Culture and Resource Conflict: Why Meanings Matter

Chapter Eight. Ecological Orientation

Chapter Eight Ecological Orientation “In the winter I follow the otters’ trail to see where the minnows are, because I know that’s where the predator fish will come.” —A Menominee fisherman TO BE SUCCESSFUL in fishing, you have to know where certain species are found and usually that means knowing what they are eating; what they are eating often consists of other fish. Are the two groups of experts equally knowledgeable concerning where fish are found and which fish are found together? Here we describe studies probing further into ecological orientation. A key question is whether majority-culture fishermen , despite their expertise, have less knowledge of ecological relations than their Menominee counterparts. STUDY 2: ECOLOGICAL SORTING BY HABITAT In study 2 we used forty of the original set of forty-four local species of fish. We dropped four species—lamprey, smelt, flathead catfish, sauger —that tend not to be found locally. Each species had a name card. We asked fourteen Menominee and fourteen majority-culture experts to “put those fish together that live together, that share a common habitat.” Because some fish have a wider range of habitats than others, we also told the fishermen that a given species could appear in more than one group. If an informant noted that some fish lived in two different habitats, such as rivers and lakes, we gave him a copy of the name card so that this species could be included in more than one pile. There was no limit on the number of groups a given species could be placed into and name cards were added as needed. The informants were asked to ignore seasonal differences in habitats (spawning season and so forth), and to give their general assessment of the dominant habitats over the whole year. Once 87 88 Culture and Resource Conflict all the fish had been sorted into groups, we asked each informant to give a short description of the type of habitat, for example, “clear, fast running water.” If a person was not familiar with a given species, the name card was dropped for that informant. Again, the cultural-consensus model was used to explore the existence of an overall model as well as culture-specific models of fish habitat sharing.1 If the two groups of experts have the same knowledge base, we would expect to observe an overall consensus and no reliable cultural differences. Results In our analyses we first looked for consensus among all the informants taken together, and then examined patterns of residual agreement. The principal-components analysis showed a strong consensus among all the experts.2 First-factor scores were positive for everyone, and the average first-factor score was .85. This means that a great deal of the experts’ knowledge is shared across the two cultural groups. No group difference was found in an analysis of residual agreement. In other words, both groups share essentially the same model and knowledge base for fish habitat. Figure 8.1 presents the MDS for average sorts of both groups. Trout and other river fish are clearly separated from fish found in lakes, and at a finer level of detail, fish found in clear running water such as trout, chubs are separated from fish found in slower-moving water, such as mudminnows. Summary As we expected, study 2 produced no reliable group differences in the sorting of the fish species by habitat. This finding is important for two reasons. First, it provides converging evidence that our experts do not differ in ecological knowledge per se. Second, the data support the idea that the differences noted in study 1 are linked to the differential salience of ecological information in the two groups. STUDY 3: SPECIES INTERACTIONS In study 3 we explicitly targeted expert ecological knowledge in the form of understandings of fish-fish interactions. On many grounds one would not expect to observe group differences in perceived fish-fish interactions . These experts engage in more or less the same activities in terms of when they fish and how they do so—their use of hook and line, artificial Figure 8.1 Fish Habitat Relations, Multidimensional Scaling (Both Groups) Dimension 2 Dace Dimension 1 Stickleback Darter Bluntnose Minnow River Shiner Emerald Shiner Golden Shiner Redtail Chub Fathead Minnow Blacktail Chub Spottail Shiner Largemouth Bass Sturgeon Dogfish Gar Black Sucker Carp American Eel White Sucker Sheephead Redhorse Channel Catfish Rock Bass White Bass Walleye Smallmouth...