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HerbalEGram: Volume 6, Number 7, July 2009
Tribute to the Late Nina Etkin Delivered at
Society for Economic Botany Annual Meeting
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At the Society for Economic Botany’s (SEB) 50th anniversary meeting, attendees paid tribute to the late Nina Etkin, a renowned medical anthropologist and ethnobotanist and one of the two recipients of the year’s SEB Distinguished Economic Botanist Award. (The other was Michael J. Balick, PhD, of the New York Botanical Garden.) A few of Nina’s closest friends and students compiled a presentation about Nina, which was delivered by Lisa Gollin, PhD, visiting colleague and affiliate researcher at the University of Hawaii and a former student of Etkin’s. Below is an abridged version of Dr. Gollin’s presentation, given June 4, 2009.
It is with joy and sadness that we celebrate and pay tribute to Professor Nina L. Etkin. It is my honor to speak on her behalf for this occasion.
Nina Etkin was a top-tier scholar whose vision exhibits the best qualities of academia. Nina’s approach was squarely located in anthropology, yet her vision was much broader. She most often self-identified as a medical anthropologist. However, her work was truly interdisciplinary, transcending and bridging the boundaries between the social and natural sciences. She treated ethnobotanical data—the foundation of her framework—holistically. She advocated for the scientific identification of plants and for locating them in the multiple contexts within which people interact with them. Nina put together puzzles from pieces comprised of plants and human health and with backdrops complicated by ecological and social landscapes. Rigor in data collection, interpretation, and presentation permeated Nina’s framework. She also integrated—sometimes subtly, sometimes vocally—advocacy for biodiversity protection and human rights into her vision of the world.
Upon hearing the news of her Distinguished Economic Botanist Award, she was so obviously tickled and proud. Her eyes sparkled and she grinned from ear to ear. When told that this year the DEB award would be given to her and to Michael Balick, she responded, “I’m in good company!” Over the years, Nina’s accomplishments have been recognized through the prestigious Regents’ Award for Excellence in Research and college teaching and merit awards at the University of Hawaii. I know she was especially honored by this one, from the Society for Economic Botany.
With 4 decades of research and publications that explore the physiologic implications of consumption, and the cultural construction and social circulation of plants used as foods, medicines, cosmetics, and textiles, Nina Etkin made substantial contributions to the discipline of ethnobotany and also to ethnopharmacology, ethnobiology, to anthropology in general, and specifically to medical anthropology. She helped us see beyond our own cultural and disciplinary constraints and deepened our understanding of plants as biodynamic substances, cultural artifacts, and components of ecological systems. Her research and scholarship greatly improved our comprehension of how people understand and use what we commonly call medicine and food.
For those of us who knew her personally, it was obvious that Nina loved what she did. Through her unbounded inquisitiveness, she blurred the distinction between work and play.
Nina was born in New York City, earned a bachelors in zoology at Indiana University, and began graduate studies in anthropology in 1970 at Washington University-St. Louis, where she received her MA in 1972 and PhD in 1975.
In 1977, she accepted her first academic position at the University of Memphis. She joined the anthropology faculty at the University of Minnesota in 1979, and the University of Hawaii in 1990. At the University of Hawaii, she served for many years as graduate chair and briefly as department chair, with strong contributions to college and university governance. She chaired dozens of anthropology PhD and MA committees, mentored extensively outside of anthropology, and served as external reviewer at both the graduate and faculty levels.
Most attendees of the SEB meeting knew Nina, or at least some side of Nina, primarily through her publications. Nina wrote as she spoke—eloquently, to the point, with authority, and when called for, with wit. Her publications reflected subjects she felt passionately about, and they demonstrated the serious detail, depth, and rigor that she applied to her work. Nina published extensively across a range of disciplines. Her CV lists over 130 publications. This includes 25 articles and 3 books since she became ill 5 years ago. Edible Medicines: An Ethnopharmacology of Food, a book she published in 2006, received many accolades. Her latest book, Foods of Association: Biocultural Perspectives on Foods and Beverages that Mediate Sociability is scheduled for publication this summer. At the time of her death, she had several other works in progress. Do not be surprised when she continues to participate in the academic dialogue even though she is not here in the flesh.
Her early inquiry emphasized the biocultural dimensions of health, beginning with her doctoral dissertation, which explains the biochemical basis of protection against malaria infection that is afforded by an inherited enzyme (G6PD) deficiency. She also explored the evolution of population variability, epidemiology, and health through studies of sickle hemoglobin and malaria; ABO blood groups and infectious diseases; and the intersection of diet, genetics, and daily activity patterns in the expression of hypertension.
Her postdoctoral research evolved into a multi-decade study of Hausa health, diet, and medicine in northern Nigeria. Nina’s husband, Paul Ross, was her collaborator and co-writer on many of the Hausa studies. She is best known for her pioneering work on the pharmacologic implications of plant use, especially the interrelations between medicine and food, and the cultural constructions of health and physiologic implications of people’s health-seeking actions.
In a later trajectory of ethnomedical inquiry, Nina began research on the use of complementary and alternative medicines (CAM) in Hawaii. Her studies revealed that the uses of CAM are not only for preventive and therapeutic actions, but also are statements about what it means to be sick and who has access to the knowledge and substance of cure. In sum, Nina’s research raised questions about explanatory disease models and healing paradigms, ‘irrational’ drug use, agency and authority in identifying drug actions as primary or side effects, the overlap of medicine and food, physiological outcomes of self- and specialist-care, physician-driven and patient-augmented polypharmacy, syncretic models of healthcare, gauging therapeutic efficacy, and the cultural construction and social negotiation of medical knowledge.
Again expertly linking biological and cultural concerns, Nina’s 2002 Economic Botany article, “Local Knowledge of Biotic Diversity and its Conservation in Rural Hausaland, Northern Nigeria,” called for greater attention to why and how indigenous knowledge and people can become part of, and inform, development and sustainable conservation efforts. Illustrating how formal conservation efforts in Nigeria are handicapped by their failure to take into account local environmental knowledge, she argued that the potential erosion of biodiversity in Hausaland has been checked by the varied management of cultivated and other lands, and by the use of plants in overlapping contexts—describing, for example, that many of the same plants used for fever and as food are also used as coloring agents for mats and leather crafts. Multiple uses affect people and plants in multiple ways and provide critical information on harvest practices and management of plant resources. Nina encouraged conservationists to look for plants that are important locally as priorities for biodiversity conservation.
Nina’s contributions, both in the academy and beyond, are many and far-reaching. Unrestrained by disciplinary boundaries or by the false dichotomy of theoretical and applied anthropological work, Nina made a difference in this world. Although her career was within the academy, the questions she chose to pursue were based on real world problems. Her work has not only shaped ethnobiology, ethnopharmacology, and medical anthropology; it has informed international public health, conservation, and development. She was an amazing colleague and mentor for many of us.
On Nina’s behalf, we thank you for this honor. We know she would have loved to have been here to receive it, and we all wish it could have been so.
—Presentation compiled by Heather McMillen, PhD, Lisa Gollin, PhD, Cynthia Fowler, PhD, and J.D. Baker, PhD. This tribute also includes excerpts of Nina's obituary, which was largely self-authored and lightly edited by Dan Moerman, PhD, Elaine Elizabetsky, PhD, and Michael Heinrich, PhD.
A tribute article to Nina Etkin was also published in the “In Memoriam” section of HerbalGram 82. That article is available here.
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