Editorial

Liwayway, Ambala Aeta ethnobotanist, at the Pamulaklakin Stream Resort, Philippines.

Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet who wrote many popular love poems, never strayed far from nature in his verse. His poems are sensual, and not just because they speak of human emotions.They are flush with images of the natural world that evoke our five senses. Take the following excerpt from Some Beasts, part of his book Canto General, which was published in 1950: The jaguar touches the leaves with his phosphorescent absence,the puma runs on the foliage like all-consuming flame and in him burn the alcoholic eyes of the jungle.The badgers scratch the river’s feet, scenting out the nest whose throbbing delight they’ll assail red-toothed.

Neruda grew up in Temuco, a frontier town of southern Chile, where his father was laying railroad tracks that reached deep into the wilderness. It was in these forests, homeland of the Araucanian Indians, that Neruda developed his talent for portraying the natural world. His childhood, as Jean Franco¹ has noted, was ‘nourished by a landscape in which he seemed the only discoverer, the namer of plants and insects, living, as he later described it, in a perpetual state of wonder’. Neruda’s observations on nature hold a valuable lesson for those of us interested in the complex relationships between people, plants and culture. His poems evoke sight, sound, smell, touch and taste - all five senses that people use when identifying and describing the plants they know. It is this holistic view of nature that we should seek to capture in our research.Today, many fine ethnobotanical monographs rely heavily on visual characteristics and measurements. What if I choose randomly a recent book on useful plants from my office shelf, and read aloud a botanical description? I will not mention the reference, as it is a description that anyone, including myself, could have written without reflection: ‘Large herb with thick roots, growing to 4 m or more in height; stem fleshy and composed of inrolled leaf sheaths; leaves arranged in a spiral to 1 – 2 m long; inflorescence a compound spike with unisexual flowers; fruit a fleshy, elongate berry, usually without seeds and deep yellow when ripe.’ Does that bring to mind the sweet taste, silk-smooth leaves and drifting aroma of a tropical banana, its torn leaves rustling in the wind? Often, we have little indication that scientists have touched, tasted, smelled or listened to plants.

Contrast this description with a portrayal of another plant, jasmine, by the Iranian writer Farzaneh Milani²: ‘There is something about jasmine that captures with special intensity the incandescence and luminosity, the simplicity and innocence of childhood. Is it its starlike whiteness? Is it the trembling delicacy of its blossom hovering over its stem and leaves almost like a dream? Is it its ephemeral beauty, its long-lasting sweet fragrance, its generous yielding of flowers every single day of summer? Whatever it is, there’s something about the jasmine that takes me to places where I have to leave words behind, to the places where I have left my childhood, places that continue to invade my dreams – in the setting of my earliest memories. In my past. There, there is jasmine; plenty of it; in abundance; in profusion. I grew up with it. The hot summer sun. Dust in the air. And suddenly, the jasmine. Like fresh snow; like a mind untainted by questions. Like certainty.’

Natural historians were not always distant from emotion. In earlier centuries, they paid attention to myriad sensual details in their quest to understand the harmony and complexity of nature. Alexander von Humboldt, the German scientific explorer who traveled extensively in the American tropics at the turn of the 18th century, exemplifies this approach. ‘His understanding of environmental unity underlying biological diversity was the first glimmer of the science of ecology, an integrative science that seeks to understand the parts of nature in relation to the whole’, notes Jonathan Maslow, who has written biographical sketches of many naturalists.

Leaves of henna (Lawsonia inermis, Lythraceae), a dye and medicinal plant, purchased in the ‘souk’ or traditional marketplace of Marrakech, Morocco

Another case in point is Georg Everard Rumpf, best known as Rumphius. Born in Germany in 1628, he came to work as a soldier and administrator for the Dutch East-Indies Company. From the mid-1600s until his death on the Indonesian island of Ambon in 1702, he studied plants and animals in the Asian tropics. The ability of Rumphius to portray plants in fine detail is evident in his description of the durian tree, source of a prized fruit of Southeast Asia. Other than being immersed in the general culture of observation of his time, Rumphius had a compelling reason to use his five senses. He suffered from glaucoma and began to lose his sight when he was in his early forties. For more than thirty years, he relied on touch, taste, smell and even hearing – in addition to “borrowed eyes and pen”, as he wrote in a poem in his Ambonese Herbal – to describe

