UA Open Access Publishing Fund / Background: Ethnobotanical knowledge continues to be important for treating illness in many rural communities,
despite access to health care clinics and pharmaceuticals. However, access to health care clinics and other modern
services can have an impact on the distribution of medical ethnobotanical knowledge. Many factors have been
shown to be associated with distributions in this type of knowledge. The goal of the sub-analyses reported in this
paper was to better understand the relationship between herbal remedy knowledge, and two such factors, age and
social network position, among the Yucatec Maya in Tabi, Yucatan.
Methods: The sample consisted of 116 Yucatec Maya adults. Cultural consensus analysis was used to measure
variation in herbal remedy knowledge using competence scores, which is a measure of participant agreement
within a domain. Social network analysis was used to measure individual position within a network using in-degree
scores, based on the number of people who asked an individual about herbal remedies. Surveys were used to
capture relevant personal attributes, including age.
Results: Analysis revealed a significant positive correlation between age and the herbal medicine competence
score for individuals 45 and under, and no relationship for individuals over 45. There was an insignificant relationship
between in-degree and competence scores for individuals 50 and under and a significant positive correlation for
those over 50.
Conclusions: There are two possible mechanisms that could account for the differences between cohorts: 1)
knowledge accumulation over time; and/or 2) the stunting of knowledge acquisition through delayed acquisition,
competing treatment options, and changes in values. Primary ethnographic evidence suggests that both
mechanisms may be at play in Tabi. Future studies using longitudinal or cross-site comparisons are necessary to determine the whether and how the second mechanism is influencing the different cohorts.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/621265 |
| Date | 30 April 2015 |
| Creators | Hopkins, Allison L, Stepp, John Richard, McCarty, Christopher, Gordon, Judith S |
| Contributors | Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Arizona |
| Publisher | BioMed Central |
| Source Sets | University of Arizona |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article |
| Rights | © 2015 Hopkins et al.; licensee BioMed Central. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. |
| Relation | http://www.ethnobiomed.com/content/11/1/33 |
Page generated in 0.0025 seconds