A Socio-Anthropological Perspective on Ethnobiology:

Medicinal Plants as Healing Technology and the Politics of an Objective Knowledge

Kayvon Reza Dehghan The University of Kent at Canterbury

This essay considers the relation of these two quotes to each other.
Every civilisation tends to overestimate the objective orientation of its thought and this

tendency is never absent (Levi-Strauss)

Translating the biological knowledge of the cultural other into the categories and

theories of global science has arguably been the mission of ethnobiology since the 1950s (Ellen 2006:7 emphasis added). As a Social Anthropologists, writing for the first time in ethnobiology, it appears a very culturally other world to me. The term 'cultural criticism' refers to anthropological attempts to probe culturally sensitive issues, and thus to elucidate significant data (Saran 2008:162). It is in this Spirit that the two quotes above from Claude Levi-Strauss and Roy Ellen are juxtaposed side by side. Making cross-cultural comparisons can be tricky. Consider perhaps one of the most obvious domains of knowledge, language. Take for example the problems one might be faced with when translating an adage from its native language into a foreign tongue, for they are problems of the same faculty the ethnobiologist faces in their own task of translation. Or if one took to the task of translating an epic poem from one language into another. Did you interpret the ideas contained in the original well? Were there any parts that proved exceptionally problematic and why? Roy Ellen's choice of language in seeing the role of ethnobiologists as translators reflects his ethnobiological training in a field closely associated to linguistics. Ellen's definition of the mission of ethnobiology since the 1950s is interesting not only because it begs the question what came together in the 1950s to set ethnobiology this particular mission but also because implicit the words he chose is the truth of how very vital it is that we have a 'global science' and not a 'EuroAmerican' version in a frame limited to the advancement of human knowledge that Europeans and North Americans have developed (Schroll 2010:2) and so not developing global, etic understandings. And with views to suggest the very term 'science' is itself becoming problematic, if it can not already be shown to having to been problematic for a while. This ethnobiological mission of translating the knowledge that the cultural other has acquired in regards the study of life (biology) into the categories and theories of global science is framed as an etic process through which global knowledge is being acquired, a project arguably still having

a few teething problems. Though when Ellen uses the term global science as opposed to Western science, bioscience or EuroAmerican science it is obvious that though it points to a clear trend towards correlating knowledge interculturally perspectives like human freedom, subjective/ethnomethodological interpretation of data, transcendence of enculturation and the cultivation of global attitudes (Schroll 1988:371) we can swiftly find the ethnographic data that clearly proclamations that we are in a new world and a new type of science came premature. The conundrum in anthropology that can be variously refer to as the etic/emic, subject/object, qualitative/quantitative, ideographic/nomothetic methodological problem is brought into sharp ethnographic focus from the study of techniques of healing and most notably with plants with strong mythological motifs in the culture and an ethnoscientific connection to . Local knowledge that is being imported from the ethnographic fieldworkers about medicinal plants carries with it not only unique new biological specimens but a complex baggage of socio-cultural beliefs and practices grounded in an alternate metaphysic with alternative attitudes about nature and ontology. Taking the position that techniques of healing such as medicinal plants are in many cases best understood as technologies aimed at healing created within a particular emic perspective with its own hegemonic epistemological and political tradition. Take the case of the medicinal plant Tabernanthe iboga. Fernandez (1982) documented ethnographically its use in Gabon among practitioners of bwiti which is at one and the same time a religion, ancestor worship, and a brotherhood. Bwiti allows its participants to travel in the world of spirits, and it also has therapeutic aim (Paicheler & Ravalec 2007:6). While clearly not an ecological keystone species in the region Tabernanthe iboga is a strong candidate for a cultural keystone species (indeed it is so culturally significant on June 6, 2000, the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Gabon declared Tabernanthe iboga to be a national treasure) The plant fares well against the types of evaluations discussed by Turner (19??) to assess the cultural significance of a plant as among the bwiti Tabernanthe iboga is subject in local mythology, is used with very high intensity with palnt populations intentionally maintained though habit modification and its ubiquitous ecological and perceptual salience among practitioners. The plant also contains as identified by science the principally active and, more importantly, the morphologically unique biologically active indole alkaloid, ibogaine. Howard Lotsof is the man principally associated in the history of attempts to translate Tabernanthe iboga into the language of professional medical science.The details of Lotsof's lifelong campaign, to see Tabernanthe iboga going into clinical trials to test its effectiveness as a technology for treating substance-related disorders, and explored in the work of Agnes Paicheler (2007) saw Lotsof set up a not-for-profit organisation and attach a number psychiatrists and neurologists to his cause. If Paicheler is to believed the story of ibogaine appears a modern medical scandal. The National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) refusing to fund study into ibogaine in the 1980s, suggestions that when a project of research was began by the mid-1990 there were attempts within the Medical Development Division (MDD) of NIDA to distance certain people from the project: the activists African American ones in particular, and even certain scientists such as

