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Ethnobotany

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DOI: 10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0300

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Ethnobotany
Robert Voeks
California State University, Fullerton, USA
Ethnobotany is the study of the dynamic
relationship between plants and people. It traces
its early history to the colonial quest for precious
spices – cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, and other
tropical treasures. As colonial merchants and
settlers unwittingly spread tropical microbes
to the far corners of the Earth, the search
expanded to botanical remedies for the flotilla
of new and geographically expanding diseases.
Entrepreneurs and men of science sought fame
and profit as they scoured these newfound
lands for “green gold,” and so was born the
ethnobotanical enterprise.
Ethnobotanists continue to search for novel
botanical products, especially drug plants. These
bioprospecting efforts have yielded considerable
pharmaceutical success, but often at the expense
of indigenous intellectual property. Beginning
in the 1960s, the primary objectives of ethno-
botanical research became more conceptual and
problem oriented, as researchers shifted away
from useful plant inventories to explore the
complex relationship between people and plants.
Ethnobotanical inquiry likewise became more
interdisciplinary, involving especially anthro-
pologists, archaeologists, botanists, chemists,
and geographers. Laboratory and field methods
were adopted from cognate disciplines, while
data analysis became increasingly quantitative.
The time frame of inquiry ranges from the late
The International Encyclopedia of Geography.
Edited by Douglas Richardson, Noel Castree, Michael F. Goodchild, Audrey Kobayashi, Weidong Liu, and Richard A. Marston.
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0300
Pleistocene to the present, while the scale of
investigation ranges from genes to landscapes.
Ethnobotanical research involves any dimen-
sion of people–plant relationships, but most
current research focuses on several “projects.”
Ethnobotanists seek to understand the process of
domestication and diffusion of crop plants. They
study the strategies employed by traditional soci-
eties to manage plant species, and the degree to
which these actions are environmentally sustain-
able. They investigate how species are cognitively
categorized, ranked, named, and assigned mean-
ing. And they explore the impact of globalization
on knowledge and use of plant resources.
The origin and spread of agricultural crops
had long been a focus of interest, but in recent
years there has been an expansion of inquiry
beyond the big commercial staples – rice, maize,
wheat, and potatoes – and toward understand-
ing the patterns and processes of lesser known
“wild” and semidomesticated species. Manage-
ment involves selective wild harvest, sparing of
perennials, pruning, weeding and fertilizing wild
populations, burning competing vegetation,
distributing seeds, and protecting important
taxa through community regulation. Species
managed by these strategies often exhibit signif-
icant differences in seed size, seed number, and
other morphological features compared with
unmanaged populations. In Mesoamerica, for
example, 5000–7000 plant species are exploited
by people, most are in some way managed,
and roughly 200 are in some stage of incipi-
ent domestication (Casas et al. 2007). When
wild species are introduced to home gardens,
even more intense management occurs. Home
E T H NO B OTAN Y
gardens are crucial resources for rural people,
especially women, who use them for food,
medicine, fuelwood, fiber, and shade, as well as
for ornamental and ceremonial purposes. They
are important repositories of rare wild species,
particularly as their natural habitats disappear,
and they are hotbeds of incipient domestica-
tion. These studies suggest increasingly that
plant domestication should be seen not as a
binary beginning and endpoint, but rather as a
continuum, from totally wild species to highly
modified modern cultivars.
Species management is often associated with
intense manipulation of nature, and so inves-
tigation of species domestication often segues
into the question of the “pristine myth.” Due to
long-term encouragement or sparing of useful
tree species, many so-called natural landscapes are
better termed “cultural landscapes” or “domes-
ticated landscapes.” The ancient Mesoamerican
Maya, for example, planted old-growth fruit
trees in fallows and created orchard gardens (pet
kotoob) in the forest. Consequently, many of the
otherwise pristine forests of Guatemala, Belize,
and Mexico’s Yucatan today are dominated by
useful wild trees that were planted and tended by
people over a thousand years ago (Ross 2011).
Amazonian forests likewise exhibit significant
species distribution and composition features
that are consistent with human management. To
this day, indigenous people clearly distinguish
between the varying utility of forest stands that
are more or less anthropogenic. Even the distri-
bution of the endemic Brazil nut tree (Bertholletia
excelsa), which for many is iconic for the Ama-
zonian forest primeval, is the result of centuries
of movement and likely planting by forest folk.
As pointed out early by Carl Sauer, the use
of fire to manage species and vegetation was
widespread in temperate latitudes. Recent eth-
nobotanical research has confirmed many of
these observations. In California, large expanses
2
of oak woodlands were burned by native peoples
to reduce insect predation on acorns and to
reduce competition from invading conifers. In
the southern Andes, monkey puzzle (Araucaria
araucaria) was managed by fire to enhance its
growth and productivity. Aboriginal peoples
of southeastern Australia employed burning to
enhance the growth of edible herbaceous plants
at the expense of trees. And Canada’s First Peo-
ples used fire liberally to enhance the quality and
quantity of edible berry and tuberous species.
Rural subsistence farmers often maintain
huge lexicons of plant names. But while they
universally name and classify familiar species,
all taxa are not treated equally. Staple crops,
such as corn (Zea mays) and potatoes (Solanum
tuberosum), are specified by dozens of subspecific
epithets – the blue type of corn, the red type
of corn, and so on. But less useful species often
receive simply a nondescript gloss – it’s a weed,
or it’s a liana. Species salience appears to be the
primary naming feature; manioc (Manihot escu-
lenta), for instance, is more salient to Amazonian
subsistence horticulturalists than a rare vine that
invades the swidden. Traditional societies orga-
nize their ethnofloras into ranks, often including
kingdom, life form, genus, species, and variety;
ranks tend to be similar across cultures, regardless
of cultural significance (Berlin 1992). The genus
in particular represents the most recognizable
rank of plant perception among humans, and in
most classification schemes finds its parallel in
the Linnaean system.
The field of ethnobotany developed around
understanding the relationship between indige-
nous people and native floras in rural, often
isolated settings; the more sedentary and the
more natural, the better. Yet in spite of precon-
ceptions that people lose their ethnobotanical
skills in the process of migration, it is clear
that immigrants go to extreme lengths to con-
tinue using their traditional foods and healing

