Prof. Dr. Wulf Schiefenhoevel

Introduction

The perspective I will take for this presentation is partly that of cognitive anthropology, of ethnoscience. In this so called emic approach one tries to see and understand the world, as much as one can, with the eyes and through the concepts of the people one is living with - in my case the Eipo of the highlands of Irian Jaya, West-New Guinea, the Trobriand Islanders in the Solomon Sea of Papua New Guinea and other peoples in Melanesia. Scientific insight is increased when one switches perspectives; in anthropology from the emic to the so called etic approach. In the latter, one tries to see and handle data collected in the field according to one's own traditions of obtaining and analysing knowledge. This process of combining emic and etic perspectives, e.g. indigenous botany and academic botany plus connected sciences as they have developed in our own knowledge institutions, has proven its heuristic and explanatory power (cp. Berlin, 1992, Schultes & von Reis, 1995, Cotton, 1996) and may help to shed light on how members of Melanesian societies perceive and use nature.

Two Melanesian cultures

Fig. 1 shows the island of New Guinea and the surrounding other islands of Melanesia where I have done most of my research since 1965. Two of these projects, fieldwork among the Eipo and the Trobriand Islanders, were supported by DFG, the German Research Council, and I am glad that I can, with this presentation in Bonn, express my gratitude for this support in the presence of some of its representatives. The Eipo live just north of the Central Cordillera of Irian Jaya approximately at 140° eastern longitude and 4° 26' southern latitude in climatic and ecologic conditions rather typical for the mountainous interior of New Guinea. The Eipo represent descendants of Papuan immigrants who arrived at the coasts of the big island at least 35,000 (Jorgensen 1994) probably 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. Humans and their culture (Schiefenhövel 1991) are well adapted for life in the rugged high mountains which protect them from malaria and other infectious diseases occuring in lower altitudes. Archaelogists have shown that the domestication of plants and corresponding horticultural techniques were present at least 9,000 years ago in highland New Guinea, which is thus one of the very early centres of agriculture worldwide.

Since 1982 we are also conducting interdisciplinary fieldwork on one of the Trobriand Islands, which have become known through the work of

B. Malinowski, one of the founders of modern anthropology. Describing their techniques to grow food in the coral gardens, getting food from the sea and to conduct daring seavoyages and economic transactions of large scale Malinowski (1922, 1935) convincingly demonstrated the complexity of traditional cultures. The Trobrianders are, in contrast to the Papuan Eipo, Austronesians; their ancestors have arrived, by well designed seagoing outrigger sailing canoes, some thousand years ago and their language is related to the other Austronesian languages spanning more than half the globe between Taiwan and Hawaii in the north, Madagascar in the West, New Zealand in the South and the Polynesian societies in the Pacific as far east as Easter Island.

Living close to nature

The Eipo in the highlands of West New Guinea lived, at the onset of our fieldwork in 1974, in material and social conditions which resembled a neolithic setting (Schiefenhövel 1976), they can therefore be seen as 'modern models of the past'. From birth to death members of this culture are embedded in nature in a very direct sense. When a child is born in an Eipo village it is usually born onto the grass outside the women's house; me delina, putting the child down, is their term for birth (figure 2). In this society, post partum life usually starts in physical contact with nature - as did its very beginning: the place to enjoy sexual intimacy is usually the garden or some other part of nature outside the village. In Eipo poetry (cp. Hiepko & Schiefenhövel 1987) lush nature, the wilderness of the forest and the sprouting power of the wide gardens is contrasted with the village - metaphor for norms and narrow regulations, but also for being protected and at home.

Fig. 1. The Eipo place their deads on boughs in the top of the trees.
In a second ceremony, the mummified bodies are brought to little huts in the gardens.
Sometimes the skull and long bones are transferred to a third location under overhanging rocks.

When a person dies the corps is put up on a tree (fig. 1), of which the branches have been cut so that there is space to surround the deceased person with a shelter, made of bark and leaves. The dead body is thus protected, to a certain degree, from the rain. Corpses exposed in this way mummify in the course of several months and are then usually transferred to a secondary place, mostly under the roof a small garden hut. And in cases where there is a tertiary exposure, the skull and the long bones are kept under overhanging rocks. - These customs symbolize well the fact that life in societies as traditional as that of the Eipo is virtually embraced by nature.

