211
Current Anthropology Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
2004 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2004/4502-0004$3.00
Indigenous People
Incorporated?
Culture as Politics, Culture as
Property in Pharmaceutical
Bioprospecting1
by Shane Greene
The ongoing debate over indigenous claims to intellectual and
cultural property reveals a series of indigenous strategies of mobilization
that both appropriate from and work against the logic
of the market. Of particular significance in this regard are the
various indigenous strategies used in contemporary pharmaceutical
bioprospecting activities to address claims to traditional medical
knowledge as cultural property. This article presents field
data on a controversial ethnopharmaceutical project among the
Aguaruna of Peru's high forest and offers a comparative analysis
of the outcomes with attention to several other cases in and beyond
South America. In particular, questions are raised about the
forms of legitimating authority in the burgeoning international
indigenous movement, the role of NGOs, researchers, bureaucracies,
and corporations in this process, and the dilemmas that
emerge from the politicization and privatization of indigenous
culture and identity.
shane greene is a doctoral candidate at the University of
Chicago and preceptor of the university's Master of Arts Program
in the Social Sciences (MAPSS, Pick 301, University of Chicago,
5828 S. University Ave., Chicago, IL 60637, U.S.A. [lsg@uchicago.
edu]). Born in 1971, he received a B.A. from the University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1993 and an M.A. from the University
of Chicago in 1995. He has done field research in Peru
and has published "The Shaman's Needle: Development, Shamanic
Agency, and Intermedicality in Aguaruna Lands, Peru"
(American Ethnologist 25[4]), "Intellectual Property, Resources,
or Territory? Reframing the Debate over Indigenous Rights, Traditional
Knowledge, and Pharmaceutical Bioprospection," in
Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights, edited by
Mark Bradley and Patrice Petro (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 2002), and (with Mamais Juep Greene) "Settlers
Clash with Aguaruna in Peru's Amazon" (Cultural Survival
Quarterly 26[1]:72­73). The present paper was submitted 13 iii
02 and accepted 20 viii 03.
1. At different stages various institutions made possible the fieldwork
on which this article is based: the Social Science Research
Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Fulbright program, the
Tinker Foundation, and the University of Chicago's Center for Latin
American Studies. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha and the participants
in her intellectual property rights seminar at the University of Chicago
read and commented on a very early draft of the paper in the
winter of 2000. Since then several other readers have pushed me
to improve the argument: Jean Comaroff, Michael Brown, Josh Rosenthal,
Steve King, three anonymous reviewers, and probably others
along the way. Most of my debt is due to Brendan Tobin, the
members of the ICBG team, and several Aguaruna leaders and comThe
long-standing Euro-American tradition that imagines
indigenous peoples as forever teetering on the brink
of cultural collapse and demographic destruction,
whether in colonial ideologies of the civilizing process,
anthropological scholarship on acculturation, or development
policies that project an inevitable triumph of
modernization over tradition, has proven profoundly
misleading. The native subjects of Europe's imperial expansion,
the ethnic and tribal pockets still existent
within modern nation-states, and the tradition-laden
"obstacles" to capitalist development have demonstrated
themselves to be actors of world-historical proportions.
Being indigenous in our era has become much
more than a question of tenuous cultural survival or
merely the discursive product of colonial and modern
imaginations. It is a historically validated subject position
that is accompanied by a conscious strategy of effective,
if still highly contested and multiply configured,
political, cultural, and historical action for significant
populations across the world.
One of the more remarkable phenomena of the past
few decades in this regard has been the increasingly visible
efforts by indigenous peoples from different world
regions to formalize their own forms of political struggle
and representation at local, national, and global levels
(see Chirif, García, and Smith 1991, Brysk 2000, Brown
1993, Muehlebach 2001, Kearney and Varese 1995, Smith
1996, Friedman 1999, Warren and Jackson 2002, Van Cott
1994, Warren 1998, Smith and Ward 2000, Ramos 1998,
Greene 2002, Ballón Aguirre 1988, Albó 1991, Urban and
Sherzer 1991, Niezen 2003, Montejo 2002, Ewen 1994).
In the process they have formed an institutional network
of indigenous activists, organizations, and advocates that
is global in scope. The most significant and internationally
visible forum in which indigenous spokespeople
come together is the United Nations Work Group on
Indigenous Populations, which conducts debates on the
definition of "indigenous" and drafts legislation for
rights to territory, self-determination, the environment,
and culture (Muehlebach 2001, Niezen 2003). The activities
of the UN Work Group and the increasing visibility
of indigenous movements are often cited as evidence of
indigenous peoples' having gained a "voice" in national
and international politics (Muehlebach 2001, Montejo
2002, Ewen 1994). The idea of a "voice" immediately
raises the question of who is speaking for whom and to
whom, and therefore of central importance to these
emergent forms of indigenous mobilization are the issues
of indigenous self-representation and the role of persons
and organizations that act as mediators between external
interests and local constituencies.
Political and cultural mediation is nothing new to the
encounter between indigenous peoples and the projects
of European colonizers or modern nation-states. Colonial
munity members. Particularly deserving of mention are Walter and
Memory Lewis, Rogerio Castro, Steve Caspers, Ricardo Apanu,
César and Jorge Sarasara, Evaristo Nugkuag, José Catip, Adolfo Juep,
and all the other federation leaders. I retain full responsibility for
any flaws in the ideas expressed here.
212 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
administrations often relied heavily on native "chiefs"
of one kind or another to enforce colonial policies on
local subjects. The role of native kurakas in Spanish
America and the system of indirect rule employing tribal
chiefs in Africa are classic examples (see Rasnake 1988;
Stern 1982; Comaroff and Comaroff 1991:255). Nor is
the study of indigenous political mediation new to the
anthropology of the modern nation-state context. Eric
Wolf's (1956) article on native leaders in Mexico as political,
economic, and cultural "brokers" between their
home communities and the national society is a classic
in this respect.
Some of the more notable controversies in contemporary
anthropology suggest that indigenous self-representation,
global indigenous mobilization, and the mediation
involved in such intercultural politics are still
very much at the heart of recent anthropology. David
Stolĺs (1999) contentious rereading and revision of the
Nobel prizewinner Rigoberta Menchú 's account of life
as a Maya during Guatemala's internal war landed him
in a heated debate about his authority to question representations
of her as an internationally revered indigenous
icon. More controversial still is Patrick Tierney's
(2000) critical account of several researchers' work with
the Venezuelan Yanomami. Tierney's book includes details
about the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon's attempt
to call into question the act of political representation
of one of the group's most outspoken leaders, Davi
Yanomami, whom he considered a "pawn" of environmental
NGOs and his own anthropological rivals (see
Graham 2002).
Ultimately these recent controversies reveal that contemporary
indigenous spokespeople and representative
organizations are negotiating their role as mediators and
representatives of indigenous collectivities with a whole
host of other nonindigenous peoples and organizations
specific to this historical moment. While anthropologists
and missionaries have long been key interlocutors with
indigenous peoples, they are hardly alone in this emergent
debate--productive at times of somewhat uncomfortable
encounters--over the nature of indigenous activism
and what constitutes legitimate representation.
Environmental and human rights nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs), state and international bureaucracies,
development and funding agencies, corporations,
researchers, and activists all now have their own stakes
in negotiating the politics of indigenous representation.
Indeed, global environmental activism, the objectives of
transnational NGOs, sustainable-development initiatives,
and even the "green capitalism" practiced by ostensibly
eco-conscious corporations have emerged as
powerful agendas with respect to indigenous peoples and
their forms of representation. Through such environmentally
friendly contacts some indigenous leaders and
organizations have successfully communicated their
plight to global audiences and powerful international
funding and development institutions (Conklin and Graham
1995, Smith 1996, Turner 1993, Carneiro da Cunha
and Almeida 2000). However, many point to the pitfalls
of seeing indigenous peoples as inherently environmentally
conservative and thus stereotyped as "ecologically
noble savages" (see Redford 1990; Orlove and Brush
1996:334).
Two related phenomena are part and parcel of this
greater and more visible indigenous mobilization and its
mediation by nonindigenous interlocutors: the politicization
of culture and its treatment as property. In an age
in which anthropologists and other scholars are increasingly
critical of the arbitrary boundaries implied by the
"culture" concept (see Gupta and Ferguson 1992), indigenous
peoples publicly embrace such boundaries, citing
the virtues of indigenous cultures in ways that portray
them as relatively fixed and identifiable wholes associated
with delimited ethnic collectivities/territories and
specific histories (see Fischer 1999). Indeed, claims to
distinct, delimited cultures give validity to the historically
specific subnational ethnic identities on which
much global indigenous politics is based. Indigenous representatives
increasingly speak about their distinct cultures
as objects around which political struggle is organized
in their efforts to negotiate the legacies of colonial
occupation, incorporation into modern national projects,
and the pressures of globalization.
The politicization of indigenous culture is accompanied
by a tendency to define it as property. Indigenous
representatives across the world now commonly speak
about themselves not merely as representatives of distinct
cultures but also as part-owners of collectively
propertied cultures (Brown 2003).2
Contemporary indigenous
cultural property claims range from the material
(human remains, artifacts, significant sites) to the intangible
(sacred symbols, music, cultural heroes, traditional
plant knowledge). Struggles to make culture property
represent one of the most active spheres of indigenous
political and, I will argue, economic action. Indeed, in
some instances cultural property claims have surpassed
in importance the concerns over territory and land rights
that have historically been central to indigenous mobilization
(Muehlebach 2001). Passage of the Native American
Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990 gave
Native Americans unprecedented rights to reclaim human
remains and material cultural artifacts in the possession
of U.S. museums (see Haas 1996, Brown 1998).
Significant struggles over intangible cultural property are
occurring as well. In an extraordinary legal settlement
the administrators of the Crazy Horse Estate and the
Rosebud Sioux tribe of South Dakota successfully challenged
a brewing company's use of the name "Crazy
Horse" in the marketing of a malt liquor product. SBC
Holdings issued a formal apology and settled with the
2. Richard Handler's (1985) essay on the politics of cultural property
legislation and the expansion of the concept of patrimoine in Quebec
demonstrates that such politics is also central to certain forms
of nationalism and subnationalism. National and subnational polities,
he suggests, especially emerging ones, claim to "have" culture
and construct policies of legal exclusion, rights, and ownership
around it in an effort to bolster their political legitimacy. Here I
concentrate more on issues of representation and political-economics
than on the forms of nationalism and subnationalism of which
such claims are part.
greene Indigenous People Incorporated? F 213
Native American plaintiffs in 2001 (Gale 2001). Halfway
across the world in Southern Africa, the San peoples, now
enveloped by a number of ethnotourism enterprises, presented
a very similar complaint about the misuse of their
cultural property. A group of !Xu^ n San denounced a
South African photographer and a local tourist lodge for
the unauthorized use of a photograph that featured a
now-deceased leader of the San in tourist brochures (Sylvain
2002:1080).
These examples suggest that at one level indigenous
people are struggling to monitor and assert more direct
control over their cultural property by challenging and
politicizing its use by nonindigenous actors. Their own
economic motivations seem to be a secondary concern.
The Crazy Horse case, for example, involved not monetary
damages but culturally appropriate compensation
including racehorses, braids of tobacco and sweetgrass,
and Pendleton blankets (Gale 2001). These strategies to
reclaim tangible and intangible elements of their culture
from nonindigenous private parties (e.g., corporations,
museums, researchers, tourist agencies) and effectively
remove them from the public domain revolve primarily
around the apparent sacrilege and defamation that the
misuse, possession, display, and/or commercial exploitation
of these elements entails.
The contemporary search for scientific-commercial
utility in the worlďs biological resources known as bioprospecting
confronts a similar set of issues with respect
to indigenous claims to traditional medicinal
knowledge as cultural or intellectual property. In this
sphere of practices and politics a set of dynamics is
emerging that requires as much attention to its economic
aspects as to ever-present concerns about sacrilege
and defamation. In this paper I hope to raise a
series of provocative questions about what is at stake
when indigenous representatives take their own economic
aspirations seriously in negotiations over the potential
market value of their people's traditional medical
knowledge and the kinds of new problems that
emerge as a result. In this sense, I depart from a very
old Durkheimian structural-functionalist tradition in
anthropology. Instead of focusing on the principles of
lineage, marriage, descent, and so on, that structure the
corporate kin group, I am interested in the contemporary
political-economics that give rise to entrepreneurial
and identity-based strategies of indigenous incorporation
in cultural property claims. What political and
economic dilemmas arise from the treatment of indigenous
medical knowledge as property in the current era
of drug bioprospecting and the pursuit of sustainable
development? And what kinds of dilemmas are encountered
when exclusive cultural property owners
must be legally and contractually defined in a terrain
that involves the multiple agendas and differing expectations
of indigenous representatives, drug corporations,
state institutions, academics, NGOs, and activists
of all sorts?
Drug Bioprospecting and Indigenous Property
Claims to Traditional Knowledge
The 1990s witnessed a resurgence of public and private
interest in the potential of plant-based sources for new
pharmaceutical products after a steady decline in such
research since the mid-twentieth century. The United
Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, ratified in
1992, is the primary international regulatory agreement
concerned with bioprospecting. In an effort to address
North/South, developed/developing inequities in the international
biotechnology industry, the convention recognizes
each state's sovereign control over access to biological
resources found in its national territory. This
provides poorer nation-states with considerably more
leverage in negotiating the terms for the extraction of
biological resources from their territories--resources
that were previously considered part of a universal public
domain or common heritage of humankind. Furthermore,
article 8j of the convention suggests that bioprospecting
efforts that draw on traditional uses of biological
resources and result in successful commercial ventures
should entail protection for and benefit sharing with the
indigenous or local populations whose knowledge contributes
to biologically engineered products.
The possibility of future drugs based on traditional
plant remedies is in large part rooted in historical examples--aspirin,
antibiotics, and quinine being only a
few of the more common. The idea of medicinally valuable
plants is often invoked with images of indigenous
groups, their traditional medical practices, and the miracle
drugs that presumably lie undiscovered in the
depths of the tropical forest (see Goering 1995, Dye
2000). However, it is unclear whether the future of pharmaceuticals
will depend significantly on bioprospecting,
much less on the input of the medical knowledge of
indigenous peoples. Recent prognoses (see Artuso 1997,
Aylward 1995, Moran, King, and Carlson 2001, Economist
1999, Albers-Scho¨nberg 1995, O'Conner 2000,
Macilwain 1998) are not nearly as optimistic as those of
the early nineties (e.g., Pollack 1992).
In response to current pharmaceutical bioprospecting
activities and the UN Convention, many now conceptualize
traditional knowledge as a novel form of collective
intellectual property (see Rosenthal 1997; Cox and
Balick 1994; Elisabetsky 1991; Plotkin 1993; Lewis et al.
