Interviews

Professor Sir Ghillean T. Prance

Former Director of Research at the New York Botanical Garden – where he started the Institute of Economic Botany – and now Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew – where there is a Centre for Economic Botany – Professor Sir Ghillean T. Prance is widely known for his studies of the ethnobotany, ecology and systematics of tropical plants. Additional perspectives on his life and research can be found in a biography that appeared a few years ago: Langmead, C. 1995. A Passion for Plants: from the Rainforest of Brazil to Kew Gardens. Oxford, Lion Publishing. Contact: Professor Sir Ghillean T. Prance, Director, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Richmond, Surrey TW9 3AB, UK; Tel. +44.181.3325112, Fax +44.181.9484237, E-mail g.prance@rbgkew.org.uk Website www.kew.org.uk/GJM

GJM: In the 1980s, when you were Director of Research at New York Botanical Gardens, you innovated the approach of using ecological plots in ethnobotanical studies. Can you tell me how you developed this idea?
GTP: Yes, I originally developed it through conversations with Bob Carneiro, anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History. Bob had some data from transects he had done with two groups of Indians in Brazil, including one in the Xingu Park, and the Yanomami. He had come to see me, because that is a group I had worked with also. I thought these were really useful data, but it was a pity that we didn’t really know what the plants were, because he had recorded just the Indian names. We decided that we should try to do something like this more scientifically. So he and I came up with the idea of actually laying out some plots amongst indigenous peoples and doing what we subsequently termed quantitative ethnobotany. We furthermore had a suitable person to do it as a post-doctoral study, Linda Glenboski. She had done a study of the Tikuna Indians in Colombia and was at that time free.

We applied to the US National Science Foundation for a grant to do this. We sent it to the systematic section and they said “No, this is anthropology”. We reapplied to anthropology and they said, “No, this is systematics, this is botany”. So it fell between the cracks and we were very disappointed because by that time Linda had to take another job and we had lost the opportunity to work with her. We actually tried three times with NSF and failed, so we abandoned the idea. A few years later – when I had set up the Institute of Economic Botany at the New York Botanical Garden – the president, James Hester, put me in touch with a foundation that seemed interested in ethnobotanical research.

I phoned Bob Carneiro and said, “Bob, should we try this proposal?” We did and they agreed to fund it. And out of that we were to appoint Brian Boom as a postdoctoral researcher. He did the first quantitative inventory with the Chácobo Indians in Bolivia and the second one with the Panare Indians in Venezuela.

GJM: Apart from these initial studies by Brian Boom, what were some of the other projects in which you first used this approach?
GTP: There were two other projects that I instigated to do this. The first one involved employing another post-doctoral researcher at the New York Botanical Garden, Bill Balée – now at Tulane University – and getting him to use the approach with various tribes in the Southwest Amazon, the Ka’apoor Indians in Maranhão and the Tembe Indians, principally. He actually did quantitative work with three different tribes. The other project was carried out by Katy Milton, an anthropologist who is now at the University of California at Berkeley. I had nothing directly to do with the financing, and it wasn’t a New York Botanical Garden program, but we discussed the approach and set her off to do exactly the same thing so we would get more data from more tribes. So she did some quantitative ethnobotany in the upper Amazon. We quickly compiled the data from quite a large number of tribes. The same story came out time and time again, that they really used a large proportion of the plants in whatever habitat we were studying. It began to quantify what conservationists had been saying all along, that the forest was important and that the local people relied on a lot of plants, but it had never been quantified before.

GJM: The early projects were all carried out in Latin America and the approach was most widely used there particularly in the 1980s. Do you know if this approach is being used in other areas such as Africa and Asia?
GTP: I believe it is beginning to be used in more areas now. I think even more important is the fact that it was refined and made mathematically more sound by work that Oliver Phillips and Al Gentry did in the Peruvian Amazon. I think that was actually the next step forward that I was very pleased about, that had developed out the approach. But you probably know more about how it is being applied in Africa and in Southeast Asia.

GJM: Yes, there are a few experiences in Africa and Asia, but ethnobotanical plots are particularly popular in Latin America. The Smithsonian Man and the Biosphere plots that have been set up mostly in Latin America and the Caribbean always have an ethnobotanical component, don’t they?
GTP: That’s right. Here at Kew we had William Milliken, who I hired. I continued to develop the idea in Latin America by obtaining a grant for him to continue his work with the Waimiri Atroari Indians. He did quantitative plots with them, which was particularly interesting because when he carried out the study, they were a very recently contacted group of Indians. So that was an important application of it because most of the other groups we worked with had been in contact with Western civilization for a much longer time than the Waimiri Atroari.