Charles Kaplan, the person responsible for the evaluation of treatments using ibogaine at the University of Rotterdam (Paicheler 2007:151, eventual sanctioning of trials in 1995 but under the the condition that the dosages have to be limited to 8mg/kg, which is generally insufficient to break an addiction (Paicheler 2007:153). Alper, Lotsof et al. (2008) is part of a thirty year and counting suggestion that there is a need for systematic investigation of Tabernanthe iboga in a conventional clinical research setting. Technology choice which radically departs from the status quo implies a significant redistribution of political power and is, therefore, very difficult Wayland's (2003:483) work on the themes of science, superstition and biopiracy and the way in which physicians construct and negotiate these themes as part of a process of maintaining and legitimating their authority gives a more erudite elucidation of the complex political agendas involved in scientific scrutiny of plants reported ethnographically as medicinal. Wayland's paper is an ethnographic examination of the attitudes of public health physicians in the urban Amazon. Like I hope I have achieved above with the example of Tabernanthe iboga Wayland argues that being at the interface of two epistemological systems (namely the local & the scientific) medicinal plants provide a lens through which anthropologists can study the politics of knowledge (Wayland 2003:483) and his conclusion that though physicians value local plant knowledge when in global context in the clinic they ignore, deride, or appropriate competing local plant knowledge (Wayland 2003:495) only serves to show how on the right lines Levi-Strauss was in writing

Every civilisation tends to overestimate the objective orientation of its thought and this

tendency is never absent (Levi-Strauss)

Due to historical and political processes certain epistemic systems come to be valued over others and are seen as only or the best way of understanding the world (Wayland 2003:484). This a Foucauldian perspective whereby biology for example, or medicine is examined from the perspective of the different ways that humans in our culture develop knowledge about themselves. The main point is not to accept knowledge at face value but to analyse these so-called sciences as very specific 'truth games' related to specific techniques that human being use to understand themselves (Foucault 1988:18). Michael Jackson (1989:36) suggests that at the heart of all modes of understanding theoretical and atheoretical alike lies a need to reassure ourselves that the world out there is coherent and built on a scale which is compatible with and manageable by us. Only then can we enter into a relationship with it; only then can our sense of self be stabilized. Before any of those with a particular mechanistic bent in your thinking become too skeptical of this idea we must note science alters and refashions the object of investigation. In other words method and object can no longer be separated (Heisenberg 1958:16). While Jackson (1998:35) cautions against terms such as culture which can all too easily obscure the lifeworlds they are supposed to cover his approach in playing up the similarities between how anthropologists and those we study organize and interpret

experience is exactly the approach that is needed if we as researchers are going to fully see the benefit of ethnopharmacology to western medicine, an area where there is no doubt that new drugs will developed from such an investigation but an area where research is suggesting political tradition may be a large determining factor in our societies new medical technologies.