Ethnobotany and Social Representation in Traditional Communities

teachers

Marcos Roberto Furlan

Project title

goals

Considering the main questions about how the actors of a traditional community represent their knowledge of the flora and how it relates to the place where they work, the objectives of the work are: characterize the profile of actors, in demographic terms and activities in the community, evaluate the perception of the actors about their role in the community and identify and describe the knowledge provided by such actors.

theoretical Foundations

The purpose of this work is based on the assumption that the individual providing the information about the flora uses relates to your group. This relationship is built from the statement of inherited individual knowledge of several generations.
This individual has characteristics that differentiate it from others on the subject, and its influence in the group is significant enough to be directly related to the well being of all.
The concepts related to ethnobotany are essential in conducting this work, Consider historical aspects of the community, social aspects of the individual generator of information and ways of obtaining information.

Methodology

Groups to be studied.

The groups to be studied are residents of rural areas, It is considered that have the knowledge about the use of medicinal plants in your community.
The work can also be applied in other groups, how, for example, the different health professionals.

search ranking.

This ranks as the research goals, as descriptive and exploratory; on the approach to the problem, and qualitative and quantitative.
The research of the exploratory type is needed, considering that provides greater familiarity with the problem, in order to make it explicit or even to build hypotheses, according to Gil (2002). m Triviños (2009).
A quantitative approach will be used from statistical processing of data originating side.
The qualitative approach will be used in all the work, however there is the use of the content analysis technique, defined by Bardin (2011) how […] a set of communication analysis techniques aimed at obtaining by systematic procedures and description of objective indicators content of messages (quantitative or not) that allow the inference of knowledge about the conditions of production / reception (inferred variables) these messages.
As for the collection of information about the aforementioned plants, the following formulas apply:
index of relative importance of the plants used – For the relative importance of species used as the number of respondents that cited the agreement and the uses cited, plants are selected for at least cited 5 informants and set the percentage of agreement as to the main uses (CUP), for each species.

The calculations will be based on work DAYS (1999), calculated as follows:

a) concordance percentage calculation as the major uses for each species (CUP)
CUP = number of informants mentioned that the main uses / number of informants mentioned the use of species x 100
Then the value obtained will be multiplied by a correction factor taking into account the popularity of the plant in relation to most cited species.

b) Calculation of the correction factor (FC):
FC = the number of informants cited kind / number of informants cited kind mentioned more.

c) Calculation of percentage of agreement corrected (CUPc):
CUPc= CUP x FC
The calculation of the relative importance of the species will be based on work DAYS (1999). This calculation is to evaluate the relative importance of species used in the local community and is based on the number of respondents who cited the species and the degree of concordance between the information, determining the percentage of agreement as to the main uses (CUP), for each species.

Suggestions for topics related to the project that can be developed

• Studies related to the social representation of individuals that transmit traditional knowledge
• Social Representations of community individuals
• Social representations of traditional knowledge about the flora
• ethnobotanical survey regarding the use of plants