Maya Medicine in the Biological Gaze - CBDagroecology, food systems, and natural resource...

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C u r r e n t A n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 43, Number 3, June 2002� 2002 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2002/4303-0004$3.00

Maya Medicine in theBiological Gaze

Bioprospecting Research asHerbal Fetishism

by Ronald Nigh

The relationship of human societies to territory and natural re-sources is being drastically altered by a series of global agree-ments concerning trade, intellectual property, and the conserva-tion and use of genetic resources. Through a characteristic styleof collective appropriation of their tropical ecosystems, Maya so-cieties have created local institutions for governing access totheir common resources. However, new mechanisms of globalgovernance require access to Maya biodiversity for world com-mercial interests. The Chiapas Highland Maya already face thisprospect in the International Cooperative Biodiversity Groupdrug discovery project, which proposes to use Maya medicalknowledge to screen plants for potential pharmaceuticals. Theethnobiological focus of the project emphasizes the naturalisticaspects of Maya medicine, primarily the use of herbal remedies.This biological gaze decontextualizes the situated knowledge ofMaya healers, ignoring the cultural context in which they createand apply that knowledge. The search for raw materials for theproduction of universal medical technology results in symbolicviolence to the cultural logic of Maya peoples. Only the full rec-ognition of Maya peoples’ collective rights to territory and re-spect for their local common-resource institutions will provideultimate protection for their cultural and natural patrimony.

ro n a l d n i g h is Research Professor at the Centro de Investi-gaciones y Estudios Superiores en Anthropologıa Social del Sur-este (Carretera a S. Juan chamula Km 3.5, San Cristobal Las Cru-sas, 29247 Chiapas, Mexico). He was born in 1947 and receivedhis Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1977 with a dissertationon traditional Maya architecture in highland Chiapas, Mexico.Since then he has pursued applied and basic research on Mayaagroecology, food systems, and natural resource management. In1990 he founded the Global Ecology Laboratory at Mexico’s Au-tonomous National University and began a new phase of re-search applying geographical information systems and landscapeecology to community-based natural resource and agriculturalplanning and biodiversity issues. His work at CIESAS includestraining activities in organic agriculture for small farmers and ru-ral teachers. The present paper was submitted 31 v 00 and ac-cepted 22 v 01.

The politics of nature is thus based on contested as-sumptions. These assumptions imply value judge-ments which are derived from conflicting culturaldefinitions of the right and the good.

—klaus eder , The Social Construction of Nature

The considerations presented in this paper arose unex-pectedly from research through which I found myself amodest witness to a major controversy. For several yearsI have conducted fieldwork on how indigenous farmersin Chiapas, Mexico, articulate the biophysical, eco-nomic, and political elements of their life-worlds toconstruct their livelihoods and reproduce their society.Working primarily with speakers of Tzotzil, Tzeltal,Ch’ol, Mam, and Lakantun (all Mayan languages), I havefocused on collective and cooperative organizations ded-icated principally to organic agriculture, traditional med-icine, ecotourism, and handicrafts that seek to increasethe general welfare of their communities and to achievemore effective control over their territories and naturalresources (Nigh 1997, 1999, 2000). As a result of thiswork, I have become aware of an emerging context inwhich Indian organizations increasingly are engaged incomplex international networks with enormous poten-tial effect on their lives.

Throughout the world, the relationship of human so-cieties to territory and natural resources is being dras-tically altered by a series of global agreements concern-ing trade, intellectual property, and the conservation andappropriation of biological resources. The importance ofthese novel issues was impressed upon me by the pres-ence, since 1998, of a major international research ef-fort—the Maya International Cooperative BiodiversityGroup (Maya ICBG) bioprospecting project for highlandChiapas, directed by Brent Berlin of the University ofGeorgia. Having relied on Berlin’s recognized ethnobo-tanical contributions (Berlin and Berlin 1996, Berlin1992, Berlin, Breedlove, and Raven 1974) in my own re-search for many years, I watched with some surprise aswhat appeared to be yet another phase of a long academiccareer became a hotly contested issue locally and inter-nationally. I found myself socially situated in the con-troversy because many local scientists participating inthe project have been friends and colleagues for manyyears and many of the Maya involved have collaboratedin my own research and applied work.1

Criticism of the Maya ICBG, particularly by nongov-ernmental organizations, has been couched in terms ofcompeting transnational and local interests and howthey shape and are shaped by policies and resource con-

1. I especially thank some of the actors in the events referredhere—Rafael Alarcon, Sebastian Luna, and Antonio Perez from OM-IECH, Luis Garcıa and Jose Carlos Fernandez of ECOSUR, and BrentBerlin of the University of Georgia—for sharing their views. I amgrateful to my colleagues at CIESAS, Graciela Freyermuth, CarolinaRivera, Witold Jacorzynski, Dolores Paloma, and Miguel Lisbona,as well as Brent Berlin and the anonymous referees, for their in-sightful and constructive comments on the drafts.

452 F current anthropology Volume 43, Number 3, June 2002

flicts (see, e.g., RAFI 2000). While I have favored thisapproach to political ecology in the past, I share a con-cern expressed recently by other anthropologists to en-rich our understanding through the study of the mean-ings through which people structure and comprehendtheir ecosystems (Escobar 1999, Atran 1999). I felt thatmy relationship to the Maya ICBG controversy presentedan opportunity to explore, through my own data andthose of other researchers of the Maya area, how differentmeanings assigned to nature and ecosystems, plants andanimals, contribute to contested views of research, theenvironment, and the human use of nature (Nazarea1999, Haenn 1999).

Here I analyze a number of meanings generated by thecontroversy surrounding the Maya ICBG, beginning withthe very notion of the Maya. Although the project’s focuswas restricted to highland Chiapas, working with threedistinct Mayan language groups, the adoption of thename “Maya ICBG” for the project participates in sym-bolic meanings that go beyond mere ethnographic de-scription. Deconstructing “the Maya” prepares the ar-gument about contested visions of nature and humanrelationships to natural resources. Independently of themany legal and policy issues brought up by the project,I argue that bioprospecting proposals such as the ICBGdo violence to indigenous meanings of nature, medicine,and property. These contested meanings—these differingcultural definitions of the right and the good in the con-text of enormous power inequality—generate conflict.By contrasting the medical knowledge and practices ofthe highland Maya with the knowledge and practices ofscientists turned bioprospectors, I attempt to show howthe clash of hidden assumptions produces interculturalmisunderstanding.

The Construction of the Maya World

A vast ethnographic literature documents the resilientand fascinating Maya culture area, in which some 29distinct but related languages and cultures form one ofthe major indigenous regions of the world. Resistanceand continuity of Maya cultures have been identified asdefining characteristics of this area (e.g., Ruz 1992) sincebefore the Spanish invasion. Indeed, anthropology’s re-cent attempts to purge itself of ethnographic romanti-cism and “essentializing” concepts of cultural identityhave found the Maya case problematic (Fischer 1999).

On the basis of the archaeological definition of theMaya culture area and ethnographic observation of sur-viving Mayan-speaking groups in that area, anthropologyhas identified the Maya as a particularly attractive objectof study. The archaeological background, with its focuson material culture, its time lines, and its quantitativemethods, gives the notion of “the Maya” a certain con-creteness and legitimizes the category in scientific dis-course. Thus, one can slip unnoticed from the irrefutablereality of stone monuments, ancient waterworks, andcalendrical texts to the ethnographic present of any ofsome 6 million Maya people, carrying that scientific le-

gitimacy into the realm of social and cultural analysiswhere it is infrequently granted. Curiously, until the fi-nal decades of the 20th century, none of the people wecall the living Maya thought of their own identity interms of this anthropological category. This fact, whilerecognized by scholars, has done little to dampen theenthusiasm for Maya studies or to lessen the reality ofthe mysterious Maya for the general public.

To say that “the Maya” is a category “constructed” byanthropologists is not to invoke epistemological relativ-ism or assert that there is no empirical basis for imputingsuch a category. I rely on insights from cultural studiesof science that “nature is always constructed by ourmeaning-giving and discursive processes” (Escobar 1999:2) but is contingent on the systematized experience ofscientific practice. “To be ‘made’ is not to be ‘made-up’”(Haraway 1997:99). What we must abandon, however, isthe idea that the practice of science—be it archaeologi-cal, ethnographic, or biological—is the mere uncoveringof a pre-given reality. In our practice—in the contingencyand specificity of experience—we find an order that weinterpret in terms of categories that are simultaneouslysemiotic, institutional, organic, and material. But thesecategories are valid, validated, scientific constructions.

The error occurs in the next step, in the naturalizationof the idea of the Maya; forgetting its constructed nature,we take “the Maya” literally, as a pre-given part of thenatural, real world and therefore a legitimate object ofscientific study. Notions of Maya authenticity and puritymay impose our own construction on the self-represen-tation of the Maya as they live today. The question ofMaya identity and self-representation is a crucial issuein the struggle for recognition of Maya peoples and thedefense of their intellectual and cultural patrimony. Theanthropological image of the Maya can be seen as anobstacle in this struggle, a romanticized, homogenizing,tourist gaze (Castaneda 1996) that confines Maya cultureto the past and ignores the problems and realities of thepeople who live in the Maya area today.

At the same time, among the different Maya groups,many people who previously represented themselves inexclusively local terms are constructing a pan-Mayaidentity. There can be no doubt that the Maya are in-volved in a struggle for recognition and equitable partic-ipation in global society and are facing threats to crucialelements of their livelihood and patrimony. Part of thatstruggle, at least in some areas, involves a fundamen-talist reaffirmation of the “old ways” and the essential-izing of pan-Maya identity by the Maya themselves. AsHerzfeld (1997) has noted, people often essentialize as apolitical strategy. This Maya self-representation is itselfinfluenced by the archaeo-anthropological concept of theMaya. Thus, the category has now left its birthplace inacademia to become a resource in identity politics.

Local identities of Maya groups were the basis of afurther important constructed category, “the Maya com-munity.” The current concept of the Maya communityis an artifact of the ethnographic literature of the middledecades of the last century. A strong nostalgic currentin industrial society that idealizes “the village” as the

nigh Maya Medicine in the Biological Gaze F 453

cradle of our most cherished values (see Critchfield 1994)also nourishes this view. But besides these imaginarydimensions, “the community” is a resource in the po-litical field in contemporary Mexico and Central Amer-ica. The ethnographic view of community has influencedIndian legislation as well as government and interna-tional development policies for many decades and dom-inates influential expressions of alternative political fu-tures in the region (Toledo 2000). Most important for thecase at hand, it is the “community” that is supposed tohave legal and moral authority to grant “prior informedconsent,” a legal prerequisite for biological sampling, in-cluding bioprospecting. Therefore, what we mean by“the community” is more than an issue of social theory.

Once again, the empirical referents of the “Maya com-munity”—especially its importance and developmentduring the colonial period (Farriss 1984)—are easy topoint to, but I object to its use as an unanalyzed “natural”category. References to community often do not specifywhether an actual legal entity or a face-to-face social orcultural unit or a residential unit is meant. Maya societytoday, in Chiapas and Guatemala especially, is charac-terized by the “explosion of communities” (Nash 1995),the fragmentation of formerly homogeneous loyalties bythe emergence of new social and demographic move-ments organized around supracommunity interests of re-ligion, politics, gender, productive activity, and migra-tion. Indeed, relationships beyond the community havebecome a significant source of identity, perhaps as im-portant as “belonging” to a specific community (Her-nandez and Nigh 1998). The “Maya community” cannotbe taken as a given; we must specify how that com-munity is constructed—or how it will be recon-structed—and the current empirical basis of its socialsolidarity.

The Maya Commons as Spirited Landscape

Some scholars have seen deep historical patterns of hu-man settlement and land use in the Maya culture area(Vogt 1964). Varied forms of collective resource manage-ment have characterized communities throughout theMaya area, and these community institutions are oftenpoints of conflict and resistance to government and de-velopment agencies. The historic form of propertyamong Maya and other Indian communities in Mexicosince colonial times has been that of communal lands.This form of land tenure is recognized in the MexicanConstitution, in which the community assembly is des-ignated as the ultimate authority in granting use rightsto land parcels and the natural resources they contain.Even after the constitutional reforms of the Salinas ad-ministration (1988–94), communal tenure provides fullconstitutional protection to Indian communities’ landsas long as a majority of comuneros wishes to maintain

that tenure status.2 In this restricted context of agrarianlaw, “community” has a precise and unambiguous mean-ing that is usually, though not necessarily, broadly cul-tural and social.

Communal lands create an ideal legal context for localmanagement of common-pool resources. Thus, the com-munity has often become an institution for the creationand implementation of rules governing the use of suchresources. The Mexican Revolution was fought largelyfor the restoration to Indian communities of communallands that had been expropriated during the liberal periodof Benito Juarez and Porfirio Dıaz in the late 19th cen-tury. But the land reform of the revolution created a newcategory of social property, the ejido—a quasi-communalproperty in which the federal government rather thanthe community assembly retained ultimate authority.Once again, under the neoliberal policies of the past twodecades, the political class of Mexico attempted to elim-inate such forms of social property through privatizationof ejidos and communal lands. And, once again, the re-sponse by Indians has included armed insurrection,drawing world attention to a conflict that has really beencontinuous throughout the last century (Harvey 1998,Montemayor 1997).

The institutional arrangements that communitiesadopt to administer their common resources and assignproperty rights are not static but can change dramaticallyover time. Within a given community, there may exista variety of property regimes in which some areas orresources (e.g., house sites) are assigned indefinitely toindividual heads of households whereas other areas (for-ests or rough areas) may be collectively managed. Thegreat advantage of these arrangements is that the designand implementation of the rules governing resource useare entirely in the hands of the local community and canbe readily modified to adapt to new circumstances (Os-trom 1990).

One of the great challenges for indigenous commu-nities today is the adaptation of their traditional insti-tutions of common-property resource management tothe demands of a growing population and globalizing so-ciety: demands for the conservation of their biologicaldiversity and ecosystems, on the one hand, and for ag-gressive commercialization of their resources, on theother. Far from being archaic arrangements left over fromthe past, common-property resource management insti-tutions have shown an extraordinary capacity to changeover the centuries and are continually being revised tomeet new challenges (Bray 1995, Gray, Colchester, andParellada 1998).

