Eugene Hunn, “Meeting of minds: how do we share our appreciation of traditional environmental knowledge?,”The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12 (2006), 143-160.

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• 143 – “Ethnobiology’s signal contribution is to show how traditional environmental knowledge or local natural history is central to cultural knowledge, at least for the mostly rural societies that have been our prime descriptive focus.”
• “It is A Zapotec botany, for in fact there can be no single Zapotec botany, as there are several hundred Zapotec communities, each with its own autochthonous tradition knowledge specific to its traditional lands.”
• 144 – “When we speak of ‘folk’ biologies and of ‘traditional’ environmental knowledge, we self-consciously set our modern urban existence in opposition to a way of life that has endured far longer than ours and which I hope may continue, in some form or other, in the face of globalization. I see no reason to apologize for upholding this dichotomy nor for taking sides. I reject the notion that it is either romantic or patronizing to affirm the value of a way of life that has as its primary goal the continuation of that way of life through the generations — that is my definition of sustainability — and that is confined in space and through time to an intensely familiar landscape, one sufficient for the continued existence of an established community. Such confined communities are my definition of ‘indigenous’.”
• 149 – “How might we avoid alienating the audience for our ethnographic stories so burdened? One solution might be to write our accounts in layers, each designed to appeal to a distinct audience. I will described three such narrative layers: the master narrative, the technical narrative, and the monographic narrative. The top layer would address the most generalized audience and be designed first of all to convey the power and complexity of our ethnobiological material to an audience with limited firsthand knowledge or appreciation of natural history. . . . Master narratives are designed to convince the reader with all the rhetorical powers at our command, to convince intellectually, emotionally, and sensually. Master narratives are a form of propaganda, but heartfelt. Our master narratives may argue that other peoples at other times and places deserve our respect for their humanity, their intellect, their curiosity, their sense of place and attachment to family and community.”
• 150 – “This brings us to the second ethnographic layer, our technical narrative. As narratives, these texts are argumentative still, but must address the issues in more detail, for example citing the academic literature to highlights the status of particular debates that engage various scholarly communities. For instance, the technical narrative beneath our master narrative highlighting nomenclatural curiosities or the impressive detail of native taxonomic distinctions might elaborate on the fit of the particular case to general principles . . ..”
• “One might finally elaborate a third layer, that of the monographic narrative, that would explore the limits of the data, acknowledging ambiguities and varied opinions among consultants, summarizing the consultant sample with respect to how representative it might be of the wider community . . ..”