1999; King and Tempesta 1994; Boyle 1996; Tobin 1999b,
1994). Rosemary Coombe (1999, 1998) is critical of this
move because intellectual property is historically associated
with an ideology of possessive individualism and
romanticized individual authorship, a peculiar feature of
and for capitalist societies. She is nevertheless cognizant
of the political-rhetorical potential of intellectual property
claims when they are deployed by historically subjugated
indigenous groups eager to gain some control
over the market forces transforming their societies (1998:
chap. 5). Indigenous activists offer differing opinions:
some enthusiastically promote the idea of traditional
knowledge as intellectual property while others reject it
214 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
as an imposition of Western categories on their own cultural
forms (see Brush 1999, Coombe 1999). Environmental
NGOs, also crucial actors in the debate over bioprospecting,
often position themselves as a counterbalance
to the exploitative tendencies of transnational
capital interests and as allies of indigenous, local, and
Third World peoples more generally.
Darrell Posey was one of the first anthropologists to
engage and promote the idea of traditional knowledge as
indigenous groups' collective intellectual property (see
Posey 1990).3
Other anthropologists have since cited
problems with the arbitrary exclusivity and enclosure
implied in intellectual property, its history as a legal
mechanism of capitalist societies, the incompatibility of
collective and culturally fluid noncapitalist knowledge
systems with individualized, exclusive Western property
laws, and the threat that such a move represents to the
public domain of knowledge (see Brush 1994, 1996, 1999;
Posey and Dutfield 1996; Brown 1998, 2003; Strathern
1996). Dove (1995), Coombe (1999), and Greene (2002)
make the related points that many indigenous peoples
are plagued more by problems of territorial invasion, loss,
dislocation, and marginalization by their own state elites
than by the appropriation of their traditional knowledge
by bio-pirates from the North.
Much of the early literature on bioprospecting and traditional
knowledge as intellectual property is rife with
polemics and ideological positioning. Further debate
should be tempered with more extensive evaluation of
actual cases, the complicated negotiations involved, and,
as Cori Hayden (2003, n.d.) shows, the increasing avoidance
by bioprospectors of such negotiations. On the basis
of my own field studies and related documentation, I
examine a controversial example of pharmaceutical bioprospecting
negotiations involving the Aguaruna people
of the Peruvian Amazon. The Amazon is a particularly
good context in which to begin such an evaluation, given
its central position in much of the contemporary debate
over bioprospecting, indigenous and environmental activism,
and cultural property protection (see, e.g., Conklin
2002). The Aguaruna case will be compared with related
cases in and beyond the Amazon in an attempt to
formulate some preliminary conclusions about the dilemmas
of indigenous representation, indigenous incorporation,
and contemporary claims to culture as prop-
erty.
ICBG-Aguaruna Negotiations, Round 1
One of the most commonly cited examples of renewed
interest in bioprospecting is the public grants program
3. Posey's work brought anthropologists into the debate about biodiversity
and the ethics of ethnobotanical appropriations of traditional
medical knowledge for pharmaceutical research just before
the Second International Congress of Ethnobiology in 1990, where
the issue was more thoroughly discussed. In a later publication with
Dutfield, Posey places the indigenous struggle over traditional
knowledge and intellectual property in the context of the larger
struggle over indigenous and local groups' traditional resource
rights (Posey and Dutfield 1996).
entitled the International Cooperative Biodiversity
Group (ICBG).4
The ICBG program is the product of a
workshop in 1991 sponsored by the National Institutes
of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF),
and the United States Agency for International Development
(USAID). The NIH emerged as the administrator
of the program and announced a competition for large
grants for research into the pharmaceutical potential of
international biodiversity. According to Rosenthal (1997:
281­82), the ICBG program is essentially "experimental,"
since biodiversity's pharmaceutical utility is far
from certain, and is designed to operate with goals that
are clearly responsive to the principles outlined in the
UN Convention.5
Two rounds of ICBG grants, one in 1993 and one in
1998, were awarded to a total of eight research teams
with principal investigators from U.S. universities or
health institutes (see the ICBG web site: www.nih.gov/
fic/opportunities/icbg.html). ICBG grants are based on a
collaborative funding, research, and mutual-benefits relationship
between U.S. and developing-country institutions,
commercial partners, and, in a few cases, specific
indigenous/local communities. The ICBG Request
for Applications (1997:11) promotes "active participation"
of corporate-sector sponsors, effectively obliging
potential grant recipients to secure private partners.
In 1993 a team from Washington University headed
by Walter Lewis, a career ethnobotanist, won an ICBG
award for the collection of plant samples in collaboration
with the Aguaruna, a sizable Amazonian group (population
45,137 in Peru's 1993 census) that inhabits titled
lands in Peru's high jungle region near the Ecuadorian
border. Long reputed to be dedicated warriors, the
Aguaruna have been at the forefront of Amazonian indigenous
political organizing in Peru since the 1970s.
The vast majority of the 187 individually titled Aguaruna
communities are affiliated (with varying degrees of loyalty
and participation) with local Aguaruna-run organizations
or in some cases organizations comanaged with
other Amazonian ethnic groups (the Huambisa and
Chayahuita peoples). As of this writing I can identify 13
distinct organizations of this type, the most recent having
surfaced in 2002. The local organizations typically
4. Other forms of bioprospecting, agro-industrial and human-genetic,
are certainly tied to the larger debate about biodiversity and
access to and ownership of biogenetic resources. While the acquisition
of new seed varieties apparently makes up a significant part
of agricultural industry practices (see Brush 1999), in every case
this also involves access to the human innovation (i.e., cultivation
practices) attached to it. In pharmaceutical bioprospecting, in contrast,
many companies and researchers prefer a random or taxonomic
methodology for collecting biological material to ethnobotanical
methods that involve traditional knowledge and indigenous
rights (see Aylward 1995; Moran, King, and Carlson 2001:506).
5. The United States did not sign the convention, and most interpretations
of its refusal assume that the measures favoring benefit
sharing and national sovereignty over biodiversity resources represented
a potential threat to U.S. corporate interests in foreign
biological resources. However, this does not neatly fit with the
virtually simultaneous appearance of the ICBG program, in which
the basic principles of the convention are clearly taken into
account.
greene Indigenous People Incorporated? F 215
Fig. 1. Agreement structure of the first round of
ICBG-Aguaruna negotiations.
coordinate with or are claimed as local affiliates by one
of two national indigenous confederations based in Lima,
the Peruvian capital. All of this makes for a complicated
set of political alliances and divisions among the larger
Aguaruna collective, as the ICBG researchers soon dis-
covered.
Under the ICBG protocols, Washington University's
research was carried out as a partnership with Peruvian
and indigenous institutions. Washington University, the
Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia (UPCH), the Museo
de Historia Natural de la Universidad San Marcos,
and a category termed "Aguaruna People" constituted
the four partners. All three institutions participated in
plant collections with the Aguaruna, with Washington
University and UPCH collecting for use in biological
screening and the museum for an inventory of Peru's
biodiversity. On the basis of prior contacts with Monsanto
Corporation in the St. Louis area and in order to
comply with the ICBG program's "encouragement" of
private-sector collaboration, Washington University secured
the participation of G. D. Searle & Co. (then Monsanto's
pharmaceutical division).
According to Lewis (interview, 2000), the Organización
Central de Comunidades Aguarunas del Alto Maran~ on
(OCCAAM) had been considered as a potential indigenous
partner in the original ICBG grant application, but
having received the award the ICBG team entered into
negotiations with the Consejo Aguaruna Huambisa, historically
a much more influential indigenous organization
in the region. Lewis (interview, 2000) says that the
NIH referred him to the Consejo and its internationally
famous founder and president, Evaristo Nugkuag, but the
current director of the ICBG program, Josh Rosenthal
(personal communication), disputes this. In any case, the
Consejo was clearly the more prominent institutional
actor among the Aguaruna. Until recently it was commonly
presumed to represent a large proportion of the
Aguaruna population, and without question it has a more
illustrious history than the smaller, less visible Aguaruna
organizations. Furthermore, Nugkuag's involvement
in local, national, and international indigenous organizing
had equipped him with substantial experience
in international networking and won him several prestigious
prizes. His fame was, of course, not without substantial
controversy in the heated politics of indigenous
representation.6
In April 1994 the ICBG team signed a very simple
letter of intent to collaborate with the Consejo Aguaruna
Huambisa in which the indigenous organization was
promised an up-front annual payment for plant collec6.
He was awarded the Right Livelihood (Alternative Nobel) Prize
in 1986 and the Goldman Environmental Prize in 1991 in recognition
of his leadership in the Asociación de Desarrollo Interetnica
de la Selva Peruana (AIDESEP) and the Coordinadora de Organizaciones
Indígenas de la Cuenca Amazónica (COICA) and for work
in the areas of indigenous rights and environmental conservation.
While he is clearly an effective and charismatic leader, the degree
to which he is representative of indigenous Amazonian peoples has
been questioned by Amazonian indigenous organizations that compete
for member support (see Smith 1996).
tions and, in relatively ill-defined terms, a share of future
royalties. Having secured a preliminary agreement with
the Consejo, Washington University researchers returned
to the United States and formalized the terms of
Searle's participation with a license option agreement
that made Washington University responsible for delivering
the annual payments to the Consejo and any future
royalties to be shared among the four partners. Under
this agreement and the letter of intent signed with the
Consejo, Washington University essentially became the
legal intermediary between the U.S. pharmaceutical interest
and all the Peruvian partners (fig. 1).
When the Consejo Aguaruna Huambisa heard of the
separate agreement between Washington University and
Searle, it began stalling the research and demanding
more information about the content of the agreement.
As Nugkuag reasons, "They [the ICBG team] were not
very clear. The earnings [i.e., the future royalty scheme],
logically, are established between Monsanto and Washington
University. And we were not included in that
agreement, thus, our claim [to share in the earnings] is
in vain" (interview, 2000). With these reservations about
the potential benefits and the separate agreement, the
Consejo consulted with a North American NGO, Rural
Advancement Foundation International (RAFI), which
acts as a watchdog with regard to bioprospecting activ-
ities.7
It was through contacts at RAFI that the Consejo
obtained a copy of the license agreement (Evaristo Nugkuag,
interview, 2000). RAFI published the royalty rates
on the World Wide Web and accused Searle and the ICBG
team of being "bio-pirates" with the intention of exploiting
Aguaruna knowledge in the interest of corporate
7. RAFI has since changed its name to ETC Group (see
www.etcgroup.org).
216 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
gain (RAFI 1994). During the summer of 1994 Brendan
Tobin, an Irish-born Peruvian-naturalized lawyer working
in an NGO called the Sociedad Peruana de Derecho
Ambiental (SPDA), received a copy of the agreement and
then requested a copy of the letter of intent from the
Consejo (Brendan Tobin, personal communication). Tobin
objected to the legal inconsistencies between the letter
of intent and the agreement, criticized the royalty
rate as too low, and judged the ICBG-Searle research "directly
linked to the furtherance of the economic and development
interests of U.S. industry" (1994:11).
The idea that the Consejo was being offered a skimpy
benefit package thus arose from consultation with the
two NGOs. It had in fact already signed the letter of
intent and accepted $10,000 as part of an annual payment
specified in the letter as compensation for collections
(see Lambrecht 1998). The two NGO opinions advocated
more direct and transparent negotiations between Searle
and the Aguaruna (see Tobin 1994, RAFI 1995). Both
RAFI's polemical attack on the ICBG program and Tobin's
legal analysis assumed that bioprospecting with
Aguaruna traditional knowledge was of great importance
to Searle and therefore the flaws of the agreement structure
represented an attempt to cheat the Aguaruna out
of highly valued traditional knowledge.
With the Consejo's concerns unresolved, the ICBG
team entered the field in late 1994. It is impossible to
verify exactly how and where it collected plants during
this conflictive period. Lewis (interview, 2000) maintains
that the collections were made in conjunction with local
Ministry of Agriculture officials and largely without the
use of native informants in the hills around a nonindigenous
settlement called Imazita. Nugkuag (interview,
2000) says that the ICBG researchers made a critical
mistake in choosing to work with the Ministry of
Agriculture and that "without having authorization to
enter into communities with the community chiefs they
went astray in order to collect orchids. They collected
other species of medicinal plants in what could be called
a discrete fashion." Lewis (personal communication) adamantly
denies this latter claim. He says that of the
roughly 300 samples collected during the disputed period,
only about 10 samples were collected with
Aguaruna informants and that these came from the
home community of the OCCAAM, from which the researchers
had received consent.
In early 1995, as its distrust of the ICBG team's field
activities grew, the Consejo withdrew from the ICBG
project. The ICBG team returned to the Aguaruna area
to talk to the leaders of OCCAAM in the hope of finding
an indigenous partner that would be receptive to the
research. OCCAAM leaders showed support for the project
and soon signed onto the ICBG program with a separate
and much more elaborate agreement than the original
letter of intent. On learning of the new agreement,
the Consejo sent a strongly worded letter, signed by various
Aguaruna community chiefs and Consejo leaders,
to officials at the NIH and Washington University protesting
the ICBG activities. It made the letter public
through its contacts at RAFI, who immediately translated
it and posted parts of it on its web site (see RAFI
1995). The letter alleged, among other things, that Washington
University had denied the Consejo adequate information
about the license agreement and entered
Aguaruna territory without authorization and vigorously
demanded that the project be terminated. Significantly,
it also implied that OCCAAM did not exist (referring to
it as "the phantom group"). The organizational efforts
of OCCAAM (initiated around 1975) had begun prior to
the Consejo's (initiated around 1977), however, and the
relation between the two organizations had been conflictive
from the beginning.
In its web-site publications RAFI portrays the Consejo
Aguaruna Huambisa as the sole organizational representative
of Aguaruna people. Its report on the ICBG conflict
with the Consejo states that "without consultation with
or approval from indigenous people, Washington University
researchers unilaterally decided to initiate collection
of samples and ethnographic material (to be provided
to chemical giant Monsanto) in remote native
communities in northeastern Peru" (RAFI 1995:5). They
make no mention of the ICBG's relations and subsequent
written agreement with OCCAAM, instead presenting
"the Aguaruna" as a single homogeneous mass unproblematically
represented by the Consejo--a representation
that does not at all reflect contemporary or customary
Aguaruna reality. OCCAAM clearly suffered from
international invisibility and a lack of transnational
NGO contacts while the Consejo did not. But the tide
was about to change.
Although the desire to have the project removed from
Aguaruna territory did not materialize, the Consejo's
protest letter and its translation/publication by RAFI for
an English-speaking activist audience proved to be a useful
weapon. ICBG program officials at the NIH took the
protest seriously, launched their own investigation, and
insisted that the ICBG researchers return all the samples
collected during the period in question to Peru. The NIH
also insisted that the ICBG researchers clarify the terms
of consent to the project with legitimate representatives
of Aguaruna communities if they wished to continue
with the grant.8
A new round of negotiations was in
order.
