Produção, transmissão e estrutura do conhecimento tradicional sobre plantas medicinais em três grupos sociais distintos: uma abordagem evolutiva

Abstract

The current study falls into the Cultural Evolutionary Theory's theoretical framework, which recognizes culture as cybernetic systems able to shift its traits frequency by following the same darwinian assumptions. The main objective of this study is to understand part of the mechanisms that guarantee medical system's cultural evolution in three social groups with different characteristics. In the first chapter, an analytical description of those Cultural Evolutionary Theory's assumptions, its review and main investigative questions are shown. Still a discussion about research which were concern in understand local ecological knowledge is presented as well as an attempt to attach Cultural Evolutionary Theory and Ethnobotany. In the second chapter, a review about the main methods used to evaluate cultural systems' temporal and special developments by analyzing its principal contributions and limitations is exhibited. By assuming that medical systems are illness factual episodesbased, it is argued that construction of methodologies which are used in knowledge transmission's investigation must be based in the concept of episodic memory. The third chapter presents a general description of cultural and physical contexts from those three actual research partner communities and also highlights characteristics which allow those communities insertion in a social and environmental variability gradient. The fourth chapter analyzes plants local system from a structural point of view and argues that this set of knowledge has an episodic nature. This specific dynamics builds mechanisms that guarantee local knowledge adaptedness, specially for allowing future-focused behaviors which guarantee a better behavioral adequacy. Finally, the fifth chapter analyzes knowledge individual production and transmission of information in the three investigated groups. It was hipothesized that situations within a greater social and environmental variability would stimulate knowledge production and the horizontal way of transmission. However, these two hypothesis were not confirmed by the presented data. It is believed that the medicinal plants dynamics of use, which is based in using security, influences the transmission of knowledge by "how", "when", "whom" and "in what context" it happens. The last chapter, using cladistic analyses, evaluated if different strategies of knowledge transmission produce cognitive systems with different structures. It was found that transfer routes influences the distribution of knowledge but not diversity. Vertical transmission is the process responsible for spatial dynamics of local knowledge of plants.