Description

Ethno botanists continue to search for new botanicals, especially medicinal plants. These bioprospecting efforts have resulted in considerable pharmaceutical success, but often at the expense of the indigenous intellectual property. Initially, the main goals of ethnobotanical research became more conceptual and problem-oriented as researchers moved away from useful plant supports to explore the complex relationship between humans and plants. Ethnobotanical research also became more interdisciplinary, especially anthropologists, archaeologists, botanists, chemists, and geographers. Laboratory and field methods have been adopted from related disciplines, while data analysis has become increasingly quantitative.

Study of Ethno-Botanical

Ethnobotanical studies include any measurement of people plant relationships; however, maximum cutting-edge studies specialize in several “projects.” Ethno botanists are seeking to recognize the technique of domestication and diffusion of crop plants. They have a look at the techniques hired with the aid of using conventional societies to control plant species and the diploma to which those moves are environmentally sustainable. They inspect how species are cognitively categorized, ranked, named, and assigned meaning. And they discover the effect of globalization on the know-how and the use of plant resources.

The origin and distribution of agricultural crops have long been a focus of interest, but in recent years research has moved beyond the main commercial and processes of "wild" species, and semi-domesticated species. Management includes selective wild collection, perennial conservation, pruning, weeding, and fertilization of wild populations, burning of competing vegetation, seed distribution, and protection of important taxa through community regulation. Species managed using these strategies often show significant differences in seed size, number, and other morphological characteristics compared to unmanaged populations. These studies increasingly suggest that plant domestication should not be viewed as a binary starting and ending point, but rather as a continuum, from completely wild species to highly modified modern varieties.

Species management is often associated with intensive manipulation of nature, so the study of species domestication often leads to the question of the "intact myth." Due to the long-term promotion of the conservation of crops, many of the so-called natural landscapes are better known as "cultural landscapes" or "dominant landscapes". Amazon forests also have important species composition and distribution characteristics that are consistent with human management. To this day, indigenous peoples clearly differentiate between the uses of more or less anthropogenic forest stands. Even the spread of the endemic Brazil nut tree (Bertholletia excelsa), which for many is a symbol of the Amazon rainforest, is the result of centuries of movement and probably planting by forest dwellers.

The field of ethnobotany evolved around an understanding of the relationship between indigenous peoples and native plants in rural, often isolated settings; the more sedentary and natural, the better. This botanical homogenization facilitated the continuity of African plant-based culinary and healing traditions among their New World descendants, thus opening avenues of cultural resistance to Euro-American hegemony. Even people with a migratory background today encounter significant obstacles in the international transfer of crops. Many customs restrictions by secretly bringing plants or seeds with them. In some cases, especially in the case of medicinal plants, the indigenous species are weeds and cosmopolitan, and often precede the arrival of immigrants. When other strategies fail, immigrants learn the identities of surrogate species in their new home or the use of crops in favours of supermarkets and pharmacies.