Isabelle, responding here to why I don’t like the framing of scientific vs. alternative medicine. I am on the board of herbal anthropology project, which is codifying indigenous plant and other medicine and validating it via the world intellectual property org because big pharma comes into the rainforest and patents something that’s been used as medicine for thousands of years and the native people get nothing because their practice is not seen as scientific. https://herbalanthropology.org/ The best illustration of this is with the bali water temples and rice paddies. A development agency wiped out the ritual supposedly superstitious practice and got no rice and lots of malaria. They examined what happened with rituals, where people got rice and no mosquitoes and reinstituted it. Indigenous science is often encapsulated in ritual,assigned no value and its theft is not seen as a crime because property rights don’t translate cross culturally. There’s a great you tube video on it can’t find it at the moment
Kevin the Bali mess you described is in the book Perfect Order, by Stephen Lansing.
I agree with you completely. More than that, I’m involved right now in a small consulting gig to help BioOne, an open access scientific publisher, map interesting futures, and a two-way relationship with indigenous peoples is top of their list.
I’m on the cusp of introducing them here in OGM, but need a green light to do so.
Thanks. There is also a really good video of that. The book 1491 is also good on indigenous land management not being seen; resulting in managed waterways becoming malarial tidal swamps in virginia, etc.
The framing of scientific medicine opposed to alternative gives preference to western science which ignores indigenous science and patents medicine that has been in use in situ, in combinations for thousands of years without compensating the people who discovered its use. That’s why I am on the board of the herbalanthropology.org we are working with WIPO to get indigenous medicines recognized, even though their treatment is often hidden from western eyes in religious ritual. Like the balinese water gardens. It relates to a bigger thing of indigenous not being seen.
One of my good friends is a miwok; the tribe whose home is Yosemite Valley. When Ansel Adams wanted to take pictures, the tribe was evicted because the picture he wanted, and that manifest destiny needed to reify the myth was of a pristine wilderness. So eliminate the natives and don’t see them. Don’t value their medicine. It also relates to the Cherokees negotiating in Washington to be recognized as a nation and Andrew Jackson’s response was displacement; the trail of tears. There is a lot on how they tried to be seen there. Sequoia had them sit in schools in rows and plant their crops in rows and use clapboard for the school building, etc. to look like what the Americans thought of as a nation. Violent displacement and necessary genocide followed to make the myth of a pristine wilderness it was not a crime to take away because the personhood of native americans had to be denied for the colonizers property rights and to enact their myth of sea to shining sea.
If they are not seen, they can be eliminated easily. If they are not recognized as people, with a science and medicine embedded in culture and ritual Its easy to steal their IP. If their land management and plant curation, which is managed but not domesticated, their land and innovations can be stolen easier. Then there is Sochan and the taste of Cherokee, which is another story.