The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

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The cultural context of biodiversity conservation
of intellectual property rights (IPR). As mentioned, IK did not only emerge as a subject of
growing interest for anthropologists, development practitioners or environmental researchers
but also for bio-prospectors in search for commercially valuable genetic resources,
who increasingly became aware of its previously underestimated utility in the
past decades (Posey 1996b: 58). As a consequence, the patenting of domestic plant varieties
and traditional medicinal products has become a source of general concern. In
response to the quest for natural products to be identified and exploited for commercial
benefit, government institutions and NGOs as well as local peoples themselves as
knowledge-holders have sought to protect their knowledge from commodification by
the pharmaceutical, biotechnological and agricultural industries (Ellen 2003: 68). 41
Such arguments over the links between ecological, cultural and economic aspects in
indigenous politics have emerged as a very contentious issue in the 1990s. 42 Escobar
(1998: 58) is critical of the debates on benefit sharing and compensation that dominate
contemporary discourse as a »neoliberal imposition« of the industrialised countries
rather than a democratically agreed upon option. Since emerging in the 1980s, the
debates in social research on the topic lack paradigmatic and methodological coherence
and may evoke the impression of being caught in a battle of perspectives, as the
book title Battlefields of Knowledge by Long and Long (1992) suggests.
Before going further into the wide range of analytical directions, this chapter first
aims to approach some definitional issues of indigenous knowledge and endeavours to
systematise the diverse conceptual approaches to the theme that is, as Ellen and Harris
aptly comment, »a veritable semantic, legal, political and cultural minefield« (2000: 3).
Given the assumed aim of anthropological research, to explore what societies know
about the world and the ways in which people generate, represent and communicate
knowledge, the following sections expound selected core ideas developed in recent anthropological
approaches that serve as a foundational frame for the findings of the
field investigation. The primary glance at the terminological issue is followed by a review
of different perspectives arising from several research traditions reflecting the
aforementioned transdisciplinary process. The last part of the chapter delineates epistemological
aspects and considers the relational complementarity of indigenous and
scientific knowledge as an important theme in the discursive frame focused on crosscultural
approaches to biodiversity conservation and rural development.
41 At the international level, the question of what is patentable is both unsettled and controversial
(Grenier 1998: 15). Intellectual property rights are only granted for particular innovative achievements
and not for general notions located in the public domain, to which IK pertains as it is most
often commonly held. A vast amount of writings deals with this contentious issue. For the role anthropology
may play within this discourse, see Brush (1993).
42 Posey (1996b) reminds that even the publishing of scientific information has become a ›superhighway‹
for transporting restricted and even sacred information into the unprotectable public domain.
Myer (1998) comments that IK is, like biodiversity, a resource, which is extracted and manipulated,
the resulting profits rarely return to the original source. Questions on ethics and equitable relationships
in the field of research on biodiversity have also been discussed as a central theme in the
contributions edited by Laird (2002). With reference to standards of scientific practice, Posey (2002)
hints at codes of conduct developed by the International Society for Ethnobiology.