First we will present the results and discussion regarding types of interaction with text and illustrations, then we will present methodological implications.
Knowledge about plants was important for all of our interlocutors, even those who have little practice in plant collection. Local plants were a part of their identity and constituted an important part of social relations [12]. Basing on the process of interaction with written text and illustrations, and the process of co-designing the booklet with Shiri people, we identified three kinds of interactions between individuals and text/illustrations/herbaria specimens. The first kind of interaction, “text-wayfaring”, is predominantly a bodily interaction between the individual and illustrations (with or without an additional notice of plant names). It may include tracking the contour of leaves, or of the entire plant. The second kind of interaction, “fact/spelling checking”, is predominantly discursive and information-focused. The third kind of interaction, “between wayfaring and fact checking”, is the mix of the two.
Patimat (in her 70s) and Malaykat (in her 40s), who had vast knowledge on plant collection, were happy to receive the booklet in 2017, but they did not read it; they just browsed through it looking at the illustrations and plant names. They briefly looked at the photos/illustrations, and only stopped at those that were close to 1:1 scale, such as: duc’armura (Bunias orientalis L.), ʡaˤʁʷamura (Cerastium davuricum Fisch. ex Spreng.), guržinakːʷi (Oberna multifida (Adams) Ikonn.). They looked at them with some suspicion, tracing the contours of leaves, or the contour of drawings, as if trying to determine if it was a proper representation or not. It seemed to us that by delineating the borders of the leaf blade they tried to make a visual experience more embodied (bodily connected to the movement). They skipped the close-ups without comment. When we asked them later about these illustrations, they doubted whether this plant actually grows in Shiri, or if this was a correct illustration of the species. When tracing the contour of the drawn plant (for example in sːisːupi, Allium victorialis L. and daga̰la qʼar, Plantago major L.), they also made a “cutting” gesture when they came to the root which, when asked later, they considered unnecessary/not-useful. Compared to our other interlocutors, they put the booklet away relatively quickly. They were surprised when they heard us discuss the section “Uses in Shiri” with the men present in the room. Three of our interlocutors commented: “we know this anyway”.
Abdulkadyr was then a university teacher in his 60s[1]. When he first received the printed version of the booklet in 2017, he started reading from the table of contents. He right away spotted two spelling mistakes and one typo in the plant names, pointing them to us in a didactic manner (our gender might have encouraged him to assume the authoritative perspective). He took us to his brother, Timur (in his 40s), on the outskirts of Makhachkala. Their family left Shiri when they were children, and now they would visit the village only once or twice a year for religious holidays. Timur’s wife Fatima (in her 40s) lived in Shiri until getting married and often visited the village in summer to collect plants with her mother. The whole family gathered to take a look at the booklet.
“Žibžni” – reads Fatima looking at the heading at the top of the page with Polygonum aviculare agg. “This is certainly not žibžni. Žibžni does not grow up” – she points up. “It goes like this” – she makes a movement with both of her arms and palms above the surface of the table, to show how the plant grows on the ground and how it spreads. “It cannot be žibžni” – she continues. “Žibžni grows in the middle of the village” – she repeats the movement. Abdulkadyr is sitting nearby but not really paying attention to Fatima.
“Sporish” – he says looking at the section with local Russian names of Polygonum aviculare agg. “It really totally cleanses the body[2], if you drink tea made of it, for half a year, it will truly cleanse your body. A very useful thing,” – he adds.
“Is žibžni the same as sporish?” – Iwona asks.
“No, gorets ptichiy is sporysh, it is written here” – he points to the sporish name in the local plant names section in the booklet.
“It grows in the centre of the village. It spreads and creeps (Rus. stelitsya), it grows in all conditions, it just grows like… Look, there is a word ‘sporish’ (in Russian: quarrels) – he says in a lecturing tone. – it just quarrels with nature, you can even trample on it, it is a very life-loving plant.”
