain philosophically obscure” (Ludwig and El-Hani 2020, 5).

In this paper I argue that the idea of radical differences as introduced by anthropologists does not pose a limitation to the project of knowledge integration in ethnobiology. Methodological recommendations resulting from the ontological turn, instead, suggest a much more inclusive understanding of integration. In section two I provide a close reading and interpretation of the central example of radical difference in the philosophical literature: Viveiros de Castro’s case of humans transforming into jaguars in Amerindian shamanism. In the third section I apply Viveiros de Castro’s analysis of Amerindian shamanism by way of a thought experiment to the institution of citizenship and the process of naturalization under nationalism. This thought experiment illustrates what I take to be the ontological turn’s core methodological commitments. In section four I present the philosophers’ framework of ontological overlaps and argue that it misses the methodological challenge posed by anthropologists and that it results in an even more restrictive outlook on integration than the presence of radical differences would. Finally, in section five I look at two case studies in ethnobiology that would have to be classified as integration failures in the framework of ontological overlaps. I show that both cases are well captured by the methodology illustrated in section three. I argue that both cases are also epistemically fruitful despite the absence of ontological overlaps and that they should not therefore be dismissed as integration failures.

2. What it Takes to Literally Transform into a Jaguar

The point of the ontological turn is to counter a powerfully intuitive model of cultural differences that is both suggested by and reflected in Western multiculturalism. According to this multiculturalist model, as Martin Holbraad and other anthropologists of the ontological turn see it, differences “can only be understood as a divergence between contrasting representations of reality” (Holbraad 2010, 182). To take other communities to have (merely) different representations of or beliefs about one underlying reality leads to the dismissal of different perspectives as nothing more than false beliefs or representations. Or, as Holbraad puts it, this “is just to say that they deny what we take to be true or, in other words, that they assert what we take to be false” (Holbraad 2010, 184). Instead, anthropologists should consider the things reported in ethnography to be real.

For this project to succeed, however, we would somehow need to accept that Amerindian shamans really transform into jaguars. This is the notorious case taken from Viveiros de Castro’s work that is presented as the most radical limitation to the project of knowledge integration in ethnobiology (Ludwig 2016; Ludwig and El-Hani 2020; Ludwig and Weiskopf 2019). ³ The concern here is not only the question of how to understand the transformation of a human into a jaguar as an actual process, but also Viveiros de Castro’s answer: we have to revise the categories of nature and culture suggested to us by our Western multiculturalism. Rather than having one nature that is represented in multiple cultures, we would have to conceive of “multiple natures” in order to understand Amerindian cosmology. These claims about shamans, jaguars, and natures are so far only stated in the literature on ethnobiology as a challenge to the category of nature (Ludwig 2016; Ludwig and El-Hani 2020; Ludwig and Weiskopf 2019). In the rest of this section, I present a close reading and interpretation of the shamanistic transformation into a jaguar by emphasizing an analogy with social institutions.

Viveiros de Castro attempts to provide an explanation for something that may seem rather impossible to a Western reader: the transformation of humans into animals in Amerindian shamanism. The interpretation he wants to resist is that shamans are merely pretending to transform into animals by wearing animal masks during rituals. This would be at odds with the physicality of this process that is claimed by shamanism and reported in ethnography (Viveiros de Castro 2012, 124). He offers a different interpretation of the function of masks in shamanism:

[…] the animal clothes that shamans or sorcerers use to travel the cosmos are not fantasies but instruments: they are akin to diving equipment, or space suits, and not to carnival masks. The intention when donning a wet suit is to be able to function like a fish, to breathe underwater, not to conceal oneself under a strange covering. (Viveiros de Castro 2012, 136)

Viveiros de Castro arrives at this interpretation by means of an idiom that can be found in Amerindian communities across the Americas; namely, that all forms of life occupy a house or container (Viveiros de Castro 2012, 133). The crucial difference here, however, is that the factor that determines what a thing is, its essence, or its active principle, travels with the container. By contrast, Western conceptions tend to place this factor, as well as the subjective point of view, quite naturally in the soul that inhabits an otherwise indifferent material container. For example, in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, the protagonist is presented as a human mind trapped in the body of an insect. For a similar conflict to even arise from an Amerindian point of view, the protagonist’s body would have to have both human and insect parts, more like in George Langelaan’s The Fly. On Viveiros de Castro’s interpretation, the bodily container of an animal is not a mere disguise, but a “distinctive equipment, endowed with the affects and capacities which define each animal” (Viveiros de Castro 2012, 136). This notion of the animal’s body is what explains the function of masks in shamanistic rituals:

