№ 770. "Hearsay is not excluded"

You write that Wallace, Linnaeus, and Rumphius helped set the stage for the field of ethnography and note that Harold C. Conklin became a legendary practitioner of ethnographic research. What makes his work stand out?

Dove: Long-time Yale Professor Harold C. Conklin, one of the greatest anthropologists of the 20th century, had what anthropologist Clifford Geertz called a “preternatural” gift of observation. His discovery that the Hanunóo of Mindanao, in the Philippines, could identify and name 1,652 different plants in their lands — 1,524 of which had specific uses — initiated a sea-change in our view of the complexity of the tropical rainforest and the knowledge of it possessed by those who dwell in it. His informants also appreciated his work: The Hanunóo adopted Conklin’s name into their language as a term for “things related to knowledge;” and when Conklin passed away in 2016, an Ifugao priest living in Connecticut performed a traditional mortuary rite at his bedside.

What would be gained by returning to a more holistic approach to studying natural history that combines folk knowledge and scientific knowledge in studying nature and culture? 

Dove: Two millennia ago, the great botanist and physician Dioscorides explicitly listed the epichōrioi, “those who live in the region, the inhabitants” — thus, the natives — as one of his sources of information. This stance persisted into the 19th century when, for example, scholars and farmers in the United States still exchanged observations on weather and climate. This came to an end with the rise of narrow, siloed scientific disciplines, a dichotomization of the natural and social sciences, and an atrophy in communication between the scientific community and the lay public, which has contributed to the science skepticism that we see today. 

The online credo of science skeptics — “Do your own research” — is a product of this historic development; it reflects the reemergence of a type of folk knowledge, but one no longer in a constructive interplay with the academy. It also reflects a divide, a suspicion, a paranoia that is impossible to imagine in earlier eras: None of Dioscorides’ informants said anything like this to him, nor the informants of Rumphius, Linnaeus, Wallace, or Conklin. Importantly, this divide co-developed between the public and the academy, so there is shared responsibility for it. 

As the French philosopher Paul Virilio said, when you invent the airplane, you invent the airplane crash: Science is the airplane, and science skepticism is the airplane crash. The national organizations in the United States addressing climate change skepticism only see the public half of this dyad, not their own, so their only solution is to gather and disseminate more data, which does not address the root of the problem.