Medical ethnobotany of the Chayahuita of the Paranapura basin (Peruvian Amazon)

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Abstract

Ethnopharmacological relevance

Up until now, the plant pharmacopoeia of the Chayahuita, an ethnic group from the Peruvian Amazon, has been poorly defined. This paper details the uses of medicinal plants within this community, as recorded in two villages of the Paranapura basin, Soledad and Atahualpa de Conchiyacu. This study aimed to describe the basis of the Chayahuita traditional medical system, to document part of the medicinal plant corpus, and to compare it with data from other Amazonian ethnic groups.

Material and methods

Methodology was based (i) on field prospection with 26 informants (ethnobotanical walks methodology), (ii) semi-structured interviews including 93 people (49 men and 44 women) focused on the most recent health problem experienced and on the therapeutic options chosen, (iii) individual or group thematic discussions relating to disease and treatments, (iv) 6-months of participants' observations between May 2007 and May 2008. At the end of the project in May 2008 a workshop was organized to cross-check the data with the help of 12 of the most interested informants.

Results

Six hundred and seventeen voucher specimens were collected, corresponding to 303 different species, from which 274 (belonging to 83 families) are documented here. Altogether 492 recipes were recorded, corresponding to a global figure of 541 therapeutic uses and a total of 664 use reports. The main therapeutic uses are related to dermatological problems (103 uses; 19%), gastro-intestinal complaints (69 uses; 13%) and malaria/fevers (52 uses; 10%). Diseases are analysed according to Chayahuita concepts, and for each disease the species having a high frequency of citation are listed, and the most frequently used remedies are described. Whenever possible, comparisons with other Amazonian groups have been drawn.

Conclusion

Chayahuita nosology and medical ethnobotany appear to draw their inspiration from a common panamazonian root. Despite the fact that a certain number of medicinal plants are shared with other nearby groups, there seem to be specific uses for some species, thus highlighting the originality of the Chayahuita pharmacopoeia. Presently there is a certain disinterest in the most traditional area of the Chayahuita medical ways, and the role of the penutu (shaman) seems to be less highly-valued than in the past. Nonetheless, the use of medicinal plants in phytotherapeutic treatment is very much a living, shared knowledge.

Introduction

The Chayahuita community, Shawi in local Spanish and Kanpo piyapi in their own language (Barraza de García, 2005), counts more or less 18,000 people (13,717 after INEI, 1994). Chayahuita people belong to the Cahuapana linguistic family, subfamily Cheberoana (Garcia Tomas, 1993). Their historical territory is delimited by the Marañon River to the north, the Huallaga River to the east, the Cahuapanas River to the west, the Shanusi River to the South-west, and the mountains that divide Loreto from San Martin department in the south (Soto-Valdivia, 1983). Administratively, they live in the Cahuapanas and Balsapuerto districts, in Alto Amazonas province, Loreto department, Peru (Fig. 1).

Nowadays, Chayahuita people mainly dwell along the rivers, but formerly they lived in the inland forest, away from river banks, practicing slash and burn agriculture, hunting, and gathering food from the wild. New settlements by the rivers have changed some aspects of their way of life: fishing is more developed, and commercial crop cultivation, as well as breeding cattle and chickens, are slowly increasing, allowing some people to trade with the closest urban centres (San Lorenzo or Yurimaguas) (Fuentes, 1988). Main food crops are by far sweet cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz), boiled or prepared as masato (fermented beverage), plantain (Musa x Paradisiaca L.), and other amylaceous tubers, such as yams (Dioscorea trifida L. F., Dioscorea alata L.) and taros (Alocasia sp., Xanthosoma spp.).

Very few studies have been published on the Chayahuita pharmacopoeia. A short introduction to Chayahuita phytotherapy was written by Ochoa (1999). It deals with some aspects of Chayahuita nosology and treatments and extensively describes the use of Ficus sp. latex, localy known as Ojé. In 2007, at the end of her book Castillo listed some plant names, albeit crudely identified because of the absence of herbarium vouchers (Castillo, 2007). Finally, in her ethnographic work, Garcia Tomas (1994) records information on some Chayahuita plant uses.

Thus, overall, there is still a need for the Chayahuita pharmacopoeia and medical system to be described. Nevertheless, with the passage of time, there have been changes and homogenization in traditional knowledge (Lenaerts, 2002), and such work was urgently required. So, within the framework of a project aiming to find natural substances with anti-leishmanial properties (Odonne et al., 2009), we collected data on Chayahuita ethnomedicine and medicinal plant use in general.

Section snippets

Material and methods

In the text, italics is used for regional Spanish terms (and Latin names of plants) and Bold for Chayahuita terms.

Chayahuita traditional medicine

The main practitioners in the traditional Chayahuita medical system are the shamans (curandero, penutu) (Ochoa, 1999). They drink and prepare ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic beverage widely used in the Amazon by other groups such as the Kofán, the Tukano, the Shipibo, the Yagua or the Mestizos (Schultes and Raffauf, 1990, Chaumeil, 1993, Schultes and Hofmann, 2000, Jauregui et al., 2011). Among the Chayahuita, ayahuasca is prepared by decocting crushed stems of Banisteriopsis spp. (mainly

Conclusion

Despite the Chayahuita's apparently growing attraction to biomedical remedies, this study shows that there remains a comprehensive knowledge of the uses of medicinal plants in the Paranapura basin, although the inhabitants regularly assert the opposite. The body of plants collected forms part of a pharmacopeia, used in the framework of a traditional medical system which draws its inspiration from a common panamazonian root, as proven by the roles given to the penutu and the uwatu, the uses of

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Chayahuita of Soledad, Atahualpa, and the Paranapura basin, for their generosity, and particularly to every person who accepted to help us during the field work, walks, and interviews.

We also wish to thank the botany/economic botany team of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Lima). Determinations have been realized by the first author and supervised by Hamilton Beltran, Rodolfo Vasquez, Ricardo Callejas (Piperaceae), Betty Millan (Arecaceae), Severo Baldeon and

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