Influence of the Expert Effect on Cultural Models |
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| Authors: | Tracy Van Holt H Russell Bernard Susan Weller Wendy Townsend Peter Cronkleton |
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| Institution: | 1. Global Economic Dynamics and the Biosphere Program, Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden;2. Stockholm Resilience Center, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden;3. Department of Anthropology, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA;4. Institute for Social Science Research, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA;5. Preventative Medicine and Community Health, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas, USA;6. Noel Kempff Natural History Museum, Santa Cruz, Bolivia;7. Tropical Conservation and Development Program, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA;8. Forests and Livelihoods Program, Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), Lima, Peru |
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| Abstract: | We examined hunters’ perceptions of fauna to see if expert hunters and other hunters perceive wildlife abundance similarly. We used cultural consensus analysis (CCA) to assess the knowledge of 25 hunters in the Bolivian Amazon about the abundance of 38 animals. CCA indicated highly shared beliefs among hunters concerning wildlife abundance (average agreement = .62). However, expert hunters (as judged by their reported successful hunts of rare species, having hunted recently, and consuming more game in their diet) perceived more animals as abundant than did non-experts, although they all shared the same model. Since the expert hunters did not always agree on which species was more abundant, they had low cultural knowledge scores in CCA results. These experts may be unwilling to curtail hunting efforts on key species that they perceive to be abundant. |
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| Keywords: | Cultural consensus expertise hunting traditional ecological knowledge |
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