Ethnobotany in North America: an historical phytogeographic perspective

1981 ◽  
Vol 59 (11) ◽  
pp. 2178-2188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard I. Ford

In 1855 Alphonse de Candolle challenged his contemporaries to describe and to explain the geographical and historical distribution of economic plants. It was only in the 20th century, however, that ethnobotany, the direct interrelationships between human populations and their plant environment, and paleoecology and archaeology could combine to delineate from antiquity the history of economic plant usages, to describe the ecological changes introduced by humans, and to detail the cultural determinants of new plant evolution.The prehistory of plant uses depends upon paleoecological and archaeological data. Pollen and plant macroremains have demonstrated that only during the past 2000 years in North America have humans expanded the number of taxa they used. Ecologically humans have become important agents for transforming the landscape during the same time period in areas where plant food production was practiced. Fire was the principle agent for clearing the land and plant husbandry intensified the disjunction of plant species. Humans, then, became significant ecological and evolutionary factors in the landscape with the introduction of domesticated cucurbits from Mexico in the eastern United States about 5000 years ago. It was not until 3000 years ago that indigenous North American Helianthus and Iva were domesticated and other plants were cultivated and introduced beyond their known ranges. In the Southwest com cultivation started 3000 years ago and spread rapidly as a staple and source of phytogeographical changes. Com-field farming in the past 1000 years by prehistoric Americans created new habitats and had the greatest effect on the geographical distribution of plants. Ethnobotany and its associated discipline, archaeobotany, have brought an indispensible complement to paleoecology and a new dimension to historical phytogeography.

Author(s):  
Marta Koval

Although Ukrainian emigration to North America is not a new phenomenon, the dilemmas of memory and amnesia remain crucial in Ukrainian-American émigré fiction. The paper focuses on selected novels by Askold Melnyczuk (What is Told and Ambassador of the Dead) and analyzes how traumatic memories and family stories of the past shape the American lives of Ukrainian emigrants. The discussion of the selected Ukrainian-American émigré novels focuses on the dilemmas of remembering and forgetting in the construction of both Ukrainian and American narratives of the past. The voluntary amnesia of the Ame- rican-born Ukrainians in Melnyczuk’s novels confronts their parents’ dependence on the past and their inability to abandon it emotionally. Memories of ‘the old country’ make them, similarly to Ada Kruk, ambassadors of the dead. The expression becomes a metaphoric definition of those wrapped by their repressed, fragmentary and sometimes inaccessible memories. Crucial events of European history of the 20th century are inscribed and personalized in the older generation’s stories which their children are reluctant to hear. For them, their parents’ memories became a burden and a shame. Using the concept of transgenerational memory, the paper explores the challenges of postmemory, and eventually its failure. 


Author(s):  
Konstantinos I. Kakoudakis ◽  
Katerina Papadoulaki

Abstract This chapter illustrates the process of social tourism development in Greece, from the interwar years until the present day. The chapter first sets the discussion within the context of the country's turbulent political, social and economic background, throughout most of the past century, which has exercised significant influence on the development of Greek tourism in general, and social tourism specifically. It then identifies and presents two main phases of social tourism development, highlighting important initiatives and key players that contributed to the incremental evolution of social tourism programmes in Greece, and also events that impeded their implementation and smooth running. Specific emphasis is given to the past four decades, since this time period has largely shaped the contemporary form of Greek social tourism programmes. Therefore, the chapter explicates the close linkages between the establishment of the modern Greek welfare state in the early 1980s, and the development of social tourism as we know it today. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion on the developmental process of contemporary Greek social tourism over time, and the important socioeconomic implications of its current practice in the aftermath of the Greek financial crisis, and in the midst of the refugee crisis in Europe, and the Covid-19 pandemic.


