Background Herbal tea usually refers to “beverage plants that do not belong to the genus Camellia ”, and it holds a significant historical legacy as a traditional beverage among specific regions and ethnic groups. In light of this, our research aims to investigate and analyze the traditional knowledge pertaining to herbal tea plants used by local people in the Qianxinan Buyi and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, Guizhou Province. We also initiated preliminary efforts to create tea products from herbal tea leaves using various processing techniques. Additionally, we attempted to test hypotheses to elucidate how local people select herbal tea plants. Methods Data related to the use of herbal tea plants in this study were collected through semi-structured interviews and participatory observations in four villages in Qianxinan. Quantitative indicators, including the relative frequency of citation (RFC) and the relative importance (RI) value, were calculated, and the availability of plants was also evaluated. General linear model was performed to examine the relationship between the frequency of citation and resource availability, as well as the correlation between the relative frequency of citation and the relative importance, to test both the resource availability hypothesis and the versatility hypothesis. Centella asiatica tea was processed using techniques from green tea, black tea and white tea, with a preliminary sensory evaluation conducted. Results A total of 114 plant species were documented as being used for herbal teas by local residents, representing 60 families and 104 genera. Of these, 61% of herbal tea plants were found growing in the wild, and 11 species were exotic plants. The family with the highest number of species was Asteraceae (20 species). The study identified 33 major medicinal functions of herbal tea, with clearing heat-toxin and diuresis being the most common functions. General linear model revealed a strong correlation (correlation coefficient of 0.72, p < 0.001) between the frequency of citation and plant availability, as well as a significant correlation (correlation coefficient of 0.63, p < 0.001) between RFC and RI. Under different processing conditions, the characteristics of Centella asiatica tea exhibited variations and were found to be suitable for consumption. Conclusion The consumption of herbal tea serves as a preventive measure against common ailments for local residents. The resource availability hypothesis, diversification hypothesis and the versatility hypothesis were shown to provide some insight into “how and why local communities select plants for use.” Exotic herbal tea plants in the study area also possess valuable therapeutic properties. The processing and production of Centella asiatica herbal tea products hold promising prospects.

Centella asiatica (commonly known as gotu kola, the Chinese name is Jixuecao) has a long history of application and is widely used in many countries. Ethnobotanical fieldwork with Buyi villagers in Guizhou Province, China revealed that Centella asiatica is one of the most frequently consumed herbal teas. This paper reports on the nutritional value of Centella asiatica and some preparation methods for a new complex health care tea that we developed with it. The main objective of this short case study is to reflect on the social and ethical implications of developing a commercial tea product based on traditional ethnobotanical knowledge.

Adam Stout, Glastonbury Holy Thorn: Story of a Legend(Glastonbury: Green and Pleasant Publishing, 2021), 156 pp., £12.99 (hbk), ISBN: 978-1916268609.

In anthropology, the body is theorized, manifested, and experienced in multiple ways that impact medical practice, social life, biopolitics, and spirituality. This article considers the role of 'dreadlocks' (matted hair) in the Rastafari spiritual body and, guided by the 'body multiple' concept, explores how the symbolic and performative nature of hair articulates with age and gender. Ethnographic data from the United Kingdom suggest the ways dreadlocks are groomed and/or covered vary widely, revealing diversity and changing meanings attributed to matted hair. By focusing on the spiritual aspects of hair, our work shows that dreadlocks and baldness are outward (visible) and inward (hidden) manifestations of a covenant with Jah (the Creator), rather than contrasting social or psychological statements. The hair symbolism debate in anthropology reveals limitations of universalist and reductionist approaches to understanding the human body. Our Rastafari material suggests the body multiple provides a better framework for interpreting (African-inspired) spiritual hair.