GJM: One of the important aspects of ecological plots is that they can be compared across regions. That is what you did in the early work on quantitative ethnobotany in Latin America, and the results were published in Conservation Biology. Do you know if there has been any attempt since that article to draw upon additional plots and to do a broader comparison?
GTP: Not that I know of, and it is something that I would really like to get involved in eventually. After starting the quantitative approach, I became Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and I don’t do very much field research. But I have been doing things like getting people such as William Milliken to collect more data. I had another student – I was on his thesis committee – who has done a great deal more work in Peru, Miguel Alexiades [and who just finished his Ph.D. in the joint program between the New York Botanical Garden and the City University of New York]. He has done quite a lot of very detailed work, which is excellent, because he spent so long with the Indians. The other one who I am supervising is James Cominsky of the Smithsonian Man and the Biosphere project that you mentioned. He is doing his doctorate at London University together with Barry Goldsmith, an ecologist. We have lots of data now, and what I think would really be good is if we could get plots set up in other places. There is only one other that I know of, that I have been involved in Africa, and that was in Gabon.

GJM: Another one of the important aspects of ecological plots is that they allow for long-term monitoring. This is an important element in understanding climate change and many ecological parameters. In ethnobotany, is long-term monitoring developing as an important aspect of quantitative studies in ecological plots?
GTP: It should be, but it hasn’t been developed nearly enough. There are two projects in which I think the research is long-term. One is in Peru, where the studies that Miguel Alexiades has carried out include long-term monitoring in plots, from the original basic botanical work to the ethnobotanical work on the plots that were set up.

Professor Sir Ghillean Prance examining Xanthosoma leaves (Araceae). Right: Prance posing in front of Victoria amazonica (Nymphaeaceae) water lilies growing in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Photos: Andrew McRobb, © RBG, Kew.

The other one is the one you have already cited – the Smithsonian Man and the Biosphere work in Bolivia and other countries. In those two cases, the ethnobotany has been longer term. I have been involved in long-term ecological plot work quite a lot in the Amazon, but separated from ethnobotanical studies. I had a post-doctoral researcher who worked with me on this for several years who has continued it, fortunately, over the years. He is David Campbell, who is now at Grinell University. But I think that long-term ethnobotanical monitoring is a very logical and important next step because it would be very interesting to do ethnobotanical studies in plots with different generations. An experiment that I wanted to do – but I have not had the time to do yet – is to go out to the plots with three generations from the same indigenous group and see what information one gets from the grandfather, the father and young people. I think that one would be documenting some of the acculturation of local people. That is a study that someone needs to do.

Selected References

Balée, W. 1994. Footprints of the Forest. Ka’apor Ethnobotany – the Historical Ecology of Plant Utilization by an Amazonian People. New York, Columbia University Press.
Boom, B. 1989. Use of plant resources by the Chacobó. Advances in Economic Botany 7:78-96.
Campbell, D.G. 1989. Quantitative inventory of tropical forests. Pages 523-533 in D.G. Campbell and H.D. Hammond, editors, Floristic Inventory of Tropical Countries. New York, The New York Botanical Garden.
Phillips, O. and A.H. Gentry. 1993a. The useful plants of Tambopata, Peru. I. Statistical hypotheses tests with a new quantitative technique. Economic Botany 47:15-32.
Phillips, O. and A.H. Gentry. 1993b. The useful plants of Tambopata, Peru. I. Additional hypotheses testing in quantitative ethnobotany. Economic Botany 47:33-43.
Prance, G.T., W. Balée, B.M. Boom and R.L. Carneiro. 1987. Quantitative ethnobotany and the case for conservation in Amazonia. Conservation Biology 1:296-310.

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Jan Salick

Jan Salick, Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental and Plant Biology, Ohio University, has criss-crossed the tropics to carry out ethnobotanical research. Trained in ecology, she draws on her background in plant and animal interactions when studying how people manage plants. In an interview conducted at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Jan discussed her views on how to apply ecological methods to ethnobotanical research. We later continued the interview by E-mail, allowing Jan to expand on her initial comments. Contact: Jan Salick, Dept. Environmental and Plant Biology, Porter Hall, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio 45701 USA; Tel. +1.740.5931122/1126, Fax +1.740.5931130, E-mail salick@ohiou.edu/ GJM

GJM: I know you are familiar with Professor Prance’s development of ethnobotanical hectare plots, since you have worked with him for many years. As an ecologist, what has been the importance for ethnobotany of this quantitative approach?
JS: For a time ethnobotany was a very subjective and descriptive field with the publication of long lists of plants used by various native groups of people around the world. Since that time, anthropologists have developed methods for analyzing ethnobotanical data, sometimes through linguistic classification. At the same time, Prance was a leader in developing methods to systematically collect, analyze and compare ethnobotanical plant data from a botanical point of view. For botanists, he is extremely influential in moving ethnobotany from description to scientific investigation. As a single major contribution, Prance’s hectare plot, which standardizes and quantifies ethnobotanical investigation, has had a major impact on the development of modern ethnobotany.

