Etnobiología en áreas urbanas: avances y oportunidades en un escenario de crisis socioambiental

LADIO A H

Joao Pessoa

Congreso; Conferência Internacional Online de Etnobiologia (1 : 2020 : João Pessoa-PB). Perspectivas e avanços na Etnobiologia : uma avaliação na Conferência Internacional do Brasil; 2020

Universidad de Paraiba

Disponible en https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyDP83u-c9s&t=91sWe define urban ethnobiology as the study of material and immaterial relations thatare established individually and/or collectively between urban inhabitants and the elementsof Nature. It is known since 2007 that most of the human population lives in cities at theplanetary level, a process that tends to increase in the coming years due to internal andexternal migration. Ladio and Albuquerque (2016) pointed out that the interdependenceNature-Culture is extremely important in the cities, although it does not seem as evident inrural areas. This interrelation has a high environmental heterogeneity according to the sizeof the city (in general, for communities to be considered cities, they must have more than2,000 inhabitants), where scenarios coexist with different stages of the natural (flora andfauna) and the artificial (buildings, streets, supermarkets, etc.). Multiculturalism is anothersignificant element. Different social groups and collectivities arising from internal or externalmigrations add new concepts of relation to the elements of Nature. Finally, dynamism isthe most notorious character that is crossed by several factors of socio-cultural changes.In this research, I analyze, based on other researches carried out by our group, theadvances of urban ethnobiology, opportunities, and questions in order to reflect on the issuesthat must be reinforced in the future in a context of socio-environmental crisis.A review by Ladio and Acosta (2019), which includes 66 studies, found that urbanethnobiology has been increasing logarithmically in recent years. Most studies have focusedon the commercialization of medicinal plants that are sold in markets and fairs. Likewise,considering the 30 most important species in each work, it was estimated that 522 speciesconstitute the main urban herbal corpus, composed of cosmopolitan plants from theAsteraceae and Lamiaceae families, used mainly for gastrointestinal and liver diseases.I Conferência Internacional Online de Etnobiologia CAPA ? SUMÁRIO ? 202Urban ethnobiology is essential for several reasons, but mainly for its contributions to the study of adaptive and resilient systems. Cities are places of high socio-environmental vulnerability. For example, in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, urban centers in Latin America have shown not only the fragility of their official health systems but also their inhabitants? lack of access to healthy food. However, the consumption of industrialized foods predominates and green spaces are insufficient for recreation - what contributes to a favorable scenario for the conditions of poverty, overcrowding, and inequality, which endanger the health of most of its inhabitants. In this sense, Vandebroek et al. (2020) realized the importance of urban ethnobiology in providing post-COVID-19 solutions, such as the revitalization of agroecological and sustainable forms of food, the promotion of urban gardens, the use of supplementary herbal medicine (used by herbalists), and the return to rural life.Internal and external migrants who live in cities are the most affected by socio-environmental crises. Urban ethnobiology shows that cities either ignore or disregard their cultural logics linked to the use of plants and animals, which may be quite different from the dominant mercantilist society, but which are a significant part of their biocultural diversity. A paradigmatic case study is the use of medicinal plants. The cities chosen by migrants have a high population density, high levels of consumption of goods and services but also high levels of contamination and environmental degradation, so access to medicinal plants can be difficult.In cities, migrants are subject to situations of illegality, labor exploitation, insecurity, overcrowding, inequality, limited access to food and drinking water, high levels of stress, contamination, and, above all, violence and xenophobia that put them in a situation of high vulnerability. In terms of health, in general, this would trigger processes of adaptation and resilience, oriented to care in the domestic sphere. That is why the maintenance of migrant herbal medicine has an essential role in the face of adverse conditions. Acosta et al. (2018) found that 12% of the plants in a Bolivian community in the city of Jujuy (Argentina) are adaptogenic, providing comfort and well-being in the face of pain and suffering. These plants would be palliative of situations of systematic loss and mourning, since migration generates a variety of adverse effects. Some of these effects are the removal of family and friends, the retraction of their language, the difficulty of expressing their culture - whichI Conferência Internacional Online de Etnobiologia CAPA ? SUMÁRIO ? 203generates the feeling of lack of their territory, their food, and their social status - and the physical risks that come with being a migrant.The study of the use of medicinal plants in cities and with migrant groups has led us to study processes of cultural hybridization. Based on Ladio and Albuquerque (2014), several processes can be seen, such as the fusion of species, their relocation, innovation, spatial segregation, restructuring, recombination, etc., in response to adaptive processes. Rereading the review by Ladio and Acosta (2019), including 98 publications (> 48%), we found that the processes among migrants are based on the relocation of their medicinal plants and restructuring of recipes, while non-migrants are based on simple (summation) fusion of the use of different medicinal plants. This could have important health implications, as was observed with COVID-19 (VANDEBROEK et al., 2020), since non-migrants turn strongly to the use of medicinal plants without prior knowledge and history of use, generating a increased risk of poisoning. On the other hand, if we look at hybridization diversification, we will see that migrants diversify more than non-migrants. In addition, there is no variation in the cultural distance between immigrants and the receiving culture. This can show that being a migrant, ?by itself?, implies the strong development of adaptive strategies for your health and your survival everywhere. The results found reinforce the idea and the need for a biocultural epidemiology in cities where ethnobiology has a lot to contribute.