I’ve been reading up on ethnobotany lately, which is the arm of anthropology that studies the interactions between human cultures and plants. One man, Richard Evans Schultes, keeps coming up again and again, labelled as the “father of modern ethnobotany.” I’m only really beginning my investigation of him and his work, but so far I am not as impressed as I was hoping I would be. I recognize that this may simply be a matter of the materials I’ve been looking through though, such as this interview conducted in 1995 with Schultes and published in High Times magazine.
In it, Schultes reveals a peculiarly Western way of going about his research. This in particular rankles me a fair bit:
The Indians are wonderful natural collaborators, because they are so interested and knowledgeable about their flora. Everyone was always interested in why I wanted this plant or that plant. The fact was, I wanted it because they used it. If they asked me why I wanted something, I made up a disease we use it for—I’ve invented more diseases than we ever had, so they think we’re a good deal more decrepit than we actually are. And then they’d often say “You can’t use that plant for that. That plant is for treating earaches,†or something like that. That’s how I’d find out how they used it, you see?
Certainly I see how this could make a funny anecdote in a magazine for First World stoners, but I have to wonder if Schultes saw at all the strangeness of this tactic. Maybe it worked, I don’t know. Maybe it was the only way he could find to convince the Indians to help them. But is lying - even for an ostensibly “good” cause such as ethnobotanical research - ever going to be a foundation upon which our knowledge of healing and nature can ever fruitfully advance? When he knowingly suggests that the Indians think we are “a good deal more decrepit than we actually are,” I wonder if he realized just how decrepit we really are - but maybe not always in the ways we think of ourselves as being? Something in me doubts he was aware of this…
There’s a good David Abram quote that I think speaks to this subject as well. He’s talking about our culture’s attempts to copy the techniques of shamanism, without understanding the real context within which these things were practiced. He says:
Mimicking the indigenous shaman’s curative methods without knowledge of his or her relation to the wider natural community cannot, if I am correct, do anything more than trade certain symptoms for others, or shift the focus of disease from place to place within the human community. For the source of stress lies in the relation between the human community and the living land that sustains it.
Makes me wonder if our attempts to mine the rainforests of the Amazon for undiscovered (in the West anyway) chemical compounds to use in drugs (which regrettably seems to be a major element of ethnobotany) isn’t rather missing the boat. Maybe what we should be doing isn’t running in, lying to the natives, and stripping out the medical knowledge they have, but actually looking at and learning more from the complex web of inter-connections between the people and their natural environment and understanding the spiritual components of that which allow them to discover and use these things as medicine in the first place…
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11 Comments
All he elicits (apparently) by this method is a couple-word datum “earache-related.” He doesn’t get the proper usage, the context of proper use, the gestalt of the plant usage.
out of context is out of context no matter how you slice it. it should be no surprise that a representitive of modern medicine would be that deceptive in his approach to knowledge. the problem is that if you do gain the natives trust you tend to go native, much like terence and his brother, and wander around the jungle stoned for days…………and the only questions you are left with are about how western civilisation is going to make it much further……………
Great post Tim. I think a lot of this simply has to do with what you were discussing back when you were focusing heavily on the Gnostic stuff. This kind of attitude, that if you can see it and you can grab it and you can take it, then you’re getting exactly what you’re seeing, grabbing and taking, is what’s wrong. You can’t lie, cheat and steal you’re way into getting what you’re after. (the fact that you’re “after” it is probably also a big problem) There’s a process you have to go through, information and experience that has to be learned and gathered for this stuff to “work”, I’d imagine.
I think the indigenous peoples’ shamans know what they know and live how they live and interact with plants and nature as they do, because they walked the long-ass road to get to that point. They went the distance….respectfully. They tried…and probably died…to get where they are now by trying to respect nature and recognize that we’re all linked in some way or another…but also pushed forward in the spirit of exploration…..respectfully.
