Ethnoecology & Ethnophysiography: ‘Scaling up’ plants to landscape, or making vegetation into geographic features

 Recently, ethnoscience has turned attention to landscape. Two different approaches have been used. The core of Landscape Ethnoecology is to identify uniform patches of “habitat types.” Ethnophysiography delimits and classifies landscape features. Ethnophysiography has an ontological commitment to objects or object-like features, whereas landscape ethnoecology has an ontological commitment to fields. A key concept in landscape ethnoecology is ecotopes, "the smallest ecologically-distinct landscape features in a landscape mapping and classification system." Although many landscape ethnoecology papers also discuss types of landforms and waterbodies, it is difficult to fit these into an ontology based on ecotopes. But vegetation, an important component of landscape, is equally difficult to fit into the features or objects view that underlies ethnophysiography. This paper will review these approaches and suggest ways to integrate both approaches into a unified ethno-theory of landscape. Examples will be drawn from fieldwork with the Yindjibarndi (Australia) and Navajo (USA) peoples.