Culture and Epistemologies: Putting Culture back into the Ecosystem

This chapter reviews a body of research on cultural differences in framework theories for engaging with nature, focusing primary on Indigenous American and European-American comparisons. NativeAmerican samples reveal a pattern of converging observations that point to a relational epistemological orientation and a propensity for systems level thinking. In contrast, Non-Native samples show observations suggesting that humans are conceptualized as more psychologically distant from the rest of nature. Correlated with distance is a tendency for a taxonomic rather than an ecological orientation. We also suggest that the way that researchers think about and study culture may reflect their own cultural practices and we propose a more ecological analysis of culture itself.