2. Though the Constitution stops short of recognizing rights to“territory,” it does grant the community full control over naturalresources within the boundaries of its communal lands, except forresources of the subsoil, which are reserved to the state. The con-cept of “territory,” as defined in international indigenous rightsdocuments such as International Labor Organization Convention169 and the Draft UN Declaration on the Rights of IndigenousPeoples, goes beyond the mere recognition of rights to land propertyand asserts the notion of the “habitat” necessary for the social andcultural reproduction of the group.


There has been considerable debate in anthropologyrecently over the ecological sustainability of indigenouscommon-property resource management systems andwhether indigenous people achieved a harmonious re-lationship with their environment (Krech 1999, Ruttanand Borgerhoff Mulder 1999). These issues are beyondthe scope of this paper, but the discussion is relevant inthat it has revealed some of the complexities of humansocieties’ engagement with their natural resources andchanging environments. Ostrom (1990:91) identifies asone condition necessary for an enduring system of com-mon-property management of a resource the existenceof clearly defined boundaries for the system. Theseboundaries must designate unambiguously the extent ofthe common resource and the individuals or householdsthat are considered to have rights and obligations withrespect to it.

A Maya agrarian community under Mexican law, withclearly defined territorial boundaries and a list of house-hold heads who form part of the community assembly,creates a situation of clearly defined rights with respectto a common land resource. Under these conditions theassembly can issue a set of enforceable rules with respectto the natural resources on its land. The capacity to gen-erate and enforce such clearly specified management sys-tems gives the notion of “community” an empirical con-tent. Wild-crafted, widely distributed medicinal plantsand the local knowledges of their uses, shared acrossdifferent Maya cultures, do not, however, provide sucha clearly bounded resource system.

The refusal of most governments to recognize the le-gitimacy of indigenous systems of property and resourcemanagement is one of the most egregious violations ofthe collective rights of Indian peoples. Ostrom (1990) hasidentified the wider institutional context of common-property resource systems as another crucial factor de-termining their success or failure. Indeed, it is clear thatthe generally poor showing of the ejido system in Mexicoas a common-pool resource manager is primarily due tothe hostile institutional environment created by the au-thoritarian, paternalistic, and corporatist rural and In-dian policies of the Mexican state in the late 20th cen-tury. Recent neoliberal and free-trade policies tend to beeven more hostile to forms of local resource management(Key et al. 1990).

Both sociological experiments and studies of empiricalcases have begun to provide a robust basis for the theoryof common-property resource management (Ostrom etal. 1999). North American social science is focused onthe individual actor and theories of rational choice (Os-trom 1998, Ruttan and Borgerhoff Mulder 1999), whereasin the South there is considerably more focus on collec-tive action and cultural analysis (e.g., Bonfil 1996, Toledo2000). A central question for the North Americans in-volves determining when people will stop acting as ra-tional maximizers of short-term self-interest, a choicethat leads to the tragedy of the commons on a collectivelevel, and cooperate for a better long-term outcome forall. Studies show that people do, in fact, cooperate, pre-senting the North Americans with something of a par-

adox needing explanation, while in Mexico such an out-come hardly causes comment.

Everyone agrees, however, that one crucial elementnecessary for cooperative behavior to occur is commu-nication. In an experimental setting, just being able tocommunicate in “prisoner’s dilemma” and other suchgames greatly increases the tendency toward coopera-tion. But communication alone is insufficient. Com-munication must be effective in establishing the rulesof cooperation and mutual commitment to those rulesfor an enduring system to emerge. Berkes (1999) has ar-gued forcefully that indigenous resource managementsystems cannot be explained in terms of cost/benefit cal-culations and individual self-interest alone. Carefully de-signed experiments indicate that (even with Americancollege students as subjects) the mere transfer of infor-mation about optimal individual strategies is not suffi-cient to influence people’s behavior. Rather, “enhancingmutual commitment, increasing trust, creating and re-inforcing norms and developing a group identity appearto be the most important processes that make commu-nication efficacious (for resolving social dilemmas)” (Os-trom 1998:7).

The conditions indicated by Ostrom are familiar onesfor the anthropologist. Group identity, mutual trust, rec-iprocity norms, and the importance of individuals witha reputation for keeping community commitments (pres-tige) are all described in the ethnographies of many Mayaand other Mesoamerican communities. Ecological an-thropologists since Reichel-Dolmatoff (1976) have ob-served that indigenous cosmology and culture can re-inforce social norms of reciprocity and respect forecosystem integrity that promote ecologically sustain-able behavior. In the recent “science wars” over indig-enous knowledge (e.g., Whelan 1999), such studies aredismissed as ethnographic romanticism. However, incommon-property resource theory and case studies asdeveloped by Ostrom and others (e.g., Berkes and Folke1998) we can find solid empirical and theoretical ground-ing for the notion that indigenous cosmology and world-view can reinforce sustainable patterns of resource use.The critical point is that, even within a theory of rationalbehavior, the existence of potential benefits from a col-lectively managed resource can provide a strong incen-tive for the invention (or reinvention) of cultural insti-tutions and the reaffirmation of cultural identity andcontinuity.

Atran (1999) has pointed to the interesting situationin the Peten, Guatemala, of two Maya groups—theQ’eqchi’ and the Itzaj—that contrast greatly in theirtreatment of the lowland rain forest. The Q’eqchi’, morerecent colonists to the Peten from the highland Cobanregion, plant large (5� ha) milpas to three crops—maize,squash, and beans—and use a field only once before mov-ing to a new site each year. They do not protect trees orhilltops or keep forest reserves. The Itzaj, by contrast,plant complex polycultures, conserve forest resources inand around their fields, leave large reserves in their plots,and worry about sustaining biodiversity. We found a verysimilar contrast between the Lakantun (cultural and lin-


guistic kin of the Itzaj) and highland Tzeltal colonists inthe Lacandon rain forest of Chiapas (Nations and Nigh1980). Yet ceremonial life and communal organizationare manifestly richer among the Q’eqchi’ and the Tzeltalthan among the Itzaj and the Lakantun. Atran observesthat the Q’eqchi speak of their homeland as the “sacredmountain valley” but do not consider any element of thePeten environment sacred or in need of protection. Thus,despite the lack of well-developed communal organiza-tion, the more self-sufficient, autonomous family unitsof the Itzaj and Lakantun show far greater environmentalawareness and stewardship of the forest than their morecommunally organized neighbors. Indeed, in Atran’sstudy area, the mestizo colonists with a longer historyin the jungle are more similar to the Itzaj in their en-vironmental awareness than the highly monolingualQ’eqchi’.

The obvious question is how Itzaj and Lakantun so-cieties achieve cooperative, conservationist behavior to-ward their forest without a communal institutionalframework that regulates and monitors the commons.To account for such behavior, Atran refers to a kind ofbelief system he calls latent knowledge structures, “cog-nitive procedures that make possible an evaluation ofthe future consequences of purposive behavior for one’slife and the environment in which life is embedded”(1999:207). In the absence of explicit rules for reciprocityand appropriate conduct, there is a rich set of referencesin stories, shared personal experiences, and episodes ofencounters with spirits interwoven into an imaginary ofthe forest landscape that motivates characteristic behav-ior. Atran (1999:206–7) describes the construction of this“spirited” landscape:

Places in the landscape that the Itzaj call “Maya-land” (u-lu-um-il maayaj) tag episodes in a person’slife that Itzaj are most readily willing to communi-cate to others. Reference to such places “automati-cally” makes recounting of a personal experienceculturally relevant for any other Itzaj who is listen-ing. . . . They do not locate the places only, or evenprimarily, by spatial positioning. . . . They refer epi-sodes to these cultural loci that connect the differ-ent paths of individual life stories. . . . They recountthat the arux (forest spirits) play tricks on people . . .in order to assess valor in doing what is appropriatein the forest. The unworthy will show themselves.. . . Then the arux will abandon them to their fate.. . . There is no principle of reciprocity applied toforest entities, no rules for appropriate behavior andno controlled experimental determinations of the fit-ness of ecological relationships. Yet reciprocity isall-pervasive and fitness enduring.

We shall return to the notion of latent knowledgestructures below. Here it is important to note that theItzaj and the Lakantun have left their generations-longisolation in the forest and now are surrounded by a seaof colonists and a transformed landscape, as well as gov-

ernment and nongovernmental officials bringing pro-grams of conservation and sustainable development.They have been forced to formalize their knowledge instructured institutions. Thus, with the help of outsideadvisers the Itzaj participate in the Bio-Itzaj committeeto protect mature forest from outside loggers (Atran1993) and the Lakantun in La Comunidad Lacandona andthe Council of the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve.These and other examples show how Maya latent knowl-edge structures can evolve into explicit rules for resourcemanagement in response to a changing institutional con-text (e.g., Flores 2000).

Maya Models of Nautre

The cosmology of Mesoamerican peoples has been de-scribed as integrating the natural and social worlds intoa whole (Bonfil 1996). Men and women not only live inthe world but are embedded in it in such a way thatevery act affects the universe and everything in the uni-verse resonates in the individual. Responsible humanaction is carried out with consciousness, even manipu-lation, of this interdependence. Successful farming, forexample, depends on maintaining a harmonious rela-tionship with cosmic forces through a series of ritualsassociated with preparing the soil and planting maize andits companion crops. Not only poor harvests but alsoillness and natural disasters can be caused by a lack ofrespect or falling out of harmony with these natural andcosmic forces.

In the communities with which I am familiar in theMaya culture area, all land and natural resources (e.g.,springs, caves, rivers, forests, animals) have owners orguardians (Burguete 2000, Pitarch 1996, Vogt 1969).These owners are variously identified as “God,” Jesus,the Angel, some Catholic saint (e.g., Saint John), theEarth Lord, or any of several other such spiritual beings.Almost universally among Maya peoples and many otherindigenous groups in the Americas, an essential aspectof caring for natural resources is collective or individualritual obligations to these owners. The users of a resourcesuch as a water hole celebrate periodic festivals to keepthe owner happy, providing food and drink, candles, sky-rockets, music, and dance. Although the form of the rit-ual changes, such festivals are sometimes held evenamong converts to Protestantism (Burguete 2000). Re-source users establish a reciprocal arrangement with theowner of the resource, requesting permission and givingcompensation in return for use. These rituals are amplydescribed in the ethnographic literature (e.g., Vogt 1969).Through these symbolic relationships of reciprocity, thedifferent Maya peoples establish what is essentially asocial relation with the elements of their territory. Par-ticipation in the ceremony determines one’s status as aresource user and establishes reciprocal obligations withother users.

As is the case in many premodern societies (e.g.,Strathern 1980), there is nothing in any Mayan languagethat corresponds directly to our notion of “nature” or


the environment. This fact suggests an interesting com-parative approach examining the way in which differentMaya groups refer to the things we mean by our words“nature,” “biodiversity,” or “genetic resources.” One op-portunity to engage in this comparative language anal-ysis is provided by a text published by the state govern-ment of Chiapas (1991) in which people from severalMaya groups (as well as Zoques) write, in their own lan-guages, on “The Conservation of Nature.”

If you ask a bilingual native Maya-speaker to translatethe concept of “nature,” he will usually respond with aword such as banamil (Tzotzil). The term has manymeanings but is usually translated as “world,” “land,”or “earth” but also “vegetation” (Laughlin 1975:78). Itdoes not include the sky, the planets, and other heavenlybodies.3 The term “nature” is sometimes translated bythe compound term banamil vinajel, roughly “earth andsky” (in Tzeltal the equivalent term is lum k’inal ). An-other term used for “nature” or “countryside” isk’uxlejal (Tzotzil “life”). In the text, “conservation” isglossed in Tzotzil as k’uxubinel, “to care for to do a favorfor to reciprocate” (Laughlin 1975:201). The termsk’uxubinel ta banamil vinajel do not correspond verywell in meaning with “conservation of nature,” in theWestern sense of “nature” as opposed to “society” or“the artificial” or as something that has to receive specialtreatment in order to be “protected” or “conserved.” AMaya is in “the world” and must treat each being, in-cluding the “owners” of natural resources, with“respect.”

There is a current of contemporary thought among theChiapas Maya that attributes the difficulties facing In-dian society today to changes in moral behavior and at-titudes of Maya people themselves, encouraged by theexpansion of capitalist development ideology or “mod-ernization.” For example, Maya people often contrast theattitudes of their ancestors (those within living memoryand beyond) with the attitudes of young Indians today.One young Tzotzil-speaker from Chenalho writers (Xi-menes Kuteres 1991:30):

This was the custom of our ancestors, they showedrespect for nature (lek yich’ojik ta muk’ li banamilvinajele). Wherever they went, if the sun came outin their path, they would stop there a while, crossthemselves, and beg God that nothing would happento them on the road. But now we young people don’tknow how to do this; we say that what the old onesdid is useless. But we are mistaken; it was more cor-rect, the way they used to live. Look now at our suf-fering: what we plant does not grow well, even if theland is fertile, the pests come . . . and we don’tknow why this is so. But I think it is from notknowing how to respect nature. This is the reasonour crops no longer grow.

3. It does include clouds, rain, lightning, and thunder, as these aresaid to arise from the earth—especially from the mouths of caves,from which the mountain spirits expel them.

Another Tzotzil-speaker, from Chamula, observes (XilonKomes 1991:25):

The elders say that in old times the land was verygood, it gave very well then, the dry season didn’tlast long, the milpas grew well. The mountains werefull of great trees, of plants; the land was very green.Everywhere there were animals and the chattering ofbirds. . . . Also there were lakes and rivers thatnever ran dry, with fish and ducks, and springsflowed everywhere. But now it is not like that, nowthere is scarcity and suffering, because they say weare finishing the greenness of the land [syaxal libanamile, i.e., fertility] that gives the rain. . . .

Besides the degradation of their environment and thechanges in their relationship to nature, “progress,” thatis, the penetration of capitalist market relations into In-dian communities, has brought fundamental culturaland socioeconomic changes as well. These changes arecomplex but are symbolized by the progressive com-modification of a central element of Maya culture. Maizeis the staple food of all Maya households, and its pro-duction, along with the foods that accompany it, suchas beans, chiles, and vegetables, is the primary work ofa man, just as processing maize into tortillas, tamales,and pozol is the primary work of a woman. Though Mayapeoples have been part of a money economy, as wagelaborers, for centuries—at least since the Spaniards mon-etized the payment of tribute in the 18th century—maizeis an item whose commodification was always resisted.A writer from Chamula recalled the customs of his elders(Munyos Komes 1991:28):

When they planted a lot [of maize] they would lookfor workers to help them, but they would not paythem with money. They would only help each other,or they would pay with maize and beans, becausethere was the belief that if they paid with moneythe maize wouldn’t grow well. It would be burnedby the sun because they thought money was veryhot.

