History

Ideal Segue

Participants

Segues

Keystone Plants

Workshop 2007

Workshop 2008

Keystone Plant Concept:

Every culture around the world has one or more symbols or icons that are seen as standing for the values of the culture itself. People may associate themselves with the symbol, seeing themselves as genetically, spiritually, or socially connected or related to the symbol. In many cases the symbol is a plant or a plant product. Common examples are centrally important crops such as corn, rice, potatoes, manioc, bananas, dates, or taro. Other plants are not major crops but have so many uses that they are widely accepted into many cultures and have become deeply rooted into cultural discussions of themselves. Examples include chili peppers, garlic, apples, and mangoes. Some botanical examples cross a wide range of cultures because the plants have been widely distributed and have found homes in diverse array of communities. Two examples, one from temperate climates and one from tropical climates are Apples and Taro.

Apples and Taro have been selected for development as examples of keystone plants in this project for different, yet interlocking reasons. First, taro, or kalo as it is known by Native Hawaiians, is THE central plant within Hawaiian cultures. In order to center our discussions within Hawai`i we need to center our focus upon kalo. Taro is also a crop that unites almost all of the non-Hawaiian tropical colonists of the Hawaiian islands in that most of the colonial cultures arriving in Hawai`i arrived with their own knowledge and culture of taro. Second, apples are one of a very few plants that actually unites the diverse range of temperate colonial cultures that arrived in Hawai`i. Colonists from temperate East Asia, Europe and North America each arrived with their own understandings, uses, and meanings for apples.

Ethnobotany of Taro and Apples:

In order to develop segues to science using kalo and apples, the researchers will be spending 9 months of the project to explore the ethnobotany of kalo and apples in various source cultures in Hawai`i, Asia, North America, and Europe in order to understand the basis for the ethnobotanical side of the Segue. This information will be shared with collaborators in each of the recipient sciences and used as the basis for developing the segues from keystone plants.