GJM: When we were giving a course together in Kinabalu Park [Sabah, Malaysia] in September 1997, you mentioned that quantitative ethnobotany can go beyond plots. What do you mean by this?
JS: When I said that we could expand ecological ethnobotany beyond plots, I meant two things. First, there are ways to use plots that we have not done yet. There is a lot of ecological data being generated from one hectare plots or even bigger plots in many places around the world. Steve Hubbell at Princeton has 50-hectare plots where he and his colleagues are looking at production rates, turnover rates and other ecological processes and ecosystem studies.

Jan Slick and Amuesha shaman discussing non-timber forest products in the upper Peruvian Amazon basin. Photo: © Jan Salick.

If we take these ecological data and combine them with ethnobotanical data, it gives us the basis for assessing important variables like sustainable harvest and production levels. If we take quantitative plot data this step further, we would have all that much more information to use. Second, hectare plots are a subsection within the larger field of ecological ethnobotany. Plot methods and related techniques fall under what is called plant community ecology, in which we look at phytosociology, the association of plants within a forest.

But within ecology, there is a whole range of plant and animal interactions that go beyond community ecology all the way from ecological genetics at the micro level, up to global changes. I was trained in plant and animal interactions, and this approach can be applied equally to people and plant interactions – it works smoothly and beautifully.

GJM: You have coined the term ecological ethnobotany to describe your approach, and I understand that you are working on a book on the subject. How do you define ‘ecological ethnobotany’ in your work and writing?
JS: Oof! I’m not one for definitions. I’m more of a doer; here’s a recipe. Pick up any introductory plant ecology textbook and add people. Ask questions like how do people affect plant genetics; how do people affect plant populations, plant communities, ecosystems, landscapes, and global change? Use the varied theoretical framework already provided by ecology and the well-stocked toolbox of ecological methods. Discover how the multiple ways in which people affect plants – that is ecological ethnobotany.

GJM: In what countries and in what sort of projects have you been applying this quantitative approach to studies of people and plants?
JS: I think it can be applied almost everywhere. Recently, I have worked mostly in the Amazon and in Central America. I started out in Southeast Asia and have worked a bit in Africa. There is no limitation to it – it is a theoretical construct with methodological and analytical tools, rather than geographically situated. In the Amazon I worked with a group of indigenous people called the Amuesha, doing research on their influence on an incipient domesticate crop – Solanum sessiliflorum, basically a tropical tomato – of which there are wild and semi-domesticated varieties. These intercross and people select and nature selects in the opposite direction. There are ecological tools that are well developed for studying this sort of interaction. By doing reciprocal transplants and measuring selective pressures and gene flow in experimental regimes, I was able to model the whole process of human domestication as it occurs today. This gives much more detailed information than a purely theoretical approach where we have to guess at what has happened in the past. We can actually measure domestication in the field.What ecological ethnobotany allows us to do is set up a hypothesis and test it. It gives us methods for analysis. I think that it is very powerful for testing reality. And the results are often different from what you would expect – you often get surprising results. For the tropical tomato, I didn’t expect that the method of reproduction would be under selective pressure and yet it was. Many of the characteristics that people are interested in are maternally inherited. Had I been making a theoretical model without experimentation I wouldn’t have guessed that.

GJM: Your work on Solanum sessiliflorum is a good example of what you call the genetic level of ecological ethnobotany. What are some examples of the plant population and community levels of ecological ethnobotany in which you have been involved?
JS: In Central America, I have been working on non-timber forest products. My studies of their distribution and abundance within the tropical rainforests of the Atlantic lowland region were plant community analyses including the effects of logging and natural forest regeneration. The methods are borrowed directly from plant community ecology and Prance’s hectare plots – we had 14 comparative hectare plots. These studies showed clearly that non-timber forest products can be easily incorporated with natural forest management and that natural forest regeneration is capable of maintaining tropical diversity under management.Some species however were adversely affected by logging and among these was ipecac, a valuable medicinal plant of the tropical rainforest. So I set about doing a population ecology study of ipecac to determine a sustainable harvest level and its potential in cultivation. The results were dramatic in that its production in the wild is so slow that a sustainable harvest is nearly impossible. On the other hand, under shaded cultivation it flourishes and reproduces ten times faster. This is encouraging news for local farmers, but cautionary for conservationists, since producers will often cut down the understory of the tropical rainforest to cultivate beds of ipecac.These two studies used, first, plant community ecology and second, population ecology to address applied ethnobotany problems – a very straightforward process.