floras. This is particularly true when these
plants represent distinctive cultural markers for
oppressed diaspora communities. In the case
of enslaved Africans, for example, there was
a powerful impulse to recreate a semblance
of their ancestral flora in the Americas. And
in spite of the enormous barriers, significant
elements of their useful flora arrived in the New
World as part of the Columbian Exchange. This
botanical homogenization facilitated continuity
of African plant-based culinary and healing
traditions among their New World descendents,
thus providing avenues of cultural resistance to
Euro-American hegemony (Voeks and Rashford
2013). Migrant people today likewise encounter
considerable obstacles to international transfer
of useful plants. Many avoid customs restric-
tions by surreptitiously bringing plants or seeds
with them. In some instances, particularly with
medicinal plants, the homeland species are
weedy and cosmopolitan, and so often precede
the arrival of immigrants. When other strategies
fail, immigrants either learn the identities of
replacement species in their new home, or
simply abandon the use of useful plants in favor
of supermarkets and pharmacies.
Subsistence harvest of traditional plant products
in many cases has shifted to commercial extrac-
tion. Exotic foods, fiber, medicines, latex, and
sundry other plant and fungal products – termed
non-timber forest products (NTFPs) – are
finding ready markets in the more developed
world. By the 1990s, many nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) and government agen-
cies began to view NTFPs as a potential rural
development-resource conservation win-win.
NTFPs can open routes to livelihood improve-
ment among marginalized, rural communities,
and, unlike alternative destructive forms of land
use, the effects of petty extraction on the struc-
ture and function of forests is much less than
other uses. Research on this subject is ongoing,
ETHNOBOTA NY
and the results are mixed. In Latin America
and Africa, earnings represent an economically
justifiable use of gatherer time, but this is not
the case in the poorest countries of Southeast
Asia. Regarding ecological sustainability, most
studies report that current levels and intensities
of harvest are not threatening the biological
replacement of individuals and populations, nor
is the ecological integrity of the relevant ecosys-
tems threatened. Regardless, commodification
of previously subsistence plant products is dra-
matically changing many aspects of people–plant
relations. Young people abandon all but com-
mercially valuable species, gendered relations
with nature change as women and men redefine
their roles in the community, and the cultural
significance of plants shift as botanical products
are increasingly defined by their monetary value
(Shackleton and Pandey 2014).
SEE ALSO: Agricultural environments;
Agricultural geography; Biodiversity;
Globalization; Nature conservation; Sustainable
development
References
Berlin, Brent. 1992. Ethnobiological Classification: Prin-
ciples of Categorization of Plants and Animals in Tra-
ditional Societies. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Casas, Alejandro, Adriana Otero-Arnaiz, Edgar
Pérez-Negrón, and Alfonso Valiente-Banuet.
2007. “In situ Management and Domestication of
Plants in Mesoamerica.” Annals of Botany, 100(5):
1101–1115.
Ross, Nanci. 2011. “Modern Tree Species Com-
position Reflects Ancient Maya ‘Forest Gardens’
in Northwest Belize.” Ecological Applications, 21(1):
75–84.
Shackleton, Charlie, and Ashok Pandey. 2014. “Posi-
tioning Non-Timber Forest Products on the
3
E T H NO B OTAN Y

Development Agenda.” Forest Policy and Economics, Further reading

38: 1–7.
Voeks, Robert, and John Rashford, eds. 2013. African
Anderson, Edgar. 1952. Plants, Man and Life. Boston:
Ethnobotany in the Americas. New York: Springer.
Little and Brown.

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