Mapping styles of ethnobiological thinking in North and Latin America: Different kinds of integration between biology, anthropology, and TEK

Abstract

Ethnobiology has emerged as an important transdisciplinary field that addresses the epistemic and political value of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) through an integration of biological and social sciences. In North and Latin America, ethnobiology encompasses a diversity of approaches towards TEK but there is no consensus on how TEK relates to biological and anthropological research. The aim of this article is to develop an account that helps to map integration strategies in ethnobiological approaches in North and Latin America that jointly embrace biology, anthropology, and TEK. Borrowing the notion of ‘styles of reasoning’ and the framework of integrative pluralism from philosophy of science, we argue that ethnobiologists across the Americas have developed heterogeneous research programs. At the same time, we argue that these styles of reasoning tend to converge in prioritizing biological perspectives and are often limited in their understandings of cultural practices due to a lack of substantive ethnographic methods.