Overview

• Preliminaries.
  • Admin.
  • Questions.

Preliminaries

Admin

• Today's note takers: FC and LY.
• Reminder: You should be meeting with a library lab person asap.
• Today's guest lecturer is still the legendary Monty Roper.

Upcoming EC

• Convo Wednesday: Philip Deloria, Professor of History and Native American Studies, University of Michigan.
• Sexual Assault Awareness Week activity.
• http://www.pioneerweekend.com

Leftovers from Last Time

• Coverage of how anthropologists of Roper's type think.
• Goals for last time
  1. What is TEK
  2. What roles does it serve?
  3. Where does it come from?
  4. Who holds the knowledte?
  5. Dangers
  6. So what?
• Reminder: Small-scale indigenous societies
  • Some of today's readings were about "India", which includes small scale societies but is also a large nuclear country.
• Roles: Ethnomedicine, management of the environment, integration.
  • Wanted to come back to this idea of integration.
  • It's integrated into the culture as a whole. Like anything in a culture it, it can't be separated out without affecting lots of other things.
  • Integrated into religion, social systems, an entire world view
  • TEK is part of the glue that holds the society together.
• Where it comes from: From generation to generation; Natural science (observation, trial and error).
• Who holds the knowledge?
  • Not everyone shares the same knowledge. Men and women may have different knowledge. Elders may have different knowledge.
  • We also have "universal" knowledge (e.g., we can all identify a "tree")
  • Knowledge is also associated with language. "Language is an index to a group's world view."
  • Concerning as we look at language loss around the world. When you lose a word for a thing, you lose some knowledge that a thing is important.
  • Culture also holds knowledge - it is embedded in cultural practice.
  • Anthropologists say that culture is like an iceberg - There are parts that you recognize (e.g., "I'm an American, so I support freedom"), but there's a lot that's buried that you aren't aware of. When you find yourself in another culture - you may be surprised to discover how different implicit culture is.
    
    • Example: How close people stand to each other.
  • The same is true of TEK - much of it is implicit
    • The way you interact with the land
    • The way you plant your crops
    • You may not be aware of it, but it represents hundreds or thousands of years of adaptation.
  • This knowledge is not speciality or universal; it's not even conscious.
  • You can't get this knowledge by talking people - you have to go in and observe and ask questions (of yourselves and of them and ...).

Questions

• Does "TEK" stand for Traditional Ecological Knowledge or Traditional Environmental Knowledge? Either.
• Functionalism - Anthropologists look at what look like religious rituals and see if they have environmental implications (e.g., a taboo on a practice during certain times of the year might allow regendration).
  • Might be an evolution of practice.
  • Might be based on careful knowledge turned into practice, practice regularized, underlying knowledge is lost.

Dangers to TEK

How is under threat?

• Expansion of "west". We change or challenge behaviors
  • Culture change / Acculturation
  • Inequal change - There flow of change is mostly one-directional; one group slowly assimilates another.
  • Change often leads to a loss
    • Loss of knowledge (including language)
    • Loss of practice (very few pure hunter/gatherer systems any more)
      • E.g., seemingly traditional, but on phone with child who is working the city
      • E.g., seemingly traditional, but with a dug well which lets them raise goats, which they can then sell at market
  • The people Roper studies often want to go off to different careers (e.g., Ranchers)
• Environmental change / degredation / global warming
  • Oil drilling changes water quality and other aspects of the environment, forces people to move.
  • Large scale deforestation for things like soy plantations or cattle ranches or ....
  • Might help the country as a whole (more income), but bad for the environment and very bad for the indigenous people.
  • Also a loss of biodiversity.
    • Puts environmental knowledge under threat

So What? Do we care?

• Few of us live the way our ancestors lived 1000 years ago.
• Are we worse off because we can't name a few dozen trees or hunt a squirrel (at least a non-Grinnell squirrel) or ...?
• We're losing potential sources of information for things we don't understand right now. (Roper writes "Potential Cures")
• We might be losing sustainable farming practices (and other practices)
• Spirital diversity - Loss of connection to spirit world.
• "Global knowledge commons"
  • What's in it for me? What food, medicine, etc. won't I get?
  • Broader morality of diversity. Diversity may have a value in of itself. These things have a right to exist.
    • Applied to biodiversity.
    • Could also apply to knowledge systems.
  • Biodiversity and knowledge diversity are often intricately tied together.
• Anthropologists mourn this loss because it loses a bit of our knowledge of what it means to be human.

What do we do about it? That's perhaps a bit far for us to deal with right now.

Biopiracy and Bioprospecting

• Some answers to that prior question will come up here, and we'll come back to the broader issue on Friday.
• Definitions: What do we mean by bioprospecting and biopiracy?
  • Biopiracy: Taking indigenous biological knowledge and using outside that culture, typically for monetary gain.
    • Does this prevent the original culture from using that knowledge? [Not inherent in the definition, but it's a concern about biopiracy.]
  • Doesn't that definition also include bioprospecting.
  • Biopiracy includes "without compensation or permission"
  • May not include money, but taking ownership can have significant cultural implications.
  • Biopiracy is not necessarily from indigenous cultures, but it's our focus today.
  • "Taking without permission"
  • But typically in terms of developing countries or indigenous communities (a power relationship)

Exercise

• Half the class represents an indigenous group.
• Half the class represents a business that has created a medicine from ayahuasca and are patenting it.
• First half: Why do you care?

• Second half: Why do you deserve a patent?

• Big Pharma Group: You've been accused of bioprospectpiracying. Are you guilty?

• No. We're making potentially life-saving drugs and we can impact a huge number of people.
• Indigenous people: What do you think?
• You've done this without respect. It's new knowledge to you, but it's not new.
• We will assume they are not being compensated.
• Why didn't you patent it before us?
  • Because patenting is your imperial western approach.
  • And imperialism is bad.
  • Go solve your own damn problems on your own.
• You haven't respected us! Why won't you take this a step further?
• "Respect is a moot point if you can bring it to a broader audience."