How we define ethnoscience in relation to “science” and the “history of science,” the extent to which it is a conceptual “other,” and the way knowledge moves between them, depends on our starting point. Ethnoscience is configured differently depending on context: sometimes a linguistically-rooted methodology (usually in anthropology), sometimes referencing any traditional or Indigenous knowledge that approximately matches the conventional branches of science. Here I examine plant identification in the work of the seventeenth-century Dutch naturalist Rumphius living in Ambon, comparing it to the practices of Indigenous Nuaulu people in modern Indonesia. When seeking to identify plants in our ordinary lives or as professionals, what we mean by “identification” is not the same. Differences between people in the production of identifications arise from the way material presents itself in varying socio-cultural situations, and the reasons why identifications are sought. But to begin with I shall illustrate the interplay between seventeenth-century European beliefs, emerging scientific method, and Rumphius’s appraisal of Ambonese natural history knowledge.

Plant Worlds in Seventeenth-Century Europe and Ambon

Georgius Rumphius (1627–1702) joined the Dutch East India Company in 1651, along the way acquiring some familiarity with Dutch “Protestant science.” He arrived in Ambon, the center of the spice trade, in 1654, where he remained for the rest of his life. As a merchant he took an interest in local flora. He also found a partner in Susanna, probably a mixed-race Ambonese woman who bore him three children. This fact is significant not only because it tells us much about racialized gender relations in the Indies, than because it indicates an unusual cross-cultural intimacy in the production of new plant knowledge. After a series of personal disasters, including blindness, he completed his Herbarium Amboinense. His posthumous publications came to the attention of Linnaeus in Leiden, who adopted many of his plant descriptions (see Rumphius 1741–1750 (2011); Beekman 2011; Baas and Veldkamp 2013; Yoo 2018; Snelders 1995). The titles of each “book” in Rumphius’s Herbal are a mixture of utilitarian categories, groupings referencing morphology, and ad hoc residues. The order makes sense when seen as a journey from the south shore of Ambon through forests and mountains to the north shore. There is no standard order within each book, but groups of chapters begin by describing a representative type, followed by chapters devoted to individual Rumphian taxa. Rumphius described each plant in relation to that proceeding it, using the same template: a preamble (including characteristics), followed by names, places found, and uses.

We can compare Rumphius’s scheme with the hierarchical model of folk classification introduced by Brent Berlin (Berlin, Breedlove and Raven 1974), using concepts of over- and under-differentiation to measure correspondence with scientific taxa. Rumphius had a notion of “species” or “basic category” but understood the biological relationship between taxa differently. Berlin’s approach is partly post-Darwinian hindsight: we are drawn to a semblance of phylogenesis in a folk classification being accustomed to the idea of descent with modification. For Rumphius this cannot be assumed. Rather, the logical “kind-of” relation was often the same as “similar-to.” There is evidence of taxonomic hierarchy, but he does not necessarily invoke inclusion of lesser categories into larger. He is more “agglomerative,” emphasizing greater or lesser proximity. We might envisage cross-cutting schemes along two axes: one approximating what we today think of as phylogeny, and one stressing other major morphological features. For example, he does not treat Ficus (the fig genus) as a single unit, though he sees some resemblance in the grouping of species. Instead, he appropriates Ambonese categories to model the groups of species at the lower level, while a division between trees, shrubs, and vines prevails at the highest levels, overriding genetic similarity (Peeters 1979).

Rumphius’s botanical ontology must be judged by the diverse influences upon it. He was a scholar, and in organizing his Herbal was influenced by Pliny the Elder, seventeenth-century ideas about “natural history,” and the notion that nature is planned to benefit humanity. But he was not only a post-Reformation thinker. His early life was steeped in European beliefs that we would nowadays regard as unscientific. These are reflected in his later writings. For example, he incorporated a homunculus in the nymphs of the crustacean Irona renardi (Ellen 2004), observed that overhanging mangrove leaves of Sonneratia caseolaris became fish on touching water (Rumphius 1741–1750 (2011)), and accepted the spontaneous generation of life.

Rumphius’s botany has been hitherto assessed using the framework of globalized post-Linnaean taxonomy. Indeed, Rumphius and Linnaeus make an interesting comparison, their lives and work falling around the transition between what Foucault called the natural history and biology epistemes, where traditional or scholastic knowledge became recognizably science. Both sought to confer legitimacy to their writing by deferring to Indigenousness and by appealing to the wisdom of local peoples (Foucault 1970; on the authority of Indigenous peoples see Cooper 2007). Linnaeus self-consciously revered Saami traditions, while a feature of Rumphius’s work is his trust in local knowledge authenticated through an intimate familiarity with both language and ethnography. At a time when Moluccan spice gardens were being extirpated and violence perpetrated against their owners, Rumphius frequently claimed that Ambonese know more of nature than his detractors in the East India Company. Much of his data were collected first-hand, while his descriptions systematically interweave Indigenous knowledge with his own European interpretations and experience.

Rumphian ideas among the Nuaulu

Rumphius was therefore a precursor of Linneaus, sheds light on the ethnobotany of seventeenth-century Ambon, and is also an illuminating subject for the study of European natural history at a crucial moment in its transition. His observations have impacted my own work as an anthropologist and ethnobiologist studying the classifying behavior of Nuaulu, a people of central Seram (Ellen 2020). Rumphius knew of Nuaulu, mentioning them in his history of Ambon. He traveled to West Seram, but probably not into the hills where Nuaulu were living at that time. To illustrate how Rumphius’s observations have helped me disentangle some ethnobotanical puzzles, I take the example of gender in plant nomenclature.

The terms hanaie (male) and pina (female) appear in about 40 of 597 Nuaulu plant binomials (7 percent). One might think these refer to male and female plants of dioecious species, but this is unclear. Dioecious species are infrequent in the coastal tropics, perhaps constituting 14 percent. Of the more obvious dioecious species, none reported for Nuaulu display names suggesting this. One genus divided using gender terms is Clerodendrum. Unuhutu hanaie is Clerodendrum rumphianum (with a spike-like inflorescence), while unuhutu pina is usually Clerodendrum speciosissi-mum (similar leaves to rumphianum but a shorter more open inflorescence). Neither is technically bisexual but avoids self-pollination by staggering the maturation of male and female reproductive parts. 

Things become complicated where species are optionally dioecious (male and female flowers on different plants) and monoecious (all plants bisexual), where several types of female plant are distinguished as separate kinds. This is so with the kenari nut iane (Canarium indicum), where iane hanaie is distinguished from iane hanate (larger fruit) and iane mkauke (smaller fruit). Other Canarium are either monoecious or carry both male and female flowers (Ellen 2019). Terms are rarely used by Nuaulu to specifically indicate sex types, but serve to differentiate paired species, varieties of the same species, species of the same genus, or even genera in different families. This mirrors a wider occurrence of male-female opposition in Austronesian languages, found also in Rumphius’s Herbal. He sometimes used terms to reference same species sex morphotypes, but did not recognise the male as having a role in fertilizing female flowers. The sexuality of plants was a matter for speculation in Europe while Rumphius was writing, but the issue was quite unsettled (Taiz 2017).

Communities of Practice Across Time

The term “community of practice” derives from the situated learning theory of Lave and Wenger, emphasizing identification as a socially-shared, processual, and practical task, contextually embedded and embodied (Lave 1991). It marks doing rather than thinking, outcomes achieved through everyday activity rather than abstract theorizing, where “everyday” ranges between the practices of formally-trained professionals and of Indigenous people with skills undivided by occupation. But how do Rumphius’s working practices compare to modern taxonomy or Nuaulu ethnobotany? In what community of practice was he a member or participant? He was connected with the world of Western scholarship, but interacted everyday with Ambonese and had a different vision of plant relatedness. This necessitated intra-cultural and cross-cultural translation in hybrid spaces, where different assumptions and practices met and overlapped, evoking “partial overlaps” (see Ludwig and El-Hani 2020).

