Botanical Ontologies Conference Program: A Cross-Disciplinary Forum on Human-Plant Relationships, Oxford, 16-17 May 2014 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Personal and shared: the reach of different herbal landscapes
Estonian Journal of Ecology, 2012
We analyse the use of medicinal plants by local populations from two parishes in central Estonia in the 1930s applying a model of herbal landscape. Our study, based on archived records of traditional ecological knowledge of 11 schoolchildren and 5 adults, compares the individualsí expertise of medicinal plants to the common knowledge of the local community. This shared knowledge, passed on from generation to generation inside the community (ecocultural commons), is distributed unequally among its members. The results of the study show that 65 plant and 3 fungi taxa were used in folk medicine to deal with 49 indications. Further, the study reveals how knowledge on plants was distributed among individuals throughout the local communities and how folk wisdom about medicinal plants was preserved. The individual herbal landscapes of the respondents varied considerably, with the usage of many plants shared by only a few members of the community. Still, the general pattern of the communal herbal landscape follows relatively well the pattern of the plant use in folk medicine in Estonia at the time under review, with just a few exceptions. Hence, every person partakes in the knowledge of the ecocultural commons, whereas the individual share of the communityís knowledge is not complete.
Background: Mountain environments are fragile socio-ecological systems and the conservation of their biological and cultural diversities-seen as co-evolving, strongly intertwined entities-represents a crucial issue for fostering their sustainability. Very few ethnobiological studies have assessed in the mountainous regions of Europe how local botanical knowledge, which represents a vital portion of the local environmental knowledge (LEK), changes over time, although this may be quintessential for a better understanding of the factors influencing how knowledge and practices are shaped, eroded, or even recreated. Methods: In the current study, we compared the gathering and use of local medicinal plants in the Upper Sangone Valley, Western Italian Alps, Piedmont (NW Italy) as described in a field study conducted in the mid-seventies and published in 1977 and those arising from field research that we conducted in the spring of 2015 and 2018, during which time ethnobotanical and ethnomycological information concerning both folk medicinal and wild food uses was obtained via 47 in-depth open and semi-structured interviews with community members. Results: In total, one hundred thirty folk taxa represent the past and present medicinal and wild food plant/ mushroom heritage of the Sangone Valley: 26 herbal taxa were recorded 40 years ago only; 68 herbal and wild food taxa have been recorded in the current study only; and 36 herbal taxa have been continuously used during the last 40 years. There were no remarkable quantitative differences between the two diachronic medico-ethnobotanical datasets, but the qualitative differences were substantial. The gathering and use of some medicinal plants growing in meadows, forests and higher mountain environments (i.e. Arctostaphylos, Filipendula, Hepatica, Larix, Laserptium, Picea, Polygonatum, Primula, Tussilago and Veronica spp.) disappeared, whereas the collection of plant genera growing in more anthropogenic environments or possibly promoted via popular books and media has been newly introduced (i.e.
Herbal Landscape: The Perception of Landscape as a Source of Medicinal Plants
Trames. A Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2010
This contribution investigates the idea of herbal landscape, associated with a personal perception of landscape as a source of materia medica. The herbal landscape can be divided into specific smaller units according to several natural and cultural boundaries. This explains why the original knowledge of plants gleaned by one set of inhabitants may be clearly distinguished from that of close neighbors. The natural boundaries are, for example, the habitat (community) and geographical range limit of plants. Cultural boundaries, for example, constitute the cultural space that influences people, the peculiarity of a given language, and the availability of education, popular books and other media regarding plant use. Nevertheless, Estonian natural herbal culture can be viewed as one large-scale herbal landscape.
2020
The cross-cultural exchange of plant resources between societies across the globe added to the diversification of medicinal floras and pharmacopeias. Understanding how and why people select plants for medicine is still a common focus and topic addressed by the interdisciplinary research fields of ethnobotany, anthropology, ethnopharmacology, ethnomedicine, pharmacy, phytochemistry, and pharmacognosy. Here, we scrutinize recently reviewed ethnobotanical theories and hypotheses, which focus on the selection of plants as medicine by putting them into historical, ecological, and pharmacological perspective. We contextualize the availability, versatility, and diversification hypotheses, often presented in association with the inclusion of non-native species or imported herbal drugs into medicinal floras or ethnopharmacopeias. We also discuss the relevance of the concept of utilitarian redundancy and the apparency hypothesis, as well as the appropriateness of various statistical models applied for assessing non-random plant selection. It appears that the concept of utilitarian redundancy has been applied in a too reductionist and uncritical way, while the apparency theory is conceptually inconsistent and contradictive allowing for multiple interpretations. While the availability, versatility, and diversification hypotheses are not contextualized historically, they are used to explain retrospectively deliberate and well-documented human activities and cultural developments. Therefore, considering the cultural history and the pharmacology of plants is essential for the formulation of hypotheses related to the selection of plants as medicine and food. Ecological research questions applied to human-plant relationships should consider the historical impact of human culture as a framework and confounder to be integrated into the analysis.