The United Kingdom's 'hostile environment for immigrants' is having distressing effects on people of African Caribbean heritage, especially those who have been threatened with deportation. While some research demonstrates a strong connection between the threat of deportation (deportability) and abjection, deportable migrants may also develop strategies (e.g. religious participation) to work around state controls. Jamaican family relations and spiritual practices emphasise intersubjectivity. This paper presents intersubjective ethnographic work conducted with a (formerly) deportable research partner, among Jamaican-born Rastafari men who migrated to the UK in the 1990s as young adults. Restrictions against working during deportation appeals leave Rastafari men with the options of idleness, odd jobs in the informal economy or crime (typically selling drugs). Rastafari men find the discipline required to survive deportability through spirituality and engage in a variety of bodily rituals to generate positive energies, which help them remain calm and healthy. Vigilant attention to manners and dress are essential to raising social (and financial) capital on the road. The case of Rastafari migrants in the UK reveals a need for further expansion of ethnographic research into hostile environments from intersubjective perspectives that explore spirituality and deportability in diaspora families.

In Rastafari smoking herbs (cannabis) and tobacco is central to spiritual practices, including grounding (the process of initiation into Rastafari) and reasoning (ritual discussions). This paper presents ethnographic research with Rastafari smokers in England. It shows that smoking is considered a ‘professional’ activity that communicates dedication to the movement, aids in learning different dialects, and facilitates experiences of communication with herbs ‘herself’. Through rituals that ‘professional’ smokers engage in herbs becomes a ‘plant teacher’, which Tupper [2008. The Globalization of Ayahuasca: Harm Reduction or Benefit Maximization? International Journal of Drug Policy, 19:300] defines as ‘a natural divinatory mechanism that can provide esoteric knowledge to adepts skilled in negotiating its remarkable effects’. Appreciation of smoking as a form of multispecies communication between ‘professional’ smokers and ‘plant teachers’ recasts the role of agency in anthropological studies of smoking and contributes to our understanding of consciousness and intentionality in both humans and plants.

The anthropology of food addresses fundamental questions about humanity. Food has been instrumental in human evolution and the development of culture and society, yet the ways people classify food and distinguish it from medicinal, poisonous, and other ingested materials varies widely. The overlap between food and mind‐altering substances reveals the crucial role that “drug‐foods” played in the development of colonialism and globalization. Consuming various foods may represent shared identities, political divisions, health imperatives, and spiritual duties, or lack thereof. Malnourishment and other disordered eating patterns are manifestations of the imbalances in global food production and distribution systems. With growing skepticism about corporate, biotechnological approaches to food crises, permaculture and other grassroots initiatives offer promise for the future.

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) refers to a wide array of healing strategies and therapeutic techniques that are not part of (mainstream) biomedicine but may be used alongside or instead of it. CAM ranges from the use of acupuncture to help manage the symptoms of chronic illness (while reducing the need for prescription medications), to the employment of spiritual healers in hospitals that serve indigenous peoples, to reliance on home remedies and folk healers by undocumented migrants and people who live in remote areas with no rural clinics. An ever‐increasing demand for complementary and alternative medicines both challenges the global dominance of biomedicine and also provides new opportunities for improving it through the integration of other healing modalities.

Rastafari spirituality is a nonsecular science that considers how various energies and powers influence socio-ecological systems. Rastafari people follow a number of spiritual prescriptions related to the body, including smoking, meditating, growing matted hair, eating an Afrocentric vegan diet and drumming/chanting. However, a person does not have to follow all of these practices to be Rastafari, rather they are means to achieve specific spiritual objectives. While anthropology is generally a secular discipline, by participating in various rituals, the body becomes an ethnographic tool that can lead to an awareness of how spiritual and material worlds interconnect. While I have collected data through conventional ethnographic methods, the most important insights have come through my own personal, bodily engagement in many Rastafari practices. Anthropological work on the ‘spiritual body’ provides a theoretical framework for making sense of experiences of embodied intersubjectivity that arise out of participation in various bodily rituals.

