Historical ecology of treeness

Ethnobiologists have argued for a heuristic dichotomy between intellectualist and utilitarian perspectives concerning traditional knowledge about biota visible to the naked eye. In comparing tree-name freelists obtained from two societies found in different hemispheres, pertaining to different linguistic phyla, and exhibiting distinct contact histories, neither perspective seems to explicate the bulk of the variation in the data. These two societies, namely, the Jah Hĕt (Aslian language family, peninsular Malaysia) and Ka’apor (Tupí-Guaraní language family, extreme eastern Amazonian Brazil), are nevertheless comparable in terms of environmental gradients, size of the language family they are in, and economy oriented, in part, toward the export of local products derived from the raw material of ambient organisms. Comparison of the tree-name freelist data suggests that both intellectualist and utilitarian criteria apply. Therefore, it may be time to revisit the debate, or even to supersede it with a more satisfactory explanatory framework.