Utilizing nature in the highlands

Fig. 4 shows a typical afternoon scene in the highlands. An Eipo woman is coming home, carrying her own body weight in garden products plus fire wood plus her three year old daughter, a total of more than 40 kgs. The Eipo are very small but very powerful versions of Homo sapiens, surprisingly healthy and able to sustain highly demanding physical activities for a long time. In the background of the photograph one sees fires, signs of the typical slash and burn technique to clear land for new gardens. Usually plots of old gardens, which have been allowed to lie fallow and are now overgrown by secondary vegetation, are used again. We have estimated the fallow period to last about fifteen years. The Eipo use Trema tomentosa, the typical tree in anthropogenous grassland, as most important bio-indicator: when the stems have reached a certain circumference the fallow land is considered fertile again and fit for new usage. In the process of shifting cultivated areas in such way that sufficient fallow time is achieved (cp. the contribution of W. Kühbauch in this volume) virgin forest has to be cleared only occasionally. This principle of re-using old gardens coincides with cost-benefit considerations: it is much more time and energy consuming to cut down, with stone adzes, large forest trees than to clear secondary growth.

At the onset of our fieldwork in 1974 the Eipo were living under neolithic conditions. They had stone adzes and other tools made of stone, wood, bone or teeth; the technology to produce metal was unknown. In the West, there is a tendency to portrait traditional peoples as always being in sacred harmony with nature. Unfortunately, this image is far from true. Homo sapiens is a maximizer, alàs. The large flightless Moa bird of New Zealand was exterminated by the country's indigenous Maori population (genetically, linguistically and culturally related to that of the Trobriand Islands). When one lives with people in Melanesia one is surprised how often wounds are inflicted to trees and other plants by purposeless strikes with adzes or axes and how brutally animals are often treated or killed. The concept of preventing cruelty towards living beings is definitely not a world wide phenomenon. Certain cultures are able to control some factors critical for the equilibrium between humans and nature more effectively than others, but it seems that most of the nature-culture balance we see in traditional societies is due to the fact that their members just don't have the technology to do lasting damage. New Guinea is an example for the scope of changes which were brought about just by replacing stone adzes with steel axes.

Fig. 2. A woman, her husband and child are leaving their garden.
Sweet potatoes (in this case a cultivar wtith reddish skin) provides
most of the carbohydrates needed and leafly greens
(wrapped in bundles) most of the proteins.

Fig. 2 shows the harvest of one day. Wife, husband and child are about to return to the village, their string bags filled with sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas), the staple diet in this part of the highlands, and green leafy vegetables. Ipomoea batatas was probably introduced less than 300 years ago; there is still some debate wether this new and very successful crop was perhaps introduced much earlier from South America through Polynesian contacts, but this seems doubtful. The most important protein suppliers in the diet of the basically vegetarian (by necessity, not by choice) Eipo are Rungia klossii and Abelmoschus manihot, domesticated shrubs with dark green leaves (taxonomic identifications from Hiepko & Schlutze-Motel 1981).

Fig. 6 shows samples of various cultivars of sweet potatoe. They look rather similar to us but most of them are still different. Even children are able to identify and name the common varieties - one of the examples of how effective a nonformalized system of knowledge transfer can be; one only has to think of our children's meagre knowledge in such cognitive tasks, e.g. when it comes to identifying even the most common trees in our forests - despite the efforts of their teachers.

Taro (Colocasia esculenta) very probably was the main staple food before the arrival of Ipomoea batatas. Fig. 7 shows one of the particularly large specimens of taro, which are grown in special places and with special care. This is food to honour guests and to be integrated in sacred ceremonies. Sweet potato is everyday food, taro is served at feasts. Gerd Koch, Klaus Helfrich and Thomas Michel, the anthropologists of our interdisciplinay team, have collected names for different cultivars of some main food plants, the result is shown in table 1. If one accepts the view that Colocasia esculenta (and perhaps other Araceae) represent pre-Ipomoean horticulture in this region of the highlands than it is somewhat surprising that Ipomoea batatas has been bred, in under 300 years, in such way that it produced almost as many cultivars. Perhaps (this is just a mere guess of a non-botanist) mutation rates are higher in sweet potatoe than in taro.

