Placating the thunder-being with the smells of plants For the Batek, a lowland rainforest-dwelling hunting and gathering group of Peninsular Malaysia, plants are necessary to everyday life. They are also greatly loved for their beauty and smells, are understood to be sentient, and to have unique kinds of personhood.    Holding a flower to be used as a hair decoration.    On one fishing trip that took place during my eighteen months of fieldwork with the Batek, there had been a lot of laughter. As we traipsed back to the camp, the sky darkened and the air became very ..read more

  It was all we had. We used it for everything, fertiliser for the cabbage and potatoes, medicine, food for the animals, and to eat… chreathnach was the treat. I remember it hanging in the kitchen to dry so we had a supply for the winter. - Jane, from Connemara, ninety-two years old A village shop in Connemara, on the Atlantic coast of Ireland. The texture should be like velvet. Dry, yet soft and yielding. The colour, a deep inviting violet. A gratifying chew releases a complex bouquet of flavour; a rich seawater saltiness, shrouded with earthy and meaty umami undertones—moss, seabed, g ..read more

  We fan off the heat, waiting for the heavy summer sun to dip in the horizon, watching sparrows swoop and nest in the grass-thatched roof above. As dusk finally falls, Meer takes a small curved blade, and we walk towards the edge of the jungle. Drowsy from tea creamy with buffalo milk, I watch astonished as Meer quickly climbs the tall slender trunk like a ladder, carefully cutting specific branches for his herd. Spread across these jungled slopes extending from the Himalayas are Van Gujjars, a semi-nomadic pastoralist community with whom I spent two months living and learning in 2019. N ..read more

  First published in April 2021 Peace can be a sky-blue hospice with daffodils a grave green lawn for innocents bald and serene as Buddhist monks Happiness can be written in Chinese on a decal clinging to a jade bar of soap at the visitors’ sink Beauty can be simple and fragile as children laughing the play of skin and shadow under the unknowing sun Fate can be exactly the size and shape of an olive diagnosis or misdiagnosis a surgeon squinting over a slide Salvation can be danger thinly veiled caustic milk of the periwinkle halfway from malignant to benign Faith can be a near empty ..read more

  I n January 2019, twenty-three undergraduate students, including all authors, traveled from Eckerd College located in St. Petersburg, Florida, to Belize to participate in a three-week tropical ethnobotany course. One of our assignments while in-country was to collect data for a photo essay concerning an ethnobotanical relationship. While some student groups investigated knowledge of medicinal plants or non-domesticated foods, our task was to investigate agricultural techniques and domesticated plants. We made observations and conducted informal interviews primarily in and around two loc ..read more

  Scientific discovery comes in many forms and travels many paths. Sometimes it is a planned endeavour that follows a predictable script from start to finish. Other times, it involves a big dose of sheer dumb luck. The latter was the case that led to the publishing of one of my articles, entitled 'Sagas of the Solanaceae: Speculative Ethnobotanical Perspectives on the Norse Berserkers' in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology (Fatur 2019). As part of my doctoral research in Ethnobotany at the University of Ljubljana, I had decided to undertake a few (not entirely related) research projects. On ..read more

  T he modern, Western world is underpinned by a web of assumptions about reality. One of the more pervasive assumptions is that nature is external to culture, and that both nature and culture have intrinsic and universal qualities (Foucault 2002 [1966]; Classens 2014). However, as early as the 1940s, social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss claimed that no modern assumption had been as confidently repudiated as the distinction between nature and culture (1969 [1949]). Despite this, the division between nature and culture is usually taken as self-evident in the popular press (Kesebir and ..read more

  In August, I moved in. From the balcony one could see the buildings across the street, and between them, Lycabetus on one side, and Hymettus on the other. Facing north-east, it wouldn't get much direct sunlight, only in the morning. But it was big. In September, I started a garden on my balcony. I got some pots, bought some small plants, and planted some seeds. I made a compost bin, and added dead leaves from the nearest park to bring in microbes. I started making a vertical herb garden with pallets. Little mushrooms grew, and some herbs struggled with infections. I started building a b ..read more

  B y the end of June the rainy season is almost gone, but some sudden unforeseen squalls may still occur daily in the Central Forest of Peru. I had been visiting the community of Mapiniki for six months, which is composed of two different ethnic groups, the Ashaninka and the Yanesha. My presence in the village had been accepted—albeit with some initial scepticism—since the beginning of December, when I had met with the community to propose the creation of a collaborative multimedia book. Through a process of negotiation, we slowly developed the project in a way that allowed both sides to ..read more

  A book review of Madhu Ramnath and Ramon Razal (2019) Wild Tastes in Asia: Coming Home to the Forest for Food. Philippines: NTFP Exchange Programme. Available at tinyurl.com/wildtastes for $30 / £21 (hardbound) or $20 / £14 (paperback) (Rs.1500/1000 in India). 'F orest as Home, Home as Forest' (p.5): this is a book about 'wild food' knowledge systems in several Asian countries. It confronts many modern assumptions about culinary normality, starting with ideas about food as something cultivated, bought, and sold as part of an economised food-chain. The book is superbly illustrated, and w ..read more