ICBG-Aguaruna Negotiations, Round 2
In response to the Consejo's protest letter and in the hope
of salvaging the project, an Aguaruna named Ricardo
Apanú involved in OCCAAM (who later became the
ICBG field coordinator) began to organize a defense of
the ICBG team's research activities with the support of
two other Aguaruna organizations, the Federación de Co8.
Notably, the 300 samples collected during the disputed time
period were returned not to the Aguaruna but to the Peruvian Ministry
of Agriculture (Tobin 1999a). Regardless of the truth or falsity
of the various accusations leveled at him by the Consejo (which I
cannot judge, not having been present), Lewis now earnestly acknowledges
his "political naiveté" (see Lambrecht 1998) as regards
the complexity of Aguaruna politics and organization structure.
greene Indigenous People Incorporated? F 217
munidades Nativas Aguarunas del Río Nieva (FECONARIN)
and the Federación Aguaruna del Río Domingusa
(FAD). In April 1995 these three organizations signed,
stamped, and sent a written rebuttal to the recipients of
the Consejo protest letter. The "Memorial" clarified that
the ICBG researchers had worked appropriately with the
leaders of OCCAAM and its affiliated communities. It
also harshly criticized Evaristo Nugkuag, forcefully rejected
his "representativeness" of the Aguaruna people
("desconocer su representatividad"), and even questioned
the authenticity of the protest letter.
In a further effort to turn the political tides in theirfavor,
the three local Aguaruna organizations put the ICBG researchers
in contact with a national-level actor: the Confederación
de Nacionalidades Amazónicas del Perú
(CONAP). Based in Lima, CONAP is a multiethnic Amazonian
indigenous confederation to which OCCAAM,
FECONARIN, and FAD claim affiliation, and its president
is of Aguaruna origin. Initial discussions culminated in a
large meeting in December 1995 in Santa María de Nieva,
a small river port in Aguaruna territory. In the absence of
the Consejo Aguaruna Huambisa and several other
Aguaruna organizations, CONAP convoked a meeting of
some community and organizational leaders, among them
leaders and delegates of the three organizations already
interested, two other Aguaruna organizations, the Organización
de Desarrollo de las Comunidades Fronterizas del
Cenepa (ODECOFROC) and the Organización Aguaruna
del Alto Mayo (OAAM), and a Huambisa organization,
the Federación de Comunidades Nativas del Río Santiago
(FECONARSA).
Also present at the meeting were the ICBG researchers,
Brendan Tobin from the SPDA, and a Searle representative,
establishing the first direct contact between
the drug company and Aguaruna representatives. After
a long debate about the ICBG project and much discussion
about internal issues, OCCAAM, FECONARIN,
and FAD accepted the ICBG research in their affiliated
communities, confided in their national-level associate,
CONAP, and unofficially incorporated a consortium of
Aguaruna organizations which hereafter I will refer to
as CONAP and Affiliates. While OAAM communities
initially fell outside of the research area, they were later
included in the ICBG agreement and constituted a fourth
local Aguaruna partner to CONAP and Affiliates.9
An
important issue discussed during the 1995 meeting was
the possible inclusion of ODECOFROC and FECONARSA.
CONAP leaders explained that while the other
organizations had registered as nonprofits (asociaciones
9. Acceptance by CONAP and Affiliates of course did not automatically
mean acceptance by all Aguaruna communities formally
affiliated with those organizations. In many instances, individual
communities challenged CONAP and Affiliates' authority to accept
the project on their behalf and refused to permit the ICBG researchers
to work in their communal territory despite their affiliation
with one of the participating organizations. While there is
not enough space to document all this local dissent, it is important
that it be mentioned, since even the apparent incorporation of these
organizations provoked substantial internal debate, discussion, and
disagreement among Aguaruna community leaders.
civiles), these two lacked formal recognition within the
Peruvian legal system and, further, had previously maintained
close affiliations with the Consejo Aguaruna
Huambisa. Both the president of ODECOFROC and a
delegate from FECONARSA used the occasion to criticize
the Consejo. The seemingly eternal association between
the Consejo and its once-celebrated founder and
visionary leader converted the event into an opportunity
to pass judgment on Evaristo Nugkuag, now a common
target in the Aguaruna's internal blame game. In fact, it
was during this meeting that ODECOFROC's founder
and first president announced that his organization
would soon formally disassociate itself from the Consejo.
Although both organizations eventually gained legal
status as nonprofits and disassociated themselves from
the Consejo, neither ever became a member of CONAP
and Affiliates or received benefits from the research.10
As a result of this historic meeting, three persons were
designated to negotiate the contractual details of
CONAP and Affiliates' acceptance with the ICBG researchers
and Searle: César Sarasara, CONAP's Aguaruna
president, Mercedes Manríquez, a lawyer from Lima
working with CONAP, and Brendan Tobin of the SPDA.
After various discussions and drafts of potential agreements,
in May 1996 a team including Sarasara and the
two lawyers traveled to St. Louis to negotiate the final
details with Searle and its lawyers face to face. Figure 2
diagrams the resulting agreement structure.
In this second round CONAP and Affiliates, represented
by Sarasara and the two lawyers, were in direct
contractual negotiations with Searle, the relations no
longer being mediated by Washington University. This
is a significant achievement for the indigenous peoples
involved, and they recognize it as such. It is certainly
one of the first instances of an indigenous group's representing
its own interests--albeit as mediated by nonindigenous
legal experts--with a large pharmaceutical
entity in negotiations over the potential commercialization
of traditional knowledge. This round of negotiations
resulted in a different royalty and annual collection
payment scheme and, most significant, a know-how license
agreement. Tobin (personal communication) believes
that the know-how license is a truly novel step in
contract law, for the first time giving a group of indigenous
peoples control and full ownership of its traditional
knowledge. In legal terms the representatives of
CONAP and Affiliates, who constituted the only indigenous
signing partners, licensed directly to Searle the
traditional medicinal knowledge, conceived as collective
know-how, of all the Aguaruna for an initial four years
(see Tobin 1999b, n.d.). The annual payments distribut10.
The information presented about this meeting of Aguaruna organizations
with the ICBG researchers, SPDA, and Searle is taken
from notes that form an appendix to the ICBG biological collecting
agreement signed in 1996. Ironically, despite the absence of thenactive
leaders of the Consejo Aguaruna Huambisa, the secretary,
Santiago Manuig, was a former president of the Consejo (1989­93).
Having developed his own conflictive relationship with Nugkuag,
he used the meeting to call into question the activities of his
successor.
218 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
Fig. 2. Agreement structure of the second round of
ICBG-Aguaruna negotiations.
able by Searle were reformulated and divided between a
flat "collection payment" for the plant samples and "license
fees" for the Aguaruna medicinal know-how. The
know-how license also included a stipulation of two
early, nonreturnable royalty payments (termed "milestones")
to CONAP and Affiliates contingent on Searle's
reaching two very advanced stages of new-drug approval
based on a lead from the ICBG research.
In addition to the know-how license, CONAP and Affiliates
signed a biological collecting agreement with the
ICBG researchers specifying the terms and conditions of
the field collections. This agreement included a stipulation
"to ensure the fair and equitable sharing of benefits
among the Aguaruna People" (article 3.01). The
agreement thus remains open to other Aguaruna communities,
provided that they apply for inclusion by affiliating
themselves with an existing Aguaruna organization,
and to other Aguaruna organizations, provided
that they are approved by CONAP and Affiliates in a
traditional assembly and dialogue called the Ipaamamu
that has become central to CONAP's strategy for dealing
with the local constituency (article 7). This measure of
inclusion and the promotion of equitable sharing are significant
because the Aguaruna consortium represented
by CONAP and Affiliates in fact accounts for less than
half the Aguaruna population (see Tobin 1999a). Nonexclusivity
in the contracts reflects the fact that the property
rights claim being made to indigenous medicinal
know-how is a collective one in the name of the "Aguaruna
People," the category that has been consistently
used in the ICBG agreements.
The definition of "Aguaruna People" used in the biological
collecting agreement identifies them as those
"who live in the collection area," while the "collection
area" is defined as the areas "inhabited by members of
the Collaborating Organizations" (article 1). "Collaborating
Organizations" (article 1.06) refers to what I have
chosen to call "CONAP and Affiliates" as a way of reflecting
the contractual nature of this attempt to incorporate
the specific subset of Aguaruna organizations that
signed the agreement. This definition excludes Aguaruna
in other organizations or other nonorganized areas who
choose not to associate themselves with CONAP and
Affiliates and may not even know that such a possibility
exists. Ironically, these nonparticipants, including the
Consejo Aguaruna Huambisa, constitute a clear
Aguaruna majority. Further, it is quite clear from the
second-round agreements that any and all monies are and
will continue to be funneled directly through CONAP
and Affiliates (article 3.01). In short, the resulting ICBG
agreements, while they may contain pretensions to nonexclusivity
among the indigenous partners, effectively
produce the opposite. The legal arrangement clearly
moves in the direction of contractual and financial legitimation
of CONAP and Affiliates as representatives
of the "Aguaruna People."11
In essence, therefore, the relatively arbitrary exclusivity
and oversimplification represented by RAFI's move
to legitimate the Consejo Aguaruna Huambisa in protest
of a bioprospecting project in round 1 was undone and
then effectively duplicated at another level by ICBG and
Searle's countermove to legitimate CONAP and Affiliates
in support of the project in round 2. The major difference
was in their opposed agendas and the indigenous
organizations they chose to back as the legitimate
"voice" of the "Aguaruna People."
Calculating the Results: Bad Odds and Big
Expectations
With the multiple agreements in place, the ICBGAguaruna
project finally got under way with renewed
collections in 1996 and worked in communities affiliated
with OCCAAM, FAD, FECONARIN, and OAAM over
the next four years. The researchers visited 22 Aguaruna
communities and collected approximately 3,500 medic11.
The Peruvian state, despite its signing of the Convention on
Biological Diversity and the participation of two major Peruvian
universities (one public and one private), was notably absent (except
for the requirement of licenses from the Ministry of Agriculture)
in both rounds of the ICBG-Aguaruna negotiations (Tobin n.d.:6­7).
Interestingly, however, on the basis of its experience with the case
the state has begun promoting the opposite approach. The agreements
between the Aguaruna and the ICBG and Searle have been
used as a model for proposed legislation for access to genetic resources
and traditional knowledge in which the state will take more
of an interventionist role (see Tobin n.d.:31­32).
greene Indigenous People Incorporated? F 219
inal extracts.12
In terms of global biodiversity equity and
the goals of the Convention on Biological Diversity, the
host-country benefits were not insignificant. According
to Lewis (interview, 2000), the value of the grant funds,
resources, and technology brought to Peru by the project
totaled nearly $1 million. The majority of these benefits
were made possible by public grant funds and were channeled
into the two Peruvian universities, providing research
and training opportunities for Peruvian students
and faculty (Lewis et al. 1999:81). The ICBG project also
brought several environmental training and higher-education
opportunities to the Aguaruna involved (Lewis,
interview, 2000). Two Aguaruna in particular were
trained so thoroughly in botanical methods and scientific
classification of plants that they eventually went on to
direct their own field collections (Lewis et al. 1999:81).
CONAP and Affiliates used a portion of the annual
know-how license and collection fees contributed by
Searle for their own organizational needs and distributed
the rest to their affiliated communities in the form of
small loans, scholarships for Aguaruna students, and individual
reimbursement to field informants who worked
with the ICBG researchers in identifying medicinal
plants.
One of the most significant effects of the ICBG is the
amount of political and symbolic capital it has bestowed
on CONAP and its Aguaruna president, César Sarasara.
When I first visited in early 1997, CONAP consisted of
little more than César Sarasara in a small Lima office
with a couple of desks, a phone, and a typewriter and
was constantly borrowing money to pay the rent and
utility bills. A couple of years later it was staffed by a
number of salaried workers, sponsored events, and had
the visible material items found in any functioning NGO
(computers, fax machine, active web site, etc.). Sarasara,
whose business degree and Aguaruna origin make him
an appealing leader and a savvy multicultural negotiator,
has become a frequent guest on the global indigenousrepresentative
circuit. He is much sought-after by the
press, has been awarded a prize by the International Society
of Ethnobiology, and has become a coauthor of a
scientific paper--all events directly related to the
project.13
The rise of CONAP and Affiliates has its counterpart
in the fall of the Consejo Aguaruna Huambisa, whose
momentary success in questioning the legitimacy of the
ICBG research via RAFI was soon overshadowed by
12. The number 3,500 is slightly misleading in that, according to
Lewis (personal communication), many of these extracts are duplicates
of the same plant. It is also important to note that other
nonmedicinal plants (some of them unidentifiable by the Aguaruna)
were collected for the purposes of a biodiversity inventory (samples
to be sent both to the Museo de San Marcos in Lima and to the
Missouri Botanical Gardens) that was not made available for screening.
Therefore the total number of plants collected was in the neighborhood
of 4,800 (Lewis, interview, 2000).
13. Sarasara's interactions with the press are various (for examples,
see Lambrecht 1998, Chatterjee 1997). He was awarded the first
José Guallart Prize by the International Society of Ethnobiology
(Lewis, personal communication) and is a coauthor of Lewis et al.
(1999).
CONAP and Affiliates' successful renegotiation of the
project. Questioning the legitimacy of the Consejo, in
part because of its strong association with its former
controversial leader, has become commonplace in Peru
for both external actors and the indigenous peoples
themselves. One of the founders of the Consejo, Pancho
Juwau (interview, 2000), remarked cynically that when
people mention the Consejo now they think, "Eso apesta
desde lejos" (That stinks from far away).14
There is another important and sobering result of the
ICBG-Aguaruna experience: a clear clash between the
odds and the expectations generated in the course of the
negotiations (see Greene 2002). CONAP and Affiliates'
attempt to privatize Aguaruna traditional medicinal
knowledge has resulted in local expectations of large
sums of money. Indeed, raising expectations of a substantial
economic gain over the long term became an
essential part of their strategy to persuade local communities
to accept the project. A past president of FAD
reported, for example, that the Aguaruna on the Domingusa
River--in good millenarian fashion--were expecting
millions of dollars in the year 2000, merely four
years after the initiation of field collections. In meetings
of CONAP with OAAM's affiliated communities I witnessed
leaders several times creating high expectations
by speaking about the arrival of millions of dollars almost
as if it were guaranteed. The realization that these
expectations were exaggerated has already begun to manifest
itself in local resentment toward the leaders of
CONAP, who are deemed responsible.
From the outset Searle used a screening process employing
high-throughput machinery that tested plant
samples for bioactivity against certain diseases that the
company had identified beforehand in the hope of randomly
producing interesting leads. This approach effectively
ignored the specific ethnomedicinal information
collected by the ICBG researchers that had been the object
of so much political controversy in the first place.15
Further, the tests were limited to diabetes, cardiovascular
problems, and inflammatory diseases, health con14.