Taxonomists theoretically start with a post-Linnaean model, procedurally working down a hierarchy from family to sub-species. They employ tested lexical distinctions to ensure plants are described in the same way, have articulated concepts of level, and have words defining these. Botanists share a domain of knowledge excluding many uncertainties and variables important to others identifying plants—such as use—only employing non-taxonomic distinctions at the initial stages of a decision tree to achieve effective “keying-out” (Dupré 1993). Naturalists have sought to deliberately discard “artificial” and “practical” classifications and replace them with forms dependent on logic internal to the theory of science, whether Linnaean primacy of sexual organs or Darwinian models of common ancestry. Classification as against identification is more distinct in scientific taxonomy, making identification more efficient by grouping associated characters and reducing the steps in a sequence. 

Nuaulu identification of plants is multi-sensorial, in that touch, smell, and taste are as important as visual clues (Ellen 2020). Among professional botanists, the sense that underpins taxonomic practice is primarily visual. An obvious difference between Nuaulu identifiers of plants and contemporary taxonomists is that the former do not write  descriptions to which they can refer, or create images of diagnostic characteristics. Writing, text, and the physical medium on which text is inscribed had massive impacts on conceptualizing and executing acts of identification. Something as definite as “a classification” could hardly exist before it was written down. For Jack Goody, the impulses to classify that accompany literacy encourage “over-systematisation,” overwhelming “reasonable human purposes” (Goody 1982). Science has extracted individual plants from their contexts and re-thought them through abstract features, aided by the globalization of knowledge, and the facility to store specimens and descriptions. Once inscribed, plant names become discrete “things,” and where improvised, likely to become accepted once archived, even when not shared widely (Goody 1977; Ellen 1979). In Rumphius’s Herbal, because each plant is described through a template in relation to that proceeding it, an “order” is possible but rarely achievable where knowledge is orally transmitted. Nuaulu operate as if names were stable, but in effect, the relationship between name and plant is only as good as the last identification, and its frequency of application.

Though writing simplifies sensory reality and perpetuates mistakes, by permitting an “archival” tradition it allows systematic comparison through lists, tables, and lexically-annotated diagrams (Olson 1994). Rumphius drew pictures or had pictures drawn, and by the time of Linnaeus, it was accepted that natural history demanded “arrangement and designation” (Olson 1994, 226). Even modern ethnobiological accounts retrofit the operations of folk classification within the conventions of the written mode, often distorting the significance of notions of hierarchy and level, diminishing category overlap, suppressing dimensionality, and generally constraining the fluidity otherwise enjoyed by orality. 

In Nuaulu plant identification there is built-in flexibility enabled by the absence of one ultimate physical reference specimen or tight permanent descriptions that must be matched to achieve accuracy. For both Nuaulu and professional taxonomists, plant identification involves constant revision, partly because the boundaries of taxa change depending on the criteria selected. The scientific taxonomist faces the same practical and cognitive problems as the Indigenous expert, but whereas modern taxonomists are generally specialists, Nuaulu and Rumphius are generalists. Whereas professional taxonomists always refer to earlier physical specimens and descriptions, Nuaulu identification is fluid, informed by memories established from experience, confirmed or revised with the benefit of other people’s shared experiences. Rumphius too identified plants with reference to general abstractions incorporated into his written descriptions and likely in illustrated notes never preserved (Ellen 2020, 155-59).

Rumphius provides a bridge between several worlds. His work illuminates how the history of biological theory between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries intertwined with ethnobiology as we construe it today. Existing local knowledge systems made the conditions for science possible. In moving from Rumphius to late Linnaeus (and after), European botany rode “a wave of objectification” by which specimens were wiped clean of cultural complexities in order to be “pasted neatly into folios of European herbaria…and classificatory systems” (in Schiebinger and Swan 2005, 7). A focus on the practice of identification sheds light on issues surrounding the integration of heterogeneous knowledge systems. What early ethnoscience ignored with its strict focus on linguistics was the way bodily practice and skill influence how we secure something as mundane as identification (Conklin 1962; see also Ellen 2018). Identification and classification operate in all empirical knowledge systems as distinct processes. Yet in the case of scientific literacy, the two conflate, classification effectively overwhelming identification.

Read another piece in this series.

Works Cited

Baas, P. and J.F. Veldkamp. 2013. “Dutch pre-colonial botany and Rumphius’s Ambonese Herbal.” Allertonia, 13: 9–19.

Beekman, E.M. 2011. “Introduction.” G.E. Rumphius. (1741–1750) 2011. The Ambonese Herbal, Volume 1 (translated by E. M. Beekman_. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, vol. 1, 1–169.

Berlin, B., D.E. Breedlove and P.H. Raven (1974). Principles of Tzeltal plant classification: an introduction to the botanical ethnography of a Mayan-speaking people of highland Chiapas. New York: Academic Press.

Conklin, H.C. 1962. “Lexicographical treatment of folk taxonomies.” International Journal of American Linguistics 28: 119–41.

Cooper, A. 2007. Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dupré, J. 1993. The Disorder of Things. Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science. Cambridge, Mass; London: Harvard University Press.

Ellen, R. 1979. Introductory essay. In Classifications in Their Social Context, edited by R. F. Ellen and D. Reason. London: Academic Press, 1–32.

———. 2004. “From ethno-science to science, or ‘What the indigenous knowledge debate tells us about how scientists define their project.” Journal of Cognition and Culture 4(3–4): 409–50.

———. 2018. “Ethnoscience.” In The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by H. Callan, v4: 2086–87. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

———. 2019. “Ritual, landscapes of exchange, and the domestication of Canarium: a Seram case study.” Asian Perspectives 58 (4): 261–86.

———. 2020. The Nuaulu World of Plants: Ethnobotanical Cognition, Knowledge and Practice Among a People of Seram, Eastern Indonesia. London: Sean Kingston for the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Foucault, M. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock.

Goody, J. 1977. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 1982. Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lave, J. 1991. “Situating learning in communities of practice.” Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition, ed. L. B. Resnick, J. M. Levine and S. D. Teasley. Washington DC: American Psychological Association.

Ludwig, D. and C. N. El-Hani 2020. “Philosophy of ethnobiology: understanding knowledge integration and its limitations.” Journal of Ethnobiology 40: 3–20.

Olson, D.R. 1994. The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Peeters, A. 1979. “Nomenclature and classification in Rumphius’s ‘Herbarium Amboinense’.” Classifications in Their Social Context, ed. R. F. Ellen and D. Reason. London: Academic Press, 145–166.

Rumphius, G.E. (1741–1750) 2011. The Ambonese Herbal, Volumes 1-6 (translated by E. M. Beekman). New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Schiebinger, L. and C. Swan. 2005. “Introduction.” Colonial Botany; Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, ed. L. Schiebinger and C. Swan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1–18.

Snelders H. A. 1995. “Naturwissenschaft und Religion in den Niederlanden um 1600.” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte. 18 (2): 67–78.

Taiz, L. and Taiz, L. 2017. Flora Unveiled: The Discovery and Denial of Sex in Plants. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Yoo, G. 2018. “Wars and wonders: the inter-island information networks of Georg Everhard Rumphius.” The British Journal for the History of Science 51 (4): 559–84.

Formularies, or books of prescriptions, have been in circulation since the very onset of recorded history. A large part of Egyptian papyri and Assyrian-Babylonian cuneiform tablets, for example, consist of collections of medical prescriptions. This genre of literature awakened the attention of European scholars, together with the rise of philology in the nineteenth century, to gain momentum starting in the early decades of the following century. To our surprise, during research for another project, we fell upon a study of a formulary that antedates by several decades the earliest known ones. This is noteworthy not only for its temporal precedence but also because this study was carried out in the “New,” rather than in the “Old,” World and within a context entirely foreign to both philology and historical studies. Here, we are referring to James Mooney’s The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees (1891).

