African Ethnobotany in the Americas 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. Bolstered by abundant visual content and contributions from renowned experts in the field, African Ethnobotany in the Americas is an invaluable resource for students, scientists, and researchers in the field of ethnobotany and African Diaspora studies.

African Ethnobotany in the Americas 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. Bolstered by abundant visual content and contributions from renowned experts in the field, African Ethnobotany in the Americas is an invaluable resource for students, scientists, and researchers in the field of ethnobotany and African Diaspora studies.

In the mysterious and pristine forests of the tropics, a wealth of ethnobotanical panaceas and shamanic knowledge promises cures for everything from cancer and AIDS to the common cold. To access such miracles, we need only to discover and protect these medicinal treasures before they succumb to the corrosive forces of the modern world. A compelling biocultural story, certainly, and a popular perspective on the lands and peoples of equatorial latitudes—but true? Only in part. In The Ethnobotany of Eden, geographer Robert A. Voeks unravels the long lianas of history and occasional strands of truth that gave rise to this irresistible jungle medicine narrative. By exploring the interconnected worlds of anthropology, botany, and geography, Voeks shows that well-intentioned scientists and environmentalists originally crafted the jungle narrative with the primary goal of saving the world’s tropical rainforests from destruction. It was a strategy deployed to address a pressing environmental problem, one that appeared at a propitious point in history just as the Western world was taking a more globalized view of environmental issues. And yet, although supported by science and its practitioners, the story was also underpinned by a persuasive mix of myth, sentimentality, and nostalgia for a long-lost tropical Eden. Resurrecting the fascinating history of plant prospecting in the tropics, from the colonial era to the present day, The Ethnobotany of Eden rewrites with modern science the degradation narrative we’ve built up around tropical forests, revealing the entangled origins of our fables of forest cures.

"A beautiful catalogue of 80 plants, revered by indigenous people for their nourishing, healing, and symbolic properties." —Gardens Illustrated The belief that all life-forms are interconnected and share the same breath—known in the Rarámuri tribe as iwígara—has resulted in a treasury of knowledge about the natural world, passed down for millennia by native cultures. Ethnobotanist Enrique Salmón builds on this concept of connection and highlights 80 plants revered by North America’s indigenous peoples. Salmón teaches us the ways plants are used as food and medicine, the details of their identification and harvest, their important health benefits, plus their role in traditional stories and myths. Discover in these pages how the timeless wisdom of iwígara can enhance your own kinship with the natural world.

The 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.

The fascinating account of a pioneering ethnobotanist’s travels in the Amazon—at once a gripping adventure story, a passionate argument for conservationism, and an investigation into the healing power of plants, by the author of The Amazon: What Everyone Needs to Know For thousands of years, healers have used plants to cure illness. Aspirin, the world's most widely used drug, is based on compounds originally extracted from the bark of a willow tree, and more than a quarter of medicines found on pharmacy shelves contain plant compounds. Now Western medicine, faced with health crises such as AIDS, Alzheimer's disease, and cancer, has begun to look to the healing plants used by indigenous peoples to develop powerful new medicines. Nowhere is the search more promising than in the Amazon, the world's largest tropical forest, home to a quarter of all botanical species on this planet—as well as hundreds of Indian tribes whose medicinal plants have never been studied by Western scientists. In Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, ethnobotanist Mark J. Plotkin recounts his travels and studies with some of the most powerful Amazonian shamans, who taught him the plant lore their tribes have spent thousands of years gleaning from the rain forest. For more than a decade, Dr. Plotkin raced against time to harvest and record new plants before the rain forests' fragile ecosystems succumb to overdevelopment—and before the Indians abandon their own culture and learning for the seductive appeal of Western material culture. Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice relates nine of the author's quests, taking the reader along on a wild odyssey as he participates in healing rituals; discovers the secret of curare, the lethal arrow poison that kills in minutes; tries the hallucinogenic snuff epena that enables the Indians to speak with their spirit world; and earns the respect and fellowship of the mysterious shamans as he proves that he shares both their endurance and their reverence for the rain forest.

After arriving from South Asia approximately a thousand years ago, cannabis quickly spread throughout the African continent. European accounts of cannabis in Africa—often fictionalized and reliant upon racial stereotypes—shaped widespread myths about the plant and were used to depict the continent as a cultural backwater and Africans as predisposed to drug use. These myths continue to influence contemporary thinking about cannabis. In The African Roots of Marijuana, Chris S. Duvall corrects common misconceptions while providing an authoritative history of cannabis as it flowed into, throughout, and out of Africa. Duvall shows how preexisting smoking cultures in Africa transformed the plant into a fast-acting and easily dosed drug and how it later became linked with global capitalism and the slave trade. People often used cannabis to cope with oppressive working conditions under colonialism, as a recreational drug, and in religious and political movements. This expansive look at Africa's importance to the development of human knowledge about marijuana will challenge everything readers thought they knew about one of the world's most ubiquitous plants.