Resistance to the commodification of maize was nec-essary to preserve it as a central axis of community cul-tures—to keep from destroying the multiple functions(Pimbert 1998) of maize and milpa in the life of the fam-ily and the community by reducing it to the one-dimen-sional yardstick of price. Apart from the plethora of re-ligious and cultural associations of maize in Mayaculture, it was the fundamental link of social life andcultural and gender identity. As Collier writes of Zina-cantan: “Corn as a basic food is for Zinacanteco men andwomen what it means to live together in a home . . . toshare the production and consumption of corn” (1992:204–5). When maize was used for payment of labor itretained a locally created value with a dual function asa medium of exchange and the basis of community foodsecurity. When money displaces maize as the medium


of exchange, that is, as social relations themselves be-come commodified, maize “is no longer produced forcommunity food self-sufficiency and comes to be pro-duced for family food self-sufficiency” (Garcıa andGarcıa 1992:223). Thus, the function and value of maizein society are fundamentally transformed, a change thatunderlies the changing values concerning respect for na-ture and community reciprocity that Indians perceive ashaving occurred since olden times.

In particular, many of the beliefs and customs that canbe seen as functioning to reinforce a community’s set ofrules for managing common resources are questioned bythe younger generation. For example, a farmer from To-jolabal country states (Hernandez Jimenez 19821982:38):

It’s like they say, that the old customs are disappear-ing and there is now a custom of not believingthings that used to be believed out of fear. Now allthose things are being forgotten because they haveseen that it’s just imagination, that what they be-lieved isn’t reality. . . . They had said that it’s notgood to do certain things at certain times, becauseeverything has a secret. That’s what the elderswould say, but the youth of today are testing to seeif it’s true, and they realize that if you do somethingthat you’re not supposed to, it comes out all right.That is where now they don’t respect those beliefsanymore.

The Maya’s forced entry into the capitalist global econ-omy has provoked changes in their relationship to theirenvironment, and the social arrangements and cosmol-ogies that have been effective in resource managementare also changing. Writing in Spanish, an Indian school-teacher from the Tzeltal community of Oxchuc refers tochange in his community (Gomez Sanchez 1982:16–17):

The mountain that is known as the dwelling of thegods is a sacred mountain and is the object of allpossible reverence, because it is in this mountainthat we find all good and evil. If the gods accept theofferings, they show it through the beauty and de-velopment of the crops. . . . The gods notice the atti-tude of the owners of the milpas. . . . Now in mytown we suffer from hunger because the land doesnot produce. The gods have become permanently an-gry. They do not send occasional punishments anymore, nor do they ask for offerings in order to keepproviding food to the people. The elders (principales)understand that [the gods] have abandoned theirdwellings forever—abandoning the farmer to hisluck, because they have abandoned the path of re-spect and of the good, they no longer believe in themountains, the roads, caves, and the springs. Mean-while we have to eat rotten corn from the CONA-SUPO [government warehouses], because now thereis no maize, no beans, no vegetables. There is hun-ger and disease. In my village we no longer producefood.

The Cultural Logic of Maya Medicine

On the night of the first air strike on Iraq in the DesertStorm campaign commanded by U.S. President GeorgeH. Bush, the people of the highland Maya community ofZinacantan, Chiapas, were concerned and frightened.They had been closely following the events leading upto war on the radio news. Despite official rhetoric jus-tifying the military action, the Zinacantecos knew whatthe war was really about: petroleum. And since therewas petroleum in Chiapas—indeed, a newly establishedexploratory well in Zinacantan itself—they were deeplyconcerned that the war might reach them. In order toprevent this catastrophe, the shamans of Zinacantan(j’iloletik, or seers) performed the ceremony of the But-terfly, which had not been conducted for at least a gen-eration. The purpose was to seal off the paved highwayleading into Zinacantan so that war would not enter thehighlands. Butterfly is the animal soul of one of Zina-cantan’s mythological ancestor shamans, whose exploitsare recounted in folktales (Robert Laughlin, personalcommunication; Laughlin and Karasik 1988).

For the Ch’ol community of Nueva Esperanza, theyears following the 1994 Zapatista uprising were difficultones. Although the community had attempted to steera neutral course through the conflictive political situa-tion of northern Chiapas and create a climate of toler-ance for difference, it was continually threatened by aparamilitary organization from a neighboring village thatwas pressuring it to take sides. One night a messengerarrived warning that the paramilitaries were planning anarmed invasion. The community elders called on thefour guardians, men who live on the edges of the townand protect it from outside dangers, and with the supportof other elders and shamans held a special ceremony inwhich protector deities were invoked to deflect the mal-ice and aggression of the paramilitaries (by sending themdown the road to another community!).

In Chiapas Highland Maya communities, the j’ilol(Tzeltal ch’abajom) or shaman “sees” into the moun-tains where ancestral gods and other mountain spirits(the owners) dwell. The shaman’s work is to negotiatewith this kind of spirit or holy (ch’ul ) being on the behalfof individuals or the community as a whole (Vogt 1969,Fabrega and Silver 1973). This function of the shaman isanother cultural element in which some scholars see anexpression of Maya cultural continuity (Vogt 1964, Frei-del, Schele, and Parker 1992). Besides important publicceremonies such as the ones referred to above, shamans,both men and women, are often called upon to conductcuring ceremonies for the sick. These ceremonies of sac-rifice and prayer involve “seeing” the Earth Lord or othermountain spirits and negotiating the return of part of thepatient’s collection of “souls,” loss of which is alwaysassociated with disease. For many Maya of highlandChiapas, both traditional and not so traditional, thej’iloletik are virtually the only option and final recoursefor the seriously ill (Freyermuth 1999).

The social institutions and cultural logic with regard


to the nature of such fundamental resources as maizeare also revealed in Maya notions of health, disease, andcuring. The ethnographic record from a wide variety ofcommunities in the Maya culture area and Mesoamericain general suggests a native cosmology in which the no-tion of metaphysical balance is a key concept. It is thebelief that “continued human existence is predicated onthe maintenance of cyclic cosmic balance that both af-fects and reflects earthly conditions” in terms of “har-mony between the physical and metaphysical worlds”(Fischer 1999:480). The notion of reciprocal balance un-derlies social relationships but also applies to relation-ships with “supernatural” spirit-owners of “the world,”expressed, as in the texts presented in the previous sec-tion, in terms of the Maya idea of “respect.”

The Maya shaman treats disease essentially by relig-ious means, through sacrifice and prayer. Human inten-tion and behavior, either of the patient or of others inthe patient’s life-world, cause sickness. It is often theresult of deviant behavior, especially disrespect towardelders or higher-ranking individuals or the “owners” ofnatural resources, refusal to meet obligations of reci-procity with neighbors and relatives, rejection of Mayaculture and the adoption of characteristics consideredladino or foreign, refusal to speak the Maya language ofthe community, or the establishment of overly close re-lationships with people outside the community. The cur-ing ceremony is “socially reconstituting and reorigin-ating” (Kapferer 1996); the shaman seeks to restore thepatient’s relationships to the physical, metaphysical, andsocial worlds—to correct the imbalance that is the rootcause of the illness.

The Maya shaman’s ritual, both in the highlands ofChiapas and in a wide range of Maya societies reportedin the ethnographic literature, has to do with the recov-ery of the soul or parts of it. The Chiapas Highland Mayahave a variety of souls and parts of souls (Hermitte1970[1950], Holland 1963, Vogt 1969, Guiteras 1961, Pi-tarch 1996). The two principal concepts are the ch’ulel(Tzotzil and Tzeltal) and the chanul (Tzotzil xch’ulel orTzeltal lab) The ch’ulel resides at the heart and is nec-essary for life.4 It determines character and is sometimesdescribed as a shadow being with the same general shapeas the person. It is the seat of memory, feelings, andemotions and is responsible for dream experiences andthe ability to speak (Pitarch 1996). The ch’ulel frequentlyleaves the body, for example, during sleep, but prolongedabsence provokes illness. A duplicate ch’ulel for eachliving individual inhabits the interior of certain moun-tains under the care of the ancestor spirits.

The chanul or lab, sometimes referred to in the lit-erature by the Nahuatl term nagual, is an animal spiritcompanion. It can be almost any kind of wild animal,insect, or, in some cases, a natural phenomenon such as

4. Many groups also speak of a third soul, the heart-bird (conceivedof as a chicken or a dove dwelling in the center of the heart). Thepresence of the heart-bird is absolutely essential for life. There islittle curing activity, apart from some preventive ritual, for the lossof this kind of soul, since it is almost immediately fatal (Pitarch1996).

a thunderbolt. Each person has such a companion ani-mal, which is kept in a corral in the sacred mountainunder the care of the highest-ranking “official” of theancestor spirits and allowed out to graze during the day.Vogt (1969:372) reports that in Zinacantan each personshares a ch’ulel with his animal companion. The Tzeltalof Cancuc apparently do not share this particular belief(Pitarch 1996). In Zinacantan and many other Tzotzil-speaking communities, the ch’ulel is believed to be di-vided into 13 parts, whereas in others (e.g., Cancuc) sha-mans are believed to have 13 animal spirit companions.

Despite these differences, almost everyone in thesehighland Chiapas communities agrees that misbehaviorwill result in some kind of soul loss and illness. Also,economic or other success or refusal to share good for-tune will provoke envy and sorcery among neighbors. Ineither case, the recovery of good health and good rela-tionships with fellow community members is achievedby one or more curing ceremonies. (Even Protestants willpray for this purpose, though they may decline to consulta j’ilol.) The shaman will usually diagnose the patientby “pulsing,” in which the blood speaks to the shamanand identifies the problem. The shaman will pray in frontof the patient’s house altar and may visit sacred moun-tains or caves to “see” mountain spirits directly in orderto find and recover the lost soul. A ceremony may lastone day or several and involves long hours of praying bythe shaman. The patient usually remains passive, lyingon a bed in front of the altar.

What Freyermuth (1999) calls the “Indian health sys-tem” has a variety of specialists—herbalists, midwives,masseurs, paramedics,5 and diviners. Today spiritualisthealers are consulted, especially in urban areas, but thej’iloletik are definitely the top rank of the system. Theirability to listen to the speech of the blood in pulsing andto see and deal with the mountain spirits is consideredto be a gift from God and the saints and is usually con-ferred in dreams. Being called in a dream is consideredevidence that a shaman has the gift of healing. Someshamans even say that they have learned about medic-inal plants in dreams, though most herbalists learn fromothers, usually their parents. The shamans are powerfulstewards of a symbolic and metaphysical field that hasbeen central to the values and norms of Maya commu-nities. Although religious and political change has re-duced their monopoly over this field, they continue tobe a significant and influential force in the affairs of mostMaya communities.

In 1978, in the Declaration of Alma-Ata, the WorldHealth Organization recommended that certain resour-ces of local traditional medical systems be incorporatedinto governments’ strategies for primary health care. Asa result, the Mexican government began a series of pro-grams for integrating indigenous healers into officialhealth care services (Freyermuth 1993). These attempts,characterized by Freyermuth as “a difficult encounter,”

5. Spanish promotores. They have received government training inprimary health care to channel patients to the official health caresystem. Some of them later start private practices.


were not particularly successful. For example, Ayora(1998, 2000) provides an analysis of the interaction ofmedical professionals practicing what he calls “cosmo-politan medicine” and local healers. As both these writ-ers note, cosmopolitan medicine characterizes itself asa superior rationality, and therefore the relationship withMaya healers can only be one of subordination. However,if we consider the “path” of sick persons (Freyermuch1993) in highland Chiapas today, we see that they havea number of choices for health care. Cosmopolitan med-icine must compete with other options. At first, patientswill attempt to cure their condition with homemaderemedies, which may be herbs or, increasingly, store-bought medicines. They may consult a person with areputation for “knowing plants” (Tzotzil much’u xojti-kin li vomole) or knowing the remedy for a particularillness (much’u sna spoxil li chamele). If these “empir-ically based” remedies fail, they must choose betweencosmopolitan doctors and shamans.

The Maya do not sharply dichotomize between “or-ganic” and “supernatural” causes of disease—all sick-ness has both aspects, though in varying degrees, andboth aspects must be treated if the patient is to be cured.Anyone can apply herbs or drugs, but if the nonorganicaspect is too strong only a j’ilol can heal. The secondaryimportance of herbs for the j’ilol was explained to me inan interview by a Tojolobal shaman who used manyherbs not only from traditional Maya medicine but alsoof Chinese and European origin and was well aware oftheir pharmaceutical properties. The herbs were useful,he said, but what really cured patients was their “prom-ise”—their confession of misbehavior and repentance.The example he gave was of a man suffering from al-coholism: there were herbs to help the patient recover,but if he would not keep his promise not to drink again,then the herbs alone would not cure him.

Thus the Indian health system is a hybrid one in whichMaya patients appropriate health care options from avariety of sources according to their own cultural normsand values (Ayora 1998:187):

For some . . . people, cosmopolitan medicine failsprecisely because it separates the biological from thesocial and spiritual worlds. A cosmopolitan healerfocuses his efforts on the biological and bodily dys-function and pays no attention to the care of the in-dividual’s soul or disrupted social relations. On theother hand, for the ill person and her relatives, it isevident that in some instances health problems arethe outcome of a disorder in the social world or onthe boundaries between the social and spiritualworlds. When seeking treatment for their healthproblems, patients take into account which practic-ing healers can provide the level of attention theyneed.

The Biological Gaze

In an essay concerned with the technologies developedin biology to “gaze at the secrets of life,” the science

historian Evelyn Fox Keller (1996) notes that the micro-scope did not become a truly useful tool for science untilbiologists learned to intervene physically in the struc-tures they wished to observe. The microtome was usedto cut exceedingly fine slices of tissue and micromanip-ulators to modify the structures of the cell itself. Thesemanipulations of the sample to be observed are essentialfor effective imaging of the cell and its subunits. Withthe advent of the electron microscope the biological gazebecame even more intrusive. To be imaged, microstruc-tures must be extracted entirely from their cellular en-vironments and prepared in ways that completely in-activate their life functions. The images of the most basicstructures of life itself are “no pristine point of origin,but already a construct at least partially of our own mak-ing” (Keller 1996:121).

