The Ethnobotany Of Eden

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The Ethnobotany of Eden

Author : Robert A. Voeks
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 334 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2018-06-27
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780226547855

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The Ethnobotany of Eden by Robert A. Voeks Pdf

In the mysterious and pristine forests of the tropics, a wealth of ethnobotanical panaceas and shamanic knowledge promises cures for everything from cancer and AIDS to the common cold. To access such miracles, we need only to discover and protect these medicinal treasures before they succumb to the corrosive forces of the modern world. A compelling biocultural story, certainly, and a popular perspective on the lands and peoples of equatorial latitudes—but true? Only in part. In The Ethnobotany of Eden, geographer Robert A. Voeks unravels the long lianas of history and occasional strands of truth that gave rise to this irresistible jungle medicine narrative. By exploring the interconnected worlds of anthropology, botany, and geography, Voeks shows that well-intentioned scientists and environmentalists originally crafted the jungle narrative with the primary goal of saving the world’s tropical rainforests from destruction. It was a strategy deployed to address a pressing environmental problem, one that appeared at a propitious point in history just as the Western world was taking a more globalized view of environmental issues. And yet, although supported by science and its practitioners, the story was also underpinned by a persuasive mix of myth, sentimentality, and nostalgia for a long-lost tropical Eden. Resurrecting the fascinating history of plant prospecting in the tropics, from the colonial era to the present day, The Ethnobotany of Eden rewrites with modern science the degradation narrative we’ve built up around tropical forests, revealing the entangled origins of our fables of forest cures.

Plants, People, and Places

Author : Nancy J. Turner
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Page : 480 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2020-08-20
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780228003175

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Plants, People, and Places by Nancy J. Turner Pdf

For millennia, plants and their habitats have been fundamental to the lives of Indigenous Peoples - as sources of food and nutrition, medicines, and technological materials - and central to ceremonial traditions, spiritual beliefs, narratives, and language. While the First Peoples of Canada and other parts of the world have developed deep cultural understandings of plants and their environments, this knowledge is often underrecognized in debates about land rights and title, reconciliation, treaty negotiations, and traditional territories. Plants, People, and Places argues that the time is long past due to recognize and accommodate Indigenous Peoples' relationships with plants and their ecosystems. Essays in this volume, by leading voices in philosophy, Indigenous law, and environmental sustainability, consider the critical importance of botanical and ecological knowledge to land rights and related legal and government policy, planning, and decision making in Canada, the United States, Sweden, and New Zealand. Analyzing specific cases in which Indigenous Peoples' inherent rights to the environment have been denied or restricted, this collection promotes future prosperity through more effective and just recognition of the historical use of and care for plants in Indigenous cultures. A timely book featuring Indigenous perspectives on reconciliation, environmental sustainability, and pathways toward ethnoecological restoration, Plants, People, and Places reveals how much there is to learn from the history of human relationships with nature.

Plants, People, and Culture

Author : Michael J Balick,Paul Alan Cox
Publisher : Garland Science
Page : 487 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2020-08-19
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781000098488

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Plants, People, and Culture by Michael J Balick,Paul Alan Cox Pdf

Is it possible that plants have shaped the very trajectory of human cultures? Using riveting stories of fieldwork in remote villages, two of the world’s leading ethnobotanists argue that our past and our future are deeply intertwined with plants. Creating massive sea craft from plants, indigenous shipwrights spurred the navigation of the world’s oceans. Today, indigenous agricultural innovations continue to feed, clothe, and heal the world’s population. One out of four prescription drugs, for example, were discovered from plants used by traditional healers. Objects as common as baskets for winnowing or wooden boxes to store feathers were ornamented with traditional designs demonstrating the human ability to understand our environment and to perceive the cosmos. Throughout the world, the human body has been used as the ultimate canvas for plant-based adornment as well as indelible design using tattoo inks. Plants also garnered religious significance, both as offerings to the gods and as a doorway into the other world. Indigenous claims that plants themselves are sacred is leading to a startling reformulation of conservation. The authors argue that conservation goals can best be achieved by learning from, rather than opposing, indigenous peoples and their beliefs. KEY FEATURES • An engrossing narrative that invites the reader to personally engage with the relationship between plants, people, and culture • Full-color illustrations throughout—including many original photographs captured by the authors during fieldwork • New to this edition—"Plants That Harm," a chapter that examines the dangers of poisonous plants and the promise that their study holds for novel treatments for some of our most serious diseases, including Alzheimer’s and substance addiction • Additional readings at the end of each chapter to encourage further exploration • Boxed features on selected topics that offer further insight • Provocative questions to facilitate group discussion Designed for the college classroom as well as for lay readers, this update of Plants, People, and Culture entices the reader with firsthand stories of fieldwork, spectacular illustrations, and a deep respect for both indigenous peoples and the earth’s natural heritage.

