What is science? Is it a unique expression of the European Renaissance rooted in classical Greek philosophy, or can we expect to find science in an indigenous village deep in the heart of Oaxaca, Mexico? If, following Gonzalez (2001:22), one defines science simply as a “quest for truths about the world,” or, after Malinowski (1974[1925]), as “knowledge, based on experience and fashioned by reason” then one would expect to find science in all societies and cultures, including those of indigenous peoples. On the other hand, if we define science as “a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws” (American Heritage Dictionary, 2004), then only that which is observed and empirically measured can be called a science. The field of study that has asked this question is often termed ethnoscience, and since the field’s development in the 1960s a large body of work has been produced, largely in favor of Gonzalez’s and Malinowski’s definition. Eugene S. Hunn, a long-time contributor to the field and advocate of these more inclusive definitions, has recently authored a book that eloquently discusses the science – or ethnoscience – of the Zapotec people of Oaxaca, Mexico. In A Zapotec Natural HistoryHunn argues that Zapotec understandings and classifications of trees, herbs, flowers, and animals is a science, and this book is an excellent example of the complexity and sophistication such indigenous science’s can reach.

Arguing that the outstanding differences between modern and indigenous sciences are a consequence of transformations in the scale of the scientific enterprise, rather than any fundamental advance in the quality of human thought, A Zapotec Natural Historyis a welcome contribution to the field of ethnoscience and its related disciplines of ethnomedicine, ethnobotany, and ethnozoology, as well as indigenous studies and anthropology.

Using Latin as a bridge between Zapotec and English, Hunn is able to show how Zapotec speakers grasp the phenomenological reality of nature, and how that phenomenological reality is then categorized into an indigenous Zapotec epistemology. This process is the basis behind all science, despite the processes obfuscation across cultures and languages. One of only a few books on indigenous Zapotec science, Hunn clearly articulates how the Zapotec go about this process of developing their science and what it means for them in their everyday life.

A Zapotec Natural Historyis based on a twelve year long collaboration with the Zapotec people of San Juan Gbee, located in the Sierra Sur of Oaxaca. As an indigenous community located on the fringe of the modern global sphere, San Juan Gbee provides an informative example of how indigenous science continues to survive and be passed down. One component of this survival that becomes clear is the community’s connection with – and ownership of – their traditional lands. San Juan Gbee’s claim to its land, which is held communally, derives from the community’s occupation of the land prior to the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the 1500s. Subsequently affirmed by colonial title deeds over the next 300 years, San Juan Gbee kept its communal lands throughout the Colonial period and even the Porfiriato period – the pre-Revolutionary period of Mexican history dominated by the dictator, and Oaxaca native son, Porfirio Diaz – when communal lands in many other parts of Mexico were confiscated from local indigenous groups for sale to foreign capitalist interests in pursuit of national economic growth.

Shortly after the Porfiriato period ended, and as a legacy of the revolutionary efforts of Emiliano Zapata, Mexico adopted it’s constitution which reaffirmed San Juan Gbee and other indigenous people’s rights to their land in Article 27, Provision VII:

The centers of population which, by law or in fact, possess a communal status shall have legal capacity to enjoy common possession of the lands, forests, and waters belonging to them or which have been or may be restored to them. (1917 Constitution of Mexico)

These initial claims and protections helped many indigenous communities in Mexico maintain their culture, traditions, knowledge, and science during the twentieth century as the country developed and became part of the global market. The book does not go into this long history, nor does it explore how San Juan Gbee retained its traditional indigenous science; that is not the purpose of the book. Rather, A Zapotec Natural Historyexamines the Zapotec science as it stands today, asking what can be documented and preserved now as well as what the future may hold for the survival of this indigenous science. These latter two questions are what make Hunn’s contribution so important.


In order to have a science, whether indigenous or not, the “things” of reality need to be named. As Hunn demonstrates throughout TITLE, Zapotec names are rarely if ever arbitrary labels for “things” in the world, despite the fact that the arbitrariness of words has been taken as a fundamental characteristic of human language since at least Saussure ([1916]1977). While it is true that there is no necessary connection between the name itself and the concept or “thing” named, as Hunn shows plant names are often highly informative about the “thing” named. That is, they are descriptive in some way: about where, how, or the time of year they appear; their use; or what place they hold within the larger environment and epistemology of the namer. In the case of the Zapotec of San Juan Gbee this naming of “things” in reality has reached a level of sophistication and complexity often not found in non-indigenous communities.

For example, Hunn documents 844 San Juan Zapotec plant taxa and 461 taxa for animals. Compare this with the average person in the United States and their knowledge of plants (see Dougherty, 1979; Hunn 2002) and one begins to grasp just how sophisticated Zapotec indigenous science is, as well as how central it is to the people’s everyday lives. Zapotec science, as it stands today, is just as complex and sophisticated as that of Western science, although the categories used to define “things” in the world are obviously different.

Beyond the detail Hunn provides of Zapotec indigenous science that will appeal to anthropologists, botanists, biologists, and others interested in ethnoscience, A Zapotec Natural Historyalso gives us some tantalizing clues into Zapotec medicine, religion, and cosmology.

For instance, although humans are recognized as an animate species, sharing with other such beings “life,” “heart,” “sexual differentiation,” and “intelligence,” within Zapotec indigenous science humans are granted a unique ontological status apart from other animal species by virtue of possessing a “soul.” Despite the outward appearance of similarity with Judeo-Christian cosmology, as Hunn argues it is inappropriate to attribute this similarity to diffusion. Rather, the distinction is completely Zapotec, and only by studying their science does this unique ontological distinction make sense.

Similarly, the book goes into some detail concerning Zapotec ethnomedicine and the various specialists who use plants, animals, and fungi in their practices. These specialists include herbalists, midwives, bone-setters, and pulse readers, as well as people who specialize in specific illnesses, such as chaneque, a debilitating condition sent by the Earth as punishment for laziness.

A Zapotec Natural Historyis a superb study in indigenous science, and a welcome contribution to our growing knowledge of the important relationship between humans and their local environment. As Hunn states, “I have studied the environmental knowledge of North American native peoples for more than thirty years. My ethnobiological research in the Pacific Northwest is guided by the same vision that drew me to San Juan, the search for our common humanity in a shared fascination with the biodiversity that surrounds and nurtures us all.” (p. 236)

References

American Heritage Dictionary. 2004. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Dougherty, J. 1979. Learning Names for Plants and Plants for Names. Anthropological Linguistics, 21: 293-315.

Gonzalez, Roberto J. 2001. Zapotec Science: Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Hunn, E. 2002. Evidence for the Precocious Acquisition of Plant Knowledge by Zapotec Children. In Ethnobiology and Biocultural Diversity. J.Stepp, F. Wyndham, and R. Zarger, eds. Pp. 604-613. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1974[1925]. Magic, Science, and Religion, and Other Essays. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday Anchor Books.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1916[1977]. Cours de linguistique générale, ed. C. Bally and A. Sechehaye, with the collaboration of A. Riedlinger, Lausanne and Paris: Payot; trans. W. Baskin, Course in General Linguistics, Glasgow: Fontana/Collins.
Reviewed by Peter N. Jones, Bauu Institute and Press.

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