Aoife “Kate” Pitts, a PhD candidate in the ICON and Anthropology program, recently received the Richard Evans Schultes Research Award ($5,000) from the Society for Ethnobotany for her project, “Livelihoods, Knowledge, and Chagras: Ethnobotanical Change in the Colombian Amazon.” This award will help support the second half of her year of fieldwork in Puerto Nariño, Amazonas, Colombia.
Kate’s work integrates anthropology and ethnobotany and uses mixed methods: interviews/ethnographic methods, market surveys, household and livelihood surveys, chagra inventories, and communal workdays in the chagras called mingas, during which she conducts plant free listings, walking interviews, and creates participatory maps with the farmers of their plots.
The primary aim of this research is to understand how small-scale farming communities in the Colombian Amazon adapt to changing socioeconomic conditions, and how these processes impact local knowledge and farming practices. This research contributes primary empirical data linking livelihood diversification, ethnobotanical knowledge, and chagra management and composition in the Colombian Amazon, advancing ethnobotany by conceptualizing TEK as a continually evolving, heterogeneous body of applied knowledge.