The detailed history of indigenous organizations is best left for
another paper. While the Consejo was originally intended to represent
several river areas (Maran~ on, Chiriaco, Nieva, Santiago, Cenepa,
Domingusa) and managed many projects, OCCAAM was
largely isolated. FECONARIN and FAD were founded around 1990
by Aguaruna disillusioned with the Consejo, and by the mid-1990s
ODECOFROC and FECONARSA had appeared in the same area
with familiar criticisms of the Consejo. The current leaders of the
Consejo are extremely self-conscious about the organization's fragmentation
and loss of prestige. The past two or three presidents
have all begun taking measures to address what they call the Consejo's
"crisis." So far the results are fairly meager.
15. Some would argue, of course, that the mere fact that the plants
have already been identified by the Aguaruna as medicinally useful
is in itself an intellectual contribution (a sort of prescreening). My
own opinion is that the contribution is restricted at that point to
a purely abstract utility without any contextual, practical, medical,
cultural, or social content. Generally ethnobotanists believe that
the chances for a plant identified by local informants to become
useful in research and development are much greater if detailed
and specific information about its "usefulness" is used as a guide
in researching how the plant might be developed (see Farnsworth
1990).
220 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
ditions that are much more common in Searle's consumer
base in wealthy countries than among the
Aguaruna.16
In September 1999, at the final ICBG annual
meeting with CONAP and Affiliates, Walter Lewis of
Washington University announced on behalf of Searle
(which had sent no representative) that the pharmaceutical
company had found no leads worthy of pursuit and
did not intend to extend the know-how license. From
Searle's economic point of view, the deal was closed.
The fact that Searle never really explored the Aguaruna
know-how that it had gone to so much trouble to acquire
does not mean that the company did not gain from participating
in the ICBG program. Monsanto featured the
ICBG-Aguaruna project in an annual report to its consumers
and shareholders as an important effort to conserve
the tropical forest and promote benefit sharing in
accordance with the Convention on Biological Diversity,
praising the Aguaruna's traditional medical knowledge
(Monsanto 1998:28). This suggests complicated motives
that involve a concern with marketing and company image
in an era in which sustainable development is the
discourse of the day as much as or perhaps more than a
concern with successful cooperation with indigenous
peoples on an environmentalist agenda. Searle's cancellation
of the know-how license was, of course, entirely
legitimate from a financial and contractual point of view.
After all, business is business.17
Bioprospecting and Indigenous Property
Claims in the Broader View
The case studies that are now emerging complicate the
clichéd accounts of bioprospecting negotiations, indigenous
cultural property claims, and the politics of indigenous
representation. Two of the best-known cases
involve patent challenges, a successful one against a
transnational corporation and a less successful one
against a U.S. researcher. After several years of public
protest and concerted legal effort by a coalition of Indian
and U.S. research institutes, NGOs, and farm organizations,
the European Patent Office revoked a patent on a
fungicidal compound derived from the neem tree held
by the agro-industrial company W. R. Grace (see Rag16.
For an account of the division of research interests between
Searle, UPCH, and Washington University and their results thus
far, see Lewis et al. (1999).
17. Gaining a fuller impression of Searle's interests and motivations
has proved difficult, especially given corporate turnovers and takeovers.
I spoke with an ex-Searle representative who had previously
worked closely with the ICBG researchers and had contact with
CONAP and Affiliates. He chose not to go on record with any
information about the project, given that Searle was no longer his
employer. Press releases from Searle related to the project were
unavailable because of the corporate restructuring. When Monsanto
merged with Pharmacia/Upjohn, Searle was dissolved and restructured
into Pharmacia Corporation. A media representative from
Pharmacia generously provided me with some articles that mentioned
the ICBG project from the company archive, but he was
unable to locate any press releases distributed by Searle itself and
had no information on current contacts within the company with
knowledge about the ICBG project.
havan 2000). Vandana Shiva (2000), one of the most visible
Indian activists and scientists involved in the protest,
has shown that the medicinal and pesticidal
properties of neem have been known to farmers in India
for millennia and that the tree figures as a sacred symbol
in Sanskrit and Islamic traditions. In arguing that neem
has "become a symbol of Indian indigenous knowledge,"
she reveals an apparent conflation of the modern Indian
nation with the many ancient and contemporary peoples
native to the subcontinent that have recognized the
tree's multiple uses.
In 1999 a coalition formed between North American
environmental law NGOs and the Coordinadora de las
Organizaciones Indígenas de la Cuenca Amazónica
(COICA), based in Quito, Ecuador, filed a similar petition
with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) requesting
the cancellation of a U.S. researcher's patent on
an ostensibly "new" variety of ayahuasca. Indigenous
peoples throughout the Amazon have used this vine for
centuries in the preparation of hallucinogenic remedies
that are central to local cosmologies and traditional
forms of healing. The PTO initially recognized the validity
of the petition but later, on very shaky legal
grounds, declined to revoke the patent. Representatives
of COICA considered this decision a "profoundly disturbing
sacrilege and assault on their traditional values"
(Wiser 2001:13).
These patent disputes show that some indigenous peoples
and even some spokespersons and activists who
identify their entire Third World nations with indigenous
peoples (as in the neem case) feel deeply affronted
by some cases of politicized bioprospecting. The apparent
sacrilege committed and the global historical inequities
reenacted when foreign companies and researchers
claim culturally sacred remedies as patented property
clearly play a crucial role in the way in which indigenous
and Third World indigenous nationalists conceive of
their cultural property claims. In the name of all Amazonian
peoples, for example, the president of COICA,
Antonio Jacanamijoy, defended his organization's position
by stating that ayahuasca is "a sacred plant used to
cure our illnesses, clean our spirits, and predict our future.
Ayahuasca belongs to all our communities that use
it and therefore it is impossible that it could be the property
of just one man" (COICA 2002:2). In the neem case
Shiva (2000) makes it clear that the patenting of a
method of neem seed emulsion by W. R. Grace is sacrilege.
Furthermore, she argues that this case of international
"bio-piracy" not only was legally unfounded (a
claim that was upheld by the European Patent Office)
but would have resulted in a price hike that would have
adversely affected traditional farmers who relied on
neem seeds.
The ICBG-Aguaruna negotiations raise a set of issues
that have received less attention in the bioprospecting
and indigenous rights literature. In particular, I have emphasized
the politics involved in legitimating (and delegitimating)
indigenous forms of representation, the
ramifications of the incorporation of indigenous groups
in claiming culture as property, and the possible clash
greene Indigenous People Incorporated? F 221
of expectations associated with the pharmaceutical sector's
tenuous commitment to bioprospecting. These
problems are not unique to the ICBG-Aguaruna case. The
events leading to the collapse of an ICBG project with
the Maya of Chiapas, Mexico, in 2000 are strikingly similar
(see Brown 2003, Nigh 2002). Using a similarly aggressive
Internet campaign, RAFI again inserted a biopiracy-watchdog
agenda into the negotiations in
conjunction with a faction of Maya representatives opposed
to the research and this time helped bring the project
to a complete halt (RAFI 2000). Similarly labyrinthine
politics involving rival indigenous representatives,
NGO intervention, and lack of consensus about legitimate
representation of the Maya people played a prominent
part. The corporate partner in this case was a startup
drug company with capital resources so limited as to
make the likelihood of a major drug discovery roughly
equivalent to that of winning the Mexican lottery, according
to Brent and Elois Ann Berlin, the principal investigators
of the Maya project (2002:467). Controversy
over indigenous representation and distrust of the motives
of foreign bioprospectors were matched again by a
heightened and somewhat distorted perception of the potential
economic ramifications of such research into traditional
plant knowledge.
Of the eight ICBG grants awarded, the two that were
clearly the most controversial, ICBG-Aguaruna and
ICBG-Maya, entailed direct negotiations between indigenous
peoples and bioprospectors and the intervention
of interested third-party NGOs claiming to act on behalf
of or in conjunction with those indigenous peoples.
Meanwhile, other ICBG projects have seemingly been
carried off without the slightest scandal in collaboration
with host-country universities, research institutes, and
governmental agencies. Cori Hayden (n.d.) has been
tracking another ICBG project that is collecting plants
in Chile, Argentina, and Mexico, working with public
and private universities and research institutes. ICBGLatin
America has received two rounds of ICBG funding
and established apparently cordial relations with its
host-country partners (see Timmerman et al. 1999). Hayden
attributes this apparent success to a strategic avoidance
on the part of the researchers of the indigenousknowledge
question and of identifiably "indigenous"
communities that might claim their own cultural property
rights. The ICBG researchers avoid this issue by
buying plant samples in urban herbal markets from local
vendors. They consider this "de-indigenized" plant
knowledge circulating in urban markets in an already
commodified form as part of the national public domain.
Thus, while they purchase plants at a "fair" price from
local vendors, the only long-term benefit-sharing obligation
they feel compelled to recognize is to the nation,
represented by their host-country research partners'
institutions.
The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) ICBG program
in Laos and Vietnam seems to share some of these
dynamics (see Soejarto et al. 1999). The UIC researchers
make collections primarily in national parks (e.g., areas
demarcated as "public" national space) and in contractual
collaboration with state and private research institutions
in the host countries. For the ethnobotanical
component of the project, contact between the foreign
researchers and local communities is mediated by state
institutions such as the National Committee of Ethnic
Communities in Vietnam and the Ministry of Health in
Laos. As beneficiaries of the project, the host-country
institutions essentially speak for and must represent the
interests of the local peoples in the ICBG research (p.
107). Bioprospectors of this sort approach benefit-sharing
obligations primarily as a national problem to be resolved
with state or other host-country institutions that do not
present uncertainty about institutional legitimacy and
representation.
Contrary to the tendency toward hyperbole in accusations
of global bio-piracy and rampant exploitation of
indigenous knowledge, the current state of affairs in
pharamaceutical research suggests that we need a more
subtle understanding of the dynamics at work. Several
observers have noted that from an investment standpoint
drug companies allocate very little to bioprospecting of
any sort compared with their investment in the synthetic,
computer-modeled and engineering-based research
which constitutes the preferred method of drug
development (see Aylward 1995; Albers-Scho¨nberg 1995;
Goering 1995:10). Discourses of sustainable development
and environmental conservation will no doubt continue
to influence drug companies to consider demands
in the public sphere for an environmentally responsible
capitalism. A greener, moral politics requires a greener,
more moral capitalism. Yet, there are inherent contradictions
in the idea of "green capitalism" when it seems
more profitable to maintain the capitalist status quo (see
Gersh 1999). Interests in capital accumulation and survival
among corporate competitors easily outweigh interests
in a renewed moral and environmental order. A
recent report reveals that despite the industry emphasis
on pioneering research and development, drug manufacturers
are in fact remarkably uninventive entrepreneurs
that dedicate more financial resources to advertising and
corporate-image campaigns that boost sales than to discovering
new medicines (Public Citizen 2001). The study
also finds that a considerable proportion (more than half)
of new drug products released between 1982 and 1991
were not miraculous new medicines but "me-too" drugs,
slightly modified imitations of already existing pro-
ducts.
The tenuous commitment to bioprospecting by the
private pharmaceutical sector is especially pronounced
with regard to the kind of bioprospecting that directly
relies on indigenous knowledge. The failure of Shaman
Pharmaceuticals, a start-up company founded in 1990,
to discover a profitable drug based on traditional plant
knowledge only adds to the evidence provided by the
ICBG-Aguaruna and ICBG-Maya projects. Although Shaman
maintains a stance consistent with the Convention
on Biological Diversity, ready to implement profit-sharing
mechanisms with local peoples who contribute traditional
plant knowledge, such a scenario has yet to materialize.
Despite some significant advances with an
222 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
experimental drug named Provir, based on the traditional
Amazonian remedy sangre de grado, Shaman was forced
to close down its pharmaceutical research division and
is currently marketing an unprofitable herbal supplement,
still operating with the same environmental and
moral ideals under a mountain of corporate debt (see
Brown 2003, Economist 1999). This is reason enough for
pause and reflection.
Quandaries of Indigenous Representation and
Incorporation
Pharmaceutical companies' relative uncertainty with respect
to bioprospecting and concerns over corporate image
in an environmental era and indigenous peoples' increasingly
common efforts to treat knowledge as property produce
widely differing expectations, assumptions, and
strategies for negotiation. A panel of external experts identified
the creation of unrealistic expectations surrounding
the potential economic rewards of bioprospecting in developing
regions as one of the major dangers of the ICBG
program's design (see Report of a Special Panel of Experts
on the International Cooperative Biodiversity Group
1997). Others have pointed to the raising of expectations
in economically poor but biodiversity-rich nations as a
general problem created by the rhetoric of bioprospecting
(see Macilwain 1998). I would add that while the creation
of inflated expectations may be a problem within bioprospecting
research as a whole, current cases suggest that
it is most exaggerated and politicized when negotiations
involve the question of indigenous cultural property and
indigenous representation. Indeed, scholars such as Cori
Hayden suggest that in evading the indigenous-knowledge
question and designing bioprospecting activities in terms
of obligations to the nation-state some bioprospectorsconsciously
attempt to avoid controversy, misunderstanding,
and allegations of bio-piracy. Why do contemporary bioprospecting
arrangements with indigenous peoples produce
such contention?
One answer, as some of these cases reveal, is that the
emergent global politics of representation and mobilization
in which many indigenous peoples are involved
has yet to be fully recognized, legitimated, and routinized
by national and international societies and indigenous
communities. The debate over who speaks for whom in
indigenous affairs continues to create crises of representation
in which indigenous leaders, organizations, and
spokespeople are forced to re/negotiate their representativeness
both among themselves and in relation to the
agendas of foreign actors who typically hold positions of
greater power, resources, influence, and prestige.
Coming to terms with the influence of NGOs in this
process is an important step, since relatively little has
been written about them from an anthropological point
of view. While critics see the more powerful international
NGOs as part of a neoliberal project to perpetuate
a false consciousness of marginalized peoples' "empowerment"
(see Petras 1997; Hardt and Negri 2000:36), others
argue that NGOs represent the primary force of democratization,
social service, and development in the age
of the shrinking state (see Meyer 1999, Bebbington et al.
1993, Clark 1990). In the case of indigenous peoples, external
NGO allies and indigenous institutions, often of
the NGO sort themselves, can and do provide important
leverage against private and state interests. But as bureaucratic
institutions with their own political and social
agendas they also often operate at considerable geographic,
cultural, and linguistic distance from local
constituencies, which can result in a tendency to oversimplify
and romanticize indigenous realities. For example,
the currently popular image of Amazonian Indians
as guardians of the tropical forest is in significant
part due to the alliance created between environmental
NGOs and indigenous peoples in the past two decades
(Conklin and Graham 1995). Similarly, examination of
bioprospecting negotiations indicates that NGOs operating
in conjunction with indigenous representatives
play a determinative role in supporting indigenous
claims while also creating exaggerated expectations
about the economic potential of indigenous intellectual
property claims and playing into the fear associated with
the widespread discourse of pharmaceutical bio-piracy.