Most of the anthropological knowledge production on traditional medicine (TM) and ethnomedicine in Mexico is based on the assumption that there are two medical compendiums—the traditional or Indigenous and the biomedical—that are clearly distinct and between which the main dynamic is one of conflict and competition. One consequence of this premise is that ethnomedicine functions more as a means of understanding the culture or worldview of a given social collective than as an explanation of disease and therapeutic practices. As stated in one of the first ethnographies devoted to health and illness among the Tzotzil-speaking inhabitants of Chiapas: “Nowhere are the generalizations about Tzotzil philosophy and worldview more clearly verified than in their interpretation of health and disease” (Holland 1963, quoted in Menéndez 2023, 158). The alterity that traditional medicine helps to delineate is then uncritically aligned with the presumed, rather than proven, existence of internally uniform collectives—usually Indigenous—who are supposed to act in neatly distinct ways from non-Indigenous collectives. 

This is the conclusion of a review of the literature on this subject by a specialist with decades of experience in the field: “When [studies on TM] conclude that indigenous peoples have a concept of the unity of body and soul, while medicine is characterised by taking only the body into account, they do not observe whether this is also the case among the non-indigenous population” (Menéndez 2023, 165).^[1]This is what José Luis Escalona (2016) calls “etnoargumento.” Moreover, cultural alterity is not only seen as a result of social practice but also as its motivation. 

An example of this appears in an excellent historical study of the first Centro Coordinador Indigenista, the regional headquarters of the recently created Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI, 1948), inaugurated in Chiapas to deal with the “backwardness” of the Indigenous population. The official documentation of this institution is dominated by testimonies of the complaints and frustrations of anthropologists and doctors who tried, in vain, to introduce biomedicine into the region. In their perspective, the main obstacle they faced was, indeed, the cultural alterity of the local inhabitants: “no dimension of the INI’s development program clashed more directly with the spiritual foundations of Tzeltal and Tzotzil culture [than biomedicine]” (Lewis 2018, 80). 

To open a dialogue with this Special Focus Section on the history of ethnosciences, I would like to discuss these explanatory models. To do so, I use a set of diaries and ethnographic records created during the first ethnographic field trip to the Tzotzil village of Zinacantán, Chiapas, in 1942-43, which are housed in the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collection (HHGSC) at the University of Chicago Library, in the Sol Tax Papers (STP) collection.^[2]Gee (2017) has also written about this expedition in this journal; see also, Mentanko (2020).

Among the enormous amount of data gathered in that expedition, I am here concerned with the records collected on the medical practices of the inhabitants of Zinacantán, at a time before the rise of ethnomedicine in Mexico. The documentary evidence from this expedition suggests that the exercise of demarcating a different Indigenous medical corpus that would index the Indigeneity of the inhabitants results more from the anthropologists’ research practices than from the lived experience of the inhabitants of Zinacantán. This article is therefore an invitation to reflect on how the link between traditional medicine and Indigeneity has been consolidated through the scientific practices of anthropologists.^[3] This commentary is part of a broader research project that draws on the anthropology of the state and the cultural history of science in a transnational dimension to analyze the spaces, materialities, contingencies, interactions, and subjectivities, experienced by anthropologists and—as far as the sources allow—Native inhabitants, when doing intensive field research in Mexico between 1940 and 1960.

Healing Espanto and Taking Aspirins

In January 1943, nine students from the National School of Anthropology of Mexico, led by the American professor Sol Tax, had already been in Zinacantán, a Tsotsil village in Los Altos de Chiapas, for a month in order to carry out one of the first ethnographic field trips for educational purposes in Mexico. Among them was the young Pedro Carrasco (1921- 2012), a Spaniard in his early twenties who had recently arrived as an exile from the war in his home country, and who would eventually become a well-known expert on the Mesoamerican world. In Zinacantán, Carrasco produced one of the first records on the theory of disease and healing techniques in the area, cataloged as “theory of disease” following George Murdoch’s guide (Murdoch 1938).^[4]In 1938, G.P. Murdock, an American anthropologist, published his Outline for Cultural Materials. This book soon became a popular tool for cataloging cultural items collected during ethnographic fieldwork, using numerals and scientific categories. The data obtained through this method was later centralized into the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University, starting from the 1950s. The aim of this integration was to enable comparisons between different cultures and populations. He began with the first letter of his name to identify the author of the file, the page number, and the number attributed by Murdoch to the subject the file dealt with, before recording the description:

P

29

543 Theory of disease

When a person falls, he is frightened [espanto], but only if it was in the place of enchantment. When he falls, his soul goes out of him. He gets a fever, headache, and pain in the body. […] To cure the fright they call the [Indigenous] doctor […] bringing him a gift, mostly bread, sometimes alcohol […] The doctor finds out about the illness by feeling the pulse [pulsar]. If it turns out to be espanto, they look for two 5-cent candles, the white ones. With them, the doctor goes with other boys from the sick person’s house to the place where he was frightened to pray. […] He brings incense which he lights in front of the candles in a basket. […] He stays there for about 30 minutes. […] While he is praying, he starts to whistle with a tecomatillo [flute]. When he leaves, he hits the place where [the sick person] was frightened, calling him by his name and saying that he was frightened there, that he has to get up, and let’s go, etc. On arriving at the house, he stops whistling. […] The sick person stays in bed for three days, starting to count the day of the cure (STP, Box 101, F.4, p. 20).

The norm that anthropology had established for itself was realized in files like this one. This ethnographic record, imagined as a newly “discovered” element, was noted, filed, and cataloged as part of the results of the research—ready to be compared and ordered, following the modernizing and evolutionary paradigm that characterized the discipline at that time. This data, a fragment of lived experiences, thus transcended the chaos of everyday life to be fixed and delimited as an object from which cultural specificity could emerge. 

But alongside these “ethnographic notes,” the field diaries document less predictable information that was left out of the demarcation exercise implicit in those records. In addition to Carrasco, the expedition included Ann Chapman, a 20-year-old American student, and Miguel Acosta (1908-1989), a Venezuelan doctor in exile like Carrasco who began his studies as an anthropologist upon his arrival in Mexico in 1941. Chapman and Acosta worked in tandem throughout the expedition. Just two days after settling in Zinacantán, Chapman met Antonia, a Native woman from Zinacantán who spoke Spanish and told Chapman that her son was ill. Chapman, who had been looking for an informant, seized the opportunity, offering to visit them with her medical companion. For the next two months, Chapman and Acosta visited Antonia daily to obtain ethnographic information and help her sick son.

Little by little, word began to spread in the village, and by the end of December, the doctor-anthropologist already had two rounds of patients that he visited every day. Acosta provided them with asprin, sulfates, and quinine for malaria. He injected some of them, for example, Juana, who had a severe infection in her foot caused by a wound that had not been treated in time. Chapman, excited, speculated in her diary: “It looks like we’re going to have a hospital and that will be very good, to really help them a bit and also to learn. I see the absolute necessity of knowing something about medicine” (STP, B. 101, F 5, p. 13). 

These recurring situations in which Acosta and Chapman visited “their” sick people from house to house were, of course, opportunities they did not miss to discuss the medical knowledge, theories of illness, and healing techniques of the inhabitants of Zinacantán. Toward the end of the stay, word of the student’s medical work had spread to such an extent that every morning there were two or three patients at the boarding school where they were staying. Even the town council authorities and the religious authorities called on Dr. Acosta:

[A]fter lunch, José Pérez Hacienda [mayordomo saliente] came with a bad cold and [also] the policeman Manuel Hernández, who is now better from an infection in his legs. […] I was called by the PM [municipal president] who also has a bad cold. The síndico came too, and the president told me to come and give him an injection. […] When I finished injecting them, another sick person came, and someone gave him an aspirin [cafiaspirina] for some pain he was suffering (STP, B. 101, F. 2, p. 134).

