Catherine
Potvin is a francophone botany prof at Montreal’s great
English-language university, McGill. A specialist in
physiological ecology, she’s part of the McGill program
that operates down here in association with the City of
Knowledge and works part time with the Smithsonian Tropical
Research Institute. At the October 14 Tupper Center science
lecture she described some work that takes her beyond the
boundaries of her specialty into an interdisciplinary study of
Embera healing and how knowledge of medicinal plants gets
passed on within that culture.
“I always
feel very challenged by tackling social aspects,” Potvin
said, describing her work at eastern Panama province’s
community of Ipeti-Embera as “a little bit of biology and
a little bit of anthropology.”
The community
was founded after the relocation of Embera villages that were
flooded by the Bayano Dam. The traditional Embera way of life
is to establish temporary villages in forest settings,
supporting themselves by gardening, raising poultry and pigs,
hunting, fishing and gathering, and then moving on every few
years when nearby natural resources become depleted and the
settlements become too overcrowded or pestilential, allowing
the jungle to grow back. Nowadays the land necessary to live
that way is generally not available, and at Ipeti the problem
is compounded by the government’s failure to provide legal
title to the land where the Embera were relocated and by a
population problem caused by the influx of people from
communities affected by the spillover of Colombia’s civil
conflict.
Just a few
generations ago the Embera, whose language only includes
numbers that go up to five, lived off of the land in an economy
that had little to do with money. Now the principal source of
outside income for Ipeti-Embera, as with many other Embera
communities, is the sale for cash of baskets and sculptures
carved from cocobolo wood or tagua nuts. Within the indigenous
economy as well, the botanicos --- herbal healers --- work for
money rather than the traditional barter for food or labor.
Scientists from
developed countries, often funded by pharmaceutical companies,
are renowned --- often “infamous” is a better word ---
for picking the brains of indigenous healers in search of
plants from which medicines may be extracted, tested and sold
on the global market. Sometimes this research is a survey and
testing of diverse plants in search of medicinal properties ---
“bio-prospecting” --- and sometimes it’s a
matter of outright theft, wherein unscrupulous individuals and
powerful corporations seek to claim patent rights over the
traditional pharmacopoeia, fraudulently trying to pass
themselves off as inventors.
In any case,
bio-prospecting is not what Catherine Potvin does. Although
part of her work includes the documentation of medicinal plants
that are used, she’s mainly interested in the conservation
of thes plants, studying the ways that knowledge of these
plants and their uses is passed on within Embera society, and
surveying Embera attitudes about the ownership of that
knowledge.
The research
includes a social component and an ecological one.
On the social
side, information is collected by group discussions, formal
interviews and workshops on intellectual property that include
Embera and non-Embera, including lawyers.
Early on a need
was perceived to work with both sexes separately, something
that Potvin could do but male colleagues probably
couldn’t. It turns out that, in addition to the medicine
practiced by botanicos and jaibanas (spirit healers, who are
often botanicos as well), there are distinctly female branches
of herbal medicine, which tend to concentrate on gynecological
and obstetrical problems. This knowledge, which is passed on
from generation to generation within families, overlaps with
that in which the botanicos specialize, for example with
respect to plants that are used to treat intestinal parasites.
Potvin said that early in her research she was approached by
women and warned that the botanicos’ knowledge is not all
there is to Embera herbal medicine, and that at subsequent
encounters she learned a bit about women’s medicine but at
a certain point --- short of, for example, specific revelations
about an herbal contraceptive that is said to exist among the
Embera --- the women declined to say more. The existence of a
separate women’s branch of medicine, however, was freely
admitted to Potvin by the male botanicos.
On the
ecological side, five Embera botanicos (actually four botanicos
and a botanica) participated in a field collection of medicinal
plants, in which three good specimens of each species were
taken, the characteristics of the ecological niches in which
the plants were found were noted and certain scientific
blinders were imposed to avoid biasing the studies.
Potvin was
working on a grant from Canada’s International Development
Research Center, and the donor mandated certain restrictions on
her work that presented an immediate controversy with the
Embera healers. The big problem was an insistence on
validation. The sponsors didn’t want to pay for a study of
quackery with no real medical value, but traditional healers at
Ipeti-Embera, like their counterparts in many other places, are
insulted by the suggestion that their knowledge must be
validated in the terms of institutions from the developed
world.
