Sociological group

Nicholas C. Mullins, Theory and Theory Groups in Contemporary American Sociology (footnote continued on next page)... 

As a consequence, I would like to develop a working explanation or, perhaps more accurately, a schematic taxonomy for the particular kind of "knowledge-discipline" we find in science. My scheme is explicitly not a sociological model. In contrast, I draw on the notion of the construction of historical identities. In practice, national or ethnic identity may be conflated with professional or disciplinary identity, in a way that actually integrates the notions of "tradition" and "school" with that of our historical understanding of "discipline." In this explanation, the school is best understood by analogy to an extended family rather than to a nuclear group at one site. 

Nor is this conflation unwarranted from a sociological point of view. We need only keep in mind Pierre Bourdieu s influential notion of an "intellectual field" composed of individuals, small groups, schools, and disciplines distributed as a network of agents and powers. Fieldlike relationships exist within subfields, which in turn occupy particular regions within the broader intellectual field.22... 

This chapter deals with the documentation of traditional ethnobotanical knowledge of rural communities and phyto-sociology of ethnobotanical resources of district Kachchh in western India with a major objective of setting up conservation priorities of ethnobotanical resources. We recorded the ethnobotanical knowledge from about 900 respondents spread across various age groups, gender, educational and socio-economic strata. We documented more than 10200 information units on medicinal and non-medicinal (i.e. domestic) uses of plants. While 259 species were reported for 16 human and 10 veterinary disease classes, 193 plant species were reported for 18 domestic uses. In total 320 species were reported useful by the local communities. The availability of these species was recorded by sampling 24 representative locations in the district. Based on reports of purpose-part used combinations of species, two different indices (the Use-Value Richness, and Use-Value Diversity) were computed to record overall ethnobotanical use-values of each species. 

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