The table demonstrates that other important food plants are represented in a rich variety as well. Knowing that this enormous genetic richness has been brought about by stone age people makes one aware of the effectiveness of neolithic plant domestication and of the threat we are imposing to cultures like this through acculturation, logging and the introduction of monocultures, pesticides, herbicides and the like. Other contributors to this symposium have convincingly demonstrated how this genetic richness is in danger. I am convinced that we must not only protect biodiversity but also cultural diversity to facilitate the survival of the former.

Wild food plants are very important for this population. Fruitstands of Pandanus brosimos, growing in the rain forest above approximately 2,000 m, are carried home (fig. 8). One can see the enormous load carried in stringbags and supported by a band around the forehead. Pandanus brosimos contributes a little bit of fat (and probably other valuable nutrients) to the diet of the Eipo; fat is otherwise very scarce in their culinary repertoire. Fig. 9 shows a festive meal being prepared with the red sap of Pandanus conoideus, a domesticated species growing below 1,600 m, i.e. outside the home territory of the Eipo, who are getting this highly valued and symbolically powerful food from neighbours in lower lying areas in exchange for things growing well in higher altitude. - The ethnic groups in the isolated mountain valleys of New Guinea, sometimes only a few hundred in number, do not live an isolated life. Necessity makes them trade with other groups, who are often living on the other side of the central cordillera; the lowest passes, to be crossed, bare footed, are about 3,700 m high.

Fig. 3. The red, slightly bitter sap of Pandanus conoideus is a rare delicacy

Meat is valued very much, but is very scarce as wild animals (all except a few transferred placentalia are marsupials, cp. fig 10) are small and difficult to hunt or snare and the meat of the few domesticated pigs (fig. 11) is kept for festive ceremonies. Women collect, during their daily walks to and from the gardens and their activity in the gardens, small reptiles and their eggs as well as certain spiders and various kinds of insects and their larvae (fig. 12). These tiny but physiologically probably very important quantities of animal protein are reserved for women and infants. In this quasi neolithic culture, the ones who need high quality food most actually get it. In my view nutrition is so precarious in this region that culture had to find a wise way to distribute the scarce protein resources by creating regulated "ecological niches"... and by defining every flying, crawling or otherwise moving creature as food. Certain rather intensely smelling stinkbugs (Pentatomidae?) are also eaten, they serve as spice for leaf-food in the midst of which the are steamed. - Primatologists have provided new insight into the importance of such "bizarre" foods, like ants termites and the like, which represent sources of valuable animal protein. It is very likely that insect food played a prominent role in the human past; the Eipo and other traditional peoples are carrying this nutritive strategy over to our times.

Fig. 4. Pigs are the most important animal in the culture of the Eipo.
Women take a lot of care to raise them. Their number is limited and they are
killed only at special occasions. Therefore pork contributes very little fat and
animal protein to the daily diet.

The Eipo hunt arboreal marsupials with bows and (non-poisoned) arrows, sometimes assisted by specially trained dogs, but they also catch these animals with snares (fig. 13, from Blum 1979). These traps are constructed preferably on tree stems which form part of a runway. On the drawing one can distinguish the individual elements of the snare which are cleverly combined to achieve maximum effectiveness and one realizes that the Eipo, like members of other traditional cultures, do not only have perfect knowledge of how to build such ingenious snares but also command over a precise linguistic terminology consisting of functional lexems for all elements of this construction: Homo sapiens and Homo faber at their best.

