Ethnobotany

Ethnobotany is the study of human–plant interactions in their historical and geographical totality, including how plants are perceived, named, and classified as well as the symbolic and material aspects of their management, harvesting, processing, and use. The extent to which plant?based knowledge and interactions are socially patterned at different scales and how and why these patterns emerge and change over time are key concerns. Studies have often prioritized the cognitive, linguistically encoded aspects of knowledge, usually within such specific domains as health, nutrition, or agriculture. Multidisciplinary from the outset, ethnobotany's approach has become increasingly so since the closing decades of the twentieth century, drawing from and contributing to a growing set of disciplines in the natural and social sciences and humanities. The post?1980s increase in academic and public interest in ethnobotany is consistent with the social, cultural, political, and economic conditions of late modernity with its multiple crises—epistemic, social, political, and environmental—and closely related transformations.