First we will present results and discussion regarding types of interaction with text and illustrations, then we will present methodological implications.
Knowledge about plants was important for all of our interlocutors, even those who have little practice in plant collections. Local plants were a part of their identity and made up for important part of social relations [9]. Basing on the process of interaction with a written text and illustrations and the process of co-designing the booklet by Shiri people we identified three kinds of interactions between individuals and text/illustrations/herbaria specimens. The first kind of interaction “text-wayfaring” is predominantly a bodily interaction between individual and illustrations (with or without additional notice of plant names). It may include tracking the contour of leaves or of the whole plant. The second kind of interaction “fact/spelling checking” is predominantly discursive and information focused. The third kind of interaction “between wayfaring and fact checking” is the mix of the two above.
Patimat (in her 70s) and Malaykat (in her 40s) who had vast knowledge on plant collection were happy to receive the booklet in 2017 but they did not read it, but just browsed through it looking at the illustrations and plant names. They briefly looked at the photos/illustrations and stopped at those that were close to 1:1 such as: duc’armura (Bunias orientalis L.), ʡaˤʁʷamura (Cerastium davuricum Fisch. ex Spreng.), guržinakːʷi (Oberna multifida (Adams) Ikonn.). They looked at them with some suspicion, tracing the contour of leaves or the contour of drawings, as if trying to determine if it was a proper plant or not. It seemed to us as their try to make visual experience more or bodily (embodied) connected to the movement delineating the borders of the leaf blade. They skipped the close-ups without comment. When we asked them later about these illustrations they doubted if this plant actually grows in Shiri or if this is the right illustration of the species. When tracing the contour of the drawn plant (for example in sːisːupi, Allium victorialis L. and daga̰la qʼar, Plantago major L.) they also made a sign of “cutting” when they came to the root, which when asked later, they considered unnecessary/not-useful. Compared to other interlocutors, they put the booklet relatively quickly away. They were surprised when they heard us discuss the section “Uses in Shiri” with men present in the room. Three of our interlocutors commented: “we know this anyway”.
Abdulkadyr, university teacher in his 60s when he first got the printed version of the booklet in 2017, he started reading it from the table of contents. He right away spotted two spelling mistakes and one typos in the plant names pointing them to us in a teacher-like way (our gender obviously made it easier for him to assume the authoritative perspective). He took us to his brother, Timur (in his 40s), in the outskirts of Makhachkala. Their family left Shiri when they were still children, nowadays, they visit the village once or twice a year for religious holidays. Timur’s wife Fatima (in her 40s) lived in Shiri until getting married and often visited the village in summer to collect plants with her mother. The whole family gathered to take a look at the booklet.
“Žibžni” – reads Fatima looking at the heading at the top of the page with Polygonum aviculare agg. “This is certainly not žibžni. Žibžni does not grow up” – she points up. “It goes like this” – she makes a movement with both of her arms and palms above the surface of the table to show how the plant grows on the ground and how it spreads. “It cannot be žibžni” – she continues. “Žibžni grows in the middle of the village” – she repeats the movement. Abdulkadyr is sitting nearby but not really paying attention to Fatima.
“Sporish” – he says looking at the section with local Russian names of Polygonum aviculare agg. “It really totally cleans a body, if you drink a tea out of it for half year, it will truly clear your body. A very useful thing,” – he adds.
“Is žibžni the same as sporish?” – Iwona asks.
“No, gorets ptichiy is sporysh, it is written here” – he points to the sporish name in the local plant names section in the booklet.
“It grows in the centre of the village. It spreads and creeps (Rus. stelitsya), it grows in all conditions, it just grows like… Look, there is a word ‘sporish’ (in Russian: quarrels) – he says in a lecturing tone. “it just quarrels with the nature, you can walk on it, it is a very life-loving plant.”
“How is then sporysh in Shiri language?” – Iwona asks.
“In Shiri I don’t know” – says Abdulkadyr. His brother also shrugs his shoulders.
At another occasion, in March 2019, Rabadan (in his 50s) and Marat (in his 30s) were browsing through the booklet in Marat’s house in Izberbash.
“It is not zveroboy”, said Rabadan with confidence when reading the heading and looking at the photograph of (zveroboy is the Russian folk name for Hypericum perforatum spp.)
“No, it is zveroboy, they just made a photo from here” – argues Marat making a gesture to suggest that photo was made from above.“These are zveroboy flowers, just photographed from here.” – he adds.
