Harold Colyer Conklin (April 27, 1926 – February 18, 2016) was an American anthropologist who conducted extensive ethnoecological and linguistic field research in Southeast Asia (particularly the Philippines) and was a pioneer of ethnoscience, documenting indigenous ways of understanding and knowing the world.
[3] Conklin entered the University of California, Berkeley as an undergraduate in 1943, studying with anthropologists Robert Lowie, Alfred L. Kroeber, and Edward W. Gifford, as well as geographer Carl O. Sauer.
In Manila, he met with the tropical botanist Harley Harris Bartlett, who instructed him in botanical research and provided him with funds to create an ethnobotanical collection from Palawan.
He continued publishing his analysis of the Hanunóo until 1961, when he moved his research to Ifugao in northern Luzon, where he would make a series of fieldwork trips for the next two decades.
[4] Based on his extensive research, Conklin built one of the largest ethnographic collections from the Philippines at Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History, where he was Curator of Anthropology from 1974 until his retirement in 1996.