“What is sporysh in Shiri language, then?” – Iwona asks.
“In Shiri, I don’t know” – says Abdulkadyr. His brother also shrugs his shoulders.
On another occasion, in March 2019, Rabadan (in his 50s) and Marat (in his 30s) were browsing through the booklet in Marat’s house in Izberbash.
“It is not zveroboy”, said Rabadan with confidence reading the heading and looking at the photograph (zveroboy is the Russian folk name for Hypericum sp.)
“No, it is zveroboy, they just took the photo like this” – argues Marat, making a gesture to suggest that the photo was taken from above. “These are zveroboy flowers, just photographed from here.” – he adds.
“It looks like a shrub here.” – says Rabadan. “And a half of it is missing” – he adds. He made a similar comment on qːaˤnala čutni (Malva spp. (Malva neglecta Wallr. and M. pusilla Sm.)).
“Shulum (Mentha aquatica L.), is also not clear here. At this time (as in the picture) it is already too old” – said Marat turning the page. In his opinion, the illustrations of plants in the booklet should be “as they look when they are collected”, as otherwise it may be confusing.
Text and illustration poaching, wayfaring, fact-checking
Patimat’s and Malaykat’s interaction with text and illustrations in the booklet described above is an exemplification of text wayfaring. The term wayfaring comes from Tim Ingold, who differentiated between modern traveller (travelling from one point to the other and not interested in the way itself) versus wayfarer (focused on the process of travelling, finding important things on the way, apprehending in movement) [26], [27]. Such interaction was specific for interlocutors whose knowledge was based on experience and passed from generation to generation - that is, (for the most part) for people who lived in Shiri (or visited often) and actively collected plants, either during forest-walks, or when going to the pastures. It is mostly women who belong to this group, however men living in Shiri usually also possess knowledge about plants, particularly those they collected for snacks in childhood. People who have a vast amount of embodied knowledge, plus practice in plant collection, tend to interact with the illustrations physically (by touching, tracing the contour of the drawing with the finger). They behaved likewise with pressed herbarium specimens (explained later). Through touching, tracking and remembering the contour, they check if the plant is as named above. Bodily experience of plants is so crucial for them that contour tracking proves to be the best way to recognize the plant in the illustration. Such a way of deciphering the illustration is not necessarily obvious for a reader more familiar with botanical illustration; looking for details relying solely on vision would be much more intuitive for an Ingoldian “modern reader” [27]. Touching the illustrations resembles the idea proposed by the authors mentioned below: to combine poking (here poking the illustrations and herbarium specimens) with de Certeau’s [22] poaching (Matsutake Research Group [28] and then Eben Kirksey, Craig Schuetze and Nick Shapiro [29]). The above researchers observed the affinity of the English word “poach” with the French word pocher (to push or poke with a finger or pointed instrument, to pierce). Kirksey uses the following metaphor: “At the Multispecies Salon, panelists poached each other’s papers, like chefs «poach» pears, using red wine and honey to intensify and transform the flavour of the fruit.” [29]. Similarly, Patimat and Malaykat “poach” the contours of drawing to intensify the experience, to make it more similar to their everyday practice, and to be able to recognize the plants they collect and use on a daily basis.
Fatima did not recognize žibžni (Polygonum aviculare agg.), a species she knows and collects for ħuˤlkni (a pie with filling, also referred to as chudu). The illustration she was watching is a botanical print, showing the plant abstracted from the environment. That is why it looks like it has shoots pointing upwards. Polygonum aviculare agg. is a plant species (or rather, an aggregate species) presenting in natural environment a high diversity of shapes, depending on the habitat it grows in (bigger, more numerous leaves and an upright shape in fertile habitats; creeping habit and smaller leaves in places with less available soil and high trampling levels). The two dimensional, de-contextualized picture did not enable her to identify a plant she knows very well and easily recognizes in various habitats (for example, in the Shiri village centre, where it grows in poor soil and is prone to tramping by animals and people). Fatima was quite sure that the illustration is not proper.