“It looks like a bush/shrub here.” – says Rabadan. “Half of it is missing” – he adds. He made a similar comment on qːaˤnala čutni (Malva spp. (Malva neglecta Wallr. and M. pusilla Sm.)).
“Shulum (Mentha aquatica L.), it is also not clear here. At this time (as on the picture) it is already too old” – said Marat turning the page. In his opinion we should put in the booklet illustrations of plants “as they look when they are collected”, as it may be confusing.
Text and illustration poaching, wayfaring, fact-checking
Patimat’s and Malaykat’s interaction with text and illustrations in the booklet described above is an exemplification of text wayfaring. The term wayfaring comes from Tim Ingold who differentiated between modern traveller (travelling from one point to the other and not interested in the way itself) versus wayfarer (focused on the process of travelling, finding important things on the way, apprehending in movement) [26], [27]. Such interaction was specific for interlocutors whose knowledge was based on experience and passed from generation to generation that is (for the most part) people who lived in Shiri (or visited often) and actively collected plants: both during forest-walks or when going to the pastures. It is mostly women who belong to the group, however men living in Shiri usually also possessed knowledge about plants, in particular snacks that collected in childhood.
People who have vast amount of embodied knowledge plus practice in plant collection tend to physically interact with illustrations (touching, tracing the contour of the drawing with the finger). People did the same when watching pressed herbarium specimens (explained later). Through touching, tracking and remembering the contour they check if it really is the plant named above. Bodily experience of plants is so crucial for them that contour tracking proves to be the best way to recognize the plant on the illustration. Such way of deciphering the illustration is not necessarily obvious for a reader more familiar with botanical illustration, looking for details using the sense of vision would be much more intuitive for Ingoldian “modern reader” [25]. Touching the illustrations with fingers by our interlocutors resembles the idea to combine poking (here poking the illustrations and herbarium specimens) with de Certeau’s [20] poaching proposed by Matsutake Research Group [26] and then Eben Kiksey, Craig Schuetze and Nick Shapiro [27]. The above researchers do it by noticing the affinity of the English word “poach” with the French word pocher (to push or poke with a finger or pointed instrument, to pierce). Kirksey uses such metaphor: “At the Multispecies Salon, panelists poached each other’s papers, like chefs «poach» pears, using red wine and honey to intensify and transform the flavour of the fruit.” [27]. Similarly Patimat and Malaykat “poach” the contours of drawing to intensify the experience, to make it more similar to their everyday practice and to be able to recognize the plants they collect and use on daily basis.
Fatima did not recognize žibžni (Polygonum aviculare agg.), the species she knows and collects for ħuˤlkni (pie with filling, also referred to as chudu) filling. The illustration she was watching is a botanical graphic showing the plant abstracted from the environment. That is why it looks like it has shoots pointing upwards. Polygonum aviculare agg. is a plant species (or rather aggregate species) presenting in natural environment a high diversity of shapes, depending on the habitat it grows in (bigger leaves more and upright shape in more fertile habitats; creeping habit and smaller leaves in places with less available soil and tramping more often), but she did not recognize it on the illustration. The two dimensional de-contextualized picture did not enable her to recognize plant she knows very well and easily recognizes in various habitats (for example in Shiri village centre, where it grows in poor soil and is prone to tramping by animals and people). Fatima was quite sure that the illustration is not proper.
Shiri people were proud to posses a booklet, they showed it to their neighbours from different ethnic groups and regions who eagerly invited us to their regions to prepare such a booklet for them. It was, however, surprising for us that both men and women did not have a need for the information about local uses, or local recipes to be included. This information when printed seemed irrelevant, as if from a different knowledge order. Other parts of the plant description (if read at all) were not questioned – on the contrary, they served as a confirmation of one’s knowledge – “look, it is written here”. Some of our interlocutors hoped that the book will reveal that there are plants in Shiri that contain good medical properties to cure such illnesses as cancer. It turns out that although they were mostly interested in medical properties and occurrence in other parts of the world (or former USSR) they never actually read it at the very moment or later (we do not know, however, if they would actually apply it if somebody was in medical need). This knowledge was, therefore, rather meant as pure information to be collected but not practised. The authority of the rigid botanical text seemed prevailing.
