African Ethnobotany in the Americas

431 Pages·2013·9.624 MB·English

by  Robert Voeks Ph.D., John Rashford Ph.D., M.A. (auth.), Robert Voeks, John Rashford (eds.)

African Ethnobotany in the Americas
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Robert Voeks John Rashford
●
Editors
African Ethnobotany
in the Americas
Editors
Robert Voeks John Rashford
Department of Geography Department of Sociology and Anthropology
California State University College of Charleston
Fullerton, CA, USA Charleston, SC, USA
ISBN 978-1-4614-0835-2 ISBN 978-1-4614-0836-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-0836-9
Springer New York Heidelberg Dordrecht London
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012944256
© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
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Contents
1 Introduction ............................................................................................. 1
Robert Voeks and John Rashford
Part I Crops and Cultivators
2 Seeds of Memory: Botanical Legacies
of the African Diaspora .......................................................................... 13
Judith Carney
3 Did Enslaved Africans Spark South Carolina’s
Eighteenth-Century Rice Boom? ........................................................... 35
Stanley B. Alpern
4 African Origins of Sesame Cultivation in the Americas ..................... 67
Dorothea Bedigian
Part II Handicrafts and Crafters
5 By the Rivers of Babylon: The Lowcountry Basket
in Slavery and Freedom .......................................................................... 123
Dale Rosengarten
6 Gathering, Buying, and Growing Sweetgrass
(Muhlenbergia sericea): Urbanization and Social
Networking in the Sweetgrass Basket-Making Industry
of Lowcountry South Carolina .............................................................. 153
Patrick T. Hurley, Brian Grabbatin, Cari Goetcheus,
and Angela Halfacre
7 Marketing, Culture, and Conservation Value of NTFPs:
Case Study of Afro-Ecuadorian Use of Piquigua,
Heteropsis ecuadorensis (Araceae) ......................................................... 175
Maria Fadiman
v
vi Contents
8 Berimbau de barriga: Musical Ethnobotany
of the Afro-Brazilian Diaspora .............................................................. 195
James Sera and Robert Voeks
Part III Medicinal and Spiritual Ethnofloras
9 Trans-Atlantic Diaspora Ethnobotany:
Legacies of West African and Iberian Mediterranean
Migration in Central Cuba .................................................................... 217
Erica S. Moret
10 What Makes a Plant Magical? Symbolism
and Sacred Herbs in Afro-Surinamese Winti Rituals .......................... 247
Tinde van Andel, Sofie Ruysschaert, Kobeke Van de Putte,
and Sara Groenendijk
11 Medicinal and Cooling Teas of Barbados ............................................. 285
Sonia Peter
Part IV Ethnobotanical Continuity and Change
12 Candomblé’s Cosmic Tree and Brazil’s Ficus Species ........................ 311
John Rashford
13 Exploring Biocultural Contexts: Comparative Woody
Plant Knowledge of an Indigenous and Afro-American
Maroon Community in Suriname, South America .............................. 335
Bruce Hoffman
14 Ethnobotany of Brazil’s African Diaspora:
The Role of Floristic Homogenization ................................................... 395
Robert Voeks
Index ................................................................................................................. 417
Author Biographies

