Maya Folk Botany and Knowledge Devolution: Modernization and IntraCommunity Variability in the Acquisition of Folkbotanical Knowledge

One potential source of folkbiological knowledge loss is changing patterns of interaction with the natural world stemming from ‘‘modernizing’’ material change. This article compares models of plant knowledge among age-matched groups of children and adults in two communities of a municipality located in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. Use of the Cultural Consensus Model (CCM), analysis of residual agreement, and examination of model content show that while plant knowledge remains fairly robust in the municipality, devolutionary change is ongoing and manifests in the urbanized municipal town center relative to a rural outlying hamlet. Quantifying disparities in folkbiological knowledge is considered as a preliminary step in understanding general processes of culture change. Recent investigations into domain-specific folkbiological expertise in adults and the acquisition of folkbiological models in children shows that differences in propositional knowledge interact with culture-specific reasoning strategies and have profound consequences for value complexes and environmental behavior. [knowledge devolution, child development, culture change, folkbotany, Tzotzil Maya] Environmental and cognitive anthropologists have long documented the vast breadth and depth of ecological knowledge among traditional peoples (e.g., Berkes 1999; Berlin 1992; Berlin et al. 1974; Conklin 1954). Because of the implications that biological knowledge ‘‘devolution’’ may have for environmental decision making and behavior, environmental knowledge disparities in both traditional and postindustrial communities have become the subject of much recent discussion in ethnobiology (e.g., Atran and Medin 2008; Atran et al. 1999, 2004; Coley et al. 1999; Nabhan and St. Antoine 1993; Ross 2002a, 2002b, 2003; Wolff et al. 1999; Zent 2001). Biological knowledge devolution has been linked both to material and ideational bases. For example, the introduction of ‘‘modern’’ infrastructure like roads, electricity, running water, or health clinics could have consequences for cultural practices and shared values, resulting in changes in knowledge about the natural world. Atran and Medin’s recent ‘‘devolution hypothesis’’ posits that modernization leads to a lack of ‘‘hands on, visceral contact with other forms of life’’ (2008:38). In this account material change parallels, and may even be causally related to, concomitant shifts in what the authors call ‘‘cultural support’’: cultural media, talk, and value complexes (Atran and Medin 2008). Other authors have noted that ‘‘modernizing’’ influences, such as the transition of traditional peoples to sedentism and Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology MAYA FOLK BOTANYAND KNOWLEDGE DEVOLUTION 349 ETHOS, Vol. 39, Issue 3, pp. 349–367, ISSN 0091-2131 online ISSN 1548-1352. & 2011 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1352.2011.01197.x. compulsory formal education may lead to folkbotanical knowledge loss (Heckler 2001; Ross 2001, 2002a, 2002b; Zarger 2002; Zent 2001). Our assumption regarding the process of biological knowledge acquisition follows from that outlined in the work of Hatano and Inagaki (Hatano and Inagaki 1994, 2002; Inagaki and Hatano 2002). These authors make the case for a theory of folkbiological conceptual development typified by ‘‘domain specific constraints’’ (Hatano and Inagaki 2002) that, while possibly innate, take the form of ‘‘biases and preferences’’ (Inagaki and Hatano 2002), rather than specific knowledge or universal reasoning strategies. Although disparate cultural groups show similarities in folkbiological cognition (Berlin 1992; López et al. 1997), pointing to its possibly innate cognitive architecture (Medin and Atran 2004), acquisition and maintenance of such knowledge may simultaneously be sensitive to the cultural importance placed on certain types of ideas about, and interactional experience with, the biotic world (Waxman et al. 2007). Looked at from this perspective, systematic knowledge devolution becomes part of the complex process of cultural change (Atran et al. 1999, 2002; cf. Ross and Medin in press for a more general argument). This formulation stands in contrast to the influential hypothesis of folkbiological development put forth by Carey (1985) that attempted to formulate a universal scheme for biological knowledge acquisition. Carey claimed that children universally reason about the nonhuman biological world from the perspective of folk psychology (i.e., based on a nondomain-specific anthropocentrism), at least until the age of about seven (Carey 1995). In our view, Carey’s idea that folk psychology provides a universal template for folkbiological knowledge acquisition is an artifact of her focus on testing children living in postindustrial societies with an impoverished biotic context (Ross et al. 2003) and may reflect the very devolutionary processes that we seek to measure here. The question of biological knowledge devolution is intimately linked to domain expertise. However, developing an expert model consists in more than just being able to identify species tokens. The development of expertise has been shown to have quantifiable effects on the strategies that individuals use for making inferences about domain-specific knowledge (e.g., Burnett et al. 2005; López et al. 1997; Medin et al. 1997; Proffitt et al. 2000). Being an expert, for example, has the universal effect of rendering individuals more ‘‘flexible’’ in their strategies for inference making: although nonexperts tend to use category-based similarity judgments for such inferences, experts can use this or other bases, such as causal reasoning (Burnett and Medin 2008; Ross and Medin in press; Zarger 2002). The ‘‘flexibility’’ that expertise affords, however, is not universal according to an ‘‘expert’’ template (Boster and Johnson 1989; Johnson et al. 2004), but is guided by culture-specific frameworks (Medin et al. 2002; Ross et al. 2007). Culture-specific reasoning strategies act as further inputs for knowledge generation and learning (Ross and Medin in press). Few studies have analyzed folkbiological knowledge devolution as an ongoing process of acquisition and retention among members of a given community. We assume that such changes in knowledge take place on the time-scale of generations and might not be readily 350 ETHOS