Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

What's In A Name? Plant Naming As Cultural Artifact And Story In The Midwestern United States, Sophie Wesseler

Undergraduate Theses

This project sought to collect and contextualize the historical and contemporary names given to plants by inhabitants of the Midwestern United States, understanding plant names as cultural artifacts that can offer insight into the communities in which they were created and evolved. Formatted as a series of entries, this collection gathered these names and contextualized them within other artifacts of cultural significance, such as art or poetry, and alongside historical research on their origins and cultural environments. Examining plant names through the fields of linguistics, semiology, anthropology, cultural studies, taxonomy, and ethnobotany, this work traces the names of various plants …

Editorial: Wild Plants As Source Of New Crops, Eric Von Wettberg, Thomas M. Davis, Petr Smýkal

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

An Overview Of American Ginseng Through The Lens Of Healing, Conservation And Trade, Margaret Wulfsberg

Lawrence University Honors Projects

American ginseng (Panax quinquefolius) is an herbaceous plant found in the eastern United States and Canada. Due to the high demand for ginseng roots on the Chinese market, it has been harvested at unsustainable rates. If this continues, overharvest along with other environmental factors will lead it to become extinct in the wild. American ginseng became popular due to its similarities with Asian ginseng, (Panax ginseng), a related plant that has been used in Chinese medicine for hundreds of years. Since there is so little Asian ginseng left in the wild, American ginseng now helps satisfy …

Recovering Our Roots: The Importance Of Salish Ethnobotanical Knowledge And Traditional Food Systems To Community Wellbeing On The Flathead Indian Reservation In Montana., Mitchell Rose Bear Don't Walk

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis provides a culturally-comprehensive review of the plants utilized for food in the Bitterroot Salish tribe of northwestern Montana. As part of the larger Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CS&KT) of the Flathead Indian Reservation, the Bitterroot Salish historically utilized hundreds of plants for food, medicine and hygiene. This thesis aims to highlight food plants and their important cultural components. The information herein is a combination of history, ethnography, linguistics, ethnobotany, and first-hand experience with the current Salish community to provide a holistic framework of understanding traditional food plants today. A comprehensive plant list is provided with Latin, Salish …

Plant Poetics And Politics Of The West Usambaras: Power And Memory Of Narrative Botanical Science In Kizanda, Sagara, And The Mazumbai Forest Reserve, Cameron Daddis

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This is a story about people and plants. About the power of relationships between floral organisms and human lives. Using narrative botanical science as a methodological framework, this study highlights the power of local people’s ecological knowledge from the villages of Kizanda and Sagara in the West Usambara Mountains. Building from semi-structured interviews and personal conservations with thirty residents of these villages—voices of local healers, farmers, and forest guides—this work unfolds through a series of vignettes. Its aim is to identify both the precise yet diverse ways in which these people have developed botanical knowledge of their local environment. From …

Political Ecology Of Medicinal Plant Use In Rural Nepal: Globalization, Environmental Degradation, And Cultural Transformation, Emily Dovydaitis

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Prior to the advent of biomedicine, rural communities in Nepal relied on phytochemically active compounds in medicinal plants as their primary source of medicine; however, ethnobotanical practices have shifted over time due to economic, environmental, and sociocultural stimuli. Findings from 2016 fieldwork conducted in Dumrikharka, Nepal and Tutung, Nepal are compared to existing literature to describe the political ecology of medicinal plants in rural Nepal.

Anthropogenic climate change threatens individual plant species and ecosystem biodiversity. Globalized markets unabated by weak conservation programs place increasing demands on medicinal plants. As indigenous plants become overharvested and more difficult to access, Nepalis incorporate …

Working With Locals To Restore Biodiversity To A Rubber Dominated Landscape, Francis Commercon

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Xishuangbanna, in Yunnan,China, contains the country’s highest concentration of biodiversity. Since the 1980s,rubber plantations have replaced a significant portion of the prefecture’s lowland Seasonal Tropical Rainforest, leading to wildlife habitat loss and other environmental issues.Monoculture farming practices also leave farmers economically vulnerable to market fluctuations. To learn the best solutions for increasing ecosystem services and income stability in rubber-dominated areas, the World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF) project Green Rubber engages smallholders directly in establishing and maintaining scientifically rigorous intercropping experiments in their villages.

