Review of African ethnobotany in the Americas (2012), edited by Robert Voeks and John Rashford.

This art icle was downloaded by: [ AAG] On: 02 Decem ber 2014, At : 16: 01 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK The AAG Review of Books Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions for aut hors and subscript ion informat ion: ht t p:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ rrob20 African Ethnobotany in the Americas a Case Wat kins a Depart ment of Geography and Ant hropology, Louisiana St at e Universit y, Bat on Rouge, LA. Published online: 20 Feb 2014. To cite this article: Case Wat kins (2013) African Et hnobot any in t he Americas, The AAG Review of Books, 1:4, 165-167, DOI: 10.1080/ 2325548X.2013.871982 To link to this article: ht t p:/ / dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 2325548X.2013.871982 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Taylor & Francis m akes every effort t o ensure t he accuracy of all t he inform at ion ( t he “ Cont ent ” ) cont ained in t he publicat ions on our plat form . However, Taylor & Francis, our agent s, and our licensors m ake no represent at ions or warrant ies what soever as t o t he accuracy, com plet eness, or suit abilit y for any purpose of t he Cont ent . Any opinions and views expressed in t his publicat ion are t he opinions and views of t he aut hors, and are not t he views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of t he Cont ent should not be relied upon and should be independent ly verified wit h prim ary sources of inform at ion. 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New York: Springer, 2012. xii and 429 pp., 13 maps, 107 color photos, 14 black-and-white photos, 22 diagrams, 14 color illustrations, 7 black-and-white illustrations, 5 appendices, footnotes, bibliography, index. $49.95 paper (ISBN 978-1-4614-0835-2); $39.95 electronic PDF (ISBN 978-1-4614-0836-9). Reviewed by Case Watkins, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA. Is ethnobotany more-than-indigenous? Convention once dictated that indigenous peoples are the sole “repositories of ancient plant wisdom” (p. 2), whereas communities in diaspora, as passive strangers in strange lands, possess only limited biocultural knowledge and are therefore unworthy of serious inquiry. Yet such a representation caricatures native peoples as static, both geographically and cognitively, and migrants as mindless wanderers without personal or social memories of their homelands or the capacity to learn new places and plants. African Ethnobotany in the Americas is a rich and exciting volume that joins a burgeoning effort to widen the ethnobotanical gaze, embracing the dynamisms of diaspora, migration, and disturbance. The African diaspora is, of course, a diverse amalgam of peoples and ideas but is bound by a shared connection to the transatlantic slave trade. Given that cruel history, Africans in the Americas, the editors note, “seem poorly situated to have introduced their rich agricultural and ethnobotanical traditions” (p. 3), yet this volume presents Afro-descendent communities as havens of ethnobotanical knowledge. Thus besides amplifying ethnobotany beyond the indigenous, the volume also enlists a broader (post)colonial agenda to reinterpret the Columbian exchange by recognizing the socioecological agency of Africans in the Americas as resistance to European hegemony. Through fourteen chapters representing nineteen contributors and no fewer than eight academic disciplines, each work makes one or more individual contributions, all the while building a collective case for a diasporic, Afro-American ethnobotany. Case studies emanate from South America (Brazil, Ecuador, Suriname), the Caribbean (Cuba, Barbados), and North America (South Carolina). The content is appropriately diverse, but the volume finds cohesion around an accommodating conceptual organization and a crisp editorial introduction that contextualizes the work within the field of ethnobotany as well as broader postcolonial dialogues. This cohesion is indeed laudable considering the wide topical and methodological diversity of the volume and the field it reflects. Furthermore, the four conceptual categories give flow to the volume, each section nested within an organizing concept. Overall, the introductory essay and the volume’s arrangement ensures that most readers will recognize (1) the novelty and importance of diasporic ethnobotany, (2) the value of focusing on the African diaspora in the Americas, and (3) the individual contributions of each of the chapters as players in the discrete sections and the volume as a coherent whole. The editorial introduction sets the stage with a strong case for not only a diasporic ethnobotany in general, but a study of African and Afro-Americans specifically. Scholars intent on studying the ethnobotany of other groups in diaspora benefit from the former discussion, whereas those studying other aspects of the African diaspora will draw from the latter. The introduction flows purposefully into the first section, “Crops and Cultivators,” which focuses on the historical ethnobotanical and agricultural relationships that link the Americas with the African The AAG Review of Books 1(4) 2013, pp. 165–167. doi: 10.1080/2325548X.2013.871982. ©2013 by Association of American Geographers. Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC. Downloaded by [AAG] at 16:01 02 December 2014 continent. In its opening chapter, Carney lays the historical foundation for the volume with an overview of African plants and agricultural knowledge in the Columbian exchange. Her chapter frames the floristic proficiency of Africans both as a form of resistance to the superimposition of European social and agricultural hegemony and as a fundamental contribution to the agronomic, culinary, and pharmacological development of the Americas. As the lead to this volume, she in effect connects her ongoing research program on the historical ecology of the African diaspora to research by others on contemporary Afro- and African-American ethnobotany. The result at once strengthens her own historical arguments and broadly historicizes the study of contemporary Afrodescendent communities in this volume and elsewhere. In her broad narrative, Carney devotes only a brief paragraph to African influences in rice cultivation in the Americas. In the following chapter, Alpern takes up the “black rice hypothesis” she championed, directly engaging the thesis’s most salient critique in what will likely stand out as one of the more influential and lasting individual contributions of this volume. In previous work, Carney followed Wood and Littlefield to argue that the lowland South Carolina rice economy owed much of its emergence to African cultural and cognitive agency. Since 2005, a group of prominent historians of the transatlantic slave trade has criticized that thesis, arguing that Carney and others exaggerated the roles of Africans in establishing North American rice cultivation. An accomplished specialist of primary African sources, Alpern deploys his expertise to craft a penetrating rebuke of the counterargument, deconstructing many of the historians’ specific claims with acuity and grit. He points out where the historians rely on weak evidence to make controversial claims; for example, their assertion based on a single source that red rice grown in the Brazilian state of Maranhão was “native to the Americas” (p. 42), despite the almost unanimous view of botanists and agronomists to the contrary. Later he exposes the historians’ faulty logic in comparing African knowledge of rice cultivation with sugar and tobacco, crops of respective Asian and American, as opposed to African, provenance (p. 47), and “strawmanship” in embellishing Carney’s secondary claims (pp. 58–60). Alpern is particularly cunning in using the historians’ own claims against them. The historians assert that, in Alpern’s words, “there were too few slaves with ricegrowing experience to play a decisive role in the genesis and early development of South Carolina’s rice industry,” but Alpern counters with a footnote from the historians’ 166 own argument that explained that a mere “three dozen Arawaks brought from Dutch Guiana taught the English in Barbados how to grow tobacco” (p. 48). Alpern goes on to place rice cultivation technology within a broader argument of African contributions to Lowland society. In conclusion, he reiterates his, and by proxy Carney’s, message: “What Eltis, Morgan, and Richardson see as a deeply flawed revisionism … , I see as a long overdue and laudable effort to set the record much straighter” (p. 60). Although the debate over the black rice hypothesis continues apace, Alpern’s solid scholarship and careful reasoning is a direct and effective response to its chief critics and will likely be seen as a pivotal and durable argument in its favor. The section that follows, “Handicrafts and Crafters,” offers four informative chapters on contemporary artisanal traditions from North and South America. Together these chapters illustrate a variety of approaches and methodologies, providing readers and students with exemplary works of cultural recovery and analysis. Chapters by Rosengarten, Sera, and Voeks (along with the chapter by Bedigian in the previous section) take a decidedly historical ecological approach, employing archival sources among others, whereas the analyses by Hurley et al. and Fadiman are classic political ecologies owing to their discussions of multiscalar influences and hierarchies. All four chapters employ varying forms of ethnography, and that by Hurley et al. uses an exciting “grounded visualization” method that integrates ethnography with GIScience. This instructive section will appeal to students, specialists, and other practitioners as proficient demonstrations of various research approaches and innovative methodologies. Section three, “Medicinal and Spiritual Ethnofloras,” offers a valuable series of ethnofloristic compendia in parts of the Caribbean and Suriname. Here the chapter by Moret stands out. She compares West African with Iberian plant