National Institute of Science and Technology in Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Studies in Ecology and Evolution (INCT IN-TREE), Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil.
Institute of Biology, Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), Brazil, R. Barão de Jeremoabo, 668, Salvador, BA, 840170-115, Brazil.
J Ethnobiol Ethnomed. 2022 Mar 27;18(1):25. doi: 10.1186/s13002-022-00522-y.
Traditional fishing communities are strongholds of ethnobiological knowledge but establishing to what degree they harbor cultural consensus about different aspects of this knowledge has been a challenge in many ethnobiological studies.
We conducted an ethnobiological study in an artisanal fishing community in northeast Brazil, where we interviewed 91 community members (49 men and 42 women) with different type of activities (fishers and non-fishers), in order to obtain free lists and salience indices of the fish they know. To establish whether there is cultural consensus in their traditional knowledge on fish, we engaged a smaller subset of 45 participants in triad tasks where they chose the most different fish out of 30 triads. We used the similarity matrices generated from the task results to detect if there is cultural consensus in the way fish were classified by them.
The findings show how large is the community's knowledge of fish, with 197 ethnospecies registered, of which 33 species were detected as salient or important to the community. In general, men cited more fish than women. We also found that there was no cultural consensus in the ways fish were classified.
Both free-listing and triad task methods revealed little cultural consensus in the way knowledge is structured and how fish were classified by community members. Our results suggest that it is prudent not to make assumptions that a given local community has a single cultural consensus model in classifying the organisms in their environment.
传统的渔业社区是民族生物学知识的据点，但在许多民族生物学研究中，确定它们在这种知识的不同方面具有文化共识的程度一直是一个挑战。
我们在巴西东北部的一个手工渔业社区进行了一项民族生物学研究，在那里我们采访了 91 名社区成员（49 名男性和 42 名女性），他们从事不同类型的活动（渔民和非渔民），以获得他们所知道的鱼类的自由列表和显著度指数。为了确定他们对鱼类的传统知识是否存在文化共识，我们让 45 名参与者中的一小部分参与了三人小组任务，在这些任务中，他们从 30 个三人小组中选择最不同的鱼类。我们使用从任务结果生成的相似性矩阵来检测他们分类鱼类的方式是否存在文化共识。
研究结果表明，社区对鱼类的了解是多么广泛，登记了 197 种民族物种，其中 33 种被检测为对社区有重要意义或重要。总的来说，男性比女性提到的鱼类更多。我们还发现，鱼类的分类方式没有文化共识。
自由列表和三人小组任务方法都表明，知识的结构方式以及社区成员对鱼类的分类方式没有文化共识。我们的结果表明，在对其环境中的生物进行分类时，不要假设给定的当地社区具有单一的文化共识模式是谨慎的。