Eghindi is an illness built around a set of pathological states experienced by Sahrawi in the desert environment of Western Sahara. Its core symptoms are caused by osmotic imbalances related to salt consumption. In 1975, many Sahrawi were exiled into refugee camps, and they have since experienced radical sociocultural changes, which are reflected in changing explanatory models of eghindi. Older and conservative refugees, attached to traditional Sahrawi culture, have expanded its conceptualization to include new pathogenic factors, while younger and progressive refugees, acculturated with Western culture, began challenging its existence. Eghindi became embodied within a broader process of negotiation of Sahrawi cultural identity. Our findings provide a framework for thinking about the evolution of illness in response to displacement, and highlight that when explanatory models evolve, intracultural tensions can arise within a population.

Approaches to the History of Western Herbal Medicineherbals. 4 The work of Bernard Ortiz de Montellano on Aztec medicine provides a particularly robust method for applying ethnobotanical insights to the interpretation of historical documents that concern medicinal plants.By considering both an Aztec world-view and that of colonial officials (who trained Aztec scribes to develop a Nahuatl orthography), Ortiz de Montellano is able to show that Aztec use of medicinal plants had an empirical logic to it in his innovative Aztec, Medicine Health and Nutrition, which was published in 1990.This chapter shows how to apply ethnobotanical concepts to contextualize the use of medicinal plants, to achieve finer resolution in historical studies of herbal medicine and to gain a more panoramic perspective on the global movement of medical knowledge and practices throughout time.Using Ortiz de Montellano's work as a guide, it addresses the importance of socio-ecological context; political motivations of the authors of historical texts; cosmology, culture and world-view; and local concepts of efficacy as applied to herbal (and other) medicines.The chapter then explores how this ethnobotanically informed Mesoamerican case study fits into, and helps to create, a more complete picture of global historical processes that have led to a widely shared body of medical knowledge and materials which extends throughout Central Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Americas.The main conclusion to be drawn is that ethnobotany can help answer questions about how past populations used herbal medicines, as well as how medical knowledge and materials have been shared with, adopted by, stolen from and/or forced upon, others.Combining ethnobotany and history thus increases the chances of adapting medical texts from the past to benefit people in the present.

A multidimensional trip into psychedelic consciousness, science and culture, covering topics ranging from Neolithic worldviews, prehistoric rituals and Amerindian epistemology to weaponised hallucinogens, religious freedoms, trip-lit and the death of the '60s dream. This collection of 22 original essays transects a wide range of disciplines to offer empirical, mystical, imaginal, hermeneutic, queer, phenomenological and parapsychological perspectives on the exploration of psychedelics, taking in scientific debates on MDMA, manifestos and policy challenges.

Researchers examining the relationships between traditional medicine and biomedicine have observed two conflicting tendencies. Some suggest that the use of biomedicine and biomedical concepts displaces the use of traditional medicine and medical beliefs. Other scholars have found that traditional medicine and biomedicine can co-exist, complement, and blend with each other. In this paper we use an econometric model and quantitative data to test the association between individual knowledge of pharmaceuticals and individual knowledge of medicinal plants. We use data from a survey among 136 household heads living in a rural indigenous community in Oaxaca, Mexico. Data were collected as a part of long term fieldwork conducted between April 2005 and August 2006 and between December 2006 and April 2007. We found a significant positive association between an individual's knowledge of medicinal plants and the same individual's knowledge of pharmaceuticals, as well as between her use of medicinal plants and her use of pharmaceuticals. We also found a negative association between the use of medicinal plants and schooling. Our results suggest that, in the study site, individual knowledge of medicinal plants and individual knowledge of pharmaceuticals co-exist in a way which might be interpreted as complementary. We conclude that social organization involved in the use of medicines from both traditional medicine and biomedicine is of particular significance, as our findings suggest that the use of pharmaceuticals alone is not associated with a decline in knowledge/use of medicinal plants.