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The Impact of Traditional Lifestyle, Provenance and Contact History on Plant Use Knowledge and Management: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Two Small-Scale Societies from the Bolivian Amazon

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Abstract

It is well known that ethnobotanical knowledge can vary significantly among societies. However, it often remains difficult to fully capture the factors underlying differences in perceptions of usefulness. A quantitative ethnobotanical study was conducted in Indigenous Territory and National Park Isiboro-Sécure (TIPNIS), Bolivia, to compare the plant use knowledge and management of the Yuracarés and Trinitarios, two indigenous groups that share the same living environment. Results show that the Trinitarios have higher knowledge of plants from anthropogenic environments and maintain a significantly larger pharmacopoeia than the Yuracarés. By contrast, the Yuracarés are more knowledgeable of wild flora and particularly excel in their knowledge of wild food plants. I relate these differences to: (1) cultural heritage, customs and practices; (2) ethnomedicinal system; (3) (historical) mode of subsistence; (4) provenance; (5) history of contact with Western society; and (6) modernization and social position. I argue that although contemporary Yuracarés are semi-sedentary, their plant use knowledge and management reflect their previous semi-nomadic foraging lifestyle. Similarly, Trinitarios’ current plant use knowledge and management reflects their legacy of having developed one of the most advanced pre-Colombian agricultural societies in the tree savannahs of Moxos.

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Notes

  1. Although the Jesuits departed from the region in 1768, present day Mojeños largely maintain the original missionary culture (Lehm 1999).

  2. For a detailed description of the tropical forest vegetation see Navarro and Maldonado 2002, and Thomas 2009a.

  3. Only four communities had over 200 inhabitants.

  4. I acknowledge this is a challenging position. First of all, plant use knowledge is dynamic. Knowledge is transferred between members of the same or different ethnic groups, and new applications of plants are frequently being “discovered” (Milliken and Albert 1997; van Andel 2000; Perrault-Archambault and Coomes 2008; Thomas and Van Damme 2010). A second critique is the possibility that one or the other group simply has more use applications for certain plant species cultivated by both over generations. For example, tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum L.) and ginger (Zingiber officinale Roscoe) have far more diversified uses among Trinitarios than among Yuracarés even though, early ethnographers noted their cultivation by Yuracarés (Von Holten 1877; Nordenskiöld 1924). The method of subtracting uses is additionally subject to bias related to the number and background of the participants who provide use data. Clearly a more ideal approach would also have included a linguistic assessment of indigenous plant names (cf. Leonti et al. 2003), but this was beyond the scope of this study.

  5. The fact that comparable results were obtained from both ways of calculating use knowledge diversity corroborates my earlier presumption that the bias created by different numbers of participants interviewed per plant species would not substantially alter the real patterns available in the data.

  6. This may also be part of the reason why Trinitarios showed little interest in learning about wild fruit plants from the Yuracarés.

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Acknowledgments

The present research was financed by a doctoral research grant of the Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds (BOF) of Ghent University to Evert Thomas (Grant Number: B/03801/01 FONDS IV 1). Logistical support in Bolivia was provided by the Centre of Biodiversity and Genetics and the Herbarium Martin Cardenas of the Universidad Mayor de San Simon in Cochabamba. I am grateful to Reynaldo Berdeja, Kim Torfs, Jamie De Munk, Anouk Floren, Jurgen Ceuppens, Bert Wallyn and Olivier Beck for collaboration during data collection. Special thanks are due to all inhabitants of the indigenous communities San Jose de la Angosta, San Antonio, El Carmen de la Nueva Esperanza, Tres de Mayo and Sanandita for their kind assistance in this project. I am indebted to the professional botanists who identified many of the collections. They are P. Acevedo, W. Anderson, G. Aymard, S. Beck, C. Berg, R. Bianchini, A. Brant, T. Croat, D. Daly, S. Dressler, H.-J. Esser, R. Fortunato, A. Fuentes, R. Oritiz Gentry, C. Gustafsson, B. Holst, I. Jiménez, J. Kallunki, Liesner, R., L. Lohmann, J. Lombardi, P. Maas, J. Mitchel, M. Moraes, S. Mori, M. Nee, T. Pennington, G. Prance, J. Pruski, N. Raes, H. Rainer, S. Renner, J. Ricketson, L. Rico, C. Stace, C. Taylor, H. van der Werff, T. Wayt, J. Wen, J. Wood and F. Zenteno. Thanks also go to Ina Vandebroek, Patrick Van Damme, Paul Goetghebeur, two anonymous reviewers and the editors of Human Ecology for commenting on earlier drafts of this article.

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  1. Bioversity International, Regional Office for the Americas, Recta Cali-Palmira Km 17 – CIAT, P.O. Box 6713, Cali, Colombia

    Evert Thomas

  2. Laboratory of Tropical and Subtropical Agriculture and Ethnobotany, Ghent University, Coupure Links 653, 9000, Ghent, Belgium

    Evert Thomas

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Thomas, E. The Impact of Traditional Lifestyle, Provenance and Contact History on Plant Use Knowledge and Management: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Two Small-Scale Societies from the Bolivian Amazon. Hum Ecol 40, 355–368 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-012-9488-1

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