Paths of Life: American Indians of the Southwest and Northern Mexico (original) (raw)
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Ecological and social overviews of ethnobotanical research
1985
I was kindly invited by the organizers of this Symposium to comment on the papers presented by the contributors, particularly from an ecological point of view. In attempting to do so, I did not restrict my commentaries to the purely ecological aspects, but tried also to express my viewpoints, as a scientist working in a country like Mexico, on the social and economic issues that form an indivisible part of the subject of the Symposium. All papers in the Symposium have pointed directly or indirectly to both the cultural and biological diversities that go hand in hand in all examples of plant utilization by human societies, across space and time. Such diversities are the result of the interplay among a given physical and biotic environment, a given set ofgenotypes that man recognizes as belonging to a species of useful or potentially useful plant, and man, a fundamentally energy-economic organism, surrounded by an intricate mesh of cultural attributes. This interplay is basically ecological in its nature, so much so that throughout human history-and currently for certain societies-one should consider culture to be an ecologically determined trait. When we speak of the interactions by which early societies developed domesticated plants, it is easy for us to think in terms of selection of the plant populations through domestication, and we implicitly accept many underlying ecological interactions in that process. What does not come so readily to mind is the fact that man also has been under the selective pressure of ecological-energetic efficiency. Decisions, such as the seed selection, the right planting times, and the appropriate field management of his crop, had to focus on the prospect of a positive balance between his energy inputs and his crop's energy yields. Red figures in this balance usually meant famine, propensity for disease, reduced life expectancy, and reduced birth rates; in a word, the risk of his genotype being left out of the evolutionary game. What better school than this for man to learn his trade well and teach it to his progeny well! The long process of plant evolution under domestication and the resulting ctfltural evolution of human societies are the roots of the cultural and biological diversity that constitute the riches of the field of ethnobotany and for which examples were given in the Symposium by Efraim Hernfindez, Robert Bye, Anson Thompson, and Gary Nabhan. However, the impact of man upon his plants is not restricted to the relatively reduced number of present-day crops that constitute the bulk of human food sources, but may have had a very important expression
Land
Globally, the agricultural sector is facing many challenges in response to climate change, unsustainable farming practices and human population growth. Despite advances in technology and innovation in agriculture, governments around the world are recognizing a need for transformative agricultural systems that offer solutions to the interrelated issues of food security, climate change, and conservation of environmental and cultural values. Approaches to production are needed that are holistic and multisectoral. In planning for future agricultural models, it is worth exploring indigenous agricultural heritage systems that have demonstrated success in community food security without major environmental impacts. We demonstrate how indigenous practices of customary harvest, operating in multifunctional landscapes, can be scaled up to service new markets while still maintaining natural and cultural values. We do this through a case analysis of the wild harvest of Kakadu plum fruit by Abor...
Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, 2013
Background: Management types and their intensity may vary according to indicators such as: (1) practices complexity, (2) degree of techniques specialization, (3) occurrence and types of social regulations, (4) artificial selection intensity, (5) energy invested, (6) tools types, and (7) amounts of resources obtained. Management types of edible plants were characterized and analyzed in Náhuatl communities of the Tehuacán Valley. We expected that both natural and human pressures generate risk on plant resources availability, influencing human responses of management directed to decrease risk. We particularly hypothesized that magnitude of risk would be a direct function of human pressures favored by cultural and economic value and ecological factors such as scarcity (restricted distribution and abundance). Management practices may decrease risk of plant resources, more effectively when they are more intense; however, absence or insufficiency of management practices on endangered plants may favor loss of their populations. Understanding current management motives and their consequences on the purpose of ensuring availability of plant resources might allow us to understand similar processes occurring in the past. This issue is particularly important to be studied in the Tehuacán Valley, where archaeologists documented possible scenarios motivating origins of plant management by agriculture during prehistory. Methods: Through ethnobotanical collecting, 55 semi-structured and free listing interviews we inventoried edible plant species used in five villages of Coyomeapan, Mexico. We identified: (1) native plant species whose products are obtained exclusively through simple gathering, (2) native species involving simple gathering and other management types, and (3) non-native species managed by agricultural management. We conducted in depth studies on the 33 native species managed through gathering and other types of practices. We carried out a total of 660 sessions of detailed interviews to 20 households randomly selected. We showed to people voucher specimens and photos of the sample of species chosen and documented their cultural and economic values. Spatial availability of these plant species was evaluated through vegetation sampling. Values for each cultural, economic, and ecological indicator were codified and averaged or summed and weighed according to frequency of interviewees' responses or ecological conditions per plant species. With the standardized values of these indicators we performed a PCA and scores of the first principal component were considered as a risk index, which summarizes information of thirteen indicators of human use, demand and scarcity of each plant species. Similarly, eleven indicators of energy invested, complexity, tools and management strategies were used for performing PCA and scores of the first principal component were considered as management intensity index for each plant species. A linear regression analysis was performed to analyze the relation between risk and management intensity indexes. Amounts of variation of management data explained by ecological, cultural and economic information, as well as their risk level were analyzed through canonical correspondence analyses (CCA).
