INTRODUCTION
Over the last decade or so ethnobotany has assumed a scientific prominence
previously denied it. It is endorsed by institutions with a high international
profile (Kew, the Royal Geographical Society, WWF, UNDP, UNESCO),
has a market value placed upon it by foresters, agronomists, development
advisors and pharmacologists, and has become pivotal in preserving
the cultural identity and knowledge of indigenous peoples whose traditional
way of life is under threat (Posey 1990). Ethnobotanical knowledge
has, therefore, become both economic commodity and political slogan.
This is particularly true with respect to the plant knowledge of rainforest
peoples, as these peoples are often those with the highest media profile.
However, in our eagerness to exploit a product and to demonstrate
its usefulness there has been a tendency to oversimplify what ethnobotany
entails and just how it can be useful. I argue in this paper that
we must not be narrow-minded or simplistic in our conception of ethnobotanical
knowledge, and that to take anything less than a broad culturally-contextualised
approach may miss the point of the relevance of indigenous knowledge
altogether.
In an historical review of the subject published a little over a
decade ago Richard Ford (Ford 1978: 29) says of ethnobotany that it
represents a common discourse but lacks a unifying theory. That this
is still the case is in part due to the historical differences between
what we might call biological ethnobotany and anthropological ethnobotany.1
The first operates within a bio-economic paradigm. At its narrowest
this has been simply the study of plants used by indigenous people
(whoever they might be). Data thus provided have often been no more
than species identifications against vernacular names, and lists of
uses. In its most recent version this approach has become heavily
identified with the discovery of new applied botanical and phytochemical
possibilities, and with the economic valuation of rainforest (Peters
et al 1989); and so becomes virtually synonymous with what is widely
understood as the remit of economic botany. Although the global significance
of such work should not be underestimated, bare lists are of limited
application (see e.g. Alcorn 1981a: 228).
The second kind of ethnobotany operates primarily within a cultural-linguistic
paradigm, is concerned with indigenous rules and categories and is
particularly evident in the work of Harold Conklin, Brent Berlin and
those who have been influenced by them in the US; and in the work
of those within a Francophone tradition closely associated with what
is now the Laboratoire d'Ethnobiologie-Biogéographie
in Paris, and which finds much of its intellectual legitimation in
the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Although there is some
overlap between the data and findings of the two kinds of ethnobotany,
it is the second which - especially when situated in systematic botanical
investigation - comes closest to what Ford (Ibid. 44)
believes best exemplifies what ethnobotanists should be doing: namely,
the direct investigation of the relations between plants
and humans, placing plants in their total cultural context.
I wish to explain here why it is vital to adopt a 'progressive contextualist'
(Vayda 1983) approach, beginning at the species level and working
outwards; an approach which locks specific local knowledge within
increasingly more general but denser culturally-relative paradigms,
and which links indigenous ecological know-how to general subsistence
and social behaviour. This is not - nor should it be - privileged
or esoteric anthropological methodology, but a strategy of practical
relevance to botanists, foresters and all those working in the development
field.
The main weakness of the first kind of ethnobotany, then, is one
of definition: that for many it has become simply that empirical knowledge
embodied in fixed folk traditions which can be of value to global
science. A pharmacologist looking at ethnobotany in this sense thus
sees potential drugs, a botanist scientifically-unrecorded species,
food scientists new foods, materials scientists new materials (for
example, milled coconut fibre as a substitute growing medium for peat),
and the Body Shop some new politically-correct cosmetic. Such an approach
tends to reduce ethnobotany to partial unconnected bits:
or to put it another way, knowledge is transformed into information.
In the process much of potential value is lost. Rather than generating
selected bits of information in a framework determined by the quite
specialised requirements of conventional biological science and taxonomy,
we should be focussing on connected systems of local knowledge, informed
by an understanding that such knowledge is intrinsically highly variable
between individuals and populations, fundamentally situational, and
dynamic. My remaining remarks - which put more flesh on these bare
assertions - fall under four headings: (a) species-focussed empirical
knowledge, (b) knowledge of the rainforest as an entity, (c) the interconnectedness
of social and mundane knowledge, and (d) domains of ethnobotanical
knowledge defined functionally. I shall conclude by returning to the
question of variability and change.