We are dealing with societies which inscribe efficacious meanings onto the skin, and which use animal masks […] endowed with the power metaphysically to transform the identities of those who wear them. (Viveiros de Castro 2012, 135)

Amerindian shamans are, therefore, not pretending to transform into jaguars, but are literally transforming into jaguars. ⁴ By what analogy could we understand this process? Certainly, we also do not (in a trivial sense) pretend that two people are married, that money has value, or that nations have borders. Following Viveiros de Castro, we could say that marriage is a real thing, rather than a peculiar representation of certain relationships among people. And so might shamanistic transformation be a real thing in Amerindian communities, rather than a representation of certain ritualistic practices that would have to be explained by peculiar cognitive processes on the part of Amerindian shamans. A change of marital or citizenship status literally changes one’s relations to others: they “transform” into husbands, sisters-in-law, fellow citizens, and foreign nationals. What changes is what somebody else “counts as” in relation to oneself, despite otherwise appearing quite the same before and after a wedding or a naturalization.

To explain how the Amerindian cosmology of multiple natures results from these relations, Viveiros de Castro introduces a distinction between a perspective and a representation. In a much-cited passage he claims that different perspectives within Amerindian thought are not different mental representations or phenomenal appearances of some object but are relations that determine what something is for any given perspective (Viveiros de Castro 2012, 112). Blood is here taken to look the same to humans and to jaguars, but for humans it is blood while for jaguars it is manioc beer (a local beer brewed from the manioc shrub):

Blood is to humans as manioc beer to jaguars in exactly the same way as a sister to me is a wife to my brother-in-law. (Viveiros de Castro 2012, 111)

A jaguar’s representation of blood is the same red liquid that humans see, but from the jaguar’s perspective—its relation to blood—it counts as a drink. Similarly, in Viveiros de Castro’s example, I and my brother-in-law will have the same representation of my sister—she will look the same to both of us—but she will be a sister from my perspective and a wife from the perspective of my brother-in-law. Blood has, by this analogy, at least two different natures in Amerindian cosmology: while it may be similarly represented by humans and jaguars, its nature from the human perspective is that of a vital bodily fluid and its other nature from the jaguar’s perspective is that of a drink. For this reason, shamans do not merely experience the animal’s representation of the world (it would look just the same) but instead inhabit the animal’s relations with the world through a ritual involving animal masks.

The cosmology that emerges from these relations, according to Viveiros de Castro, is one in which there is a representational unity (a red liquid independent of perspective) set off against a diversity of realities for different perspectives (blood or manioc beer from the human’s or jaguar’s point of view, respectively). Noting the contrast with Western multiculturalism, which reversely pictures a unity of the natural world against a diversity of subjective and partial representations of it, Viveiros de Castro conceptualizes the Amerindian approach to nature/culture and body/soul distinctions as multinaturalism (Viveiros de Castro 2012, 112). For shamanistic transformations to be real things for a Western multiculturalist, that person would need to inhabit a different, multinatural world of multiple perspectives and corresponding natures.

3. The Anthropology and Integration of Ontological Differences

In the previous section I suggested that Amerindian shamans transform just as literally into jaguars as people transform into sisters-in-law, citizens, or landlords through certain real institutions like marriage, citizenship, and ownership. Of course, the latter are social categories. While it may sound relatively natural, real, or possible to “transform” into social categories, it may seem rather supernatural, unreal, or impossible, from a Western point of view, to extend this sense of transformation to a natural category like a jaguar.

Surely, Westerners might think, there are no metaphysical properties to the jaguar’s skin that would have escaped biologists and that allow Amerindian shamans to transform their relations to the world. This however would once again frame the difference between communities here as if it was a conflict or disagreement between two representations of one underlying reality. The ontological turn’s alternative explanation is that multiculturalist anthropologists and their multinaturalist Amerindian interlocutors might instead be talking about two different things and, therefore, talk past each other. In this section I apply the ontological turn’s methodology to citizenship under nationalism. By way of this thought experiment, I want to abstract the relevant methodology from Amerindian shamanism, bring out what I take to be the ontological turn’s core commitments, and show that Viveiros de Castro’s Western multicultural communities can similarly be found ascribing a transformative metaphysical property to what they take to be natural objects or categories.

Imagine a group of anthropologists who were never exposed in any way to the global system of nation states. They might visit one of our present-day nation states and find that people there assign a special metaphysical significance to some natural landmarks but not others. Crossing certain rivers and mountain chains not only alters somebody’s location; it also may transform the individual’s relations to other people, as well as toward those same landscape features.

