Cassava plant, Ghana. Photo by Sabina Leonelli.

At 8 am on the first of September 2023, I find myself in Fumesua, a small town close to Kumasi, the second largest Ghanian city and the historical seat of the Ashanti kingdom. I am visiting the Crop Research Institute (CRI), the national center for plant and agricultural science since 1964, and I am taking a walk through their cassava field trials together with the agronomist and technicians in charge. The cassava root (Manihot esculenta, also known as manioc or yuca) is a key staple crop for Western Africa as well as Brazil and Indonesia. Cassava plants therefore take pride of place among the crops studied at CRI, with several fields hosting experiments that range from identifying sturdy, drought-resistant varieties to testing propagation and storage methods, verifying characteristics of varieties in demand for local markets, and finding ways to facilitate farmers’ everyday work.

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