The ETHNOPHYSIOGRAPHY Project

David M. Mark | Andrew G. Turk | David Stea

The goal of the Ethnophysiography Project is to learn how people describe and communicate about the landscapes that they live in. Are the concepts underlying words for landscape features and places more or less the same across the languages, or are there significant differences? Ethnophysiography studies how people conceptualize the natural landscape, especially landforms and waterbodies. It relies heavily on ethnography as a method for obtaining information through interviews, description, and community participation. Ethnophysiography focuses on kinds of things in the landscape, and aims to document in detail what things in the world are referred to by each term, and why.