Rumphius’ acute observations provided him with insights into Ambonese perceptions and uses of plants. He discovered that the dukuns or local healers used the yellow Curcuma rhizomes for jaundice. The leaves of a plant called daun kesembukan in Indonesian, which give off a strong fecal smell when its leaves are crushed, were used for dysentery. He noted that restless children would sleep if the sensitive plant (Mimosa pudica L.) was placed under their pillow; a use related to the observation that its leaves curl up and look as if they are sleeping after being touched. He spoke openly of herbs to increase sexual pleasure, counteract venereal diseases and to guarantee birth control. As Beekman observes, ‘perhaps Rumphius’ work was the last major document which dealt with these matters, for it seems sometimes that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries eroticism had been banished from the tropics, a region otherwise notorious in the popular imagination for its exotic sensuality’.

In this issue of the People and Plants Handbook, dedicated to methods and tools for assessing biological resources and local knowledge, we return often to the theme of using all the senses common to humanity. In the Viewpoints and Issues section, you will find an excerpt of Rumphius’ description of the durian and Manslow’s biographical sketch of Humboldt, along with reflections from Diane Ackerman and David Abram on senses and sensibility in natural history. Interviews with Ghillean Prance and Jan Salick explore the role of ecology in ethnobotanical research. Gary Nabhan and his colleague Janice Rosenberg offer Advice from the Field, discussing ways of ‘passing on a sense of place and traditional ecological knowledge between generations’. Interspersed in the text, you will discover some of nature’s most evocative plants, including dates, henna and jasmine. To get in the spirit, continue with Speaking of Jargon, which explores how the Mixe people of Oaxaca, Mexico have codified the five senses in common plant names. /GJM

1. Franco, J. 1975. Introduction. Pablo Neruda, Selected Poems. London, Penguin.
2. Milani, F. 1992. Veils and Words. Syracuse, Syracuse University Press. Full annotated citations of Beekman (1993) and Maslow (1996) are found in the Viewpoints and Issues section, beginning on page 20.

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Speaking of jargon

The five senses are reflected not only in the ways that local people identify plants, but also in how they name them. Take the following examples from the Mixe people of the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, Mexico, where I carried out my doctoral research and where my colleague Søren Wichmann studied the relationship between Mixe-Zoque languages. /GJM

Sight

kaaj taatsk. The Mixe believe that the large shiny leaves of various Clusia species (Clusiaceae) resemble cattle ears, hence the figurative name: kaaj = ‘cattle and other animals’ and taatsk = ‘ear’.

nu’upun kup. The red thick sap of Croton draco Schldl. (Euphorbiaceae) reminds people in many cultures of blood. The Mixe call it ‘blood tree’, and similar names are found in other indigenous languages.

Smell

poo’p xuu’k. Angel’s trumpets, Brugmansia x candida Pers. (Solanaceae), perfume gardens throughout the world. But the Mixe have come up with the most magical name, which translates as ‘white aroma’.

poom kup. The ‘incense tree’ of the Mixe comprises various species of Bursera and perhaps Protium (Burseraceae) that yield copal resin, which is burned for ritual and medicinal purposes. The etymology of this tree name can be traced to the proto-Mixe-Zoquean term *po:m(o), giving partial evidence that copal incense has played a role in Mesoamerican culture for thousands of years. A proto-language is an assumed or recorded ancestral language that can be reconstructed by comparing words and grammars of current-day, related languages. Reconstructed terms from these languages are always preceded by an asterisk to indicate that they are long-forgotten forms that are not currently in use.

Touch

oo’tsun aa’ts. Psitticanthus calyculatus (DC.) G.Don (Loranthaceae), a beautiful mistletoe with reddish-orange flowers, has sticky seeds that attach themselves to tree trunks. The Mixes have named it ‘sticky vine’; the term ‘to stick’ has been reconstructed in proto-Mixe-Zoque, whereas the term ‘vine’ can be traced back to proto-Mixe.

taaxt ke’ev and tajkts ke’ev. A pair of stinging species, Cnidoscolus urens (L.) Arthur (and related plants in the Euphorbiaceae) and Urtica dioica L. (and its relatives in the Urticaceae), are called ‘hail sting’ and ‘mouse sting’ by the Mixe. The proto-Mixe-Zoque term *ke:w? is proof that these plants have left a lasting impression on local people.

