Abstract
Although a gendered ethnobotany has been gaining ground recently, few systematic academic or applied works on the differences between the sexes in relation to the botanical world have been made. A lack of interest in a gendered ethnobotany has been the rule. Women and Plants opens up an academic discourse that has lagged behind the feminist theory and action of the late 1960s. More than demanding the insertion of women as meaningful agents in the management of botanical resources, this book is a sound articulation of qualitative and quantitative studies with rigorous data and first hand fieldwork and demonstrates the explanatory power of a gendered ethnobotany. It is an explosive declaration against a gender-neutral ethnobotany.
This book hopes to unlock a new perspective, a new look, and requests an end to a period where gender was largely an invisible variable in ethnobotanical research. Many scholars have highlighted the direct relationship between rural women and plants used in health, nutrition, and biodiversity or note women's central role in plant conservation, but they have failed to offer precise formulas or recommendations for concrete actions for engendering ethnobotany. The papers in this volume help fill in these critical gaps.
According to some of the contributors (e.g., Howard) to Women and Plants, a major handicap affecting the progress of the discipline is the lack of a sound theoretical body of work. This does not prevent some of them from challenging current perspectives on women and the use of wild vs. domesticated plants or minor vs. staple foods, for example (Price, Daniggelis). Nor does it stop others from pondering the relationship between environmental degradation and population nutritional status (Daniggelis, Malaza), understanding the nutritional value of wild plants (Ertuğ), or stressing the importance of gathering wild resources for female farmers or plants’ changeable significance for them (Price, Ertuğ).
Other contributors consider the absence of women healers or their invisibility in ethnobotanical and ethnomedicinal research as well as the direct relationship between power, tradition, and healers. This topic is analyzed in depth, a theoretical and methodological assessment for the inclusion of women as healers is proposed, and a case study is described (Kothari). Two papers (Ertuğ, Bissonnette) provide the reader with significant examples of the social, material, and spiritual importance of women as healers and the connections between knowledge, health, and power. Sillitoe provides a theoretical contribution on the gender of crops. Wilson and Son and Jiggins consider the dualistic perception of inside vs. outside spaces as identified with male or female domains and assess how these spatial relationships are associated with women's rights, their access to monetary resources, and the acceptability of gender concepts and praxis by everyday people, politicians, and academics. Malaza describes how a growing dependency on a cash economy shapes broader social theories. Looking at these examples, then, the authors have provided much of the empirical and theoretical substance that was previously missing from the subject of women and plants.
Beyond this theoretical contribution, Women and Plants covers a broad spectrum of the different spheres of interaction between woman and plants. The texts is divided into five parts (Kitchen and Conservation; Gender, Women's Rights, and Plant Management; Gendered Plant Knowledge; Women's Status; Biodiversity Loss and Conservation), includes sixteen articles of research from all over the world (Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe), and covers many different ecological and social contexts (Amazonian Indians, Nepali foragers, Zimbabwean woodlanders, Californian collectors, Andean Indians, New Guinea highlanders, Turkish wild gatherers, Mali farmers, sub-Saharan Swazilanders, and maize growers in China).
These sixteen chapters share a coherent line of thought and present a major change in perspective that recognizes a gendered, co-evolutionary path of culture and plants. The roles that men and women play in this new perspective are illustrated. Accordingly, women's roles as keepers of phytodiversity, guardians of food security, and unique knowledge holders are described in detail. Attention is also paid to how women manage wild or cultivated plant-based ingredients for cooking, how they create or introduce new recipes when gathering wild botanical resources (specifically, Greenberg, Pieroni, Daniggelis, Price, Wilson, Wooten, Malaza, Hoffman), and how women share plant-based products, information, and services (Pieroni, Ertuğ). Over half of the papers consider how land tenure and botanical resource management are directly related to biocultural conservation, phytodiversity, and gender as a principle of social organization.
The text confronts and analyzes many challenging, politically charged topics: gender-specialized knowledge, belief systems, and resource management (Goebel, Turner, Kothari, Bissonnette, Son and Jiggins), knowledge maintenance and transmission through female lines (Daniggelis, Bissonnette), women's rights (Price), and women's struggles to access and manage plant genetic resources (Price, Greenberg, Pieroni, Goebel, Bissonnette, Son and Jiggins). Finally, many authors at least touch on the tradition and maintenance of homegardens and their potential to increase and manage agrobiodiversity, preserve crop varieties, and provide new access to financial resources for women.
For all the authors, the impact of modernization, urbanization, and colonization constitutes an important aspect of the relationship between women and plants. These are considered as meaningful analytical variables that prompt some authors to create strategies to stop or at least understand the erosion of gendered botanical knowledge (Pieroni, Turner, Ertuğ, Wooten, Malaza, Hoffmann). Both Malaza and Hoffman, for example, pay special attention to the patterns of globalization, the loss of agrobiodiversity, and the loss of intergenerational knowledge of agrobiodiversity. Those same authors also examine crop substitution and the linkages between these substitutions, new labor requirements for food processing, and changes in sociocultural values of new cultivars. Papers by Turner, Ertuğ, Wooten, Malaza, and Hoffman all use ethnohistorical and diachronic, human ecological approaches to understand the changes particular societies are going through. Their methods expose how interethnic contact creates asymmetry between men and women in temporal and spatial relationships and in domestic and public spheres. Similarly, Malaza and Son and Jiggins explain how change through globalizing forces acts as a trigger that modifies the distribution of labor between men and women, accentuating the load of work on the latter as a result of male-centered migration (Malaza, Son and Jiggins).
Recognizing some meaningful exceptions, the authors forcefully and effectively denounce the lack of scholarly attention to the differences between how men and women relate to plants. In so doing, the book highlights the double marginalization of women in society and academia while underscoring the difference of approaches in the use and distribution of power, knowledge, space, and time between men and women. Furthermore, it exposes the typical one-dimensional approach used by the Western scientific research tradition, which has attempted to systematize ethnobotanical knowledge as held only by men while excluding a meaningful portion of botanical lore possessed by woman. Throughout the book, the authors identify some of the methodological difficulties in doing gender-oriented ethnobotanical research. Many authors provide hints about how to best work through these methodological obstacles and explain the benefits of doing so.
Although the book will do wonders in terms of raising the profile of an engendered ethnobotany, I did find some small problems. I missed, for example, any reference explaining how women's heavier daily work load is a handicap to many ethnobotanical studies—or a suggested method for overcoming that handicap. Usually, women have less available free time to get involved in scientific research simply because they have their hands full with domestic or public labor. Also missing are references to numerous theoretical and methodological studies that describe the transmission of ethnobotanical knowledge where women play relevant or equal roles to their male counterparts (e.g., Boster 1984; Kainer and Duryea 1992; Nazarea 1998; Zent 1999; and many others). Also, absent are the references to the equally rich home garden or gender oriented agricultural studies (e.g., Millate-e-Mustafa-M. 1997, FAO 1999, Vogl and Vogl-Lukasser 2003; and many others).
That being said, after reading Women and Plants no ethnobotanist could ever enter the field without giving the same priority to men and women as collaborators or informants. Spending time in the kitchen and the care of children will no longer be an appendage to research, but a lively part of data collection.