Paul Hiepko and Wolfram Schultze-Motel (1981), the botanists in our team among the Eipo, collected, as is proper for botanists, plants and noted down their names in the local language. Some of the native taxonomy was puzzling, as it seemed that plants were grouped together which did not appear to be related to each other in our Linnean system (fig. 14 shows two seemingly very different species of Saxifragaceae, Polyosma induta and Polyosma sp. which are both termed bensukwe in the Eipo language). Sometimes Eipo informants gave specific explanations like: "This plant is the uncle of that one", thereby creating a relationship between plants which was built according to the principle of kinship in humans. Finally, it turned out that the Eipo were excellent botanists. In those cases where they had claimed a relationship between different plants (which was sometimes not immediately recognized by the academic specialists) this relationship existed in our taxonomic system as well. For those familar with ethnobotany and ethnozoology this won't be a surprising outcome (cp. Berlin et al. 1973), but it still is a very powerful proof of the human capacity and propensity to detect and conceptualize structure and order in the living world.

Utilizing nature on the islands

Most of the Trobriand Islands are coral atolls with a very limited fauna, especially of terrestrial animals and a somewhat limited flora as well. In contrast, biodiversity in the coral reefs is breathtaking. The inhabitants of this region of the Solomon Sea have a number of cultural traits which are different from those found in the Eipo highland society. The Trobrianders are matrilineal and have a rather developed political system with powerful matrilineally inherited chieftainships. Institutionalized, ritualized forms of competition as well as a very highly developed sense of aesthetics are also characteristic for their culture.

Marine ressources are exploited in countless very clever ways; fig. 15 shows one of them: in the night torches made of dried leaves of the coconut palm are lit and swung through the air, so that they flare up; in this light the fishermen see their prey in the shallow water and speer them. Panulirus ornatus and P. punctatus spiny lobsters (fig. 16) form part of the culinary repertoire, as do many other species of shellfish and fish from the various regions of Trobriand environment. Virtually every animal which lives in the coral reef and in the deeper sea is known by this people, is given a name, is arranged in a classificatory system and is caught in a special way. It is amazing to see how these people utilize different techniques, including Derris elliptica, a fish poison also known in other parts of the world. It was very surprising to witness Trobriand divers use Derris in the coral reef, because one should expect the poisonous latex to be quickly diluted by the sea so that there wouldn't be any effect. But the Trobrianders have a very clever method: they keep crushed Derris roots in their clenched fist and release it underneath or within a coral stock so that the poison is kept there and is prevented from being watered down. The fish (Oxycirrhitus?) adapted, also in colour, to life in and around these particular reddish coral stocks take refuge from the human figure approaching them in their hiding place and are thus incapacitated by the poison. They then float in the water and can easily be collected. One gets a small bucket of fish in 20 minutes and does not have to worry about any bad effects from eating the catch. Almost every species of fish is caught by a special method and these methods are built on precise knowledge of the ecology of the particular animals, their perferred habitats, their chronobiology and their behaviour - applied ethology in a non-literate society.

Fig. 17 shows a porcupine fish (Diodon holacanthus, Diodontidae). While we were looking at this amazing creature and photographing its dramatic way of changing shape a Trobriand man said: "You must be very careful, because there are two very similar fish. You eat the wrong one you die, but this one is the type you can eat, nothing will happen to you". Obviously, he was referring to one of the puffer fish (Tetraodontidae) which are related to the Diodontidae; one of them is the famous fugu with its deadly poisonous bile, considered a delicacy in Japan and prepared by specially licensed chefs in expensive restaurants.

What was said before about the excellent botanical knowledge of the highland Eipo can be stated here again with regard to marine biology in the environment of the Trobrianders. Ecology, form, colour, behaviour and any peculiarity of the creatures in and around the sea are known in detail and utilized to catch them for consumption.

Ethnoscientific knowledge - enigma and danger

Table 2 (from Schiefenhövel & Prinz 1984) lists a number of well known drugs without which modern medicine is unthinkable; without curare, e.g., modern anaethesia and surgery would not be possible. All these medicines have been taken from the pharmacological thesaurus of traditional cultures, including our own.

All cultures have their kinds of science. Often this knowledge was not put into museums and not published in journals or books, it was passed on, in an incredibly efficient manner, orally from generation to generation; seemingly without loss and with an occasional addition. For me, one of the very surprising aspects of natural science in traditional societies is the fact that people know plants and animals even when these species do not lend themselves to be researched and known. Our friends in New Guinea usually also know very insignificant plants which are neither useful nor dangerous or remarkable in any other way. Homo sapiens longs to collect knowledge, to find structures and to be a natural scientist. We are a curious species and with our scientific mind we find hidden secrets in nature and construct our concepts of the world.

