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An anthropological consideration for appropriating ethnomedical knowledge for modern medicine.

An anthropological consideration for appropriating ethnomedical knowledge for modern medicine

Key words: ethnomedicine, modern medicine, appropriation of medicine, intellectual property, indigenous people.

Context

    Almost all modern medicinal drugs historically originated from traditional and indigenous usage, also known as ethnomedicine.  Ethnomedicine is not only a localized therapeutic system, but is also part of our human heritages. But we only talk about scientific episodes of historic discoveries of useful traditional drugs while never discussing levying an economic payment from modern society, or oven multinational companies, for the indigenous people who introduced the drug to us. This social condition calls for indigenous people to contest the unequal distribution of profits from ethnomedicine.

Objective

    The aim of this paper is to elaborate on the social value of maintaining ethnomedicine as intellectual property based on the global capitalistic circulation of industrial commodities.

Task

    To complete the objective above, we need to answer the following two questions. (1) What is the social condition that we are able attain by guaranteeing fair accessibility of useful medical systems without any limiting factors, especially economic ones? ; (2) How do we redistribute the economic and non-economic profits that indigenous people have provided for modern society?

Discussion

    To discuss the tasks above, the concept of "appropriation" is applied as a theoretical framework to some historical case studies in Asia and Latin America.  "Appropriation" is defined as the strategic usage of cultural elements between a dominant culture and a subordinate one in a colonial and/or postcolonial context.

    There are some difficulties in redeeming economic payments as "counter-service" (a sociological term of Marcel Mauss, 1924) from modern society for indigenous peoples that have contributed to the development of modern science. The reason stems from the impossibility of defining either modern medicine or a traditional one. These two medical systems have been cross-fertilizing each other historically and it is hard to explain why each medical system is independently autonomous. It is also difficult to establish how a single legal subject can be attributed to ethnomedicine, because ethnomedical knowledge is generally collective. Moreover, realistically, modern nation states are not willing to recognize the social importance of indigenous people who can potentially maintain useful ethnomedical knowledge, because national agendas focus only on how to appropriate ethnomedical knowledge as a national property.

Conclusion

    There is an inequality between the benefits which modern society has gained from ethnomedicine and those which indigenous people have gained from modern science. The problem is that indigenous people have not received any type of restitution for contributing ethnomedical knowledge to modern society. How should anthropologists respond to these problems?

    The author criticizes the recent trends in the globalization of intellectual property rights that protect only multinational medical pharmaceutical companies.  One radical option is to have international societies calculate the total economic value for the contribution and maintenance of ethnomedical resources by indigenous people and to compensation them through international multilateral cooperation plans.

    Or, a more realistic alternative is to collect the compensation proposals of indigenous societies and make a consensual agenda to make sure that the indigenous people's voices are heard. Anthropological knowledge has the potential to help coordinate this agenda.

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