The prefix ETNO means people or human community.
The word BOTANY means plants and the study of plants.
BoTaniCuLtuRa: Ethnobotany for BoriKÉn.
¿What is EtnoBotany?
Ethnobotany is the interdisciplinary fiend of study that explores the relationships that we human beings have with plants. Most cultures are based upon the complex collaborations that exist between people and the plants that share their territories.
These collaborations include infinite exchanges of survival and economy. They also include expressions of spirituality and pure friendship between humans and the plant kingdom.
In reference to post-indigenous societies, the scientific community prefers the term "economic botany". However, BotaniCultura honors the fact that our relationship with the plant world goes far beyond quantifiable economy.
Botanical medicine: our Abuelas' legacy
Rooted in profound knowledge about our plants as physical and spiritual medicine, the botanical medicine tradition of Borikén is part of a powerful cultural inheritance of our past.
It is also part of our future as a people wise in the ways of health and wellbeing.
The Puerto Rican folkloric tradition of green medicine and home remedies has always served as an integrated system of holistic healing.
Our TraditioN
empowers our people because it
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Has its origins in a pre-capitalist solidarity economy, making it accessible to people of all social classes.
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Emphasizes (mostly invisible) preventive medicine, starting in the kitchen.
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Promotes ecological knowledge as it teaches about the abundant and totally eaccessible neighboring plants ready to prevent and cure illnesses. With each need, this tradition puts its participants in direct contact with these resources. In this way, it helps us to know and to conserve our archipelago's biodiversity.
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Fosters historical and cultural knowledge by strengthening community ties and promoting communication between generations.
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Conserves and spreads scientific knowledge, empirically proven, supervised, and preserved by grandmothers and grandfathers on three continents throughout the centuries.
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Treats our people — and our participating communities — on physical, emotional, and spiritual levels;
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In spite of these great benefits, during the years of exodus from our countryside into urban environments (especially during the 1950s, 60s and 70s) many boricuas (Puerto Ricans) internalized the colonialist message that our ancestral medicine was only practiced out of ignorance or poverty. Our people learned to perceive this tradition as inferior, something that only had a place among those who could not aspire to the care of doctors and pharmaceutical preparations.
Barbara Rodríguez of Orocovis relates: They told us that the bottle was better than our breasts. They ridiculed and threatened our midwives. Our folk healers were “backward,” “illiterate spiritists,” “ignorant farmers.” People started denying their botanical knowledge because they feared being called superstitious or stupid. Attitudes like these were supported by economic structures that promoted the unbridled adoption of imported products. As a result, instead of being a source of national pride, our age-old practices of holistic healing, human exchange and ecological wisdom were ridiculed and rejected. Today, the survival of our tradition of botanical medicine depends on us!
Through lively conferences, participative workshops, ethnobotanical safaris, wisdom circles, the course Bendiciones Botánicas, publications and other offerings, BotaniCultura works to reestablish, practice and teach the knowledge, skills and attitudes associated with a tradition that has always represented our people’s physical health and spiritual well being.