Introduction: in favour ofindeterminacy

Arun Agrawal

In the mid-1990s, the National Science Foun-dation, the National Institutes of Health, andthe United States Agency for InternationalDevelopment launched a novel partnership. TheInternational Cooperative Biodiversity Groups(ICBG) sought to bring together universityresearchers, pharmaceutical companies, non-government organisations, and representativesof indigenous peoples into a consortium toidentify genetic and biochemical materials thatcould prove commercially valuable. The venturewas also intended to create innovative mech-anisms to share with indigenous peoples theanticipated benefits from accurate identificationof commercially profitable compounds. Six con-sortium groups received funding. In each case,the consortium’s activities were directed bywell-known researchers in the fields of indigen-ous knowledge and ethnobotany.

Despite the prestigious names and insti-tutions, and the expertise of well-known pharm-aceutical companies – among them the Smith-sonian Institution, the University of Georgia,Novartis, Conservation International, Glaxo–Wellcome, Bristol–Myers and Squibb – resultsfrom the initiative remain uncertain at best.Nearly a decade after the program waslaunched, the number of commercially valuableproducts that has been identified is limited.Several research projects funded through thisadmittedly innovative partnership have comeunder fire from indigenous peoples and inter-ested observers, and little benefit has reachedindigenous peoples.1

It would be quite right to suggest that withthe best of intentions, the success of the ICBGis mixed. In no small measure is this mixed

ISSJ 173/2002 UNESCO 2002. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

outcome the result of the veritable political andconceptual minefield into which discussions andactivities related to indigenous knowledge andpeoples inevitably step. Four essentially con-tested questions make the debate on indigenousknowledge productive: (1) what is indigenousknowledge; (2) how valuable is indigenousknowledge; (3) what role can indigenous knowl-edge play in development and modernisation;and (4) what measures are best suited to pro-mote the interests of those seen to possessindigenous knowledge? Basic informationaluncertainties, ethically irresolvable differences,and confusions about how power works inrelation to the idea of the indigenous hobbleattempts to answer these questions. The ICBGran into difficulties because of the dilemmas inaddressing the above questions.

Members of the consortium faced problemsin defining indigenous knowledge in relation tothe medicinal value of collected organic matter.They ran into difficulties in sharing economicbenefits commensurate to the medicinal valueindigenous peoples ascribed to their knowledgeand to the plants and trees near their homes.Their classificatory activities evoked the taxo-nomic and epistemological questions involvedin creating databases of indigenous knowledge.Their desire to identify valuable indigenousknowledge confronted criticisms about neo-colonial extractive activities. Underlying allthese problems is the basic question of howto think about indigenous knowledge and itsrelationship to power.

The essays in this volume examine differ-ent aspects of indigenous knowledge by focus-ing on this critical question of the relationship

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between indigenous knowledge and power. Thearguments the essays flesh out are ultimatelyabout politics and power, and how they affectthinking and judgements about indigenousknowledge. Four of the essays in the collectionfocus on those specific elements of indigenousknowledge on the basis of which it is possibleto make claims about the need to reconstitutethe relations of power in which most indigenousknowledge is located. Luisa Maffi focuses onbiocultural diversity, simultaneously advancingan argument about the overlap between culturaland biological diversity, and emphasising theneed to protect disappearing languages and cul-tures. Joeli Veitayaki examines the role ofindigenous knowledge practices in the lives andlivelihoods of Fijian indigenous peoples.