Anthropologists who would not be aware that to us a natural border and a national border are two different things, could find several of the same properties in the descriptions of a river as a natural border and that same river as a national border. The river’s general topography as a geographic feature and as a political border may not be different at all in terms of shape, location, and amount of water carried. But what exactly makes it possible to “cross the river” as a physical and as a political obstacle can involve talking about two different things: swimming and migrating.

Let us now assume further that the imagined anthropologists endorse the ontological turn. They want to resist the interpretation that we are merely pretending to go through a substantial transformation when we cross this invisible political property of the river. And they also want to resist the interpretation that we are merely misrepresenting a natural border as a national border. Indeed, they conclude, this is not a case of conflicting representations at all, as there seem to be two entirely different things involved.

They notice that there are certain things and relations in our community like nations, citizenships, fellow citizens, as well as transformative rituals involving paperwork called “naturalizations.” Let us finally specify that the anthropologists come from a community in which all people are born into one unified political world, the same way that, for Western multicultural communities, everyone is born into one unified natural world. To describe their ethnographic material in a way that is not outright absurd to them, they come up with the notion of “multinationalism,” according to which one’s geographical location at birth, or the birthplace of one’s parents, determines the relations between oneself and certain mountains and rivers.

What would it mean for them and us to be talking past each other? Imagine we told them that we would like to “see what it is like to live on the other side of that river” and they would offer to help us build a bridge. Their solution would target the river as a physical obstacle, while we are talking about a change of our political relations. They might even find it rather supernatural, unreal, or impossible to extend the simple concept of physically “crossing a river” to our political category. I would consider this misunderstanding in analogy to Amerindian shamans maybe saying that they would like to “see what the jaguar’s world looks like” and the scientific community offering to help develop advanced bionic binoculars that would mimic the jaguar’s night vision and color perception. This solution would target the jaguar’s perceptual experience of its environment, while the shamans are talking about the jaguar’s relations to other jaguars, humans, and their blood. These are not two conflicting representations of the jaguar’s eye’s physiology, but two entirely different ways of understanding what it means to see the world through the eyes of a jaguar.

These are then the methodological implications of the ontological turn: anthropologists discover the reality of certain things and relations present in one community that are absent in another. Ontological differences between communities do not imply disagreements about the natural world, because they involve talking about different things. Understanding these differences then requires revisions of one’s most basic assumptions about what kinds of things and relations exist. And this is what gives the ontological turn its name:

This, then, is what an ‘ontology’ is: the result of anthropologists’ systematic attempts to transform their conceptual repertoires in such a way as to be able to describe their ethnographic material in terms that are not absurd. (Holbraad 2010, 185)

An implication for knowledge integration in ethnobiology would be that a diverging taxonomy of plant or animal life may not really be at conflict with biologists’ ways of “carving nature at its joints.” Instead, an ethnoscientific classification could serve a different purpose entirely. Also, as I suggest with the example of a border river, two descriptions of what we take to be one natural object could seem to coincide over many properties and still be talking about two different things. Rather than focus on elements of ethnoscientific knowledge of nature that already seem to fit scientific categories and purposes, knowledge integration should then require anthropologists and biologists to rethink their own categories in the light of ethnographic material. This still leaves us with at least four different ways of thinking about knowledge integration that I will here dub (1) self-awareness, (2) revision, (3) addition, and (4) transfer.

Take again the anthropologists in my thought experiment above. (1) They could become aware of their own assumptions about political unity for the very first time and come to understand those better by having a contrast. (2) They could revise some of their most basic social and political assumptions, concepts, or theories in light of our multinationalism. (3) Or, if their community already features some sort of political disunity, they could simply add our ideas and practices surrounding national citizenship to their ideas and practices. Finally, (4) if they find something useful in our ways of describing and determining national borders but cannot accept the latter to be real or relevant, they could still transfer some aspect from our political theory or practice to some other purpose in their community without major revisions or outright additions on their part. I see all four of these processes as potentially fruitful factors in knowledge integration and will indicate with the case studies in section five how they feature in ethnobiological research and how they can also go both ways across communities.

Knowledge integration in terms of the ontological turn would fail of course wherever the ontological turn as an anthropological theory or method would fail. In a reply to Viveiros de Castro, David Graeber discusses several unclarities and inconsistencies he finds with the ontological turn and contrasts these with his own experiences from ethnographic work (Graeber 2015). One possible failure that Graeber notes would be the disregard of what I call emic doubt or emic disagreement, and the resulting overemphasis of some particular interpretation of a communal practice. Even if some radically different entities, processes, or relations feature within a given community, members of that same community can be found to hold all kinds of attitudes toward those entities, processes, or relations, including what may look like the same incredulity outsiders of that community might display (Graeber 2015, 10-14). Of the participants in a Catholic mass only a few—and possibly not a single one—might actually believe in the reality of any particular interpretation of the process of transubstantiation, and yet the mass still may be a meaningful practice even to members of the community who hold emic doubts about transubstantiation. If such circumstances pertain, a process like transubstantiation might actually serve a different communal function than whatever the concrete metaphysics of being able to turn wine into blood would seem to entail. ⁵ However, the disregard of emic doubt could just as well happen in the approach based on ontological overlaps, which I discuss in the next section.

