Abstract
Nearly five million enslaved Africans were transported to the shores of Brazil over the course of the Atlantic slave trade. During the latter stages, from the 1780s to 1851, the majority hailed from the Bight of Benin, representing especially the Yoruba, Ewe, and Fon peoples. The belief systems introduced by these sub-Saharan peoples were reassembled in Brazil under the generic name of Candomblé. Among the noteworthy features of this religion is a profound spiritual association between a pantheon of deities (the orixás) and a host of edible and medicinal plant species. This chapter demonstrates that Brazil’s African diaspora capitalized on a cornucopia of esculent and medicinal plants that had diffused back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean as part of the Columbian Exchange. Centuries before the kidnapping and transport of most African slaves, the anthropogenic habitats of South America and West Africa—the second-growth forests, swiddens, plantations, trails, and kitchen gardens—exhibited significant floristic similarity. This early transatlantic botanical homogenization greatly enhanced the ability of newly arrived Africans and their descendants to reassemble their ethnobotanical traditions in what was otherwise an alien floristic landscape.
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Acknowledgments
This project would not have been possible were it not for the kindness and generosity of the Candomblé community in Itabuna, Ilhéus, and Salvador. I thank Charlotte Greene for tracking down and translating primary material in the Muséum National d’Historie Naturelle, Paris, and Kelly Donovan for producing the maps and figures. I also thank Stanley Alpern and Tinde van Andel for their insightful reviews of an earlier version of this manuscript.
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Department of Geography, California State University—Fullerton, 800 N. State College Blvd, Fullerton, CA, 92834, USA
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Robert Voeks
, Department of Sociology and, College of Charleston, 66 George St., Charleston, 29424, South Carolina, USA
John Rashford
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Voeks, R. (2013). Ethnobotany of Brazil’s African Diaspora: The Role of Floristic Homogenization. In: Voeks, R., Rashford, J. (eds) African Ethnobotany in the Americas. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0836-9_14
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