Shiri people were proud to possess such a booklet; they showed it to their neighbours from different ethnic groups who eagerly invited us to their regions to prepare a similar booklet for them. It surprised us, however, that neither Shiri men, nor women expressed a need for information about local uses, or local recipes to be included. This information, when printed, seemed irrelevant, as if from a different knowledge order. Other parts of the plant description (if read at all) were not questioned – on the contrary, they served as a confirmation of one’s knowledge – “look, it’s written here”. Some of our interlocutors hoped that the book would reveal plants in Shiri that have valuable medical properties, employable to cure such illnesses as cancer. It turns out that although they were mostly interested in medical properties and occurrence in other parts of the world (or the former USSR), they never actually read it(we do not know, however, if they would actually apply it if somebody was in medical need). This knowledge was, therefore, meant rather as pure information, to be collected but not practised[1]. The authority of the rigid botanical text seemed prevailing.
As we can see from the case studies, people do a lot of textual poaching[2] [22]. They select the information needed, and change it according to their goals. Our interlocutors freely inscribe meanings to the texts they are reading, poaching into them or, as de Certeau puts it, they “convert the text through reading and to ‘run it’ the way one runs traffic lights” ([22] p.176). Their practice of reading rarely – or even never – resembles the practice de Certeau ascribed to “elite literati” [22]. “Elite literati” claim the rights to inscribe “proper” meanings to texts, and assume that people reading these texts internalize those meanings. In a way, researchers who fear the influence of books on LEK behave as such “elite literati”. De Certeau’s theory refers to the written texts; the case studies presented below, will show that this remark may be as well extended to the way people interact with illustrations.
Adbulkadyr’s interaction with text and illustrations is an exemplification of an interaction that we called fact-checking. He engaged mostly with the text, not the illustrations, and he was the first to find spelling mistakes in the table of contents and in particular entries. He partly read the descriptions, in particular the sections about medical characteristics. He also paid attention to the Russian names, both folk and official (he also kept a notebook full of Shiri plant names translated into Russian). The “fact-checking” kind of interaction between individuals and text is more discursive – the authority of the written text matters most. The written names are linked to the general knowledge, but not necessarily to the practice of plant collection. Abdulkadyr also paid close attention to the etymology of plants’ names - a fact possibly related to the emphasis put on it both now and in the Soviet times, especially in linguistics and literature studies (see for example [30], [31]). He remarked that mat'-i-machekha (Tussilago farfara L.) means mat' (mother) and machekha (step-mother), and zveroboy is an animal killer (cf. [32]). On other occasions, he also asked his wife about the meaning of a particular plant name, which seemed more important to him than the plant itself. It has to be mentioned here that Abdulkadyr had also been working on a book about Shiri and collected Shiri plants names, assigning Russian plant names to them rather than to particular species (a practice noticed by Łuczaj in regard to some Polish ethnographers [33], [34]). Generally, the knowledge about plant names and their meanings seems to be more discursive than practical knowledge – mat'-i-machekha is not widely used, while zveroboy is collected but rarely actually used (also, neither of the plants has a local name). Nevertheless, they are often mentioned when the conversation is conducted in Russian: both plants are characteristic for the Russian pharmacopoeia, and popular in media the discourse on plants. Such interaction was specific to individuals with LEK characterized by high interest in plants, but based on a discursive rather than practical knowledge. They left Shiri in childhood, or early adulthood, and have little experience of plant collection. They may, however, have subscribed to magazines, or read Soviet-style botanical books[3]. They generally valued the authority of the written text. As otherwise “knowledgeable” people (teachers, professors), they usually held high positions in their tukhums (lineages) and were asked for advice.
