Ana Maria Alfonso-Goldfarb

Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo

The Absence of Brazilian Medicinal Plants in Portuguese Writings

“Upon sowing, everything grows!”—wrote a Navy registrar, expressing amazement with Brazil’s luxuriant nature in a 1500 report to the Portuguese king (Caminha 1981).[1] Pero Vaz de Caminha, a registrar with Pedro Alvares de Cabral’s pioneering expedition to Brazil signed this letter to the Portuguese king on May 1st, 1500. It was first published in 1817; see C. Prado Junior, “Introdução”, in Casal, Corografia Brasilica, xxix. This statement was an early manifestation of European excitement with the exuberance and uniqueness of the flora in Terra Brasilis. From that time onward, European travelers, missionaries, and physicians, never stopped reporting on previously unknown plants and animals, as well as on Amerindian civilizations. While many of those visitors spent some time among Indigenous populations, to make their presence in the “New” World permanent, Europeans required alternative food sources. Shipments from Europe were both expensive and sporadic, and more often than not also arrived in a damaged condition. In addition, they had to learn how to identify unknown diseases and their respective treatments. Therefore, surveying their immediate surroundings proved essential for survival. For this reason, it comes as no surprise that the earliest settlers, including Jesuit missionaries, immediately explored the wealth of the three kingdoms of nature. Despite this, the fact that this knowledge was omitted from any publications written in Portuguese for many centuries still puzzles scholars to this day.

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Notes

Notes
1 Pero Vaz de Caminha, a registrar with Pedro Alvares de Cabral’s pioneering expedition to Brazil signed this letter to the Portuguese king on May 1st, 1500. It was first published in 1817; see C. Prado Junior, “Introdução”, in Casal, Corografia Brasilica, xxix.

Special Focus: Histories of Ethnoscience

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.

In the middle of the twentieth century, a flurry of scientific sub-disciplines emerged. These went by the name of ethno-sciences and they came in numerous varieties from ethno-medicine to ethno-botany, -zoology, -biology, -medicine, -pharmacology, -astronomy, -psychology, -cartography, and more. The creation of these sub-disciplines was not, however, a strictly twentieth-century phenomenon. The development of “ethno-science” as an epistemic category that, in one way or another, involves other knowledges than science has a much longer and uneven history. This Special Focus Section aims to provide a critical historical account of the emergence of the “ethno-sciences,” largely focusing on the plant sciences as a paradigmatic example. In particular, it focuses on the ruptures and continuities that occurred from the late eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, when Western scientists’ attitudes to the category of “Indigenous knowledge” were subject to change across space and time.

Table of Contents

March 2024

Science and Its Others: Histories of Ethnoscience

Raphael Uchôa, Staffan Müller-Wille and Harriet Mercer

Between the Ethnographic Record and the Field Diary: The Hybrid Medical Practices in Zinacantán before Ethnomedicine (Mexico, 1940s)

Paula López Caballero

April 2024

Sources for the History of Ethnosciences: James Mooney and the Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees

Raphael Uchôa and Silvia Waisse

May 2024

Plant Identification and Ethnoscience in the Work of Rumphius

Roy Ellen

August 2024

“Women in Traditional Agricultural Knowledge”: Mexican Ethnobotany in the 1970s

Diana Sclavo

The Absence of Brazilian Medicinal Plants in Portuguese Writings

Marcia H. M. Ferraz and Ana Maria Alfonso-Goldfarb

October 2024

The Beyond-Intellectual-Property Moment in Context

Graham Dutfield