The Amazon Teacher’s Guide
Ethnobotanists: The Shamans’ Apprentices
Ethnobotanists are scientists who study the ways that indigenous people use plants as for medicines and other purposes.
Ethnobotanists use a combination of anthropology, (the study of people and their cultures), and botany, (the study of plants), to learn how indigenous people use plants. An ethnobotanists studies can take her or him to some very interesting places like Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Madagascar, and Suriname. Traveling can be hard work sometimes, but one gets a chance to meet and work with people from all over the world.
Richard Evan Schultes was the “father of ethnobotany” and a professor at Harvard. His classrooms were filled with maps of the Amazon, Indian clothing, bows, arrows, blowguns,
strange tropical fruits, and beautiful carvings and weavings. During lectures Professor Schultes would turn out the lights and show pictures of a strange and wonderful world. His students were mesmerized by slides of shamans, hunters, princesses, Indian children, and pictures of plants that the Indians used for food, medicines and fibers.
From that moment on, some of his students were hooked! Hooked on plants, hooked on Indians, and hooked on the Amazon. And a new generation of ethnobotanists was born!
They went to places like the Amazon to learn about medicinal plants, but soon learned something that they and Professor Schultes found sad and shocking. The forest peoples' priceless knowledge of medicinal plants, developed over thousands of years, was in danger of being lost because no younger people were volunteering to become apprentices to the tribal shamans. Some of the ethnobotanists asked the shamans if they could become their students, and in exchange they would write down what they were taught and preserve this knowledge. The shamans agreed, and the ethnobotanists began to live with and learn from the forest people. They followed the shamans through the forest that they knew so well, learned their language, and wrote down all they taught them. Then they made books, as promised, and gave them to the Indians. The ancient knowledge was saved!
