Culture and Epistemologies: Putting Culture Back Into the Ecosystem

This chapter reviews a body of research on cultural differences in framework theories for engaging with nature, focusing primarily on Indigenous American and European American comparisons. Native American samples reveal a pattern of converging observations that point to a relational epistemological orientation and a propensity for systems level thinking. In contrast, Non-Native samples show observations suggesting that humans are conceptualized as more psychologically distant from the rest of nature. Correlated with distance is a tendency for a taxonomic rather than an ecological orientation. It also suggests that the way that researchers think about and study cult