Another example. People from India to Melanesia love to chew betelnut (Areca catechu), the main active principle of which is the alcaloid arecoline. It has, apart from being a strong parasympathicomimetic, a mild hallucinogenic effect; the Trobrianders often call it "our beer". But to get this much sought after effect is not so easy. If one chews the seed of the Areca nut, one experiences a more or less pronounced adstringent effect, but nothing happens to the central nervous system. To free the arecoline and to turn it into a pharmacologically active form, burnt and slaked lime has to be added. On the Trobriand Islands this precious substance is produced by collecting certain white corals, burning and later slaking them carefully with a spray of water coming from the mouth of the specialist lime maker. To pep up the effect of the now freed alcaloid and attach a culinary quality to their morsel, people everywhere add Piper betle or some other peppery plants.

Who on earth has found all this out? Who found out about treating Manihot esculenta tubers containing harmful levels of prussic acid to be turned into delicious Cassava dishes. Who found out about the hidden powers of tens of thousands of medicinal plants? How did Homo sapiens develop all this vast and detailed knowledge in times before the onset of chemistry and pharmacology? I don't know how many plant species are accessible to members of a given culture in various types of environments, but the numbers must be forbidding.

Fig. 6. Many persons in lowland Melanesia suffer from 'ringworm'
(Tinea imbricata), a superficial mycosis that is feared because of
its stigmatizing effect

For me, this is one of the most intriguing questions in ethnoscience. It is unthinkeable that our own forefathers and the forefathers of others populations set out on a gigantic experimental scheme to test all possible herbal or other substances for possible beneficial and/or harmful effects by neolithic technology. Intimate knowledge of nature can not have come about by simple trial and error, it must, I'm sure, have come about by specific neurobiological perception mechanisms and learning abilities of early humans. Otherwise it would have taken far too long to discover all those active principles.

I believe we have to postulate certain search and evaluating mechanisms in the brain of animals and, particularly perhaps, in that of mammals. Mechanisms which are able to foster, as it were, pharmacognostic curiosity and to trigger specific evaluation processes and store their results, retrieveably, in the central nervous system. There are indications that the area postrema in our brain is one of the elements of such an intelligent (non-esoteric) system to help us find the right food and the right cure (cp. Schiefenhövel, in press).

In the low lying areas of Melanesia many people suffer from Tinea imbricata (fig. 18), a basically harmless, but socially stigmatizing superficial mycosis, caused by Trichophyton concentricum. Some decades ago my informants said that a certain plant, Cassia alata, (fig. 19) was the appropriate cure for this skin disease. And indeed, this plant (called seven candle sticks in English) is pharmacologically active, particularly through its main principle, chrysarobic acid. Cassia alata was, no surprise therefore, integrated into the European pharmakopoea and used, e.g., to treat Psoriasis vulgaris. It seems that the local people should have every reason to continue using this traditional pharmakon.

There is only one problem. Doctors in hospitals, nurses and medical orderlies at aid posts but also teachers and missionaries have started long ago to hand out Griseofulvin tablets, a very powerful oral antimycotic drug which can cure Tinea imbricata in a much shorter time than applying Cassia leaves for days or weeks. Papua New Guineans have realized that this new way of regaining a healthy, nice skin is superior to their traditional methods - and this is of course true for many other elements of modern medicine as well. There is only one problem: Griseofulvin is not only a very effective antimycotic but also has possibly dangerous side effects, especially on the liver. Rather than risking possible gastrointestinal, hepatic, teratogenic and other consequences from insufficiently controlled doses of this modern medicine, Tinea patients should opt for the traditional alternative. They don't. When one asks people these days about possible usages of the conspicuous Cassia with its yellow flowers, one is likely to hear either: "I don't know", or "Our grandparents used to rub the leaves of this plant on the skin of people suffering from 'ringworm', but we don't have to do this any more. The white people have tablets which make our skin healthy much quicker".

