Natural Heritage and Healing Landscapes

The UNESCO Chair of Genoa in “Anthropology of Health—Biosphere and Healing Systems” (UNESCO Chair of Genoa) promotes a scientific integration between families of knowledge conceiving well-being in the harmonious relationship between humans and the environment. The research is developed around the collection of the Museum A. Scarpa of Ethnomedicine (MEM), offering a multiple worldwide vision of health built around the sites, the shapes, and the ways of healing. Worldwide, focalized deductive observation of the elaborate climatic and environmental processes that keep an ecosystem in balance lies at the heart of the idea of health of all forest cultures. In particular, neotropical forests evolved cosmocentric civilizations, where the notion of balanced flow and harmonic relationship with the environment is manifested on both a material and a spiritual level. The archaeological evidence of the importance of medicinal plants, omnipresent in World Heritage Sites (WHS) ceremonial centers and venerated as authentic divinities, is reflected in the contemporary traditions of the maestros curanderos of the Andes and the Amazon, generating Natural and Healing scapes. The continuity of this gaze on the environment, guaranteed on the one hand by the constant presence of an indigenous gaze imprinted on the territory, on the other by a real economy of traditional medicines, is active in every rural market and organized as a pole of exchange. The work of the UNESCO CHAIR of Genoa in WHS in America, Asia, and Europe is bridging Outstanding Universal values to the territory while merging the management issues towards a participated governance.