The paper by Haami and Roberts, as alsothe one by Roue and Nakashima, focus on parti-cular types of indigenous knowledge in twoantipodal locations: New Zealand and Quebec,Canada. Haami and Roberts explore theindigenous knowledge embedded in the Maoriwhakapapa genealogies of biological organisms,and Roue and Nakashima focus on a series ofinterviews with a specific Cree hunter. Thesetwo papers show the multiple strands of complexsocial, cultural, and metaphysical connections thatmust be traced if the idea of indigenous know-ledge is to make sense. Their papers also hintat the obstacles into which most programmesto protect indigenous knowledge are likely torun. Since such programmes ultimately attemptto cull the practical from the metaphysical, thenecessary from the non-essential, and the spe-cific from its context – they make implicitjudgements about what is valuable aboutindigenous knowledge (even as they claim tovalorise indigenous knowledges in theirentirety), and contribute to reshaping suchknowledges and practices in the very effort tosafeguard them. This transformation of indigen-ous knowledges by locating them in databasesand archiving them in lists of best practices isthe theme of Agrawal’s paper as he examinesthe politics involved in the classification andscientisation of indigenous knowledges.

The papers by Sundar, Li, and Leach andFairhead complicate the usual alignmentbetween power and indigeneity. Their argu-ments can be seen as a reflection on what hap-pens to our usual ways of thinking when

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indigenous knowledge is no longer identifiableas the possession or characteristic of a groupof people who are also simultaneously mar-ginalised and poor. Sundar looks at the differ-ences in nature between attempts by Hindunationalists in India to claim the label ofindigenous knowledge for astrology, and theirattempts to transform India’s tribal groups asHindu and in the process deny value to tribalidentities and knowledges. Li focuses on theviolence that has scarred the social body ofcentral Sulawesi in Indonesia, and asks howindigenous-sponsored violence has led to sil-ences that are hard to explain once we beginto think of the concept of indigeneity outsideof its usual entanglements in ethnobotanicalknowledge and in relation to identity politics.Leach and Fairhead, similarly, examine thepowerful appeals that become feasible on behalfof indigenous knowledges and peoples, andthe potential of such appeals to generate dis-comfort when views of the indigenous do notfall into place with their usually allied con-cepts of poverty, marginality, and socialexclusion.

Michael Dove’s paper presents insightsdrawn from the hybrid life history of small-holder rubber cultivation in South-East Asia,and its movement from Para in South America.Using the case history of rubber, Dove elabor-ates the notion of a conceptual life cycle thatmight describe what has happened to dis-cussions of indigenous knowledge. The initialinnovativeness and later critique of the conceptof indigenous knowledge parallel the historyof other concepts in rural development, amongthem common property and community-basedconservation. The more complicated under-standings of indigenous knowledge portrayedby many of the papers in this collection arethus a natural progression in the life of aconcept.

Gururani’s paper, on gender and indigenousknowledge, is an attempt to think about howindigenous knowledge of women in a specificregion in the Indian Himalayas comes into being.She advances a nuanced argument in favour ofthe need to focus less on proxy conceptual categ-ories such as gender, community, and indigeneity,and more on the contextual, political relationshipsof social agents with their environment. Her argu-ment flowers further in Raffle’s elaboration of

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the concept of intimate knowledges. Deploying peoples live, indigenous knowledge is gener-ethnographic materials from his fieldwork in ated, and interactions between the putativeAmazonia, Raffles demonstrates the nature of indigenous/local and the alleged scientific/abstraction and localisation that goes into the modern occur. But there is another commitmentproduction of local knowledge and how they in the method being espoused: the need forcan be rethought and undermined by focusing closer attention and deeper appreciation of theon the nature of social and political inequalities political relations for which easy conceptual cat-involved in the production of all knowledge. egories often, inappropriately, come to stand.

Ultimately, the principle of method Such movements in perspective potentially layespoused by Raffles is one to which all the the foundations for greater uncertainty in socialessays in this collection are deeply sympathetic. outcomes and shifts in political relationships: itAt one level, the arguments of the papers that is in favour of such indeterminacy and changesfollow can simply be seen as a plea for greater in asymmetrical relations that the essays in thisattention to the contexts in which indigenous collection are written.

Note

1. See information on the ICBG at http://www.nih.gov/fic/programs/icbg.html and http://www.biodiv.org/doc/case-studies/cs-abs-icbg.pdf. See also the critical discussion of ICBG activities by the Rural AdvancementFoundation International on their website http://www.rafi.org/. (Accessed on November 29, 2001).

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