Such organizations sometimes provide key resources and
scientific and legal expertise, as in the ayahuasca and
neem patent cases. In other cases their activities, however
well intended, effectively result in legitimating the
indigenous groups that most clearly conform to their
own institutional, political, and social objectives and
forms of anticorporate, antibioprospecting self-representation
without ever confronting the complex political
realities of local populations.
NGOs, however important, are in fact just one subset
of actors among many that influence the negotiation and
de/legitimation of indigenous representativeness. Researchers
of all sorts, religious organizations, international
funding agencies, corporations, and state bureaucracies
all influence and complicate the politics of
indigenous representation in accordance with their own
agendas. The tendency of NGOs to distort claims of indigenous
representation in protest of bioprospecting are
matched by the tendency of researchers, agents of public
institutions, and pharmaceutical corporations to do the
same in their own support. Both sides seek out and attempt
to legitimate indigenous allies in accordance with
their institutional, political, or economic goals. Furthermore,
as we have seen here, dissent and internal discussion
within indigenous groups over the issue of representation
often gives potential credence to both sides
of the argument, just as it reveals the problems inherent
in negotiating collectively owned cultures with only a
selection of indigenous brokers. Because of the collective
nature of claims to culture as property, there is a common
assumption on all sides of the debate that indigenous
collectives must possess a centralized structure of
representative authority comparable to that of consolidated
nation-states with which external actors can negotiate.
Establishing who are the legitimate representatives
of indigenous collectives is, however, often a matter
greene Indigenous People Incorporated? F 223
of internal and external debate. In circumstances where
indigenous institution building is still in process, it is
no surprise that the legitimacy of any particular indigenous
organization varies with the prevailing political
winds and the degree of access to more powerful external
actors.
This does not, I suggest, make indigenous peoples innocent
pawns of more powerful players but rather demonstrates
their active engagement in wider networks of
power as political strategists whose decisions have direct
repercussions on their legitimacy as indigenous representatives.
Key legal victories and the successful insertion
of indigenous agendas into the decisions of more
powerful economic and political institutions and actors
indicate that indigenous strategies can under the right
circumstances prove extremely effective, but "victory"
is usually relative. The costs of politicizing culture and
treating it as property must also be taken into account.
While global indigenous mobilization is a sign of significant
strength for some of the worlďs most marginalized
peoples, the politics of indigenous authorities and
spokespeople remains a highly contested sphere. Emergent
indigenous political representation is simultaneously
supported and constrained by national and international
alliances that are continually identifying
legitimate mediators between external interests and local
communities in ways that are as much dependent on
their own agendas as on those of indigenous collect-
ivities.
While some of the cases examined here highlight primarily
concerns about sacrilege, misrepresentation, and
exploitation, others force us to consider the ramifications
of the economic expectations and aspirations born
from indigenous cultural property claims. Some have
emphasized that cultural property claims, based on Western
intellectual property laws, imply a privatization derived
directly from market models and ideals (see Brush
1996, 1999; Coombe 1998, 1999). The cases analyzed
here demonstrate that cultural property claims are in fact
marshaled both against outside market interests and in
accordance with indigenous peoples' own internal interests
in putting the market to use for their own mobilization.
The neem and ayahuasca cases, for example,
revolve around the perceived moral, cultural, and economic
attack on a nation's and an indigenous people's
right to prohibit collectively propertied knowledge from
becoming the exclusive patented property of a corporation
or a private individual. The material presented here
on the ICBG-Aguaruna case suggests that we must consider
the ways in which indigenous claims to cultural
property also lead to strategies of local entrepreneurship
and examine the potential ramifications of these strategies.
Treating culture as property is a strategy indigenous
groups use to adopt and transform the logic of their
Western counterparts--to market themselves as Indigenous
People Incorporated and create a form of politically
informed economic activity that in another context
has been labeled "tribal capitalism" (see Rata, quoted in
Friedman 1999:9).
The ICBG-Aguaruna project demonstrates that indigenous
entrepreneurship is also very much a part of
claims to cultural property. The know-how license
signed with Searle is one clear instance of it, and another
is the application for a utility patent that Washington
University researchers filed in January 2003 (Lewis and
Ramani n.d.). The lack of corporate support since Searle's
withdrawal has not hindered Walter Lewis's ethnobotanical
research on Aguaruna plant samples, an endeavor
that has produced leads in the area of antimalarials for
which he and his colleagues are seeking patent protection.
In the patent application the inventors assign equal
ownership (25% each) to members of the original four
ICBG partners. One of those four potential patent owners
is CONAP, which represents the local Aguaruna federations
that are partners to the agreements. Should the
patent be granted, CONAP would become probably one
of the first indigenous institutions anywhere to own patented
knowledge. The likelihood of a patenťs being converted
into profits is, of course, small, but one cannot
fail to acknowledge the apparently economically interested
nature of this particular brand of indigenous
mobilization.18
What exactly is at the core of the contemporary indigenous
strategies of mobilization witnessed not only
in bioprospecting negotiations but in traditional crafts
and folk music marketing and eco- and ethno-tourism?
Ultimately what is being represented, discussed, negotiated,
and in some instances sold is indigenous identity
itself (see Brysk 2000: chap. 4; Sylvain 2002; Conklin and
Graham 1995; Friedman 1999). It is not merely Amazonian
plant knowledge, Andean music, or tours of a San
village that are the object of privatization. At a more
fundamental level, indigenous group identities themselves
are subject to these strategies, since it is often the
connection to an indigenous culture and identity that
makes these commodities potentially attractive to global
consumers and producers.
Privatizing and marketing parts of their traditional cultures
or resources is another strategy used in a broader
politics of self-determination that emerges in connection
with the economic demands of a global market. It is
precisely through this kind of indigenous entrepreneurship
that incorporated groups such as CONAP and Af18.
The patent makes specific mention of the individual informants
who identified the plants from which the patented compounds have
been isolated and the Aguaruna communities in which they live
(Walter Lewis, personal communication). The decision to include
only CONAP in representation of the other four Aguaruna federations,
rather than all of them together as in the biological collection
agreement, in the patent application is curious. As a nationallevel
actor CONAP is obviously more stable and convenient for
coordinating such matters. Unlike the other local federations involved,
however, it is not an exclusively Aguaruna organization but
an interethnic confederation, and other indigenous Amazonians
constitute the majority of CONAP's local affiliates (particularly
important are the Shipibo and Yanesha peoples). None of them had
anything to do with the ICBG collections, but as participating members
of a democratically run organization they presumably have as
much claim to the patented property as the Aguaruna organizations
that CONAP represents. The complexities of identifying stakeholders,
contractual partners, and property owners of indigenous
knowledge seem only to multiply.
224 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
filiates promote a specifically indigenous mobilization.
They argue that indigenous mobilization needs more
than a solid historical and cultural foundation in today's
multicultural identity politics. It also requires economic
viability, for survival as an organized social movement
is directly tied to the financial solvency of the institutions
indigenous groups have founded and the communities
they represent in a world dominated by market
relations. This complicated state of affairs makes untenable
any explanation of indigenous incorporation as a
simple sell-out to corporate ideals. It also calls into question
the simplified images of the indigenous masses living
in unity and clamoring against the alleged evils of
corporate America. Both strategies are at work, and they
present opportunities for advancing an indigenous
agenda in some circumstances and harbor potential dangers
to it in others. The adoption of corporate ideals is
part of indigenous mobilization, but it cannot be separated
from the broader issues of historical inequity, cultural
sacrilege, and misrepresentation around which indigenous
peoples also organize struggle. Strategies of
indigenous incorporation mix with local cultural frameworks
and are deployed as part of a broader indigenous
politics of identity and self-determination (see Coombe
1998: chap. 5).
Two principal dangers emerge, however, with regard
to such moves to privatize indigenous knowledge, culture,
and identity. One of these, as the history of capitalist
expansion has repeatedly made clear, is that the
incorporation of indigenous groups could just as likely
lead to the monopolization of cultural identity and property
by certain indigenous classes and the marginalization
of others as to collective political-economic mobilization.
The other is that the creation of unrealistic
expectations about the market value of traditional
knowledge, cultural property, and incorporated identities
will continue to sow discontent not only between indigenous
groups and the various agents of development
and modernity but between the indigenous constituency
and its brokering leadership. In either case, there is still
space for ample debate in the search for a way forward.
Comments
subhabrata bobby banerjee
International Graduate School of Management,
University of South Australia, City West Campus,
North Terrace, Adelaide, SA 5000, Australia (apache@
unisa.edu.au). 14 xi 03.
Greene's paper addresses an important and controversial
issue. Rather than talking about its strengths and weaknesses,
however, I want to comment on what it leaves
unsaid.
Greene rightly points out that indigeneity is a highly
contested process, but I do not think that we can dismiss
the neocolonial influences on this process as easily as
he does. If indigenous self-representation is "at the heart
of recent anthropology," then we cannot dismiss the discursive
effects of the colonial project (Banerjee 2000). In
fact, we must place the discussion of colonialism and
the role of anthropology in producing indigenous subjects
in the center of the debate. Greene raises the question
of "representative legitimacy." What is not made
part of the discussion is why indigenous communities
have to prove that they are legitimate and why the
grounds for establishing legitimacy are in most cases a
product of the colonial system. To claim representative
legitimacy they are forced to conform to the categories
of what Wolfe (1999) calls "repressive authenticity." "Indigenous
ecology" thus comes to be represented as a pristine
source of knowledge separate from indigenous economy
and society. Like Spivak's subaltern, the indigenes
can have only a quoted existence in a larger statement
that belongs to the anthropologist alone. We talk about
them and occasionally quote them, but in the end we
are their authors.
As Osuri (2003) argues, these discourses do not explain
the conflations of indigeneity as identity and indigeneity
as a series of events that make visible the relationships
between non-indigenous and indigenous communities.
Rather, they obscure the notion that the production and
consumption of indigenous identity occur within Western
(post)modern modes of theorizing identities, a process
that disavows the colonial context within which
"indigenous policies" are developed and indigenous
identities are regulated. Indigeneity can also be represented
as a set of relationships between indigenous communities
and their colonizers that produces empowering
or disempowering representations in the context of colonial
relations of power. Despite acknowledging the
domination effects of colonialism, Greene does not seem
to accept that indigenous peoples continue to be regulated
by structures that are a legacy of the colonial era
and must conform to what for many of them are still
alien categories.
In fact, the politicization and treatment as property of
culture that Greene talks about are precisely the result
of applying Western categories to non-Western sites.
"Value" as defined by Western capitalism can be created
only if indigenous culture and knowledge are converted
to property, and indigenous communities all over the
world are forced to employ these categories if they want
to protect their knowledge. What is missing from
Greene's analysis is the consequences of this process for
the community. While he discusses the range of stakeholders
involved in the bioprospecting arrangements,
one voice is missing, and that is the voice of the people.
In revealing the complexities of interactions between
First World corporations, Third World governments, indigenous
organizations, and NGOs, he is silent about the
disparities in power among them--disparities that ensure
particular outcomes while precluding others.
Greene rightly identifies the vagaries of the market
and the "tenuous commitment" of the pharmaceutical
sector as factors that can influence the future of indigenous
involvement in bioprospecting. For instance, on
greene Indigenous People Incorporated? F 225
November 11, 2003, the president of the Aveda Corporation
announced that it was discontinuing its indigenous
product line to "demonstrate our ongoing support
and respect for indigenous peoples in their efforts to protect
their traditional knowledge and resources" (Conseil
2003). He also declared that the company would begin
the formalities necessary to abandon any rights it might
have in the "indigenous" trademark. Leaving aside the
problematic question of why a multinational corporation
should possess rights in an "indigenous" trademark in
the first place, we can only speculate as to the motives
behind the company's decision.
If "Indigenous People Incorporated" is to be a genuine
agent for promoting indigenous self-determination, significant
structural barriers in the political economy will
need to be overcome. The high failure rate of indigenous
enterprises has as much to do with lack of access to
infrastructure as with profound incompatibility with
many elements of the market system. The business success
of indigenous enterprises is always predicated on a
separation of commerce and culture that is alien to most
indigenous communities. It also denies the historical legacy
of indigenous dispossession and assumes the existence
of a level playing field on which indigenous communities
can compete in the mining, tourism, forestry,
and arts sectors of a global economy.
The indigenous economy is a hybrid economy with
market, state, and customary components, all of which
need to be recognized and integrated in assessing indigenous
economic development (Altman 2001). Developing
a sustainable indigenous enterprise implies understanding
the relationships among these components. It
is crucial that such a configuration be informed by an
explicit social-justice agenda. The challenge for indigenous
communities is to determine the best form of political
and cultural mediation for delivering the economic
and social outcomes they desire, and this will
depend on the political, economic, social, cultural, and
environmental contexts of each community.
kelly bannister
School of Environmental Studies, University of
Victoria, P.O. Box 3060, Victoria, B.C., Canada 8W
3R4 (kel@uvic.ca). 14 xi 03
Greene's article provides a much-needed case-based approach
to analyzing bioprospecting arrangements. The
broader global context in which he situates his detailed
analysis is effective in drawing attention to some fundamental
assumptions about these kinds of projects that
merit further consideration.
Having also traveled to Santa María de Nieva and Lima
in 2002 to interview some of the same actors about their
involvement in the ICBG-Aguaruna bioprospecting project,
I find that Greene has presented a fair and reasonable
account. As he notes, some details cannot be reconciled
because of conflicting versions of the same incident by
different actors or the unavailability of documents. However,
the case still offers a rich opportunity to understand
some of the political, cultural, and economic complexities
that underlie international, multi-institutional, and
cross-cultural bioprospecting arrangements. Such an opportunity
is also rare--more typically, those involved in
contentious projects tend to protect themselves from further
scrutiny and criticism. In this respect, I think that
the individuals who agreed to be interviewed and share
redacted copies of contracts and other agreements for this
case study should be commended.
Greene identifies several important contradictions inherent
in indigenous self-representation, political mediation,
and the legitimacy of who is speaking, for whom,
and to whom. An irony exists whether it is state governments
or indigenous political leaders who lay claim
to cultural knowledge when they are not the traditional
heirs of that knowledge. Furthermore, from a practical
point of view, it seems that the more the knowledge is
distanced from its traditional sources, the more likely
that the scientific application of that knowledge will be
assessed out of context and the less likely that it will
provide drug leads--at least, leads related to the traditional
use. Rather than which of the national Aguaruna
organizations or regional federations is the legitimate
authority to contract with Searle on Aguaruna medicinal
plant knowledge, the question--on both moral and practical
grounds--becomes whether these are the appropriate
signatories for such a contract. The "indigenous entrepreneurship"
that Greene discusses may, in fact, be
based on intracultural appropriation.