The criticism is not that biologists intervene in theirmaterial better to reveal the underlying structures ofcells. It is, rather, that such revealed relationships arereified and their contingent, contextually dependent na-ture is forgotten. Instead of merely revealing relation-ships, they come to stand for “life itself,” as in Haraway’s“gene fetishism . . . forgetting the tropic quality of allknowledge claims” (1997:142):

This kind of gene fetishism rests on the denial anddisavowal of all the natural-social articulations andagentic relationships among researchers, farmers,factory workers, patients, policy makers, molecules,model organisms, machines, forests, seeds, financialinstruments, computers and much else that bring“genes” into material-semiotic being. . . . the gene isfetishized when it seems to be itself the sourcevalue. . . .

Writing on “Maya ethnomedicine as a science,” Berlinand Berlin state: “Work over the past several decades inthe emerging field of ethnobiology, and research in med-ical ethnobotany in particular, has demonstrated that theethnobiological knowledge of traditional peoples con-forms in many respects to basic scientific principles”(1996:3). Such statements express a truth often taken asself-evident in ethnoecology. They reference an impor-tant contribution of the field that led to “a radical shiftin mindset from viewing native systems of thought asnaıve and rudimentary, even savage, to a recognition thatlocal cultures know their plant, animal, and physicalresources intimately” (Nazarea 1999:4). Yet, if we reflecton the idea that traditional ethnomedicine is science, wemust ask how this can be so: scientific principles areconstructed through scientific theory and practice,whereas Maya healing is rooted in the latent knowledgestructures and livelihood practices of local people. Bothkinds of knowledge are grounded in social practice butvery different kinds of practice, based on different cat-egories and assumptions, involving particular experi-ences, values, and cultural definitions.

In reality, rather than an empirical “folk” science con-forming to universal principles of “real” science, whatwe have is multiple contrasting orderings of reality (Tam-


biah 1990) among which there is only limited commen-surability. It is something to be explained rather thanmerely taken as “natural” that such different knowledge-making practices converge to the degree that they do.Atran says that latent knowledge structures are like sci-entific theories in that they generalize from concrete ex-perience but unlike theories are not systematic formu-lations of laws or methods. Rather, they involve theadjustment of forms of human livelihood to the envi-ronment in which they are embedded (1999:207). Whenthese contrasting sets of principles meet in a situationof highly asymmetrical power relations—as when indig-enous people encounter scientists in bioprospecting pro-jects—attempting to force indigenous knowledge intothe mold of “scientific principles” can only do violenceto the former (Scoones and Thompson 1994).

The idea that local knowledge must be science becauseit leads to empirical results consistent with Western sci-ence conceals a circular reasoning based on a concept ofnature as pre-given and “science” as the only means ofdiscovering its universal laws. Berlin is perfectly clearon this point, asserting that cultural categories must re-flect a “biological reality . . . discontinuities whose struc-ture and content are seen by all human beings in essen-tially the same ways, perceptual givens” (1992:99). HereI argue, rather, that nature is not perceptually given butconstructed, in the microscope or in the forest, by “per-ceptually guided action” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch1991:173), the practices that make up our experience.Latent knowledge structures arise from livelihood prac-tice in the spirited landscape of myth and tales. Scientificknowledge arises from the practices and metaphors ofthe distinct disciplines. The “biological realities” con-structed by these two types of practice clearly have acommon basis in intersubjective human experience butcannot be entirely reduced to an “objective” reality in-dependent of that experience.

The biological packaging of Maya medicine—the viewof Maya healers primarily as herbalists and empiricalpharmacologists—does emphasize the common basis ofethnomedical and scientific knowledge. In this sense,Berlin’s research provides an essential dimension ofMaya medicine that was previously understudied. TheBerlins (1996:53) assert that Maya phytopharmacologicalknowledge “is an ethnoscientific system . . . based onastute and accurate observation that could only havebeen elaborated on the basis of many years of explicitempirical experimentation with the effects of herbalremedies on bodily function.” However, such explicitexperimentation must have occurred at some unspeci-fied time in the past, because no such activity is attestedto by any ethnographer. The actual “empirical” practiceof Maya healers and their patients that generates suchknowledge is, in contrast, set aside in the study of Mayamedical botany. A kind of herbal fetishism conceals thesocial relations and cultural context of Maya healingpractices. “Maya medicine as ethnoscience” is a con-struct that may be useful for scientific or commercialpurposes but empties Maya medical practices of theircontingency and cultural and social specificity.

An example of the remaking of Maya medical practicefor viewing by researchers, tourists, and nongovernmen-tal organization (NGO) personnel can be found at theMuseum of the Center for Maya Medicine, constructedby the Organization of Indigenous Healers in the High-lands (OMIECH, the most important organization of In-dian healers in Chiapas; see Freyermuth 1993 and below).The museum is located in San Cristobal de Las Casasand was built with donations from European foundationsunder the direction of the organization’s cosmopolitanmedical advisers. It has a dramatic display showing thedifferent aspects of the work of the j’ilol and emphasizingthe religious basis of his practice. Ayora (2000:184) as-serts, however, that setting this content in a “museum”results in the symbolic displacement of religiously basedhealing practices into the past, “confining them to a darkand closed space where they do not threaten the rationalworld.” The exhibit contrasts with other, brighter roomsof the Center where “modern traditional medicine,” thenaturalistic practices based on herbal medicine preferredby the cosmopolitan medical advisers, are emphasized.The naturalistic gaze transforms and inverts the hier-archy of Maya medicine.

The leaders of the OMIECH are aware of this tensionand continue their traditional practice with their Mayapatients and for some tourists while promoting primarilyherbal medicine to the outside world. The organization’sproposals for outside funding have concentrated on thecultivation of their medicinal plants and the marketingof herbal preparations based on those plants. Both leadersand advisers of the organization express awareness of thecontrast between the insider’s view, that of the com-munities the organization serves, and the biological gazeof cosmopolitan doctors and foundation officers. The ad-aptation to the naturalistic view of their medicine is seenas a necessary survival strategy for the organization,while the community programs attempt to adapt to theirpatients’ desires and needs. Nonetheless, the dilemmais real; as Ayora (1998:13) concludes, “Local people findthemselves compelled to objectify segments of their cul-ture for the consumption of travelers in order to maintaintheir own mechanisms of hybridization.”

The Maya International CooperativeBiodiversity Group

The latest encounter of the Maya of highland Chiapaswith the biological gaze concerns a significant researchproject involving bioprospecting and drug discovery us-ing local ethnobotanical and ethnopharmacologicalknowledge: “Drug Discovery and Biodiversity among theMaya of Mexico.” A $2.5 million grant, one of six in theU.S. National Institute of Health’s International Coop-erative Biodiversity Group (ICBG) program, was awardedfor five years (1998–2004). The recipients of the grantformed a consortium that included the University ofGeorgia, El Colegio de la Frontera Sur (ECOSUR, a localChiapas research institute), and MolecularNature Lim-


ited, a private British pharmaceutical company (Berlin1999). According to ICBG director Jonathan Rosenthal(1996), the drug discovery program is

designed to stimulate the field of bioprospecting, toprovide models for the development of sustainableuse of biodiversity, and to gather evidence on thefeasibility of bioprospecting as a means to: (1) im-prove human health through discovery of naturalproducts with medicinal properties; (2) conserve bio-diversity through valuation of natural resources,training, and infrastructure building to aid in man-agement; (3) promote sustainable economic activityof communities, primarily in less developed coun-tries in which much of the world’s biodiversity isfound.

The principal investigator’s own previous ethnobiolog-ical research suggests the likelihood that pharmacolog-ically important natural products will be discovered,given that the search is to be guided by the medicalknowledge of the Maya inhabitants of the research areaand that the Maya demonstrate an exact and complexunderstanding of the physiological effects of the medic-inal plants of their environment on bodily function andpathogens (Berlin and Berlin 1996:53). Thus the first ob-jective of the Maya ICBG, the discovery of natural prod-ucts with medicinal properties, will further test this no-tion and seems feasible.6

There can be no doubt concerning the intention ofICBG personnel and Maya ICBG researchers to ensurethat the Maya are compensated for use of their knowl-edge and territories for bioprospecting research for thepurpose of commercial development (Grifo and Downes1996). Maya ICBG policy is that all monetary benefitsresulting from the project will be shared equally amongthe three members of the consortium and the “HighlandMaya peoples of Chiapas.”

For this purpose, however, no mechanism has beenestablished by the Maya ICBG, though Berlin himselfhas set up an irrevocable trust fund for Maya peoples touse for community development and the preservation ofethnobiological knowledge. More immediate benefits ofthe research include training for Maya technical assis-tants and support for ECOSUR, the local research insti-tute. The Maya ICBG has facilitated the development ofeight medicinal-plant gardens, providing technical assis-tance and garden tools.

In the spirit of Article 8j of the 1992 Convention onBiological Diversity, ICBG policy specifies obtaining

6. Rausser and Small (2000), criticizing previous studies for relyingon a “brute force” model of bioprospecting research, present a nu-merical simulation of the economics involved in such research.They are able to show that if bioprospecting is carried out as arandom search it is probably not economical, but when it is guidedby previous knowledge such as that of traditional healers the rev-enues it generates are potentially sufficient to provide incentivesfor biodiversity conservation. This study supports the Maya ICBG’sown assessment of its probability of success in achieving its goals,but it also highlights the crucial role of indigenous knowledge inthe bioprospecting process.

prior informed consent from the communities in whichbioprospecting research is to be conducted. Beginning inearly 1998, as the Maya ICBG project initiated its activ-ities, contact was made with Indian organizations andcommunity leaders at several levels. The lack of an in-stitutional and legal framework within Mexico not onlyfor regulating biotechnological research but also for rep-resenting basic indigenous rights in general presented aserious obstacle to finding an arrangement agreeable toall the parties involved.

One of the principal problems the Maya ICBG facedin seeking the prior informed consent of the Maya inhighland Chiapas was the problem of representation.7

Under Mexico’s current environmental law, researchersare required only to obtain the consent of the owner ofa parcel of land on which biological collections will betaken. However, in the case of biotechnological research,a broader principle needs to be invoked, since the sam-ples collected are not simply being used for academicpurposes but consciously sought for development intocommercial products with intellectual-property protec-tion. Indigenous knowledge is embodied in such poten-tial products either directly, by guiding bioprospectingresearch, or indirectly, because of the latent knowledgestructures and livelihood practices through which indig-enous people have managed and preserved the bio-diversity in their territories. Thus, the individual ownerof a given field in which a collection is made is not thesole owner of the knowledge embodied in medicinal andother species. Nor can he be conceived of, in giving hisinformed consent, as having the sole right to representthe wider community from which the knowledge em-bodied in those species arose. Therefore, current Mexi-can environmental law is inadequate to the task of reg-ulating biotechnological research—something it wasnever designed to do in the first place.

Early in 1998, researchers associated with the MayaICBG approached the Chiapas Council of Traditional In-digenous Doctors and Midwives (COMPITCH), consist-ing of OMIECH and ten other organizations whose mem-bers are some 1,100 men and women healers from allIndian areas of the state. COMPITCH was formed in1994 in the context of the government and NGO en-couragement of traditional medicine earlier mentioned.It is a member, in turn, of a national-level organizationof Indian traditional healers consisting of 43 organiza-tions from 17 states. Being the organization most broadlyrepresentative of traditional Maya medical knowledge inthe region, COMPITCH was the logical one to approach.According to its leaders, the Maya ICBG researchers pre-sented them a preliminary document describing theproject and invited them to collaborate. When theypointed to the lack of a regulatory framework for bio-

7. The issue of representation reflects the ambiguity of the notionof community. At times in the consent process individuals, infor-mal leaders, or formal authorities were treated as representativesof “the community,” but later Maya ICBG investigators argued thatCOMPITCH was not “representative of Maya Indians as a whole.”The deficient regulatory framework did not help to resolve theseambiguities.


prospecting in Mexico, they say, the researchers assuredthem that no activity would be initiated until such aframework was in place. Further attempts to agree oncollaborative activities between COMPITCH membersand the Maya ICBG were unproductive and were grad-ually abandoned. Meanwhile, by mid-1998 the MayaICBG’s funding had received final approval from the U.S.National Institutes of Health, and project researchersasked for legal authorization from the Mexican federalenvironmental ministry to proceed with the project.Faced with lack of agreement with COMPITCH and theabsence of any progress by the federal government increating a clear regulatory procedure, Maya ICBG re-searchers felt that the only course open to them was tooperate within the existing law, obtaining direct consentfrom communities on whose lands collections would bemade. Accordingly, they began to design contractsamong the various parties in the spirit of the Conventionon Biological Diversity and other relevant internationalaccords.

Following the standard procedure for decades of an-thropologists and other fieldworkers in Chiapas, MayaICBG scientists used their personal and political net-works to approach individuals and communities whowere sympathetic to the project and obtained writtenagreements to conduct bioprospecting research on theirlands. An agreement was also drawn up among the con-sortium members involving the protection of intellec-tual property generated by the research activities thatincluded provisions for benefit sharing with Indian com-munities, although the specific mechanism of Maya rep-resentation remained undefined. To further the processof informed consent, a didactic skit in Maya languagesrepresenting the process of bioprospecting and drug dis-covery was used to communicate the goals of the projectto prospective communities.

COMPITCH members became increasingly concernedthat the project was advancing in a regulatory vacuumand that the information being provided was insufficient.Seeking advice from the international community,COMPITCH requested a Canadian NGO concerned withissues of commercial use of biodiversity, Rural Advance-ment Foundation International (RAFI), to come to Chia-pas and review the situation. After consulting with RAFIand other local advisers, COMPITCH members con-cluded that the project was potentially damaging toMaya peoples’ interests. In September 1999 they directedletters to local and federal authorities calling for a sus-pension of the Maya ICBG and exhorting Maya com-munity authorities not to sign agreements until every-one was adequately informed of their implications andproper legal and regulatory frameworks were in place.RAFI reported these events, characterizing the MayaICBG as “biopiracy,” in December 1999, thus directingworld attention to the issue (RAFI 1999a, b).