To sum up: what is “radical” about radical differences is that they require revisions of our assumptions about what kinds of things exist and how they relate to each other. And what is “ontological” about the ontological turn is its understanding of communal differences in terms of different things and their relations, rather than different representations of the things we know.

4. Ontologies and Overlaps in the Philosophy of Ethnobiology

In contrast to the ontological turn’s claims about different worlds, philosophers of ethnobiology propose to understand cultural differences in a framework of distinct ontologies and their overlaps. Multiple ontologies here are supposed to capture the things and relations anthropologists find across different communities. David Ludwig and Daniel Weiskopf give the following definition of the term:

By ‘ontology’ here, we mean the way that the world is organized according to a particular cultural group. Ontologies include an inventory of the types of things that exist, the classes that they sort themselves into, the properties they have, and relations they stand in. (Ludwig and Weiskopf 2019, 2) ⁶

Modeling the ontologies of different communities into such sets of entities, properties, and relations subsequently allows to look for “ontological overlaps” between them. ⁷ This approach is intended to strike a middle ground between an overly optimistic emphasis of similarities in ethnobiology and an overly pessimistic emphasis of differences in anthropology. The idea is to begin the study of differences between communities in a nuanced “bottom-up” way with partial overlaps and non-overlaps between scientific and ethnoscientific taxonomies, rather than “top-down,” as anthropologists of the ontological turn do, with “the most salient cases of deep ontological difference” (Ludwig and El-Hani 2020, 6). The presence or absence of such overlaps is then taken to account for successes and failures of integrating scientific and ethnoscientific knowledge. In this section I go through examples given for successful and unsuccessful integration in terms of overlaps and argue that they miss the challenge posed by the ontological turn.

Ludwig’s example of successful integration is a case of Inuit and Western biologists who cooperated in the description of the arctic fox. ⁸ What made the cooperation possible is that both referred to the same biological kind. Once this co-reference was established, they were able to complement each other’s knowledge of the kind’s properties. Western biologists had knowledge of the species’ anatomical and phylogenetic properties but did not know about the specifics of its diet. Inuit biologists had knowledge of the species’ different feeding strategies (marine and terrestrial) and were thus able to supplement the scientific account of the arctic fox with their knowledge of its behavior (Ludwig 2016, 38). Both of Ludwig’s other examples of successful integration repeat the same pattern of agreement over kinds (common eider ducks, bowhead whales) and mutual complementation of the properties each side associates with a kind. These are the ontological overlaps that ground integration efforts in ethnobiology:

While both Indigenous and Western biologists had different knowledge, integration turned out to be possible and epistemically beneficial because it involved co-reference to the same kinds. (Ludwig 2016, 38)

To avoid the metaphysical controversies that may come with a focus on natural kinds, Ludwig understands this co-reference to kinds in terms of what he takes to be the less contentious notion of empirically discovered property clusters. ⁹ Different communities may know different sets of properties within the empirically stable cluster associated with the arctic fox, but they still successfully co-refer to the same cluster.

Ludwig offers examples of two different ways that integration can fail. One is the case of a divergent classification of soil types by the Yucatec Maya, where the Indigenous system reflects properties such as soil depth, stoniness, or drainage conditions, which are ignored by scientific soil taxonomies. These are for Ludwig socially mediated differences as they arise from different epistemic and social goals in the practice of Indigenous agriculture, which lead to the recognition of different property clusters and respective kinds of soil (Ludwig 2016, 39). The other kind of integration failure is due to what Ludwig calls “locally stable property clusters.” The example is the Tzeltal Maya category of Tsa’ wakax mushrooms, which are locally known as small, brownish, short-lived, and growing on grasslands between June and October. These features will indeed be locally stable in the region inhabited by the Tzeltal Maya, but they would differ for the same kind of mushroom across different environments and are therefore not recognized as relevant property clusters in scientific mycology. These are for Ludwig non-overlapping ontologies due to social as well as environmental specifics: “we should expect an Indigenous society to employ an at least partly different ontology that acknowledges the existence of different kinds within its target domain” (Ludwig 2016, 40).

