Viewpoints to consider ...Issues to explore

As I argued in the opening editorial, ethnobotanical research draws upon all the senses. The following excerpts develop this theme further. The first two pieces discuss the role of the senses in our perception of the world, and the final two are reflections of natural historians who put this concept into practice. All together, they present a case for rediscovering a natural history that emphasizes holism and harmony. /GJM

A natural history of the senses

Smell

Flowers have scents and bright colors as sex attractants; leaves have aromatic defenses against predators. Most of the spices, whose heady aromas we are drawn to, repel insects and animals. We are enjoying the plant’s war machine. As one quickly learns in the Amazon rain forest, there is nothing wimpy about a plant. Because trees can’t move to court each other or to defend themselves, they’ve become ingenious and aggressive about their survival … One night a year, in the Bahamas, the Selenicereus cactus flowers ache into bloom, conduct their entire sex lives, and vanish by morning. For several days beforehand, the cactuses develop large pregnant pods. Then one night, awakened by a powerful smell of vanilla, you know what has happened. The entire moonlit yard is erupting in huge, foot-wide flowers. Hundreds of sphinx moths rush from one flower to another. The air is full of the baying of dogs, the loud fluttering of the moths that sounds like someone riffling through a large book, and the sense-drenching vanilla nectar of the flowers, which disappear at dawn, leaving the cactuses sated for another year.

Touch

Our skin is what stands between us and the world. If you think about it, no other part of us makes contact with something not us but the skin. It imprisons us, but it also gives us individual shape, protects us from invaders, cools us down or heats us up as need be, produces vitamin D, holds in our body fluids. Most amazing, perhaps, is that it can mend itself when necessary, and it is constantly renewing itself. Weighing from six to ten pounds, it’s the largest organ of the body, and the key organ of sexual attraction. Skin can startling variety of shapes: claws, spines, hooves, feathers, scales, hair. It's waterproof, washable, and elastic. Although it may cascade or roam as we grow older, it lasts surprisingly well. For most cultures, it’s the ideal canvas to decorate with paints,tattoos and jewelry. But, most of all, it harbors the sense of touch.

Taste

[O]mnivores are anxious eaters. They must continually test new foods to see if they’re palatable and nutritious, running the risk of inadvertently poisoning themselves. They must take chances on new flavors, and, doing so, they frequently acquire a taste for something offbeat that, though nutritious, isn't the sort of thing that might normally appeal to them - chili peppers(which Columbus introduced to Europe), tobacco, alcohol, coffee, artichokes, or mustard, for instance. When we were hunter-gatherers, we ate a great variety of foods. Some of us still do, but more often we add spices to what we know, or find at hand, for variety, as we like to say. Monotony isn’t our code.

Hearing

Leonardo da Vinci once suggested dipping an into the water and listening, with oneand ’s ear against its handle. Fishermen in West Africa also in the South Seas discovered the same trick. Using the oar as a kind of listening straw, you can hear the sounds of the underwater world. Some fish are a noisy lot. Sea robins, drum-fishes and many others make sounds with their swim bladders; croakers grunt loud enough to keep China Sea fishermen awake at night; Hawaiian triggerfish grind their teeth loudly; the male toadfish growls; bottlenose dolphins click and squeak like badly oiled office chairs; bowhead whales purr and twirp; humpback whales put on a songfest. The ocean looks mute, but is alive with sounds from animals, breaking waves, tidal scouring, ship traffic, and nomadic storms, locked within the atmosphere of water as our sounds are within the atmosphere of air.

Vision

Of the many ways to watch the sky, one of the most familiar is through the filigree limbs of a tree, or around and above trees; this has much to do with how we actually see and observe the sky. Trees conduct the eye from the ground up to the heavens, link the detailed temporariness of life with the bulging blue abstraction overhead. In Norse legend, the huge ash tree Yggdrasil, with its great arching limbs and three swarming roots, stretched high into the sky, holding the universe together, connecting earth to both heaven and hell. Mythical animals and demons dwelt in the tree; at one of its roots lay the well of Mimir, the source of all wisdom, from which the god Odin drank in order to become wise, even though it cost him the loss of an eye. We find trees offering us knowledge in many of the ancient stories and legends, perhaps because they alone seem to unite the earth and the sky - the known, invadable world with everything that is beyond our grasp and our power.

Synesthesia

The stimulation of one sense stimulates another: synesthesia is the technical name, from the Greek syn (together) + aisthanesthai (to perceive). A thick garment of perception is woven thread by overlapping thread. A similar word is synthesis, in which the garment of thought is woven together idea by idea, and which originally referred to the light muslin clothing worn by the ancient Romans.

