The colonial era witnessed a fevered quest for the healing flora of the equatorial latitudes. Subscribing to ancient Eden notions of plant-people relations, European physicians and scientists were motivated by the belief that God had planted botanical cures for diseases in their places of origin. While many colonial bioprospectors subscribed to the biblical Doctrine of Signatures, they discovered early that indigenous tropical folk represented reservoirs of medicinal plant knowledge. Assuming that native knowhow constituted more instinct than intelligence, Europeans employed bribes, torture, and, in the cases of enslaved Africans, promises of freedom to extract their ethnomedical secrets. In the case of especially lucrative healing plants, imperial and colonial entities conspired to pilfer and naturalize endemic species in their distant colonies. This legacy of inappropriate exploitation of native peoples and tropical plants during the colonial era continues to cast a shadow over ethnobotanical inquiry.
Robert A. Voeks is the Editor-in-Chief of Economic Botany and a Professor in the Department of Geography & the Environment at California State University, Fullerton
Copies of Professor Voeks' new book "The Ethnobotany of Eden: Rethinking the Jungle Medicine Narrative" will be available for purchase.
-----
All program fees include same day admission to the Garden, rain or shine (a $12 value per adult).
Please email gardenprograms@berkeley.edu to inquire if ASL Interpretation is available.
Cancellation Policy: Notification two weeks prior to program receives full refund; less than two weeks receives a one-time credit toward another Garden program to be used within 90 days; less than 48 hours from program start, no refunds or credit will be given for cancellations or absences.
In the event that the Garden has to cancel a program you will be offered a full refund or the option to transfer to another program.