Cannabis

Author : Robert Clarke,Mark Merlin
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 452 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2016-06-28
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780520292482

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Cannabis by Robert Clarke,Mark Merlin Pdf

Cannabis: Evolution and Ethnobotany is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary exploration of the natural origins and early evolution of this famous plant, highlighting its historic role in the development of human societies. Cannabis has long been prized for the strong and durable fiber in its stalks, its edible and oil-rich seeds, and the psychoactive and medicinal compounds produced by its female flowers. The culturally valuable and often irreplaceable goods derived from cannabis deeply influenced the commercial, medical, ritual, and religious practices of cultures throughout the ages, and human desire for these commodities directed the evolution of the plant toward its contemporary varieties. As interest in cannabis grows and public debate over its many uses rises, this book will help us understand why humanity continues to rely on this plant and adapts it to suit our needs.

Evolving Eden

Author : Alan Turner,Mauricio Anton
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 269 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2007-07-03
Category : Science
ISBN : 0231119453

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Evolving Eden by Alan Turner,Mauricio Anton Pdf

Linking the evidence of the past with that of the present, this exquisitely illustrated guide examines the evolution of the mammalian fauna of Africa within the context of dramatic changes over the course of more than 30 million years of primate presence. The book covers such topics as dating, continental drift, climate change, and both the physical evolution of the African continent and the biological evolution of its mammalian fauna.Restorations of the musculature of mammals and their appearance take into account the affinities between fossil forms and extant species in order to make well-founded inferences about unpreserved animal attributes. Environmental reconstructions benefit from the authors' visits to more than a dozen wildlife preserves in five African countries as well as the use of an extensive database of published studies on the evolution of landscapes on the continent. A detailed and engaging volume, Evolving Eden discusses human evolution as a part of the larger pattern of mammalian evolution while responding to the unique interest that we have for our own past.

The Garden of Eden

Author : Annemette Fogh
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 176 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2014-03-26
Category : Gardens, English
ISBN : 1870673824

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The Garden of Eden by Annemette Fogh Pdf

Writer Annemette Fogh stumbled across the abandoned Garden of Eden on the Venetian island of La Giudecca by accident. Intrigued by its locked wrought iron gate, and curious about this lost paradise, she set about discovering its magical past. The nine-

Gardeners of Eden

Author : Dan Dagget
Publisher : University of Nevada Press
Page : 345 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2017-03-15
Category : Nature
ISBN : 9781943859368

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Gardeners of Eden by Dan Dagget Pdf

Dan Dagget believes that humanity can have a positive effect on the land. He demonstrates case after case of positive human engagement in the environment and of managed ecosystems and restored areas that are richer, more diverse, and healthier than unmanaged ones. Much of pre-Columbian America, he contends, was not a pristine wilderness but an ancient garden managed over millennia by native peoples who shaped the plant and animal communities around them to the mutual benefit of all. Dagget recommends a new kind of environmentalism based on management, science, evolution, and holism, and served by humans who enrich the environment even as they benefit from it. His new environmentalism offers hopeful solutions to the current ecological crisis and a new purpose for our human energies and ideals. This book is essential reading for anyone concerned with the earth and anyone seeking a viable way for our burgeoning human population to continue to live upon it.

Pomegranate Roads

Author : Gregory Moiseyevich Levin
Publisher : Pomegranate Roads
Page : 222 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0964949768

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Pomegranate Roads by Gregory Moiseyevich Levin Pdf

A Memoir with pomegranates by famed Soviet botanist, Dr. Gregory Levin. Botany, history and myths, range of tastes and rometies, amisine, health benefits of the pomegrante. Adventurous tale of survival in USSR, accounts of treks across trans-caucasus and Central Asia in search of last wild pomegranates.

Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice

Author : Mark J. Plotkin
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 1994-08-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781101644690

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Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice by Mark J. Plotkin Pdf

The fascinating account of a pioneering ethnobotanist’s travels in the Amazon—at once a gripping adventure story, a passionate argument for conservationism, and an investigation into the healing power of plants, by the author of The Amazon: What Everyone Needs to Know For thousands of years, healers have used plants to cure illness. Aspirin, the world's most widely used drug, is based on compounds originally extracted from the bark of a willow tree, and more than a quarter of medicines found on pharmacy shelves contain plant compounds. Now Western medicine, faced with health crises such as AIDS, Alzheimer's disease, and cancer, has begun to look to the healing plants used by indigenous peoples to develop powerful new medicines. Nowhere is the search more promising than in the Amazon, the world's largest tropical forest, home to a quarter of all botanical species on this planet—as well as hundreds of Indian tribes whose medicinal plants have never been studied by Western scientists. In Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, ethnobotanist Mark J. Plotkin recounts his travels and studies with some of the most powerful Amazonian shamans, who taught him the plant lore their tribes have spent thousands of years gleaning from the rain forest. For more than a decade, Dr. Plotkin raced against time to harvest and record new plants before the rain forests' fragile ecosystems succumb to overdevelopment—and before the Indians abandon their own culture and learning for the seductive appeal of Western material culture. Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice relates nine of the author's quests, taking the reader along on a wild odyssey as he participates in healing rituals; discovers the secret of curare, the lethal arrow poison that kills in minutes; tries the hallucinogenic snuff epena that enables the Indians to speak with their spirit world; and earns the respect and fellowship of the mysterious shamans as he proves that he shares both their endurance and their reverence for the rain forest.

Natural

Author : Alan Levinovitz
Publisher : Beacon Press
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2020-04-07
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780807010884

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Natural by Alan Levinovitz Pdf

Illuminates the far-reaching harms of believing that natural means “good,” from misinformation about health choices to justifications for sexism, racism, and flawed economic policies. People love what’s natural: it’s the best way to eat, the best way to parent, even the best way to act—naturally, just as nature intended. Appeals to the wisdom of nature are among the most powerful arguments in the history of human thought. Yet Nature (with a capital N) and natural goodness are not objective or scientific. In this groundbreaking book, scholar of religion Alan Levinovitz demonstrates that these beliefs are actually religious and highlights the many dangers of substituting simple myths for complicated realities. It may not seem like a problem when it comes to paying a premium for organic food. But what about condemnations of “unnatural” sexual activity? The guilt that attends not having a “natural” birth? Economic deregulation justified by the inherent goodness of “natural” markets? In Natural, readers embark on an epic journey, from Peruvian rainforests to the backcountry in Yellowstone Park, from a “natural” bodybuilding competition to a “natural” cancer-curing clinic. The result is an essential new perspective that shatters faith in Nature’s goodness and points to a better alternative. We can love nature without worshipping it, and we can work toward a better world with humility and dialogue rather than taboos and zealotry.

What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be?

Author : John Hausdoerffer,Brooke Parry Hecht,Melissa K. Nelson,Katherine Kassouf Cummings
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 299 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2021-05-28
Category : Nature
ISBN : 9780226777436

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What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be? by John Hausdoerffer,Brooke Parry Hecht,Melissa K. Nelson,Katherine Kassouf Cummings Pdf

This book "challenges our relationship to the environment and to each other, not only now but across generations. It is an important question for our time, when communities have become fragmented by a global consumer society, when our selves have become isolated in a competitive and technology-driven economy, and when our spiritual, social, and ecological impacts on human and other-than-human beings extend farther than ever imagined due to globalization and climate change. Through interviews and poetic snapshots into the experience of Indigenous people and others, this book demands that the reader think about how contemporary concerns oblige us to see ourselves as someone's future ancestor and, in turn, creates for the reader a different way of looking at his or her traditions and self"--

Vascular Plants and Paleobotany

Author : Philip Stewart,Sabine Globig
Publisher : CRC Press
Page : 340 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2011-12-15
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781466558632

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Vascular Plants and Paleobotany by Philip Stewart,Sabine Globig Pdf

This title includes a number of Open Access chapters. This book provides an important collection of new research that sheds light on many aspects of the evolutionary patterns of gymnosperms, angiosperms, and pteridophtes. The book includes a complete chloroplast genome sequence study and describes a method that induces the systemic silencing of target genes in the Ceratopteris gametophyte. It presents a study of how herbicide treatments reduce fern densities and create the establishment of regeneration. It also analyzes an EST dataset from G. biloba that reveals genes potentially unique to gymnosperms and includes a study of episodic rate acceleration in the ancestral grasses.