Daily life is a constant onslaught on one’s perceptions, and everyone experiences some intermingling of the senses. According to Gestalt psychologists, when people are asked to relate a list of nonsense words to shapes and colors they identify certain sounds with certain shapes in ways that fall into clear patterns. What’s more surprising is that this is true whether they are from the United States, England, the Mahali peninsula, or Lake Tanganyika … A certain amount of synesthesia is built into our senses. If one wished to create instant synesthesia, a dose of mescaline or hashish would do nicely by exaggerating the neural connections between the senses.

Ackerman, D. 1990. A Natural History of the Senses. New York, Random House. Republished in paperback in 1995 by Vintage Books. Poet and writer Diane Ackerman dedicates a chapter to each sense – and a final chapter to speak of the interaction of the senses – in a popular book that amply covers the history of perception.

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The spell of the sensuous: philosophy on the way to ecology

My life and the world’s life are deeply intertwined; when I wake up one morning to find that a week-long illness has subsided and that my strength has returned, the world, when I step outside, fairly sparkles with energy and activity: swallows are swooping by in vivid flight; waves of heat rise from the newly paved road smelling strongly of tar; the old red barn across the field juts into the sky at an intense angle. Likewise, when a haze descends upon the valley in which I dwell, it descends upon my awareness as well, muddling my thoughts, making my muscles yearn for sleep. The world and I reciprocate one another. The landscape as I directly experience it is hardly a determinate object; it is an ambiguous realm that responds to my emotions and calls forth feelings from me in turn. Even the most detached scientist must begin and end her study in this indeterminate field of experience, where shifts of climate or mood may alter his experiment or her interpretation of “the data” … Indeed, it is precisely from his experience in this preconceptual and hence ambiguous world that an individual is first drawn to become a scientist, to adopt the ways of speaking and seeing that are acknowledged as appropriate by the scientific community, to affect the proper disinterested or objective attitude with regard to a certain range of natural events. The scientist does not randomly choose a specific discipline or specialty, but is drawn to a particular field by a complex of subjective experiences and encounters, many of which unfold far from the laboratory and its rarefied atmosphere. Further, the scientist never completely succeeds in making himself into a pure spectator of the world, for he cannot cease to live in the world as a human among other humans, or as a creature among other creatures, and his scientific concepts and theories necessarily borrow aspects of their character and texture from his untheorized, spontaneously lived experience.

Indeed, the ostensibly “value-free” results of our culture’s investigations into biology, physics, and chemistry ultimately come to display themselves in the open and uncertain field of everyday life, whether embedded in social policies with which we must come to terms or embodied in new technologies with which we all must grapple. Thus, the living world – this ambiguous realm that we experience in anger and joy, in grief and in love – is both the soil in which all our sciences are rooted and the rich humus into which their results ultimately return, whether as nutrients or as poisons. Our spontaneous experience of the world, charged with subjective, emotional, and intuitive content, remains the vital and dark ground of all our objectivity.

And yet this ground goes largely unnoticed or unacknowledged in scientific culture. In a society that accords priority to that which is predictable and places a premium on certainty, our spontaneous, preconceptual experience, when acknowledged at all, is referred to as “merely subjective.” The fluid realm of direct experience has come to be seen as a secondary, derivative dimension, a mere consequence of events unfolding in the “realer” world of quantifiable and measurable scientific “facts.” It is a curious inversion of the actual, demonstrable state of affairs. Subatomic quanta are now taken to be more primordial and “real” than the world we experience with our unaided senses. The living, feeling, and thinking organism is assumed to derive, somehow, from the mechanical body whose reflexes and “systems” have been measured and mapped, the living person now an epiphenomenon of the anatomized corpse. That it takes living, sensing subjects, complete with their enigmatic emotions and unpredictable passions, to conceive of those subatomic fields, or to dissect and anatomize the body, is readily overlooked, or brushed aside as inconsequential.

Nevertheless, the ambiguity of experience is already a part of any phenomenon that draws our attention. For whatever we perceive is necessarily entwined with our own subjectivity, already blended with the dynamism of life and sentinence. The living pulse of subjective experience cannot finally be stripped from the things that we study (in order to expose the pure unadulterated “objects”) without the things themselves losing all existence to us. Such conundrums are commonly consigned to psychology, to that science that studies subjective awareness and perception. And so perhaps by turning to psychology we can expect to find a recognition and avowal of the pre-objective dimension that permeates and sustains every reality that we know, and hence an understanding of the manner in which subjective experience both supports and sets the limit to the positive sciences.

