The Social Lives of Plants and People: Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Food Practices in Amis Home Gardens
Journal
Taiwan Journal of Anthropology
Journal Volume
20
Journal Issue
2
Pages
79 - 138
Date Issued
2022-01-01
Author(s)
Abstract
This article presents ethnographical narratives on the joint social lives of the Amis people and the edible wild plants in home gardens with anthropological and ethnobotanical perspectives. The approach, based on material culture theory and botanical survey, brings us to an overall understanding of the social, cultural, and biological processes which contrasts with former research that only stresses either the classification of the plants or the dimension of food culture. Through long-term participant observation, formal and informal interviews, and interdisciplinary methods, we emphasize the important aspects of corelative local foodways and cultural memory of the edible wild plants in the home gardens as well as the embedded sociality in their exchange. This study was mainly carried out between 2014-2019 with a total of 10 home gardens in the Amis community of ‘Atolan, Taitung. Among them, we select 4 cases for a detailed demonstration of the used species and related techniques. Different choices reflect the informants’ botanical practice and memory of the landscape, which show their preferences and different life processes. We can see the co-relative contextual data in their life histories connected with these plants. The knowledge and exchange of the edible wild plants reveal the co-existence of elements from adaptive transmission passed down from generation to generation and also from modern agriculture, and the stressed value of sharing food and seeds among age group members and relatives is entangled with these phenomena. The everydayness and high productivity make the edible wild plants invisible and difficult to notice. At the same time, this abundance is worth discussing with anthropological exchange theory on affluent society. With the sophisticated techniques of maintaining the gardens with certain amounts of edible wild plants in different seasons, the Amis people in ‘Atolan demonstrate their idea of the good life in our contemporary world. With this practice, they also manage to resist full monetarization and the mass industrialization of gardening by the outside world. In this comparative study on indigenous local traditional ecological knowledge which stresses practice and oral transmission, we gain a deeper understanding of the nature of this particular knowledge and its special characteristics. The case of the edible wild plants of the Amis reflects a kind of contemporary indigenous knowledge in Taiwan that highlights a new perspective concerning the dynamics and practices of a locally-based traditional ecological knowledge system. This new perspective should be considered by researchers so that we can avoid the misinterpretation of this rich indigenous environmental knowledge. In addition, we can make the application of this knowledge possible in some domains of practice such as the development of indigenous areas, official ethnic education, and the activities of cultural transmission of the tribal communities. In this case, we can also see how the Amis people are good at applying their ecological knowledge in manipulating biological and cultural materials for living with resilience and sociality. Here we articulate an understanding of edible wild plants and their co-existence with human beings through the processes of production, exchange, and consumption, and try to clarify the dialectical relationships between these particular plants and the people.
Subjects
edible wild plants | exchange | Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge | social life of things | sociality
Type
journal article