COMPITCH’s open declaration of opposition to theMaya ICBG created a storm of controversy. The federalenvironmental ministry attempted to mediate what itviewed as a conflict between COMPITCH and the sci-entists, but little progress was made in a series of talks.

The Indian organizations continued to insist that thegovernment establish clear regulations, and the environ-mental ministry continued to delay issuing such regula-tions.

The principal point of disagreement, however, con-cerned the issue of intellectual property. The Maya heal-ers objected to the contract that required exclusivity forthe products of the research, and this was one point onwhich the ICBG and the Mexican government refusedto compromise. One COMPITCH j’ilol, while giving aclassic expression of the principle of common heritageand public domain, also clearly felt that he had the rightto a say about the use of his intellectual property:8

Our medicinal plants are not ours. They belong toeveryone. We are sharing all the knowledge from thetime of our first fathers and mothers, how theycured themselves with medicinal plants, minerals,and animals. In this way we want all communitiesto have the knowledge to cure themselves. We donot wish someone to appropriate our knowledgeonly for his or her personal benefit.

Finally, after nearly a year of increasingly heated, evenacrimonious debate within Mexico and beyond, in Oc-tober 2000 ECOSUR retired its application for authori-zation for biotechnology collection from the environ-mental ministry and announced a suspension of itsactivities with the Maya ICBG project. In a public state-ment directed to COMPITCH the local researchers saidthat no bioprospecting would be conducted until twoconditions were fully met: (1) that the environmentalministry establish the administrative and legal mecha-nisms for bioprospecting in Indian territories and theprocedures for obtaining prior informed consent and finalauthorization and (2) that Indian communities and or-ganizations establish a formal representative body withthe authority to propose modifications to projects thatrepresent Indian interests, to certify prior informed con-sent, and to enter into agreements with research insti-tutes and/or private companies that guarantee theprotection of their rights to knowledge and natural re-sources. At this writing (September 2001) the project re-mains suspended indefinitely, though the controversyshows little sign of subsiding.

8. Brush (1996:148) notes that until this century the common-her-itage principle governed the use and distribution of plant geneticresources all over the world. Common heritage, a notion derivedfrom Western jurisprudence, “delineates public and private do-mains and defines products of nature, scientific theory, and folkknowledge to be public goods belonging to the public domain”(Brush 1999:540). As is the case with many societies, however,Maya groups have a range of notions concerning ownership of plantresources, from the purely collective to the individual or the in-dividual “embedded in the context of community use rights”(Cleveland and Murray 1997:485). The medical knowledge of thej’ilol or the midwife is a highly individual talent, and people paysignificant amounts for their services. Knowledge of plants is oftenheld by family groups, whereas the plants themselves may belongto individuals or come from collectively managed areas.


Situated Knowledges and UniversalTechnologies

The debate surrounding the Maya ICBG has had a dra-matic impact on anthropological research in Chiapas.Nearly all Indian communities are aware of the contro-versy, though the accuracy of the information they haveis highly variable. There is no general agreement amongthe Maya concerning the project—many see it as highlythreatening while others are still willing to collabo-rate—but it has become a topic of discussion far beyondthe membership of COMPITCH and has highlighted theissue of the motivations for and effects of research onthe Maya population. Researchers cannot approach acommunity today without answering a series of ques-tions about the uses to which their results will be putand the benefits or risks of the project for the community.The question of public goods’ being appropriated by pri-vate interests with little or no benefit for the Mayacommunities is a central topic of discussion on theseoccasions.

This discussion of the ICBG controversy could givethe impression that many Maya reject Western scienceor oppose research in their communities. But my expe-rience and that of many others who work with Mayacommunities suggests that Maya people, even as theyvalue their own cultural heritage, are very much inter-ested in what science can teach them about their owntraditions and about the outside world. Organic agricul-ture, practiced today by thousands of Maya farmers, isan example of a fruitful collaboration between Westernagroecological research and traditional Maya farmingsystems (Nigh 1997, Toledo 2000). There is, in fact, greatopenness to scientific interpretation and to the potentialbenefits of new technology. It is not antiscience or clo-sure to new ideas that prompts the negative response tothe Maya ICBG.

Long and Villareal (1994) have noted that the gener-alization and utilization of ecological knowledge is notmerely a matter of instrumentalities (e.g., the identifi-cation of pharmacologically active plants) or a questionof hermeneutics (the contested meanings given by dif-ferent actors to elements of the natural environment).Rather, it is primarily an issue of control, authority, andpower in the interface between the producers and theappropriators of such knowledge. Here, where multiplerealities and potentially conflicting interests meet, wemust carefully assess whose interpretations or modelsprevail in the identification of the goals and methods ofresearch.

What has become clear to those of us who continueto do research in Chiapas in the post–Maya ICBG era isthat we are facing a fundamental rethinking of the man-ner in which research in the Maya area is designed andconducted. In this respect, I find the distinction of Wa-ters-Bayer (1994) between extractive research and en-riching research to be suggestive of the kind of changeof approach that I believe anthropology will have to un-dertake in Chiapas and elsewhere. Extractive research is

designed to provide information to outsiders: develop-ment agents, scientists, or private corporations. Enrich-ing research is that conducted with and by local peopleto increase their knowledge and empower them to dealmore effectively with the contemporary world.

Members of COMPITCH such as the OMIECH havebeen developing their own proposals for research onMaya medicine, including proposals for possible com-mercial development, for many years. These would in-volve considerable collaboration of Maya healers withscientists, providing ample opportunities for productiveresearch as well as training and experience for Mayayoung people. Yet these proposals did not count as pri-orities in the elaboration of the bioprospecting researchplan of the Maya ICBG, even after the fact, when re-searchers approached COMPITCH to invite their collab-oration. An enriching research design would perhapshave begun with a dialogue with these local projects toconstruct a mutually acceptable approach to document-ing traditional medical knowledge. In the process of thisdialogue many issues could have been resolved and atruly informed group of Maya would have been createdthrough which interaction with the wider communitycould have taken place. In such a project Maya knowl-edge would have been seen as living and dynamic ratherthan merely an achievement of the past, an archived“text” to be read for the purpose of guiding biopros-pecting research. An enriching research design wouldhave facilitated the contemporary “reinvention” of this“living local knowledge” (Rolling and Brouwers 1999).

The Maya have expressed their belief that their med-ical knowledge and the plants they use for healing are acommon heritage and should remain in the public do-main. If their plants hold the key to a cure for AIDS orcancer, they believe that scientists should be free to de-velop that cure and that it should be shared openly withthe world. Yet, before any Maya had been involved inthe discussion, the ICBG was already firmly committedto intellectual-property regimes that have largely aban-doned the common-heritage principle for the distribu-tion and use of plant resources. The Convention on Bi-ological Diversity removes genetic resources, includingcrop genetic resources, from the public domain by grant-ing control over access to these resources to the nationalstate.9

9. In what many feel is contradictory to the Convention’s provi-sions, the 1994 Trade Related Aspects Intellectual Property Rightsagreement (TRIPS) of the World Trade Organization requires coun-tries to create mechanisms such as patents for life forms. In thiscontext, concern has been widely expressed about developing someform of protection for indigenous knowledge and cultural and nat-ural patrimony. These international agreements, including the Con-vention, reveal the failure of the international community to rec-ognize the need for effective legal mechanisms for the protectionof indigenous cultural and natural patrimony (Simpson and Jackson1998). Despite its well-intentioned language, the Convention is asignificant step toward the production of nature as a postindustrialcommodity (Smith 1996). Projects such as the Maya ICBG instigatea radical transformation of local appropriation of natural resourcesthrough the commodification of ethnobotanical knowledge. Onceagain, the Maya are forced to objectify part of their culture to con-form to the consumption desires of outsiders who come with the


Only under the values of contemporary Western cap-italist culture is it considered acceptable to isolate ele-ments of the situated (and therefore privileged) knowl-edge of a Maya shaman from their social and meta-physical context and use them in the production of uni-versal medical technologies for private commercial ben-efit.10 A new legal framework is necessary in which In-dian peoples are recognized as possessing individual andcollective rights, especially rights “to maintain andstrengthen their distinctive spiritual and material rela-tionship with the lands, territories, waters and coastalseas and other resources” and “to the full recognition oftheir laws, traditions and customs, land-tenure systemsand institutions for the development and managementof resources, and the right to effective measures by Statesto prevent any interference with, alienation of or en-croachment upon these rights.”11 Only when nation-states are ready to recognize these rights of Maya peopleswill their cultural creativity and natural patrimony beguaranteed and the world be assured of the continuedcontributions of a brilliant civilization.

Comments

steffan igor ayora diazFacultad de Ciencias Antropologicas, UniversidadAutonoma de Yucatan, Merida 97000, Mexico([email protected]). 20 xii 01

This paper can be read as a courageous effort to bringinto the academic sphere a bitter discussion that is tak-ing place in Chiapas and elsewhere. However, and ingeneral, it contributes to a misrecognition of local med-icines in the Chiapas highlands predicated upon the ro-mantic gaze that seems to accompany most discussionsof the relationship between local people and nature (Eder1996). Among its several essentializing attributes are theideas that indigenous people have a privileged relationto nature, that they live in harmonious convergence withthe cosmos, and that, consequently, they are organizedinto “communities.” Nigh concludes from this that in-digenous people have a quasi-natural right to control andmanage (with centuries-old wisdom) the natural re-sources, including herbal medicines, they have at hand.

The concept of latent knowledge, as discussed in this

good intention to “improve human health . . . and promote thesustainable economic development of communities.”10. “Partial perspective can be held accountable. . . . All Westerncultural narratives about objectivity are allegories of the ideologiesof . . . mind and body, of distance and responsibility. . . . Feministobjectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, notabout transcendence and splitting of subject and object. In this waywe might become answerable for what we learn how to see” (Har-away 1991:190). On decontextualized knowledge and universalmedical technologies, see Oudshoorn (1994).11. Draft United Nations Declaration on the Rights of IndigenousPeoples, adopted by the Working Group on Indigenous Populations,UN Economic and Social Council, Geneva, August 1993.

paper, seems to drive anthropological thinking back tosome sort of cognitive reductionism resembling Jung’scollective unconscious. I have discussed in a number ofplaces (Ayora Diaz 1998, 1999, n.d.) how indigenous peo-ple, in their medical practice, subordinate herbal thera-pies to interventions in the spiritual and social domains.It is local healers who have been directly subjected to“training” (a form of neocolonialist intervention calledcapacitacion in Spanish) who give public performancesstructuring their rhetoric around their knowledge ofherbal remedies. The organization of healers—imagined,constructed, and consulted by cosmopolitan doc-tors—gives priority to herbal knowledge, a form of in-tervention easily translated into scientific thought (Web-ster 1991). It has therefore been granted recognition andendowed with the power to represent all local healers inthe region. I wish to underscore two consequences: First,the organization de-authorizes other local medical formsof knowledge, and, second, as it echoes the medical doc-trine into which NGO personnel and activists have beensocialized it masks its role as a vehicle for new forms ofcultural colonization. Herbal knowledge, according tolocal healers outside the organization, is acquired boththrough revelation and by oral means. Herbs have heal-ing power because of the prayers recited and the ritualsperformed by the local healer. Rather than assuming aform of knowledge (naturally) ingrained in the mindstructures of indigenous people, it would probably bemore profitable to explore how knowledge is locally em-bodied both in individual practices and in the unequalstructure of social relations and power.

This brings me to the second issue: According to myfindings, and as Nigh points out, in their therapeuticinterventions local healers seek to manipulate the bod-ily, spiritual, and social domains at once. But this doesnot imply a state of harmony between indigenous peopleand the cosmos. I believe that this form of action reflectsthe local conviction that worldly phenomena parallelthose that occur in and between other domains. Far fromharmonious, the godly world of the highland Maya ispeopled with spirits at war among themselves and withflesh-and-blood individuals (remember the Popol Vuh).Within and between “communities,” individuals andhealers perform witchcraft to affect their opponents inquarrels, and very often, because of these quarrels, peoplefall ill. Most of the healers I spoke to recognize that thereare God’s diseases and diseases provoked by other hu-mans (roughly corresponding to natural diseases and dis-eases produced by witchcraft). A very fine line separatesthem: diarrhea may be a disease sent by God (an unluckyoccurrence), but if the patient fails to recover or suffersfrequent relapses in spite of all quotidian efforts, the af-flicted and the family may suspect witchcraft. Thus, ahealer recognizes a bodily disorder, its possible link to asocial conflict, and the manipulation of spiritual beingsby the parties to that conflict. His interventions canhardly be taken as a demonstration of any harmoniousconvergence between individual and cosmos in indige-nous thought.

It is only on the premise of a harmonious indigenous


society that one can presume the existence of Maya“communities.” It has been already argued that, for pur-poses of control, the Spanish conquistadores forced scat-tered highland hamlets into reducciones resembling Eu-ropean villages (Wasserstrom 1983) and that postrevolu-tionary Mexican parties contributed to the creation ofcorporate communities (Rus 1994). Efforts to re-createindigenous communities proliferate today (Ayora-Diaz2000, Vargas Cetina 2001). In fact, one condition imposedby COMPITCH for being recognized as a healer is dem-onstrating the backing of a “community,” and this, Ihave argued (2000, n.d.), is forcing some indigenous heal-ers to create simulacra of communities. The kind of mis-recognition that this paper reinforces contributes, in thelong run, to disempowering the very people it seeks toempower and strengthening new forms of culturalcolonialism.

mauricio bellonCentro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maız yTrigo, A.P. 6-641, 06600 Mexico, D.F., Mexico([email protected]). 21 xii 01

This paper deals with an important issue—the interac-tion between different knowledge systems and the peo-ples and institutions that generate, support, and usethem, particularly when those peoples and institutionsrepresent asymmetrical power relationships—on the onehand the Maya peoples of the highlands of Chiapas andon the other Western scientists from the United States,Mexico, and the United Kingdom. The focus is a critiqueof a major international research effort—the Maya In-ternational Cooperative Biodiversity Group (MayaICBG), a bioprospecting project for highland Chiapas.The paper argues that the bioprospecting proposal doesviolence to the indigenous meanings of nature, medicine,and property. It is clear that the scientists in the ICBGproject have acted in good faith and tried hard to developa fair interaction with the Maya people to the extent oftheir knowledge and the institutional setting available.This paper shows the challenges of this type of inter-action: How can benefits be shared fairly? What is fair?Who represents the Maya and their knowledge and cantherefore provide prior informed consent?