Sound

tsaa’n xi’tsun. Literally, ‘snake rattle’, a name used by the Mixe for Crotalaria bupleurifolia Schldl. & Cham. (Fabaceae) and related species. The Crotalaria seed pods turn brown and dry when mature, and the seeds come loose, producing a sound reminiscent of rattlesnakes.

Taste

pa’ajk tsaats. Can you guess what a ‘sweet agave’ is? For some Mixe speakers, it is the local name for pineapple (Ananas comosus L., Bromeliaceae), a fleshy sweet fruit that almost everyone knows. Of South American origin, the pineapple was introduced to Mesoamerica centuries ago, probably before the arrival of Europeans. Linguistically, the Mixe consider the pineapple a part of the native Agave generic tsaats, apparently because of the similar habit of these distantly related plants. The general tendency to expand existing plant generics to include newly introduced plants is referred to as lexical extension.

Martin, G.J. 1996. Comparative Ethnobotany of the Chinantec and Mixe of the Sierra Norte, Oaxaca, Mexico. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Ann Arbor, University Microfilms.

Wichmann, S. 1995. The Relationship among the Mixe-Zoquean Languages of Mexico. Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press.

 

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Handbook description

The People and Plants Handbook brings together information on local knowledge and management of biological resources, conservation and community development. The Handbook is designed especially for people who work in the field: park managers, foresters, cultural promoters, and members of non-governmental, governmental or indigenous organizations. The first three issues are available in English on People and Plants Online, http://www.kew.org.uk/peopleplants. In addition, they have been translated and published in Spanish.

Please send us suggestions of new subjects that could appear in future issues. We would appreciate receiving any pamphlets, posters, popular articles, drawings or other materials that illustrate the objectives and results of programs and projects in which you are involved.

If you wish to reference this issue of the Handbook, we suggest the following citation: Martin, G.J. , A.L. Hoare and A.L. Agama, editors. 1998. Issue 4. Measuring Diversity: Methods of Assessing Biological Resources and Local Knowledge. In: G.J. Martin, general editor, People and Plants Handbook: Sources for Applying Ethnobotany to Conservation and Community Development. Paris, UNESCO.

When writing to the individuals cited in this issue, please tell them you ‘saw it in the People and Plants Handbook’. Letting them know where you found information about their organization, publication or project will help us strengthen our networking efforts.

Gary J. Martin, General Editor, PPH
B.P. 262
40008 Marrakech-Medina
Morocco
Fax +212.4.329544
E-mail gj_martin@compuserve.com
or peopleandplants@cybernet.net.ma

Agnes Lee Agama, Associate Editor, PPH
P. O. Box 14393
88850, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia
Fax +60.88.242531
E-mail molydes@pc.jaring.my

Jasmine, written here in Persian script, is the common name for many fragrant plants. Among the most familiar is the white-flowered Jasmimum grandiflorum (Oleaceae), which is widely cultivated as an ornamental, and for its fragrant essential oil. From: Chevallier, A. 1996. The Encyclopedia of Medicinal Plants. London, Dorling Kindersley. Contact: Dorling Kindersley Limited, 9 Henrietta Street, London WC2E 8PS, UK. Website http://www.dk.com

Leaves of papers: letters to the editors

Editorials are meant to evoke responses. Adapting the approach of Current Anthropology (see this Issue’s Multimedia Center), I sent my editorial on the ‘common senses of ethnobotany’ to several colleagues and asked for their comments. The harvest was impressive, ensuring that inviting letters to the editors of PPH will become standard practice. In addition to letters on this Issue’s theme, we have printed some feedback on Issue 3, which addressed the challenge of returning results of ethnobotanical studies. /GJM

16 April 1998

In his editorial Gary Martin calls for botanists to better express the extraordinary aesthetics of plants, using all of our senses. I applaud his sentiments, but I don’t think Gary wants us to start writing poetry instead of data on herbarium labels. Indeed, there is something beautiful about a crisp technical diagnosis. Note the precision of Den Hartog’s description of the seagrass genus Thalassodendron: ‘Dioecious, rhizome robust, up to 1/2 cm thick, ligneous, creeping, sympodial, with 2 erect, unbranched or little branched stems at every fourth internode.’ (Hartog, D. 1970. The Seagrasses of the World. Amsterdam, North-Holland Publishing Company.)

