Concepts and Transformations of Indigenous Knowledge in the World of Intellectual Property Rights, Laws and Agreements

A Review on the Articles of Darrell Addison Posey and Roy Ellen & Holly Harris

Summary
Posey (2000) started with his discussion on the importance of indigenous knowledge (IK) or Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). He explained that IK was used for advancing hypotheses and enriching scientific knowledge, conservation of development projects and was employed in the ‘shift from implementing top-down management to community-based participation.’ The author also reiterated that IK is not a compilation of facts but is holistic, evolving and used in different aspects of contemporary life. He went on to defend that IK is used in the ‘sustainable utilization of natural resources and these are embodied in traditional livelihood systems’ based on historical evidence. The sustainable utilization of traditional livelihood systems is referred by the author as ‘conservation ethic’ of indigenous systems.

Despite the importance of IK, Posey (2000) pointed out the inability of the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) to protect the IK systems in the traditional communities. IPR, which is supposedly ‘a mechanism for equitable sharing and protection,’ only protect the economic interest of individuals in western societies. As such, the author persuades those studying IK to develop alternative methods. He proposed a ‘rights-based Traditional Resource Rights concept as a catalyst to transform conflict into conciliation.’

The discussion of Posey (2000) is much related to Ellen & Harris (2000) article on indigenous and environmental knowledge and its transformation. They went on to expound IK and its characteristics, historical evidence of IK collection to support the advancement of western science and technology by means of decontextualization. Arguments were presented on the recognition of local knowledge. Positivists wanted to make it universal by eliminating ‘imperfection and subjectivism.’ Post-modernism asserted the view of relativism. Neologism, on the other hand, emphasized mixing local and global to which Robertson (1996) termed as ‘glocal.’ With these wrangles, the authors considered the existence of universal reasoning but believed that these should be ‘activated and experienced in different contexts.’

Critique and Reflection
Increasing interest to IK leads to finding means to protect indigenous and local knowledge. This is directed to the realization that IPR exploits local communities and resources within. IPR, which is supposedly a legal system for ‘equitable sharing and protection,’ is only for those who have the means to avail of it. Biodiversity prospecting, or rather biopiracy at times, of pharmaceutical companies and other private institutions use IPR as a clot to exploit traditional local knowledge and publish such for their gain. This is not surprising, at the least, since IPR is a creation of the west. Thus, intentionally or unintentionally, it favours industrialized nations rather than bioculturally rich developing nations.

Going back to the discussion of Ellen & Harris (2000), the sophisticated advancement of European medicine is the product of long history of bioprospecting. It is with concern that although the intention is good for the provision of medical cures for their people, on one hand, it is the exploitation of traditional societies, on the other hand. I find it comical that western scientists hold IK in low esteem when the medical and scientific knowledge they have is the product of a long history of pirating traditional knowledge. In the guise of fieldwork to accumulate local knowledge and convert it into scientific knowledge, western scientists, thereby, misrepresent the context of which IK or TEK came from.

With the discussion on whether local knowledge should be transformed into global knowledge, I go with the idea that what makes IK significant is its relativity and its application is still embedded in the local because of the meanings attached to it. The trial and error methods applied by the locals in coming up with traditional knowledge is a test of unwavering belief to devise something that has to do in maintaining harmonious relationship to nature and the supernatural.

Question
There is a line at the end of the article of Ellen & Harris (2000) that I find questionable. It says, ‘Indigenous knowledge is dead.’ If the statement is really what is intended, then it defeats the rest of the arguments posted in the article. In fact, it would be deemed pointless. I am wondering if there is a missing word there, the ‘not’ before ‘dead.’ Such a minute word but it implies an opposite standpoint. Optimistically, it was just unintentionally overlooked.

