Adam and Eve got all the attention. The snake got second billing. But who thinks about the plants in the Garden of Eden? Except perhaps the tree that produced the apple that got Adam and Eve expelled into a world of sin.
Robert Voeks cares about all the rest of the plants that bedecked the Garden of Eden. But not really, what he cares about is how humans have taken the story of the plants of Eden and transferred it to the forests of the tropics. And what happens as a result. The reader realizes early on that the title is not an accurate depiction of the book. The Eden part of the title is clever and attention-grabbing, but the book isn't about Eden, except superficially. Which is, parenthetically, too bad as ‘the ethnobotany of Eden’ would make a great book. The book is really about the ‘jungle medicine narrative’—the changing Western/European narrative about tropical forests and the people who inhabit them.
Voeks’ thesis is that the most compelling narrative to emerge from the last decades of scientific, media and public attention to the tropics is that ‘tropical forests are pristine, largely unknown to science, and home to mysterious and wise native people who are privy to their great botanical secrets … [including] … miracle-cure medicinal plants known and dispensed only by indigenous shamans and herbalists’ (p. 4). This narrative then sets up, in the minds of many Europeans and Westerners, that the value of tropical forests lies in their potential to provide cures for their intractable ailments.
The book develops this narrative and then proceeds to deconstruct and refute it, using history, botany and anthropology. The pressing issue of loss of tropical forests plays a role in this jungle medicine narrative, being portrayed as a loss of both plants and traditional knowledge about the utility of plants. So too do the big-bad pharmaceutical companies which are portrayed, in this narrative, as exploiters of both forests and traditional healers.
The first portion of the book provides a satisfying, although not original, review of the concept of the noble savage and the myth of the pristine tropical forest. From here on the book wanders, deviating from a tight focus on the central jungle medicine narrative. First is a history of the Western pharmacopeia based on the Mediterranean experiences and how it influenced the search for medicine in tropical climes, including the history of lignum vitae (tree of life), nutmeg and cinchona (the first effective drug for malaria). The stories of flamboyant explorers and rich Europeans desperately seeking cures for what ailed them and the terrible treatment of those peoples from whom the plant uses were learned are satisfyingly woven in with ethnobotany to repeat a story that has been told before but here receives a satisfying remake.
From there the jungle narrative stops being the structuring device for the book and instead the reader follows the author as he highlights his field research experiences around the world—but particularly in the northeast of Brazil. Interesting though it is to learn about the loss of knowledge about medicinal plants in Brazil or the role of gender in ethnobotany, it is disappointing to lose the strong thread and rich discussion of the first part of the book. Voeks’ book has many interesting observations and details based on a close reading of history and a long time in the field. However, it is a bit dated in the sense that the jungle medicine narrative has been overwritten by a new narrative—that of jungle ecosystem services. Perhaps this will be the author's next book.