Ethnobotany of Mexico Interactions of People and Plants in Mesoamerica
Ethnobotany is a research aimed at understanding what people know about plants, how plants form part of their systems of beliefs and conceptions of the world, and how humans make use and manage plants for reproducing their social and cultural life. This chapter shows a general panorama of the historical use of ethnobotany in Mexico from pre-Columbian times to the modern arising of ethnobotany as a research fi eld, as well as the main contemporary methodological approaches and challenges of researchers working on Mexican ethnobotany. Such panorama conforms an introductory context for discussing the importance and limits of this book and a general description of the contributions of the each chapter that forms part of the text. We then discuss a general perspective of the Mexican ethnobotany in order to make stronger an "after description step" of this research fi eld, recognizing the importance of descriptive methods but the need of emphasizing the analytical contribution of ethnobotany on research questions connected with research fi elds like anthropology, archaeology, ecology, and evolutionary biology. All these are research areas requiring support from both quantitative and qualitative ethnobotanical approaches in order to analyse social and anthropological problems such as the role of natural resources in human cultures, peoples' cosmovision, and their social organization and technology for interacting with ecosystems. Also, ethnobotany is necessary to ecology for studying important problems like the human 2 infl uence on distribution and abundance of the fl ora of the world and the historical confi guration of ecosystems. In addition, ethnobotany is crucial for understanding the past and ongoing processes of domestication in order to understand factors infl uencing the origins of agriculture. Ethnobotany is crucial for understanding evolutionary ecological processes infl uencing divergence between wild and managed populations of plants and perspectives of management of plant genetic resources. And fi nally, we discuss the general importance of ethnobotany as a bridge for building social-ecological views and trans-disciplinary approaches for constructing sustainability science. Ethnobotany is a promising research fi eld for reinforcing the human understanding of nature and society, but also for solving practical problems in the context of the world's environmental crisis associated to global change.
Background: Management types and their intensity may vary according to indicators such as: (1) practices complexity, (2) degree of techniques specialization, (3) occurrence and types of social regulations, (4) artificial selection intensity, (5) energy invested, (6) tools types, and (7) amounts of resources obtained. Management types of edible plants were characterized and analyzed in Náhuatl communities of the Tehuacán Valley. We expected that both natural and human pressures generate risk on plant resources availability, influencing human responses of management directed to decrease risk. We particularly hypothesized that magnitude of risk would be a direct function of human pressures favored by cultural and economic value and ecological factors such as scarcity (restricted distribution and abundance). Management practices may decrease risk of plant resources, more effectively when they are more intense; however, absence or insufficiency of management practices on endangered plants may favor loss of their populations. Understanding current management motives and their consequences on the purpose of ensuring availability of plant resources might allow us to understand similar processes occurring in the past. This issue is particularly important to be studied in the Tehuacán Valley, where archaeologists documented possible scenarios motivating origins of plant management by agriculture during prehistory. Methods: Through ethnobotanical collecting, 55 semi-structured and free listing interviews we inventoried edible plant species used in five villages of Coyomeapan, Mexico. We identified: (1) native plant species whose products are obtained exclusively through simple gathering, (2) native species involving simple gathering and other management types, and (3) non-native species managed by agricultural management. We conducted in depth studies on the 33 native species managed through gathering and other types of practices. We carried out a total of 660 sessions of detailed interviews to 20 households randomly selected. We showed to people voucher specimens and photos of the sample of species chosen and documented their cultural and economic values. Spatial availability of these plant species was evaluated through vegetation sampling. Values for each cultural, economic, and ecological indicator were codified and averaged or summed and weighed according to frequency of interviewees' responses or ecological conditions per plant species. With the standardized values of these indicators we performed a PCA and scores of the first principal component were considered as a risk index, which summarizes information of thirteen indicators of human use, demand and scarcity of each plant species. Similarly, eleven indicators of energy invested, complexity, tools and management strategies were used for performing PCA and scores of the first principal component were considered as management intensity index for each plant species. A linear regression analysis was performed to analyze the relation between risk and management intensity indexes. Amounts of variation of management data explained by ecological, cultural and economic information, as well as their risk level were analyzed through canonical correspondence analyses (CCA).
