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"Human-plant relationships."
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The natural history of flowers
\"Flowers have played an important role in human culture for thousands of years, symbolizing love, sorrow, and renewal. They provide bursts of color to homes and gardens and convey messages to friends, family, and significant others. Yet we often overlook their real purpose--why do flowers exist and why are they certain colors, shapes, and smells? In nature, flowers are key to healthy ecosystems and play a functional role, increasing a plant's chances for survival. Flowers have evolved to attract specific pollinators and to take advantage of climate variables and animal migration to disperse seeds, ensuring that the species will survive. These fine-tuned methods have evolved over a long period of time, and the importance of pollination and seed dispersal to a healthy environment cannot be overstated. As climate change places pressure on animals and plants, it is also challenging these methods flowers have developed for survival. The Fogdens describe flowers' functions and structures, pollination and seed dispersal methods, and close the book with descriptions of their favorite tropical flowers. The information is illustrated with intimate photographs of flowers and pollinators.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Animism in rainforest and tundra
Amazonia and Siberia, classic regions of shamanism, have long challenged 'western' understandings of man's place in the world. By exploring the social relations between humans and non-human entities credited with human-like personhood (not only animals and plants, but also 'things' such as artifacts, trade items, or mineral resources) from a comparative perspective, this volume offers valuable insights into the constitutions of humanity and personhood characteristic of the two areas. The contributors conducted their ethnographic fieldwork among peoples undergoing transformative processes of their lived environments, such as the depletion of natural resources and migration to urban centers. They describe here fundamental relational modes that are being tested in the face of change, presenting groundbreaking research on personhood and agency in shamanic societies and contributing to our global understanding of social and cultural change and continuity.
eBook
Wildscape : trilling chipmunks, beckoning blooms, salty butterflies, and other sensory wonders of nature
\"From Nancy Lawson, author of The Humane Gardener, an insightful and personal exploration of the vibrant web of nature outside our back door-where animals and plants perceive and communicate using marvelous sensory capabilities we are only beginning to understand\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
How forests think : toward an anthropology beyond the human
Can forests think? Do dogs dream? In this astonishing book, Eduardo Kohn challenges the very foundations of anthropology, calling into question our central assumptions about what it means to be human -- and thus distinct from all other life forms. Based on four years of fieldwork among the Runa of Ecuador's Upper Amazon, Eduardo Kohn draws on his rich ethnography to explore how Amazonians interact with the many creatures that inhabit one of the world's most complex ecosystems. Whether or not we recognize it, our anthropological tools hinge on those capacities that make us distinctly human. However, when we turn our ethnographic attention to how we relate to other kinds of beings, these tools (which have the effect of divorcing us from the rest of the world) break down. How Forests Think seizes on this breakdown as an opportunity. Avoiding reductionistic solutions, and without losing sight of how our lives and those of others are caught up in the moral webs we humans spin, this book skillfully fashions new kinds of conceptual tools from the strange and unexpected properties of the living world itself. In this groundbreaking work, Kohn takes anthropology in a new and exciting direction-one that offers a more capacious way to think about the world we share with other kinds of beings.
eBook
How do plants help us?
Discusses the physical characteristics of plants and describes some ways people use them.
Book
On Land and Sea
During the vast stretches of early geologic time, the
islands of the Caribbean archipelago separated from continental
land masses, rose and sank many times, merged with and broke
from other land masses, and then by the mid-Cenozoic period
settled into the current pattern known today. By the time
Native Americans arrived, the islands had developed complex,
stable ecosystems. The actions these first colonists took on
the landscape—timber clearing, cultivation, animal
hunting and domestication, fishing and exploitation of reef
species—affected fragile land and sea biotic communities
in both beneficial and harmful ways.
On Land and Sea examines the condition of biosystems
on Caribbean islands at the time of colonization, human
interactions with those systems through time, and the current
state of biological resources in the West Indies. Drawing on a
massive data set collected from long-term archaeological
research, the study reconstructs past lifeways on these small
tropical islands. The work presents a wide range of
information, including types of fuel and construction timber
used by inhabitants, cooking techniques for various shellfish,
availability and use of medicinal and ritual plants, the
effects on native plants and animals of cultivation and
domestication, and diet and nutrition of native
populations.
The islands of the Caribbean basin continue to be actively
excavated and studied in the quest to understand the earliest
human inhabitants of the New World. This comprehensive work
will ground current and future studies and will be valuable to
archaeologists, anthropologists, botanists, ecologists,
Caribbeanists, Latin American historians, and anyone studying
similar island environments.
eBook
Ethnobotany in the New Europe
The study of European wild food plants and herbal medicines is an old discipline that has been invigorated by a new generation of researchers pursuing ethnobotanical studies in fresh contexts. Modern botanical and medical science itself was built on studies of Medieval Europeans' use of food plants and medicinal herbs. In spite of monumental changes introduced in the Age of Discovery and Mercantile Capitalism, some communities, often of immigrants in foreign lands, continue to hold on to old recipes and traditions, while others have adopted and enculturated exotic plants and remedies into their diets and pharmacopoeia in new and creative ways. Now in the 21st century, in the age of the European Union and Globalization, European folk botany is once again dynamically responding to changing cultural, economic, and political contexts. The authors and studies presented in this book reflect work being conducted across Europe's many regions. They tell the story of the on-going evolution of human-plant relations in one of the most bioculturally dynamic places on the planet, and explore new approaches that link the re-evaluation of plant-based cultural heritage with the conservation and use of biocultural diversity.
eBook
Ingrained
Plants are fundamental players in human lives, underpinning our food supply and contributing to the air we breathe, but they are easy to take for granted and have received insufficient attention in the social sciences. This book advances understanding of human-plant relations using the example of wheat. Theoretically, this book develops new insights by bringing together human geography, biogeography and archaeology to provide a long term perspective on human-wheat relations. Although the relational, more-than-human turn in the social sciences has seen a number of plant-related studies, these have not yet fully engaged with the question of what it means to be a plant. The book draws on diverse literatures to tackle this question, advancing thinking about how plants act in their worlds, and how we can better understand our shared worlds. Empirically, the book reports original ethnographic research on wheat production, processing and consumption in a context of globalisation, drought and climate change and traces the complex networks of wheat using a methodology of 'following' it and its people. The ethnobotanical study captures a number of moments in the life of Australian wheat; on the farm, at the supermarket, in the lives of coeliac sufferers, in laboratories and in industrial factories. This study demands new ways of thinking about wheat geographies, going beyond the rural landscape to urban and industrial frontiers, and being simultaneously local and global in perspective and connection.
eBook