It is clear from Acosta’s notes that the inhabitants turned both to biomedicine and to the traditional doctor to be healed. This heterodoxy of medical practices did not fail to surprise Chapman, who noted her amazement on several occasions at what was for her a contradiction, but which seemed to be experienced as relatively natural among her informants:

It should be noted here that Antonia seems to have a lot of faith in the medicines, as she followed all the prescriptions given to her by M[iguel] for Antonio. And she herself, before we came [to Zinacantán], went to Las Casas to consult Dr. Ochoa for Antonio. But in spite of this, she gives much account to superstitions as an explanation for illnesses and bad luck (STP, B 101, F. 5, p 101-2).

These testimonies show that biomedicine did not compete or conflict with local medical knowledge. The resource that biomedicine represented for the inhabitants of Zinacantán, at least during this expedition, did not fail to be used by a variety of actors differentiated in terms of gender, status and class within the locality. The evidence suggests, then, that the line dividing biomedicine from ethno-medicine was not isomorphic with that dividing Indigenous from non-Indigenous. The type of medicine used was not necessarily a social marker of Indigeneity.

However, in terms of anthropological research, the heterodoxy of the medical practices that the students witnessed was not relevant in ethnographic terms. Indeed, the data retained as ethnographic notes were those considered relevant as cultural norms to characterize a population. Studying the field diaries allows us to know that this was not the only information available. Actually, healing practices in Zinacantán seemed to be more pragmatic and flexible, even though this dimension was left out of the anthropological record and treated as simply anecdotal of the field experience. Maybe that explains why no cataloged file for “adoption of allopathic medicine” was ever produced.

Biomedicine vs. Ethnomedicine?

These field diaries document the porosity of the boundary between traditional medicine and biomedicine, a boundary whose imperiousness often forms the premise of ethnomedicine. Indeed, according to these diaries, believing in “superstitions”—as the anthropologists arrogantly called them—did not prevent people from also resorting to allopathic medicine. In fact, the patients/informants used various types of experts (the traditional doctor, the doctor-anthropologist) depending on who best solved their problem. This evidence invites us to develop more complex explanations, rather than reinforcing the presumed otherness of Indigenous peoples as an explanatory cause. If these two bodies of medical knowledge did not always seem to be in conflict, then a better explanation of the power relations and rivalry between them is needed. 

The diaries also show us the central role that anthropology played in establishing traditional medicine—and other cultural practices—as important social markers of Indigeneity, and thus in the development of ethnosciences. To be sure, anthropological research at the time was situated within a modernizing and evolutionary paradigm in which Indigenous cultural practices had to be recorded because they were inevitably disappearing due to their (supposed) anachronism. It is worth remembering, however, that anthropological research was uncovering cultural specificities precisely by depurating what anthropologists perceived as properly Indigenous practices. Not without paradox, then, the essentialized representations of Indigenous medicine and alterity produced by anthropologists continue to justify and legitimize traditional knowledge. Perhaps a better understanding of the roles these anthropologists played in producing such representations will serve to unpack the complexities they necessarily entail.

Read another piece in this series.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the support of the Programa de Apoyo a la Superación del Personal Académico (PASPA) from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Archival Sources

Museum of Traditional Medicine, located in San Cristóbal de las Casas, the capital of the state of Chiapas. 

Sol Tax Papers in the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collection, Library of the University of Chicago (STP).

Works Cited

Ayora Díaz, Steffan Igor. 2000. “Imagining Authenticity in the Local Medicines of Chiapas, Mexico.” Critique of Anthropology, 20 (2): 173-190.

Escalona, José Luis. 2016. “Etnoargumento y sustancialismo en el pensamiento antropológico. Hacia una perspectiva relacional.” Revista INTERdisciplina, 4 (9): 71-92. https://doi.org/10.22201/ceiich.24485705e.2016.9

Gee, John. 2017. “Methodological Dissension on Sol Tax’s Training Expedition to Chiapas.” History of Anthropology Review. 12 July 2017.

Holland, William. 1963. Medicina maya en los Altos de Chiapas: un estudio del cambio sociocultural. México: Instituto Nacional Indigenista.

Lewis, Stephen. 2018. Rethinking Mexican Indigenismo: The INI’s Coordinating Center in Highland Chiapas and the Fate of a Utopian Project. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press.

Menéndez, Eduardo L. 2023. “Medicina tradicional mexicana: los objetivos y las formas de estudiarla.” Relaciones. estudios de historia y sociedad, 44 (174): 149-171. 10.24901/rehs.v44i174.943

Mentanko, Joshua. 2020. “The Gendered Story of Fieldwork and State Medicine in the Altos of Chiapas, 1940-1960.” History and Anthropology, 34 (2):215-233.

Page Pliego, Jaime. 2023. El mandato de los dioses: etnomedicina entre los tsotsiles de Chamula y Chenalhó. San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Centro de Investigaciones Multidisciplinarias sobre Chiapas y la Frontera Sur.

Pitarch, Pedro. 2010. The Jaguar and the Priest: Ethnography of Tzetzal Souls. Austin: Texas University Press.

Stocking, Georges (ed.). 1983. Observers Observed. Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork. Madison and London: The University of Winsconsin Press, Coll. History of Anthropology, Vol. 1.

HAR editors are pleased to bring you this Special Focus Section, guest edited by Raphael Uchôa, Staffan Müller-Wille and Harriet Mercer. The pieces in this collection will be published on a rolling basis, and the table of contents will be updated accordingly.

The Problem: Science and its Others

This Special Focus Section originated from a workshop that we—Raphael Uchôa, Staffan Müller-Wille, and Harriet Mercer—convened in September 2022 at Darwin College, University of Cambridge. Our workshop brought together a diverse group of scholars from the fields of history and philosophy of science and anthropology. It was the culmination of three years of studies conducted within the context of the “Science and its Others” working group, hosted by the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies (gloknos) and the Ethno-science reading group at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge. Initially, our ambition was to historicize the whole suite of ethnosciences, but it soon became apparent that ethnobotany and to some extent ethnomedicine would form a suitable focus because of their paradigmatic status (on other “ethno-sciences” not discussed in this Special Focus Section, see Alves and Ulysses 2017; D’Ambrosio 1985; Martín 2011; Stiles 1977).

The central purpose of the September 2022 gathering was to understand the emergence of a flurry of seemingly new scientific sub-disciplines in the mid-twentieth century: the “ethnosciences,” which ranged from ethno-medicine to ethno-botany, -zoology, -biology, -pharmacology, -astronomy, -psychology, -cartography, and more. We began with a fundamental, if naïve, question: under what historical and epistemological conditions did Western scientists start to rethink their attitudes to non-Western/Indigenous forms of knowledge, moving away from their derogatory notions of “savage” or “primitive” knowledge to the more equitable twentieth-century term “ethno-science”? In the course of our reading sessions, however, we began to appreciate that the ethnosciences represented another instantiation of a long tradition of defining science in relation to “other” knowledge systems.  

This realization raised a series of further questions: What forms of credit and intellectual property organized these intersections of Indigenous and scientific knowledges? What consequences, if any, did these intersections have for the demarcation of science from non-science? And what are the political consequences of these demarcations, not least for Indigenous communities themselves, and their own perspectives on Indigeneity and science?

To begin addressing these questions, it is helpful to revisit, if briefly, the history of the term “Indigenous” and its relationship to what is called “science.” Ironically, Renaissance herbalists and encyclopedists first deployed the term “indigenous” in relation to Central and Northern European floras and faunas. Herbalists and encyclopedists believed that these floras and faunas needed to be reevaluated vis-à-vis the classical heritage of Mediterranean lore and the flood of “exotic” remedies that inundated European markets as world trade expanded (Cooper 2007).

The survey practices that developed out of this increasing revaluation of local knowledge, and the appreciation of vernacular knowledge holders that accompanied it, soon spread to regions outside of Europe. In regions where powers like Spain and the Netherlands sought to exert imperial and/or colonial control, European naturalists increasingly directed other naturalists and travelers to include in their accounts the knowledge possessed by other cultures regarding natural products, their properties and uses, and their value and ontological significance (Fox 1995; Moravia 1980). Think, for example, of the twelve-volume Hortus Malabaricus edited by Dutch scholars on the Malabar coast from 1678 to 1693 (Manilal 1984).