I think, however, that the critique presented is biased.It reports only on the views of one, albeit probably largeand important group of the Maya people—the ChiapasCouncil of Traditional Indigenous Doctors and Midwives(COMPITCH). There is very scant information on thegroups that were willing to work with the ICBG. Thepaper gives the impression that these groups and indi-viduals were basically the friends of Brent Berlin, whichmay or may not be the case. We do not learn anythingabout these other Maya actors and their views, for oragainst the project. The key disagreement of COM-PITCH with the ICBG concerned the issue of intellectualproperty rights. COMPITCH objected to the contract’srequiring exclusivity for the products of the research.The specifics of the intellectual property rights associ-

ated with the project are left very vague. It is not clearwhat these rights entailed. Probably it was not clear evenin the project, but this is not explored. If the issue is thatthe Maya people reject intellectual property rights andfavor only collective property, then it is clear that anyinteraction between them and groups that want to de-velop medicines is extremely unlikely. While it is easyto talk of the public good appropriated by private inter-ests and the profit motives behind initiatives such as theICBG, this view fails to recognize that to transform theknowledge of the Maya people or of particular individ-uals among them into medicines with global reach couldrequire investments of hundreds of millions of dollars.Furthermore, there is no guarantee that the effort willlead to medicines that work, make it to the market, andactually generate a profit.

One of the main reasons for the protection of intel-lectual property rights is to insure that free rid-ers—people or organizations that did not invest or takerisks to generate or maintain a good—do not benefit fromit without bearing a share of the costs. The Maya shouldeasily recognize this problem to the extent that theyparticipate in collective-action institutions of their own.While Nigh invokes collective property and action ascentral to Maya stewardship of resources and knowledge,he fails to point out that a fundamental element in thesuccess of collective action is the way in which an or-ganization controls the problem of free riders (Ostrom1990). Failure to manage free riders effectively leads tothe destruction of collective action and the tragedy ofthe commons. While intellectual property rights mayseem foreign to the Maya, the problem they attempt toaddress should be very familiar. This is not to say thatintellectual property rights regimes do not have prob-lems or generate inequities or that those who have themmay not try to abuse them. But it is important to putthem in context, as Nigh does with other aspects of col-lective action.

The paper illustrates how difficult it is to negotiate ingood faith in order to generate outcomes that have po-tential benefits for the parties involved but also entailcosts and compromises. Obviously good faith is a nec-essary but not sufficient condition for such negotiation.It also shows the high transaction costs of such negoti-ations. The danger is that in the future the knowledgeof the Maya, developed and conserved through genera-tions and capable of making important contributions tothe welfare of humankind, will be irrelevant in a globalworld. Even under intellectual property rights regimesthere is room for negotiation so that people in the de-veloping world will have advantageous access to theproducts of such contributions. I hope that a great op-portunity that could benefit the Maya and the rest of theworld has not already been missed.


brent berlin and elois ann berlinLaboratories of Ethnobiology, Department ofAnthropology, University of Georgia, Athens, Ga.30602, U.S.A. ([email protected], [email protected]).18 xii 01

Nigh’s critique of the Maya International CooperativeBiodiversity Group (Maya ICBG) paints a grim picture ofbiodiversity prospecting and of those who engage in it.From the vantage of his recently acquired postmoderniststance, his accusations are especially damning of ourroles in the project. We are accused of “decontextualizingthe situated knowledge of Maya healers” and doing“symbolic violence to the cultural logic of Maya peo-ples.” We are bent on the “production of universal med-ical technologies for private commercial benefit.” We“do violence to indigenous meanings of nature, medi-cine, and property” and force the Maya to “objectify partof their culture to conform to the consumption desiresof outsiders.” Having spent the better part of our field-work lives among the Highland Maya, working in waysthat have contributed to the recognition of the remark-able richness of their ethnobiological knowledge andpractices, we find these difficult accusations to read, es-pecially when they come from a respected ethnographicfieldworker who has lived and worked in Chiapas formany years.

Unfortunately, the analysis Nigh presents is gravelyflawed. A major error in his critique of the Maya ICBGproject flows directly from his understanding of theHighland Maya medical system. On one hand he criti-cizes us for our attention to the empirical (i.e., nonre-ligious) bases of Maya medicine, arguing that our focuson Maya knowledge of medicinal plants constitutes akind of “herbal fetishism [that] conceals the social re-lations and cultural context of Maya healing practices.”On the other hand he states, in regard to common illnessevents, that “patients will first attempt to cure their con-dition with homemade remedies [herbs]” or “may con-sult a person with a reputation for ‘knowing plants’(much’u xojtikin li vomole) [in Tzotzil].”

The Tzeltal equivalent to the descriptive phrase citedby Nigh is ja’te mach’a sna bey sba swamale ‘he/shewho has knowledge of herbs’. Descriptive phrases suchas these must be employed to designate persons withmore than average knowledge of medicinal plants. Thelack of a specific term for “herbalist” in Tzeltal andTzotzil largely reflects the fact that the knowledge anduse of common medicinal plants are widely shared bymost adult Maya. It is precisely the knowledge associ-ated with these general Maya healing practices to whichour work has been directed (Berlin and Jara 1993; B. Ber-lin et al. 1990; E. Berlin et al. 1995; Tortoriello et al.1995; Meckes et al. 1995). Spirituality plays no greaterrole in naturalistic healing than in other aspects of ev-eryday life such as agriculture and ecotourism—and per-haps less, since ecotourism has recently expanded to in-clude paid guided tours to sacred Maya caves that hadheretofore been off-limits to outsiders (Schwartz 2001).

Nigh’s emphasis on the magical/religious aspects of

Maya healing trivializes the epidemiological significanceof the major health conditions that are regularly treatedwith common and widely known medicinal plants (e.g.,the several types of diarrhea, respiratory illnesses, skin,mouth, and tooth infections, sprains, and wounds). Yetthese conditions are the everyday illnesses that theHighland Maya deal with constantly and the ones thatare the most life-threatening. Consequently, it is an errorto state that we “deliberately foreground the ‘natural-istic’ aspect of Highland Maya medical practice” (i.e.,healing with medicinal plants). The “naturalistic” aspectof Highland Maya medical practice is the very founda-tion of the folk system. We document this claim withextensive ethnographic data based on more than tenyears of research (E. Berlin 1998, 1999; B. Berlin and E.Berlin 1994, 1996, 1998; B. Berlin et al. 1999; 1999; E.Berlin et al. 2000). That Nigh wishes to treat spiritualshamanism as central to Highland Maya treatment ofdisease reflects a romantic and exotic vision of theHighland Maya that has little to do with the empiricalprocedures that they employ in dealing with sicknessand healing in daily life.

Although Nigh argues that it is unjustified to “use[‘Maya community’] as an unanalyzed ‘natural’ cate-gory,” he uses “Maya” and “community” in exactly thesame sense that we used them in our project. In thecontext of gaining permission and prior informed con-sent for research, “community” clearly refers to a spe-cific, geographically bounded sociopolitical unit thatforms a recognized subdivision of the municipality.Communities, as designated in census records and gov-ernmental documents, are the legal decision-makingbodies with regard to the governance of natural resourceuse.

By law and custom, permission from the local com-munity is a prerequisite for any legitimate claim of priorinformed consent for any project. Mexican law is quitespecific in this regard with reference to research involv-ing biological resources. Articles 87 and 87b is of theEnvironmental Secretariat’s General Law of EcologicalEquilibrium and Environmental Protection state that bi-ological collecting permits can only be granted “when[the request] is supported by the previous, expressed, andinformed consent of the legal owner[s] of the land[s] onwhich the biological resource is found” (SEMARNAP1997). In the context of the Maya ICBG, the “legal ownerof the lands on which the biological resource is found”is the local Maya community.

Moreover, in the case of Chiapas, the San Andres Ac-cords (agreements growing out of the Zapatista rebellionthat demand autonomy for indigenous communities) callfor the “recognition of indigenous communities as en-tities of public rights” and “mandate an order of pref-erence that privileges the indigenous communities in theaward of concessions for obtaining the benefits from ex-ploitation and use of natural resources” (Acuerdos de SanAndres 1996). There is no legal requirement or socialprecedent for obtaining permission to conduct researchfrom nongovernmental organizations.

The Maya ICBG contacted 47 and obtained prior in-


formed consent to work in 46 communities in 15 mu-nicipalities of the highlands of Chiapas representingapproximately 30,000 Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Tojolabal-speaking individuals—an inconvenient fact that Nighsignificantly chooses to ignore. We feel comfortable inclaiming that we developed an information dissemina-tion program about the activities of our research that,while clearly deficient in some ways, is unprecedentedfor multidisciplinary research projects on bioprospectingand in anthropology generally. We voluntarily ceasedseeking permission in Indian communities and sus-pended all other potentially controversial research activ-ities while the Mexican government and we tried to ne-gotiate with our detractors, all to no avail.

Nigh’s emphasis on the enormous economic rewardsthat would have resulted from the activities of the MayaICBG is naıve and presents a grossly distorted picture ofour efforts. The drug-discovery component of the projectnever involved patenting of plants. Furthermore, thelikelihood that the project’s work would lead to the dis-covery, development, production, and marketing of anew pharmaceutical product based on a novel compoundwas approximately that of winning the Mexican lottery,a fact that we went to great lengths to point out in allof our presentations about the project to communitymembers. Ironically, the Maya communities understoodthis much more clearly than our detractors, who cast theproject as one that would result in great financial rewardsfor multinational drug firms (our private-industry part-ner consisted of 12 employees).

Nigh chooses to ignore the project’s many appliedaims, such as scientifically testing the efficacy and safetyof existing Maya herbal remedies so that they might bemore effectively promoted in local communities. Hedoes not discuss the project’s experiments to developmedicinal plant extracts to be used as natural biologicalpesticides in local agriculture (Trujillo and Garcıa Barriosn.d., Ramırez and Garcıa Barrios 2001). Our efforts tocodify and make widely available Maya ethnomedicalknowledge in bilingual educational publications (see E.Berlin et al. 2000) are likewise ignored. He also mini-mizes the establishment of cooperative ethnobotanicalcommunity gardens as part of the Maya ICBG’s effort topromote and maintain traditional knowledge of medic-inal plants, all at the explicit request of Highland Mayacommunities themselves. Finally, Nigh never mentionsthe biodiversity survey activities carried out exclusivelyby ICBG-trained Maya researchers. The survey wouldhave put in the hands of the Highland Maya the firstcomplete inventory of the region’s rich diversity of plantresources. The importance of such data, to have beenpublished in Spanish, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Tojolabal,cannot be overemphasized as the Maya struggle to de-velop sustainable natural resource conservation andmanagement plans for Chiapas. Tragically, this work,too, was never completed.

Many of Nigh’s errors stem from his failure to conducta careful ethnographic study of the Maya ICBG and ofthe controversy that ultimately led to its end. To do sowould have required that he objectively gather primary

data from project members and participants. He spokeonly briefly with Brent Berlin about an earlier version ofthe current paper. He did not follow up on Berlin’s sug-gestion that he check the truth of the accusations thathad been brought against the project and widely circu-lated by the local healers’ group and the internationalNGOs that opposed us. He never interviewed Elois AnnBerlin, the Maya ICBG co-leader most directly involvedin research on Highland Maya ethnomedical knowledge,nor did he gather information from project co-leaders atour Mexican host institution, El Colegio de la FronteraSur. He failed to interview a single Maya of the hundredsthat participated in the project, either our collaboratorsworking as research assistants or members of the com-munities that had provided their prior informed consentfor the project to go forward. Given Nigh’s careful eth-nographic work in the past, the remarkable superficialityof his efforts to learn about the Maya ICBG project isdisconcerting indeed.

In his concluding remarks, Nigh characterizes theMaya ICBG as a form of “extractive research . . . designedto provide information to outsiders [such as] develop-ment agents, scientists, or private corporations.” Ourproject contrasts starkly with (presumably) his “enrich-ing research . . . conducted with and by local people toincrease their knowledge and empower them to dealmore effectively with the contemporary world.” If Nighreally believes this, he is mistaken. Had he seriouslyaimed to provide an accurate picture of the project’sgoals, its accomplishments over the two years in whichit struggled to carry them out, and the testimony of Mayacommunities that had worked closely with it to imple-ment these goals, he could only conclude that our workwas enriching in precisely the ways that he finds so laud-able. Meanwhile, as the local, national, and internationalNGOs celebrate their victory of closing down the project,the real losers are the Highland Maya communitiesthemselves, who once again have been denied the op-portunity to participate as legitimate players in a chang-ing world over which they now have little control.

stephen b. brushHuman and Community Development, University ofCalifornia, Davis, Calif. 95616, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 11 i 02

The frustration experienced by the Maya ICBG projectis increasingly common to all ethnobiological research-ers. Anthropologists are particularly susceptible to sim-ilar obstacles because of the nature of their fieldwork,but botanists, geneticists, and crop scientists are alsoaffected by the demonization of research involving bio-logical resources. The ETC group (nee RAFI) (http://www.etcgroup.org) lists companies and research insti-tutions that are judged to be “bio-pirates,” and asignificant number of the ICBG projects are tarred withthis label. Anthropologists and many other researchersare now impeded or precluded from collecting samplesbecause of the fear that these will lead to illicit gain or


inappropriate products such as genetically modified or-ganisms. Obstacles to research exist at many levels, fromthe village to the international agency.

Nigh’s article is valuable in explicating the ethno-graphic context of one international project that at-tempted to combine scientific, commercial, and human-itarian goals. The wider political context of obstructingbiological research suggests that we need to go beyondthe specific attributes of this project (e.g., a politicizedindigenous group, possible commercial exploitation) tounderstand the general plight of this type of research.Widening the scope of inquiry is suggested by the roleof institutions beyond the community at regional, na-tional, and international levels.

