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Reviewed by:
  • Ethnobotany: Evolution of a Discipline
  • Karen Reeds
Richard Evans Schultes and Siri von Reis, eds. Ethnobotany: Evolution of a Discipline. Portland, Ore.: Timber Press, 1995. 414 pp. Ill. $49.95.

As a word, ethnobotany is just a century old: it was coined by the American taxonomic botanist John W. Harshberger in 1895. As a discipline, it is barely a half-century old. Since 1941, Richard Evans Schultes’s expeditions, research, teaching, and outreach have been so central to defining the field that it was inevitable that he should preside over a centennial survey of ethnobotanical research and issues. Although the book is dedicated to Harshberger, the contributors inevitably treat it as a festschrift in Schultes’s honor.

For all the celebratory air of this volume, its overall mood is elegiac. Just at the moment when ethnobotany has finally convinced the modern world of the relevance of “the study of human evaluation and manipulation of plant materials, substances, and phenomena, including relevant concepts, in primitive or unlettered societies” (pp. 11–12), both the plants and the unlettered societies are being wiped out by the modern world. Ethnobotanists are racing to record as [End Page 595] much as they can while preaching the cause of ethnobotanical conservation, but they cannot bring back lost habitats, languages, and ways of life.

The section on historical ethnobotany recognizes the give-and-take relationship between historians of medicine and ethnobotanists. All three essays in this section are stimulated by Schultes’s renowned work on Amazonian psychoactive plants. Using art and artifacts as evidence of the use of psychoactive plants in the ancient Near Eastern cultures, William Emboden, Jr., concludes that dynastic Egypt used mandrakes, poppies, water lilies, and probably Datura, but not hemp, in shamanic rituals. He makes the interesting suggestion that, in both ancient Egypt and ancient Maya, the greater the complexity of the priestly caste, the greater the depiction of plants used to produce ecstatic states. Carl A. P. Ruck traces symbolic, magical, linguistic, and botanical connections between entheogenic plants and gods in ancient Indo-European cultures (notably the sacred mushroom, Amanita muscaria, that sprang up where Zeus’s thunderbolt struck), and identifies less potent plants (such as Apollo’s bay tree and Athena’s olive tree) that acted as surrogates for the entheogens in ritual and myth. In a particularly interesting essay, Peter T. Furst analyzes the sacred and medicinal uses of four psychoactive plants—Datura, morning glory, tobacco, and cacao—as they were described in the celebrated Badianus manuscript composed by an Aztec physician in Mexico in 1552, and as they are used in Mexico now. In administering mixtures of several Datura species, he notes, Aztec healers carefully differentiated between externally applied poultices (the equivalent of skin-patches) to ease pain, and internal potions to cause various degrees of insanity.

Historians of medicine should also be alert to historical discussions in other sections: R. Gordon Wasson on Amanita, A. Hofmann on psilocybin and peyote, and George R. Morgan on sugarcane and peanuts, for example. Bo R. Helmstedt places his own field research on coca in the context of the encounters of earlier explorers and scientists with arrow poisons, stimulant plants, ephedra, and peyote.

This handsomely produced book deserves to be widely read, both for its general observations about the discipline of ethnobotany and for its abundance of remarkable tidbits of information. However, its editors, contributors, and readers alike are badly shortchanged by the lack of indexes. There is an index of scientific names of plants, but absolutely no way to look up plant families, animal species, vernacular plant names, or—to mention just a few topics—curare, cortisone, ephedrine, taxol, contraceptives, alkaloids, hallucinogens, hemorrhage, diarrhea, diabetes, arthritis, cancer, mandrake, tobacco, wheat, fungi, Kwakiutl, the Amazon, ancient Egypt, Thailand, Ayurvedic medicine, ethnosystematics, swidden agriculture, ants, chewsticks, natron, bandages, beer, ceramics, insect repellents, toxicology, WHO, Pliny, Francisco Hernández, François Magendie, “Hieronymous Bosch” (sic, p. 41, for the Renaissance botanist Hieronymus Bock), or Richard Evans Schultes himself.

Karen Reeds
Columbia University and
National Coalition of Independent Scholars
...

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