SPECIES-FOCUSSED EMPIRICAL KNOWLEDGE
By species-focussed knowledge I mean those data which
an investigator will primarily elicit with a single voucher specimen
as the unit of analysis, or multiple specimens of the same 'natural
kind'. This will include all names which informants give to a particular
specimen, the terminology used for its parts, knowledge of variation
in form, its reproductive cycle, seasonal and geographic distribution,
growing conditions; in fact, all information that a field botanist
would ordinarily seek concerning a particular species being investigated.
The secondary data, secondary only in some putative
logical order of elicitation, refer to cultural uses, and practices
with respect to the specimen type. These include how it is located,
collected, prepared for use, protected and cultivated, including of
course its recognised effects: material, nutritional, medicinal or
symbolic; and evaluations of the plant type and particular specimens
of the plant. As Hays has stressed (Hays 1974; Hays 1982), it is really
only when we examine our data in this way that we can see what constitutes
a 'use', and that one use is by no means functionally equivalent with
another. A third dataset at this level consists of associated ecological
knowledge. This includes knowledge of the identity and activity of
predators and diseases, the effects which the plant has on the habitat
in which it is found and on associated flora, and the effects they
have on the plant. Rich data in this area has emerged over the years
with respect to specific cultigens, for example the important work
of Paul Richards on folk understandings of Zonocerus
infestations of cassava in southern Nigeria (Richards 1979; Richards
1985). More recently, and of more concern to rainforest specialists,
Darrell Posey (Posey 1988) has shown how Amazonian Kayapó maintain
buffer zones between gardens and forest which contain plants with
nectar-producing glands on their foliage which have the effect of
drawing away aggressive ants and parasitic wasps from crops. Then
there are the effects of different patterns of rainfall, predation
and human extraction; the role of other organisms in the dispersal
of seeds, and the use made of the plant by other non-human organisms
as food. Nuaulu, for example, in the lowland rainforests of Seram
in eastern Indonesia, are well-informed on many species not because
they are directly of use to humans, but because they represent the
food of animals which they hunt, particularly cassowary, pig and deer.
In other words, plants have to be understood as part of the web of
forest life, not simply in isolation.
Although such knowledge as discussed here can be presented in terms
of a checklist for the species as a whole, it is important to realise
that most folk-botanical knowledge differs fundamentally from conventional
scientific knowledge in not being organised abstractly within some
convenient general-purpose classification, but rather with respect
to particular contexts, defined perhaps in terms of different subsistence
activities (hunting, planting trees, collecting, artefact manufacture,
burning swidden trash, or whatever). Moreover, how that knowledge
is apprehended by people will be determined by culturally relative
coordinates of sense perception which sometimes deviate sharply from
the expectations of scientifically-trained personnel; for example,
the significance of olfactory and textual stimuli compared with the
purely visual. Thus, much knowledge is inaccessible except via a research
strategy which allows a multi-focal approach; and if investigators
additionally wish to appreciate how local people make key subsistence
decisions, they must attend to the categories of knowledge locally
applicable (Ellen 1982). To do all this requires a general
understanding of the underlying principles of ethno-botanical knowledge
(e.g. Berlin et al 1974; Conklin 1954), but goes beyond the more formal
systematical aspect of folk classification, to what we might call
folk-autoecology (rather, that is, than folk-synecology). But then,
that ethnobotany and the study of indigenous knowledge of particular
plants needs to be ecological has been recognised for over half a
century (Carter 1950; Jones 1941), even if the implications have seldom
been followed through, or its relevance fully understood.
Species-focussed knowledge is, additionally, variable between individuals,
and so may not be fully documented until a number of people have been
queried regarding the same species, or indeed the same individual
has been interviewed on the same subject on a variety of occasions.
Moreover, since such knowledge is situational, the optimal conditions
for finding out are with respect to growing specimens, at different
stages in the life-cycle, in contexts where there is a pre-determined
subsistence goal, such as cutting bush for swiddens or collecting
fungi for food. And just as knowledge is not fixed in its contemporary
distribution, so it also changes through time: the result of generations
of trial-and-error testing, extensive experimental evidence, enormous
individual specialist and collective experience; new plants moving
in and out. This does not mean that mistakes are never made, but simply
that daily routine pragmatic considerations act as a major incentive
for identifying effectiveness. As in science as a whole, there may
be bad folk science; but there is also a wealth of good science (Richards
1993). It is this which pharmaceutical firms are now taking advantage
of, but they and us also need to appreciate how that
experience has been gained.