Author(s):  
David A. Hoekema

In the past two centuries, relations among Protestant, Catholic, and Muslim communities in Uganda have been marked by competition and mistrust more than cooperation. The interfaith initiative of northern religious leadersv is a noteworthy exception. In this chapter the history of these communities is briefly reviewed, setting the background for the group’s formation. An important historical event that helped bring Catholics and Protestants together was the execution of 45 Christian pages to the Buganda king in 1886. Mention is also made of the far more prominent role that religion plays in public life in East Africa than in Europe and North America, and of the persistence of traditional beliefs and practices.


Author(s):  
Tom Conley

Michel de Certeau, a French philosopher trained in history and ethnography, was a peripatetic teacher in Europe, South America and North America. His thought has inflected four areas of philosophy. He studied how mysticism informs late-medieval epistemology and social practice. With the advent of the Scientific Revolution, the affinities the mystic shares with nature and the cosmos become, like religion itself, repressed or concealed. An adjunct discipline, heterology, thus constitutes an anthropology of alterity, studying the ‘other’ and the destiny of religion since the sixteenth century. De Certeau opens the hidden agendas that make representations of the past a function of social pressures, so that sometime histories are rearticulated in mirrored or subversive forms. This subversion makes accessible a general philosophy of invention that works within and against the strategic policies of official institutions. De Certeau’s writings also belong to activism, the history of ideological structures, psychoanalysis, and post-1968 theories of writing (écriture) as defined by Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard.


Author(s):  
Marc Raymond

Martin Scorsese’s name has come to symbolize many broad ideas over the past few decades, to the point where he is no longer merely a filmmaker, but rather a cultural touchstone. He is associated with a particular religion (Catholicism), ethnicity (Italian), genre (gangsters), and time period (New Hollywood), while also being the foremost cinephile in American cinema, influencing whole generations in his wake. Consequently, the amount of writing on Scorsese is quite vast, and this bibliography will try to represent that variety while pointing readers to the best of this work. It is thus organized with a focus on Scorsese’s own scholarly contributions, interviews, career overviews, anthologies, major films, documentaries, and influence. There is a temptation to try to divide the work thematically, since so much of the writing centers around either religion, ethnicity, or masculinity, but doing so would risk perpetuating this overemphasis in the scholarship while also not representing the best writing on this important auteur. Thus, while certainly the work on Italian-Catholicism and masculinity will be frequent within the citations to come, they will not predominate among the selections taken as a whole. This bibliography also attempts to give some of the history of Scorsese scholarship itself, focusing on scholarly touchstones that tended to define particular historical moments and how Scorsese has been useful to particular critical approaches and/or arguments.


1998 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 410-419
Author(s):  
Patricia Valasco de León ◽  
Sergio RS Cevallos-Ferriz ◽  
Alicia Silva-Pineda

A new plant from the Los Ahuehuetes locality, near Tepexi de Rodríguez, Puebla, Mexico, is described based on its leaves. They are characterized by being ovate to elliptic, 4.5 cm long by 2.1 cm wide, having an entire margin, eucamptodromous venation, a midvein that is slightly curved and attenuated towards the leaf apex, seven pairs of secondary veins diverging at an acute angle from the midvein, percurrent tertiary veins forking or sometimes reticulated forming areoles, and having a petiole 1.3 cm long and 0.3 cm wide. An agglomerative nonhierarchical analysis with average linkage, based on the definition of 41 character states in 18 operational taxonomic units allows distinction between Karwinskia, Berchemia, and Rhamnus; the recognition of an extinct monotypic genus, Berhamniphyllum; and the identification of two fossil species of Karwinskia, among which the new plant from Puebla, Karwinskia axamilpense Velasco de León et al., is well defined. This new fossil leaf not only adds to the recently known Tertiary plants of the Los Ahuehuetes locality, but it gives new insights into the past flora of tropical North America and further supports the long history of some neotropical endemics, suggesting that, during the Tertiary, at least some areas in southern latitudes of North America could have been important for the origin and radiation of some taxa.Key words: Oligocene, Mexico, paleobotany, Rhamnaceae, Karwinskia.