Also worth noting is a fundamental challenge that is
not raised by Greene but has plagued the ICBG-Aguaruna
and other bioprospecting projects--communication. Not
only did actors in the ICBG-Aguaruna have to overcome
the geographical distances between U.S. and Peruvian
institutions and Aguaruna communities (where there are
no roads, let alone an Internet) but they faced challenges
in translating lengthy and complicated legal documents
and conducting business in three languages (English,
Spanish, and the local Jívaroan language). While political
agendas to some degree influenced the events that transpired,
including the generation of unrealistic financial
expectations (i.e., "millions of dollars"), it cannot be
ruled out that communication problems leading to a genuine
lack of understanding also contributed to some of
the conflict.
Given Greene's insightful discussion of roles, motivations,
and strategies on the indigenous side of bioprospecting
agreements, I was somewhat disappointed
in his shallower treatment of NGOs and corporations.
Since one NGO was responsible for the majority of the
controversy around both the ICBG-Aguaruna and the
ICBG-Maya projects mentioned and no other NGO is
cited in the context of "distort[ing] claims of indigenous
representation in protest of bioprospecting," the broader
generalization of this practice across NGOs seems unwarranted.
With respect to corporations, the portrayal of
Searle is slightly misleading in this instance, and it is
unfortunate that the company's perspective was unavailable.
For example, regarding the expiration of the
know-how license, Greene concludes that "after all,
226 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
business is business," which does not adequately account
for the fact that Searle was, coincidentally, eliminating
its natural-products program as the license term
came up. Likewise, the biological screens that Searle
used to test the Aguaruna plant extracts (i.e., "diabetes,
cardiovascular problems, and inflammatory diseases")
were, indeed, largely irrelevant to the types of diseases
of primary importance to Aguaruna peoples. However,
at the time of the ICBG grant application, Searle did have
an infectious-diseases division, which had closed down
by the time the grant was awarded.
I do not raise these points in defense of any NGO or
corporation. Rather, I offer them as a reminder that conclusions
may differ depending on the availability of facts
under consideration and as an encouragement to probe
beneath the generalizations that have, thus far, largely
impeded our understanding of the complicated dynamics
at work among the various actors in today's bioprospecting
arrangements. Overall, Greene makes an important
contribution toward a deeper understanding in this
regard.
stephen brush
Department of Human and Community Development,
University of California, Davis, Calif. 95616, U.S.A.
(sbbrush@ucdavis.edu). 11 xi 03
A decade and more has passed since the United Nations
Conference on the Environment and Development in Rio
de Janeiro that launched the Convention on Biological
Diversity. A key objective of that convention was to create
a formal regime of access to biological resources and
benefit sharing from their use. This regime was envisioned
as a solution to the "bio-piracy" that was perceived
to result from the previous system of common
heritage. The direct beneficiaries of the new regime were
nation-states, which the convention recognized as sovereign
owners of genetic resources. Indigenous people
and other stewards of biological resources were implied
beneficiaries, but their participation in the imagined benefit
stream was to be mediated by the state. The decade
since the convention was launched has been a disappointment.
Very few countries have negotiated or implemented
access and benefit-sharing regimes, the flow
of genetic resources has slowed, no new drugs have resulted
from bioprospecting, large pharmaceutical companies
have withdrawn from the screening of plants, and
the loss of biological diversity has proceeded apace.
While the imagery of the "tragedy of the commons"
dominated the formulation of the convention, an increasingly
popular image after a decade of conventioninspired
politics is the "tragedy of the anticommons"
(Heller and Eisenberg 1998). Perhaps the most direct result
of the convention has been to raise consciousness
in governments and some social groups about the importance
of biological resources, but this has been
achieved by creating unrealistic expectations about the
value of these resources and confusion about "ownership"
of genetic resources and intellectual property.
Greene's exploration of the ICBG-Aguaruna is an insightful
and important discussion of the way the idea of
access and benefit sharing played out in the Peruvian
Amazon. The ICBG program is an innovative effort to
bring together different sectors engaged in creating, using,
conserving, and studying genetic resources. Like
other bioprospecting programs. ICBG projects have been
most successful when community participation is minimized,
but the ideal of the Convention on Biological
Diversity and the ICBG has been to create reciprocal
flows of genetic resources and benefits that would reach
into communities to support traditional knowledge and
foster biological stewardship. Greene's article expands
our knowledge of the experience of these more participatory
projects, and it confirms the suspicion that the
difficulties experienced in the ICBG-Maya are not
unique.
The logic of the convention and the framework for
bioprospecting that follows it are based on the premise
that the public-domain or common-heritage approach offered
fewer benefits than could be realized by commoditizing
genetic resources through contracts between
"suppliers" and "users." The benefit stream, however,
is powered by granting intellectual property rights to discoveries
based on biological resources. The scope of exclusion
relating to intellectual property is expanded
through the contracting process that is the keystone of
bioprospecting. The benefit stream from bioprospecting
is defined by the contracting parties--a principle that is
relatively unproblematic at the nation-state level but
fraught with difficulties at the community level, where
political strife within and between communities ensues
from the exclusion inherent in contracting.
Greene's description of the power struggles among different
Aguaruna groups confirms the observation that
development projects have very different meanings for
their nominal beneficiaries than for national and international
participants, sponsors, and advocates who depend
on local clients. It also shows us that actors at the
national and international level have multiple and complicated
motives and that political influence and opportunities
for publicity are as important as genetic resources
in the approach to local communities. The
history of the Maya and Aguaruna ICBG projects would
seem to suggest that future bioprospecting will eschew
direct community participation. Nevertheless, the World
Intellectual Property Organization is actively developing
a model for the protection of "traditional knowledge"
(Wendland 2002). Greene's paper is an important cautionary
tale of how good international intentions can go
awry at the local level. Similar political asymmetries,
local conflicts, ambiguous social boundaries, broad sharing
of poorly documented knowledge, and complicated
agendas are numerous. If traditional knowledge and biological
resources are precious but diminishing resources,
we might wonder whether to pursue policies
that will invite conflicts within groups like the Aguaruna.
Although the architects of the ICBG believed in
nonexclusivity, the program's reliance on intellectual
greene Indigenous People Incorporated? F 227
property produced the opposite. A policy that begins with
exclusivity is bound to produce similar results or worse.
noel castree
School of Geography, Manchester University,
Manchester M13 9PL, U.K. (mfvssnc2@man.ac.uk).
31 x 03
One of the peculiarities of bioprospecting is that its
champions and critics--despite their differences--both
misunderstand the object of their fervour and censure.
Greene's measured essay capsizes some of the verities
commonly uttered in debates about the three main forms
of biological prospecting (chemical, mechanical, and genetic).
More specifically, he criticizes the way in which
indigenous peoples are typically figured in what Hayden
(2003:36) evocatively calls "the bioprospecting imaginary."
His illuminating analysis of the ICBG-Aguaruna
relationship in Peru shows how programmatic beliefs
about bioprospecting founder on the complexities of reallife
bioaccords. Embracing the sort of "situational pragmatism"
that Michael Brown (1998:205) has recommended,
Greene demonstrates the ambivalent potentials
of attempts to reward indigenous "stewards" of material
and informational biodiversity. Bioprospecting, he
shows, fails to deliver on the ideal-typical aspirations of
its cheerleaders while managing, simultaneously, to offer
certain indigenous peoples the hope of something better.
Greene thus wisely resists easy denunciations. His undogmatic
approach is to see bioprospecting as a doublesided
phenomenon which requires contextual evalua-
tion.
It seems to me that Greene's principal contribution to
the debate about bioprospecting and indigenous peoples
is twofold. First, he urges us to resist theoretical essentialism.
Bioprospecting has become an abstract signifier
that is understood either through a pejorative reading of
the market (among the left) or through a positive assessment
of the privatizing and pricing of hitherto "openaccess"
goods (among liberals and conservatives). The
problem here, it seems to me, is that preconceived theoretical-normative
ideas become the rigid lenses through
which examples of bioprospecting are viewed (Castree
2003). Determined to show that their preferred worldview
is the right one, critics and fans of bioprospecting
selectively assess cases in such a way that the conclusions
are, in effect, known from the start. Greene's essay
shows why measured empirical analysis defeats theoretical
simplicities. What we have been calling bioprospecting
in the singular is, he implies, really a cluster of
ideas and practices whose effects are contingent. Bioprospecting's
successes/failures on the ground cannot, as
he shows, be predicted from the supposed essential character
of the phenomenon.
Secondly, Greene takes us beyond the now tired debate
over whether indigenous peoples stand to gain or lose from
bioprospecting. His alternative is to focus on the complexities
within the indigenous movement. This de-homogenizing
move not only points up the impossibility of
a unified indigenous voice (even at the regional scale) but
also highlights the precarious and shifting webs of connection
that allow some indigenous peoples to be recognized
as legitimate stakeholders in any and all bioaccords.
The "problem of representation" is not simply that of the
identification by Western biotech companies, botanical
gardens, and the like of the "right" indigenous partners.
It is also a problem of how different indigenous peoples
step onto the political stage locally and regionally while
others are marginalized or silenced. This is complicated
by the role played by NGOs, national governments, and
other nonindigenous institutions. As Greene shows, over
time the "Aguaruna" in the ICBG-Aguaruna relationship
were, variously, the Consejo Aguaruna Huambisa, OCCAAM,
FECONARIN, FAD, ODECOFROC, OAAM, and
CONAP. The perceived legitimacy and representativity of
these organizations were, he demonstrates, contingent on
their changing relationships with ICBG partners, national
indigenous federations, and a host of other players.
Ultimately, as Greene notes, prospectors for novel biological
resources will increasingly try to avoid the need
to identify indigenous stakeholders, but his wider arguments
have a longer-term purchase. The politicization
and treatment as property of "culture" will continue
apace, whether in the realm of the biological or elsewhere.
Those of us who care about the fate of subaltern
communities cannot afford to see the commodification
of culture as an unqualified menace, but neither can we
see it as an unproblematic means for the subaltern, at
long last, to speak in their "true voice."
shivcharn s. dhillion
Centre for Development and the Environment, Box
1116 Blindern, 0317 Oslo, Norway (shivcharn.
dhillion@ina.nlh.no). 24 xi 03
The privatization of indigenous knowledge, culture, and
identity is indeed an emerging problem in both the developing
and the developed world. Indigenous peoples in
India, Malaysia, Thailand, and many countries in South
America are forming consortia working towards such privatization
at the expense of other, less conspicuous or
"glamorous" indigenous peoples. As in the case of
CONAP and Affiliates, individual communities often
challenge the authority of heads of consortia to speak on
their behalf. This has occurred recently in Sabah, South
and North-East India, Vietnam, the Lao P.D.R., Thailand,
and China (Tibet). In Thailand indigenous organizations
at the national or regional level are made up of a few
dominant groups that represent all local knowledge, culture,
identity, and diversity. Their representation is further
enhanced and championed by NGOs and researchers
who focus on select indigenous communities, thus globalizing
the indigenous culture and identity across Thailand
and beyond its borders to include Burmese, Laotian,
and Vietnamese indigenous people. In the Sichuan District
of China, for instance, nomads who are now sedentary
and owners of land resources allocated by the Chinese
government now speak for all nomadic pastoralists
228 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
in the region. Among the Sami of the northernmost part
of Europe, including Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia,
local Sami communities have repeatedly contested
the structure of the central Sami organization as not articulating
their differential needs. Regional indigenous
consortia can easily lead to the monopolization and
structured dilution of cultural identities.
Although the Convention on Biological Diversity explicitly
champions recognition of national sovereignty
and provides measures for securing "environmentally
sound use," access and benefit-sharing regimes, and acknowledgment
of indigenous "groups" and their knowledge
and cultural systems, few parties to it in the North
have implemented detailed regulations for compliance
with it (Dhillion et al. 2002). Broad-scale plans exist in
many nations but are far from any clear definition. Then
there are nations like the U.S.A., which have not ratified
the convention but have schemes for biodiversity transfer
from the South through programs such as the ICBG
without regulatory regimes in place. The question arises
how indigenous communities can protect themselves
when the bioprospector's state has no regulatory regime.
A number of nations in the South are beginning to implement
the convention's provisions, especially in relation
to access and benefit sharing, although in some parts
of the South progress is very slow (see Aguilar-Sten and
Dhillion 2003). Thus, given the current rather loosely
woven regulatory system, there is room for flexible negotiations
between consortia of indigenous groups and
those interested in genetic resources, fostering corporatelike
ideals with consequences for the marginalization of
selected indigenous communities, distortion of cultural
identity, and equity in benefit-sharing regimes. Thus in
most cases there are no clear regulatory regimes or models
that begin to take into account the complexities of
traditional knowledge, ownership, equity, and sustainable
management of the resource itself that communities
can draw upon--such regimes have to be outlined to
provide templates that can be built upon by all stakeholders,
including communities within organizations.
The growing role of the convention in constructing and
influencing regulatory regimes for biological diversity
and its access cannot be ignored (see www.biodiv.org and
Svarstad and Dhillion 2000). There is also a growing body
of good and bad cases that lessons can be learnt from.
Of relevance here, as pointed out by Greene, is the
market value of the biological resource related to traditional
knowledge. The current political climate with
regard to the need to implement the provisions of the
convention, coupled with the cropping up of traditional
knowledge institutes, healers' associations, and biodiversity
resource and inventory centers, is leading bioprospectors
to move away from using traditional knowledge
as potential leads to new discoveries. The high
processing costs associated with post-collection of the
biological resource from the field are far from recognized
and understood by biodiversity-rich states, let alone indigenous
group organizations. Furthermore, the future of
bioprospecting, like that of most economic activities, is
unpredictable and dependent on biotechnological developments
that appear to facilitate moving from the use
of traditional knowledge to random collection. The more
cost-effective the technological advances, the less the
value of bioprospecting and the less will be allocated to
R&D budgets on bioprospecting (Rausser and Small
2000). Although the arguments and observations in the
case presented by Greene are all relevant, overestimates
of expected income can play a even bigger role in influencing
the continual interest of bioprospectors in indigenous
cultural properties than is assumed. The monopolization
of indigenous culture through organization of
indigenous communities can also lead to the misrepresentation
of the actual value of the biological resource,
because traditional knowledge may vary widely among
communities within an organization. In addition, if such
organizations are to be responsible for ensuring the sustainable
management of biological resources through
their negotiations, then biodiversity conservation may
be jeopardized.
cori hayden
Girton College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge
CB3 0JG, U.K. (cph28@cam.ac.uk). 13 xi 03
At the core of Greene's detailed, thoughtful account are
the questions of property and politics and the way in
which the treatment of culture as property itself becomes
an idiom of (political) representation. His discussion
graphically illustrates some of the paradoxical effects
of bioprospecting: in the harrowing twists and turns
of different Aguaruna groups' struggles to define the
terms of their participation in the ICBG project, we see
yet again that intellectual property and benefit sharing
are chronically double-edged avenues to "inclusion" and
enfranchisement. For all of its resonance with other prospecting
experiments, the Aguaruna story is also a singularly
important one, with CONAP's unprecedented
negotiation of a "know-how" license with MonsantoSearle
and now the possibility of a jointly owned patent
with Washington University. It is telling, perhaps, that
these "victories" have come not only with consequential
political realignments and marginalizations in Aguaruna
communities but with corporate retreat as well.
