An ethnobotanist needs a stomach for menudo, as well as a passion for people and palms.
A simple taste test can measure the potential of budding ethnobotanists. The ethnobotany taste test begins with an unfamiliar restaurant’s menu.
Ethnobotanists study interactions between humans and the plants in their
environment—palm fronds woven into hats and baskets, toxic plants
domesticated into familiar foods such as potatoes, and the wild-harvested
medicines of Native American healers.
Some people will walk into a new restaurant and order the only thing on the menu they recognize—the “I like to know what I’m eating” camp. Others approach the same restaurant by choosing the only dish they’ve never tried before—the “I’ll always try something new” camp.
Elaine Joyal says that the more adventurous eaters—those who are willing and open to taste new foods—are more apt to be successful ethnobotanists. Joyal is an ethnobotanist and human ecologist at ASU West.
For example, Joyal prefers to avoid eating meat. One would think ethnobotany would be a great field for her. The botany part, with all the plants, is fine. The ethno, or people part, poses challenges.
Joyal hates menudo—the smell, the taste, not to mention the beef entrails and blood it contains—but she does fieldwork in rural Mexico. Her colleagues in ethnobotany, as well as anthropologists and other cultural researchers, know this means that when she’s in the field, she eats what the villagers in eastern Sonora are eating—menudo.
“I would be a fool, in the work I do, to not eat whatever is put in front
of me,” Joyal says. “You immediately separate yourself from the people
you’re trying to work with if you say ‘I’m sorry. I’m a
vegetarian.’
“In fieldwork, you want to break down barriers. You speak the language as
best you can. You try to fit in and not have people feel you think you’re
better than them.”
As a result, Joyal has eaten more unusual foods than the average
gringa—fried grasshoppers and corn smut in Mexico, iguana eggs in Nicaragua,
cuy (or guinea pigs) with fried potatoes in Peru.
The food adventures are a byproduct of her research. For the past seven years,
Joyal has studied the use of palm trees, Sabal uresana, by Indian and mestizo
villagers in the Mexican state of Sonora.
“The people I’m seeking out tend to be the poorest people in the
community,” she says. “Because they are so poor, they most need to
extract resources from the desert, woods, and countryside.”
Joyal travels to remote Sierra Madre villages, which rarely see Anglos, to
harvest palms alongside the residents. She interviews the women who weave the
leaves into hats, baskets, and mats, as well as the men who use the fronds to
thatch roofs and make brooms. Joyal examines how the palm workers affect the
growth of trees and how the palms enrich the lives of the
people.
Several times each year, Joyal makes the 15-hour drive from the Arizona desert
south to Mexico’s Sierra Madres. She rumbles along in her 1984 Mazda B-2000
pickup truck complete with camper top, standard transmission, and no air
conditioning. The truck bears scars from fieldwork—a bull “gored”
one fender and a cattle truck backed over the hood and scrunched in a door.
Because buses in Mexico usually drop passengers on main roads, leaving them to
walk to their more remote homes, Joyal and her blue truck often are flagged down
by hitchhikers. In the villages, the hitchhikers return the favor by introducing
Joyal to weavers and other people who can help in her research.
Getting to the palms and people she needs to see can be a chore. Joyal’s
trek often continues in her truck over rutty roads, on a cattle truck to
roads’ end, on horses and mules along paths and across unbridged rivers, and
finally, on foot.
Once she and two native guides, one Mayo and one Guarihio, spent two days on
mules traveling to the remote village of Los Bajíos in southern Sonora.
Some months later, an ecologist reached the same village using all the above
means of transportation. He was greeted with, “You know Elena, don’t
you?”
“He was trying to figure out who Elena was,” Joyal says.
“Evidently I have somewhat of a reputation as the gringa who does fieldwork
alone.
“As difficult as fieldwork is, I think when you don’t have someone
else to rely on, it forces you to interact with people more. And in my case,
because I’m female, it allows them to accept me more readily.”
It helps that driving into a new village and asking for weavers is not as
off-putting as, “Take me to your shaman.” Palms are less controversial
than peyote.
“I chose the palms because they were an important resource in the local
economy and because palm species are widespread and heavily utilized throughout
the tropics,” she explains. “I could have gone anywhere and used any
resource.”
Joyal’s basic research question involves traditional ecological
knowledge, what is sometimes mistakenly called common sense. She wants to know
how that knowledge is used to manage wild-harvested resources, such as palms.
“I was interested in testing this idea. Exactly what do traditional
people—people who aren’t trained in a Western scientific
tradition—know about natural history and ecology,” she says. “What
do they understand about resource management, and who knows what information?
“If you’re walking down the street and someone nearby gets hit by a
car, let’s hope a bystander has learned CPR or basic first aid. More often,
the injured person will need a paramedic or medical doctor,” Joyal
continues. “Yet we often have this naive assumption that we can go into any
village anywhere in the world and talk to anyone and that they will have all this
knowledge. Some knowledge is general, but much of it is specialized.”
Joyal interviewed mestizos, Guarihios, and Mountain Pimas to find out what
they understood about palms. Their knowledge may have been passed down from
previous generations or learned by observing nature. Some had answers to
Joyal’s questions, some did not, and others offered conflicting or partial
information.
In addition to the interviews, Joyal watched the palm workers at harvest. She
measured their yield and joined in the work. She asked lots of questions: which
trees to harvest, which leaves to cut, whether the moon or season was right for
harvesting, and when to stop cutting to avoid damaging the
palms.
Also during trips to Mexico, Joyal examined palm populations. She drew on
experience in assessing and inventorying plants from her years working for the
Bureau of Land Management and the Nature Conservancy. One rancher gave her carte
blanche to measure and harvest the palms on land where he had previously
forbidden harvesting.
“I not only wanted to test who knew what, but I wanted to test whether
they were managing their resource well,” Joyal says. “In order to do
that I had to do ecological work, including experimental harvests and computer
modeling, and then figure out how to merge the information.”
In the end, Joyal found that palm workers understood how to manage their
resources for weaving and thatching. However, not everyone in the villages knew
how to harvest the palms in a manner that would provide raw materials while
conserving the trees.
“There is a real double standard because people will admire a person for
really understanding the out-of-doors—where to harvest, what and how to
harvest,” Joyal says. “Then on the other hand you have so much pressure
to become acculturated and successful according to American standards.
“A lot of traditional knowledge, because it isn’t taught in school,
doesn’t get valued properly. It’s considered, in hindsight, to be
common sense because it’s known and practiced by the least educated and
poorest segment of society.”—Melissa D. Olson
