Socio-Anthropological Holism and the Origins of French Ethnobotany

Ethnobotany as a specialized knowledge has a relatively brief history, having emerged as the result of a disciplinary dialogue between botany and the social sciences. It also manifests a plurality of epistemological positions and national traditions that at a certain point converged in the different ways of imagining and practicing ethnobotany in Latin America. The context for the emergence of the French case is specifically significant. The Laboratoire d’Ethnobotanique of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris was consolidated in the early 1960s, under the direction of Roland Portères, who set up a particularly original project that conceived ethnobotany as part of the broader framework of the human sciences. This chapter aims to analyze the relationships between the early stages of this tradition of ethnobotany and the French School of Sociology and its developments in ethnology, trying to reconstruct the ideas of those ethnobotanists on nature/society relations. It is an attempt to outline a genealogy to show that current debates on these issues are inscribed in a classical formulation. Ultimately, it is expected to shed light on an epistemological background whose effect is still active in the scientific practice itself in contemporary Latin American ethnobotany.