Ethnobotany

Researchers in this field document and analyze how different societies use local flora for various purposes, including medicine, food, religious use, intoxicants, building materials, fuels and clothing.

[7]Since Schultes' time, ethnobotany has evolved from primarily documenting traditional plant knowledge to applying this information in modern contexts, particularly in pharmaceutical development.

[8] The field now addresses complex issues such as intellectual property rights and equitable benefit-sharing arrangements arising from the use of traditional knowledge.

[9] While Harshberger did perform ethnobotanical research extensively, including in areas such as North Africa, Mexico, Scandinavia, and Pennsylvania,[9] it was not until Richard Evans Schultes began his trips into the Amazon that ethnobotany became a more well known science.

[5] Historians note that Dioscorides wrote about traveling often throughout the Roman empire, including regions such as "Greece, Crete, Egypt, and Petra",[11] and in doing so obtained substantial knowledge about the local plants and their useful properties.

This expansion in knowledge can primarily be attributed to the substantial influx of new plants from the Americas, including crops such as potatoes, peanuts, avocados, and tomatoes.

[12] The French explorer Jacques Cartier learned a cure for scurvy (a tea made from the needles of a coniferous tree, likely spruce) from a local Iroquois tribe.

It was thought of in practical use terms for culinary and medical purposes and the ethnographic element was not studied as a modern anthropologist might approach ethnobotany today.

As the 18th century became the 19th, ethnobotany saw expeditions undertaken with more colonial aims rather than trade economics such as that of Lewis and Clarke which recorded both plants and the peoples encountered use of them.

Edward Palmer collected material culture artifacts and botanical specimens from people in the North American West (Great Basin) and Mexico from the 1860s to the 1890s.

[17] The first individual to study the emic perspective of the plant world was a German physician working in Sarajevo at the end of the 19th century: Leopold Glück.

Beginning in the 20th century, the field of ethnobotany experienced a shift from the raw compilation of data to a greater methodological and conceptual reorientation.

In the book, he stated that he saw wisdom in both traditional and Western forms of medicine: No medical system has all the answers—no shaman that I've worked with has the equivalent of a polio vaccine and no dermatologist that I've been to could cure a fungal infection as effectively (and inexpensively) as some of my Amazonian mentors.