The texts that resulted from these kinds of encounters between people were full of contradictions and ambiguities. From the seventeenth century, European naturalists began to routinely document Indigenous names and knowledge about the uses, behaviors, and life histories of plants and animals in a matter-of-fact manner. This was information that naturalists had gathered through their interactions with the very peoples they often derogatorily labeled “barbarian,” “uneducated,” “primitive,” or “savage” during field excursions and expeditions in the service of colonial expansion (Schiebinger and Swan 2005, 10–13).

These kinds of ambiguities where Indigenous knowledge was simultaneously derided and desired were deeply inscribed into Francis Bacon’s (1561–1621) utopian program of scientific investigation. On the one hand, the Baconian program emphasized the value of practitioners’ empirical knowledge, but on the other hand it called for the establishment of centralized institutions engaged in the systematization and verification of such knowledge. The real-world model of the Baconian program may have been the imperial institutions that both Portugal and Spain built in the sixteenth century to collate information from overseas and train pilodas accompanying their trade ships (Barrera Osorio 2006; Gascoigne 2009).

This ambiguous treatment of Indigenous knowledge also helps to explain why the subject of this volume, ethnoscience, turns out to be so historiographically unwieldy. Ethnobotany, as a named discipline, for example, seems to have a clear origin. In 1874, Stephen Powers (1840–1904) introduced the term “Aboriginal Botany” to describe the plant knowledge held by Indigenous tribes in California collectively referred to as “Diggers” (Park 1975). Subsequently, John William Harshberger (1869–1929), a botany professor at the University of Pennsylvania, defined ethnobotany as a field encompassing various subjects of study including “the cultural practices of tribes,” “historical plant distribution,” “ancient trade routes,” and “novel avenues of production” (Harshberger 1896, passim). But as a practice, ethnobotany seems to allow for an endless series of forebears and successors, sometimes traced back all the way to the ancient pharmacologist Pedanius Dioscurides (c. 40–90 AD; see, e.g., Davis 1995, 41).

Roy Ellen’s contribution to this Special Focus Section evinces that more is to be gained than a mere line of “predecessors” by turning back to the diverse array of European sources that predate the coining of such terms as “ethnobotany.” Ellen sheds light on the Dutch naturalist Georg Eberhard Rumphius (1627–1702), who studied the flora of Ambon, a small island south of Seram. Rumphius’ study was published posthumously in 1741 and Ellen reflects on how, centuries later, Rumphius influenced his own ethnobotanical research on the Nuaulu people of Seram Island, Indonesia (Ellen 2020).

Ellen shows that, being pre-Linnean and pre-Darwinian in approach, Rumphius’s work shared substantial commonalities with his Indigenous interlocutors. However, committing his explorations of Ambonese vegetation to written form fundamentally rendered his work commensurable with later taxonomic practices, occluding the situated and flexible character of oral traditions upon which it was based. This insight serves as a potent reminder of the foundation of plant identification and classification in “communities of practice,” which may be culturally and epistemologically distinct, but also remain open to bridging through practitioners’ willingness to engage with one another (see also Safier 2010).

Ellen’s investigation into the incorporation of oral traditions into naturalists’ writings illuminates a crucial facet of ethnoscience: the accessibility of Indigenous voices and the pervasive dynamics of erasure and transformation inherent in the compilation of natural history data. This thematic thread resonates with another significant contribution in this Special Focus. In “Traces of Polyvocal Botany,” Linda Andersson Burnett and Hanna Hodacs analyze the Linnaean context, focusing specifically on Lars Montin’s interactions with the Sami community in the 18th century. Their study delves into how Sami perspectives were interwoven into scholarly discourse, uncovering the disparities between Sami botanical terminology and their nuanced understanding of plants, often oversimplified in standardized botanical records like flora catalogs. Similarly, Sabina Leonelli’s paper, “Globalizing Plant Knowledge Beyond Bioprospecting?,” explores parallel inquiries within the digital realm, but with a contemporary lens on Africa. Here, she delves into the concept of ethno-data as a manifestation of ethnoscience, scrutinizing how the digitization of Indigenous knowledge perpetuates colonial legacies. Leonelli’s examination, particularly focused on the cassava research framework in Ghana, reveals how this digitization mobilizes Indigenous knowledge without adequate recognition or reciprocity for its creators, thereby perpetuating historical injustices.

The term ethnoscience itself points to yet another, epistemological rather than moral ambiguity: for practitioners, ethnoscience might be understood to designate either a science that an Indigenous group possesses, or a science that investigates Indigenous knowledge and suitably translates it into its own terms. In other words, the ethno- component might alternatively be understood as the agential subject or passive object of the ethnosciences. If we take the example of ethnobotany, we see that for some of its practitioners, ethnobotany is Indigenous peoples’ plant science, while for others ethnobotany results from extracting and translating Indigenous peoples’ knowledge into Western scientific terms.

According to anthropologist Richard I. Ford, the field has undergone a clear evolution in this respect ever since Harshberger coined its name in the 1890s, from “the study of uses of scientifically identified environmental data” to a focus on “the native’s point of view” (Ford 1978, 39). But as we will see in the following, the two perspectives—the emic and the etic, as one might also say—always remain inextricably entwined because understanding another point of view always presupposes some form of translation, while translation always hinges on understanding different points of view (Fleck 1986).

Ambiguities multiply when we turn to the changing ways that both ethnoscientists and philosophers of science have reflected on the relationship of ethnoscience and science tout court. On the face of it, practitioners of the ethnosciences simply apply science, in its latest incarnations, in their repeated efforts to register and translate what others know about a given subject. But in its disciplinary beginnings, ethnoscience was driven by a more fundamental and ambitious desire. Shaped to some extent by the research of Harold Conklin (1926–2016) on color categories among the Hanunóo, and disseminated through his fellow graduate student at Yale, ethnologist William C. Sturtevant (1926–2007), it was defined as a distinct form of ethnography centered on Indigenous classifications.

For its mid-century practitioners, Sturtevant claimed, ethnoscience aligned with earlier anthropological aspirations to “grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world” (Sturtevant 1964, 100). Continuing in the footsteps of this established tradition—which he traced back to some influential works by Franz Boas (1858–1942) (Boas 1911), Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) and Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) (Durkheim and Mauss 1903), as well as Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942) (Malinowski 1922)—ethnoscientists further developed this emphasis on the “native’s point of view” by expanding the focus of their discipline to encompass both linguistic and cognitive dimensions of knowledge, all while upholding the rigorous standards of scientific inquiry: in Sturtevant’s words, making “cultural descriptions replicable and accurate” by reducing “significant attributes of … local classifications into [the] culture-free terms” of science (Sturtevant 1964, 101-103).

Ethnoscientists like Sturtevant—who was the son of the geneticist Alfred Henry Sturtevant (1891–1970)—may have believed that this mentalistic approach helped them to avoid the discriminatory methods and ideas associated with racist traditions in anthropology and the human sciences more broadly, and instead ensured a more balanced and ethically sound approach to studying cultural phenomena. Powers, in his 1873 “Aboriginal Botany,” had still categorically claimed: “Among savages, of course, there is no systematic classification of botanical knowledge” (Powers 1874, 373). It is certainly no coincidence that, in contrast to this sort of claim, the turn towards classification as a central concern of the discipline coincided with the general reorientation of the human and the life sciences following WWII, and that some of its practitioners spoke of a “new synthesis” in analogy to the modern synthesis in evolutionary biology (Ford 1978; Davis 1991).

Physical anthropologists, but above all population geneticists associated with the modern synthesis like Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900–1975), had maneuvered very carefully in the early 1950s to dissociate their disciplines from a racist past while at the same time saving the legitimacy of studies of human racial and genetic diversity in the UNESCO Statement on Race (Brattain 2007). Moreover, promoters of the scientific anti-racism that found very public expression in the Statement remained wedded to imaginaries of development and modernization that implicitly reinstated old racial hierarchies (Gil-Riaño 2018). Sturtevant reveals the same attitude when, at the end of his article, he emphasized “the relevance of ethnoscience to the study of culture change” (Sturtevant 1964, 123).