Conflicts over collective ownership and individual in-terests are not confined to the community level. We arepossibly witnessing the emergence of an “anticommons”of biological resources (Brush 2002, Heller and Eisenberg1998). This occurs when the bundle of rights that com-prises “property” is divided among different persons andgroups and requires negotiation and unanimous consentin the use of a particular asset. Property in intangible,protean assets such as genetic codes or herbal knowledgeis especially prone to conflicting claims. In the case ofthe Maya, the different groups with partial rights includeindividuals, communities, ethnic group coalitions, sci-entists, and agencies of the national government. Anyone holder of a partial right can block others from usingthe asset, resulting in the underuse of the asset—a mis-fortune to all parties. Even though Mexico is a signatoryto the World Trade Organization and has a legal regimefor intellectual property that is applicable to plant re-sources, communities can effectively block access to re-sources. The Maya ICBG project’s difficulties are oneexpression of a biological anticommons, and on a muchlarger scale this can be seen in the dramatic reductionof international germ-plasm exchange (Charles 2001).

The particular nature of public goods (as opposed tocommon property) and intellectual property has provento be difficult to comprehend for many people, includinganthropologists. Indigenous people themselves havevoiced conflicting positions regarding intellectual prop-erty. Nigh effectively relates the plant and knowledgeresources of the Maya to the stream of analysis of com-mon property. However, we must also go beyond thebounds of property in material assets to understand theparticular difficulties of dealing with knowledge as apublic good and in the public domain (Brush 1999). Giventhe importance of information as a resource in the mod-ern world economy, property conflicts in the future willincreasingly involve intellectual property, for the Mayaand everyone else. The ICBG project had the misfortuneof being one of the first to step into this new arena.

Because the anticommons in biological resources re-sults in part from an inadequate understanding of thenature of public goods and intellectual property, it be-hooves anthropologists to understand the nature of thisproperty and the political context in which it is con-tested. Nigh’s article is an important contribution in thisregard. The future of ethnobiological research will de-

pend on successfully negotiating the political minefieldfound wherever biological diversity, indigenous people,and researchers are combined. Arguably, intellectualproperty is going to be more common and restrictive inthe future. As the Maya ICBG case shows, indigenouspeople don’t necessarily believe that they have interestsin common with anthropologists. We have a dauntingchallenge either to divert the juggernaut of intellectualproperty or to learn how to work with indigenous peopleso that they don’t feel compromised by our research. TheMaya ICBG project had this intention, and Nigh’s articleshould help others avoid the problems that frustratedthis intention. It should become required reading for re-searchers in ethnobiology and other areas that might in-volve intellectual property.

francisco chapelaEstudio Rurales y Asesorıa Campesina, Priv. Elvira120, Fracc. Villa San Luis, 68020 Oaxaca, Oax.,Mexico ([email protected]). 21 xii 01

As a dedicated anthropologist and a Chiapas resident,Nigh is certainly in a privileged position to witness thediscussion regarding bioprospecting. His paper shedslight on the issues that need to be addressed and suggestssome approaches for dealing with them—for developinga national policy for bioprospecting.

The first issue is the public nature of health care sys-tems. Nigh makes it clear that the traditional Maya heal-ing system is a whole that includes commonsense prac-tices, specialized midwives and masseurs, and holistic,spiritual j’iloletik healing treatments. Botanical knowl-edge is just a part of this whole system and makes littlesense (if any) in isolation from its context. There is ananalogous situation in urban areas, where health careservices form a comprehensive system of which phar-macology is just a part. Using pharmacology out of itscontext (i.e., self-medication) makes little sense and caneven be dangerous. Comprehensive health care systemsare needed, and the best way to provide them is to makethem public, especially in remote, poor areas, where pri-vate health services are expensive and inefficient. Tra-ditional health care systems are the main way of ac-cessing public health in rural areas in Mexico. Therefore,a primary goal of a policy for bioprospecting should beto ensure that traditional health care systems are keptin the public domain. To do so, the country needs tomake an effort to record the knowledge associated withtraditional health care. By setting up a national registerwith a “mirror” in some internationally recognized in-stitution, effective protection against “biopiracy”—abusive claims to patents on indigenous knowledge,which is in fact “previous art”—can be built. Species,races, ethnobotany, and other relevant knowledge can besafeguarded in this way. This could address the mainCOMPITCH concern, and certainly COMPITCH itselfcan be a valuable promoter and provider of such a systemof safeguards and must be supported in doing so.

The second issue is the collective nature of land stew-


ardship. Nigh makes it clear that the notion of “com-munity” becomes very concrete when we apply it tospecific human groups, engaging individuals in relation-ships of group identity, mutual trust, reciprocity, andauthority and leading them to build effective systems ofaccess to and management of natural resources. Fortu-nately, in Mexico there is legislation that recognizescommunal property, and this has contributed to the de-velopment of sustainable management systems thathave permitted both subsistence and some productionto generate cash income in various parts of Mexico, ba-sically keeping traditional social structures functioning.This is the case with the shade-coffee and rain-foresthoney production aimed mainly at international marketsand the xate palm production for the flower business inthe United States and Europe. Bioprospecting activitiesmight well be developed through such communal or-ganizations. “Prior informed consent” protocols can bedeveloped using the Mexican property regime’s recog-nition of common property. As Nigh points out, in thespecific case of Chiapas, it is unfortunate that the ICBGattempted to negotiate with “the Maya community,” be-cause there are in fact thousands of Maya communitiesand because both collective and individual propertyrights are heavily contested in Chiapas, which has beenin a virtual state of war since 1994. But this does notmean that no functional Mayan communities can befound to negotiate about bioprospecting. For example,ECOSUR has regular activities in the Calakmul area inneighboring Campeche, and there community propertyrights are widely recognized and respected.

Finally, although Nigh does not explicitly address thestrategic goals of the ICBG, it is worth mentioning thatbioprospecting activities are trying to eradicate bio-pi-racy and make biological prospecting activities as trans-parent, accountable, and beneficial to the parties as pos-sible. In doing so, the U.S. National Institutes of Healthand other promoters of bioprospecting in the world areinvesting in reliable mechanisms for accessing biologicaldiversity. If they were not, it would make no sense forthem to expend hundreds of millions instead of directlypaying pirate ethnobotanical expeditions, which are al-most impossible to prevent and much less expensive.One main component of any reliable access arrangementmust be the long-term conservation of landscapes andspecies diversity. During its short life, the Maya ICBGdid not achieve these goals, but it did help to clarify forscientists, indigenous communities and organizations,and policy makers the goals that a progressive biopros-pecting policy must target and to identify the policy toolsnecessary to achieve them. The experience is there. It isup to the national and international communities to de-velop the policy.

les f ieldDepartment of Anthropology, University of NewMexico, Albuquerque, N.M. 87131, U.S.A. 15 xi 01

In this excellent article, Nigh argues that vastly diver-gent views about nature, health, and humanity lie at the

heart of ongoing conflicts between Maya communitiesand leaders, on the one hand, and Western biomedicalresearchers and corporations, on the other. These con-flicts are centered upon the control over and commo-dification of those aspects of the Maya medical systemthat Western allopathic medicine can intellectually com-prehend and commercialize. In the main, Western re-searchers and corporations want herbs or other plantsthat Maya use in treating disease. Herbal treatments rep-resent, however, only one facet of the entire medicalsystem and are meaningful only within those broadercontexts. Corporate commodification of Maya herbaltreatments means ripping the Maya system apart insearch of what becomes, in the Western system, thegoods.

Obviously the whole infrastructure of property rights,copyright law, and corporate production and distributionhas favored and will continue to favor the Western bio-prospectors, the university researchers and research fa-cilities, and the biomedical corporations. Nigh arguesthat this inequality goes much deeper and cannot be ad-dressed only legalistically through modifications of law,fair-trade agreements, or other such ameliorative mea-sures. His analysis underscores the failures of the “in-digenous science” approach, which, while an improve-ment over deep-seated, historical denigration ofindigenous peoples and their achievements on the partof various Euro-colonialisms, seems only to have facil-itated late 20th-century forms of expropriation and ex-ploitation of indigenous knowledge systems.

A “solution” does not seem to be in the offing. Instead,the question becomes one of outcomes which are lessnegative and disempowering for “the Maya,” whateverthat term comes to mean. Nigh pays a great deal of at-tention to the development of local and pan-Mayan iden-tities in Chiapas. He skillfully navigates his critique ofnaturalized, essentializing conceptualizations of “theMaya” without pursuing an equally tiresome and (forindigenous peoples) ultimately threatening ultra-con-structionist analysis. The task of anthropologists, he ar-gues, is to take as complex, multifaceted, and polyvocala stance as possible with respect to Maya identity for-mation at every level, observing, it would seem, both thedistance and the supportive role that might be requestedof us by Maya peoples. This article that implies that ourapproach should not be to seek agreement between thebio-corporate world and the emerging pan-Mayan world.Instead, it represents the relationship between emergentMaya identities and corporate globalization as intrinsi-cally conflictual, the ongoing legacy of colonialism inthis region.

The most exciting part of the article for me is thedescription of the philosophical discussions about na-ture, wilderness, health, and development taking placeamong Maya intellectuals and scholars. These debatesand discussions are being textualized (Chiapas 1991), asis a broad range of indigenous intellectual production ingreater Mesoamerica (cf. the work of the Casa de Escri-tores en Lenguas Indıgenas). I would like to take thisopportunity to reflect in an optimistic, if not utopian,


way upon both the conflict Nigh has described and themoves Maya intellectuals are making. The work of Mayaintellectuals could conceivably lay the groundwork forbroadly drawn indigenous epistemologies that mightserve as the basis for autonomously conceptualized andadministered research and development projects. Withadequate financial support (from states? from NGOs?),Maya medicine could emerge as a more powerful, co-herent, and cohesive discursive field/practice akin toChinese or Ayurvedic medicine. Granted, the “playingfield,” so to speak, could never be level, given the finan-cial and political leverage commanded by corporate bio-medicine and its institutions. Perhaps, however, such adevelopment could better protect the resources—natural, manufactured, and conceptual—that Maya peo-ples rely upon for their health and well-being.

edward f . f i scherDepartment of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University,Nashville, Tenn. 37235, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 9 i 02

Nigh presents a cautionary tale of bioprospecting in theglobal oecumene. The setting is suitably exotic and na-tive: Maya towns of highland Chiapas. And for anthro-pologists the plot is a familiar and comforting one (in aschadenfreudlich sort of way): a classic clash of civili-zations, replete with cultural misunderstandings andcrossed intentions. On one side, we have the Maya, withtheir homegrown views of the world in which they liveand egalitarian notions of property rights. On the other,we have a consortium of U.S. and Mexican researchers,funded by the National Institutes of Health and workingwith a private Welsh pharmaceutical company, thatseeks to use indigenous ethnobotany as a shortcut to thediscovery of new drugs. Add to this volatile mix the Mex-ican state and its formal structures for interacting withindigenous communities and we have a perfect recipefor intercultural misunderstanding and the sorts of struc-tures of conjuncture about which Marshall Sahlinswrites.

But here we have more structural disjuncture thanconjuncture, itself a revealing commentary on changingbalances of power in the world system. And it wouldseem that the good guys won (or at least did not lose)this time. In November 2001 the ICBG project was closedlargely as a result of resistance from the Council of Tra-ditional Indigenous Healers and Midwives of Chiapas(COMPITCH) and pressure from groups such as the U.S.-based Global Exchange and the Canadian Action Groupon Erosion, Technology, and Concentration. This is aninspiring example of the sorts of new alliances some in-digenous peoples are able to forge in this connectedworld. Yet, at the end of the day, I cannot help but feelthat this was an opportunity lost and that its breakdownwas due not so much to star-crossed cultural logics asto political maneuvering.

Nigh offers this possibility in his comment that theMaya are generally “very interested in what science can

teach them about their own traditions and about theoutside world,” while the scientists are trying to be cul-turally sensitive. So what is the problem? As Nigh ex-plains it, it is the clash of worldviews that informed therespective sides’ positions in their politicized negotia-tions. Certainly there are different cultural predisposi-tions, different cultural logics informing the sides of thedebate. But cultural logics are ever mutable, and it is myassessment that the two sides could have just as easilychosen to stress their commonalties over their differ-ences. Indeed, the new legal framework to protect in-digenous rights that Nigh calls for is not incompatiblewith the Maya ICBG project as it was conceived. Toaddress the underlying problems Nigh raises would in-volve establishing a right to cultural knowledge.

Nigh states that “only within the values of contem-porary Western capitalist culture is it considered ac-ceptable to isolate elements of the situated (and thereforeprivileged) knowledge of a Maya shaman from its socialand metaphysical context and use those decontextuali-zed elements in the production of universal technologiesfor private commercial benefit.” Perhaps the Maya inhighland Guatemala I work with are more entrepreneu-rial, but I daresay most would not have a problem withthis as long as there were an equitable distribution ofthe profits (see Fischer 2001). Granted, such a sense ofequanimity is culturally informed, revealing a clash ofcultural logics. But this brings us back to the ever-loom-ing political issue of what interpretations prevail whenconflicting interests meet in structurally biased circum-stances. More than just opposing the ICBG project,COMPITCH and the other Maya opposition were mak-ing a statement—and one that needs to be heard—aboutthe new power relations that hold in this globalizedworld, decrying epistemological violence to their culturein the name of scientific progress.

Nigh’s most important contribution is in pointing tofundamental ethical problems for which there are noneat solutions. These involve, first, gaining permissionand informed consent to work with common “culturalproperty.” There is no person, no group that can fullyspeak for a culture on these matters—even if we couldagree on what constitutes a culture and where to drawits boundaries. Then, from whom does one get permis-sion to do research on “the Maya” or even just olderMaya men in Chiapas with extensive knowledge ofplants? More fundamentally, how can we translate ournewly minted Western notions of intellectual propertyinto a Maya cultural vocabulary? Intellectual property isnot recognized as such by most Maya people: an indi-vidual cannot own knowledge that has been passed downfor generations. Indeed, the rise of intellectual and cul-tural property rights raises troubling possibilities for usin the West as well. Ideas are to be shared, borrowed,built upon, and transformed. If we start patenting cul-tural ideas or enforcing intellectual property rights,where will it end? At the same time, one must admirethe savvy manner in which indigenous activists are ableto co-opt elements from a hegemonic system to use asweapons against that system. The Maya leaders of COM-


PITCH are fighting a grand battle of ideas with noblegoals and results.