Using Man’e village and the Green Rubber project as a case study, I asked to what degree and …

Weed Women, All Night Vigils, And The Secret Life Of Plants: Negotiated Epistemologies Of Ethnogynecological Plant Knowledge In American History, Claudia Jeanne Ford

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

This dissertation critiques the discourse of traditional ecological knowledge described as embedded in indigenous peoples' longevity in location, for the purpose of understanding the embodiment of ecological knowledge in culture. The aim of this research is to examine the historical and epistemic complexity of traditional ecological knowledge that may be both established from the length of time people reside in a specific ecosystem and constitutive of negotiations between and among different cultures. I choose the specific case of the negotiation of plant knowledge for women's reproductive health among Native, African, and European groups as those negotiations unfolded on the American …

Understanding Traditions And Practices Of Medicinal Plant Use In Carhuamayo, Junin, Peru, Anastasia Orkwiszewski

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Understanding and preserving Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Practices (TEKP) are essential for the continued resilience and cultural diversity of humanity. TEKP faces a multitude of threats from habitat loss, growth of the market economy, globalization, and acculturation. Medicinal plant use in the high Andean town of Carhuamayo, Junín, was studied to assess the vibrancy of that particular branch of TEKP in that area, in what parts of the population it was held, and what factors influence its loss or growth. Gender, age, migrant status, and acculturation levels were not found to be statistically significant in predicting medicinal plant knowledge. Analysis …

Chenopodium Berlandieri And The Cultural Origins Of Agriculture In The Eastern Woodlands, Daniel Shelton Robinson

Masters Theses

The development of agriculture in the New World has been a topic of prominent historic interest, but one that has ignored some regions in favor of others. The woodlands of Eastern North America have felt this bias in the investigation of agricultural origins, but this has not prevented the development of theories to explain the emergence of a complex of indigenous agricultural plants in the region. Data collection and technological advances have in large part validated these theories, creating a model for domestication. By emphasizing farming over other cultural practices, however, these theories lack explanatory power with regards to the …

The Use Of Plot Surveys For The Study Of Ethnobotanical Knowledge: A Brunei Dusun Example, Jay H. Bernstein, Roy Ellen, Bantong Bin Antaran

Publications and Research

This paper describes a technique for using plot surveys to measure individual informants' ethnobotanical knowledge of forests, as applied to the Dusun community of Merimbun in Brunei. Two knowledgeable but non-literate Dusun informants enumerated marked plots of both recent and old secondary growth mixed dipterocarp forest near the village. They were able to provide names (other than life-forms or the most general basic and intermediate categories) for 86-97% of species growing in the plots. Between 152 and 170 plant names were elicited by the surveys. In all cases, about 88% of the names were at the basic naming level and …

Higher-Order Categories In Brunei Dusun Ethnobotany: The Folk-Classification Of Rainforest Plants, Jay H. Bernstein

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Licuala Palms In Brunei Dusun Ethnobotany, Jay H. Bernstein, Roy F. Ellen

Publications and Research

Several species of Licuala occur in the Merimbun area of Tutong district, Brunei Darussalam. One kind of Licuala, called benjiru by the local Dusun population, is often collected for sale as a vegetable. While Licuala is not generally considered an important economic plant, overharvesting in the Merimbun area suggests that conservation measures may be needed to protect it from local extinction. Besides benjiru, other kinds of Licuala recognized by the Dusun are called silad and ukang. The three kinds of Licuala do not have one overall name in the Dusun language, but constitute a covert category at the "intermediate" ethnobotanical …