Living Grass Irrigation Ditches in Traditional Portuguese Agriculture: Autecology in the study of ethnobotany

Abstract

Over the past decades, increasing numbers of scholarlyworks recognize the importance of plant ecology in understandinghuman history, culture, and technology. Theseworks represent a wide variety of disciplines includingecological history, human geography, ecological agriculture,economic botany, conservation biology, human ecology,ecological anthropology, and ethnobotany. I believethat these disciplines differ among themselves with respectto the training, traditions, styles, points of view, anddata sources, more than they do with respect to the questionsthey seek to answer. Consideration of plant ecologyby each of these disciplines has brought their questionsand the kinds of answers they might consider even closer,without substantially diminishing other differences amongthem.The goals of this essay are: 1. To present, briefly, an historicaloverview of the concepts of the science of ecology,and to identify the place of autecology in the spectrum ofsubfields of modern scientific ecology; 2. to suggest howthe perspective of autecology might enrich ethnobotanicalstudies; 3. to illustrate the perspective of autecology withsome of my own work on the traditional agricultural technologyof Portuguese peasants; and 4. to conclude withfour points, made evident by the perspective of autecologyin this illustration: a. The power of an ecological approachto ethnobotany; b. the legitimacy of plant-humaninteractions as a subject of ecological study; c. the utilityof studying traditional cultures that have been invadedand contaminated by modern practices; and d. the roleof culture in the instruction, practice and preservation oftechnology.