An Article Review of Stanley Tambiah’s Politics of Ethnicity

The author outlined ethnicity as a possibility for mobilization for political action as opposed to mobilization of both social class and nation state. Ethnic groups try to assert and ‘exercise preferential or affirmative policies on the basis of majority status.’ Tambiah (1989) presented various explanations. One is that majority have become conscious of the role of collective ethnic identity to be manipulated in political action, with the ‘improvement of transport, quick adoption and deployment of modern media, raised levels of education and literacy, and spread of ‘print capitalism’ borrowed from Benedict Anderson (1983). The second is ‘the proliferation and popularization of street theaters and public arenas,’ as venues for staging political rallies, demonstrations and protests. Such occurrences are simultaneously taking place with population explosion and migration from the rural to the metropolitan. Another is the ‘proliferation of schools, colleges, and universities for the mobilization and massing of activists for engaging in political action.’

Parallel to the politicization of ethnicity is the explosion of ethnic conflict, particularly in the newly independent countries. Tambiah (1989) cited various examples that support this claim. He presented a distribution chart that indicated demographic combinations: (1) countries that are homogeneous in ethnic composition, (2) countries that have a dominant ethnic majority, (3) countries that constitute a large ethnic group and having several “minority” groups, (4) countries that have two large dominant groups of the same size, (5) and pluralistic countries composed of many ethnic groups where no one or two are dominant. The above context, along with the colonial legacy of ‘particularizing and standardizing policies,’ intentionally or unintentionally, promoted ethnic divisiveness and conflict.

The politicization of ethnicity reinforce the internationalization of violence exacerbated by technological advancements ‘making us all vicarious spectators and participants responding with our sympathies and our prejudices,’ Tambiah (1989:433). The author proposed 3 overlapping scenarios of contemporary ethnic conflict. One is the erosion of niche equilibrium of a particular group with the inclusion of other ethnic groups of an otherwise ‘closed’ industry. This leads to the possible displacement or dispossession of the ‘specialized minority’. Another scenario is the domination of the majorities to satellite minorities in the periphery that leads the ethnic minorities to be potential secessionists. The third is the threat for retaliations and counteractions attempts to subordinate unranked and equal groups and to incorporate them unequally as inferior citizens.

Tambiah reiterated that ‘there is a universalizing and homogenizing trend’ that makes people of contemporary societies and countries alike by wanting the same material and social benefits of modernization.’ On the other hand, these people assert their claim to be different based on their ascriptive identity, linguistic difference, ethnic membership, and rights to the soil, and, they wanted that such differences ‘should be basis for the distribution of modern benefits and rewards.’

I was given an insight on the historical analogy on ethnicity and a picture of ethnic distributions to establish the existence of ethnic groups and the conditions why these groups are easily politicized. I support the stand of the author that, indeed, colonization has a part in the conception of ethnic conflict.

Along with modernization and progress, the concept of ethnicity is still changing and given new meanings and categories. Constant reinvention of labels and boundaries takes effect. Observations of these times reveal ethnic conflict coupled with the violence that comes with, of which, is inimical for the state and the people. Yet, these actions are inevitable and mechanisms are useful to cope with such times.

A Comparative Review on the Methods Used in the Studies on Sexuality Among Young Women

To have a better comparison in the use of quantitative and qualitative research, I compared two studies on sexuality. One is the article on “Femininity and Sexual Agency Among Young Unmarried Women in Hanoi” by Quach (2008) and the other is on “Young Women's Degree of Control Over First Intercourse: An Exploratory Analysis” by Abma et al. (1998). There are quite a few citations from the articles that I have included to establish and clearly recognize the difference between the methods used by the authors.

The first article used qualitative method in the study on sexuality of young professional women of Hanoi. Purposive sampling was applied to identify the participants of the study. It was mentioned in the article that ‘a snowball method’ was used, but ‘attention was paid to the diversity of sexual experiences and social background of the key person’ (Quach 2008: 152) to avoid a ‘single social network’. Along with it, the participants were chosen according to a set of criteria as follows: (1) they were not legally married before the time of interview but had had boyfriend(s)/girlfriend(s); (2) their ages ranged from 25-34 years; (3) they were educated women, who had completed undergraduate study at least; (4) they were working and financially independent. The author used narrative analysis in ‘examining processes of negotiation and re-negotiation in the construction of sexual identities and subjectivities’ (Quach 2008: 152).