Melanesia is one the areas where biodiversity is highest worldwide. I would like to repeat: Let us protect biodiversity but not forget about protecting cultural diversity - often the latter will benefit the former.

Bibliography

Berlin, B. (1992) Ethnobotanical Classification. Principles of Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies. Princeton University Press, Princeton

Berlin, B., Breedlove, D. & Raven P. (1973) General Principles of Classification and Nomenclature in Folk Biology. American Anthropologist 75: 214-242

Blum, J. P. (1979) Untersuchungen zur Tierwelt im Leben der Eipo im zentralen Bergland von Irian Jaya (West-Neuguinea). Reimer, Berlin

Cotton, C. M. (1996) Ethnobotany. Principles and Applications. Wiley & Sons, Chichester etc.

Hiepko, P. & Schiefenhövel, W. (1987) Mensch und Pflanze. Ergebnisse ethnotaxonomischer und ethnobotanischer Untersuchungen bei den Eipo, zentrales Bergland von Irian Jaya (West-Neuguinea), Indonesien. Reimer, Berlin

Hiepko, P. & Schultze-Motel, W. (1981) Floristische und ethnobotanische Untersuchungen im Eipomek-Tal, Irian Jaya (West-Neuguinea), Indonesien. Reimer, Berlin

Jorgensen, D. (1994) Pacific Peoples in a Modern World. In: G. Burenhult, P. Rowley-Conwy, W. Schiefenhövel, D. Hurst Thomas and J. P. White (Eds.) The Illustrated History of Humankind, Vol. 5, Traditional Peoples Today, Harper & Collins, New York: 99-121

Malinowski, B. (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific. An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London

Malinowski, B. (1935) Coral Gardens and Their Magic. A Study of the Methods of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands. 2 vols. Reynolds, New York

Schiefenhövel, W. (1976) Die Eipo-Leute des Berglands von Indonesisch-Neuguinea. Homo 26,4: 263-275

Schiefenhövel, W. (1991) Eipo. In: Hays, T. E. (Ed.) Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Vol. II, Oceania. G. K. Hall & Co, Boston: 55-59

Schiefenhövel, W. (in press) Good Taste and Bad Taste - Preferences and Aversions as Biological Principles. In: Macbeth, H. (Ed.) Good Taste and Bad Taste, Berghahn, Oxford etc.

Schiefenhövel, W. & Prinz. A. (1984) Ethnomedizin und Ethnopharmakologie - Quellen wichtiger Arzneimittel. In: Czygan, F. C. (Ed.) Biogene Arzneistoffe. Vieweg, Braunschweig etc.: 223-238

Schultes, R. E. & von Reis, S. (1995) Ethnobotany. Evolution of a Discipline. Chapman & Hall, London etc.

Legends (to chapter by Wulf Schiefenhövel)

Fig. 1) Map of New Guinea with the two locations where most of the research was carried out

Fig. 2) Eipo babies are often born onto the grass outside the women's house

Fig. 3) The Eipo place their dead into the top of trees. In a second ceremony, the mummified bodies are brought to little huts in the gardens. Sometimes the skull and long bones are transferred to a third location under overhanging rocks

Fig. 4) An Eipo woman returning to the village with food and firewood. The smoke in the background indicates that secondary vegetation is transformed into new gardens by slash and burn technique

Fig. 5) Wife, husband and child departing from their garden. Sweet potatoes (in this case a cultivar with reddish skin) provides most of the energy needed and leafy greens (wrapped in bundles) most of the protein

Fig. 6) Several different cultivars of Ipomoea batatas. All of them are easily distinguished, even by children

Fig. 7) Some tubers of Colocasia esculenta are grown to become very big. They are food for guests at special occasions

Fig. 8) Fruitstands of wild Pandanus brosimos are brought home from the mountain forest. The very tasty nuts contain fat and are highly valued. Usually they are smoked for preservation

Fig. 9) The red, slightly bitter sap of Pandanus conoideus is a rare delicacy

Fig. 10) Small marsupials, like Phalanger vestitus seu carmelitae, are hunted in the forest to be consumed at special ceremonies. Game is generally quite rare

