“We Are Italians!”: The Hybrid Ethnobotany of a Venetian Diaspora in Eastern Romania

Abstract

The ethnobotanical knowledge of migrant communities has been the focus of a number of studies in recent years aimed at understanding how Traditional Knowledge (TK) about plants changes over time. Changes in TK often occur in response to various sociocultural and/or environmental factors, which affect the continuum between adaptation (i.e., changing, substituting, or eliminating home plant uses according to the new host environment/culture), and isolation (i.e., retaining plant uses according to a presumed “original” plant TK) (Pieroni and Quave 2005; Pieroni et al. 2005, 2011; Pieroni and Vandebroek 2007; Maxia et al. 2008; Ceuterick et al. 2008 and 2011; Zamudio et al. 2010; de Medeiros et al. 2012). While a few scholars (especially in Central and Northern Europe) are researching archives where unpublished ethnographic records of plant uses can still be found (Łuczaj 2010a, b; Soukand and Kalle 2011, 2012), others are using historical sources concerning plant uses (Svanberg et al. 2011, and references therein) and meta-analysis of (heterogeneous) ethnobotanical field studies (Leonti et al. 2010; Weckerle et al. 2011). Nevertheless, original field studies are still urgently needed to document ethnobotanical TK central to preservation of local biocultural heritage, as well as offering important insights into smallscale business activities involving locally neglected plants (e.g., herbal medicines, handicrafts, local food products, and ecotourism). This may be especially important for the TK of ethnic/cultural minorities, which are often not only threatened by global processes such as urbanisation and the disappearance of traditional rural lifestyles, but also by cultural marginalisation. In this study, we focused on a very small group of descendents of migrants who left Friuli and Northern Veneto in north-eastern Italy at the end of the nineteenth century to work as stonecutters around Macin Mountain in Dobruja, eastern Romania. Our aim was to record the ethnobotanical knowledge of this diaspora and to compare the data with the previously published ethnobotanical literature available for Romanians and Venetians/Friulans in their home regions in order to learn how practices and beliefs related to plants may have changed. A. Pieroni (*) University of Gastronomic Sciences, Piazza Vittorio Emanuele 9, 12060 Pollenzo, Italy e-mail: a.pieroni@unisg.it