“México es un país megadiverso”: Biocultural Heritage and Exceptionality in Mexican Ethnobiology

During my years as an ethnobiology student, I repeatedly heard the claim “México es un país megadiverso” (Mexico is a megadiverse country). This claim was usually followed by lists of relevant facts: Mexico is second worldwide in reptile species diversity and fifth in vascular plants (Llorente-Bousquets and Ocegueda 2008). It hosts 10% of the total global biota in the world without being close to having 10% of the total territory on Earth (Ávila Blomberg 2020; Boege 2021, 5). Mexico’s diversity is the result of its geographical location and geological history. The country has a varied collection of climates unique to its location.

In Mexico, dry and humid climates meet, as Alejandro Ávila Blomberg (founder and director of the Ethnobotanical Garden of Oaxaca) explained during his keynote presentation at the conference “El Museo Reimaginado” in 2019. He continued, “a condition that we don’t find again until the coast of Colombia and Venezuela, so far away and with a very different evolutionary history” (Ávila Blomberg 2020, 5:14 – 5:19).

This characteristic, it is said, not only impacts biodiversity in Mexico, but also the cultures found in the various regional climates of the country. Mexico has sixty-eight living languages which testifies to its high cultural diversity. What is more, Indigenous groups possess not only different languages but also diverse sets of beliefs, cultural practices, and knowledges that can be traced back to pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Mesoamerica is acknowledged as one of the eight centers in the world where important processes of plant domestication and diversification took place (see Figure 1) (Ortiz Espejel and Vieira de Carvalho 2021, 125).

Paul Kirchhoff introduced the concept of Mesoamerica to refer to the cultural similarities shared by different human groups inhabiting a geographical region including Central and South Mexico, Guatemala El Salvador, Belize, Northwest Honduras and the North Pacific coast of Nicaragua (Riese 1991, 349). Interestingly, when experts claim that Mexico is megadiverse, biodiversity is measured following national lines. National borders, however, rarely follow climatic, cultural, or biological lines, creating a fragmentation of ecosystems and communication pathways between cultures. Moreover, national lines are one way among many in which biodiversity can be measured (Purvis and Hector 2000).

For all these characteristics, some authors have suggested that Mexico occupies the second place in biocultural richness in the world (Ortiz Espejel and Vieira de Carvalho 2021, 124).^[1]There is no agreement on the exact ranking of countries in terms of biocultural diversity. Which country is ranked first depends on how richness and diversity are measured. See, for example, Loh and Harmon (2005). Such biocultural diversity includes “life in all of its manifestations—biological, cultural, and linguistic—which are interrelated (and likely coevolved) within a complex socio-ecological adaptive system” (Maffi and Woodley 2010, 5).

Against the background of this view of biocultural “megadiversity,” today’s Mexican ethnobiology focuses on the concept of biocultural heritage (patrimonio biocultural), the importance of its study and its preservation. Biocultural heritage refers to “the coevolution of biological and cultural diversity that form regions, territories and biocultural landscapes” (Boege 2021, 41). In general, researchers attempt to find coincidences between the presence of Indigenous territories and natural protected areas in Mexico (Luque 2023). There are specific criteria to define what counts as a biocultural region and these characteristics make them relevant for ecological, identity, and political reasons. These include, for example, the relevance of the area to Mexicans’ cultural heritage, its hydric capture capacity, a high concentration of biodiversity in a well conserved state, land management following traditional knowledge techniques, reservoirs of high diversity of seeds and plants, and carbon dioxide capture.

More importantly, biocultural regions are those in which Indigenous communities or similar peasant or urban communities who identify themselves as pueblos originarios (original Peoples) live and exert their rights in their ancestral territories (Ortiz Espejel and Vieira de Carvalho 2021, 125). Studies show that when land is managed by an ethnolinguistic group following traditional land use techniques, it is better preserved than with other types of management (Luque 2023). Its preservation can thus contribute to national security in terms of food, water, and climate. Land under traditional management harbors 25% of the water in Mexico and so these regions can be considered “cold points” or strategic zones against climate warming (Luque 2023).