In psychology, however, we discover nothing of the sort. Instead, we find a discipline that is itself modeled on the positivism of the “hard” sciences, a science wherein the psyche has itself been reified into an “object,” a thing to be studied like any other thing in the determinate, objective world. Much of cognitive science strives to model the computational processes that ostensibly underlie mental experience. While for Galileo and Descartes perceptual qualities like color and taste were illusory, unreal properties because of their ambiguous and indeterminate character, mathematical indices have at last been found for these qualities as well, or rather such qualities are now studied only to the extent that they can be rendered, by whatever means of translation, into quantities. Here as elsewhere, the everyday world – the world of our direct, spontaneous experience – is still assumed to derive from an impersonal, objective dimension of pure “facts” that we glimpse only through our instruments and equations.

Abram, D. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York, Pantheon Books. Ecologist and philosopher David Abram, in an exploration of our senses and the sentient earth, speaks of the interrelationship of people, language and the natural world.

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The durian

Fruit of wild species of durian (Durio kinabaluensis, Bombacaceae), harvested in the forest of Kiau, a Dusun community near Kinabalu Park, Sabah, Malaysia.

The durian is held by many to be the most excellent fruit of the Indies, but since newcomers are averse to it for a long time because of its heavy odor, such judgment is not universal. The tree is very tall, nay among the edible fruit-bearing trees the very tallest. Its crown is not dense but sparse, nevertheless it has spreading branches; the trunk is angular at the bottom and looks as if winged, with a bark of an even gray veering towards yellow which, among other things, is distinctive of this tree.The leaves have an ordinary shape, not unlike those of a cherry tree, though the edges are not notched at all, and therefore resemble the leaves of the nutmeg tree.

They are half a span long, two inches wide, on top smooth and bright green, and on the underside of a faded color or like that of a rough brick; the stems or feet of these leaves have also a singular character which one does not find with other trees: for they look swollen and at the end they have a shape resembling a knee.

Its bloom consists of large flowers on thick stems hanging close together in a cluster, but not on the twigs which bear the leaves but on thin and thicker branches close to the trunk: clusters on the thin branches have five to eight flowers, but the thicker ones bear clusters of from twelve to thirty. Each bud is covered with two or three pale-green and concave little leaves which are shed as soon as the blossom is full grown. The flower itself is also remarkable, its lower part resembling a silver salt-cellar or also like the spittoon ordinarily used when eating Pinang, with below a round stomach in the shape of a heart that comes to a narrow neck and then suddenly opens up again into a wide mouth formed by five little leaves, containing five spoon-shaped leaves standing so close to the salt-cellar mentioned before that they seem to form a body with it … The smell of this bloom is heavy and not pleasant, and the same thing must be said of the fruits, even those which have not been opened yet. And although so many flowers hang together only three or five come to perfection, or at most ten or twelve on a cluster, to wit those on the heaviest branches, while many of the young fruits are destroyed by parrots.

The fruits are round globes, about the size of small man’s head, and shaped like a curled-up hedgehog; some are round and some are oblong with a thick and hard, though not a wooden, rind which is covered with thorny and stiff points that are as angular as diamonds cut long and pointed. They do not wound unless one presses hard against them

A drawing of Rumphius (George Everard Rumpf) taken from The Poison Tree © Oxford University Press

On the outside they are yellow-green and hang from their thick stems. Each globe can be opened lengthwise, and if one looks for the seams with a knife, one can separate it into five pieces, but since the seams may be difficult to find one can also kick it with the foot until it splits; and if they won’t do this they are then considered not ripe yet. Within this thick and thorny husk are five little rooms or cells containing two, three or four kernels which look a little like dove’s eggs and are of a substance like a Chestnut; these kernels are encompassed by a white and viscous meat and clothed in a thin fleece which effects that they do not stick to each other. And it is this meat (very much like as to the cream of milk, or also not unlike Mangjar Blanco, which are egg custards) that is most important and what is eaten of this fruit, by sucking it off these kernels

.. The taste is mild or somewhat luscious, and not unlike those egg custards, but the smell is quite nasty and unpleasant for the newcomers to the Indies and for those who are not used to them, because it comes close to the smell of rotting onions; which smell is also given off by the whole fruits even if they have not been opened, and it can fill an entire house with it. But as unpleasant the smell may be, the taste, on the contrary, is a dainty one …Its wood is white on the outside but inside it tends toward a russet color; furthermore, it is made of long fibers, is straight, firm and durable, wherefore the Natives use it for the masts of their ships, and our own people have now also come to imitate them because these are handsome, tall and straight trunks. One does not climb these trees to get the ripe fruits but let them fall down on their own, because it is too perilous, and also from fear that someone might have one of these heavy fruits fall on his head.