KNOWLEDGE OF THE RAINFOREST AS AN ENTITY
Ethnobotanical studies of rainforest peoples have uniformly demonstrated
an impressive breadth of knowledge of plant species, in addition to
a depth of knowledge of particular significant species.
A recent attempt to collate data on the total inventories of plant
categories for different subsistence populations (Brown 1985: 44)
shows strikingly how rainforest populations have repeatedly been found
to yield much longer lists than populations living in other environments,
lists which may consist of between 800 and 2000 items at the upper
end. Clearly, to some extent this reflects the subsistence necessity
of those who extract from such environments, and also the strong tendency
for non-significant and non-useful species to go unnamed or to be
lumped within larger generic categories. Though it is still debated
whether or not human populations could ever have entirely survived
on rainforest plant matter, other than when they can rely on palm
starch (Headland 1987), breadth of knowledge is undoubtedly a key
part of any adaptive strategy.
In addition to this, it has become clear that systematic encyclopaedic
knowledge is situated within folk-models which reflect an ability
to connect observations at the species level with informed perceptions
about forest structure and dynamics. What constitutes 'forest' is,
of course, something we might expect to vary cross-culturally, but
even if we restrict ourselves to focal shared meanings it is clearly
a complex categorical construction. Thus, the Nuaulu generic term
wesie (Ellen 1993) is anything but uniform or empty in
the way they perceive, understand and respond to it. It is more like
a mosaic of resources, and a dense network of particular places each
having different material values. In this sense it is much like the
modern scientific modelling of rainforest as a continuous aggregation
of different biotopes and patches, varying according to stages in
growth cycles, degree of regeneration, underlying geology, altitude,
geography and natural contingency. In such a view, simple distinctions
between 'secondary' and 'primary' begin to look pretty academic. Seventy-eight
percent of the 272 forest trees identifiable by Nuaulu have particular
human uses, and it is through their uses that they are apprehended
(Ellen 1985), wherever they are found. The picture is similar elsewhere.
Carneiro (Carneiro 1988: 79) reports that, on average, Panare, Tembe,
Urobu and Chacobo peoples of the Amazon basin use at least two-thirds
of the tree species growing in the forests (see also Carneiro 1978).
Such peoples, like the Indonesian Nuaulu, being forest-fallow swidden
cultivators, also have sensitive understandings of how forest changes
as a consequence of different soils, selective extraction, cutting
and burning; and of the regrowth stages following abandonment. It
is this knowledge which permits such strategies - despite persistent
rumours - to be self-sustaining (Dove 1983a; Dove 1983b), and which
underlies its deliberate application in a way which assists the recovery
of degraded areas (Shanley 1991). The classic description of this
knowledge is still that by Conklin (Conklin 1957) for the Hanunóo
of Southeastern Mindoro.
THE INTERCONNECTEDNESS OF SOCIAL AND TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE
Empirical knowledge of plants, as I have referred to so far, does
not exist apart from a broader socially-informed understanding of
the world, in some kind if hermetically sealed vacuum from which other
aspects of culture are excluded. Detailed knowledge of plant reproduction
or symbiosis may, for example, comfortably co-exist with beliefs about
the world which have not been empirically tested in a conventional
scientific sense. Everything is seen as connected through chains of
mutual causation to give rise to a complex notion of nature. Indeed,
it is often plausibly argued that rainforest peoples have cosmologies
which in certain respects anticipated the systems view of the world
which underlies modern ecology; as argued, for example, by Reichel-Dolmatoff
(1976) for the Tukano of the northwest Amazon. Such a view is also
reconstructable for the Nuaulu, and we can infer their conceptualisation
of forest and attitudes towards it from systematic ethnobiological
data, from human subsistence practices with respect to it, from the
rules of land tenure, from general statements about forest, from rules
relating to the extraction of resources and sanctions consequent upon
their infringement, indirectly from myths, stories, taboos, and so
on. From these we can distill four general characteristics which,
taken together, summarise the most important aspects of Nuaulu conceptual
engagement with 'forest'. The first characteristic has already been
discussed, namely that forest is never experienced as homogeneous.
The remaining three are that forest is a complex categorical construction,
that there is an inner connection between history, identity and forest,
and that forest is not morally neutral.