I really don’t know too much about shamanism, personally. But in my experiences over the past few years, I’ve learned that there’s no quick road to anything. The quick road DOES exist, but the end destination is different. The fact that this guy is lying to get what he’s after, to me, means the plants have been tainted. They are not the same plants that they would have been, had he listened and learned and tried to really communicate with these indians. If he had been honest, if he had listened and learned and tried to communicate on an honest, HUMAN level, he would have learned so much more! that’s a shame. it’s a shame that someone with that much knowledge is pulling shit like that.
I dunno…maybe we can’t sit here and judge him because we don’t know what his whole trip is, but that just seems really lame and deceptive and…typical? typical in that way that makes me think, “Way to reinforce the negative image of the western man, dude.” He could have been building giant positive bridges made out of light and energy and information, and instead it’s just another cheap scam, attained through a lie. fucking typical.
David Abram is dead-on with that statement, IMO. I don’t think you can do that…you can’t waltz into something ancient like that and just start leaving your soda cans on the ground, talking loudly and asking where the restroom is. You can’t sit there and say, “yeah yeah yeah, I get it I get it…spirit, soul, nature, linked, sacred, yeah yeah yeah…I get all that…now, what’s THIS one do? Oh, and how is THAT one, gonna help ME?” Seems pretty straight forward, but I guess it isn’t. The same loud ass, soda can leaving prick is also sitting there, the next time, wondering aloud, “Hey! How come I can’t come in?!! What?! well, fine then…fuck this shit! I’m outta here…god damn assholes think they’re better than me…” and on and on. It’s that fucking blind, double faced, moronically hypocritical attitude that I just can’t handle anymore. That blind, dumb, loud “HUH?!!! WHAT?!!!” crap. Gee, no wonder they don’t trust us, genius…you fucking lied to them, stomped all over the place and then walked off with knowledge it took them who knows how long to get.
I’m just really sick and tired of this blow-up-the-entire-mountain-range-to-get-one-diamond-and-then-wonder-aloud
-why-the-mountain-people-hate-our-asses culture we’ve become. It’s like watching a bunch of spoiled two year olds fight in a sand box. And then, typically, the same 2 year olds that blew up the mountain and are scratching their heads over why the mountain people hate us, are the ones that then invent a bunch of bullshit about the mountain people to make it all their fault.
you are absolutely right in your conclusion. Until the “west” learns to approach the question properly, the forest and the forest people will not give up their secrets.
You might consider reading “Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice, An Ethnobotanist Searches for New Medicines in the Amazon Rain Forest” by Mark J. Plotkin. Plotkin studied under Schultes and Schultes wrote the forward to his book. I found it interesting that Plotkin uses some of Schultes tactics successfully, such as the one you’ve described, to elicit information from the tribal shamans. However, Plotkin undergoes an awakening of sorts over the course of several events, one of which is taking hallucinogenic snuff from the local shaman. He participates as fully as he can in the tribal and shamanistic practices- a technique that was modeled by Schultes. Unfortunately, Pltokin doesn’t awaken to the reductive paradigm of western science and the exploitive basis of big pharma (at least not at the time he published his book in 1993).
Sounds like an excellent recommendation, thanks Lin!
Tim:
You see, that’s the problem. You have faith in my ability to control myself. Yet I do not have that ability. I begged to be banned before simply because I cannot control myself. (Why do you think I am not true to my word?)
Even my mother wrote to you, asking you to ban me from this site. I need this temporarily. Can you please do it to help an autistic person who cannot help himself?
Great, I’m off!
Too out of context to really judge. It’s a different culture, but they’re still the same range of saints and jerks that you’d find at the local minimart. Can you honestly say that if your family was sick, you woudn’t fib a bit to a doctor in order to get the prescription in time to help them?
another ethnobotanical book you may enjoy, one with a very different perspective: Sastun, by Rosita Arvigo. She apprenticed for years with a Mayan healer, and did things his way, rather than her way. Excellent stuff.