Eventually that
difference was finessed by a medicinal plant validation process
that included three methods. A species that was mentioned as
medicinal in academia’s pharmacology or ethnobotany
literature was considered valid. So was a species listed as
medicinal by the TRAMIL international plant research group.
Finally, and controversially with some members of the audience,
the reported use of plant by at least two Embera botanicos who
obtained their knowledge independently of one another was also
considered validation.
There were 131
plants collected at and around Embera-Ipeti, eight of which
were of well-known common use and 40 of which were known by two
or more botanicos. Of these 40 plants, 12 were listed in the
developed world’s literature, one with mention of contra-
indications that had not been known to the botanicos before the
Canadian researcher pointed them out. Some of the better known
herbal cures included salvia, which is used for colds and as an
analgesic; ginger, which is used for diarrhea; and paiko, with
which parasite infestations are treated.
Potvin’s
lecture concentrated on those 40 species. She wanted to know
which plants were rare and which were common, and where these
species are found. With that knowledge, it would be possible to
begin to develop a conservation strategy for the plants
themselves. (Conservation of the knowledge of traditional plant
medicine was the main aim of her research, but of course if the
plants themselves go extinct then the knowledge of them becomes
rather moot.)
Her findings
didn’t support one of the favorite arguments advance to
save the rainforests. “Mostly medicinal plants tend to be
fairly common,” Potvin pointed out, adding that most of
the plants involved in the studies grow among agricultural
crops and in fallow fields, while few are found in untouched
forests. Thus the notion that preserving the forest undisturbed
will save medicines unknown to the industrialized world may
have some validity, but it wasn’t borne out by this
research.
Potvin found
that botanicos hadn’t domesticated the plants they use.
They told her that they’re not interested in establishing
medicinal gardens because they know where the plants they want
grow.
In any case,
she pointed out that the survival of both the knowledge of
traditional medicine and the plants used in its practice get
down to matters of economics and trust. “If people trust
their traditional medicine, it will be easier to conserve the
plants,” she said, and then noted that while 60 percent of
the people in Embera-Ipeti have used the services of botanicos,
only 18 percent go to them first when they are sick.
The competition
is the hospital in Chepo, where standard western medicine is
practiced and services are free.
Botanicos, on
the other hand, charge for their services, less for minor
ailments that are easy to cure, more for the harder cases.
Prices range from around $3 to treat a cut to $125 for a
snakebite. (Women’s medicine, on the other hand, is
practiced for free.) Botanicos charge the same rates to teach
their knowledge as to apply it, so, for example, if someone is
bitten by a snake and goes to a traditional healer who happens
to be teaching a student, the botanico stands to earn $250,
$125 each from the patient and the student. In the Embera
system patients don’t pay unless they are cured. (And
wouldn’t you know, Potvin notes that there are occasional
arguments in which botanicos complain that their interventions
didn’t work as hoped because patients didn’t take
their medicine as instructed.)
If you drive
around town in your own car and live an air conditioned
existence, set aside your economic assumptions and understand
that Ipeti-Embera, like virtually all of Panama’s
indigenous communities, is POOR by your standards. “Price
is a serious impediment to people seeking traditional
medicine,” Potvin concluded, adding that it’s also
“a major impediment to the transmission of traditional
knowledge.”
And then
there’s the economic question that is the subject of much
debate in international law. Who owns the intellectual property?
The Embera may
own land collectively, but most villagers at Ipeti-Embera say
that knowledge of traditional medicine belongs to the botanicos
rather than “the community.” Potvin notes a certain
gender gap on this issue, with women more frequently advocating
common ownership of traditional knowledge. The Embera consensus
is that arguments about such intellectual property rights
should be judged by local authorities.
So what has
been the practical result of Dr. Potvin’s work?
Ipeti-Embera
has built a hospital of traditional medicine, paid for the
training of seven new botanicos and established a medicinal
plant garden. The five botanicos involved in these works have
been paid according to custom. There is discussion about
establishing a bank so that people in Ipeti-Embera can get
loans to pay for traditional cures.
The work that
Potvin has done at Ipeti-Embera is now being extended to Mogue,
on the Pacific coast of Darien province, with one big
difference. She’s not doing it. In Mogue, the project is
directed by and the work is being carried out by indigenous
people themselves.
