Venturing through the Amazon rainforest, studying plants, taking photographs and living with unknown tribes is how ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes spent a dozen years of his life.
Along the way, Schultes discovered hundreds of plants and learned their medicinal uses and countless herbal concoctions.
Community members filled the main auditorium The City Library on Wednesday night to learn about Schultes' Amazonian adventures. Wade Davis, a Harvard-trained ethnobotanist, lectured on his mentor's years in the Amazons. Davis wrote a book titled One River chronicling Schultes' plant discoveries and experiences with indigenous tribes. The event was sponsored by the College of Humanities.
"I thought it was a fantastic combination to tell the story juxtaposed with photographs," said Koshlan Mayer-Blackwell, a graduate student going into architecture. "I think it's amazing when you see someone so invested in something that it becomes inspiring to be so unbelievably directed."
Davis described Schultes as a man with an incredible knowledge of plants who spent most of his life trying to understand plants' roles in the human experience.
Using Schultes' photographs to recount the tale, Davis talked about the time when colleagues thought Schultes was lost in November 1943.
While people in the United States thought he was lost, Schultes became sick with beriberi, a disease caused by thiamine deficiency, which he contracted in the depths of the Amazon rainforest. The nearest city where Schultes could be treated was Manaus, a city 1,000 kilometers away in northwestern Brazil. Manaus was too far for treatment, so Schultes traveled north toward a remote Colombian military base then ended up traveling to Manaus afterward. He recovered and continued to explore the region for many more years.
Davis said Schultes was able to communicate with the indigenous tribes because of his innate knack for languages. Schultes spoke several European languages and was conversant in a few languages indigenous to South America. With that linguistic ability and his interest in anthropology, Schultes learned how the indigenous tribes of the Amazon used ayahuasca, a jungle vine with hallucinogenic properties, and scores of other plants such as cariari.
The indigenous shamans learned how to combine these plants through trial and error, which would be considered empirical research in Western society. Davis said Schultes understood this and tried to learn and discover as much as he could from these untrained scientists.
Davis said people in cultures around the world have tried to change their ordinary consciousness through meditation and religious rituals with plants. Indigenous people know the need for drugs must be satisfied. They don't see it as deviant behavior, Davis said, but rather almost in a positive light because users are under a protective cloak of ritual reinforcement.
Davis said Schultes was a man who made his career possible because of the work he accomplished. Davis dedicated six years to researching Schultes' life and writing One River. Davis admits that he was nervous at first about how Schultes would react to the book but said that the nervousness subsided when he later learned Schultes kept the book at his bedside and would read it when he couldn't fall asleep at night.
"I wanted to tell my best friend and mentor's story," Davis said.
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