Folk Plant Names Are Condensed Forms of Traditional Knowledge: Case Study with the Urang Kanekes of Banten, Indonesia

Abstract

A new wave of research emerging in the last two decades has turned the focus of linguistic ethnobiology on folk names used by local communities to denote biota. Studies have used traditional knowledge or linguistic approaches to unravel the elaborate body of knowledge used to generate folk names and link them to their appropriate denotatum. In this chapter, we present the folk food plant names of the Kanekes community of Banten Indonesia, classifying them into barefaced or cryptic based on apparency of Traditional Knowledge (TK) encoded in them. Barefaced folk names are self-explanatory names where the TK on the salient feature of the respective taxa is apparent. Cryptic names are those with TK either not readily comprehensible, or those containing TK on multiple taxa/entities. We found the 294 food plant names recorded by us encoding traditional knowledge related to morphology (161), ecology (45), utility (39), and quality (49) of the taxa. The majority of the names documented (172 names) are cryptic (111 metaphors, 53 metonyms, and 08 portmanteaus), while the rest are barefaced (122 names). Our study shows that cryptic names possess a remarkable ability to encode traditional knowledge on multiple taxa/entities. When folk names are lost or replaced, the traditional knowledge encoded by them is also lost. Researchers and practitioners working with local communities should therefore consider the potential of folk names as condensed forms of traditional knowledge.