ASU Research E-Magazine: It's Not Easy Being An Ethnobotanist, Uh, Green

When Kermit the Frog warbles, “It’s not easy being green,” ethnobotanists might be hearing their song. It’s not easy being an ethnobotanist.

“Many people think ethnobotany is about going to the Amazon and hanging out with a shaman,” says Elaine Joyal, an ethnobotanist and human ecologist at ASU West. “While that is one of the things an ethnobotanist would do, it’s so much more. There’s a lot of misleading information in the press.”

Bookstore shelves swell with titles devoted to plants’ healing powers, but the validity of many publications remains questionable.

“Some are really good, and some are this New Age stuff where everybody wants to have some mystical experience and get close to nature,” Joyal says.

Ethnobotany is a broader and more consequential endeavor. It involves the plants we eat, the fibers we wear, the herbal extracts in our medicines, the trees in buildings that shelter us, and even the flowers we cultivate and cut to beautify our homes.

“It’s looking at all the ways we interact with plants in our environment,” Joyal says.

Unfortunately, the challenges of being an ethnobotanist do not end with popular misconceptions. It has not been easy for ethnobotanists to find a home in the scientific community.

“Ethnobotany has long been the bastard child of botany and anthropology, both claiming an interest in it, and both believing that the other should fund it,” Joyal says.

The study of people and plants has worldwide significance. Ethnobotany involves deserts surrounding cities, forests circling towns, grasslands and wetlands bordering farms and ranches, and rain forests giving way to development—everywhere civilization touches the plant kingdom.

“With the human population growing so fast and resources being depleted and cultures being assimilated and species disappearing, anytime a good conservation project gets started, people know you have to do more than straight ecology. You have to think about ethnobotany, economics, and working with the local cultures,” Joyal says.

“Many recognize that ethnobotany has value, but one of the problems of interdisciplinary work is getting academic institutions to commit scarce resources—new faculty lines—to it. They should just admit the obvious: Ethnobotany is a growth area.”

Yet, if you aren’t already an ethnobotanist, it can be hard to become one. Joyal knows firsthand the difficulties involved in finding teachers and mentors. Her doctoral dissertation committee at ASU consisted of a botanist, a conservation biologist, an ecologist and an anthropologist. She tapped two ethnobotanists from Universidad Nacional Autúnoma de México for expertise otherwise missing at ASU.

Since completing her Ph.D., Joyal has founded a weekly discussion group for graduate students interested in ethnobotany. Associate Professor Dennis Clark of the Botany Department along with several faculty members from anthropology—Michael Winkelman, Elizabeth Brandt, Ann Hedlund, and Katherine Spielmann—also mentor the apprentice ethnobotanists.

Corrie Platt, who is looking at graduate programs in conservation biology and ethnobotany, is among the students in Joyal’s discussion group.

“As an undergraduate in botany, I knew what I wanted to do. I found out it had a name, ethnobotany, when I saw someone with a book from one of Elaine’s classes,” Platt says.

Joyal’s courses include Economic Botany, Ethnobotany, Flora of Arizona, and the Biology of the Human Experience, which looks at human behavior, genetics, diet, and ecology as other classes might look at the evolution of any animal species.

One project growing out of Joyal’s ethnobotany group recently had Chris Makosky, a graduate student in medical anthropology, visiting the White Mountain Apache Reservation. Joyal and the Indian community are discussing a collaborative study of plants significant to Apache culture—foods such as piñon nuts and agave (or century plants), and weaving materials including sotol and beargrass.

“Given that we live in the Southwest, biologically and culturally we have an incredible amount of diversity,” Joyal says. “This is an ideal place to do ethnobotany in the United States.”—Melissa D. Olson