The hierarchical understanding of science as a reservoir of “culture-free” terms that provides access to Indigenous knowledge systems while at the same time offering a superior view from “above” has of course not gone unchallenged. Since the 1970s, historical and social studies of science have increasingly revealed that “Western” or “modern” science is simply one of innumerable ways of knowing—or, put another way by Sandra Harding, European science is just another “ethnoscience” (Harding 1997; cf. Latour 1987). While certainly deflating claims to superiority, this stance poses intricate epistemological, ontological and ethical challenges to the prospect of integrating heterogeneous knowledges through collaboration (Ludwig and El-Hani 2020).

An often-overlooked alternative to this prominent stance—and one that is especially alive within the discipline of ethnoscience itself—is grounded in the foundational work of Brent Berlin (1973). Followers of Berlin place the emphasis not on differences amongst knowledge systems, but focus instead on abstract continuities, identifying cognitive structures that run across both “modern” science and traditional knowledges around the world (Atran 1991). This position, with its explicit universalism, faces its own challenge: the universal categories it produces and employs can turn into an abstract grid that again is “etic” in nature and ignores the diversity of contexts in which knowledge is produced (Ellen 1986).

Halfway between these two poles of particularism and universalism, we find Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (1908–2009) enigmatic proposal of a “science of the concrete” as a mode of knowing persisting alongside modern science and its abstractions (Lévi-Strauss 1962). His proposal gains perspicuity once one realizes that the French anthropologist himself engaged in ethnobotany in the mid-twentieth century (Lévi-Strauss 1952). That Lévi-Strauss was both involved in ethnobotany and in developing the concept of a “science of the concrete” is indicative of the way ethnoscience has been used to define science in relation to “other” knowledge systems.

All these emphases on ideational and cognitive dimensions, contrasting with material and embodied viewpoints, drew early criticism from materialist anthropologists, including followers of Marvin Harris (1927–2001), who deemed ethnosciences excessively mentalistic (Harris 1968). In the 1990s, the ontological turn revitalized this debate, particularly in consolidating the study of non-Western ontologies, characterized by their underlying logical relations and cosmological assumptions (Viveiros de Castro 1992; Kohn 2015; Ellen 2016; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017).

One of the most transformative outcomes of the ontological turn was the realization that modern science is steeped in deeper theological and metaphysical roots than many practitioners have been willing to concede. The ontological turn showed that these foundations fostered a commitment within the natural sciences to notions of the universality of human nature and to dichotomies between nature and culture, and body and mind. Moreover, the ontological turn has engendered productive dialogues, often adopting the form of metalogues, seeking to explore the potential (in-)commensurabilities between diverse systems of thought (Lloyd and Vilaça 2020; Lloyd and Vilaça 2023).

These dialogues serve as exemplars for this Special Focus Section, chiefly because they accentuate the inherently open-ended nature of the issues under consideration, thereby encouraging an ongoing and exploratory approach. They indicate that the conflation of subject and object in the term “ethnoscience” outlined above is not just a sign of confusion. It is constitutive of the discipline and makes it a privileged site for investigating the relationship between “Science and Its Others.”

Ethnoscience’s tendency to conflate subject and object is also illustrated by the case study presented by Raphael Uchôa and Silvia Waisse in this Special Focus Section. They cast a spotlight upon the often-overlooked contributions of James Mooney (1861–1921), a figure of considerable significance in the history of North American ethnoscience. By unraveling the layers of Mooney’s involvement with the Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees (1891), the authors unveil the profound potential that these formulas had as pivotal historical sources compiled by one of Mooney’s informants, “Swimmer.” Although we know little about this person, it is obvious that “Swimmer” saw value in committing traditional Cherokee knowledge into a now lost manuscript reminiscent of the “formularies” of the ancient Mediterranean.

Alongside Mooney, Uchôa and Waisse engage with the perspectives of other interpreters, including Boas and Frans M. Olbrechts (1899–1858), and analyze them through the three pivotal spheres of analysis conceptualized by the Brazilian historian of chemistry Ana Maria Alfonso-Goldfarb (2008): historiography, context, and concepts. This approach, the authors propose, can be applied beyond their immediate focus to form a versatile framework that can be effectively wielded to decipher a broader array of historical ethnoscience documentation and acts of interpretation.

The acts of interpreting and translating other knowledges that Uchôa and Waisse investigate in this way can serve as a reminder that, as a set of sub-disciplines, the ethnosciences are rooted in Western conceptual frameworks which place value on precision and accuracy. The significance of accuracy for Western science, as historian Michael Bravo has stressed (1996), cannot be understated as it underpins the Western assertion of scientific hegemony. Much like a protective barrier, it establishes a perimeter within which the criteria for evaluating other knowledge systems are defined.

Therefore, Harding’s proposal to address modern science as just another “ethnoscience” risks inadvertently obscuring the reality that the very notion of “ethnoscience” is intrinsically tied to Western ideologies relating science to other knowledges, as outlined above. Strictly speaking, there is no “ethnoscience” outside of “science” proper, however it may be understood. To overlook this relationship between ethnoscience and Western conceptual frameworks can in turn lead researchers to miss or understate the range of uneven power dynamics that have characterized the ethnosciences and continue to do so to this day.

Indeed, ethnoscience as a conceptual construct emerged from academic disciplines such as economic botany, which was developed by imperial and colonial powers like Britain, France and Spain and was used by agents of empire to try to extract commodifiable knowledge, annex territory, and at times assimilate Indigenous knowledge and practices. Typically, though not universally, as the case of Mooney shows, nineteenth-century economic botanists expended considerable energy trying to disentangle “useful knowledge”—largely, the names for plants and knowledge of the specific uses they were put to—from what they perceived as a thicket of superstitions, false beliefs and detrimental customs (see, e.g., Brown 1868, 390–396).

Twentieth-century ethnobotanists generally looked at Indigenous knowledge systems more respectfully and considered them in their own right, but the sequential application of the latest scientific approaches throughout the history of ethnosciences—in the case of ethnobotany: Linnaean botany, biochemistry, ecology and eventually molecular biology—demonstrates a dynamic that remains at least partially driven from within the sciences. With its conflation of subject and object, “ethno-science” will always include an intrinsically etic component, which is precisely why it proves to be such a dynamic and diverse field of inquiry (Ellen 2004).

These reflections speak to the inadequacies of simple dichotomies, including of trying to categorize ethnoscience as either a friend or foe of Indigenous knowledge systems. One stance, for instance, involves the recognition that colonial and extractive practices are upheld and perpetuated by the prevailing logics of “Western science” and patent laws that exploit Indigenous peoples’ rights to their knowledge and lands (Hayden 2003; Osseo-Asare 2008; Hardison and Bannister 2011; Pollock 2014).

On the other hand, ethnoscientists played a key role in the mobilization and establishment of legal codes that have erected frameworks for protecting Indigenous knowledge from outright exploitation. Delving into the latter aspect, Graham Dutifield examines in this Special Focus Section the pivotal role of the ethnobiologist Darrell A. Posey (1947–2001) and the “Declaration of Belém”, a document that emerged from the inaugural congress of the International Society of Ethnobiology in 1988. The Declaration compellingly accentuated the importance of recognizing Native communities as stewards of 99% of the world’s genetic resources, underscoring the inseparable nexus not only between cultural and biological diversity, but also between knowledge rights and land rights.

