All roads lead to cities, external and internal migrations viewed from urban ethnobotany.

LADIO A H

Recife

Congreso; VII International Congress of Ethnobotany; 2019

Universidad Federal de Pernambuco

External migratory processes towards cities are increasing enormously, generatingconsiderable demographic change and social transformation. Some situations provokemigration to cities that are totally different from their native biocultural environment,making their adaptation much more complex, and also their access to medicinal plantresources. Through bibliographical analysis of published studies, we obtained an overviewof the medicinal plant use in cities around the world, the cultural hybridization processesat work, the main medicinal plants utilized and the principal ailments treated. 84 primarysources were selected, including urban studies with and without immigrants. The mainfocus of most of the studies is the commercialization of medicinal plants that takes placegenerally in markets and regional fairs (57%). A recurrent empirical fact is the use of plants asalternative remedies to treat diverse illnesses as consequence of an inaccessible official healthsystem, the problem of non-sustainable extraction of wild plants and their uncontrolledcommercialization. Since 2008, urban ethnobotanical research on immigrants has increased,probably because of the current relevance of this phenomenon. Cosmopolitan cities are themost studied, along with the Latin American migrants living there (50%). In recent works, theidentities of migrant groups are amplified as consequence of the massive migrations currentlyoccurring, especially from Africa (9%) and Asia (16%). More than 5 hundred of medicinalspecies form part of the main corpus in the cities; the majority cosmopolitan in distributionand belong to the Asteraceae and Lamiaceae families. Only 21% of the species appearedin both migrant and non-migrant studies. On a global level it can be said that migrants incities attempt to reproduce their practices with the same plants as they used in their placesof origin. The most common ailment between migrants was ?stomach pains? and the emicuse category ?plants that do one good?, this aspect could be associated with an ?adaptogens?properties of plant to deal to the grief of the migration context. The dangers faced by thecommunities are associated with the difficulties they experience in the acquisition of theirplants and reproduction of their practices. In contrast, general urban ethnobotanical studiesshow that the non-migrant population is more likely to employ processes of fusion of plants,with no previous knowledge.