Greene is right to argue that the eventual profitability
of these arrangements is only part of the picture (an undeniably
important one for those who have high expectations).
He also asks what these mobilizations are
about, more broadly. In answer, he turns to wider trends
toward privatizing or "incorporating" indigenous identity.
While he has many useful things to say about how
efforts to treat culture as property work both with and
against the market, I worry that boiling it all down to
the incorporation of "identity" runs the risk of resedimenting
or flattening out what is clearly a dynamic, molten
set of political and social processes--a series of ongoing
experiments with different languages and
mechanisms of recognition in which indigenous peoples,
NGOs, researchers, and companies are all implicated. As
we have seen here and in related work, these efforts clus-
greene Indigenous People Incorporated? F 229
ter strategically around a wide but not arbitrary range of
idioms: "property" and "identity" join community, territorial
sovereignty, and self-determination as languages
of representation that sometimes stand for one another.
I would thus be more inclined to keep the account open
in the terms that Greene, in dialogue with one of his
Peruvian interlocutors, productively sets out: as a question
about the forms that "representativity" can take.
I cannot help thinking here of an ongoing discussion
in the field of bioethics. Some ethicists have recently
wondered whether the ethical protocols developed to
protect indigenous and aboriginal communities involved
in epidemiological or clinical research could be applicable
to other kinds of collectivities, such as people with
HIV, women with breast cancer, or Ashkenazi Jews. Noting
the hauntingly familiar qualities associated with "aboriginal"
communities in these discussions (territorial
boundedness, shared customs, a common language), one
critical review noted that the borrowing seemed
doomed--unless, the authors argued, we were to jettison
those definitions of community and take into account
the most important feature that any group, indigenous
or not, must have in order for informed consent to work:
a system of legitimate political representation. This
move--a reminder that in these contexts, community is
as community represents--condenses much for us here.
The requirement of representativity--suffused with
notions of territoriality and identity but readily stripped
down to an essential political functionality (the capacity
to speak for)--is certainly one of the most striking aspects
of benefit-sharing agreements and the intellectual
property logics to which they are pegged. One of the
biggest problems with intellectual and cultural property,
Greene argues, is that they assume and thus must produce
"a centralized structure of representative authority
. . .with which external actors can negotiate." The effects
are often jarring, as in the poetic manner in which the
ICBG project defined its contract-signing "community":
the "Aguaruna People" are those "who live in the collection
area," and the "collection area" is the area "inhabited
by members of the Collaborating Organizations."
This reads quite smoothly alongside the abovementioned
definition of community as a collective that
"works" in political terms. There is something worth
attending to here. The problem Greene identifies with
the idiom of cultural or intellectual property is not a
problem limited to or driven by property in any simple
sense. The requirement for an authorized quasi-sovereign
has become central to the bioscience research enterprise
more generally; here, property claims and commercialization
arrangements absolutely make their
mark, but they also work with and alongside other idioms
and mechanisms for "representing interests"--most
notably, informed consent--in researchers' and funding
bodies' (such as the NIH's) efforts to identify and define
their legitimate interlocutors. Greene's piece gives us
much to think about regarding bioscience research as a
crucial site of struggle over what will count as a collective,
as representation, and as a "legitimate" form of
political sociality. Property is but one inflection here,
and an intriguingly volatile one at that: it seems important
to note that, as indigenous peoples increasingly gain
the floor with the language of intellectual property,many
commentators argue that global intellectual property regimes
are scrambling to hold onto some political legitimacy
themselves.
walter h. lewis, gerardo lamas,
abraham vaisberg, n. rogerio castro,
and memory elvin-lewis
Department of Biology, Washington University, One
Brookings Dr., St. Louis, MO 63130, U.S.A. (lewis@
biology.wustl.edu). 18 xi 03
Greene has provided a relatively balanced view of parts
of the ICBG-Peru project during its 1994-to-2000 tenure.
This is true even though he became involved in the project
only in September 1999, during the last annual meeting
and field collecting in the Department of San Martín,
when the majority of the field research had been conducted
in the Department of Amazonas. Clearly, for the
initial and more controversial years of the project he has
had to rely on the opinions, recollections, and hearsay
of others, and this has resulted in factual inaccuracies
that call for comment.
The ICBG-Peru project grant was awarded not in 1993
(in the first round, three ICBG projects were funded by
NIH in 1993 and two in 1994) but on July 1, 1994. The
award followed the signing of a letter of intent on April
7, 1994, by the Consejo Aguaruna y Huambisa's chairman,
Evaristo Nugkuag, Wraiz Pérez Ramírez, Jorge Fernández,
director of the Ministry of Agriculture at Jaén
in collaboration with the vice minister of agriculture in
Lima, and the four original applicants (Searle, the UPCH,
the USM, and WU). Greene refers to this five-page document
as a "very simple" letter, but we disagree in the
strongest way. We believe that at that time, and even
now, it was a forceful and meaningful outline of a collaborative
effort to conduct ethnobotanically oriented research
with indigenous people. Greene points to "relatively
ill-defined terms" with regard to the sharing of
future royalties, but he forgets that at this point there
was no license option agreement. This agreement, which
established the royalty rate, was signed on June 29, 1994.
Speed was critical, for without the agreement there
would be no grant, and the grant had to be awarded by
July 1 or be lost. What was included in the letter of intent
was a clear outline of how royalties and other benefits
would be shared, the one adopted from the original grant
application (submitted in 1992) and the one that we adhere
to today, namely, that the four parties would share
benefits equally, with a total of 75% of any income returning
to Peru. This remains one of the most liberal
and progressive arrangements for the sharing of profits
of any agreement on bioprospecting known and recognizes
the major contribution of the host country in a
substantial way. Other minor corrections are that two,
not three, institutions participated in collecting, and in
1994 only 4 regional Aguaruna organizations were rec-
230 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
ognized officially in Lima (of which 3 were our collaborators),
far from the current 13 that Greene notes.
With the signing of the license option agreement, royalty
rates were essentially established by Searle. The university
researchers unfortunately had little guidance on
this except for the NIH's assurance that, while the proposed
rates were low, they were within the range of other
proposals. Clearly this was something that could be reinvestigated
later, and under time pressure the agreement
was signed on June 29 despite its imperfections. New
and more beneficial royalty rates along with other considerations
were incorporated into the license option
amendment agreement signed in September 1996, prior
to any royalties' having been paid at the original rates.
Immediately after the approval of the grant, all three
university parties met with the CAH's chairman and
staff in Lima on July 7, 1994. At this time a $10,000
partial (annual) up-front payment was provided the CAH
for collecting privileges as agreed, along with a copy of
the confidential license option agreement. No request
was made for a copy in Spanish, but this was provided
later, along with a copy of the original grant application
of 300 single-spaced pages. It is not the case that the
CAH never received a copy of the agreement. A copy was
presumably provided by the CAH to RAFI, which posted
it on the web without the permission of the parties to
the agreement.
Following the July 7 meeting, and carrying a letter of
permission from Nugkuag to interact with CAH leaders
and communities, we traveled to Imazita in Amazonas,
where Aguaruna representatives took us to visit a number
of CAH communities along the Río Maran~ ón. In violation
of the letter of intent, however, we were not allowed
to collect plant material. On our return from
CAH-controlled territory, and with the full permission
of the Ministry of Agriculture in Lima and Jaén and collecting
permits from the ministry's National Institute of
Natural Resources (INRENA), we spent two to three
weeks collecting material among the mestizo communities
(with their permission) and in their privately
owned forests as well as on lands owned by the Peruvian
government. When people were involved, the prior-informed-consent
document was signed before collecting
began.
Even with the adverse publicity generated by RAFI
regarding the project, we learned that the CAH assembly
of communities, meeting in November 1994, had at least
tentatively approved it.
In January 1995, with CAH concurrence, the WU team
returned to Peru to discuss a formal agreement to extend
the content of and replace the letter of intent and to
engage in a long-term collecting expedition in collaboration
with the CAH. All aspects of the letter of intent
and the license option agreement were discussed by the
researchers representing the three universities and the
CAH chairman and staff between January 5 and January
18, 1995. A number of issues were agreed to, such as the
maximum amount of collecting per year, collecting areas,
assistance in the field, and security, but the single
most important concern was the royalty rate. There was
consensus that the rate was too low, and for the sake of
all parties WU agreed to challenge Searle and negotiate
a more favorable value. Unfortunately, there was no representative
of Searle at the meeting, and therefore this
negotiation had to be done in St. Louis, with counsels
present. We requested permission to collect in the CAH
controlled territory as planned and then, on our return
to St. Louis, to open a dialogue with Searle on the question
of royalties. To our surprise, on January 18 the meeting
was abruptly terminated by the CAH, and although
Nugkuag was to call Lewis that afternoon to arrange the
next meeting, no further contact was made despite repeated
attempts by the latter. Another CAH agenda had
obviously intervened.
The multiuniversity team left for the Imazita region on
January 24, 1995 (not late 1994) to collect again in mestizo
and government regions and also to make contact with
members of OCCAAM, whose headquarters at Yamayakat
is immediately across the Río Maran~ ón from Imazita.
This Aguaruna federation is often described as small and
isolated, but its major community is the most readily accessible
of all federation communities in the entire Upper
Maran~ ón, and it had 27 registered communities and annexes
and a population at that time of about 2,150. Renewed
contacts were made with its leaders, and on February
26, 1995, an initial agreement was signed in Lima.
During this month-long period many collections were
made strictly in the mestizo/colones/ government areas
of the Departments of Cajamarca and Amazonas with
full permission, plus a few collections around Yamayakat
with OCCAAM Aguaruna informants. No plant collections
were made in the CAH communities, and our field
collection notes, with full data on precise locality, habitat,
informants if applicable, and dates clearly attest to
this fact. Greene's statement that during this time from
January 26 (first collection in Cajamarca en route to Imazita)
to February 23 (last collection well beyond the
Aguaruna at 25.6 km north-northeast of Bagua Chica in
Amazonas) of 1995 "It is impossible to verify exactly
how and where the ICBG team collected" is incorrect.
A few months later (April 1995), RAFI wrote the NIH
a letter replete with errors, and later a similar letter was
sent to WU's chancellor, which after a thorough examination
was rejected by the university. The non-CAH
federations in the Río Maran~ ón rallied against this attack
on the project, and after an NIH investigation of the
"charges" full funding of the project was restored following
the new round of discussions (December 1995
and May 1996 in St. Louis with all parties and counsels
present) and agreements (September 1996) outlined by
Greene. Thereafter, with the assistance of CONAP (the
umbrella organization for the four collaborating
Aguaruna federations and many other indigenous
groups), headed by César Sarasara, and with the full collaboration
of the four federations, field research was completed
successfully in 1999, to be followed by continued
research at the universities. As noted by Greene, Searle
withdrew from the consortium that year (although it
never cancelled the know-how license agreement as he
reports). Regarding the intellectual property shared by
greene Indigenous People Incorporated? F 231
the four parties equally as part of a utility patent submitted
to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2003,
the portion (25%) assigned to CONAP was accepted
solely on behalf of the four collaborating federations--
OCCAAM, FAD, FECONARIN, and OAAM.
kathleen mc afee
School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale
University, Sage Hall, 205 Prospect St., New Haven,
CT 06511, U.S.A. (kathleen.mcafee@yale.edu).
24 xi 03
As Greene shows, the notion of intellectual property is
an unwieldy framework for conceptualizing and trading
cultural knowledge, genetic information, or indigenous
symbols. He asks what is at stake when indigenous authorities
negotiate the market value of their peoples'
knowledge and rightly emphasizes the pitfalls of inflated
expectations and the problematic politics of indigenous
representation. Similar dissection of the representational
politics of the ICBG and other intellectual-property brokers
would reveal that even more is at stake than
Greene's account indicates. Contracts to trade genetic
resources and related knowledge were first promoted as
the model for managing "global" natural resources by
means of market exchange. This strategy of selling nature
to save it has since been extended to markets in
carbon sequestration and other ecosystem services.
In the negotiations over biodiversity "benefit sharing"
between countries and communities in the global South
and nations and corporations in the North, such bilateral
contracts are counterposed to alternative approaches that
aim more directly at redressing past plunder and present
inequalities in resource control. In UN fora in the 1980s,
the mirage of windfalls from exports of genetic gold persuaded
many Southern governments to drop their opposition
to the patenting of medicines and crop varieties.
Some are only now reviving their earlier claims that staple
crops and vital drugs, many of which are derived from
Southern source materials, ought to be available to everybody.
In the 1990s, hopes for income from bioprospecting
deals helped persuade delegates from diversityrich
states to accede to U.S. insistence that the Convention
on Biological Diversity recognize intellectual
property rights and that the World Trade Organization
include provisions for the worldwide applicability of intellectual
property to plants and microorganisms. Similar
illusions of gains from genetic-information trade underlie
current maneuvers by China and Brazil to exclude
important food crops from the new International Treaty
on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.
This accord is significant precisely because it is a multilateral
alternative to the market-contract model, one
that would keep vital crop germplasm in the public domain
and prevent beggar-thy-neighbor competition
among communities and countries to undersell their genetic
resources.
The policy discourse of biodiversity benefit sharing
and bioprospecting focuses on marketable genetic information
as if organisms and genes acquired value only
when privatized, removed from their unique ecological
and cultural contexts, and transformed by high technology.
This construction devalues the benefits that communities
everywhere already derive from the ecosystems
that sustain them materially and culturally.
In their efforts to aid their communities, legitimate
indigenous representatives may be as entrepreneurial as
anyone else, but claiming and selling property rights is
a weak basis for economic bargaining. Contracts for trade
of genetic resources and associated knowledge are
dressed up as if they were economically rational exchanges
based upon values (prices) objectively determined
by supply and demand. What indigenous participants
in bioprospecting arrangements are actually
offering is legitimacy--their own in the eyes of outsiders--based
on some mix of outsiders' guilt, goodwill, and
perceptions of special indigenous relationships with nature.
The commodities purchased are rarely related to
any local knowledge; organic samples are assayed for
bioactivity of interest in entirely different technological
and economic contexts. Now, supply exceeds demand in
what has become a bio-buyers' market. Economic and
political power asymmetries ensure that, even where local
knowledge leads prospectors to useful materials, substantial
local returns are unlikely. Unrealistic hopes for
royalties from genetic-information sales have led some
to advise communities to keep knowledge secret, but
hiding and hoarding are likely to speed the loss of that
knowledge.
