Evaluating traditional wild edible plant knowledge among teachers of Patagonia: Patterns and prospects
Highlights
- •
- We studied the corpus of traditional ecological knowledge held by rural teachers in Patagonia.
- •
- We found a common system dominated by edible exotic herbs.
- •
- This knowledge plays a key role in contextualising locally relevant information about Nature in classroom.
Abstract
The
objectives of this study were to characterise the body of knowledge of
wild edible plants possessed by teachers working in rural and urban
areas of arid Patagonia. We also evaluated whether the different age
classes of teachers have different likelihoods of citing plants in
relation to different aspects of their ecological and socio-cultural
attributes. Study subjects were 85 female and 14 male 21 to 66 year-old
teachers from Dolavon, Gaiman, Trelew, Rawson and Puerto Madryn, who
were interviewed using written free listing questionnaires. A
multinomial logistic regression model including different age classes of
teachers as a dependent variable, and as independent categorical
variables: informant gender, plant life form, ubiquity, presence of
medicinal use and global socio-economic importance of the cited plant
species, yielded results which were both significant and predictive. A
total of 96 native and exotic species were cited, including plants
growing in the immediate surroundings (39 spp.), those from more distant
forest environments (9 spp.) and cultivated plants (48 spp.). Most
cited species are cosmopolitan herbs which have edible aerial parts,
play a significant role in the past and present global economy, have
additional medicinal uses, and are associated with the nearest
landscapes. The importance of the complementary medicinal use of the
edible plants cited, their significance in the global market, and their
local ubiquity did not seem to vary between age categories of teachers.
The traditional ecological knowledge possessed by Patagonian teachers
seems to consist of a body of knowledge constructed on a foundation of
accumulated experience of the local environment and the cultural values
that have prevailed since the initiation of formal education. This work
shows the importance of logistic models as a tool in the study of
traditional knowledge, given that they reflect, in a predictive way, the
variation existing in different subgroups in relation to a complex
network of multiple factors. In addition, in this work we emphasise the
importance of considering the cultural capital of the teachers
themselves as a highly significant dimension, which can have a direct
influence on the schools in terms of education and learning about
Nature.
Keywords
- Ethnobotany;
- TEK;
- Environmental perception;
- Cultural transmission
Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
