Emeritus Professor Roy Ellen’s 2021 book, The Nuaulu World of Plants. Ethnobotanical Cognition, Knowledge and Practice Among a People of Seram, Eastern Indonesia
(Sean Kingston Publishing), has won the 2022 Mary W. Klinger Book Award given by the Society for Economic Botany for an outstanding book published in the discipline of Economic/Ethno Botany.
The Nuaulu World of Plants is the culmination of Roy Ellen’s anthropological fieldwork on the eastern Indonesian island of Seram, and of comparative enquiries into the bases of human classificatory activity through the study of ethnobiological knowledge over a fifty year period.
This rich account of the ways plants feature in the worldview and lifeways of the Nuaulu, recognizes that plant knowledge is embedded in plural local and historical contexts: in swiddens, garden crops, managed fallow, village spaces and pathways; in the trees, and the ecological, conceptual and experiential relationships to forest; in plants’ roles as healing agents, raw materials, fuels and in ritual; and in historical flux, with the introduction of exotic plants and the impact of colonial and post-colonial ways of seeing the plant world. Professor Ellen’s contemporary examination of Nuaulu classificatory practices, in the light of comparable observations made by the seventeenth-century Dutch naturalist Rumphius, allows us to better see how scientific taxonomy emerges from folk knowledge.
This award is named for Mary W. Klinger, a generous supporter of the SEB’s mission whose husband, Bruno Klinger, was a professor of botany and a specialist in poisonous plants at the Colorado State University College of Veterinary Medicine. His obituary can be read here. Professor Ellen has donated his prize to the Student Awards programme of the Society for Economic Botany.
A book launch celebrating this, and another book Nature Wars, was held on 28th January, 2021. A recording of the event is available on the RAI YouTube channel.