Although uncut forest is recognised by the Nuaulu as a single entity
(wesie ), it contrasts in different ways with other land
types depending on context. It may contrast with wasi
(owned land, which may sometimes display very mature forest growth),
emphasising a jural distinction; with nisi (garden land),
emphasising human physical interference; or with niane
(village), emphasising landforms: empty as opposed to well-timbered
space, inhabited (dwelt) as opposed to uninhabited space, untamed
as opposed to tamed space, all with various symbolic associations
and practical consequences for Nuaulu consumers. Although there are
no Nuaulu words for either 'nature' or 'culture', it is in the various
and aggregated senses of wesie that the Nuaulu come
closest to having such a term, and from which the existence of an
abstract covert notion of 'nature' can reasonably be inferred.
The values which Nuaulu attach to forest are thus multi-faceted and
differential, simultaneously materially useful and culturally meaningful.
And in the same way that the material uses to which forest is put
must be understood in specific and local terms, so too the social
implications. While the Western conception of environment is something
which is 'opposed' to people, or some kind of medium in which we dwell ,
and which is therefore bounded; the Nuaulu conception of environment
is not as a space in which they hang, but much more like a series
of fixed points to which particular clans and individuals are connected.
These points are objects in an unbounded landscape linked to their
appearance in myths; use of land is at every turn inseparable from
specific sacred knowledge, sometimes mutually contradictory and obscure,
though never absent.
The undeniable effect of merging practical usefulness, mythic knowledge
and identity in the construction of the category wesie
is to give it a moral dimension. That is, there are right and wrong
ways in which to engage with forest which arise in part from the specific
social histories of parts of it, but also from its intrinsic mystical
properties. Forest is unpredictable, dangerous and untamed, and various
attempts are made to control it. This is reflected in the inferential
symbolic opposition between 'nature' and 'culture' evident in most
ritual, in the specific rituals conducted prior to cultivating forest,
in the charms which are used to protect travellers in the forest,
in the prohibitions on certain behaviours and utterances while in
the forest, in the correct ritual disposal of its products.
The practical implications of the interconnections between the social
and the environmental can be very important, and it is often the case
that subsistence practices triggered by cultural beliefs (for example,
linked to prohibitions) appear to regulate resources. It is in the
context of all this that we must understand Nuaulu ritual restrictions
(sasi ) on harvesting certain forest products at particular
times. Certainly, the effect of all of these things
may well be to conserve resources and maintain biodiversity, and in
particular cases people may consciously do so. But we should not confuse
effect with purpose. Much of what appears to be 'ecological balance'
amongst rainforest peoples is either illusory or simply a beneficial
function of low population densities and benign subsistence practices.
However, when governments and other agencies interfere and seek to
introduce 'rational' measures to conserve resources, ignorant of local
cultural representations of the forest, their purposes may be meaningless
to local peoples, as Richards (Richards 1992) has shown for Mende
living on the edges of the Gola in Sierra Leone. Similarly, governments
acting with the best of intentions may interfere with cultural regulators
(purposeful or inadvertent) which are often more sensitive, and in
the long term, more effective (e.g. Morauta et al 1982).
FUNCTIONALLY-DEFINED DOMAINS OF ETHNOBOTANICAL KNOWLEDGE
All human knowledge is represented and articulated not only through
the systematic lens of general-purpose classifications, such as those
offered by science, but also through the domains constructed around
specialised applied knowledge. I have already noted how specifically
'botanical' knowledge is embedded in the particular contexts in which
plants are encountered, but knowledge can also be presented in terms
of functionally-defined abstractions, such as in the context of medical
or veterinary knowledge, specific craft specialisations (such as house
building), and so on. Indeed, many peoples who might otherwise deny
formal knowledge of ethnobotany, may in fact have a considerable practical
working knowledge known to them under other headings (see e.g. Brown
1992; Telban 1988). Thus, the unit of analysis (in this case most
usually the voucher specimen) can always be organised into arrays
which demonstrate significant discontinuities other than those found
in classifications based predominantly on morphology.
