Review of "Bedouin Ethnobotany"
Bedouin Ethnobotany : Plant Concepts and Uses in a Desert Pastoral World By James Mandaville (09/2001)
The author, James Mandaville, had worked in Eastern Saudi Arabia gathering plant names and plant-related terminology in the 1960’s. His work spewed out into his free time and he began gathering samples of the local plants and cataloging names extensively. The purpose of his ethnography was to shed light on the folk classifications of Bedouin Arabic plant lore; the report and devotion of the research performed by the author married the desert-adapted plants of Arabia and the people that followed them, believed in the cosmic connection to germination, named them, and depended on them for their livelihood for thousands of years.
Mandaville organizes his book from macro to micro. He gives a brief background of himself in relation to the place that he collected data; he then describes the nature of his initial data collection and the emergence of a continued relationship with the people, place, and subsistence and traditional ecological knowledge that he was deriving from field encounters with a number of Bedouin consultants. He describes the land, then the people that live in the area (Eastern Saudi Arabia); he goes on to describe the relationship that the people have with the land and their use of stars to signal changes in the seasons. After developing a working understanding of how the Bedouin’s reveal seasons and some of their fundamental working understandings of the environment he hones in on the Bedouin relationship to the ecology of the place. I agree with his organization techniques, I like that the bulk of the data was described in the fifth chapter after getting to know the backstory. Mandaville describes himself, the nature of his data collection, then the place that he was researching, the people who were his subjects, then the beliefs and religion of those people, all before diving into the “point” of the work. This back-story allowed me to
The author, James Mandaville, had worked in Eastern Saudi Arabia gathering plant names and plant-related terminology in the 1960’s. His work spewed out into his free time and he began gathering samples of the local plants and cataloging names extensively. The purpose of his ethnography was to shed light on the folk classifications of Bedouin Arabic plant lore; the report and devotion of the research performed by the author married the desert-adapted plants of Arabia and the people that followed them, believed in the cosmic connection to germination, named them, and depended on them for their livelihood for thousands of years.
Mandaville organizes his book from macro to micro. He gives a brief background of himself in relation to the place that he collected data; he then describes the nature of his initial data collection and the emergence of a continued relationship with the people, place, and subsistence and traditional ecological knowledge that he was deriving from field encounters with a number of Bedouin consultants. He describes the land, then the people that live in the area (Eastern Saudi Arabia); he goes on to describe the relationship that the people have with the land and their use of stars to signal changes in the seasons. After developing a working understanding of how the Bedouin’s reveal seasons and some of their fundamental working understandings of the environment he hones in on the Bedouin relationship to the ecology of the place. I agree with his organization techniques, I like that the bulk of the data was described in the fifth chapter after getting to know the backstory. Mandaville describes himself, the nature of his data collection, then the place that he was researching, the people who were his subjects, then the beliefs and religion of those people, all before diving into the “point” of the work. This back-story allowed me to