Contributed by Ileana Valenzuela, member of Grupo Solidario, ISE Small Grant Recipient 2005-07 El Grupo solidario de acción y propuesta de Petén (GSAPP) The ASAPP is a nonprofit association formed by a small number of people, mostly community leaders (men, women, old, young, indigenous, non-indigenous, believers and non-believers), who formed El GSAPP in 2002. Its purpose was to: A) Analyze and reflect on how they could face the threats of...
Contributed by ISE members Elaine Elisabetsky and Kristina Plenderleith Darrell Posey was an anthropologist and ethnobiologist who lived with the Kayapó Indians of Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s. It was a time of rapid change in the Jê community and his research material recording Kayapó life at that time vividly records these changes. Darrell worked closely in the village with his shaman mentors, in particular recording their knowledge of...
Contributed by ISE Member Amy Eisenberg1 While serving as an International Expert in Hunan Province of southwest China at the Research Institute of Anthropology and Ethnology, Jishou University in impoverished Xiangxi Autonomous Minority Prefecture, Maid Wux, my Hmong graduate student took us to her high mountain village of Hlib Jiangl in the rural reaches of Guizhou Province to celebrate Naox Niex, the Hmong New Year in November. We shared some...
Reproduced with permission from Atlas Obscura The living bridges of Cherrapunji, India are made from the roots of the Ficus elastica tree. This tree produces a series of secondary roots from higher up its trunk and can comfortably perch atop huge boulders along the riverbanks, or even in the middle of the rivers themselves. Cherrapunji is credited with being the wettest place on earth, and The War-Khasis, a tribe in Meghalaya, long ago noticed...
Contributed to the ISE Newsletter by R.P. Harisha1 Of the over 15000 (33.1%) higher plant species in Indian tropical forest, a wide range of them are harvested for WEH purposes. In particular, dozens of plants are used as wild food plants; harvested from and around arable fields, scrub wood lands, wetlands, and homesteads. Several families of plants are used, with the genera Amaranthus, Cleome, Solanum and Dioscoria being the most conspicuous....
