Indonesian Tropical Forest Peoples, and Legacy Collections: Reassessing Ethnobiological Collections

This presentation, "Reassessing Ethnobiological Collections and Data from Fieldwork among Indonesian Tropical Forest Peoples, and from Asian Legacy Collections," was delivered at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History on May 1, 2023, at the first session of a 2-day "Terrestrial Ecosystem Symposium." Session 1 was dedicated to: "Australasia, Africa, South Africa, Asia Tropical, South America, Pacific."
This presentation reviews some published results of my past fieldwork in an eastern Indonesiantropical forest region, especially among the Tobelo people (West Papuan language speakers on Halmahera Island, northern Moluccas), then looks at new ways to reconsider unpublished data from that period, and also at how insights derived from field studies of indigenous classifications and uses of local biota have informed the recent study of legacy museum collections.These recent collection studies include on-going research on the ethnographic and biological collecting expeditions to the same region by Smithsonian collector William Louis Abbott (1860-1936), and recent collaborative work on collections at the Smithsonian and in museums across Southeast Asia.