A Study of Religion, Culture, and Medicinal Plants of Three South American Indigenous Groups
Date
2012-05
Authors
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This project is focused around an inventory of medicinal plants which I
compiled after conducting ethnobotanical fieldwork with three South American
indigenous populations. These groups were the Shipibo Indians, of the Peruvian
montaña, the Atacameño Indians, native to the Chilean Atacama Desert, and the
Mapuche Indians, inhabitants of the temperate valleys of southern Chile. This
information is critical during a time when both the habitats and cultures of indigenous
peoples are disappearing at an alarming rate. While the efficacy of indigenous
medicinal plant use has just recently begun to receive recognition by the Western
scientific community, these individuals have known the therapeutic worth of the
phytochemicals for millennia. In order to depict this information that I collected as
knowledge passed down from for thousands of years, I have decided to mainly focus
on the traditional histories of these groups, supplementing information from modern
times by drawing on what I saw during my time conducting research with them. In
order to do this, I describe the natural origins of these biomes, and how the indigenous
peoples existed in the biomes in both in pre- and post-Columbian times. Furthermore,
traditional religious practices also necessitate discussion when talking about tribal use
of medicinal plants. Therefore, I present the reader with an account of animism, the
doctrine of the spirits, and the shaman, the magico-religious practitioner whose duty it
is to ensure harmony between the natural and spiritual worlds through a technique of
ecstasy. His effectiveness in doing so ensures both societal and individual health,
which is most important for this thesis. I then discuss how one becomes a shaman, the
psycho-evolutionary components involved with shamanism, and the symbolism and
meaning involved in the shamanic healing of “sickness,” which encompasses both
illness (the psycho-social component) and disease (the biological component). It is the
disease component that medicinal plants address, which leads me into my chapter on
ethnoscience and ethnobotany. I offer the reader short ethnographies of the groups
with whom I worked, followed by a reflexive account of my fieldwork for a modern
perspective on the groups. I also include an inventory of the medicinal plants which I
collected and a brief discussion of my results in my conclusion chapter. Finally, I try
to bring everything together and show that there is something that the much more
recent Western Biomedical system could learn from the millennia-old shamanistic
healing practices. That is, that treating biological components of sickness is only half
the battle. The other half is addressing the psychological factors of the individual. By
attending to both, the mind-body connection can be addressed for an all encompassing
treatment of a sick person.
Description
Keywords
Shipibo medicinal plants, Atacameño medicinal plants, Mapuche medicinal plants, South America, Peru, Chile