Quach (2008) mentioned that the 13 respondents were interviewed several times to have an in-depth understanding of sexual experiences and meanings. Quotes from them were included in the article. The incorporation of ‘voices’ established the participants’ perspectives on their experiences adding richness to the study.

Abma et al. (1998), on the other hand, employed quantitative technique in their study. A survey is made periodically by the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) of the US and this is where the data was obtained. It was mentioned that the ‘probability sample is 10,847 non-institutionalized women aged 15-44 in the civilian population’. A rating scale of 1-10 was used to rate the wantedness of the participants’ first premarital intercourse. A Statistical procedure was used to explain the results. In the study, a ‘Logistic regression analysis of data for women aged 15-24 was performed to test the effect of background factors and wantedness scores on contraceptive use at voluntary first intercourse. Analysis, however, was restricted to the 2,933 women aged 15-24 at the time of the survey.’

There was an attempt to delve into the relativity of first time intercourse experience with Black women and Hispanic women as the authors oversampled to, according to them, ‘facilitate the analysis of many phenomena within these racial and ethnic groups’ (Abma et. Al (1998). Yet, such inclusion, including the large number of respondents from the teenager and young adult groups, was not sufficient to have an in-depth relative analysis of the groups because of the limitations of a structured survey questionnaire that the interviewers used to gather the data. In the analysis portion, percentages and correlation of variables were used. This, in effect, is a generalization of the results. Interpretation of responses using the rating scale of wantedness did not give a space for individual analysis of perceptions and meanings of the responses, although the authors recognized such limitations in the end.


References:

Abma, J., Driscoll, A., & Moore, K. (1998, January/February). Family Planning Perspectives Volume 30, Number 1. Retrieved July 17, 2008 from http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3001298.pdf

Aggleton, P (2008) Culture, Health and Sexuality. An International Journal for Research, Intervention and Care, Volume 10, Supplement ISSN: 1369-1058. London, Routledge, June 2008, pp 151-161.

An Article Review of Ajun Appadurai’s Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy

In the article, the author discussed the disjunctures on the general theory of global cultural processes. He used 5 dimensions of global cultural flows to explain the disjuctures, namely, the ethnoscapes that constitutes “the shifting world in which we live”, the technoscapes to be “the global configuration of technology that moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries”, the financescapes to mean “the disposition of global capital that is more mysterious, rapid, and difficult to follow”, the mediascapes that refer to “the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information”, and the ideoscapes that are “concatenations of images that are directly political and that have to do with the ideologies of states and counterideologies of movements”.

Appadurai proposed the “dynamics of global cultural systems as driven by the relationships among flows of persons, technologies, finance, information, and ideology.” He argued that these set of terms, these dynamic flows, intersect and overlap creating instability and disjuncture in patterns of globalization leading to the complex interactions between relationships of difference and sameness that are context-dependent.

On the specifics, the author talked about the “the tension on cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization.” He critiqued the idea of “Americanization” of Filipinos arguing that “the United States is no longer the puppeteer of a world system of images but is only one node of a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes.” He discussed the idea of “imagined worlds” similar to Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” to argue that we live in a universe of multiple imagined worlds that are constituted by “historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread across the globe.”

Appadurai connected his idea of cultural flows to deterritorialization. That deterritorialization is “one of the central forces of the modern world.” It creates a venue, termed by the author as “new markets,” for the things that constitute the characteristics of the different “landscapes” such as film, art, travel, food, clothing to meet the desires of deterritorialized populations for contact with their homelands.