GJM: There is now an emphasis in ethnobotany on applying results, especially in conservation and community development projects. Are the methods and results of ecological ethnobotany within the grasp of communities – can they apply some of the techniques you use? Or if they cannot carry out the studies, can they use results of these studies for conservation and development in a practical way?
JS: Yes, absolutely, there are lots of practical ways in which they can be applied. In the case of the tropical tomato that I was talking about, I got as far as collecting recipes for it and writing a cookbook! This is an underexploited tropical crop with which we could do a tremendous amount for development. People all over the world, for example Nigerians, have been asking me for the seed. We have a long way to go in developing crops for the tropics and impoverished countries – this is a big issue. Much of my work has been done on very applied questions. In Central America, the research I mentioned was in collaboration with foresters working on natural forest management for sustainable harvest of wood. My work was focused on trying to supplement timber management with non-timber forest products. The approach is very much community-based: the knowledge was from the community and the benefits were for the community. For me, applied ecology led me into ethnobotany. We are fortunate to be able to work directly with people and have our work directly applied – it is not just theory.

GJM: Do you think that women are playing a special role in the development of ethnobotany?
JS: This one I can get my teeth into! Yes, of course, but I don’t think a lot of people appreciate the diversity of why. For a long time in studies of hunting and gathering, there was a distinct emphasis on hunting and sometimes fishing – men’s work. Slash-and-burn agriculture is described – slashing and burning – as men’s work. Women were often not interviewed because they were difficult to approach or it was taboo, but it is not so for another woman interviewing. Even when talking to men, the information I get is radically different than my male colleagues. How many medicinals do you find for birth control, abortion, hemorrhaging or menopause? I find many. Women are gardeners and curers the world over and their view of the forest, not centered on timbers and tall cylindrical trees, is significantly different than men’s. I’m sure our theoretical views may prove to be equally revolutionary for ethnobotany.

GJM: As a longtime member and current president of the Society of Economic Botany [SEB, see PPH 1:10], you have a good perspective on how ethnobotany has evolved over recent years. Do you have many colleagues who share your ecological approach to the field?
JS: The recent developments in ethnobotany are staggering. The field has taken off! Part of this is due to farsighted leaders like Professor Prance and another part is due to a real grassroots ground swell around the world. I’ve never seen anything like it. I went to Peru once to give a mundane professional talk on medicinal plants and 600 people showed up! I had to change the talk, improvise a good bit, as well as give it in Spanish since few in the audience were the English-speaking professionals I was expecting. People are convinced ethnobotany is relevant to their life today. Plants are important to people. We need to encourage the interest in ethnobotany at all levels: popular, student and professional interest. Additionally, we need to encourage the diversity of approaches that are proliferating: botanical, ecological, anthropological, geographical, and particularly the approaches that come through development and conservation. I am not the type of person to stand up and say ecological ethnobotany is the only way. We are all inspired by the diversity and creativity of the proliferating approaches. On the other hand, ecological ethnobotany has many proponents advancing a multitude of issues at various levels of analyses. Ecological ethnobotany is proving to be a very powerful approach.

Selected References

Salick, J. 1989. Ecological basis of Amuesha agriculture. Advances in Economic Botany 7:189-212.
Salick, J. and M. Lundberg 1990. Variation and change in Amuesha indigenous agricultural systems. Advances in Economic Botany 8:199-223.
Salick, J. 1992. Crop domestication and the evolutionary ecology of cocona (Solanum sessiliflorum Dunal). Evolutionary Biology 26: 247-285.
Salick, J. 1995a. Non-timber forest products integrated with natural forest management. Ecological Applications 5: 922-954.
Salick, J. 1995b. Toward an integration of evolutionary ecology and economic botany: personal perspectives on plant/people interactions. Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 82: 68-85.
Salick, J., N. Cellinese, and S. Knapp, 1997. Indigenous diversity of cassava: generation, maintenance, use and loss among the Amuesha, Peruvian Upper Amazon. Economic Botany 51: 6-19.

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