Fig. 11) Pigs are the most important animal in the culture of the Eipo. Women take a lot of care to raise them. Their number is limited and they are killed only at special occasions. Therefore pork contributes very little fat and animal protein to the daily diet

Fig. 12) All kinds of small reptiles, insects, including stinkbugs, but also spiders and the like, are eaten, particularly by women and infants, who receive valuable animal protein through these "bizarre" foods

Fig. 13) Drawing (from Blum 1979) of a snare to catch arboreal marsupials. Every piece of this well designed construction is named with technical terms describing the function

Fig. 14) Like members of other traditional cultures the Eipo are extremely good natural scientists whose taxonomic classification is very precise - it follows the principle of the hierarchic Linnean system. These two seemingly very different plants are said by the Eipo to be related; they are indeed members of the same genus (Polyosma, Saxifragaceae)

Fig. 15) One way to catch fish on the Trobriand Islands is to swing torches through the air. In the flare the fish can be seen and speared

Fig. 16) Panulirus ornatus and P. punctatus are quite common in the reefs around the Trobriand Islands

Fig. 17) Trobriand Islanders know that the porcupine fish (Diodon holacanthus) is edible and related to a deadly poisonous Tetraodontidae species (cp. the Japanese fugu)

Fig. 18) Many persons in lowland Melanesia suffer from 'ringworm' (Tinea imbricata), a superficial mycosis which is feared because of its stigmatizing effect

Fig. 19) The leaves of Cassia alata contain chrysarobic acid, an effective antimycotic. Yet, its traditional therapeutic use against Tinea has stopped because of a (rather liberal) distribution of Griseofulvin, an oral antimycotic with harmful side effects

Fig. 20) This map of W. Barthlott and his team indicates that Melanesia ranks among the regions with highest biodiversity worldwide. Uncontrolled outside influences like logging etc. are serious threats for this area's genetic richness, which was so far enhanced also through planned domestication of many native cultivars

Table 1) Cultivars of the most important food plants of the Eipo in the highlands of Irian Jaya. The figures were obtained by three anthropologists in three different villages (from Hiepko & Schiefenhövel 1987)

Table 2) Our modern inventory of powerful drugs contains many herbal medicines from traditional cultures (from Schiefenhövel & Prinz 1984)

Abstract Beitrag Wulf Schiefenhövel

Do members of traditional cultures live in harmony with their environment and if so why? Do they and if so how do they classify the living world without access to natural science, its libraries and data-bases? There are a number of misconceptions regarding non-literate societies and their view of and relationship with nature.

Humans like all animal species have always had impact on the environment in which they lived. Yet, the efficiency of their actions was limited, mainly due to lack of efficient tools. Since steel axes were introduced in New Guinea much more primary forest was cut down than in the times when garden-clearings had to be made with stone adzes.

It is typical for members of traditional societies to have a very sophisticated system of understanding and classifying nature. At first sight it seems surprising and highly improbable that they use classificatory ways which are very close to our own Linnéan system. In the perspective of evolutionary biology, however, the similarity between the various forms of seeing the living world is not so unlikely. The human brain looks for structure in a very similar way, regardless of the specific culture. Humans are, by their very nature, "natural scientists", even when the object of their study is a plant without any direct material, nutritional or religious significance.

On the basis of their intimate knowledge of the living world in their environment people in Melanesia have a large variety of methods to utilize biodiversity - they have even increased biodiversity. Food plants are usually propagated via vegetative seedlings. In the long history of Melanesia and through the curiosity and skill of the Papuan and Austronesian populations a very rich array of edible species (Colocasia esculenta, Dioscorea alata, Ipomoea batatas, Saccharum edule and officinarum, Rungia klossii, Abelmoschus manihot and many others) has been developed which indeed constitutes one of the genetic treasures of our planet.

Animals including fish and other maritime beings are caught in thoughtful, clever ways which are built on very precise knowledge of the ecology, biology and behaviour of the respective species. Neolithic horticulture with long fallow periods and mulching techniques has yielded good results. Biodiversity and cultural diversity are not mutually exclusive but natural partners.