Traveling Cultures and Plants ― The Ethnobiology and Ethnopharmacy of Migrations

When people travel they take their plants and plant lore with them. In some cultures, making medicinal plants mobile is essential to survival, and nearly every culture has some sort of folk remedy they feed with a plant they would have expected to find alongside them generations ago. This collection of unique essays by experts in ethnobiology, trans-cultural pharmacy and medical anthropology analyze 12 case studies and glean the lessons learned. The studies include examples from people of the Dominican Republic and their travel to New York City with folk ways, Latino's traditional medical knowledge in the US, strategies of Indians from the Asian subcontinent as they come to the US, Swedish women and their traditional herbal remedies, Surinamese immigrants in Amsterdam, Latino migrants in London, the ethno-economy of Kurdish traditional medicine, Somalis and khat, and displacement camp medicine for the Sahrawi people in Algeria. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Andrea Pieroni is a Lecturer in Pharmacognosy, Herbal / Traditional Medicines and Ethnopharmacy at the School of Pharmacy at the University of Bradford, UK. He holds a Ph.D. in Pharmacy from the University of Bonn. His recent research concerns transcultural health and pharmacy, traditional medicines and ethnobotany. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the new Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine and the coordinator of the first collaborative ethnobotanical research project funded by the EU Commission (RUBIA).

Ina Vandebroek is a post-doctoral research associate at the Institute of Economic Botany, New York Botanical Garden, USA. She holds a Ph.D. in neurospychopharmacology from the University of Ghent, Belgium, and has conducted research into the ethnobotany and ethnomedicine of traditional healers in the Bolivian Andes and Amazon. The project she is currently working on at the New York Botanical Gardens is funded by the National Institutes of Health and involves the dynamics of medicinal plant knowledge and use by Dominican immigrants in New York City.