An equally important and related issue concerns re-turning profits to a studied group. Whether at the levelof individuals, communities, or ethnic groups, whoshould profit from any successes? Certainly we shouldstrive for what Nigh terms enriching rather than extrac-tive research, but the devil is in the details. What if amiracle drug for cancer or AIDS is discovered? To whomshould payment be made? Perhaps to the specific indi-viduals who passed the knowledge along to researchers.But, of course, they received that knowledge from family,friends, and neighbors, so perhaps the community as awhole should be compensated. But why that communityand not the one 10 kilometers away that has the sameknowledge, perhaps ultimately derived from the samesource? It would seem, and I daresay the Maya represen-tatives would agree, that this should be global knowledgeand its benefits reaped widely.

virginia nazareaDepartment of Anthropology, University of Georgia,Athens, Ga. 30602-1619, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 8 i 02

Nigh discusses the historical, political, and cultural con-text of the uneasy encounter between Maya conceptionsof disease and healing, as well as community and prop-erty, and the Maya ICBG. His main argument is that“bioprospecting proposals such as the ICBG do violenceto indigenous meanings of nature, medicine, and prop-erty.” Although the article was submitted before ECO-SUR formally withdrew from the project and the NIHrefused to continue funding, Nigh anticipates the de-nouement when he writes, “Before any Maya had beeninvolved in the discussion, the ICBG was already firmlycommitted to intellectual-property regimes that havelargely abandoned the common-heritage principle for thedistribution of plant resources.”

Nigh’s article is a timely input to crucial discussionsin anthropology: positivism and deconstructionism, en-gagement with policy and advocacy, communities andenvironmentalism, and extractive versus enriching re-search. These controversies are not limited to the MayaICBG. Broad in scope, they fuel and infect controversiesabout development, equity, sustainability, and conser-vation in various arenas. At the heart of the matter aresituated knowledges that clash and universal technolo-gies that seek, at all costs, to impose the hegemony ofprogress and the tyranny of good intentions against whatMohanty (1991) has called “cartographies of struggle.”

How is the anthropologist supposed to negotiate thisprecarious terrain? What lies ahead for the presumablywell-intentioned ethnoscientist? In Ethnoecology: Situ-ated Knowledge/Located Lives (1999), I suggested thatit is time to move away from the long-standing debateon the universality of human cognition so that we cantackle more pressing problems in both theory and prac-tice. Yet, phoenix-like, this dilemma refuses to go away.

In this case, Nigh has pointed to the incongruence be-tween the “herbal fetishism” of conventional “naturalmedicine” that seeks to establish a linear cure-for-dis-ease equation and the local medicine practiced by theshamans, who use these herbs in a more complex “so-cially reconstituting and reoriginating” context. This fet-ishism, to follow Nigh’s lead, reflects a dedication toreducing categories of indigenous knowledge to fit cat-egories of science point by point, level by level, ignoringall pragmatic contingencies and cultural configurations.

While Nigh cites a statement I made pertaining to “aradical shift in mindset from viewing native systems ofclassification as naıve and rudimentary . . . to a recog-nition that local cultures know their plant, animal, andphysical resources intimately” in implicit support of Ber-lin and Berlin’s assertion that “work over the past severaldecades . . . has demonstrated that the ethnobiologicalknowledge of traditional peoples conforms in many re-spects to scientific principles,” he fails to note that Idistinguished between an ethnoecology/ethnobiology,epitomized by Berlin’s work, that seeks to legitimize in-digenous knowledge through a scientific vindication orbenediction and one, exemplified by Conklin’s work,that seeks to understand it for its internal coherence andadaptive significance. I emphasized that the differencebetween the two perspectives is not petty and can leadto quite significant differences in repercussions andoutcomes.

Nigh points out that, while local healers base theirpractices on holistic epistemologies of illness and curinghanded down through generations, in their museums andtheir proposals for funding experts almost exclusivelyhighlight the “naturalistic herbal medicine favored bytheir cosmopolitan medical advisers.” Taussig’s (1993)insights on mimesis and representation—how the sub-ordinated and the disenfranchised copy and mock at-tributes of the dominant group in order to survive—arerelevant here. This case demonstrates that the local heal-ers have seen through the paradigm and politics of sci-ence and are selectively appropriating its elements totheir advantage. It points to the expediency of indigenousknowledge and tells us that the dominated and margin-alized have their “public transcripts” and “hidden tran-scripts” (Scott 1990), too—perhaps even more than themore politically powerful and astute. To rephrase Nigh’sanalysis, the disctinction between the public and thehidden transcripts—between representation and “soul”—blurred as objections by the highland healers to theMaya ICBG gained momentum. Unfortunately, it ap-pears that their “no,” instead of being respected, wastaken as a further challenge to the power of persuasionof Western science, law, and economics.

I predict that Nigh’s article will be followed by manyothers on the issues of bioprospecting, intellectual prop-erty pertaining to local knowledge and plant genetic re-sources, and biodiversity conservation. It comes as an-thropologists respond to a call for relevance and competefor public and private funding, at a time when we needto glamourize our work by liberally sprinkling it withbuzzwords and quantify and “bulletize” our findings to


demonstrate impact. Nigh has done an excellent job ofcreating the space in which productive discussions cantake place. If we have been paying attention and havelearned our lessons well, the local people themselves willbe participating as equal partners in the ensuingconversation.

claudia weimannInstitut fur Pharmazeutische Biologie, D-79104Freiburg, Germany ([email protected]). 20 xii 01

Nigh describes the current condition of Highland Mayain Chiapas, Mexico, but the problems he presents applyto indigenous people of many cultures. I will offer someexamples drawn from my own ethnobotanical field re-search among the Nahua of the Sierra de Zongolica, Ve-racruz, Mexico (Weimann 2000).

I shall begin by asking what happens to cultural groupsover time. Nigh explains that the Mayan-speakinggroups are defined as representing the pre-Columbianpast. But cultures and societies should be seen not justas systems but as processes. Human beings respond totheir environment, both adapting to natural circum-stances and acculturating to adjacent cultural groups(Hirschberg 1999). For example, colonizers accommodateto their surroundings over the years, as Nigh observesfor different local groups. The Mayan-speaking people oftoday are acculturated to the so-called mestizo culturein Mexico, and the same can be said of the Nahua of theSierra de Zongolica. Because of their special geography,various influences can be observed in the same region.Villages which have been connected by paved roadschange their habits (e.g., with regard to the use of Na-huatl) more quickly than those which can only bereached on foot (Weimann 2000).

In 1978 the World Health Organization declared“health for all people in 2000” as the main goal. TheMexican government’s strategy was to introduce healthpromotion programs in several regions. Indigenous heal-ers received instruction because people of the same cul-tural background trusted them. They could communi-cate with people in their native language and understandculture-bound syndromes such as susto and mal aire.Primary health care should include local herbal medi-cines, which are readily available and cheap, but theirsafety should be validated. At the same time, ethno-biological studies may be the basis for the developmentof new drugs (Weimann 2000).

Apart from the possible exploitation of indigenousknowledge, bioprospecting research can lead to misun-derstanding of a particular culture, for example, theMaya’s medicinal use of plants and other healing rituals.The researcher tends to interpret the use of herbal med-icine in terms of his own cultural background. Under-standing the use of medicinal plants requires scrutiniz-ing the particular culture’s concepts of health and illness.Even if the disease terms recognized are similar to thoseof biomedicine, the perceived causes of illness are some-times very different. The form of treatment and its per-

ceived effectiveness are based on cultural interpretationsof these illnesses and their perceived causes. For exam-ple, the Nahua’s concept of “fever” is different from thebiomedical one. Fever was believed by the Aztecs and isstill believed by the Nahua of Zongolica to be a “hotphlegm” in the body that is expelled by sweating, sneez-ing, or the action of laxatives or diuretics. Consequently,the plants used for treating it may not have febrifugeeffects but may induce sneezing or act as sudorifics, lax-atives, or diuretics. The study of the pharmacologicaleffects of indigenous medicinal plants should take intoconsideration these conceptual differences (see Ortiz deMontellano 1976 and, for further references, Weimann2000). It should be clear, however, that the “traditional”medicine of today in the Sierra de Zongolica and, I think,other regions of Mexico is a syncretic mix of Spanishand indigenous traditions (Aguirre Beltran 1980). SinceWestern medicine influences local traditional medicine,some elements of traditional healing may have been lost,but at the same time there are more possibilities forcuring systems.

Ultimately, research should be understood as a dia-logue between different cultures. A mutual exchange ofcultural knowledge may result, but at the same timethere is a process of acculturation. The basis for com-munication should be respect for nature but also for peo-ple and their knowledge. I agree with Nigh that the dis-tinctive characteristics of particular cultural groupsshould be strengthened to conserve biodiversity inplants, animals, and cultures. We should keep in mindthat “cada anciano que se muere es una biblioteca quese quema” (Every ancient who dies is a library that burns)(Alvarez Santiago 1991).

Reply

ronald nighWilliamstown, Mass., U.S.A. 28 i 02

I thank all of the commentators for their remarks. Therange of opinions and insights is rich and reflects theextraordinary diversity of reactions elicited by the MayaICBG and the larger issues it raises. I have restricted myreply to the two areas discussed that are most central tothe paper: the fundamental concepts of nature, com-munity, property, and Maya medical and ecological prac-tice and related topics of intellectual property rights, lo-cal knowledge, and control of access to biodiversity. Thepaper argues that differences concerning fundamentalconcepts led to conflict and failure to achieve agreementon property rights and access.

Ayora’s comments are the most perplexing because, asfar as I can see, we agree. Indigenous peoples’ privilegedrelationship to their environment is not a romantic no-tion but recognition of centuries of cultural and ecolog-ical adaptation. Their “quasi-natural right to control andmanage their own resources” is acknowledged explicitly


in international law, most recently in the Conventionon Biological Diversity, and is not due to any essential-ism on my part. Atran’s concept of latent knowledgestructures seeks to understand how “locally embodiedindividual practices” induce a culture of stewardshipeven in the absence of formal common-property resourcemanagement institutions. No reference is made to “in-grained mind structures.” Ayora’s views on medical prac-tices are explicitly and amply endorsed in the paper. Fi-nally, to say that harmony with the cosmos is a widelyheld value among Maya peoples is not necessarily to saythe Maya actually live in harmony with each other ortheir environment.

The contingent and shifting nature of the “commu-nity” in the Maya area, referred to by Ayora, was dis-cussed. This topic is addressed in the Berlins’ commentsas well and was a central issue in the Maya ICBG con-troversy. The Berlins’ remarks on community are re-vealing of the underlying problem. They insist that“community” refers to a “specific, geographically bound-ed sociopolitical unit.” Yet, as Ayora notes, such unitsare often fictions imposed from outside or contingent onimmediate interests of particular Maya families or evenindividuals. Anyone who has worked with Chiapas cen-sus data on the locality level knows that the designatedpoints are administrative conveniences that may or maynot bear any relationship to local residential patterns orsocial organization. The representative status, as “legaldecision-making bodies,” of the 46 “communities” thatsigned agreements with the Maya ICBG is highly vari-able. These are simple realities of highland Chiapas.

The Berlins also insist on Articles 87 and 87bis of thefederal environmental law, which specify that prior in-formed consent be given by the “legal owners of the landson which the biological resources are found.” This lawwas written to deal with traditional biological collec-tions for scientific purposes and did not contemplate bio-prospecting projects in which intellectual property rightsand commercial interests are involved. Such agreementsaffect the rights of Indian peoples of whom the ownersof a given parcel of land may not be fully representative,a point addressed in the comments of Fischer and Cha-pela. I am not implying any bad intentions on the partof the researchers, but failure to recognize the gravity ofthese issues contributed to the eventual cancellation ofthe project.

The Berlins translate key phrases from the San AndresAccords between the Zapatista army and the Mexicangovernment as referring to indigenous “communities.”In fact, the term used in those phrases and throughoutthe entire text of the agreement and its extensive an-nexes is pueblos indıgenas (indigenous peoples). Thestruggle to transcend the restricted “geographicallybounded” and imposed “community” and to empowerregional social and political formations of indigenouspeoples is a fundamental dimension of the Maya questfor autonomy (Nash 2001). If I have painted a “grim pic-ture,” it is not of biodiversity prospecting and of thosewho engage in it but of the plight of Maya peoples whohave yet to secure a fair hearing for the redress of their

ancient grievances and the recognition of their funda-mental rights.

Bellon’s interpretation of intellectual property rightsas an attempt to address the free-rider problem is a cu-rious one. Others would view intellectual property rightsas an attempt to legalize free-rider piracy by outsiderswho seek individual benefit from the accumulated col-lective knowledge of Indian peoples. Bellon seems to ac-cept the view that intellectual property rights are a nec-essary incentive for the development of Maya medicineswith “global reach.” He apparently discounts the pos-sibility that Mexican society might invest in such de-velopment as a public good or that the Maya themselvescould find their own means of promoting their medicalpractice globally, as suggested by Field. It is true thatsuch options are not ideologically favored in the currentclimate of free-trade capitalism, but that situation maychange. In Fischer’s words, cultural logics are evermutable.

Brush also seems to assume the necessity of intellec-tual property rights schemes and paradoxically identifiesopposition to them as part of the “emerging anticom-mons” of biological resources. He correctly notes thatindigenous people do not necessarily believe that theyhave interests in common with anthropologists. It isclear to me that indigenous people also do not necessarilybelieve that the privatization of cultural property is com-patible with the protection of public goods. As Field re-marks, such schemes consistently favor the bioprospec-tors, researchers, and corporations, not indigenouspeoples. It is an error for anthropologists to pretend thatthey can now broker such outside interests and continueto have the same kind of privileged relationships withthe people they study that they enjoyed in the past.

Weimann and Chapela are both sensitive to indigenouspeople’s perceptions and points of view while remainingsympathetic to bioprospecting research. Chapela is cor-rect in pointing out that the Maya ICBG is an attemptto create a scheme for responsible bioprospecting thatavoids biopiracy, though I believe his suggestion for a“national registry” of ethnobiological resources is morelikely to achieve that goal. If the Maya ICBG experiencehas taught us anything, however, it is that good inten-tions are not enough. I do not have the answers to thesecomplex issues, but it is increasingly clear that in a con-text in which indigenous peoples lack full recognitionand autonomy to control their territories and resources,even relatively enlightened projects such as ICBG willnot be successful. I can only hope that Nazarea’s call tobring indigenous people into the discussion will beheeded.

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