Ludwig and Charbel N. El-Hani see the ontological turn as potentially introducing artificial boundaries and painting an overly pessimistic picture of insurmountable differences between communities (Ludwig and El-Hani 2020, 5). The focus on partial overlaps should mitigate this threat to knowledge integration, but instead it introduces artificial boundaries where the ontological turn would not. Therefore, Ludwig’s examples achieve exactly what the framework of ontological overlaps is supposed to avoid. Take the example of the arctic fox: if Inuit biologists only complement properties of the arctic fox cluster that are already accepted by and of interest to Western biologists, such as the fox’s diet, I do not see how the ontological overlap between Inuit and Western biologists is any more significant than the ontological overlap among any two Western biologists themselves. After all, two Western biologists may well study different properties of the arctic fox and then complement each other’s findings within the cluster. Indeed, why even ascribe a distinct ontology to the Inuit in the first place, if only to later declare the two communities’ ontologies to overlap?

Similarly with the example of the Tsa’ wakax mushrooms: integration failure is here explained in terms of stable local property clusters in the Tzeltal Maya environment. This is basically another way of saying that sometimes the ontologies of other communities turn out to be right about the natural world by our lights, even if the features they track are too local to match scientific classifications. Local property clusters are uncontroversial and, I would think, even recognized by “Western scientific ontology” and so it is not clear to me why a distinct ontology should be ascribed to Tzeltal Maya communities, rather than to just anyone tracking local environmental features. The mycological reality that Tzeltal Maya and Western mycologists inhabit seems to be the same in Ludwig’s example. By classifying it as an instance of integration failure, Ludwig reduces successful integration and ontological overlaps to how well ethnoscientific taxonomies happen to match scientific taxonomies.

This reduction leads to a much higher bar for integration to succeed and for two communities to share an ontology than the ontological turn would set with its focus on radical differences. The mismatch of ontologies in the case of soil types is presented in terms of a local agricultural focus on soil depth or stoniness. These are again rather uncontroversial factors, but they give rise to a particular classification based in agricultural practice that diverges from scientific soil typology. I would see the same failure of integration in the case of the tomato in grocery stores. We could say with Ludwig’s framework, that culinary and botanical ontologies classify it as a vegetable and a fruit, respectively. But I do not see why this should be taken as a limitation or even failure of knowledge integration, given that we seem to understand perfectly well how culinary and agricultural classifications come about.

All of Ludwig’s examples are non-radical in the sense that they do not require any rethinking of Western or scientific categories. Indeed, successfully integrating ethnoscientific and scientific knowledge of nature is made conditional on not having to change the latter’s assumptions about the natural world whatsoever. If Ludwig takes the Yucatec Maya classification of soil to be a different representation of the same soil that the scientific community knows, then this example misses the central point of the ontological turn by modeling differences between communities in terms of conflicting representations. If he takes this classification to reflect a different reality, then it is the reality of soil depth, stoniness, and drainage conditions, none of which would require the scientific community to reconsider its basic assumptions about what kinds of things exist. Of course, Ludwig’s examples are intentionally moderate by contrast with the ontological turn’s examples of radical difference. However, it is exactly the dismissal of minor ontological or taxonomical mismatches that would leave cases involving radical differences out of consideration for the project of knowledge integration. In the following section I discuss two case studies in ethnobiology to show that radical differences can fruitfully take center stage in ethnobiological research, despite the absence of ontological overlaps in Ludwig’s sense.

5. Change and Difference in Ethnobiological Research

In this section I summarize two ethnobiological studies to highlight how changes in scientific and political interests as well as in ethnoscientific knowledge of nature, determine which aspects of scientific and ethnoscientific knowledge of the natural world are assessed for potential overlaps in the first place. One is a study in forest ecology by Roy Ellen with the local Nuaulu on Seram, Eastern Indonesia. The other is a study in ethnobotany by Theresa L. Miller with the Canela community in northeast Brazil. The motivations and results of both studies would be obscured by a focus on overlaps between taxonomies. Instead, I suggest that the ontological turn’s methodological recommendations, as presented in section three, better capture the motivations, results, and potential integration of the scientific and ethnoscientific knowledge involved.