Biocultural heritage in Mexico is not only relevant for ecological reasons, but also for identity reasons. Biocultural heritage can contribute to improving the quality of life of Indigenous communities who suffered historically and still suffer today from high levels of marginalization and discrimination (Argueta 2020; Luque 2023). Importantly, it is these communities that possess the knowledge that some say needs to be preserved. Their practices of agroforestry, fishing, plant management, animal husbandry, among others, constitute their communal identity as well as the organizing core of so-called “Mexico profundo” (Luque 2023).

This reference to “Mexico profundo” points to the relevance of biocultural heritage for the construction of identity. In fact, Mexico profundo is the title of a book written by ethnologist and anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla in 1987 in which he discussed the ubiquitous presence of the indio in Mexico. In this book, Bonfil Batalla argued that to develop a new successful plan for Mexico we need to consider “all the patrimony that we Mexicans have inherited”:

[…] not only natural resources, but also various ways of understanding and making use of them through knowledge and technology that are inherited from the diverse peoples composing the nation. […] We refer not only to the Western knowledge that with so much effort has been accumulated (more than developed) in Mexico, but also to the rich gamut of knowledge that is the product of millenarian experience. (1996, XVII)

Biocultural heritage echoes back to the “Mexico profundo” of Bonfil Batalla. It—at least so the common narrative goes—represents Mexico’s real deep identity, an identity grounded on ancestral pre-Columbian knowledge. It seemingly makes Mexico an exceptional place, not only because of its biocultural heritage, but also because this heritage represents the knowledge of the original inhabitants of Mexico.

Exceptionality is a common motif in ethnobiological works and it often stirs a general sense of pride. In the case of Mexico, ethnobiological works motivate pride in the general Mexican population by highlighting the incredibly diverse biocultural heritage mainly possessed by Indigenous communities. This narrative motivates nostalgic thoughts about the Conquest and the knowledge lost due to the accompanying genocide. It also inspires national pride in being an allegedly mestizo population, a strong tenet of nation-building discourse in Mexico that implies that non-Indigenous Mexicans also have an Indigenous original part. This is why biocultural heritage feels shared and owned by many Mexicans today (even though the mestizo identity is rarely freely adopted).^[2]The idea of mestizo and mestizaje are central in the nation building process in Mexico and Mexicans tend to share ideas of what a mestizo is and how a mestizo looks, although there is no single definition. People can assume being a mestizo if prompted to self-identification in those terms but there is not a strong sense of a mestizo identity as in other identity movements. (See López Beltrán et al. 2017; Nieves Delgado et al. 2017.)

However, this local pride can foster stereotypical thinking in defining who counts as Indigenous and what counts as Indigenous knowledge. In the history of ethnobiology, I identify at least three ways in which authors of different disciplines defined or framed what Indigenous knowledge is. I argue that their characterizations shape their methodologies and the relationships they establish with knowledge bearers. First, there is ancestral knowledge found in written sources such as those from Francisco Hernández (1577) and Sahagún (1577) and recovered by other writers since. This kind of knowledge is seen as static because it is not practiced anymore, and I label it ancestral written knowledge.

The second kind of knowledge, which I call ancestral practiced knowledge, is considered almost lost (due to the Conquest) but kept alive locally in different practices, rituals, beliefs, and traditions. It has been inherited from the ancestral Indigenous groups who flourished during pre-colonial times. Despite this knowledge being practiced by living Indigenous communities, ethnobiologists and other publics’ expectation has often been for this knowledge to be a reminiscence or a residue of the past.

The third kind of knowledge that I identify is the knowledge of living Indigenous communities which is subject to change (Argueta 2020). I call this the living knowledge. In what follows, I argue that these ways of defining what Indigenous knowledge is are present in the works of ethnobiologists, in the past and today.

To clarify: my intention is neither to argue against Mexico’s exceptionality (as a Mexican in exile, I think Mexico is a beautiful, biologically rich, and culturally fascinating place with exceptional food!), nor against its biocultural diversity or the importance of preserving the cultural heritage of its ethnic groups. My intention is to understand how this view of biocultural heritage and exceptionality (rooted to a deep Mexican heritage as in the quotation from Luque above) emerged and how it acquired the special epistemic role it has played historically and continues to play in current ethnobiology practices.