Rabadan and Marat’s interaction with the text and illustrations is an exemplification of an interaction that we called “between wayfaring and fact checking”. Sõukand, referring to Ingold, showed that if people do not engage with books, they are always wayfaring, and if they use books, they behave like the modern traveller [9]. Kołodziejska shows that it is strictly related to the type of plant they are looking for and the purpose of the walk [35], [10]. Similar observations can be made for text. Both Rabadan and Marat had collected plants while living in Shiri in their childhoods, but since then they had little actual experience with plant collection: they remembered the plants the way they looked during the time of collections, but had little memory of them in other seasons. These kinds of interactions were specific to people who grew up in Shiri and moved out to the lowlands as adults or young adults. In childhood, they actively collected plants, either as snacks, or helping the grown-ups. Nowadays, they visit Shiri only occasionally (for holidays or funerals), and rarely collect plants. Their interest in plants usually doesn’t reach the extent of subscribing to magazines or acquiring books on plants.
For a number of our interlocutors (including Rabadan and Marat), some kind of confusion was caused by the difference between the phenological phase in which the plant is collected by the Shiri people, and the phenological phase it was presented in the illustration. The local people would rather have the illustrations showing the plant at the time when it is collected. The idea that showing photographs with different phenological phases, which is often done to facilitate plant recognition, and in consequence elucidation of as many plant species collected by the surveyed community as possible, did not correspond with the ideas of our interlocutors, who wanted illustration to represent the moment of collection (cf. [36]). Also, they perceived the plant strictly as a whole, and the parts displayed on the figure (or figures, containing separately the root, the main part, and the flower, a practice quite typical for botanical prints) were confusing them. The criticism of graphics and photographs of “too old” or “too young” plants, as well as illustrations showing “useless” and dissected specimens, was present in all kinds of interactions.
The types of interactions analysed above, though more typical for particular groups of LEK-holders, may be observed across the groups, as every person in particular situation may interact with texts and illustrations in any of the three ways. Overall, the interactions with written text/illustrations of plants are influenced by the level of engagement with plants (or a lack thereof), an individual’s gender, and formal education, as well as his or her attitude towards the written text and its authority.
Methodological implications
Our research enabled us to notice three methodological implications, the first one concerning ethnobotanical methods which rely on showing photographs and pressed specimens, the second one concerning gender, and the third one, video-recording.
In ethnobotanical manuals (e.g. [37], [38]) one of the methods of collecting and verifying ethnobotanical data advises researchers to show local people illustrations of plants and ask them if they know or collect them. As illustrated in our case studies, pictures were only considered as proper by our interlocutors when they featured the plant in the vegetational phase when it is collected, when the parts of the plant they would use were clearly depicted, and when they were the “right” size, that is 1:1 proportion, not a close up. Thomas et al. similarly argue for 1:1 depictions but while they used magnified photographs of plant parts to facilitate species identification, in our case such depictions were confusing for informants [36]. Therefore, using illustrations for the purpose of facilitating research is not always an auspicious idea. Such properties of photographs as the picture angle, magnification, which parts of the plant specimen are presented, as well as the specimen chosen for the photo, for best field performance should be consulted with community members. It is important to remember that although the perception of illustrations is culture bounded, it also is to some extent individual. Researchers working in communities without intense contact with written texts and illustrations, for example Reyes-Garcia and her team for Tsimané in Bolivia, demonstrated that people had problems connecting an illustration of a plant with the actual species [39]. Kołodziejska has shown that in Ukraine even those who had experience in plant collection and book reading had often great difficulties with this task [35].