Ellen’s study responds to a situation in which modern forestry has increasingly diverged from the indigenous or folk classifications of forest types that it used to draw on as “there was increasing pressure to produce generic typologies of practical value to science and industry which applied over wider geographic areas” (Ellen 2007, 65). However, these new ways of representing and quantifying forest types and plots also led to generalizations that would distort local ecological realities and be deployed in “territorialization strategies” on behalf of local state power. With unifying and simplifying definitions of forests, technical forestry practice aided in the demarcation of land and was, according to Ellen, “first formalised and institutionalised, and indeed continues, within an overt political context, which has shaped its underlying assumptions” (Ellen 2007, 42). Foresters’ classifications of forest types have in turn been increasingly abandoned in modern forest ecology, which tries to model the dynamic character of forest diversity more accurately (Ellen 2007, 41). These more sophisticated attempts at modeling for example the “patchiness” of tropical rainforests or its history of manipulation by humans and differences in regrowth are reminiscent of and, as Ellen argues, anticipated by indigenous classifications of forest types (Ellen 2007, 42).

Ellen explains that, in ecology, forest types constitute so-called “secondary biodiversity,” which tracks local associations and relationships between species (like biotopes, habitats, niches, or ecosystems), by contrast with “primary biodiversity” that is measured in numbers of species present (Ellen 2007, 41). Previously dominant models of forest types relied on the concept of so-called “climax forests” or “climax communities.” These refer to idealized stable states that communities of trees are supposed to approach by adapting to their respective environments if undisturbed. Evidence that tropical rainforests are much less stable, that they feature a lot of recent regrowth, or that they were also previously already manipulated by humans, called type concepts based on such static forest ecosystems into question as stereotypical or “essentialised” (Ellen 2007, 56). Local ethnoecological categories Ellen found with the Nuaulu on Seram, by contrast, reflect the “disturbance history” of forests and therefore arguably align with this newer focus in scientific forest ecology on the patchiness, historicity, and diversity of forest composition.

Ellen conducted his research in 1996 with different individuals from the local Nuaulu population engaged in cultivation, extraction, and hunting in lowland central Seram. While Ellen was able to catalogue a list of vernacular botanical names that correspond reasonably well to scientific species (Ellen 2007, 49), he found a significant lack of congruence between official typologies of forests in the region and Nuaulu folk classifications (Ellen 2007, 56). Semantically stable and shared names and categories in Nuaulu forest typology track the cultivation and ownership of land—patches, groves, and plantations that were deliberately manipulated by humans—rather than the presence or dominance of particular botanic species (Ellen 2007, 63).

Ellen found the Nuaulu term wesie to broadly refer to all forests, but prototypically to mature forests away from human settlement. By contrast, areas that were recently manipulated by humans are called nisi, “gardens,” and these are further divided into “(1) nisi honue, recently cleared garden plots up until the end of the first year; (2) nisi monai, gardens after the first year; and (3) nisi ahue, secondary growth of various kinds” (Ellen 2007, 63). A special category Ellen documented, nia monai, translates into “old village” and also tracks the different stages of previous settlements following abandonment. He infers that the Nuaulu perceive forests to be in a constant state of flux, mostly due to humans interacting with them, and that this disturbance history is the unifying basis for their understanding of forests:

No stretch of vegetation is ever seen as an example of some generic ahistoric type, but rather as a place whose character must be understood through its particular historical associations, and the overall ‘cultural density’ […] of the landscape. (Ellen 2007, 63)

The mix of botanical and social categories results in a detailed knowledge of local forests. This is also reflected in Ellen’s impression that when he asked local guides for Nuaulu names by presenting or pointing to features he thought would be salient for classification, they were likely to produce ad hoc descriptions, rather than fixed and agreed upon ecological categories (Ellen 2007, 66). He concludes that Nuaulu representations of forests reflect continuous environmental and social change and that classifications are applied in a flexible and non-mechanical way. For this reason, Nuaulu forest typology should not be understood as a set of categories that would correspond to categories in forest ecology in a straightforward way:

To describe a ‘patch’ in terms of a permanent and simple ethnoecological category is to overgeneralise and reify in a way which is not always helpful to the representation and management of resources. (Ellen 2007, 67)

This lack of ethnoecological counterparts to scientific forest typology is why Nuaulu classifications would not qualify for an ontological overlap in Ludwig’s sense. The absence of co-reference to agreed-upon forest types or kinds was however no impediment to Ellen’s research. I would argue that the Nuaulu way of tracking social categories, such as ownership and cultivation, and to see forests in a constant state of flux, is what makes their knowledge of the environment so valuable to ecology. Deducing the amount of ontological overlap between Nuaulu knowledge of forests and scientific forest ecology from a taxonomic comparison of the two would also miss the fact that for Ellen’s ethnobotanical study to find meaningful similarities between ethnobotanical and scientific classifications, scientific forest ecology first had to abandon both the politicized typology of local forest departments as well as its own concept of a climax forest.