Beekman, E.M., editor and translator. 1993. The Poison Tree: Selected Writings of Rumphius on the Natural History of the Indies. Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press. Published as part of the remarkable series of Oxford in Asia Paperbacks, Beekman’s biographical sketch and selection of writings bring Rumphius a measure of the recognition that he deserves.

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Footsteps in the jungle: Alexander von Humboldt

Alexander von Humboldt landed in the New World at the age of twenty-nine, when life appeared to him a “boundless horizon.” The only abnormalities he suffered from were an overabundance of physical energy – something like what we would now call hyperactivity – and an insatiable scientific curiosity that drove him to take tropical America’s measurements. Before Lewis and Clark had yet explored the interior of North America, Humboldt faced a southern continent not significantly better known than in Columbus’s day. It was not only that large parts of the landmass had never been described by a scientific traveler; the physical structures of the globe itself were either unknown or poorly understood. All existing maps of the American hemisphere, for example, were wrong, based on faulty astronomical readings, making the ships Humboldt took during his five-year excursion invariably off course and several hours late …

The science of geology did not exist. Paleontology was primitive. The climate was poorly understood – especially its influence on plant and animal life. In Europe they were still trying to classify American species. The Indian nations of Spanish America, from the Aztecs in Mexico to the Incas in Peru, were not considered a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry, and so the study of antiquaries and ancient sites, known as archaeology, which has yielded so much information on the human past, also did not exist.

The pattern of colonial settlement fell almost entirely on the coastal plains of tropical America, so little was actually known about the huge interior of the Americas in the Tropical Zone. No Europeans had found the sources of the Orinoco, let alone the Amazon. None had climbed the Andes or the many volcanoes of the Pacific Rim. The continent under the Southern Cross lay unexplored. The tropical jungles were only the stuff of myths and legends. European scientific ideas about the New World were based on such misnomers – like the ludicrous notion of Buffon that the heat and humidity rendered American plants and animals inferior to European ones. Buffon himself had never, of course, set foot in the Americas.

The scientific canvas available for Humboldt in tropical America was broad indeed, and he came with a full palette and a master’s skills. Born in 1769, the son of a Prussian officer and a cold mother he never got on with, Humboldt grew up at the height of the Age of Reason and had been educated in, or studied himself, nearly every branch of the natural sciences – from mining engineering (his college major) to physics, surveying, astronomy, botany, mathematics, and medicine. He was pickled in the universalist and encyclopedic ideas of the French philosophers; the democratic principles of Thomas Jefferson; the free-market liberalism of Adam Smith; and the romanticism of his German friends Goethe and Schiller. His interests were eclectic (he had performed, for example, experiments to study electricity by attaching wires to his own body and sending a current through his back muscles), his mind wide open, his love of the natural world absolutely devoted. From earliest youth Humboldt had been such an ardent collector of flowers, butterflies, insects, and so forth that his family sneered and nicknamed him “the little apothecary.” As a boy he had studied maps of distant and exotic continents, taking, as he put it, “a pronounced sensual pleasure” in their shapes and forms, filling his being with a classic eighteenth-century wanderlust “to travel to distant regions where Europeans have seldom visited.”

Humboldt also brought to America a kit of scientific instruments that could have turned Columbus into Galileo. It was without question to that time the most complete mobile geoscience lab of scientific instruments assembled for measuring, gauging, testing, recording, surveying, mapping, collecting, counting, probing, tickling, sensing, and viewing American nature in all her tropical splendor…

At every point Humboldt tirelessly measured, collected, surveyed, took readings, notated, mapped, sounded, and drew landscapes. At every turn he sought positive knowledge with that special Cartesian craving to understand how things work that we now associate with the late eighteenth century. Many years later, one of the hundreds of local Indian guides Humboldt employed during his travels told a biographer that this German, who spoke flawless Spanish and numerous Indian dialects, was not as intelligent as everyone seemed to think. Otherwise why did he have to keep asking so many questions about things that every simpleton knew – the names of rivers and mountains and plants? Probably due to a weak memory, the informant said, Humboldt had to write everything down in a small book …In his final work, Cosmos, written when he was in his eighties, Humboldt wrote of the link between region and culture, between environment and human history. “The influence of nature’s physical traits on the moral nature of people, the secretive mutual interaction of sensual and super-sensual,” he wrote, “lends to nature studies a special challenge as yet unappreciated.”

Maslow, J. 1996. Footsteps in the Jungle: Adventures in the Scientific Exploration of the American Tropics. Chicago, Ivan R Dee. Journalist Jonathan Maslow provides biographical profiles of thirteen explorers of the New World Tropics, ranging from Alexander von Humboldt to Daniel Janzen.

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