With the author’s discussion on the politics of global cultural flows centered on “Americanization”, I was struck with the term he borrowed from Fredric Jameson, the “nostalgia for the present,” of “nostalgia without memory.” This is in reference to Filipinos’ affinity for American popular music. In the context of CAR, this can be observed by the country music heard being played by a friend, a neighboring house, in bars, radio stations, even the audio tapes played over and over again when riding a bus along Halsema H-way. Indeed, the contents of such songs are not the history of a local person, but the playing of such songs invokes nostalgia to that person picturing a somewhat similar experience. All the same, it is the nostalgia of a past that that will remain to be a memory. Whether it is an “Americanization” or otherwise, the point is, such scenario is subsumed in the “imagination as a social practice in the global cultural processes.”

The arguments in the article are somewhat similar to the views of Mathews on the “global cultural supermarket.” Having arrays of choices, and easy access to most through technology and public media, it breaks the distinction of other people in other places. This leads to having a global identity that transcends cultural identity through the different global cultural processes that transcends national boundaries.

An Article Review on the” Global Culture/Individual Identity” of Gordon Mathews

It is the proposition of the author to combine the opposing definition of culture, the culture as “the way of life of a people” and the culture as “the information and identities available from the global cultural supermarket.” The first definition alludes to “culture shaped by the state and the second one refers to “culture shaped by the market.” He went on to discuss the theory on cultural shaping of self and then investigated the questions on cultural identity.

I agree with the idea of the author that both definitions of culture are problematic in the presence of expanding diversity, interrelations and the arrays of choices. It is sad to note that at present culture is reduced to “a matter of personal taste,” a mere picking from the wide variety of choices. Although, as mentioned in the article, the freedom to choose is curtailed by factors in the social world such as class, gender, age, economic status and nationality.

Going deeper on the idea of culture shaped by the state, the author implied that culture is manipulated and may even be invented by the state to justify its existence. For its legitimization, the education and media is used to facilitate and shape nationalism or having a national identity, when before such claim, there is no such thing as a nation, only groups. However, there is a resurgence of ethnicity and ethnic identity that may pose as a threat to the identity of the nation as a whole, though; this is insignificant to the strength of market identity of the cultural supermarket. Compared with the forceful exploitation of the state, the manipulation of the cultural supermarket is more of seduction with the glitters of advertising. In a way, it is a subtle way of persuasion that is difficult to refuse.

In the author’s discussion of “cultural shaping of self,” he mentioned three levels; the deep shaping, middle-level shaping and the shallow shaping. It is the distinction of actions done “without thinking,” actions done “because you have to,” and actions done “because you choose to,” respectively. He linked these to the definitions of culture, in which he categorized the 2 deepest levels of the self’s cultural shaping to be under culture as “the way of life of a people,” and the shallowest level is under culture as “the global cultural supermarket.”

He made an exception, though, for those in the upper economic strata wherein, it is the realm of the cultural supermarket that is taken for granted because of the notion that one is free to choose. Accordingly, the two contradictory principles discussed in the article, that of the state and that of the market, is not seen as contradictory by most affluent people because it is in the taken-for-granted level, that of the shallow stage.

Retracing Mathews’ discussion in the limitation of our choices based on the make-up of our social world, I think this is a precursor to having a global identity that transcends national or cultural identity. Having arrays of seductive choices, and easy access to most, it breaks the distinction of other people in other places. But, this may also be detrimental in a sense that it may lead to the slow but cannot be stopped erosion of acknowledging roots and history. Except, of course, for those who chose to leave and migrate to other countries and still consider themselves Filipinos, acknowledging that this is their home country.

I find the article refreshing to read and I agree to most of the discussions. The bias I saw, though, is how the author chose his respondents for his study. He chose only “those of the elite in their societies, and in the world.” This is with the positivist assumption that “their struggles resonate throughout their societies.” I just want to point out that there should have been a balance of getting both the perspectives of what the author consider as the “intellectual and economic elites” and what he consider as “less well-off people in their societies and in the world.”