Stanley B. Alpern served with the US Navy in World War II. He received a Harvard
A.B. in 1947 and a Columbia M.A. in 1950. He spent 6 years as a copyreader with
the New York Herald Tribune and then served with the US Information Agency for
22 years. Among his foreign posts were Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, and Ouagadougou,
Burkina Faso. For the last three decades, he has been researching and writing about
precolonial West African history. His scholarly articles have included “The European
introduction of crops into West Africa in precolonial times,” History in Africa , 19
(1992), 13–43, and “Exotic plants of Western Africa: where they came from and
when,” HA , 35 (2008), 63–102. He has also written A mazons of Black Sparta: the
women warriors of Dahomey (London & New York, 1998), new ed. 2011, and
Guide to original sources for precolonial West Africa (Madison, 2006). He is a
consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary for words deriving from West Africa,
and he lives on the French Riviera.
Tinde van Andel received her Ph.D. degree in 2000 from Utrecht University and
now works as a postdoc at the National Herbarium of the Netherlands (NCB
Naturalis, Leiden University). She has published several scienti fi c papers on tradi-
tional plant use in Guyana and Suriname and two illustrated fi eld guides: Non-
timber forest products of the North-West district of Guyana (Tropenbos, 2000) and
Medicinal and ritual plants of Suriname (KIT Publishers, 2011). Her current research
focuses on similarities between plant use in West Africa and the Caribbean.
Dorothea Bedigian received her Ph.D. in Agronomy at the University of Illinois.
She investigates traditional sesame cultivars and the natural history of wild species
of S esamum , as well as peoples who use them, in Africa and Asia. Her approach is
interdisciplinary, blending agronomy with anthropology, archaeology, botany,
chemistry, genetics, geography, history, and linguistic analysis. Her current projects
are a taxonomic revision of the genus S esamum and an in-depth review of sesame
and subsistence in Africa, historically, to the present time.
Judith Carney is professor of Geography at UCLA. She teaches courses on African
ecology and development, Africa and the African diaspora, and comparative food
vii
viii Author Biographies
and environmental systems. She is the author of more than 60 research articles and
two award-winning books: B lack Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in
the Americas (Harvard University Press, 2001) and with Richard Rosomoff, In the
Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (University of
California Press, 2009). B lack Rice was the cowinner of the Melville Herskovits
Book Award (2002) from the African Studies Association and the James M. Blaut
Publication Award (2003) from the Association of American Geographers. I n the
Shadow of Slavery is the cowinner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize (2010).
Professor Carney is a recipient of research fellowships from the John Simon
Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies,
the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Maria Fadiman received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin and is
currently an associate professor in the department of Geosciences at Florida Atlantic
University. Her research focus is on how people use plants in the developing world
in relation to conservation and sustainability.
Cari Goetcheus is an associate professor of Historic Preservation at Clemson
University. She received her Master’s in Historic Preservation from the University
of Georgia and her Bachelors of Landscape Architecture from Utah State University.
Her research explores the intersection of planning, preservation, and landscape
architecture, with a focus on African American communities and their landscapes.
Brian Grabbatin is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at the
University of Kentucky. His research focuses on the relationship between property
regimes and natural resource management. He is currently working on a dissertation
that explores racialized landscapes and landownership in the South Carolina
Lowcountry.
Sara Groenendijk contributed to this research in Suriname as a student of the
M.Sc. Natural Resources Management (Utrecht University, the Netherlands) in
2006–2007. This research triggered her interest in the fi eld of international develop-
ment cooperation. Today, she uses her interdisciplinary background in her work,
advising governments of developing countries on their environmental policy and
practice.
Angela Halfacre is an associate professor with the Department of Political Science
and Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Furman University. She
earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Florida. Her research
examines public perceptions of sustainability issues and conservation approaches.
In examining community governance and natural resource decision-making and
management, she incorporates an environmental justice framework.
Bruce Hoffman has spent much of the past 20 years working as a fi eld botanist and
ethnobotanist in the Guiana Shield region of northeastern South America. He
received his Ph.D. in Botany from the University of Hawai’i-Manoa in 2009. He is
currently working as honorary research staff at the Netherlands National Herbarium –
Leiden University. His research is focused upon cross-cultural cognitive ethnobotany,
Author Biographies ix
the biology and use of non-wood forest products, and advances in fi eld identi fi cation
of tropical plants.
Patrick T. Hurley is an assistant professor of Environmental Studies at Ursinus
College. He earned his Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Studies and Policy from the
University of Oregon. His research focuses on human-environment interactions,
drawing on insights from political ecology and conservation science. In examining
non-timber forest products in cities and peri-urban areas, Hurley speci fi cally exam-
ines the ways that urbanization transforms the use and management of local eco-
logical systems.
Erica S. Moret has a Ph.D. in Geography from Jesus College, University of Oxford.
Her research entailed a multi-scaled analysis of US economic sanctions on Cuba in
the post-Soviet era, combining human geography, political economy, geopolitics,
and environmental science.
Sonia Peter is Head of the Departments of Chemistry and Environmental Science
at the Barbados Community College, Barbados, West Indies. She received her B.S.
in Chemistry from the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, and after a
long stint of teaching graduated with her Ph.D. in Natural Products Chemistry in
1994. Her areas of interest include organic chemistry and structure elucidation of
natural products from medicinal plants.
Kobeke Van de Putte spent three months in the Saramaccan village Brownsweg
(Suriname) for her Master’s thesis, where she conducted an ethnobotanical house-
hold survey. She has contributed to several scienti fi c papers on traditional plant use
in Suriname, and a fi eld guide of medicinal and ritual plants of Suriname (KIT
Publishers, 2011). She is currently working at the mycology research group of
Ghent University, Belgium, focusing on the taxonomy and systematics of the world-
wide species complex of the fi shy milkcaps (L acti fl uus volemus sensu lato).
John Rashford received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the City University of
New York and is currently professor of Anthropology at the College of Charleston
in Charleston, South Carolina. His research focuses on the ethnobotany of the
Caribbean.
Dale Rosengarten has been studying the tradition of African American coiled bas-
ketry since 1984. As guest curator for McKissick Museum at the University of
South Carolina, she developed the exhibition and catalog R ow Upon Row: Sea
Grass Baskets of the South Carolina Lowcountry (1986), which enjoyed a 20-year
run as a traveling show. Her doctoral dissertation (Harvard University, 1997) placed
the Lowcountry basket in a global setting and led to a partnership with the Museum
for African Art in New York. With cocurator Enid Schildkrout, she produced the
exhibit and book G rass Roots: African Origins of an American Art (2008). Pursuing
her other fi eld of research—southern Jewish history and culture—Rosengarten
founded the Jewish Heritage Collection at the College of Charleston Library. In col-
laboration with McKissick Museum, she curated the exhibition A Portion of the
People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life (2002) and, with her husband,
Theodore Rosengarten, coedited the accompanying volume.
x Author Biographies
So fi e Ruysschaert is a plant ecologist and ethnobotanist af fi liated with the
Laboratory of Tropical and Subtropical Agriculture and Ethnobotany at Ghent
University, Belgium. She conducted fi eldwork in Suriname between 2004 and 2006.
In the near future, she hopes to publish her Ph.D. thesis on the use of non-timber
forest products by Arawak Indians and Saramaccan Maroons. Currently, she works
as a biologist for the Flemish government, but continues to be involved in ethnobo-
tanical fi eld projects.
James Sera received a Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. He
now resides in Los Angeles, California, where he lectures at California State
University, Los Angeles. His research interests include Brazil, African diaspora,
race and color, Capoeira, religion, social hierarchy, politics, ethnomusicology, and
ethnobotany. He is a Contra-Mestre of Capoeira Angola for the Associação de
Capoeira Angola Corpo e Movimento and director of the Brazilian Cultural
Foundation, a nonpro fi t organization based in Los Angeles.
Robert Voeks received his Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California,
Berkeley. He is currently a professor of Geography at California State University,
Fullerton, and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Economic Botany . He is author of
numerous publications on tropical ethnobotany, biogeography, and the African
diaspora, including Sacred Leaves of Candomblé: African Magic, Medicine, and
Religion in Brazil (Univ. of Texas Press, 1997).