I would see the Nuaulu description of forests for reasons of determining ownership and cultivation in analogy to the description of the border river for reasons of determining the political border between two nations in my thought experiment above—an example of what I called integration by transfer in section three. Even though Ellen and the Nuaulu might in this sense be talking about different things, the Nuaulu means of describing social categories are considered by Ellen to motivate a revision or adjustment of the scientific modeling of forests inspired by local perceptions and classifications of forests—what could be an example of integration by revision (Ellen 2007, 66). The fact that Ellen states both the non-existence of corresponding Nuaulu categories and the need to rethink scientific forest typologies in the light of Nuaulu classification of forests makes his research align rather well with the ontological turn.

The second study I consider here is Miller’s account of her fieldwork with the Canela community of northeast Brazil. Gardening is the primary way in which the Canela sustain themselves in the region and interact with their environment. The radical difference to scientific ways of interacting with this environment is that the Canela treat plants as individuals and not as populations: “Canela gardeners conceptualize their cultivated crops as children who require frequent care and affection” (Miller 2016, 105). Or, as Miller’s local co-researcher explained, the Canela take care of plants in the same way as they take care of people (Miller 2016, 112).

This relationship between Canela gardeners and their crops has implications beyond the obvious importance of successful cultivation to their community. Plants are taken to be able to hear, smell, feel, and see, allowing for multisensory ways of caring for humans’ “plant children.” This involves frequent visits of garden plots, maintaining one’s own bodily appearance while visiting, the application of balms to the plants as well as ritual singing of specific songs to different crop species and varieties such as squash, watermelon, sweet potato, fava bean, sweet and bitter manioc (Miller 2016, 112). On particular occasions, plants are also ritually “fed” during feasts that the community holds in their gardens to eat alongside their crops. Shamans with a specific set of perceptual skills also visit the gardens to converse with plants and the so-called “plant people,” who would appear to them and signal specific needs on behalf of the plants (Miller 2016, 112). In all these ways, expert Canela gardeners tend to individual plants throughout the plants’ life cycles.

Canela botanical classifications reflect these social connotations and Miller found them often to refer to Canela people and their characteristics or attributes during various life stages (Miller 2016, 115): “The Canela category of fava bean (pànkrỳt), for example, encompasses multiple genera and species in the Linnaean system” (Miller 2016, 119). Fava bean varieties are named after children, warriors, or old people according to their color and shape that is associated with the umbilical cord, the red body paint of warriors, or wrinkled brown skin, respectively. New folk varieties are also acquired through contact with outsiders as is reflected in the “white woman fava bean” (pànkrỳt cupẽkwỳj), which is associated with white women in nearby towns due to the bean’s white color and red “lipstick” (Miller 2016, 115ff.). Aside from just formal incongruities with the Linnaean system, these categories “have combined aesthetic, moral, and cosmological connotations that are not accounted for fully in a Western taxonomy” (Miller 2016, 119). ¹⁰

Despite these differences between scientific and Canela taxonomies Miller also found the two to overlap. However, what she means are not overlaps in taxonomies, but the innovative co-option of non-indigenous concepts and tools by the Canela for their own purposes (Miller 2016, 120). Writing materials from non-indigenous nearby towns, as well as written Canela language introduced by missionaries, is associated by the Canela with “outsiders,” “enemies,” or “others” (cupẽn). Nonetheless, the ethnobotanical lists Miller compiled with her local co-researchers have a profound significance to the Canela and several community members “actively seek out writing activities on their own” (Miller 2016, 117).

The practice of compiling written botanical lists met with the Canela a centuries-old oral tradition of naming and identifying crops as part of plant childcare. By perpetually revising and expanding the ethnobotanical lists used during fieldwork, Miller found that both the written classification of plants and the writing materials were co-opted and transformed by her research assistants and by extension the Canela community at large (Miller 2016, 117). This process of taking classification systems, languages, writing, and photography from outsiders and turning them into innovative new practices of care was already going on before Miller’s arrival:

Just as the multi-sensory embodied activities of weeding, tending, keeping gardens tidy, ritually singing, and sharing food with crops are conceptualized as gardener parents affectionately caring for their plant children, ethnobotanical naming can also be considered as crop childcare. (Miller 2016, 116)

Miller notes that the descriptive purpose of scientific taxonomies does not appear to be incommensurable for the Canela with the new role they found for them within their own ways of caring for plants (Miller 2016, 120). By contrast with botanical classifications, these lists will however continue to grow with the practices they became a part of.

