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Ethnoscientists: Job Description, Education, Skills and Duties, Earnings and Outlook

Submitted by: paula

Job Overview Ethnoscientists is an umbrella term for a profession that covers different subprofessions such as ethnoarchaeology, ethnobiology, ethnoveterinary medicine,ethnozoology and ethnomusicology. Most of the ethnoscientists are Western practitioners. They are specifically interested in studying and exploring beliefs, traditions, practices or collectively the culture of ethnic groups in less and non industrialized parts of the world such as the Eskimos of Alaska, the Aetas of the Philippines and the Maoris of the New Zealand. They study specific subjects like zoology, biology, archaeology, veterinary medicine, and music from the perspective of these cultural groups. As these groups are fairly or poorly explored, they do have many traits, practices and perspectives that are unique, unstudied and undocumented in books, journals and other written sources.

Education, Knowledge and Trainings Required

The most important and preferred subjects to be taken as early as high school are subjects like History, Sociology, Psychology as well as Foreign Language and/or Lingusitics. The minimum educational level to become an ethnocientist is a possession of a doctorate degree, more especially to be able to teach in a university. Preferred undergraduate courses include Anthropology, Biology, Sociology and Pharmacology and preferred doctorate degrees includeanthropology and botany.

Skills and Abilities

Skills in communication and interprsonal skills are the most valuable skills to be able to study different aspects of rare and indigenous cultural groups in different parts of the world. Research, critical thinking and writing skills are important in analyzing data gathered and recording and reporting the qualitative results to the board as well as publishing them to the journals, books and other scientific papers.

Duties

The focus of duty of an ethnoscientist will depend on the specialty of studies chosen in a specific cultural group such as the language, music, veterinary practices, plants and animals use and function to name a few. They work both indoors conducting readings, analyzing data gathered, writing reports, as well as outdoors doing fieldwork such as interviewing and living with these people to experience the culture, data gathering by different means such as taking samples of plants, food, and artifacts and doing participative observation.

They collate and consolidate the data taken and analyze them and afterwards use them for a qualitative research or ethnographical studies, to be published in research papers, journals and books, disseminated and taught to students in history, sociology, psychology and anthropology.

Earnings and Job Outlook

Ethnologist salary may range from 25,000 to 50,000 U.S. dollars in a year depending on the state of practice, employer, the projects at hand as well as the offsetting benefits like travel and subsistence allowance, insurance  and retirement plans. Others who are already senior and experts in the field may earn as high as 99,000 U.S. dollars or more. The job outlook in this career is also good and moving as fast as the average for the other careers or industry.

Paula Hiz is a researcher and a human resource specialist who helps newly graduates, job applicants and post graduate professionals be aware of their job opportunities and available trainings for skills and practice upgrading.

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Word Count: 522 Date: Thu, 25 Nov 2010 Time: 5:31 PM


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