The Path of Ethnopharmacobotany From Economic Botany to Ethnobotany

WAGNER, MARCELO L.; ANCONATANI, LEONARDO M.; RICCO, RAFAEL A.; VARELA, BEATRIZ G.; GIBERTI, GUSTAVO C.

Ethnobotany Local Knowledge and Traditions

CRC Press Taylor & Francis Group

Lugar: Londres & New York; Año: 2019; p. 34 - 48

A transformation of knowledge is happening in the scientific field. There is a fresh look where western science is not the only theoretical-practical model of assuming reality. Other ways of knowing and perceiving nature are being raised. We started studying how knowledge is passed on and has been passed on from generation to generation, millenium to millenium, town to town, person to person. Therefore, other kind of realities and other truths come together, prevail, are kept, are reproduced and give rise to new knowledge, new perceptions, and cosmovisions about the world, life, and nature.This knowledge or ?folk wisdoms? or ?traditional knowledge? are the subject of study of almost all scientific disciplines. Natural science is the most developed area; fields like Ethnography, Ethnology, Antrophology, and Sociology have been focusing on the study of the peoples and their associated knowledge. It is thus that the prefix ethnos makes reference to human aspects and specific knowledge of the peoples and ethnic groups, i.e., to the knowledge of groups of individuals of the same culture (Arenas and Martínez 2013).Nevertheless, we must bear in mind that human groups neither parcel nor sectorize their knowledge, but have a general worldview, i.e., they do not have a unidirectional view ?the whole makes the part of the whole?. Therefore, they have a holistic view of the world, they join past and future, lifeless with life, material with spiritual, they link norms, values, nature, traditions, health, sickness, and many other concepts with magic, legends, and myths that are an indissoluble part of their knowledge and their daily practices (Arenas and Martínez 2013, Rengifo-Salgado et al. 2017).Let?s consider as premise that ?traditional knowledge? is the practical knowledge of ethnic groups or local communities which is based upon accumulated and selected experience throughout thousands of years to obtain the best results in the utilization of natural resources and their survival (Arenas and Martínez 2013).As mentioned above, this knowledge must be grasped not only in a utilitarian view, for example, when Botany investigates these sources of knowledge it gives shape and sense to many of these concepts in Economic Botany, Medicine, Agriculture, and Ecology, but we should take into account the worldview of the community, who provided that knowledge. Thus, new fields of research are created, such as Ethnobotany, Ethnomedicine, Agroecology, and Ethnoecology (Reyes García and Martí Sanz 2007, Nolan and Turner 2011, Johnson and Davison-Hunt 2011).At an early stage, information about medicinal flora, its usefulness, and ways of usage were collected without considering the cultural setting in which that knowledge was produced. Then, there was a progress towards a multidisciplinary study, where humankind and the plants that they use to heal and the different ways of usage were taken into account according to their worldview. We suggest a journey through the history of different fields to disentangle the path towards Ethnopharmacobotany and the importance of herbaria so that we can document this ride.