The Sweetness of Flowers in the Air: Literary Ethnobotany and Classical Burmese Poetry

This chapter proposes the idea of literary ethnobotany as both a conceptual framework for reading classical Burmese poetry and as a subgenre of the nature poetry tradition of the "Golden Age" of Burmese literature prior to British colonisation. In general, works of literary ethnobotany narrate aspects of human interactions with and uses of plants as food, fiber, medicine, decoration, enjoyment, pleasure and spiritual investment. This chapter briefly traces the origin of literary ethnobotany back to the late fifteenth-century tawla tradition of the forest journey in Burma. Subsequent poets, such as UK yaw, invoked the tawla in the nineteenth century in poems that express the beauty and multisensoriality of the botanical world as well as traditional uses of flora by villagers for subsistence purposes. In Burma and the Southeast Asian region today, literary ethnobotany has the potential to serve as a vital means to preserve rapidly disappearing traditional understandings of plants.