Plants, Health and Healing: On the Interface of Ethnobotany and Medical Anthropology

Plants have cultural histories, and their culturally known applications change through time and across contexts. The impact of individual plant species on human cultures has been profound, whether it is the coca and quinine from South America or tea and coffee from the Old World. This pattern is seen in all types of uses that humans make of plants, from trees used for construction, through species used for perfume through to food plants. However, it is medicinal plants that have attracted considerable attention recently, whether as a justification of plant conservation efforts or through the perception that direct use of medicinal plants may offer something that is not delivered by orthodox medicine. Nevertheless, surprisingly little research has been done on the interface of ethnobotany and medical anthropology. This volume makes an important contribution to filling this gap. Its two central aims are to demonstrate that plant knowledge is not paradigmatic positive knowledge but situational and arises in relationships, and to show that modern medicinal plant discovery can be viewed as the epitome of a long history of borrowing, stealing, and exchanging plants.

Elisabeth Hsu is University Lecturer in Medical Anthropology at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. She has a Ph.D. Cantab in Social Anthropology on "The Transmission of Chinese Medicine" (published with CUP in 1999). She is joint series editor of "Epistemologies of Healing" and currently on the editorial board of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Stephen Harris was awarded a Ph.D. in plant systematics from the University of St. Andrews in 1990. He has been the Druce Curator of Oxford University Herbaria since 1995 and has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers in genetics and systematics, associated with the evolutionary consequences of plant-human interactions.