Indeed, the interconnection of cultural and biological diversity stands out as a prominent and recurring motif within the ethnosciences narratives throughout the decades following World War II. Edvard Hviding (2003) highlights how, since the late 1950s, numerous sub-branches of anthropological investigation have emerged under the prefix “ethno-,” loosely connected by their cognitive approaches to “the native’s point of view”. This is not surprising. As discussed above, the ethnosciences consolidated their disciplinary identity in the mid-twentieth century, when colonial dominion was being challenged by new registers of national independence, development policies and autarchy. The emergence of the ethnosciences mirrors a broader paradigmatic shift in the natural sciences and international politics, accompanied by a growing global awareness and calls for the incorporation of “traditional” knowledge, previously considered “savage,” into political and scientific discourses concerning environmental issues, health policies, and related fields (Tilley 2021; Métailié 2015).

This thematic nexus between nationalism, post-colonialism, and the ethnosciences emerges as a key theme in this Special Focus Section, especially in the essays by Abigail Nieves Delgado, Daniela Sclavo and Paula López Caballero working on the Mexican context. Nieves Delgado dissects the concept of “mega-diversity,” deeply ingrained within nationalist identity discourses in Mexico, but also carrying the risk of essentializing ethnic difference. Sclavo, on the other hand, turns to the conjunction of ethnobotany and the patriotic revaluation of traditional agricultural systems in Mexico in the 1970s to counter the excesses of the Green Revolution. As Sclavo also shows, the campesino who emerged as a figure of hope and as a bearer of traditional knowledge occluded female knowledge from the sight of ethnobotanists.

Finally, Paula López Caballero takes us back to a time when the categories and frontiers introduced by the “ethno-” perspective were not yet fixed, by reviewing a set of field diaries produced during ethnographic fieldwork in the village of Zinacantán, Chiapas, in 1942-43. Her analysis of these sources brings out how anthropologists constructed “traditional” medical practices associated with a particular ethnic group, while their Indigenous informants took advantage of access to biomedical therapies from the two-month expedition. These exchanges resulted in hybrid medical practices that were excluded from the reports on the expedition in favor of establishing traditional medical practices as a “social marker of Indigeneity.”

Latin America has long been acknowledged as playing a crucial role in the transformation of the ethnosciences (Ford 1978), but the specificities brought out in the Mexican context by two contributions to this Special Focus Section suggest a cautious revaluation. Though not explicitly dealing with the ethnosciences, recent contributions to the “global” history of science and medicine cast interesting light on the role that Indigenous knowledge has played in the formulation of ethnic, national and transnational traditions of science and medicine (see, for example, Leong et al. 2021). Thus, the development of ethnoscience in Brazil and Mexico—where disparate traditions unfolded concerning the interplay between modern science and Indigenous knowledge systems—challenges the notion of a homogenized “Latin America.”

The diversity in ethnoscientific traditions is equally manifest in the European context (Svanberg et al. 2011), and has endured from much earlier times, as exemplified by the Portuguese and Dutch cases analyzed in this Special Focus Section by Ferraz and Alfonso-Goldfarb. While there was a dearth of references to Brazilian native plants in Portuguese medical writings during colonial times, including those of significant figures like the Jesuit José de Anchieta (1534–1597), Dutch sources from the short-lived seventeenth-century colony in Surinam provide a valuable perspective on Indigenous practices, accentuating the significance of medicinal plants. Intriguingly, Ferraz and Alfonso-Goldfarb’s piece also shows that appropriation of Indigenous knowledge was not a conditio sine qua non of colonialism—at least not in the form of published, formalized, “scientific” knowledge.

To date there are no sustained histories of the mid-twentieth century emergence of the ethnosciences. To be sure, the exchange of knowledge between diverse peoples has been a topic of increasing study by scholars of global history and especially global histories of science. These histories show that Western efforts to collect, curate, and convey Indigenous knowledge is not a mid-twentieth century phenomenon born with the disciplinary emergence of the ethnosciences. Instead, they demonstrate that articulations of “scientific” with “other” knowledge systems have a long history going back (at least) to early modern European state formation and colonial expansion. (Fox 1995; Moravia 1980).

But these global histories have not yet connected these earlier epistemological encounters between peoples to the mid-twentieth century efforts of (mostly) Western scientists to turn the study of Indigenous knowledge into a formalized series of disciplinary sub-fields. So far, it is the practitioners of ethno-science who have tended to give the formation of their discipline more sustained attention. Professionals in the fields of ethnobotany and ethnobiology have reflected upon its societal significance, from Richard E. Schultes’ influential edited volume, Ethnobotany: Evolution of a Discipline (1995), to recent calls for decolonizing the field of ethnobiology (McAlvay et al. 2021).

In this context, a few scholars, largely from within the discipline, have also dedicated efforts to mapping the contributions of various authors throughout the history of ethnobotany and ethnobiology (Murray 1982; Clément 1998; Hunn 2007; Wyndham et al. 2011; D’Ambrosio 2014). Yet, whereas global histories of encounter tend to lose sight of twentieth century disciplinary developments, these practitioner-based accounts of ethnoscience have overlooked the larger context and deeper origins of their sub-fields.

Accordingly, the primary objective of this HAR Special Focus Section is to present a series of propositions, methodological challenges, and conceptual problems that reveal the rich potential that a historiography of the ethnosciences—conceptualized as “Science and Its Others”—possesses for the history and epistemology of anthropology and its complicated relationship with the sciences. Each unique context presents a plethora of historical sources and gives rise to epistemological challenges tied to the (in)commensurability of knowledge systems and classifications. Numerous issues, geographies, and institutional and political contexts remain unexplored. The essays presented in this series serve as an initial endeavor to engage researchers from the history and philosophy of science, science and technology studies, anthropology, as well as ethnobotany and the ethnosciences more generally, in explorations of this vital theme.

Read another piece in this series.

Works Cited

Alfonso-Goldfarb, Ana M. 2008. “Simão Mathias Centennial: Documents, Methods, and Identity of the History of Science“. Circumscribere 4:1–4.

Alves, Romulo Romeu Nobrega, and Ulysses Paulino Albuquerque. 2017. Ethnozoology: Animals in Our Lives. Academic Press.

Ambrosio, Ubiratan d’. 1985. “Ethnomathematics and Its Place in the History and Pedagogy of Mathematics.” For the Learning of Mathematics 5 (1): 44–48.

Atran, Scott. 1991. “L’ethnoscience aujourd’hui.” Social Science Information 30 (4): 595–662. https://doi.org/10.1177/053901891030004001.

Barrera-Osorio, Antonio. 2010. Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution. University of Texas Press.

Berlin, Brent, D. E. Breedlove, and P. H. Raven. 1973. General Principles of Classification and Nomenclature in Folk Biology“. American Anthropologist 75 (1973): 214–42.

Bravo, Michael T. 1996. The Accuracy of Ethnoscience: A Study of Inuit Cartography and Cross-Cultural Commensurability. Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester.

Brown, Robert. “On the vegetable products, used by the north-west American Indians as food and medicine, in the arts, and in superstitious rites.” Transactions of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh,9 (1868): 378-396.

Boas, Franz. 1911. “Introduction”. In Handbook of North American Indian Languages, edited by Franz Boas, 5-85. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 40.

Buchan, Bruce, and Linda Andersson Burnett. 2019. “Knowing Savagery: Humanity in the Circuits of Colonial Knowledge.” History of the Human Sciences 32 (4): 3–7.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press.

Clément, Daniel. 1998. “The Historical Foundations of Ethnobiology (1860-1899).” Journal of Ethnobiology 18: 161–87.

Cooper, Alix. 2007. Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge University Press.

D’Ambrosio, Ugo. 2014. “Theoretical Reflections on Ethnobiology in the Third Millennium.” Contributions to Science 10 (1): 49–64.

D’Ambrosio, Ubiratan. 1985. “Ethnomathematics and Its Place in the History and Pedagogy of Mathematics.” For the Learning of Mathematics 5 (1): 44–48.

Davis, E. Wade. “Towards a New Synthesis in Ethnobotany.” In Las plantas y El Hombre: Memorias del Primer Simposio Ecuatoriano de Etnobotánica y Botánica Económica, edited by M. Ríos and H. Borgtoft Petersen, 339–357.

