Wild medicinal plant collection in transitional societies: A case Analysis from French Guiana

Abstract

French National Research Agency) and its ReKABioS project. It received support from the OyaMar project financed by French Guiana ERDF. It also forms part of the EA 929 AIHP-GEODE project: "Urban territories: from the Antilles archipelago to the Guiana Shield: spaces, societies and relationships (16th-21st centuries)", and the doctoral thesis by Marc-Alexandre Tareau.

Phytotherapies in motion: French Guiana as a case study for cross-cultural ethnobotanical hybridization

“…The level of knowledge around medicinal plants seems favored by migratory contributions, and this even in the city, as already observed by Tareau et al [16,17] or by van Andel et al [74]. Indeed, if the artificialization of rural spaces and the sedentarization of urban populations can appear as a major obstacle to the perpetuation of phytotherapy practices and knowledge [75], we note however that in average, levels of knowledge appear in French Guiana roughly similar among urban and nonurban residents.…”

“…On the one hand, it is certainly linked to the fact that a large part of the urban dwellers being of recent rural origin (immigration, rural exodus), the link with nature seems stronger and is for the moment probably maintained in the city in some segments of the population, in which the phytotherapy practices still constitutes an inexpensive alternative to biomedicine and a strong identity marker [16,17]. On the other hand, even in densely populated areas, contact with nature is still possible in the cities of French Guiana: people go picking on the Cayenne forested hills, in the "Malgaches' forest" in St. Laurent, or in urban wastelands [17]. We were also able to show that many plants came from outside French Guiana along the migration process, which is consistent with the "relocalization" sub-process of ethnobotanical hybridizations described by Ladio and Albuquerque [22].…”

“…Ethnobotany of migrants is occupying an increasingly important place in modern ethnobiology, thanks to numerous recent works of ethnographic description and conceptualization of these practices [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13], and particularly in an urban context where moving populations are often concentrated [1,2,5,[8][9][10][14][15][16][17][18][19]. Indeed, the question of the resulting ethnobotanical hybridizations is now at the heart of interdisciplinary questioning in ethnosciences [20][21][22][23][24][25], as it is nowadays accepted that phytotherapeutical practices are dynamic cultural processes which are constantly nourished by the circulation of people and the interactions between different cultural groups.…”

“…If the vitality of herbal medicine practices among young French Guianese urban people has already been shown [16], along with the importance in this Amazonian space of the gathering of medicinal plants by several populations [17] and the circulation of medicinal plants at its borders, especially with Brazil [28], a general overview of the current phytotherapeutic uses in this territory had not been established yet. Thus, from a perspective seeking to question every cultural group present, we wanted to understand what could be the main dynamics in ethnopharmacopeias in this context of interculturality, migration, and urbanization, in order to better understand how they adapt to these social changes.…”

When local phytotherapies meet biomedicine. Cross-sectional study of knowledge and intercultural practices against malaria in Eastern French Guiana

“…Concerning the use of plant medicine in general in French Guiana, access to plants is largely informal, but easy. Plants are often locally collected in gardens or around villages, either by patients themselves or by their relatives (Grenand et al, 2004;Tareau et al, 2017) although important exchange networks have also been documented in the region (Tareau et al, 2019a(Tareau et al, , 2019b.…”