The Students of Schultes: What the Next Generation Found

“Schultes trained a generation of ethnobotanists who went back to the communities he had documented. What they found was a race against time that Schultes had warned about and no one had adequately funded.”

Richard Evans Schultes trained more than the 3,000 undergraduates who passed through his Harvard Economic Botany course. He trained a generation of field ethnobotanists who took his methods and his urgency into the field: Wade Davis, Mark Plotkin, Glenn Shepard, William Milliken, among others. Their fieldwork, conducted primarily in the 1980s and 1990s, extended Schultes's documentation project into the period when the race he had described in 1967 was visibly being lost.

Mark Plotkin's Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice (1993) documented his work with the Tirio people of Suriname and Brazil. What Plotkin found was Schultes's aspirin-pill problem in acute form: young Tirio men were choosing to train as health workers in the Western medical system rather than as traditional plant medicine practitioners. The knowledge was not being transmitted. The healer Plotkin had apprenticed himself to had no successor in the traditional sense.

Wade Davis's One River (1996) reconstructed Schultes's Amazon expeditions through Davis's own fieldwork in the same regions, twenty years later. What Davis documented was both the persistence of the knowledge and its precarity, specific villages still had healers with specific knowledge, but the healers were old, the apprentices were fewer, and the botanical contexts were under pressure from agricultural expansion, mining, and road development.

The Amazon Conservation Team, founded by Plotkin in 1996, developed a documentation methodology, community-controlled mapping projects that recorded traditional knowledge in formats the communities themselves owned, that has become a model for ethnobotanical preservation. By 2025, the ACT had supported territory mapping and knowledge documentation projects in more than 70 indigenous communities across the Amazon basin.

What the students of Schultes found, collectively, is that documentation is necessary but not sufficient. The knowledge does not survive in an archive, it survives in people, and people survive in communities, and communities survive on territories. The ethnobotanical preservation project is inseparable from the land rights project.

Sources

• Davis, One River (1996)
• Plotkin, Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice (1993)
• Amazon Conservation Team Reports (2020-2025)