If trading cultural "property" is understood as a political
negotiation rather than a market transaction, the
risks and potential gains for knowledge providers can be
analyzed more realistically. Indigenous and other communities
can rescue, preserve, and increase useful local
knowledge by documenting it in community registries
and publications of resources, inventions, practices, and
traditions, thus helping to establish it as "prior art" that
cannot legally be appropriated or patented. They can
claim collective rights to documented knowledge and
negotiate know-how licenses or other terms for allowing
access to it. Backed by the requirements of the Convention
on Biodiversity that collectors obtain "prior informed
consent," they can bargain for remuneration,
with total payments specified in advance. Classification,
analysis, and processing of plant samples and botanical
information can add value to local resources for local
purposes and for sales to others. Such arrangements can
highlight continuing processes of collective invention,
bring status to knowledge contributors, and strengthen
group identity and organization. But selling genetic information
and cultural capital has in common with selling
handicrafts, forest products, crops, or ecotourism
packages that export markets are rarely adequate, reliable
livelihood sources. The extent to which they are
helpful depends on how much they contribute to broader
strategies for applying local resources and knowledge to
local development objectives.
The same criterion applies to damage caused by biopiracy.
Unauthorized use of genetic resources and infor-
232 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
mation does not prevent local people from continuing
to use such resources. However, it can prevent them
from commercializing crop varieties, medicinal plants,
etc., if these are legally appropriated by competitors, as
in the case of the yellow beans from Mexico patented
by a U.S. bean dealer. Whether biopiracy causes material
harm depends on how the resources involved fit into
local strategies for cultural survival and economic
development.
hanne veber
Department of Language and Culture, Roskilde
University, P.O. Box 260, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark
14 xi 03
Greene's paper highlights a feature of contemporary politics
that invites our consideration of not only the politics
of culture but also the political economy of culture-aspolitics.
Revolving around a sequence of bioprospecting
arrangements among the Aguaruna in Peru's high forest,
the paper exposes the absurdities of strategies that claim
traditional local knowledge as cultural property. Obviously,
Greene is not the first to question the sobriety of
efforts toward copyrighting local traditional culture,
whether on the part of indigenous groups or corporate
interests, but his case represents a timely exposé of the
implications of such efforts in terms of evoking unrealistic
expectations of easy economic windfalls, creating new
cleavages or aggravating existing divisions, and accelerating
rates of leadership turnover within indigenous
groups. Greene's presentation concedes that temporary
advantages flow from the economic conjunctures implicated
in the politics of culture as property, including opportunities
for leadership training or funding for intellectual
training related to bioprospecting and environmental
conservation. However, the Aguaruna experiences also
suggest a real risk of exhausting indigenous leadership
resources among their own constituency or subverting the
credibility and legitimacy of indigenous leaders in the eyes
of the nonindigenous world.
Looking into the role of NGOs, researchers, bureaucrats,
and private corporations in the process of raising
indigenous claims to intellectual and cultural property
in bioprospecting contexts, Greene calls attention to the
tendency for naiveté on the part of prospectors as to the
complexities of indigenous politics to be matched by an
equally nai¨ve idealism on the part of NGOs, legal experts,
and others advocating indigenous rights to culture
as property. He demonstrates how these agencies are exploited
through the cunning of indigenous leaders aiming
to reap whatever profits--symbolic, economic, organizational,
or political, large or small--may be extracted
from the situation. In this way indigenous strategies
emerge as modes of appropriating sources of power from
the dominant society--or from the logic of the market,
as Greene has it--and working against it. This is a welcome
perspective that could become revelatory of much
that remains to be explored in the fissures between culture-as-historical-isolate
ethnography and activism-informed
globalizing orientations in contemporary Amazonian
research.
The paper offers the contours of a political-economic
perspective on the dynamics of indigenous mobilization
centered on bioprospecting arrangements and their varied
effects on the shaping of indigenous political culture;
with some analytical elaboration and specification the
approach may lead research toward a truly productive
interpretation of the interconnections and contingencies
that give rise to indigenous and other strategies of converting
culture into capital through a politics of culture
and identity. Insofar as such strategies remain highly taxing
for leadership credibility and indeed for the authenticity
of indigenous identity, they are potentially subversive
of indigenous culture as a resource for engagement.
The phenomenon reflects its origin as a product
of the localization aspect of a globalization process in
which the meaning of the local is established in a global
framework.
Greene rightly points out that being indigenous in our
era has become a historically validated subject position
tied to a conscious strategy of multiply configured identity-based
political action that appears to take on worldhistorical
proportions. Obviously, indigenous leaders are
in the forefront of emergent indigenous activist institutions.
Far from being innocent pawns in others' games,
indigenous peoples actively engage in and influence regional,
national, and transnational networks of power. If
they are making history, they are making history under
conditions not of their own making. The million-dollar
question remains what exactly is the status of the action
aspect of indigenous strategies of mobilization for or
against the logic of the market. Indeed, deciphering the
contradictory elements inherent in the cultural politics
of propertied culture not separately as economics and
cultural symbolics but in their unity calls for a perspective
beyond a one-sided logic of the market. Yet the cultural
politics of Aguaruna bioprospecting arrangements
are certainly tied into market contexts; culture and the
symbolics involved here reflect these links in ways that
may hardly be conceived exhaustively if these contexts
are not made central to the analysis. Greene brings this
point home nicely.
Reply
shane greene
Chicago, Ill., U.S.A. 9 xii 03
The author's reply in CA tends to be either a sharp countermove
aimed at intellectual self-defense, a tactical circumvention
of well-founded criticisms, or some combination
of the two. This response will probably be
interpreted no differently. The comments are in my view
best grouped into four broad categories: congratulatory
(Brush, Castree, Veber), complementary (Dhillion, Mc-
greene Indigenous People Incorporated? F 233
Afee), substantively critical and engaging (Hayden, Banister,
Lewis et al.), and absurd (Banerjee).
Brush, Castree, and Veber congratulate me on an effort
that exposes the complexities of contemporary bioprospecting
and indigenous cultural politics by linking them
to questions related to the Convention of Biological Diversity,
indigenous representation, and global political
economy more generally. Dhillion and McAfee appear to
be convinced by the argument as well and seek only to
expand its ramifications. The former draws parallels to
cases in Southeast Asia, and the latter places pharmaceutical
bioprospecting in the wider context of bio-genetic
engineering as a whole and the need to reconsider
the local dimension of development schemes.
Hayden's and Bannister's appreciative comments are
qualified by requests for clarification on key points of
the argument. Hayden's main concern is that I "flatten
out" the issue by "boiling it down" to the "incorporation
of identity." She suggests that I should have left the argument
more "open" by aligning property and identity
with community, territorial sovereignty, and self-determination.
I don't know what she means by "open," but
I wonder if she isn't flattening me out a bit. I explicitly
relate the indigenous knowledge, identity, and property
issue to a social reality of shifting corporate and leadership
alliances among titled, administratively autonomous
communities. Likewise, I expose the mysterious
reliance on the category "Aguaruna People" in the
ICBG's contract negotiations, which implies an abstract
ethno-political, corporate actor roughly equivalent to an
Aguaruna "imagined community." In fact, as I show,
these two facts explain much about why the ICBG
caused such controversy and worked to legitimate exclusionary
legal fictions in the first place (part of a
broader problem, as the Maya ICBG and other cases suggest).
Further, the introductory and concluding sections
clearly articulate cultural property claims with a broader
politics of indigenous recognition, self-determination,
and territorial claims that have now found a reception
not only in local social movements but also in international
legislative forums like the UN. I even suggest
that indigenous territorial claims effectively trump cultural
property claims despite the increased attention to
the latter in global indigenous debates.
Bannister believes that I generalize too much about
the role of corporations and NGOs on the basis of the
Aguaruna case. She adds some important details about
Searle's participation and withdrawal but nothing that
detracts from the generally accepted observation that
pharmaceutical bioprospecting creates many more expectations
than it does realistic possibilities for addressing,
much less fulfilling, them. She is probably right that
I extrapolate too easily from RAFI's role in two ICBG
projects. There are other examples. The NGO Third
World Network provided much of the public forum for
Vandana Shiva and others' discussion of the neem seed
patent case. The common conflations deployed in that
case between indigenous people, Third World identity,
and the Indian nation-state rely on some of the same
simplistic representations I discuss in the ICBG-Aguaruna
case. Further, it is worth reiterating that I do not
merely criticize the actions of NGOs. I explicitly recognize
their importance in providing support, counsel,
and leverage in other instances. Indeed, the indigenous
organizations in question are most often NGOs as well.
The point is that all the actors mentioned, including
NGOs, indigenous leaders, corporations, bureaucracies,
and researchers (among them myself), are implicated in
the process of distorting representations to fit exclusionary
legal fictions that become legal realities through the
practices and politics of indigenous incorporation and
legitimation.
I interpret Lewis et al.'s "just the facts" response as
an attempt to set the record straight. They respond directly
and only to the factual basis of specific events
related to early ICBG-Aguaruna negotiations. Leaving
aside a few "factual inaccuracies," they believe, as does
Bannister (who came to know many of the same actors),
that I present a "relatively balanced view." Therefore, I
must assume they do not strongly disagree with the overall
argument. Lewis read an earlier version of the text
before it was submitted for publication, and unfortunately
many of the points of clarification are surfacing
only now as the paper goes to press. This is, however,
the second time that he has had to instruct me to say
that Searle "withdrew" from the know-how license instead
of "canceled" or "terminated" it in order to be
legally correct (that is my semantic oversight entirely).
They are justified in linking the original chronology of
the Consejo letter of intent and the license option agreement
to the difficult position the ICBG researchers were
placed in as a result in round one. As they state, Searle
initially unilaterally dictated the royalty rates (a point I
failed to make) and made no effort to negotiate directly
with Aguaruna representatives until forced to do so by
the need to renegotiate in round two. They draw attention
to their early intention to pursue higher royalties
even while still negotiating with the Consejo Aguaruna
Huambisa and clarify that the agreements signed in the
second round included a royalty rate increase. Too late
I realized that in one of the many attempts to shorten
this piece I cut a sentence that remarked on that royalty
increase (which I acknowledge only as "different").
They seem surprised that I mention 13 local AguarunaHuambisa
organizations, 2 of which (ODECOFROC and
FECONARSA) existed but were not legally recognized
in the Department of Amazonas at the time of the negotiations.
They would be less surprised if they related
this to my broader argument about the ongoing historical
shifts in Aguaruna authority, institutional legitimacy,
and attempts at indigenous incorporation. It would also
help if they took a clearer position on the contractual
use of ethnonyms like "Aguaruna People," which is limited
to a specific subset of legally recognized "collaborating"
Aguaruna institutions and exclusive unless other
indigenous organizations apply to CONAP and Affiliates
for inclusion (thus legitimating CONAP and Affiliates'
intent to incorporate the "Aguaruna People"). Even if we
indulge in the use of such legal fictions to define contractual
indigenous partners, my data (from Peruvian
234 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
public records) show that at least 9 local organizations
with Aguaruna members were legally recognized at the
time of the negotiations (CAH, FAD, FECONADIC, FECONARIN,
Chapi Shiwag, OAAM, OCCAAM, ONAPAA,
and ORIAM). Some of these organizations are from
other provincial departments (Loreto and San Martín)
that were initially excluded from the "collection area"
in the contractual agreements, but that is my point.
"Aguaruna People" does not exclusively correspond to
any consortium of these organizations in this or that
provincial department outside these kinds of businessmodel
social relations and contractual negotiations.
Lewis et al. offer a clear response to the statements of
Evaristo Nugkuag that I cite as evidence about the early
negotiations. I commend them for clarifying their position
and citing their field notes as evidence for what
happened during the controversial field collections in
late 1994 and early 1995. They argue that my dependence
on "opinions, recollections, and hearsay" is responsible
for the factual inaccuracies they identify in my account.
However, I relied not just on oral accounts but also on
texts from indigenous institutions and authorities. The
danger here is in the implied contrast between untrustworthy
local sources and scientific/legal statements
portrayed as "factual." At the very least, the dialogue
between history, anthropology, and politics now forces
us to acknowledge that "opinions, recollections, and
hearsay" are not as far from "factual evidence" as the
great positivist scientists once believed. Indeed, the very
impulse to separate things out into two mutually exclusive
categories of discourse--"facts" versus "opinions,
recollections, and hearsay"--reveals a reliance on a cultural
framework that still places "science" (as factual
knowledge) at the apex of a hierarchy of human knowledge
types. Such an understanding fails to recognize that
"opinions, recollections, and hearsay" may have their
own value as legitimate knowledge in a given cultural,
political, or historical context (not necessarily excluding
ours) and may even be as valued there as the scientific
"fact" is by the intelligentsia and lawmakers of our society.
The controversial aspects of the ICBG-Aguaruna
case were as much about a tremendous clash of culturally,
politically, and socially defined expectations as
anything else. The only possible solution to resolving
such intercultural conflict entails trying to understand
the role of differing expectations, how they were produced
in the first place, and how history is retold (and
"recollected") by different actors. This is in essence the
long-term project to which anthropology is committed,
but it is also of major relevance for the other actors now
engaged in such highly politicized negotiations.
Ironically, Lewis et al.'s comment stands in stark opposition
to Banerjee's. While Lewis et al. criticize me for
letting too many indigenous sources speak, Banerjee says
that "one voice is missing, and that is the voice of the
people." If this is so, what are all my direct quotations
from indigenous leaders (Nugkuag, Juwau, Jacanamijoy)
and indigenous-produced texts that claim to speak for
indigenous people? What about the citations of the work
of indigenous scholars and Third World activists (Montejo,
Shiva, Ewen) addressing global audiences and gaining
their own "voices" at the UN rather than simply
being "quoted" by the anthropologist? We live in an age
when indigenous actors help bring multimillion-dollar
international pharmaceutical projects to a halt, successfully
revoke patents, win Nobel Prizes, prevail in cultural
property law suits, and routinely meet to discuss international
legislation. And yet Banerjee remains convinced
that "Spivak's subaltern" (his phrase not mine; notice
the possession) cannot speak and that "we are their authors."
Far from being "silent about the disparities in
power" and failing to "accept . . .the legacy of the colonial
era," the entire article is about "disparities in power"
and premised on the idea that indigenous identity is configured
within a colonial legacy. Banerjee's comment
stands out from the others in failing to address the actual
argument of the paper or the indigenous struggles it
chronicles. Indeed, I wonder if in fact his recourse to
Spivak (who is more in dialogue with French poststructuralists
than with any subalterns) as the relevant authority
does anything more than reduce anthropology to
the "bourgeoisie scratching its head," to employ one of
Edmund Leach's famous phrases.
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