Author(s):  
Konstantinos I. Kakoudakis ◽  
Katerina Papadoulaki

Abstract This chapter illustrates the process of social tourism development in Greece, from the interwar years until the present day. The chapter first sets the discussion within the context of the country's turbulent political, social and economic background, throughout most of the past century, which has exercised significant influence on the development of Greek tourism in general, and social tourism specifically. It then identifies and presents two main phases of social tourism development, highlighting important initiatives and key players that contributed to the incremental evolution of social tourism programmes in Greece, and also events that impeded their implementation and smooth running. Specific emphasis is given to the past four decades, since this time period has largely shaped the contemporary form of Greek social tourism programmes. Therefore, the chapter explicates the close linkages between the establishment of the modern Greek welfare state in the early 1980s, and the development of social tourism as we know it today. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion on the developmental process of contemporary Greek social tourism over time, and the important socioeconomic implications of its current practice in the aftermath of the Greek financial crisis, and in the midst of the refugee crisis in Europe, and the Covid-19 pandemic.


Paleobiology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Pedro M. Monarrez ◽  
Joshua B. Zimmt ◽  
Annaka M. Clement ◽  
William Gearty ◽  
John J. Jacisin ◽  
...  

Abstract As practitioners of a historical science, paleontologists and geoscientists are well versed in the idea that the ability to understand and to anticipate the future relies upon our collective knowledge of the past. Despite this understanding, the fundamental role that the history of paleontology and the geosciences plays in shaping the structure and culture of our disciplines is seldom recognized and therefore not acted upon sufficiently. Here, we present a brief review of the history of paleontology and geology in Western countries, with a particular focus on North America since the 1800s. Western paleontology and geology are intertwined with systematic practices of exclusion, oppression, and erasure that arose from their direct participation in the extraction of geological and biological resources at the expense of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). Our collective failure to acknowledge this history hinders our ability to address these issues meaningfully and systemically in present-day educational, academic, and professional settings. By discussing these issues and suggesting some ways forward, we intend to promote a deeper reflection upon our collective history and a broader conversation surrounding racism, colonialism, and exclusion within our scientific communities. Ultimately, it is necessary to listen to members of the communities most impacted by these issues to create actionable steps forward while holding ourselves accountable for the past.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valbona Sulemani

This study attempts to analyze the immigration and settlement experiences of the Albanian diaspora. The paper takes an historical and anthropological perspective in outlining the experiences of Albanian people through a comparative analysis of Europe and North America. This paper examines the difference experiences of migrants in Greece and Italy to those of the United States and Canada in relation to the country of origin (Albania, Kosova, or Macedonia), the time period of migration, and the reason for migration. This study will outline and analyze the more positive experiences of Albanian people in North America, compared to the somewhat more negative experiences in Europe, with a discussion on the effects media representation has had on Albanian migrants in Greece and Italy. The history of a receiving country strongly affects its perspective on immigration and consequently its reception of immigrants.


Slavic Review ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 904-911
Author(s):  
Ranabir Samaddar

1968 saw a wave of protests and student radicalism in India, some of the tactics and issues of which were reminiscent of those in Europe and North America. The anti-imperialist theme was similarly strident, and the student and youth movement posed serious challenges to the old established Left, sharing traits of a global New Left agenda. The upsurge of post-independence radicalism in India, however, drew on different historical legacies, and exhibited many specific features, all of which culminated in the student and youth upsurge of 1968–69. In order to demonstrate the complex history and legacy of 60s radicalism in India, this essay takes us back to  the sixties in Kolkata when the insurgent movement in West Bengal had developed the tactic of occupation, which helped the movement crystallize and caused, ironically, the undoing of the mobilization in the end. Occupy as a tactic thus has a history, and the radicals of today perhaps in their enthusiasm for the New Left ethos have ignored the history of the insurgent tactics of the past, especially tactics developed in the postcolonial context.


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