Beyond the pharmacopoeiae: the Ethnobotany of everything else

Abstract

Ask a community elder about a single common plant and listen to the whole answer. The bark tans a hide, and the inner fiber becomes a rope; the young shoots are famine food and the mature stem a tool handle; the flowering marks a season, the ash seasons a dish, wood-smoke keeps insects from the house, a cut branch marks a grave. Somewhere in that answer, perhaps, there is also a remedy for a cough. Now open almost any ethnobotanical journal, this one included, and look at what survives the journey from field to page: the cough remedy, with its use-value index, and little else. We have built a rich discipline around a single thread of a much larger weave. This editorial makes the case for recording the whole cloth.