Coming in at any point into this continuous development of Canela classifications and declaring them to be partially in agreement or disagreement with botanical taxonomy over how to carve up the natural world can now be seen as a potential fallacy in terms of the ontological turn. By giving names to plants, scientists and Canela gardeners are doing somewhat different things. Both are trying to come up with meaningful and informative classifications and this is also why Canela taxonomy will certainly be a resource for scientists to draw on and look for distinctions they might miss. At the same time, Canela taxonomy is an ongoing practice of plant care that may not have the goal of approaching a final and authoritative botanical system. Taking a snapshot of it and holding it against a scientific taxonomy, may not allow an assessment of how similar the two are as representations of the same natural world. This would be the case even if at some point in time the two happen to perfectly align. Just as overwhelming agreement in the description of a border river may hide the fact that one group is describing a national border and the other group a natural border, overwhelming agreement between scientific and Canela taxonomies may hide the fact that one group is describing relations among plants and the other group relations between plants and people.

With politicized forestry departments, missionaries, and mutual co-options at different points in time, Ellen’s and Miller’s studies feature several impacts on ethnoscientific as well as scientific knowledge of nature from encounters between communities. Understanding a community’s underlying ontology in terms of its current taxonomies would present both scientific and ethnoscientific communities as more hermetic and conservative than they are. With its focus on the revision of one’s own categories, the ontological turn is theoretically in a better position to explain how knowledge integration comes about and how it fails. While rethinking scientific forest typology was a condition as well as a motivation for Ellen’s study, Miller’s study with the Canela overlaps surprisingly well with recent developments in plant genetics and the psychology of plant cognition (Chamovitz 2012 [2017]). If scientists keep revising their basic assumptions about plants’ abilities to see, hear, smell, and touch, there will be another point in the future with even more visible overlap between Canela plant care and “Western scientific ontology.”

The fact that the Canela have co-opted writing tools and practices as well as Miller’s ethnobotanical lists for their practice of plant childcare may have thwarted to some extent a straightforward match of taxonomies. But at the same time, it has also greatly expanded the documented Canela knowledge of plants in the region and this very co-option can be seen as a form of overlap and knowledge integration in ethnobiology as Miller suggests. It is in this instance, however, not a co-option from ethnoscientific knowledge of nature to scientific knowledge of nature, but the other way around, as an instance of integration by transfer. The case, therefore, serves as an opportunity for us to rethink ethnobiology’s concepts of overlap and integration in the light of Miller’s ethnographic results, just like the ontological turn might recommend. Whereas in Ellen’s case scientific forest ecology changed and gave rise to a meaningful comparison between Nuaulu descriptions of forests and scientific forest typology, in Miller’s case the innovation bringing about an overlap would be achieved by the Canela.

6. Conclusion

In this paper I have compared two ways of thinking about ontological difference and knowledge integration in ethnobiology. One is the ontological turn with its examples of radical difference. The other is a framework of ontological overlaps that sees radical difference as a hard limit to knowledge integration. I have illustrated Viveiros de Castro’s case of shamans transforming into jaguars and provided a thought experiment about a border river to show how the ontological turn’s methodology could be applied to knowledge integration in ethnobiology. I have argued that the framework of ontological overlaps sets a higher bar for integration to succeed than the ontological turn’s radical differences would and that there are studies in ethnobiology that already make use of such radical differences in a way that can be seen in analogy to my thought experiment.

The framework of ontological overlaps presents scientific knowledge of nature as a jigsaw puzzle and wherever ethnoscientific knowledge of nature happens to produce a fitting puzzle piece, that piece can then successfully be integrated into scientific knowledge of nature. But that implies that wherever there is successful integration there really is no significant difference between communities—at least not more difference than between members of the same community—and neither is there a need to speak of different ontologies. Conversely, wherever there is even a slight difference between the ways in which two communities know about the natural world, integration fails or is presented as entirely impossible. The framework of ontological overlaps ultimately safeguards realism about things like taxonomies, species, or natural kinds. However, realism in this case might make us miss alternative classification and categorization principles that are no less real and no less relevant to scientific purposes. Somewhat ironically, it might also make us wrongly infer a confirmation or disconfirmation of realism from a match or mismatch between scientific and ethnoscientific taxonomies.

By contrast, the ontological turn indeed starts with cases of radically different entities, processes, and relations that are inaccessible to outsiders of a specific community. Understanding such cases involves a rethinking of one’s own basic categories and assumptions. Given the constant change of such categories and assumptions in both scientific and ethnoscientific knowledge of nature, there would seem to be meaningful space for knowledge integration between the hard limits to outsiders posed by the ontological turn and the reductive notion of integration in terms of ontological overlaps. An appropriate revision of the very notion of knowledge integration would see integration as not just a unidirectional process and ethnoscientific knowledge of nature as cause for us to reconsider the pattern in which we think the scientific puzzle should be cut.