John
Harshberger coined the word “ethnobotany” in 1895 A.D.
Ethnobotany means the study
of traditional plant use, or the
scientific study of the traditional classification and uses of plants in
different human societies.
Because
ethnobotanists must explore how different ethnic communities use botanical
resources, ethnobotany
combines the research in a great variety of disciplines, such as botany,
medicine/pharmacy, agriculture, and geology, as well as anthropology, language
studies, and, to some degree, computer science, etc.
As
such, it is important for an ethnobotanist to:
1.
collect and classify the ethnobotanical knowledge of various
communities;
2.
evaluate and uses, or potential uses, of plant resources;
3.
estimate how to use the botanical resources in practical application;
and
4.
understand how indigenous people can reap the benefits of their
traditional knowledge.
With
the vast improvement of biotechnology today, understanding of the uses for
plants are the forefront of R&D, and to reduce costs, many companies are
“bioprospecting,” or tapping into the vast wealth of traditional knowledge
of different communities around the world.
Many cases of “biopiracy” have occurred, whereby companies from the developed
world take traditional knowledge of the developing world, determine the genetic
composition of the botanical resources or modify them in the laboratory, then
claim plants, seeds, harvested crops, or derivatives, as their intellectual
property. Biopiracy has the
potential to deprive even the community from which this knowledge came of
access to this material.
On
June 5, 1992, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was adopted, and
the CBD entered into force on the December 29, 1993. Approximately 183 countries have ratified the CBD to date.
The main objectives of this Convention are to ensure conservation of
biological diversity, to promote a sustainable use of the components of this
biodiversity, and to ensure a fair and equitable sharing of the benefits from
the use of genetic resources.
Various
parties have proposed certain defensive protection measures to ensure that
others cannot obtain IP rights over pre-existing traditional knowledge.
Traditional knowledge databases or registries are one such defensive
measure as evidence of prior art, so as to assist in defeating a claim pirating
traditional
knowledge.
The
indigenous peoples of Taiwan are scattered in the mountain regions
island-wide.
Great deals of indigenous knowledge are
available
on this island.
Japanese scholars were some of the first people to conduct
ethnobotanical studies near the beginning of the last century.
Unfortunately, as we later found, Japanese studies were relatively
difficult to locate in periodicals.
We
conducted a complete survey of the Table of Contents section of each journal
published in Taiwan during Japanese colonial era (1895 to 1945) and held in
the archives of National Taiwan University, the Taiwan Forestry Research
Institute, and the Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute.
We
selected 105
articles concerning aborigines and/or plants and plant uses.
Among these articles, 21 articles concerned ethnobotany.
We also took a look at post-WWII studies (1945 to 2000), and found 5
monographs and 72 periodical theses concerning aborigines and/or plants and
plant uses.
Among these, 24 publications concerned ethnobotany.
According to our survey, Taiwanese or Formosan
aborigines have used about 700 plants species. We created a database through MS Access.
The database has several fields (i.e., commonly-accepted names,
synonyms, common names, plant family, indigenous tribes, use, and
description). As for use we have
classified them by use: as food,
as spice, as salt replacement, as medicine, for chewing, for teeth-dyeing, for
dyeing generally, for cleaning, for wine-making, for decoration, for
fish-poisoning, for construction, for boat-making, for use as a container, for
use as fabric, etc. People can
use this database to conduct searches in Chinese.
The English version currently sets forth only the use of these plants,
but we it is our hope that this section will be translated in the near future.
