Date:
22 May 2012
“We Are Italians!”: The Hybrid Ethnobotany of a Venetian Diaspora in Eastern Romania
(There is no herb, which looks up, that does not have its own virtues - Venetian proverb)
Introduction
The
ethnobotanical knowledge of migrant communities has been the focus of a
number of studies in recent years aimed at understanding how Traditional Knowledge
(TK) about plants changes over time. Changes in TK often occur in
response to various sociocultural and/or environmental factors, which
affect the continuum between adaptation (i.e., changing, substituting, or eliminating home plant uses according to the new host environment/culture), and isolation (i.e., retaining plant uses according to a presumed “original” plant TK) (Pieroni and Quave 2005; Pieroni et al.2005, 2011; Pieroni and Vandebroek 2007; Maxia et al.2008; Ceuterick et al.2008 and 2011; Zamudio et al. 2010; de Medeiros et al.2012).
While
a few scholars (especially in Central and Northern Europe) are
researching archives where unpublished ethnographic records of pl ...