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
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
Linda Andersson Burnet: contributions / / Uppsala University
Ana Maria Alfonso-Goldfarb: contributions / aagold@dialdata.com.br / Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo
Graham Dutfield: contributions / / University of Leeds
Roy Ellen: contributions / r.f.ellen@kent.ac.uk / University of Kent
Marcia H. M. Ferraz: contributions / mhferraz@pucsp.br / Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo
Hanna Hodacs: contributions / / Uppsala University
Sabina Leonelli: contributions / s.leonelli@exeter.ac.uk / University of Exeter
Paula López Caballero: contributions / website / paulapezca@unam.mx
Harriet Mercer: contributions / hjm51@cam.ac.uk / University of Cambridge
Staffan Müller-Wille: contributions / sewm3@cam.ac.uk / University of Cambridge
Abigail Nieves Delgado: contributions / abigail.nievesdelgado@rub.de
Daniela Sclavo: contributions / ds9362@cam.ac.uk / University of Cambridge
Raphael Uchôa: contributions / ru224@cantab.ac.uk / University of Cambridge
Silvia Waisse: contributions / swaisse@pucsp.br / Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo
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