Ethnobotany of Mexico Interactions of People and Plants in Mesoamerica (original) (raw)

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.

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