new medicine book|Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice: An Ethnobotanist Searches for New Medicines in the Amazon Rain Forest
|Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice: An Ethnobotanist Searches for New Medicines in the Amazon Rain Forest
For thousands of years, healers have used plants to cure illness. Aspirin, the world's most widely used drug, is based on compounds originally extracted from the bark of a willow tree, and more than a quarter of medicines found on pharmacy shelves contain plant compounds. Now Western medicine, faced with health crises such as AIDS, Alzheimer's disease, and cancer, has begun to look to the healing plants used by indigenous peoples to develop powerful new medicines. Nowhere is the search more promising than in the Amazon, the world's largest tropical forest, home to a quarter of all botanical species on this planet—as well as hundreds of Indian tribes whose medicinal plants have never been studied by Western scientists. In Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, ethnobotanist Mark J. Plotkin recounts his travels and studies with some of the most powerful Amazonian shamans, who taught him the plant lore their tribes have spent thousands of years gleaning from the rain forest.
For more than a decade, Dr. Plotkin has raced against time to harvest and record new plants before the rain forests' fragile ecosystems succumb to overdevelopment—and before the Indians abandon their own culture and learning for the seductive appeal of Western material culture. Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice relates nine of the author's quests, taking the reader along on a wild odyssey as he participates in healing rituals; discovers the secret of curare, the lethal arrow poison that kills in minutes; tries the hallucinogenic snuff epena that enables the Indians to speak with their spirit world; and earns the respect and fellowship of the mysterious shamans as he proves that he shares both their endurance and their reverence for the rain forest. Mark Plotkin combines the Darwinian spirit of the great writer-explorers of the nineteenth century—curious, discursive, and rigorously scientific—with a very modern concern for the erosion of our environment and the vanishing culture of native peoples.
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A Phenomenal Book,
I agree wholeheartedly with the rave reviews for this book and it has become one of my favorites (I even sent it to an ethnobotanist in Yap as a must read). Not only is it wonderfully well-written, and not only does it address crucial ecological concerns, but it is an exciting account of Plotkin’s effort to identify and explore the medical possibilities of Amazonian plants, while preserving the indigineous lore about their uses, both medicinal and spiritual; the discovery and adoption of plants by Europeans and North Americans, and Plotkin’s own adventures. I found some it so fascinating on so many levels I’d read it to my family (okay, I know that may be obnoxious, but I couldn’t restrain myself). It’s thought-provoking, important and absolutely fascinating. Can’t recommend it highly enough!!
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|Good science, good work,
Mark Plotkin takes the reader on a journey to the Amazon rainforests of Brazil and Suriname, along the way teaching about rainforest ecology, the medicinal plants and rituals of shamans, indigenous cultures, and his own scientific methods. Although his prose is at times tedious and repetitive, the story itself is a fascinating one, and his determination to give something back to the people of the region is admirable. The story unfolds in a way that allows the reader to understand what is happening to the rainforest both culturally and ecologically, and it offers not merely a criticism of western society but a set of reasonable solutions that could benefit the region, not just ecologically but economically. Plotkin is a responsible researcher whose work should be a model for future ethnobotanists.
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|This was the book that turned me on to Ethnobotany.,
Reading this changed my perspective on Western civilization forever. One example is the author’s revelation that the indiginous peoples weren’t hunter-”gatherers” at all, but rather gardeners of the world’s remaining Eden, inheritors of an agricultural tradition far more ancient and advanced than ours. I was stunned by the realization that Western agriculture’s monocultures of neat little rows laid out in a landscape of squares is the simplistic imposition of a human order on a far more complex natural order- an order that the Amazonian tribes incorporate in the design of their jungle-garden. A mindblowing paradigm shift awaits you, especially if you bring some knowledge of complex adaptive systems and/or Periodic Equilibrium evolution to this lucid journal. And this amazing personal account is a ripping good yarn. The only thing this book needs is a follow-up epilog, a “where are they now” of the pharmaceuticals, the shamans, the tribes, and the author’s efforts to save them from extinction. A warning: Rereading this book in the summer of ’98 while watching the rainforests of Indonesia and Mexico burn deeply depressed me. It was like a thousand libraries of Alexandria going up in smoke. Future generations will never forgive us.
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