“I know a lot about medicinal plants. I read, I watch, and I search": towards hybrid knowledge systems in the modern era

The study suggests that medicinal plant knowledge has evolved here through hybridisation, a process whose consequences are context-dependent, offering opportunities for revitalisation but also a risk of displacement. Dialogic exchanges across families, communities, languages, and media expand people's plant repertoire and strengthen community adaptive capacity. Yet when these exchanges lead to excessive standardisation, they risk eroding the diversity of local traditions. Ethnobotanical research must therefore go beyond documenting popular and formal knowledge sources to interrogate how linguistic and sociopolitical contexts condition the emergence of hybrid knowledge systems, privileging certain forms while rendering others transformed or marginalised.