ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief introduction to the region and the small communities concerned. It presents here an ethnographic contribution to a cross-cultural research project coordinated by Giovanni Bennardo, in which ethnographers of small-scale communities in different continents have agreed to use a common blended methodological protocol that includes qualitative and quantitative strategies to analyze samples of linguistic and cognitive data. The chapter discusses the theoretical assumptions and the specifics of the methodological protocol that guide the construction of this and other ethnographic contributions to the ‘Cultural Models of Nature across Cultures’ research project. It outlines a snapshot of basic constitutive categories and relations that exist in the world and which the interviewees talked about. The chapter describes components of Nature, relations among them, and assumptions about them obtained by the analysis of free-lists focused on basic cultural domains that exist in their world.
