A Directory of the Ethnosciences
Ethnosciences can be defined in two fundamentally different ways, as:
(1) Knowledge systems that emerged and still exist as local, traditional, vernacular, folk, or indigenous knowledge systems around the world, and
(2) Cross-disciplinary sciences that link learning about humans with the many kinds of learning offered by the physical and social sciences.
Ethnoscience in the first sense is often the object of study by ethnoscience in the second sense. Observation and learning can also go in the other direction, with traidtional and vernacular knowledge systems making their own appraisals of the results of the sciences practised in modern industrial societies.
Human knowledge systems have never come into existence or prospered under conditions of complete isolation, and have never been static. Humans have always acquired new knowledge - and new ways of learning - through interactions across the social, cultural and physical boundaries that exist at any given point in time.
There are no absolute boundaries, since even those who are trained in the sciences of modern industrial society have their own vernacular traditions of knowledge creation and transmission.
The Ethnolist is an attempt to assess the breadth and depth of ethnosciences on the internet. Hit numbers produced by searches with Google provide an overview of usage of a wide range of terms and exact phrases. Using common grammatical conventions for combining words, many possible knowledge categories can be suggested even if they have not been recognised as possible categories until now. In terms of hit numbers, few of the ethnosciences represented here approach mainstream dimensions when compared to the basic or conventional disciplines - but this is compensated for, to some extent, by the large number and diversity of cross-disciplines. Knowledge has many homes.