What does ethnobotany mean?
Ethnobotany is the study of how people of a particular culture and region make use of indigenous (native) plants. Plants provide food, medicine, shelter, dyes, fibers, oils, resins, gums, soaps, waxes, latex, tannins, and even contribute to the air we breathe. Source: U.S. Forest Service: https://www.fs.usda.gov/wildflowers/ethnobotany/index.shtml
WEBSITE:
- Black Botany: The Nature of Black Experience (2020)This online exhibit seeks to acknowledge the complex relationship between enslaved Black people, nature and the colonial environment and reconsider the conscious omission of Black knowledge of the natural world. he exhibit has been curated by Rashad Bell, MLIS, Collection Maintenance Associate at the Mertz Library, and Nuala Caomhánach, the current Humanities Institute Andrew W. Mellon Fellow and PhD candidate at New York University.
BOOKS:
African Ethnobotany in the Americas by
Call Number: Mann Library E29.N3 A495 2013This book provides the first comprehensive examination of ethnobotanical knowledge and skills among the African Diaspora in the Americas. Leading scholars on the subject explore the complex relationship between plant use and meaning among the descendants of Africans in the New World. With the aid of archival and field research carried out in North America, South America, and the Caribbean, contributors explore the historical, environmental, and political-ecological factors that facilitated/hindered transatlantic ethnobotanical diffusion; the role of Africans as active agents of plant and plant knowledge transfer during the period of plantation slavery in the Americas; the significance of cultural resistance in refining and redefining plant-based traditions; the principal categories of plant use that resulted; the exchange of knowledge among Amerindian, European and other African peoples; and the changing significance of African-American ethnobotanical traditions in the 21st century.In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa's Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World by
Call Number: Clarke Africana Library E29.N3 C38 2009The transatlantic slave trade forced millions of Africans into bondage. Until the early nineteenth century, African slaves came to the Americas in greater numbers than Europeans. In the Shadow of Slavery provides a startling new assessment of the Atlantic slave trade and upends conventional wisdom by shifting attention from the crops slaves were forced to produce to the foods they planted for their own nourishment. Many familiar foods--millet, sorghum, coffee, okra, watermelon, and the "Asian" long bean, for example--are native to Africa, while commercial products such as Coca Cola, Worcestershire Sauce, and Palmolive Soap rely on African plants that were brought to the Americas on slave ships as provisions, medicines, cordage, and bedding. In this exciting, original, and groundbreaking book, Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff draw on archaeological records, oral histories, and the accounts of slave ship captains to show how slaves' food plots--"botanical gardens of the dispossessed"--became the incubators of African survival in the Americas and Africanized the foodways of plantation societies.Ethno-Botany of the Black Americans by
Call Number: Clarke Africana Library E185.89.E8 G86 1979Preface: Since the abolition of slavery in America in 1865...tremendous attempts have been made by Black Americans to spell out in great detail the contributions they have made in music (particularly spirituals, blues , and jazz) in art, and in history to enhance the quality of life in America. Many of their contributions have admittedly fallen into underserved oblivion...But among the contributions that have been least publicized were those that concern the plants brought to the Americas by Black Slaves from the Old World or those native American plants that they adapted for their use and made popular.