Books for Review

Interested reviewers: Click on the link below the book description to inform us of your interest. If you would like to review a book not on this list, please write to Cory Whitney (whitney@ethnobiologyletters.org) and/or submit the review for consideration via the online submission system.

Publishers: if you have a recently published, ethnobiology-related book you would like us to review, please contact Cory Whitney (whitney@ethnobiologyletters.org) and we will list the book here; when we have identified a reviewer we'll request that you send them the review copy directly. Thanks!

Feeding Cahokia: Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland

By Gayle J. Fritz

2019 | The University of Alabama Press
Copy Available: Yes

Feeding Cahokia: Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland presents evidence to demonstrate that the emphasis on corn has created a distorted picture of Cahokia’s agricultural practices. Farming at Cahokia was biologically diverse and, as such, less prone to risk than was maize-dominated agriculture....

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Retelling Trickster in Naapi’s Language

By Nimachia Howe

2019 | University Press of Colorado
Copy Available: Yes

Retelling Trickster in Naapi’s Language is an examination of Nitsitapiisinni (Blackfoot) origin stories about one of the most powerful and unpredictable of the early creators in Niitsitapii consciousness and chronology: Naapi. Through in-depth linguistic analysis, Nimachia Howe reinterprets the earliest references to Naapi, offering a more authentic understanding of his identity and of the meanings and functions of the stories in which he appears....

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Breath and Smoke: Tobacco Use among the Maya

Edited By Jennifer A. Loughmiller-Cardinal and Keith Eppich

2019 | University of New Mexico Press
Copy Available: Yes

Breath and Smoke explores the uses of tobacco among the Maya of Central America, revealing tobacco as a key topic in pre-Columbian art, iconography, and hieroglyphics. By assessing and considering myths, imagery, hieroglyphic texts, and material goods, as well as modern practices and their somatic effects, this volume brings the Mayan world of the past into greater focus and sheds light on the practices of today....

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The Edible Gardens of Ethiopia: An Ethnographic Journey into Beauty and Hunger

By Valentina Peveri

2020 | The University of Arizona Press
Copy Available: Yes

What is a beautiful garden to southern Ethiopian farmers? Anchored in the author’s perceptual approach to the people, plants, land, and food, The Edible Gardens of Ethiopia opens a window into the simple beauty and ecological vitality of an ensete garden.

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Moveable Gardens: Itineraries and Sanctuaries of Memory

Edited By Virginia D. Nazarea and Terese Gagnon

2021 | The University of Arizona Press
Copy Available: Yes

Moveable Gardens explores how biodiversity and food can counter the alienation caused by displacement. By offering in-depth studies on a variety of regions, this volume carefully considers various forms of sanctuary making within communities, and seeks to address how carrying seeds, plants, and other traveling companions is an ongoing response to the grave conditions of displacement in today’s world. The destruction of homelands, fragmentation of habitats, and post-capitalist conditions of modernity are countered by thoughtful remembrance of tradition and the migration of seeds, which are embodied in gardening, cooking, and community building.

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An Imperative to Cure: Principles and Practice of Q’eqchi’ Maya Medicine in Belize

By James B. Waldram

2020 | University of New Mexico Press
Copy Available: Yes

James B. Waldram’s groundbreaking study, An Imperative to Cure: Principles and Practice of Q’eqchi’ Maya Medicine in Belize, explores how our understanding of Indigenous therapeutics changes if we view them as forms of “medicine” instead of “healing.” Bringing an innovative methodological approach based on fifteen years of ethnographic research, Waldram argues that Q’eqchi’ medical practitioners access an extensive body of empirical knowledge and personal clinical experience to diagnose, treat, and cure patients according to a coherent ontology and set of therapeutic principles. Not content to leave the elements of Q’eqchi’ cosmovision to the realm of the imaginary and beyond human reach, Q’eqchi’ practitioners conceptualize the world as essentially material and meta/material, consisting of complex but knowable forces that impact health and well-being in real and meaningful ways—forces with which Q’eqchi’ practitioners must engage to cure their patients.

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Changing Climate, Changing Worlds: Local Knowledge and the Challenges of Social and Ecological Change

Edited By Meredith Welch-Devine, Anne Sourdril, and Brian J. Burke

2020 | Springer, Cham
Copy Available: Yes

This book explores how individuals and communities perceive and understand climate change using their observations of change in the world around them. Because processes of climatic change operate at spatial and temporal scales that differ from those of everyday practice, the phenomenon can be difficult to understand. However, flora and fauna, which are important natural and cultural resources for human communities, do respond to the pressures of environmental change. Humans, in turn, observe and adapt to those responses, even when they may not understand their causes. Much of the discussion about human experiences of our changing climate centers on disasters and extreme events, but we argue that a focus on the everyday, on the microexperiences of change, has the advantage of revealing how people see, feel, and make sense of climate change in their own lives. The chapters of this book are drawn from Asia, Europe, Africa, and South and North America. They use ethnographic inquiry to understand local knowledge and perceptions of climate change and the social and ecological changes inextricably intertwined with it. Together, they illustrate the complex process of coming to know climate change, show some of the many ways that climate change and our responses to it inflict violence, and point to promising avenues for moving toward just and authentic collaborative responses.

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The Nuaulu World of Plants: Ethnobotanical cognition, knowledge and practice among a people of Seram, eastern Indonesia

By Roy Ellen

2021 | Sean Kingston Publishing
Copy Available: Yes

Roy Ellen’s The Nuaulu World of Plants is the culmination of anthropological fieldwork on the eastern Indonesian island of Seram, and of comparative enquiries into the bases of human classificatory activity through the study of ethnobiological knowledge over a fifty year period.

This rich account of the ways plants feature in the worldview and lifeways of the Nuaulu, recognizes that plant knowledge is embedded in plural local and historical contexts: in swiddens, garden crops, managed fallow, village spaces and pathways; in the trees, and the ecological, conceptual and experiential relationships to forest; in plants’ roles as healing agents, raw materials, fuels and in ritual; and in historical flux, with the introduction of exotic plants and the impact of colonial and post-colonial ways of seeing the plant world. Ellen’s contemporary examination of Nuaulu classificatory practices, in the light of comparable observations made by the seventeenth-century Dutch naturalist Rumphius, allows us to better see how scientific taxonomy emerges from folk knowledge.

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