Abstract
Indigenous people living in contemporary Upper Amazonia marshal their ethnomedical knowledge and praxis to greet pressing challenges and to derive meaning from phenomena operating at wider scales of influence. In this chapter, I provide ethnographic examples of how Napo Runa deploy subaltern therapeutic narratives about medicinal plant use that contest violence they experience in their everyday lives and that reaffirm the purpose and consequences of social circulation of medicinal plants. These therapeutic narratives situate bodies in contexts of lived experience by drawing on historical, social–political, and environmental realties of the people crafting them. Here, ethnomedical knowledge is leveraged to contend with transnational processes that have direct and dangerous impacts on individual bodies. This work seeks not only to document how Napo Runa use plants to promote health and well-being but also to demonstrate that how they talk about their plant use illustrates their resistance to everyday forms of violence.
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Notes
- 1.
Samay and its role in health and well-being among Napo Runa are described in more detail below.
- 2.
Sacha ambi literally means “forest medicine” in the Kichwa language (Runa Shimi), although I will be using this term to describe medicinal plants procured from a variety of locations beyond the forest proper, including home gardens and alongside rivers.
- 3.
In considering the implications of producing research and displaying results that deal with information such as plant names that might be vulnerable to biopiracy and violations of intellectual property rights, I follow Alexiades’s suggestion to only include species “whose ethnobotanical use has already been published and thus rendered public in a previous publication…that is, plant resources and knowledge whose potential status as a community-owned commodity has not been jeopardized by a prior publication are not identified in the following discussions” (1999: 54). All plant species that appear here have been previously researched and published by other scholars.
- 4.
A notion in line with the Doctrine of Signatures.
- 5.
This specifically refers to how there was no other tree nearby: “Paylla shamun! Pis mana tiyaun. Kaita pis pis pis illyan. Payshitulla!”
- 6.
I have made every attempt to safeguard the identity and privacy of all the research participants who generously shared their lives, perspectives, and experiences with me. As such, all names that appear here are pseudonyms.
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Acknowledgements
This research was made possible through funding from the National Science Foundation and Fulbright. I am grateful to Liz Olson for organizing the original panel at the 2014 AAA meetings where a version of this chapter was presented and for her efforts to organize this book project. Thanks also to Rick Stepp for his comments delivered during our panel as well as the ones he offers in this volume. In addition, I appreciate the valuable comments from an anonymous reviewer, which I believe has made this chapter stronger. For her encouragement and insightful comments along the way, I wish to thank my mentor Kathleen Musante. Finally, I express heartfelt gratitude to my Napo Runa collaborators in the Ecuadorian Amazon. I am indebted to those who not only devoted their time, energy, and care to answering my questions and teaching me about plants and health, but who also included me in their daily lives and opened their homes to me. Ashka pagarachu!
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Bridges, N.C. (2016). Shaping Strong People: Napo Runa Therapeutic Narratives of Medicinal Plant Use. In: Olson, E., Stepp, J. (eds) Plants and Health. Ethnobiology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48088-6_4
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