While a number of recent health care studies have focused on the availability of modern health care services among rural U.S. populations, the commensurate study of access to folk medical systems has been relatively neglected. In this paper we explore the cultural conservation of folk medicinal plant use in 14 communities across the Ozark Mountain region of Arkansas and Missouri. Six relevant socioeconomic and demographic factors are examined in relation to the number of medicinal plant applications reported by expert informants in each locale. Using a multiple correlation and regression analysis, we find that the preservation of traditional medicine and praxis in the Ozarks is inversely related to community "delocalization." It is suggested that the survival of esoteric, albeit dynamic, medical knowledge and praxis among rural populations ultimately depends upon sustaining biological and cultural diversity.
Relatively neglected in the growing number of human ecological studies is the consideration of direct environmental effects on the behavioral and psychological adaptations of individuals. This paper presents some tentative cross-cultural and cross-national evidence relating one environmental variable--climate--to both behavioral and psychocultural processes. Some support for the hypothesis that the amount of emotional expression or "level of arousal? co-varies predictably with climate and weather is offered, and alternative explanations and discussions of this hypothesis are explored.
A new free-list measure of cognitive salience, B 0 , is presented, which includes both list position and list frequency. It surpasses other extant measures by being normed to vary between a maximum of 1 and a minimum of 0, thereby making it useful for comparisons irrespective of list length or number of respondents. An illustration of its properties, uses, and computation is provided with the aid of examples drawn from free lists of foods elicited from a sample of migrants from the Republic of the Marshall Islands.
This article shows that the cognitive structure of semantic ethnozoological domains is influenced by the culturally constituted affective values of these domains. Data were collected from American undergraduates who free listed the generic constituents of four ethnozoological life-forms: birds, fish, snakes, and wugs. Participants indicated on each free list which items they liked and disliked, and which single item best represented the life-form domain. They were also asked whether they liked or disliked the exemplar and the domain. Concordance was found between the attitude toward the life form (i.e., whether it is liked or disliked) and the salience of similarly judged items, and between the attitude toward the life form and the attitude toward the exemplar. Concordance was also found between the attitude toward the exemplar and the salience of similarly judged items. The exemplars of each life-form domain are highly salient overall, and the proportion of liked and disliked items in the free lists generally corresponds with the attitude toward the life-form
domain. All findings support our hypothesis that emotional meaning and culturally conditioned attitudes play a significant role in the organization of ethnozoological domains. you fool, you fool, I don't like spiders and snakesand that ain't what it takes to love me, like I wanna be loved by you
-Jim StaffordJournal of Linguistic Anthropology 1 l(2):24O-249.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.