The Abui people's language and plants: An ethnobotanical investigation in Eastern Indonesia
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2024
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Abstract
This dissertation describes foundational plant knowledge and associated speech practices by the Abui people of Alor Island, Indonesia. The Abui are an ethnolinguistic marginalized community undergoing interrelated social, economic and environmental changes. The Abui language (ISO 639-3 abz) has been assessed as threatened (Abui 2024); Abui people’s traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) likewise appears to be diminishing. Abui is a language of the Timor-Alor-Pantar (TAP) family. While there have been notable linguistic documentation efforts of this language family in recent decades, the ethnobotanical knowledge of TAP speech communities has been little studied. Furthermore, the flora of Alor Island has not been thoroughly surveyed. A basic description of Abui ethnobotany is needed so as to provide a foundation for subsequent, in depth research on Abui TEK topics.
Main topics covered in this dissertation include Abui people’s plant identification, naming, and classification. A broad coverage of these topics is attempted. The identification chapter explores strategies used in collaborative learning and identification. The naming chapter analyzes plant names structurally, as well as semantically through the encoding of knowledge within plant names. Other patterns found in Abui lexical expressions of the plant domain are also described. The classification chapter covers the Abui general-purpose folk taxonomy.
This interdisciplinary investigation incorporates a variety of methods, including ones from ethnobotany and documentary linguistics. Technologies such as the use of action cameras (GoPros) and plant identification by photographic vouchers are employed.
This dissertation makes several original contributions to the scientific fields of linguistics and ethnobotany, as well as to cognitive science more broadly:
First, it provides a basic description of Abui ethnobotany, which can be used as a basis for other future investigations of interactions between Abui people and their environment. Cultural preservation and revitalization initiatives, indigenous rights activism, as well as conservation monitoring and resource management plans, may draw on this most basic description. The coverage of Abui ethnobotanical topics adds a particularly endangered semantic domain to the Abui language documentation as well as the documentation of TAP languages more broadly.
Next, it creates an organizational structure for describing folk identification of live plants based on what is known about visual object recognition. While undoubtedly imperfect, this novel framework supplies a new tool for the under-researched study of folk identification of plants.
Furthermore, in pioneering a unique blend of methods, this dissertation demonstrates that principles and tools from language documentation can benefit ethnobotanical investigations. These include the use of audio and video recording, transcription, translation, and archiving of data.
Finally, this dissertation also highlights some of the theoretical issues and decisions that arise when a “basic ethnobotanical description” is attempted. Linguistics’ main engagement with ethnobiology has been through cognitive anthropology, with its emphasis on formal taxonomies and related nomenclatural systems (Si 2016). Along with Si (2016), I encourage researchers such as documentary linguists to explore other language-centered approaches to ethnobotanical studies. In particular, for basic descriptive investigations, I suggest less emphasis on the folk taxonomic framework of Berlin 1992, and greater documentation of the Traditional Knowledge (TK) encoded in local languages.
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Linguistics, Cultural anthropology, Botany, Abui, ethnotaxonomy, folk classification, Papuan, plant identification, Timor-Alor-Pantar
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351 pages
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