… Continued from Article 1
Article by Marie-Alpais Dumoulin, director of IRFA, published in the June 2022 issue of Revue MEP.
From nature to culture
Indeed, year after year, the missionary moved from simply compiling a “European-style” herbarium to studying indigenous taxonomies: he wanted to know how the Jörai named living things, how they used them, whether for physical, spiritual, or intellectual purposes. He therefore noted and described all the medicinal plants he saw being used by the women of the village. Dournes then took particular care to compare how species were named in the different languages of the Highlands, Srê, Jörai, Raddhe, Röglo, etc. This enabled him to understand the meaning of living things for the populations he was studying and thus move from knowledge of nature to knowledge of culture […].
Read the full article by clicking on this link.