- 1
- Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Łódź, Lindleya 3/5, 90-131, Łódź, Poland. monika.kujawska@uni.lodz.pl.
- 2
- Institute of Botany, Jagiellonian University, Kopernika 27, 31-501, Kraków, Poland.
- 3
- Department of Botany, Institute of Biotechnology, University of Rzeszów, Werynia 502, 36-100, Kolbuszowa, Poland.
Abstract
BACKGROUND:
Historical
ethnobotanical studies are useful starting points for further
diachronic analysis. The aim of this contribution is to present archival
data from the Polish-Lithuanian-Belarusian borderland, which were
collected by Adam Fischer, a Polish ethnographer from Lviv, in the
1930s. These data were originally gathered for publication in the first
part of the Lexicon of Slavic beliefs and customs, dedicated to plant
uses in traditional Slavonic culture. It was intended to be a joint
international enterprise, but was never actually fulfilled.
METHODS:
In this article we used information from historical Lithuania (the Great Duchy of Lithuania), nowadays a border region between Poland,
Lithuania and Belarus. We applied cultural importance indices such as
Use Value, Relative Importance value and Sørensen similarity
coefficient, in order to compare our data with a western Ukraine data
set from the same research framework.
RESULTS:
In
total, 153 plant taxa were registered as used in peasant culture in the
Polish-Lithuanian-Belarusian borderland in the 1930s. The species which
achieved the highest Use Values were: Calendula officinalis, Cyanus
segetum, Helichrysum arenarium, Betula sp., Prunella vulgaris, and
Nuphar lutea or Lilium sp. The most salient use categories were
medicinal, followed by food and home garden plants. The overall
similarity to plants recorded in western Ukraine within the same project
of Fischer's is quite low (46%), which may be explained by the partly
different flora found in the regions, and a cultural discontinuity,
revealed by the difference in species with the highest UV. Moreover, the
field collaborators were different in the two regions and may have paid
attention to different cultural spheres of use.
CONCLUSIONS:
The
presented ethnobotanical data are a valuable contribution to the
ethnobotany of Eastern Europe as a whole. In particular, the presented
list of plants may be a rich source for future studies on the
ethnobotany of the Polish diaspora in Lithuania, and diachronic studies
in north-east Poland and Belarus.
KEYWORDS:
Belarus; Historical ethnobotany; Lithuania; Medicinal plants; Poland