My suspicion is that preserving biocultural heritage without clarifying what knowledge is and separating these understandings, from ancestral and static to living and changing, may result in problematic interpretations of Indigenous communities and their knowledges in the present. If ethnobiologists and their historians assume that Indigenous knowledge should be preserved because it is ancestral, because it is a relic from the Conquest, then their narratives may be imposing essentialist views and requirements of authenticity on Indigenous people and their knowledge (or raising reproaches of inauthenticity; see Thomas 1994, 30). Addressing this problem is central to continue using the notion of biocultural heritage as a central concept in conservation practices and ethnobiological research.

Knowledge in the History of Ethnobiology

Along the history of ethnobiology in Mexico it is possible to identify differences in what is considered relevant knowledge and who is considered a knowledge bearer. These two issues are deeply interlinked with the methods used in the field. Here, I focus on a collection of essays titled “Classics of Ethnobiology in Mexico” (Argueta, Corona, and Moreno Fuentes 2012), published by the most important journal of ethnobiology in Mexico, Etnobiología (2012) (see Figure 2). By looking at these essays, it is possible to identify changes in how knowledge has been understood and investigated.

The editors of the volume, Arturo Argueta, Eduardo Corona, and Ángel Moreno Fuentes, are three renowned ethnobiologists who prepared this compilation for distribution during the VIII National Conference of Ethnobiology held in April 2012 in Villahermosa, Tabasco. They used three main criteria to select the included works: (1) breadth of scope aiming to consider different types of human-nature relationships; (2) texts that have been read by different generations of ethnobiologists and have become major reference points for the field; and (3) texts that may be less known but whose authors have left an important mark in their respective fields (Argueta, Corona, and Moreno Fuentes 2012, 1). The articles span the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries and include texts from naturalists, archeologists, botanists, and ethnobiologists.

In this collection, some texts (mainly written before the 1970s) focus on New World chronicles published in sixteenth-century books, natural histories, and archeological sources to analyze ancient cultures, like the Aztecs, instead of investigating the knowledge of living indios. I would classify this kind of knowledge within the first category of ancestral written knowledge.

In contrast, other works in the collection deal more closely with the knowledge of peasants and Indigenous communities. An example is the work of Maximino Martínez (1932) who used questionnaires to gather information on the traditional uses of plants. Martínez was concerned with the problems of having different names for a plant and different plants with the same name. For him, scientific identification was fundamental.^[3]Other scientists and institutions at the time were concerned with the scientific identification of medicinal plants (and animals) used in traditional remedies. The National Medical Institute (Instituto Médico Nacional) was founded in 1888 with exactly that purpose. To scientifically verify the medical properties of plants and animals, the institute collected many specimens and knowledge on their uses. These plants and animals were later subject to chemical analysis to extract the active ingredients which were tested on animals and, in a later stage, on people (Morales Sarabia and Aceves Pastrana 2011, 13). The work of Martínez can be understood within this larger context where herbal medicine research, botany and ethnobotany met. To gather knowledge on medicinal plants he asked Dr. Rafael Ramírez from the Department of Culture for help.

Ramírez helped Martínez by distributing questionnaires to collect information from rural teachers and the communities with which they worked. Martínez was interested in gathering information on the plant remedies used by “common people” (el pueblo o el vulgo) composed of Indigenous people and peasants. With this information he wanted to create a volume with the name “medicinal folklore.” The knowledge gathered from those “common people,” he wrote, could be verified by scientific research leading to important medical discoveries:

It was said among the pre-Cortesian indios that Yoloxóchitl is good for the heart; that Simonillo is good for the liver, etc. They reached that conclusion maybe only by empirical methods, and through their intimate contact with nature. Now we know that science, with modern research methods, has in fact proved that the effect of Yoloxóchitl is positive in some cardiac diseases, and that Simonillo has some benefits against biliary conditions. Also, it has been possible to isolate their active substances. (Martínez 1932, 47-48)

Despite the power asymmetry in this methodology (both due to the inability of rural teachers to reject such requests and because of researchers’ preference for scientific over traditional knowledge), in this work the living indio, peasants, and other members of the vulgo became, or were forced into becoming, the bearers of knowledge. The knowledge they had came from pre-Cortesian indios and it is reproduced by living people. Thus, we see some characteristics of ancestral practiced knowledge in Martínez’s work.

