When I first received The Ethnobotany of Eden, I assumed that the work would serve as a compilation of Robert A. Voeks’s extensive research and subsequent publications based on his decades of field work in Brazil and Indonesia. I welcomed the volume because Voeks is our discipline’s best known and most widely published ethnobotanist in a subfield long dominated by anthropology despite its own share of geographical contributors dating back to Humboldt. A compilation of Voeks’s own work would have made for interesting and important reading given his clear and engaging writing style and his extensive field work in diverse tropical landscapes. The Ethnobotany of Eden, however, is far more than just a compilation of one person’s research biography. Instead, and broadly speaking, the volume provides a history of the Western relationship with the tropical rainforest environment and its peoples, both native and immigrant.
The Ethnobotany of Eden is an invaluable source of information regarding a myriad of topics related to ethnobotany and medicinal plants, tropical rainforest conservation, colonialism in the tropics, gender and ethnobotany, indigenous people, and cultural and environmental diffusion. Voeks delves deeply into an array of topics including the concept of the “noble savage,” the ethno-pharmaceutical value of pristine tropical forests, the pristine myth and old-growth forests, the erosion of ethnobotanical knowledge, intellectual property and ethnobotanical knowledge, and biopiracy and indigenous knowledge. Perhaps most important, he explores the titular “jungle medicine narrative,” which touches on all of these topics.
This mythic narrative proposes that as-yet unknown cures for humankind’s ills will be found within rainforest plants. Secondarily, and equally important, this narrative asserts that the ethnobotanical potential of these plants resides within the minds of indigenous peoples within rainforest landscapes, particularly shamans. Although this narrative has existed for centuries, Voeks does an excellent job of chronicling its origins and evolution, tracing how the idea became embedded in the larger conservation community in the 1970s and 1980s as one of the primary rationalizations for protecting rainforests and their inhabitants.
The jungle medicine narrative also became more viable during the 1970s as childhood leukemia was effectively treated with the drugs vinblastine and vincristine, derived from Catharanthus roseus, the Madagascar periwinkle. Over time, the jungle medicine narrative found its way into popular media, such as the movie Medicine Man, starring Sean Connery, and inspired the startup of bioprospecting companies like Shaman Pharmaceuticals, which eventually filed for bankruptcy in 2001 after failing to realize a profit.
Voeks also explores historical speculation that if the Garden of Eden were an actual place, it would most likely be located in the rainforests of South America, understood to be virgin or primordial. This idea dates back to Christopher Columbus and his transatlantic voyage of 1492, which is meticulously chronicled in the beginning of this book. As Voeks argues, refences to Eden are instrumental to the jungle medicine narrative, providing a cosmology in which, for every illness, God has created a healing plant and, in the Garden of Eden, a pharmacy. This association between tropical rainforests and the Edenic is enduring. Considerable interest and investment in finding the modern-day Eden, and exploiting the healing properties of its flora to deal with humankind’s many maladies, continues today, portrayed through various media and conservation outlets. This association is likely often reinforced by the early discovery of indigenous rainforest plant treatments for conditions such as syphilis and malaria.
The main text of The Ethnobotany of Eden contains 321 pages, with nine chapters, each of which contains two through six fascinating subsections that provide background details and stories related to the larger chapter topic. For example, in Chapter 4, “Green Gold,” Voeks summarizes the “nutmeg conspiracy,” which provides an extremely violent example of the colonial Dutch desire to obtain and control the spice economy and its biomaterial. Although topics such as nutmeg and cinchona have been written about elsewhere, their inclusion here provides invaluable historical contexts for the West’s insatiable demand for tropical resources dating back hundreds of years. Chapter 7, “Immigrant Ethnobotany,” presents more of Voeks’s own research in Brazil among Afro-Brazilian cultures, an important addition to a body of literature that tends to associate ethnobotanical knowledge, and especially medicinal plants, almost solely with indigenous people, as part of the jungle medicine narrative. Voeks clearly demonstrates that Africans brought to the New World as slaves also developed a rich ethnobotanical knowledge system based both on plants brought with them from Africa and also through experimentation with flora in their new landscape. Similarly in Chapter 5, “Gender and Healing,” Voeks dispels the common assumption that the classic shaman is always male.
Ethnobotany of Eden contains five pages of notes to the various chapters, a thirteen-page index, forty-two pages of references with citations integrated into the text, and numerous interesting photographs, drawings, and maps. The bibliography is extensive and will serve as an invaluable resource for those interested in the nexus of human–plant interactions.
Looking toward the future, Voeks adopts a sober perspective regarding the future of rainforest remedies, suggesting that most important discoveries have already been made, but acknowledging that the potential for undiscovered cures remains. Given recent ebola, zika, and COVID-19 outbreaks, it will be interesting to see if the jungle medicine narrative takes a new turn as the world reacts to lethal diseases, some of which emanate from tropical landscapes. Ironically, and as discussed extensively by Voeks, most medicinal plants are not associated with pristine rainforest, again challenging the jungle medicine narrative. Instead, most are found in disturbed habitats such as home gardens, hunting trails, swidden clearings, or secondary-growth forests. Therefore, this work also contributes to a large corpus of work on the “pristine myth,” an important research theme within both geography and archaeology.
Although Voeks is not convinced that tropical forests hold the cures to all of our human ills, he does support one important component of the jungle medicine narrative: Undiscovered cures are under threat from encroachment by Western economy, culture, and religions. These encroachments are both direct and indirect, given both the quantifiable destruction of tropical forests and the loss of traditional knowledge within younger generations whose values are shaped by a globalized world affording them little interest in traditional knowledge.
The Ethnobotany of Eden is an engaging, timely, extremely well-written book. It maintains a sound balance between a respectful treatment of indigenous knowledge (and thereby some parts of the jungle medicine narrative) and a well-documented critique of Western environmental myth making, with a critical attention to the various causes it might serve, albeit sometimes perfectly well-intentioned. This book would serve as instrumental reading for geography and anthropology courses covering a multitude of topics such as tropical conservation, indigenous cultures, diffusion of people and plants, colonialism and the environment, gender and the environment, intellectual property, and more.
In conclusion, Voeks validates that tropical forests have provided important botanical cures and could still yield important biomaterial, but diligently relays a more nuanced story and history that is far more complex than those stories that have come to dominate the jungle medicine narrative.