Another methodological implication of our research concerns methodology applied by some scholars [36] and advised in classical ethnobotanical research manuals ([37], [38]). It is based on showing pressed herbaria specimens to local people. Our research revealed that interaction with illustrations was similar to interaction with pressed herbaria specimens. For example Patimat, who has a vast experience in plant collection, took a drying ʡaˤʁʷamura (Cerastium davuricum Fisch. ex Spreng.) specimen from our herbaria collection and traced the contour of the plant with her finger. Then (to our dismay) she took its leaf in between her fingers and started rubbing it, asking: “What is this?” “Did we collect it? Hmm”. Cerastium davuricum Fisch. ex Spreng. was among the most important plants collected in Shiri, it was considered unique. That is why we initially thought that we collected the wrong specimen, but ʡaˤʁʷamura collected in the following days also turned out to be Cerastium davuricum Fisch. ex Spreng. Shiri people with less experience had even more trouble recognizing pressed herbaria specimens (cf. [12]). In the research of Thomas et al. the recognition of voucher specimens was around 77%, and of photographed plants 94% [36].
Once plants are no longer 3-dimensional, taken out of their natural habitat, people touch them, rub them, or bend them. Through this interaction, through touch, they give them another dimension (cf. [36]). Our interlocutors, however, did not have a problem with identifying 3-dimensional dried plants they had dried themselves (usually by hanging bundles of herbs on a line), or the ones that were dried by their neighbours. Here some comparison can be made to Ingold, who differentiated between the modern text and the manuscripts written by scribes in the Middle Ages [40]. He writes: “But the lines of the plot are not traced by the reader as he moves through the text. They are rather supposed to be laid out already before the journey begins. These lines are connectors. To read them, as Leroi-Gourhan realized, is to study a plan rather than to follow a trail. Unlike his medieval predecessor – an inhabitant of the page myopically entangled in its inky traces – the modern reader surveys the page as if from a great height. Routing across it from point to point (...)” [40].
Another methodological implication concerns the gender of interlocutors and researchers. In most cases, the most knowledgeable individuals in regard to plants were the women. However, in the presence of men, out of respect they did not demonstrate their plant knowledge unless explicitly asked by men or by us. Men often consulted them in regard to plant names. Men watching the booklets were more self-assured and ready to contest the female researchers’ authority[1], whereas women were more reserved and only occasionally dropped a comment. Also, men paid more attention to plants they had collected in childhood (snacks) and plants that are easy to depict, but they skipped many other species. Therefore, researcher should be aware of such gender-induced implications (for example [15]), in regard to the interlocutors as well as herself/himself. Other elements of researcher’s positionality, such as the country of origin or individual knowledge, should also be considered. In our case the latter was not a significant factor, as in that part of the fieldwork we were predominantly interested in the perception of booklets rather than our interlocutor’s plant knowledge (cf. [41]). Coming from a post-socialist country and speaking fluent Russian rendered us “less foreign”. Also, we didn't receive the status of “knowledgeable foreign professors”, which is a quite common turn of events for Western researchers in the post-colonial world. This granted us a convenient and useful position of “students” who need to be taken care of, and have the world explained to them. In ethnobotanical research, local assistants are often hired to help with the research and translation – in our case such help was not necessary because we did not want to elicit specific knowledge, but rather focus on interaction with the text and illustrations.
The last methodological implication concerns video-recording. We realized that methodology based on video-recording was indispensable for this research to be successful. It enabled us to analyse details of bodily interactions with booklets which could otherwise be omitted. This kind of methodology is, however, not possible without long-term stays and great levels of trust between the interlocutors and the researcher.
[1] Abdulkadyr had been long involved in our project, helping co-create the booklet. He is a lecturer at the Islamic and technical university in Makhachkala and is regarded by Shiri people as a knowledgeable man.
[2] Rus. polnostyu ochisshchaet organism.
[1] Similarly Makovicky shows that lace-patterns collected by lace-makers in Banska-Bystrica in Slovakia were often meant to be collected rather than applied [20].
[2] We use this term after de Certeau, as a neutral term, without its negative connotations.
[3] On the influence of books and magazines on LEK in Ukraine see [35] (an unpublished PhD thesis).
[1] Male linguist researcher who was present during some parts of this research was listened to more attentively and was rarely interrupted.