Den Hartog’s diagnosis continues on for another 13 sentences, but in that first sentence he has distinguished Thalassodendron from every other organism on this planet: not bad for a single sentence. But you can’t really understand the beauty of Den Hartog’s diagnosis until you are there along the Kenyan coast with your snorkel, diving down to the mud in the warm water off the coast. Holding your breath, you see this little seagrass growing on the bottom and discover that, just like clockwork, it counts node #1, node #2, node #3, node #4, and then turns its horizontal axis straight up in a sympodial fashion towards the water surface. And when you pull up a piece (it’s tough – note the ‘ligneous’ rhizome) and take it back to the surface to examine it, you see that the continuation of the horizontal axis proceeds from an axillary bud at every fourth node. At that point you pull off your mask, ignore the herons in the mangroves near the shore and the monkeys chattering in the trees behind, and ponder this incredible mystery – how does a plant count to four? How does it know that at every fourth node, the meristem has to turn straight upward to leaf out and flower? Does it produce a ‘ligneous, creeping rhizome’ so it isn’t uprooted from the tremendous shear forces produced on a line of vertical shoots arising at every fourth node? Like the finest haiku, in a few words Den Hartog’s description forces us to confront some essential riddles of life.

So yes, let’s use all of our senses in description, let’s not eschew the fruits of what Barry Tomlinson calls ‘a good eye’ – precision in observation and precision in description. Let’s use Gary Martin’s exhortation as a call to use precise language to capture, in words, the beauty of the marvelous plants that grace our planet.

Paul Alan Cox, National Tropical Botanical Garden,
Box 340, Lawai, Hawai’i 96756, USA;
Tel. +1.808.3327324, Fax +1.808.3329765
E-mail paul.cox@cbm.slu.se

1 May 1998

Perhaps many of us are doomed to repeat the errors of the past, but as ethnobotanists, we have the golden opportunity to learn from thousands of years of experimentation and intimacy with the environment. Brad Bennett, of Florida International University, is fond of saying: ‘Ethnobotanical field research requires only two skills: courtesy and common sense.’ I am convinced that he is correct. Both courtesy and common sense seem to be obvious skills but, from my observations, few western scientists seem to have mastered either one when conducting studies in other cultures. Courtesy is the key to working with people in diverse situations outside of one’s own cultural background. The key element of courtesy is respecting others and searching for ways to fit in. The main stumbling blocks to courtesy are often our own cultural ‘values’ and other ‘intellectual baggage’ that we carry into the field. This is not to say that ethnobotanists should pursue anarchy, but that we should avoid inadvertently imposing our beliefs on other people. When studying folk taxonomic systems it is important to courteously record culturally significant distinguishing features. Frequently, traditionally recognized plant characteristics are the keys to scientific determinations of taxonomic circumscription.

Common sense is more difficult, because it often requires a deeper understanding of each research situation. A different type of cultural baggage can get in the way here: e.g., scientific explanations are better than traditional explanations. For instance, Susan Grose, a graduate student at the University of Hawai’i, recently reviewed the taxonomic history of the Hawaiian Myrtaceae. She determined that Hawaiians had traditionally recognized 3 genera and 7-8 species. Scientists working with the same flora had over the last 200 years named 3 genera and no less than 30 species. However, current scientific reviews of this family conclude that there are 3 genera and 7-9 species, matching up one to one with the traditional taxonomy first recorded over 200 years ago. Had scientists applied common sense and simply accepted the Hawaiian taxonomy as a first estimate of species diversity, much time and energy could have been saved.

The bottom line is to attempt to see the world through others’ eyes (courtesy) and believe in the interpretations of traditional people (common sense).

