Distinguised Economic Botanist Award

Abstract

The Society for Economic Botany has increasingly defined itself as a context for fostering expertise in ethnobotany and its various applications. However, given that my own work as an ethnobotanist has been much influenced by my training as an anthropologist, there may be merit in re-examining the 'economic' in economic botany from the standpoint of anthropology. In this address I suggest that economic anthropology provides a useful framework through which to interrogate the notions of 'use' and 'value' attributed to plant resources, and to understand how plants move - by exchange and dissemination - through socio-economic systems, how plant knowledge informs decision-making, and how ethnobotanical knowledge is socially embedded. Each of these processes rests on the foundational idea that all plants with which humans interact are necessarily and simultaneously biological and cultural. Such perspectives may even help us rethink the still sometimes unresolved issues as to what 'theory' in ethnobotany actually entails