VARIATION AND CHANGE
Ethnobotanical knowledge and practice must, therefore, be understood
contextually, but it must also be recognised as being intrinsically
variable and subject to change. One of the problems with the kind
of narrowly-conceived ethnobotany which I have been criticising is
that it conceals much of this. We need to take into account intra-cultural
variation, often hidden in over-generalised accounts which imply that
one respondent is as good as any other with respect to a particular
subject. We now have convincing demonstrations that knowledge may
vary qualitatively and quantitatively according to crucial social
variables, such as gender, and even within groups defined in terms
of a single key social indicator (e.g. Hays 1974). We also need to
take into account variation between different rainforest populations,
reflecting for example different modes of subsistence (Brown 1985),
though it may be artificial to separate out populations on the basis
of their apparent degree of interaction with forest, degree of acculturation
or integration into the market. I take a broad view of what constitutes
a rainforest population, including all those (such as peasants) interacting
with the rainforest (Denslow and Padoch (eds.) 1988). Knowledge may
pass between superficially different groups which are in contact or
who extract from similar biotopes. We must be wary of inventing a
category of 'traditional' peoples whose knowledge is regarded as somehow
pristine and superior, however much the temptation.
Narrow conceptions of the ethnobotanical enterprise also sustain
a non-dynamic view of particular human populations. In the popular
imagination, peoples of the tropical rainforest have hitherto been
remote, isolated, living in more or less the same place, unchanging,
living 'in harmony' with their surroundings. In fact, we now have
plenty of evidence to the contrary. Ironically perhaps, it is ethnobotany
which has provided much of this, in terms of the movement of plant
species between isolated points on all sides of the globe. The migration
of the main plant domesticates is well-documented, though we know
less of the impact this has had on the forests themselves. Certainly,
human settlement has introduced many varieties of cultivated trees
into the lowland forest of Seram in the Nuaulu area, both deliberately
and inadvertently. For example, Tectona grandis and
Toona sureni are now established, though they were probably
introduced during the seventeenth century; and the ornamental Delonix
regia cannot have been planted before the nineteenth (Ellen
1985: 563). And the picture is no different as far as foraging populations
are concerned (e.g. Fox 1952), where a nomadic lifestyle has served
well to distribute certain humanly-valued trees widely. An excellent
example of this is the role of the Mbuti of the Ituri forest of Zaire
(Ichikawa 1992) in the propagation of genera such as Canarium
and Landolphia . Many rainforest peoples selectively
fell trees, protect valued species, replant the tops of wild Dioscorea
tubers, transplant palm suckers, on a sufficiently systematic basis
for us to speak of 'rainforest management'. Alcorn (Alcorn 1981b:
410) reports for the Huastec of Mexico's Sierra Madre that 63 percent
of 800 wild species documented had uses and 25 percent were actively
manipulated. The selective extraction of wild species, strategic burning,
and swiddening at optimal conditions may combine to give rise to distinctive
patches and new opportunities for colonisation; and there are numerous
examples - such as those provided by the Kayapó (Posey 1988:
89) - of the deliberate preservation of corridors of mature forest
between plots as some kind of biological reserve. The cumulative effect
of this in some areas must be considerable, and persistent human interventions
may be presumed to have co-evolutionary consequences. Such disturbances
not only improve the rainforest as a human resource base but contribute
in significant ways to its structural patchiness and biodiversity.
They also signal, along with the gratuitous destruction of vegetation
for short-term gain, such as the felling of entire trees to catch
a single arboreal mammal (Ellen 1986; Rambo 1985), that the practical
impact (if not the cosmological representation) of even the demographically
smallest human group need not always be benign. Many tropical forest
peoples have complex histories of movement, no better illustrated
than from the intricate ethnic mosaic of northern Borneo (see e.g.
Freeman 1970). Trade and exchange has existed for centuries between
upriver peoples, including remote foraging populations, linking them
to peoples of the forest fringes, the estuaries, and ultimately the
global economy (Dunn 1975; Hoffman 1984).
We now have a considerable body of ethnobotanical knowledge and a
growing volume of literature pertaining to rainforest peoples (Conklin
1972); for southeast Asia alone there is a critical mass (Barrau (n.d.)).
But the data are of variable quality, ranging from the fragmentary
notes of field botanists, the systematic inventories of an active
generation of colonial officials (e.g. Burkill 1935), and detailed
long-term studies within an anthropological context (e.g. Friedberg
1990; Revel 1990; see also bibliography in Brown 1985). The priority
now, as I see it, is to organise such information into accessible
databases and recognise the differential quality of our data (some
of which is shoddy, much of which is inadequate). But perhaps even
more importantly we need to shift our focus from abstracted empirical
data on particular plants to contextual accounts. Indigenous peoples
have perceived, interacted with and made use of tropical rainforest
in historically diverse ways, and it is clearly important for those
making recommendations in the fields of conservation and sustainable
forest management to take this into account.
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Updated Mittwoch, 8. Mai 1996