Background: The Tehuacán Valley, Mexico is a region with exceptionally high biocultural richness. Traditional knowledge in this region comprises information on nearly 1,600 plant species used by local peoples to satisfy their subsistence needs. Plant resources with higher cultural value are interchanged in traditional markets. We inventoried the edible plant species interchanged in regional markets documenting economic, cultural and ecological data and about their extraction and management in order to: (1) assess how commercialization and ecological aspects influence plant management, (2) identify which species are more vulnerable, and (3) analyze how local management contributes to decrease their risk. We hypothesized that scarcer plant species with higher economic value would be under higher pressure motivating more management actions than on more abundant plants with lower economic value. However, construction of management techniques is also influenced by the time-span the management responses have taken as well as biological and ecological aspects of the plant species that limit the implementation of management practices. Plant management mitigates risk, but its absence on plant species under high risk may favor local extinction. Methods: Six traditional markets were studied through 332 semi-structured interviews to local vendors about barter, commercialization, and management types of local edible plant species. We retrieved ethnobotanical information on plant management from ten communities in a workshop and sampled regional vegetation in a total of 98 sites to estimate distribution and abundance of plant species commercialized. Through Canonical Correspondence Analysis (CCA) we analyzed the amount of variation of management types that can be explained from socioeconomic and ecological information. A risk index was calculated relating distribution, abundance, economic value and management of plant resources to identify the most vulnerable species.
Agrobiodiversity community participation and landscapes in agroecology
Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems 04 frontiersin.org surrounding areas. The environments where the species were found were categorized as home gardens, small plots, vicinity of houses or taperas, and more distant areas encompassing grasslands, forests, and hilltops or rocky outcrops. The botanical identification was performed by the authors, who collected samples for subsequent verification at the Laboratory of Botany at the Regional University Center of the East Region (Universidad de la República). The nomenclature used was verified against the Plant List. 3 2.2.3. Characterization of local knowledge Based on the primary assessment and with the aim of obtaining detailed information regarding species, uses, and associated local knowledge, the DCs with the highest agrobiodiversity were selected, and connections were established with guardians and other key informants knowledgeable about these plant genetic resources. An ethnographic approach (Guber, 2014) was employed as a means of immersing in the context, exploring discourses, and gaining insight into the practices of the individuals (Restrepo, 2016). Techniques such as participant observation (Kawulich, 2006) and open and semistructured interviews (Guber, 2001, 2014) were utilized, ensuring that the consent of each interviewee was obtained for the use of their provided data. A guideline was defined to cover topics such as family history and its connection to plant usage, the origin of knowledge, and the use and management of both wild and cultivated agrobiodiversity. 2.3. Data analysis The data obtained from the surveys and interviews were systematically organized and analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The following variables were recorded for each species: botanical family, origin (native or exotic, considering native species as those belonging to the Uruguayan flora), plant habit (annual herbaceous, perennial herbaceous, subshrub, shrub, tree, lichen), type(s) of DC (house or tapera) and environment where it is found (garden, small plots, adjacent environment, grassland, forest or rocky outcrops). The recorded uses were classified into 11 categories: human consumption, animal feed, medicine, veterinary use, toxic and harmful use, fuel, construction, industry and crafts, environmental uses, ornamental, and social, symbolic, and ritual uses (Pardo de Santayana et al., 2014). The management practices were classified into 10 categories, based on an adapted proposal from various authors (