knowledge in Cuba to distinguish fundamental differences in the ethnopharmacopeia between areas traditionally dominated by sugar or tobacco. Her analysis connects ethnobotany with particular migration streams, commodity production regimes, and postcolonial discourses to show how West African knowledge has been deemphasized in Cuban (post)colonial history. The two remaining chapters are also novel and effectual. Van Andel et al. use ethnography to ascribe magical meaning to a host of 411 botanical species in Suriname, and Peter conducted a sophisticated phytochemical analysis of cooling teas in Barbados, renewing the methodological richness of the volume. Section four, “Ethnobotanical Continuity and Change,” without being an explicit conclusion to the volume, does THE AAG REVIEW OF BOOKS Downloaded by [AAG] at 16:01 02 December 2014 provide a capstone to the work with three chapters focusing on processes of transformation within specific ethnobotanical canons, and in the case of Voeks’s final chapter, broader floristic landscapes of the Black Atlantic. The three chapters of this section offer sophisticated analyses of socioecological processes, each representing instructive steps forward in transatlantic ecological research that go beyond ethnobotany strictly delimited. Rashford analyzes five native and exotic species of the genera ficus used in Brazilian Candomblé to describe a complex process of adaptation within Afro-Brazilian spiritual ethnoflora. Hoffman goes to Suriname to conduct the first direct quantitative comparison of native ethnobotanical knowledge to that of a proximate Afro-American maroon community. His study revealed that, although indigenous knowledge was numerically greater, the maroon community did indeed develop a “robust utilitarian knowledge of local plant diversity” (p. 361). In the final chapter, Voeks links subSaharan West Africa with Bahia, Brazil, through shared processes of anthropogenic landscape transformation over the four centuries of colonial settlement. He argues that resulting landscapes on either side of the Atlantic shared enough ecological similarities that Bahia was, by the nineteenth century, if not before, “brimming with … esculents and medicinal plants [familiar to forced African migrants],” and therefore “the grand transatlantic biotic exchange … created coastal poles of useful plant similarity” (p. 411). He frames a variety of transatlantic peoples and landscapes in constant negotiation between continuity and change in a way that complicates more static notions of indigeneity and linear cultural evolution, and therefore provides a forwardlooking culmination to the volume. This volume began as a symposium of the same name convened at the fiftieth Annual Meeting of the Society for Economic Botany in 2009. Although each of the chapters fits nicely in a volume on ethnobotany, there is considerable cross-fertilization into broader subfields and approaches practiced by contemporary nature– WINTER 2013 society scholars in a number of disciplines. Proponents of ethno-, cultural, historical, landscape, and political ecology will all find comfort in familiar themes. In this way, the volume will find great utility among scholars of ethnobotany, per se, but most any reader interested in the human–environment interface will find value in its clear prose and probing of historical discussions. The volume will make an effective course reader for undergraduates in geography, anthropology, and other disciplines, as it provides a compelling window into contemporary research methodologies and approaches. Moreover, many specialists will find its more-than-indigenous theoretical discussion refreshing and stimulating, its case studies informative and engaging, and its botanical compendia accommodating. Lavish color figures illustrate the methodologies throughout. Historical ecologies and contemporary ethnographies use photographs to breathe life into their arguments, and quantitative studies effectively use graphs and charts to flesh out results. As a whole, the volume effectively if implicitly exemplifies how ethnobotany finds congruence with a variety of other ecological approaches practiced throughout the social and natural sciences and humanities. The work’s only notable shortcoming is its limited geographical coverage. Research from Central America and Mexico is notably absent, and expanding U.S. inquiry beyond lowland South Carolina would be particularly welcome. Its limited geographical sample does not distract from the book’s effectiveness, however. If the geographical range of the case studies is less than universal, the diversity of topics, approaches, and methodologies more than compensates, and the preponderance of studies from Brazil and South Carolina derive from the expertise of the particular contributors as well as the location of the conference in Charleston. Moreover, as the task of identifying and analyzing African ethnobotany elsewhere in the Americas now falls to subsequent researchers, they will no doubt benefit from the pioneering efforts laid out in this volume. 167