The origin and early history of the Journal of Ethnobiology and Society of Ethnobiology in Arizona in the late 1970s and early 1980s are reviewed in respect to the contributions of Steven A. Weber. The roles of Lyndon Hargrave, James Stuckey, and Prescott Center College in this history are documented, along with the events leading to the incorporation of the non-profit Society of Ethnobiology in 1981. Steven Weber became the first President of the Society and remained active in Society meetings and business throughout his career. The Society continues to grow and expand, with new publications established in recent years. The Journal also remains strong and is now published quarterly. Steve Weber's support and involvement in the Society and the field of ethnobiology over the past four decades has left a lasting legacy that will continue to influence students and professionals for many more decades to come.

In this article I explore how the legalization of marijuana in North America involves the racialized class appropriation of diverse material, social and cultural capitals borne of black-market marijuana production and distribution. This process is facilitated by a conceptual dichotomy that grants the public either a U.S.-driven “war on drugs” or a state-organized corporate marijuana sector that favors highly capitalized interests, omitting the option of simple decriminalization. I study how this false dichotomy is normalized by politicians, entrepreneurs, and lay consumers by way of two interrelated strategies: The traditional vendor is constructed as “violent” whereas the legal one is “safe,” and the legalized marijuana product of “safe” corporate oligarchs is also made “safe” by its discursive and institutional association with medicine, purity, and “healing,” whereas the product of traditional suppliers remains “polluted” and “dangerous.” In the final analysis, we remember that health itself is a political, class-making device, brought to inaugurate class rights, responsibilities, and the respectability of some at the expense of others. Synthesizing ethnographic analysis, historical inquiry, political economic theories of capitalist appropriation, social science literatures on public health, and medical anthropology, this article suggests that persons enthusiastic for legalization confuse consumer desire with a commitment to social justice when they suggest that state-controlled legalized marijuana, in the context of neoliberal capitalism, represents an anti-imperialist social good. Social scientists are invited to remain vigilant about their potential complicity in the racialized class-making politics of public health in its intersection with shifting marijuana laws.

Here I take up calls to engage in developing an “ethnobiology of us,” in which Western biota-cultural relations are centered. When Western-influenced scholars study extinct and extant cultures of cannabis cultivation, trade, and consumption in celebratory, reverential, or mundane contexts, it is crucial for appropriate self-reflective positionality to appreciate the power, persistence, and remarkable idiosyncrasy of the western socioecological worldview of cannabis. In humancannabis relations, I argue this is essential, as the Western worldview carries profound hegemonic weight, influencing preconceptions of scholars and global societies. A prevailing Western notion is that close contact with cannabis is socially legitimate only for a privileged few and otherwise harshly criminalized and stigmatized. Constructed scarcity and inequitable accessibility of this traditional and widely cultivated species and its products are ubiquitous, including near-total invisibility of wild and cultivated plots.

Drawing upon my own memories and reflections navigating multiple cannabis-related cultural frames, spanning from disgust to fear and curiosity to reverence, I will chronicle the cannabis and the various cultural frames in which it was embedded, which I have passively or actively encountered throughout my life, including in my training and practice as a geographer and medical doctor. The thematic arc has been shifting from alienating to allying with cannabis, yet, at the same time, being ever-vigilant of the official marginality of that alliance and related structural violence. To adapt to that social marginalization, I have come to accept various logics that connect cannabis with the body, stretching from spiritual and cosmological, cultural-traditional, and pharmacological-biochemical.

An indigenous crop, cannabis and its parts have traditionally been used in some regions of the Indian Himalayas for food, clothing, and enjoyment in the form of a socially consumed intoxicant. Cannabis has become engendered in social transformations and has been historically subsumed within the socio-cultural life of the region, where it has been a “humble” object (Miller 2009) of great utility, but hardly influential. However, in the last couple of decades, cannabis has been important in transforming the local economy, challenging the socio-cultural order, and influencing individual life trajectories in parts of the Indian Himalayas. This paper illustrates how cannabis becomes a “transgressive” object, one that is possessed of a force that shapes human life (for better and worse), and challenges and transforms social institutions and practices in the region. The sociocultural, historical, and material aspects of cannabis play significant roles in such a transformation. While illustrating how the history of colonization and global circulation of cannabis is inscribed with contradictory meanings, the paper suggests that much (although not all) of cannabis's present power in the Indian Himalayas can be attributed to historical and present interpretations in the global West. The paper examines the engagement between local community and cannabis, and explores how this engagement ushers in social change in the Indian Himalayas.