Reading Clocks, Alla Turca

Author : Avner Wishnitzer
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 286 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2015-07-07
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226257860

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Reading Clocks, Alla Turca by Avner Wishnitzer Pdf

Up until the end of the eighteenth century, the way Ottomans used their clocks conformed to the inner logic of their own temporal culture. However, this began to change rather dramatically during the nineteenth century, as the Ottoman Empire was increasingly assimilated into the European-dominated global economy and the project of modern state building began to gather momentum. In Reading Clocks, Alla Turca, Avner Wishnitzer unravels the complexity of Ottoman temporal culture and for the first time tells the story of its transformation. He explains that in their attempt to attain better surveillance capabilities and higher levels of regularity and efficiency, various organs of the reforming Ottoman state developed elaborate temporal constructs in which clocks played an increasingly important role. As the reform movement spread beyond the government apparatus, emerging groups of officers, bureaucrats, and urban professionals incorporated novel time-related ideas, values, and behaviors into their self-consciously “modern” outlook and lifestyle. Acculturated in the highly regimented environment of schools and barracks, they came to identify efficiency and temporal regularity with progress and the former temporal patterns with the old political order. Drawing on a wealth of archival and literary sources, Wishnitzer’s original and highly important work presents the shifting culture of time as an arena in which Ottoman social groups competed for legitimacy and a medium through which the very concept of modernity was defined. Reading Clocks, Alla Turca breaks new ground in the study of the Middle East and presents us with a new understanding of the relationship between time and modernity.

Mobility and Migration in Indigenous Amazonia

Author : Miguel N. Alexiades
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2009-04-30
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781845459079

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Mobility and Migration in Indigenous Amazonia by Miguel N. Alexiades Pdf

Contrary to ingrained academic and public assumptions, wherein indigenous lowland South American societies are viewed as the product of historical emplacement and spatial stasis, there is widespread evidence to suggest that migration and displacement have been the norm, and not the exception. This original and thought-provoking collection of case studies examines some of the ways in which migration, and the concomitant processes of ecological and social change, have shaped and continue to shape human-environment relations in Amazonia. Drawing on a wide range of historical time frames (from pre-conquest times to the present) and ethnographic contexts, different chapters examine the complex and important links between migration and the classification, management, and domestication of plants and landscapes, as well as the incorporation and transformation of environmental knowledge, practices, ideologies and identities.

What Kinship Is-And Is Not

Author : Marshall Sahlins
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 121 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2013-01-25
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780226925134

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What Kinship Is-And Is Not by Marshall Sahlins Pdf

In this pithy two-part essay, Marshall Sahlins reinvigorates the debates on what constitutes kinship, building on some of the best scholarship in the field to produce an original outlook on the deepest bond humans can have. Covering thinkers from Aristotle and Lévy- Bruhl to Émile Durkheim and David Schneider, and communities from the Maori and the English to the Korowai of New Guinea, he draws on a breadth of theory and a range of ethnographic examples to form an acute definition of kinship, what he calls the “mutuality of being.” Kinfolk are persons who are parts of one another to the extent that what happens to one is felt by the other. Meaningfully and emotionally, relatives live each other’s lives and die each other’s deaths. In the second part of his essay, Sahlins shows that mutuality of being is a symbolic notion of belonging, not a biological connection by “blood.” Quite apart from relations of birth, people may become kin in ways ranging from sharing the same name or the same food to helping each other survive the perils of the high seas. In a groundbreaking argument, he demonstrates that even where kinship is reckoned from births, it is because the wider kindred or the clan ancestors are already involved in procreation, so that the notion of birth is meaningfully dependent on kinship rather than kinship on birth. By formulating this reversal, Sahlins identifies what kinship truly is: not nature, but culture.