Discipline

Ethnobotany

Scholarly Disciplines

Origin Late nineteenth century as a named field, with its academic footing built through the twentieth. Its sources reach back much further, into the plant lists compiled by colonial administrations, missions and botanical surveys.

Ethnobotany is the study of how particular peoples understand and use plants, and it is the discipline through which most of what the atlas records about sacred plants was written down. It sits between botany and anthropology and depends on both, since a claim about a ritual plant is worthless without the species identification and meaningless without the cultural context. Its practitioners are the reason a plant such as ayahuasca has a documented preparation, a named admixture and a described ceremonial setting rather than a rumour. It is included here as a discipline in its own right because the atlas distinguishes a practice from the study of that practice, and because the reliability of an entry on a sacred plant depends almost entirely on the quality of the ethnobotany behind it.

Facts

Disputed

Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

The discipline's published surveys of psychoactive plants have been read as a shopping list by readers with no interest in the communities they came from. That gap between recording a practice and extracting a compound is the standing criticism of the field. 3

Ethnobotany documents which plants a community uses, including for psychoactive and ceremonial purposes, and how; the standing criticism of the field is that such a survey can be read very differently from how it was intended, as a shopping list for the compound rather than a record of the practice and the community it belongs to. Jonathan Ott's Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and History (Natural Products Company, 1993), a detailed treatment of the chemistry, preparation and history of entheogenic plants by one of the coiners of the term entheogen, sits exactly on this line: heavily referenced and careful in its documentation, but written by an author who is also an advocate, and self-published rather than issued by an academic press. The method is source-critical, weighing the book's documentary thoroughness against its author's advocacy and its channel of publication. The atlas records the tension between documentation and appropriation as unresolved for the field generally, not as a flaw specific to one book.

Origins

Origin Period

Late nineteenth century as a named field, with its academic footing built through the twentieth. Its sources reach back much further, into the plant lists compiled by colonial administrations, missions and botanical surveys. 1

Place of Origin

The United States, where the field was named and first taught, though the records it was built on were gathered across the colonised world. 1

Position Profile

Key Text

Luna's Vegetalismo is a standard illustration of the method at its best: plant knowledge recorded from named practitioners in their own categories, rather than reduced to a list of species against uses. 2

Status

Status Today

Living tradition, practised today 1

Practice Status Detail

Living academic discipline, taught and published today, and increasingly bound by consent and benefit-sharing agreements with the communities whose knowledge it records. 1

Terminology

Term Coined

The word ethnobotany was coined in 1896 by the American botanist John William Harshberger, for the study of the plants used by a people. The activity long predates the name: colonial, missionary and botanical-survey records had been collecting the same material without a discipline to hold it. 1

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The Method, and What It Is Trying to Record

Ethnobotany studies the relationships between a people and the plants of their place. In practice that means long fieldwork with named practitioners, botanical vouchering so that the species behind a local name can be identified with certainty, and a written record that keeps the community's own categories rather than replacing them with a table of species and uses.

The vouchering is the part that separates the discipline from travel writing. A plant named in an interview is collected, pressed, deposited in a herbarium and given an accession number, so that a later researcher can check what was actually being discussed. Without it a report of a medicinal plant is a rumour with a Latin name attached, and the literature contains a great deal of that.

The harder half of the method is the part that cannot be vouchered. A tradition that calls a plant a teacher, gives it a diet and learns its song is not offering a folk theory of pharmacology that the researcher may translate into one. Luis Eduardo Luna's work with the mestizo vegetalistas of the Peruvian Amazon is the standard demonstration of how to record that faithfully: the plants keep their own status in the account, and the reader is told what the practitioners hold rather than what a laboratory would make of it.

Done that way the discipline produces something neither botany nor anthropology alone can: a record in which the identification is checkable and the meaning survives.

From Plant List to Consent

The field was named in 1896 by the American botanist John William Harshberger, but the material it was named over had been accumulating for centuries in colonial administrations, mission stations and botanical surveys. Those records were compiled to find out what a territory contained and what could be got out of it. The discipline inherited both the data and the posture, and its history since has largely been an argument with the posture.

The specific charge is extraction. A researcher records that a community uses a plant for a condition; a compound is isolated from that plant; the compound is patented; the community that supplied the lead receives nothing and is not consulted. This has happened often enough that it has a name, and the pattern does not require any individual to behave badly, only for the chain from field note to patent to run without anyone in the middle asking who the knowledge belonged to.

The response has been procedural and it is now largely binding rather than optional. Prior informed consent, agreements on how any benefit is shared, community ownership of the resulting record, and the right of a community to withhold material it considers restricted are standard conditions of fieldwork and of publication. Journals ask for evidence of them.

None of this settles the underlying question of whether a body of knowledge held collectively and orally can be owned in a form a patent office recognises. It does mean the discipline can no longer treat that question as somebody else's.

Connections