Professor Roy Ellen has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Emeritus Fellowship for a project titled “Nuaulu ethnobotanical cognition and knowledge (Seram, eastern Indonesia).’
The grant, to the amount of £13,469, is due to start in August 2018 and will last for two years. It will allow Professor Ellen to complete a large monograph on the subject of ethnobotanical cognition, knowledge and practice among the Nuaulu of Seram, eastern Indonesia. This work – the culmination of Professor Ellen’s last 50 years of academic research – also endeavours to re-appraise how ethnobotanical classification works, addressing some of the problems associated with the received models by emphasising much more intra-cultural variation, the difficulties of simple claims for universality versus relativity, of cultural models versus individual contextual schemata, and of the two-dimensional taxonomic model.