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Mexican Ethnobotany: Interactions of People and Plants in Mesoamerica

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Book cover Ethnobotany of Mexico

Part of the book series: Ethnobiology ((EBL))

Abstract

Ethnobotany is a research aimed at understanding what people know about plants, how plants form part of their systems of beliefs and conceptions of the world, and how humans make use and manage plants for reproducing their social and cultural life. This chapter shows a general panorama of the historical use of ethnobotany in Mexico from pre-Columbian times to the modern arising of ethnobotany as a research field, as well as the main contemporary methodological approaches and challenges of researchers working on Mexican ethnobotany. Such panorama conforms an introductory context for discussing the importance and limits of this book and a general description of the contributions of the each chapter that forms part of the text. We then discuss a general perspective of the Mexican ethnobotany in order to make stronger an “after description step” of this research field, recognizing the importance of descriptive methods but the need of emphasizing the analytical contribution of ethnobotany on research questions connected with research fields like anthropology, archaeology, ecology, and evolutionary biology. All these are research areas requiring support from both quantitative and qualitative ethnobotanical approaches in order to analyse social and anthropological problems such as the role of natural resources in human cultures, peoples’ cosmovision, and their social organization and technology for interacting with ecosystems. Also, ethnobotany is necessary to ecology for studying important problems like the human influence on distribution and abundance of the flora of the world and the historical configuration of ecosystems. In addition, ethnobotany is crucial for understanding the past and ongoing processes of domestication in order to understand factors influencing the origins of agriculture. Ethnobotany is crucial for understanding evolutionary ecological processes influencing divergence between wild and managed populations of plants and perspectives of management of plant genetic resources. And finally, we discuss the general importance of ethnobotany as a bridge for building social–ecological views and trans-disciplinary approaches for constructing sustainability science. Ethnobotany is a promising research field for reinforcing the human understanding of nature and society, but also for solving practical problems in the context of the world’s environmental crisis associated to global change.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ecosistemas y Sustentabilidad (IIES), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Campus Morelia, Michoacán, Antigua Carretera a Pátzcuaro 8711, Col. San José de la Huerta, Morelia, Michoacán, C.P. 58190, Mexico

    Alejandro Casas Ph.D.

  2. Centro de Investigación en Biodiversidad y Conservación (CIByC), Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, Av. Universidad No. 1001, Col. Chamilpa, Cuernavaca, Morelos, C.P. 62209, Mexico

    José Blancas Ph.D.

  3. Unidad de Biotecnología y Prototipos, FES Iztacala, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de, México, Av. de los Barrios No. 1, Los Reyes Iztacala, Tlalnepantla, Estado de México 54090, Mexico

    Rafael Lira Ph.D.

Authors
  1. Alejandro Casas Ph.D.
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  2. José Blancas Ph.D.
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  3. Rafael Lira Ph.D.
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alejandro Casas Ph.D. .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Unidad de Biotecnología y Prototipos(UBI, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Estado de Mexico, Mexico

    Rafael Lira

  2. Instituto de Ivestigaciones en Ecosistem, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico

    Alejandro Casas

  3. Centro de Investigación en Biodiversidad, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morel, Colonia Chamilpa, Cuernavaca,, Morelos, Mexico

    José Blancas

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Casas, A., Blancas, J., Lira, R. (2016). Mexican Ethnobotany: Interactions of People and Plants in Mesoamerica. In: Lira, R., Casas, A., Blancas, J. (eds) Ethnobotany of Mexico. Ethnobiology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6669-7_1

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