Will McClatchey, Department of Botany, University of
Hawai’i, Manoa Honolulu, Hawai’i 96822, USA;
Tel. +1.808.9566704, Fax +1.808.9563923,
E-mail mcclatch@hawaii.edu
Website http://www.botany.hawaii.edu/faculty/mcclatchey/

2 May 1998

My research deals with the perception and use of rainforest trees by the Bari people of the Sierra de Perija in Venezuela. The basic and most common criteria they use to identify trees are the shape of the trunk and type of bark. Two knowledgeable Bari colleagues identified 80-95% of the trees with these criteria. People with poor sight used the taste and smell of inner bark. If the tree was hard to identify or the Bari individuals were not knowledgeable, they used the leaves, patterns of branches and, if available, fruits, flowers or even dry seeds on the forest floor. As Brent Berlin pointed out in his book Ethnobiological Classification, the salience and frequency of an organism play a significant role in recognizing and using trees. This was clearly the case among the Bari. Trees of folk-generic taxa that were represented by only one individual in the sample were much less likely to be recognized and identified than abundant generic taxa.

To identify trees, I collected 398 fertile botanical vouchers and plotted 4.83 hectares of forest that included 3,162 trees from 212 generic taxa. I interviewed 20 Bari colleagues, 7 women and 13 men, on the identities of a sub-set of trees, recording 16,459 names, along with their uses, distribution and ecological importance (e.g., as food for animals). We need to conduct this type of research before the Western world decimates native knowledge. In the Bari population, the loss of knowledge is 40-60% within two generations.

Manuel Lizarralde
Connecticut College, Mail Box 5407
270 Mohegan Avenue, New London
Connecticut 06320-4196, USA;
Tel. +1.860.4392138, Fax +1.860.4392519
E-mail mliz@conncoll.edu

May 1998

The Forest of Kwara’ae is a project to document the knowledge of the Kwara’ae people of Malaita Island (Solomon Islands) about the forest resources that have formed the basis of their livelihood for generations past, and should ensure it for the future. It is a collaborative effort involving myself, an anthropologist from the British Museum, Michael Kwa’ioloa, Secretary to the Kwara’ae Chiefs, and an informal local team of research associates and community leaders. Its objective is to publish a book in both English and Kwara’ae languages for the use of local readers as well as others concerned with local culture and forest management in the Pacific Islands.

The first part of the book will introduce the Kwara’ae forest environment and its uses. The second part will list about 400 named plants, grouped where possible according to Kwara’ae classification of trees, things which grow in clusters, vines and other smaller categories.

The book is written to present a Kwara’ae perspective of their own culture and environment, unlike most anthropological and ethnobotanical studies of Pacific Islands culture, which take their starting point in Western cultural categories. The Kwara’ae version of the text was contributed by a large number of local research associates, edited and then translated into English. The questions raised by this approach are discussed in an academic introduction in English, which deals with Kwara’ae plant classification and the issues around reducing an oral tradition to writing. Kwara’ae support for the project derives from their concern that the knowledge it records is being lost under circumstances of rapid social and cultural change.

Ben Burt, British Museum Ethnography Departement
(Museum of Mankind), Burlington Gardens,
London W1X 2EX, UK;
Tel. +44.171.3238065,
Fax +44.171.3238013,
E-mail bburt@british-museum.ac.uk

5 May 1998

I have completed a yearlong stay in Papua New Guinea in which I worked with a community to record their traditional plant knowledge. The community, Salemben village, is located in the Adelbert Mountains of Madang Province, 70 km west of the town of Madang.

One of the products of this work is a book written in English – and published with the support of The New Zealand High Commission of Papua New Guinea – that includes local and scientific names of plants and describes how the plants are used. Its primary purpose is to conserve this knowledge for the benefit of the young people of Salemben and for future generations.

In addition to keeping copies in the village, we are giving copies of the book to a number of institutions in Madang that can store the book while keeping it accessible to the people of Salemben. I am sending copies of our book to libraries and institutions throughout Papua New Guinea and to international organizations that are involved in the conservation of traditional plant knowledge. I hope that your organization can make this book available to other people who want to learn about how people use plants in Papua New Guinea, conserve traditional plant knowledge in other areas, or apply this knowledge in a manner that will benefit the people of Papua New Guinea.

You may contact my co-authors by writing to Moyang Okira, MV and CB, PO Box 1071, Madang, Papua New Guinea.

Tim Platts-Mills, 480 Ivy Farm Drive, Charlottesville,
Virginia 22901 USA;
Tel. +1.804.9719894,
E-mail tap2z@virginia.edu

 

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