Reflections and Insights on the Article by Lincoln and Guba on the Paradigmatic Controversies, Contradictions, and Emerging Confluences

How the authors presented their views is appreciated with the displayed openness/accommodation in their presentation of the different paradigms, despite mentioning their position in the earlier passage of the article. The fact that they accommodated other paradigms such as the participatory paradigm, despite their outright stand of being constructivists, it indicates that the proposition holds a bearing in social research. Although it cannot be denied that participatory paradigm is much nearer to constructivism that the authors allude to.

To help comprehend and give credit to what I suppose is the paradigm/s I am inclined to, I would like to include my insights or biases on some of the controversies discussed in the reading. I would like to start with the inclusion of values in social inquiry. With the increasing interest of researchers to the interpretative realm of human behavior with socio-cultural interaction, new paradigm inquirers are moving away from the clinical, faceless, emotionless state of research to the inclusion of spirituality and spiritual concerns. The move towards the so-called subjective realm creates issues between paradigms.

With the issue on commensurability, It was mentioned in the article that, “social phenomena are consist of the meaning-making activities of groups and individuals” (Guba and Lincoln, 2000). As such, social inquiry is consists of understanding the meaning-making activities happening. The authors believe that there is the possibility of ‘confluence,’ of ‘shifting boundaries of paradigms,’ the ‘blurring of genres.’ And so different methodologies can be used, depending to what is responsive to the problem. With this in mind, there should be no issue on commensurability.

The second issue raised is on the role of action in research. It is interesting to note that hard-line positivists believe actions as ‘taints’ in research outputs. On this matter, I would be inclined to side with post-positivists that actions are part and parcel of research results and process (Guba and Lincoln, 2000). Studying social phenomena is different from analyzing natural occurrences. Actions of people are fluid. It varies from one to another, from time to time. Thus, it is hard to generalize results as opposed to the static and consistent results drawn from molecules or mathematical equations for that matter. Nuances and peculiarities will always surface in the study of social phenomena that question the validity of results when employing positivist’s axioms as yardstick.

Another controversy is regarding control. When control means participants having active role, of communities taking control of their futures, of actions controlled by community members, this should be seen as a good thing since it promotes social development. It also reiterates that knowledge cannot be separated from the knower as opposed to the positivist’s view of a taint-free objectivity.

This leads to the issue on reality coupled with validity. Of whether reality is an entity outside human experiences that are tested using absolute criteria, or whether knowers are not separate from objective reality. Contradictions on foundational, antifoundational or nonfoundational perspectives of truth and knowledge are currently of discussion in the social sciences. Arguments on the application of rigorous scientific method against the use of interpretative processes are taking place. Yet, it seems that views under new paradigms already surpass explanations against the foundational view of reality.

In terms of voice, reflexivity, and postmodern textual representation, the struggle is on whose voice is being heard. Is it of the author, of the respondents or of the inclusion of the self? This holds true with reflexivity. Different categories of the selves were mentioned by Reinharz (1997) in the text, the research-based selves, brought selves and the situationally created selves. It is a discussion on reflecting and questioning oneself in the process of social inquiry/data gathering, a subjective action yet fruitful in terms of application. Voice is also linked with textual representation, the “messy texts” of Marcus & Fisher (1996) mentioned in the article. However, such texts seek to break boundaries, to decentralize and focus inquiries on human experience, at the same time freedom to choose alternatives in doing social inquiry. In addition, such representations, is not necessarily for the sole purpose of academic arguments, but are utilized and are applicable for the consumption of the non-academic audiences or in the context of which the research result was based.

Following the discussions in the article, I would say that I would ascribe to constructivism and participatory paradigm. However, this inclination does not mean ruling out positivist view and other paradigms. Depending on the kind of research there is, ascribing to rigorous scientific method and/or interpretative process can be used. In the search for understanding human behavior, different method of inquiries can be employed.