ABSTRACT:
Humankind's symbiosis with plants is the most fundamental material fact of human life on the earth. Geographers, as well as botanists, anthropologists and other scientists, have long been interested in this aspct of the man/nature theme. In American geography, Carl O. Sauer emphasized a temporal as well as spatial perspective in the cultural understanding of man's relationship to biological phenomena. His researches and those of his associates in the 'Berkeley school' showed that the most fruitful possibilities for implementing this approach are in non-industrial societies which have direct and pervasive links between plants and people. This study is a geography of plant resources in an important Andean jvalley having great environmental diversity and a cultural constant, in so far as a non-literate, Quechua-speaking peasantry dominates throughout the zone. My basic objecive has been to understand the present use of plants, cultivated and wild, as they have varied from place to place and through time. Primary and secondary documents and local informants were important sources of historical information. Most of the contemporary data in this study was derived from over 20 months of empirical observations of the day-to-day existence of jfarming folk in their fields, homes and markets. The great natural beauty of the Vilcanota depression is matched only by the stark poverty of the majority of the people who live there. My purpose was not, hwoever, to explore the human potential of the population or the possibilities for socio-economic development in the area. Instead, it is designed as a contribution to understanding and appreciating a highly traditional region of South America, and the basis of livelihood of a people whom many technicians and planners feel compelled to change.Chapter 1: places the plant-man relationships in the larger context of place, time, culture and livelihood. Chapter 2: organizes the use of plants by the Vilcanota peasants into their temporal, ecological and spatial dimensions. Chapter 3: discusses the useful and conspicuous plants of the valley within a taxonomic framework, in this way presenting what is important about a species without those presuppositions involved in categorizing plants solely according to use and/or distribution. Chapter 4: briefly conceptualizes the dominant themes.
