Spirits and Molecules: Ethnopharmacology and Symmetrical Epistemological Pluralism

ABSTRACT

Ethnopharmacology is the scientific study of indigenous drugs. Herein, I discuss some of the metaphysical issues at stake when rendering traditional medicines scientifically legible. I draw on my laboratory experience, my limited experience with Amazonian shamanism, and the ethnographic literature to consider drugs as relational entities animated in their particular cosmological milieu, with wider historical determinants stabilizing their ontologies. In relation to the problem of incommensurability that comes to the fore in ethnopharmacology, I review the broad problems faced by ethnopharmacology researchers, and extending Daston's concept of ‘applied metaphysics’ from history of science, I analyse ethnopharmacology as a process of synchronic translation across distinct regimes of knowledge and practice, offering insights into an anthropology of incommensurability that rests upon symmetrical epistemological pluralism. This theory may facilitate ethnopharmacologists and anthropologists in negotiations between incommensurable regimes of knowledge by fostering recognition of a plurality of ways of knowing.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnopharmacology
• epistemology
• ontology
• symmetry
• applied metaphysics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I was working towards a Ph.D. at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge, England.

2. The scientific study of indigenous drugs.

3. Richard Spruce (1817–1893), English botanist and explorer, spent approximately 15 years exploring the Andes and the Amazon, collecting more than 30,000 plant specimens. Spruce is most famous for cultivating quinine from Cinchona bark. Quinine was later shown to interfere with the reproductive cycle of Plasmodium falciparum, the causative agent of malaria.

4. Quinine: a compound found in the bark of Cinchona trees. Originally used by the Quechua of Peru and Bolivia, quinine was first brought from South America to Europe by Jesuit missionaries. Quinine was widely used to treat malaria in West, until its replacement with synthetic analogues in the 1940s; Ephedrine: an extract of the Ephedra distachia plant, ephedrine has been used in China for millennia to treat respiratory conditions. Since its isolation in the late nineteenth century, it has been used in the West as a stimulant and to treat hypotension and congestion; Digoxin: identified as a cure for bovine congestive heart failure in the late eighteenth century in Britain, the extract from the foxglove plant (Digitalis lanata), digoxin and its analogues, have has since been used to treat heart failure and arrhythmic heart conditions.

5. According to the World Health Organization's (WHO 2002) estimate. Moreover, a large proportion of the remaining 15% could have their medicines, including pharmaceuticals, traced back to natural product origins (Cox 2009). Other estimates suggest that over 50% of Western pharmaceuticals are originally derived from biological sources (Grifo and Rosenthal 1997).

6. The biodiversity of tropical forest plant species and the chemical diversity found within each plant make tropical plants one of the most abundant sources of novel bioactive chemicals. The Amazonian rainforest contains some of the world's most bio-diverse ecosystems. Indeed, plants living in tropical forest habitats have developed a large repertoire of defences – most of which are chemical – to protect themselves from viral and fungal infection as well as insect and mammalian predators. For this reason, it has been claimed, sessile organisms, and particularly plants, tend to produce the most potent bioactive molecules (Cox 2009).

7. Long-term residents of Amazonian areas presumably hold the most knowledge of these habitats and the relationships between, and distinctions within, their species (Elisabetsky 1991).

8. See Davis (1997) for a biography Schultes’ career.

9. Although greater than one-third of the world's top-selling drugs are still either natural products or their derivatives (Strohl 2000), with recent advances in technical capabilities, including genetic-, protein-, and antibody-engineering, more of the world's pharmaceutical development is now steering its focus towards the so-called class of ‘biopharmaceuticals’: drugs originating from rational design, genetic engineering, and biotechnological processes. Another reason for the recent decline of commercial interest in natural products is the uncertainty of success in natural product screens.

10. The Institute for Ethnomedicine is a non-profit charity and ethnopharmacology research institute located in Jackson Hole, WY, USA. The institute was founded by a set of trustees with the former director of the congressionally chartered US National Tropical Botanical Garden in Hawai'i. The Institute's stated mission is ‘to search for new cures by studying patterns of wellness and disease among indigenous peoples' (www.ethnomedicine.org: Accessed 12 October 2012).

11. As exemplified by the majority of articles in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, probably the leading journal in the field.

12. The tacit knowledge required for proficiency in practices associated with a Western objectivist biomedical ontology, as well as with a traditional medical ontology, is presumably contingent upon the individual growing up in, being effectively socialized into, and living as a ‘native’ in that society and internalizing its cosmological milieu. While a relative outsider, such as a travelling anthropologist, shaman, or scientist, can of course learn about, attempt to understand, relate to, and even appropriate aspects of other regimes of knowledge, there may nonetheless remain incommensurable elements, both conceptual and technical, that preclude perfect assimilation and translation.

13. Amazonian Perspectivism has been described as ‘the conception according to which the universe is inhabited by different sorts of persons, human and non-human, which apprehend reality from distinct points of view' (Viveiros de Castro 2012: 83).

14. On this phenomenon, recent work by Giovannini and Heinrich (2008) reported that the indigenous Mazatecs of Oaxaca, Mexico, have integrated biomedical pharmaceutical therapies into their traditional society, although traditional therapies remain the first preference with self-administration being preferred to seeking doctors or purchased pharmaceutical medications. The authors also published follow-up findings on the same region to indicate that there was ‘a significant positive association between an individual's knowledge of medicinal plants and the same individual's knowledge of pharmaceuticals' which would suggest that in relation to indigenous traditional healing practices ‘knowledge of pharmaceuticals [may] co-exist in a way which might be interpreted as complementary' (Giovannini et al. 2011: 928). See also Craig (2002) for an ethnography covering the hybridization of modern and traditional medicine in Vietnam. However, traditional medical practices may also disappear. Lev (2006: 4), who conducted fieldwork in Israel, claims that Jewish traditional medical practices that originated and were conserved along different ethnic Jewish lines have dwindled since the 1980s and that ‘The ethno-diversity of Israel is becoming blurred … and ethnic characteristics are fading'.

15. I concur with the Amazonian anthropologist Viveiros de Castro (2012: 62) who embraces the firm division marking traditional, non-modern, societies, and their ways of seeing and knowing, from modern Western societies, reaffirming that there are ‘striking differences between our modern official, hegemonic ontology – a precipitate of the Cartesian, Lockian and Kantian reformations (i.e. epistemologisations) of previous ontologies – and the cosmologies of many “traditional” peoples'.

16. Wahlberg's (2008) work describing the development of traditional herbal medicines reports how scientific practices also have been used to industrialize and develop a ‘Western' standardized version of the traditional remedy St John's Wort, as well as the Vietnamese herbal remedy, Heantos.

17. Levi-Strauss (1989[1962]: 12) described how the experiential knowledge of primitive societies relies on similar structuralist classificatory systems to those in Western science, and of particular inspiration to this biochemical discussion, he writes:

Wild cherries, cinnamon, vanilla and sherry are grouped together by the intellect as well as the senses, because they all contain aldehyde, while closely related smells of wintergreen, lavender and bananas are to be explained by the presence of ester  …   Ethnographic literature reveals many of equal empirical and aesthetic value.

At the level of epistemology, this kind of link between the empirical and the aesthetic – experiential knowledge and putative natural categories – such as those of botanical fragrances and their chemical constituents, points towards a symmetrization of primitive, traditional, and botanical knowledge with modern scientific taxonomies by presenting them as analogous though incommensurable arrangements.