As we can see from the case studies people do a lot of textual poaching[20]. They select information needed and change it according to their goals. Our interlocutors freely inscribe meanings to texts they are reading, poaching into it or as de Certeau puts it they “convert the text through reading and to ‘run it’ the way one runs traffic lights” [20] p.176. Their practice of reading rarely or even never resembles the practice de Certeau ascribed to “elite literati” [20]. “Elite literati” claim the rights to inscribe “proper” meanings to texts and assume that people reading these texts internalize those meanings. In a way researchers who fear the influence of books on LEK behave as such “elite literati”. De Certeau’s theory refers to the written texts, however, as will be clear from the case studies below, this remark may be as well spread to the way people interact with illustrations.
Adbulkadyr’s interaction is an exemplification of an interaction that we called a fact-checking. Abdulkadyr engaged mostly with the text not illustrations, he was the first to find spelling mistakes in the table of contents and in the particular entries. He partly read the text, in particular the part about medical characteristics. He also paid attention to the Russian folk and official names. The “fact-checking” kind of interaction between individuals and text is more discursive – the authority of the written text matters most. The written names are linked to the general knowledge of the social reality (and the fact that he collected Shiri plant names and linked them to the Russian plant names) but not necessarily to the practice of plant collection. Abdulkadyr also paid close attention to the etymology of plant names which may be related to the emphasis put on it both now and in the Soviet times, especially in linguistics and literature studies (see for example [28], [29]). He also remarked that mat'-i-machekha (Tussilago farfara L.) means mat' (mother) and machekha (step-mother), and zveroboy is an animal killer (cf. [30]). On other occasions he also asked his wife about meaning of a particular plant name, what seemed more important to him than the plant itself. It has to be mentioned here that Abdulkadyr has also been working on a book about Shiri and collected Shiri plants names, assigning to them Russian plant names (but not to the species) (the practice noticed by Łuczaj in regard to some Polish ethnographers [31], [32]). Generally, the knowledge about plant names and their meanings seems to be more discursive than practical knowledge – mat'-i-machekha is not widely used, while zveroboy is collected but rarely actually used (also both do not have local names), both are however often mentioned when conversation is conduced in Russian. Both plants are characteristic for Russian pharmacopoeia and popular in media discourse on plants. Such interaction was specific to individuals with LEK characterized by high interest in plants but based on more discursive than practical knowledge. They left Shiri in childhood or young adulthood and have little experience of plant collection. They may, however, subscribed to magazines or read Soviet-style botanical books. They generally valued the authority of the written text. As otherwise “knowledgeable” people (teachers, professors) they usually held high positions in their tukhums (lineages) and were asked for advise.
Rabadan and Marat’s interaction with the text and illustration is an exemplification of an interaction that we called “between wayfaring and fact checking”. Sõukand, referring to Ingold showed that if people do not engage with books they are always wayfaring and if they use books they behave like modern traveller [7]. Kołodziejska shows that it depends which plant they look for and why they take a walk [33], [8]. Similar observations can be made for text. Rabadan and Marat have both collected plants living in Shiri in the childhood, but since then they had little actual experience with plant collection. As their plant knowledge comes mostly from long-ago experience they remember the plants as they looked during the time of collections but had little memory of them in other seasons. These kinds of interactions were specific to people who grew up in Shiri and moved to the lowlands as adults or young adults. In childhood they actively collected plants, either as snacks or helping the grown-ups. Nowadays they visit Shiri occasionally (for holidays or funerals) and rarely collect plants. For the most part they are not as interested in plants to such an extent as to subscribe to magazines or possess plant books.
Collected by Shiri people and the phenological phase as presented on the illustration. Local people would rather have the illustrations at the time when it is collected. The idea that showing photographs with different phenological phases which is often done to facilitate plant recognition and in consequence elucidation of as many plant species collected by the surveyed community as possible, did not correspond with the ideas of our interlocutors who wanted illustration to represent the moment of collection (cf. [34]). Also they perceived the plant as a whole and parts displayed on the figure (or figures containing separately the root, the main part and the flower which is quite typical for botanical graphics) were confusing for them. The critique of graphics and photographs of “too old” or “too young” plants as well as illustrations showing “useless” and dissected specimens was present in all kinds of interactions.
The types of interactions analysed above, though more typical for particular groups of LEK-holders, may be observed across groups because every person in particular situation may interact with texts and illustrations in any of the three ways. Overall, the interactions with written text/illustrations of plants are influenced by (not)engaging with plants, individual’s gender and formal education as well as his or her attitude towards written text and its authority.