Identifying Plants as a Process of Cultural Cognition: Comparing Knowledge Production and Communities of Practice in Modern Botanical Science and Nuaulu Ethnobotany

Abstract

We all seek to identify plants in our ordinary lives, or as professionals, yet what we mean by ‘identifications’ and our intentions in seeking them are not always the same. Moreover, the ‘identifications’ we achieve are often subject to disagreement. This paper compares the practices of contemporary professional taxonomists in producing herbarium reference collections, and plant naming among Nuaulu subsistence cultivators in eastern Indonesia. I examine how these communities of practice differ as groups and among themselves in the identifications they make of plants. I argue that the differences between them arise from the way material presents itself in radically different socio-cultural contexts, and the purposes for which the identifications are made. Differences between the groups arise from the ways individuals prioritise different kinds of information as it becomes available. Ethnobotanists often seek to translate between different worlds of identification by seeking one-to-one correspondences between scientific and local categories that we describe as taxa, but sometimes fail because the material used to identify plants, and the purposes of identification, are so different. I conclude by asking how intra-cultural and cross-cultural translation might operate in in-between hybrid spaces, such as para-taxonomy, where different assumptions and practices overlap or collide.