Davis, E. Wade. 1995. “Ethnobotany: An Old Practice, A New Discipline.” In Ethnobotany: Evolution of a Discipline, edited by Richard Evans Schultes and Siri von Reis, 40–51. Portland, OR: Dioscorides Press.

Durkheim, Emile & Mauss, M. 1903. “De quelques formes primitives de classification. Contribution à l’étude des représentations collectives.” Année sociologique, 6: 1–72.

Ellen, Roy. 1986. “Ethnobiology, Cognition and the Structure of Prehension: Some Generalk Theoretical Notes.” Journal of Ethnobiology, 6: 83–98.

Ellen, Roy. 2004. “From Ethno-Science to Science, or ‘What the Indigenous Knowledge Debate Tells Us about How Scientists Define Their Project’.” Journal of Cognition and Culture 4 (3–4): 409–450.

Ellen, R. F. 2020. The Nuaulu World of Plants: Ethnobotanical Cognition, Knowledge and Practice Among a People of Seram, Eastern Indonesia. Sean Kingston Publishing.

Ellen, Roy. 2016. “Is There a Role for Ontologies in Understanding Plant Knowledge Systems?” Journal of Ethnobiology 36 (March): 10–28. https://doi.org/10.2993/0278-0771-36.1.10.

Fabian, Johannes. 2002. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. Columbia University Press.

Fleck, Ludwik. 1986. “The Problem of Epistemology.” In Cognition and Fact. Materials on Ludwik Fleck, edited by Robert S. Cohen and Thomas Schnelle, 79–112. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 87. Dordrecht/Boston: D. Reidel.

Ford, Richard I. 1978. “Ethnobotany: Historical Diversity and Synthesis.” In The Nature and Status of Ethnobotany, edited by Richard I. Ford, 33–49. Anthropological Papers (University of Michigan. Museum of Anthropology); No. 67. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Museum of Anthropology, 1978.

Fox, Christopher, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler, eds. 1995. Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains. First Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gascoigne, John. 2009. “The Royal Society, Natural History and the Peoples of the “New World(s)”, 1660-1800.” The British Journal for the History of Science 42 (4): 539–62.

Gil-Riaño, Sebastián. 2018. “Relocating Anti-Racist Science: The 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race and Economic Development in the Global South.” The British Journal for the History of Science 51 (2): 281–303.

Harding, Sandra. 1997. “Is Modern Science an Ethno-Science? Rethinking Epistemological Assumptions.” In Science and Technology in a Developing World, edited by Terry Shinn, Jack Spaapen, and Venni Krishna, 37–64. Sociology of the Sciences. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

Hardison, Preston, and Kelly Bannister. 2011. “Ethics in Ethnobiology: History, International Law and Policy, and Contemporary Issues.” In Ethnobiology, 27–49. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Harris, Marvin. 2001. The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture. Rowman Altamira.

Harshberger, J. W. 1896. “The Purposes of Ethno-Botany.” Botanical Gazette 21 (3): 146–54.

Hayden, Cori. 2003. When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico. Princeton University Press.

Holbraad, Martin, and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2017. The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge University Press.

Hunn, Eugene. 2007. “Ethnobiology in Four Phases.” Journal of Ethnobiology 27 (1): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.2993/0278-0771_2007_27_1_eifp_2.0.co_2.

Hviding, Edvard. 2003. “Nature, Culture, Magic, Science: On Meta-Languages for Comparison in Cultural Ecology.” In Nature and Society, edited by Philippe Descola and Gisli Palsson, 175–94. London: Routledge.

Kohn, Eduardo. “Anthropology of Ontologies.” Annual Review of Anthropology 44 (1) (2015), 311–327.

Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Harvard University Press.

Leong, Elaine, Ahmed Ragab and Myrna Perez Sheldon (Eds.). 2021. Therapeutic Properties: Global Medical Cultures, Knowledge, and Law. Osiris, Vol. 36. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Use of Wild Plants in Tropical South America.” Economic Botany 6: 252–270.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. La Pensée Sauvage. Paris: Plon.

Lloyd, Geoffrey E. R., and Aparecida Vilaça. 2020. Science in the Forest, Science in the Past. HAU Books.

_______. 2023. Of Jaguars and Butterflies: Metalogues on Issues in Anthropology and Philosophy. NY and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Ludwig, David, and Charbel N. El-Hani. 2020. “Philosophy of Ethnobiology: Understanding Knowledge Integration and Its Limitations.” Journal of Ethnobiology 40: 3–20. https://doi.org/10.2993/0278-0771-40.1.3.

Malinowski, Bronisław. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London, George Routledge & Sons, Ltd.

Manilal, K. S. 1984. “Hortus malabaricus and the ethnoiatrical knowledge of ancient malabar.” Ancient Science of Life 4 (2): 96.

McAlvay, Alex C., Chelsey G. Armstrong, Janelle Baker, Linda Black Elk, Samantha Bosco, Natalia Hanazaki, Leigh Joseph, et al. 2021. “Ethnobiology Phase VI: Decolonizing Institutions, Projects, and Scholarship.” Journal of Ethnobiology 41 (2): 170–91.

Metailie, Georges. 2015. Science and Civilisation in China, Part 4, Traditional Botany: An Ethnobotanical Approach. Cambridge University Press.

Moravia, Sergio. 1980. “The Enlightenment and the Sciences of Man.” History of Science 18 (4): 247–68.

Osseo-Asare, Abena Dove. 2008. “Bioprospecting and Resistance: Transforming Poisoned Arrows into Strophantin Pills in Colonial Gold Coast, 1885–1922.” Social History of Medicine 21 (2): 269–90.

Pagden, Anthony. 1986. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. Cambridge University Press.

Heizer, Robert F. and Susan Park. 1975. Stephen Powers, California’s First Ethnologist ; and, Letters of Stephen Powers to John Wesley Powell Concerning Tribes of California. Contributions of the University of California Archaeological Research Facility ; No. 28. Berkeley: Archaeological Research Facility, Dept. of Anthropology, University of California.

Pocock, J. G. A. 2005. Barbarism and Religion, Vol. 3: The First Decline and Fall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pollock, Anne. 2014. “Places of Pharmaceutical Knowledge-Making: Global Health, Postcolonial Science, and Hope in South African Drug Discovery“. Social Studies of Science 44 (6): 848–73.

Powers, Stephen. 1874. “Aboriginal Botany”. Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences 5 (1873–1874), 373–379.

Pratt, Mary Louise. 2007. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge.

Schiebinger, Londa, and Claudia Swan. 2007. Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Schultes, Richard Evans, and Siri Von Reis. 1995. Ethnobotany: Evolution of a Discipline. Portland, OR: Dioscorides Press.

Métailié, Georges. 2015. Science and Civilisation in China, Part 4, Traditional Botany: An Ethnobotanical Approach. Cambridge University Press.

Safier, Neil. 2010. “Global Knowledge on the Move: Itineraries, Amerindian Narratives, and Deep Histories of Science“. Isis 101: 133–45.

Stiles, Daniel. 1977. “Ethnoarchaeology: A Discussion of Methods and Applications“. Man 12 (1): 87–103.

Sturtevant, William C. 1964. “Studies in Ethnoscience“. American Anthropologist, Transcultural Studies in Cognition 66, 3: 99–131.

Svanberg, Ingvar, Łukasz Łuczaj, Manuel Pardo-De-Santayana, and Andrea Pieroni. 2011. “History and Current Trends of Ethnobiological Research in Europe“. In Ethnobiology, edited by E. N. Anderson, D. Pearsall, E. Hunn, and N. Turner, 189–212. Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118015872.ch12.

Tilley, Helen. 2021. “Traditional Medicine Goes Global: Pan-African Precedents, Cultural Decolonization, and Cold War Rights/Properties”. Osiris, 36: 132–59.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2020. From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society. University of Chicago Press.

Wyndham, Felice S., Dana Lepofsky, and Sara Tiffany. 2011. “Taking Stock in Ethnobiology: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” Journal of Ethnobiology 31 (1): 110–27.