Eating and Healing is aimed at exploring the idea that food can heal. The underlying argument of the volume is that, around the world, indigenous and rural people do not separate food and medicine, but rather consider them in a continuum. From the use in Spain of herbal teas as digestive beverages, to the antioxidant properties of Tibetan foods, we learn that the continuum concept is not unique to a single culture, but a common way in which humans use the natural environment. The various chapters of the volume describe a range of wild and semi-domesticated foods that traditionally have been used both as food and medicine. Although most chapters focus on the use of wild and semi-domesticated plants, the consumption of other foods (i.e., fish, mushrooms, seaweed) suggests that the overlapping nature of food and medicine is not particular to the plant kingdom, but a common way of conceptualizing. The publication of this volume is timely. The book appears at a moment in which the use of food as medicine is gaining attention among the general public in Western society. The volume, however, presents a refreshing perspective of the link between food intake and health. While medical doctors recommend the intake of dietary supplements and food scientists work to develop new “miraculous” foods (such as the golden rice) containing the nutrients lacking in many diets, this book is a call to go back to the essentials, to look at the local resources around us, and to consider the cultural context interwoven with the consumption of foods and medicines. As a whole, however, the volume does not present an overly optimistic and simplistic approach. Throughout the book, different authors point at three potential caveats of generalizing the ingestion of traditional foods as medicines. First, plants that are highly nutritious also have the potential to be highly toxic, so it is not possible to generalize their consumption without further inspection. Second, the eating of traditional foods and medicines is culturally prescribed and their intake disregarding the cultural system associated to them can result in a loss of effectiveness. Last, promoting the consumption of wild foods as medicines can increase the demand of those foods with potential pernicious effects on their sustainable use because of overextraction. By addressing the interface between food, medicine, and culture, Eating and Healing fills an important gap in ethnobiological research. The volume, however, would have benefited from including more quantitative contributions testing the various hypotheses presented. For example, quantitative data should allow researchers to test whether, in fact, people maintaining traditional diets enjoy better health. Future studies on the topic would benefit from using quantitative methods to test the relations between food and medicine. Victoria Reyes-García Institut de Ciencia i Tecnologia Ambiental Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona 08193 Bellaterra (Barcelona), Spain Victoria.Reyes@uab.es

First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies

Prior to the introduction of cosmopolitan medicine, traditional medicine used to be the dominant medical system available to millions of people in Africa in both rural and urban communities However, the arrival of the Europeans marked a significant turning point in the history of this age-long tradition and culture This paper examines the trends and challenges of traditional medicine in Africa The impact of colonialism on African traditional medicine is also examined Although the paper is on Africa, references are drawn around the world to buttress the growing demand for traditional medicine The paper concludes that to minimise the current distrust between modern and traditional doctors and to achieve the objective of regulation, standardisation and cooperation, both traditional and modern doctors must acknowledge their areas of strengths and weaknesses from which they operate and be genuinely concerned about the difficult but necessary task of being human

/pdf/trends-and-challenges-of-traditional-medicine-in-africa-7smfka36da.pdf

Trends and challenges of traditional medicine in Africa.

Woody Plants of Ghana and Their Uses@@@Woody Plants of Ghana, with Special Reference to Their Uses

Poverty is now at the heart of development discourse; we discuss how it is measured and understood. We next consider the negative and positive impacts of livestock on pro-poor development. Taking a value-chain approach that includes keepers, users and eaters of livestock, we identify diseases that are road blocks on the ‘three livestock pathways out of poverty’. We discuss livestock impacts on poverty reduction and review attempts to prioritize the livestock diseases relevant to the poor. We make suggestions for metrics that better measure disease impact and show the benefits of more rigorous evaluation before reviewing recent attempts to measure the importance of disease to the poor. High impact of a disease does not guarantee high benefits from its control; other factors must be taken into consideration, including technical feasibility and political desirability. We conclude by considering how we might better understand and exploit the roles of livestock and improved animal health by posing three speculative questions on the impact of livestock diseases and their control on global poverty: how can understanding livestock and poverty links help disease control?; if global poverty reduction was the aim of livestock disease control, how would it differ from the current model?; and how much of the impact of livestock disease on poverty is due to disease control policy rather than disease itself?

/pdf/the-impacts-of-livestock-diseases-and-their-control-on-7te1pfzs0e.pdf

The impacts of livestock diseases and their control on growth and development processes that are pro-poor.

