Ethnobotany of the Ese Eja: Plants, health, and change in an Amazonian society

This thesis examines the roles of plants in the context of Ese Eja health-related thought and behavior. The Ese Eja are a small indigenous group, currently living in lowland tropical forest, in a number of tributaries of the Madre de Dios and Beni rivers, in Peru and Bolivia respectively. Two aspects of Ese Eja ethnobotanical processes are highlighted and explored. First, the notion that plants fulfil multiple roles simultaneously: pharmacodynamic, medical, social, cultural and symbolic. These roles are frequently interrelated and, more importantly, subject to considerable degrees of spatial and temporal variability. All these aspects of ethnobotanical interactions reveal much about broader ecological and social processes.;Over 190 plant species and 50 animal species are used to in a wide range of contexts, including treatment of ailments, to manipulate social relations or improve hunting skills, to promote healthy and strong infants and to control fertility. Distribution of responses in a broad ethnomedical survey indicate a high level of idiosyncratic variability, but much variation is also patterned according to such socio-cultural variables as age and gender.;Linguistic, ethnohistoric and ethnobotanical evidence suggest that medicinals have acquired a significantly more prominent role in Ese Eja ethnomedicine over the past 50 to 100 years. About half of all native plant medicinals are explicitly identified by the Ese Eja as having been learnt through contact with non-Ese Eja, and an additional 17% of medicinals are exotic or recently introduced species. The evolutionary and ethnobotanical implications of this are assessed in the context of the history of contact and its effect on health conditions.;The projection of social identities on plants interjects symbolic meaning into plants, as metaphors for historically unique social and ecological relations. The recent introduction of ayahuasca into Ese Eja ethnomedicine coincides with the simultaneous decline in the practice of another form of shamanism, eyamikekwa. Whereas both ayahuasca and eyamikekwa shamanism employ overlapping concepts and paradigms, they each emphasize different aspect of nature with regard to the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. As such, they appear to address to different aspects of Ese Eja ethnobotanical and social experience.