Now I turn to “La investigación del huarache” written in 1978 by Efraím Hernández Xolocotzi, known in the field as Xolo. He has been a major influence in the shift of ethnobiology to a discipline concerned not only with recording Mexico’s biocultural diversity but also with the political implications of that diversity. In this work, Xolocotzi exhorted ethnobiologists to investigate Indigenous knowledge without falling into the usual prejudices. The title is a metaphor. Huarache is the sandal usually worn by Indigenous people. People in the city usually look down on this kind of shoe. In a similar way, ethnobiologists, Xolo wrote, were used to looking down on the knowledge of Indigenous people. This prejudice limits the knowledge ethnobiologists can gather:

The normal reaction to research done at the level of the sandal (huarache) is to think that it is worthless. This is natural, because those who wear sandals in our country are usually scorned. They are not part of the modern progressist culture of those who wear shoes. We have a different point of view. We call research done bottom-up sandal research […] (Hernández Xolocotzi 1978, 88).

Thus, his was an invitation to do research from the bottom up instead of top down as had been done before.

Xolocotzi argued this should start by taking seriously “our cultural heritage” and the traditional agricultural technologies (tecnología agrícola tradicional, TAT) from peasants and Native populations (grupos autóctonos) in Mexico. Traditional technology in his words was, “technology originated with the empirical knowledge of our people, accumulated for twelve thousand years since the origin of agriculture in our country” (Hernández Xolocotzi 1978, 88). In this quotation, Xolo referred to the different types of knowledge I have traced. He talks about ancestral knowledge and the invention of agriculture by the cultures inhabiting the territory that Mexico now occupies. He also stated that TAT originated with the empirical knowledge of our people. In this sense, he drew a line from the past to the present, and suggests the preservation of ancestral knowledge in current practices.

Talking about “our” people and “our” country fosters the pride I referred to previously and makes it possible for any Mexican to relate to this past and present regardless of whether or not they personally identify with an Indigenous group. Xolo explained that Mexico hosts an enormous richness in TAT which “[…] speaks of the significant adaptive capabilities of peasants to their environment […].” The richness of TAT is related to richness in crops “that [are] not present in developed countries” (Hernández Xolocotzi 1978, 88). Thus, TAT diversity which evolved over the last twelve thousand years explains crop diversity. Thus, ancestral practiced knowledge (or TAT for Xolo) and crop richness are intrinsically connected. From there, the ideas of biocultural diversity and heritage are within arm’s reach.

It is also important to mention that Xolo introduced TAT at a time when the green revolution dominated discussions on the development of agriculture. The acknowledgment of TAT diversity in Mexico went directly against the homogenizing threat that the green revolution posed to local agricultural techniques. It positioned ancestral practiced knowledge (as I called it before) on equal footing to foreign biotechnological alternatives as a counterrevolution (Sclavo 2023; Cruz Leon and Cervantes Herrera 2015).

A future analysis of the notions of knowledge implicit in the concept of “biocultural heritage” will be important, especially because ethnobiology in Mexico has recently gained attention in domestic politics. This is in part due to the tenure of Victor Toledo, a major figure in the field of ethnobiology, as Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources from May 2019 to September 2020. Despite the short duration of his appointment, he created a massive interdisciplinary network with the aim of studying the biocultural heritage of Mexico. This network will have lasting effects, within and beyond science.

Thus, a more careful analysis of the ways different notions of knowledge are used in current research and public debates is essential to promote the recognition of Indigenous groups today and their “living knowledge.” To avoid stereotypical thinking and essentialist views on Indigenous people and their knowledges, it is important to reflect on what understanding of knowledge is being applied in these projects as these surely influence the methods employed and the relationships established between researchers and knowledge bearers.

Frameworks like “diálogos de saberes” (Argueta 2012) can contribute to this process and to the larger need for decolonization of the field (Baldauf 2019; McAlvay et al. 2021). Biocultural diversity exists as much in the present as in the past. Limiting it to the latter means constraining recognition of the richness that constitutes today’s Indigenous knowledges. As such, it is fundamental to provide historical analyses of the development of ethnobiology in such an exceptional place as Mexico.

Acknowledgements

I thank Emma Spary and the members of the workshop “Science and its Others: Histories of ethno-science from the 18th century to the present-day” organized by the Ethno-Science Research Group at the University of Cambridge for comments, insights, and exciting interactions. I am also incredibly thankful to Caleb Ogden Shelburne and Rosanna Dent for their careful reading and suggestions.

Read another piece in this series.

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