Ethnoscience, as defined in the web site iResearchNet, 'is the study of what native people know about the world around them.
Harding (1998) claims that a new kind of comparative
ethnoscience movement emerged from the older 'Eurocentric' colonial frameworks which represented the knowledge traditions of other cultures as the products of 'savage minds'.
Since there is no research related to traditional knowledge about this group of animals in Brazil, this paper represents the first record on Porifera
ethnoscience, thus beginning the ethnospongiological research in the country.
An emic perspective and
ethnoscience methods for organizational research.
(8.) For Geertz's criticism of other approaches that reify and reduce cultural modalities (e.g.,
ethnoscience, cognitive anthropology), see Geertz 1973, 11.
In chapter 4, "A Medical Laboratory," she argues that the survey promoted an ecological approach to health and medicine, especially in the fight against trypanosomiasis, which incorporated both Western technical science and African
ethnoscience. Chapter 5, "A Racial Laboratory," examines the survey's involvement in race relations, focusing in particular on debates over eugenics in Kenya between the physician Henry Laing Gordon and the African Research Survey's J.
While he provides recommendations for new process of development, he emphasises on the need of "untraditional approaches including direct interference in their national affairs and governance." This approach, certainly meant for good, poses an open challenge to developing countries' sovereignty and authenticates the existence of western
ethnoscience in development paradigm.
The findings of
ethnoscience (the branch of anthropology concerned with the cultural aspects of cognitive structure (1)) and comparative semantics indicate that it is a rare thing to find a word in one language that is exactly equivalent to a word in an unrelated language.
(5) We also look at the modern field of
ethnoscience as both an attempt to revive prematurely dismissed, non western natural knowledge traditions, as well as a pretext for bioprospecting, which has sometimes been quite exploitative.