Cross-Cultural Ethnobotany of Northeast India

The book Cross-Cultural Ethnobotany of Northeast India is unique in at least three ways. It deals with the plant resources of that region of India which is universally recognised as one of the centres of biological diversity and speciation on the earth, the northern Himalaya and east India. The region is ethnically the most diverse in India, the cults, races and ethnologies showing change very few hundred kilometres. Few such multidisciplinary treatises have been written on this floristically and ethnically rich region. It is for the first time that in this part of the globe, a comparison has been made among the people on the basis of their knowledge of, and relationship with, plants of the region. The book deals with 1296 species of plants, of which 472 are reported to be used among more than one ethnic group, and 824 species are unique to a single culture. Numerous, hitherto unrecorded uses of plants discovered during intensive field work, have been described in the book. The book is a window to the rich botanical and ethnic diversity of northeast India.