Field guide to the Palms of the Americas

Contact details: Institutional Home/correspondence Research Fellow CISPAL Overseas Development Institute 8, Guest Road 111, Westminster Bridge Road Cambridge CB1 2AL London, SE1 7JD United Kingdom United Kingdom Voice/Answerphone/Fax. 0044-(0)1223-560687 Tel +44 (0) 207-922-0313 Personal Web Page: http://www.cispal.fsnet.co.uk Fax +44 (0) 207-922-0399 E-mail R.Blench@odi.org.uk Web Page: http://www.org.odi.uk/staff/r.blench

/pdf/you-can-t-go-home-again-pastoralism-in-the-new-millennium-uuiibnww46.pdf

'You can't go home again' Pastoralism in the new millennium

/pdf/position-paper-the-dimensions-of-ethnicity-language-and-zp4xt7vbwb.pdf

Position paper: the dimensions of ethnicity, language and culture in nigeria

Both the silk-cotton (Ceiba pentandra) and the baobab (Adansonia digitata) are widely associated with human settlement in West Africa and neither species is part of the ‘natural’ vegetation but owe their distribution to human activity. The paper reviews the ethnobotany of both species and the evidence for their dispersal in both prehistoric and historical times. The vernacular names seem to have been exchanged between species to another in areas where the trees co-exist. The paper analyses the biogeographical and linguistic evidence and suggests that the accepted models are at best problematic.

/pdf/the-intertwined-history-of-the-silk-cotton-and-baobab-jlsw2n2rtf.pdf

The intertwined history of the silk-cotton and baobab

The Malagasy language is generally linked to the Barito languages of Borneo and recent research suggests that these languages are part of the Sama-Bajaw group. It is assumed the dispersal of the Sama-Bajaw occurred in the 7 century or thereabouts, impelled by the expansion of the Srivijaya Malay. This is in line with the current archaeological dates for settlement in Madagascar which fall within the period 5-7th centuries AD. The role of the Malay in this process, as the protagonists with experience of open ocean voyaging may well explain why Malagasy terms in this lexical field are all Malay borrowings. However, this does not fully explain the evidence for Austronesian presence on the East African coast, as textual and other evidence suggests that there were contacts around 0 AD. Trying to develop a single model to account for the late dates of settlement on Madagascar, and the rather different nature of evidence for the East African coast has proven difficult, and it is here proposed that the reason is that the two migrations were essentially unrelated. Austronesian navigators were crossing the Indian Ocean prior to 0 AD, probably for trading reasons but may have come from a different region, perhaps the Philippines. There is no direct linguistic evidence for this, but cultural evidence is presented in Blench (1994). The original settlers on Madagascar seem not to have transported domestic animals directly and therefore carried a memorised terminology to apply to animals they encountered on the island itself. Interactions between human populations has allowed the interchange and re-application of vocabulary, such that Bantu words have entered Malagasy and Austronesian terms have now spread into Bantu languages. Recent zoogeographic research suggests the translocation of domestic and wild species across the Mozambique Channel and between the islands. An intriguing example of this is the Malagasy name for the wild pig, lambo, which reflects Austronesian names for ‘bovine’. Given the importance of pigs in Austronesian culture, such a replacement may seem surprising, but it seems that the ancestors of the Malagasy transported very large wild pigs from the African mainland as a food source, and these seemed more comparable to cattle than pigs. In the meantime, the importation of mainland cattle brought the Bantu name ŋombe, which replaced exist Austronesian terms. The term lambo, in turn spread to Shimaore, the Bantu language of Mayotte, where it is applied to the dugong. The paper explores this and other Malagasy domestic animal terminology for indications of historical interactions between populations. Surprisingly, almost all names for domestic animals are borrowed from languages of the coastal Bantu and Austronesian traces are found only in fossil forms. This may reflect the nature of the voyage; if the navigators were using the Equatorial current to cross the Indian Ocean without staging points, then it may not have been possible to keep domestic animals on the journey.

/pdf/the-austronesians-in-madagascar-and-on-the-east-african-58nmbrvt0q.pdf

The Austronesians in Madagascar and on the East African coast: surveying the linguistic evidence for domestic and translocated animals

/pdf/fulfulde-names-for-plants-and-trees-in-nigeria-cameroun-chad-jatiu292um.pdf

Fulfulde names for plants and trees in nigeria, cameroun, chad and niger

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