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Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice by Mark J. Plotkin (1993 Penguin)
Sometimes I sit around with my friends and we decide what would be the least cool PhD. You'd think it would be civil engineering because sewers and roads aren't really that exciting. On the other hand, people at cocktail parties don't say, "You're a civil engineer? You know, the other day when I was driving over the George Washington Bridge, a big chunk of the roadway fell out and I ended up swimming through the Hudson. It was really cold an unpleasant." Whereas if you tell someone you're a CS professor, they either turn away or say "You know my Windows box crashes yesterday and I lost a whole day's work."
Now that we've established the bottom end of the scale in terms of how cool your PhD can be and what you can learn during grad school that someone else might want to hear, let's look at the top end: ethnobotany. Mark Plotkin went into the Amazonian rainforests and came back with a rich collection of stories that he relates in Shaman's Apprentice.
Plotkin will educate you about the uses of rainforest plants, the intricacies of traditional Indian culture, and the catastrophic changes that were destroying the Indian villages almost before his eyes. Yet the book is mostly entertaining and interesting rather than depressing. Plotkin isn't a grim doomsayer. He notes how unfair it is that a western drug company will make $billions off an idea they took from Indians who get nothing, but rather than just complain, he has some practical ideas for getting enough money back to the Indians that they can use it to preserve their culture.
My favorite anecdote in the book is when Plotkin comes into a remote village and an elder greets him by rubbing his chest and saying "Basha, Basha." Plotkin thinks he is saying "Welcome, Welcome" but eventually learns that the correct translation is "Spider Monkey, Spider Monkey" (a reference to the hair on his chest). Stories like this make an evening spent with Shaman's Apprentice a rewarding one.
You can order this book from amazon.com (paperback) or even splurge on a hardcover edition .
Article created 1996
