Ethnobotanical Legacies of Brazil’s African Diaspora

FAIN: FT-51597-03

Robert Voeks
California State University, Fullerton (Fullerton, CA 92831-3547)

Colonization of the Americas heralded a biological and cultural interchange of unprecedented proportions. While the consequences of these landscape transformations have been discussed from European and Amerindian perspectives, the role of the African diaspora as agents of environmental change has been mostly overlooked. Building on the work of various authors (cf. Crosby, Carney, Davis, Voeks), this project will employ archival and ethnographic methods in Bahia, Brazil to investigate African antecedents of current Brazilian nature-society relations. Focused on patterns of plant knowledge and use, this project seeks to recast black pioneers and their descendents as active participants in the contouring of New World geographies.