Congo Basin hunter-gatherers have used cannabis for nearly two centuries, yet ethnographic descriptions of its use are rare or contradictory. We present the results of two projects investigating cannabis use among Congo Basin hunter-gatherers. The first study, conducted in the 1970s, was a survey of cannabis use in three populations: Efe archers, Mbuti net-hunters, and Aka net-hunters. The second study, conducted in 2011, was an in-depth biocultural study of cannabis use among one of these groups, the Aka. Methods varied between the studies, but the integration of results from both studies provide insights into: a) common features of Congo Basin hunter-gatherer cannabis use across time and space; b) cross-cultural and intracultural diversity in use; and, c) factors influencing changes in use over time. Compared to typical cannabis research populations in Western, developed countries, cannabis use among Congo Basin hunter-gatherers involves extensive sharing, such as communal smoking, absence of gender or age proscriptions, perceived performance enhancing effects, and labor-for-cannabis exchanges with neighboring villagers. Cannabis was sometimes the first or the only plant that Congo hunter-gatherers domesticated. Consistent with cross-national studies of cannabis use, Congo Basin hunter-gatherer cannabis users were typically male, often adolescent or young adult, and (among Aka in 2011) had less material wealth than non-users. Aka cannabis users also had fewer intestinal parasites. Finally, cannabis use varied across time and space both within and between the three groups in ways that reflect differences in the demographic, cultural, and historical features of the populations, especially degree of sedentarization and market integration.

Around the world, people notice birds, talk about birds, and learn from birds. Birds are identified as signs, messengers, augurs, teachers, and beings that can affect one's life and livelihood. The significations of birds vary across cultures and shift over time, but not in entirely arbitrary ways. In this review of published literature from the Human Relations Area Files and elsewhere on birds as signs, we extracted details about 498 kinds of birds in 123 ethnolinguistic groups and found that, worldwide, owls, crows, cuckoos, woodpeckers, herons, eagles, nightjars, and chickens were the most reported as sign-bearers. Ninety-two percent of signifying birds were categorized as of Least Concern in terms of conservation priority. Half of all signs were communicated by vocalizations and a quarter by bird behavior. Contrary to our expectations, when analyzed by order, passerines were not the most common sign-vehicles (23%); rather, near-passerines made up 34%, and 23% were non-passerines, both of the latter over-represented in comparison to number of species worldwide. Predictive signs can be understood as keys to human cognitive processes for remembering details of past experience and predicting/hypothesizing the future. The honed ecological awareness acquired by paying attention to birds translates more generally to sophisticated connective worldviews that extend our perceptive awareness in space and time.

The Sèmè make particularly abundant use of plants in the field of divination. Diviners practice their art with the assistance of a bush spirit that comes to live with them at home. Plants serve as material support for settling this bush spirit in the diviner's home and as powerful objects on the divination scene. Each species of plant plays one or several specific roles. This article is based on extensive field research and the analysis of the meaning of the plants used in divination (names in the Sèmè language, ritual use). It describes the role of plant species and their symbolic roles in settling the bush spirit in the diviner's home and during the divination process. Although similar to those of other societies located in the Volta River Basin, the Sèmè divination practices show some original aspects.

With ongoing resource depletion and environmental degradation in the floodplains of Bangladesh, there is a clear need to include insights from traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) in developing and implementing plans for sustainable natural resource management. The knowledge, skills, and practices related to fishing in the floodplains of Bangladesh are almost exclusively a product of the local fishers' TEK. As fishers are deeply integrated with their landscapes, they develop and refine their ecological knowledge through multi-generational sharing of experience of and knowledge about fishing and socio-cultural learnings. This study documents the knowledge of floodplain fishers of Bangladesh and examines their decision-making about harvesting as a process based on heuristic rules developed through years of curiosity experimentation, adaptive learning, and empirical and inductive reasonings. Using a participatory ethnographic approach, ten major categories of TEK systems are examined: ethno-topography of floodplains, ethno-taxonomy and aquatic productivity, diurnal and nocturnal variation patterns of fish behavior, birds and other animals, actions for aggregating fish in leased waterbodies, importance of aquatic vegetation for growth and conservation of floodplain fisheries, breeding biology tuned to complex hydrological cycles, fishers' perception of fish ulcerative syndrome, landlocked Hilsa fish from the Hakaluki haor, and fishers' views on biodiversity. This research explores the cognitive mechanisms behind fishers' decision-making about harvesting. Experienced fishers argue that if the important mother fishery sites are protected and managed through community-based institutions, floodplains of the country would benefit immensely in terms of production and biodiversity conservation.

We present new data highlighting the symbolic and ritual association of peanuts (Arachishypogaea) on the north coast of Peru during the Early Intermediate Period (200 BC to AD 800). Recent paleoethnobotanical work at the two Virú polity sites of Huaca Gallinazo and Huaca Santa Clara has revealed a distinctive distribution of peanut remains in contexts associated with elite and ceremonial practice, including performative feasting and burial ritual. In contrast, peanuts were rarely recovered from domestic spaces associated with quotidian practice. Furthermore, unlike staple crops such as maize (Zea mays) or beans (Phaseolus spp.), their low frequencies in state-run storage facilities suggest peanuts did not have a significant role in the polity-wide redistribution economy. Information drawn from historical documents and archaeological excavation beyond the Virú Valley likewise suggests differential consumption of peanuts, which were largely linked to ritual practice across the greater Andean region.