Lecture by Breeanna Elliott: “Spirited Collaborations in Ethnopharmacology: The Limits of Laboratory Knowledge and Intellectual Property Frameworks at a Phytomedicine Research Institute in Madagascar

This lecture will provide fascinating insights into an ongoing research project. It will be of value to researchers in the fields of African History and beyond, engaging with spirits and ancestors in their work, as well as to anyone interested in the methodologies of oral history and ethnographic fieldwork.

 “What are plants? Who can know them? And what counts as knowing and knowledge?”

In posing these questions, anthropologist Stacey Langwick suggests a critical starting point for recognizing the relationships between practices of colonial dispossession and the legal, scientific, and cultural categories of traditional medicine. She also offers a discursive space for examining the “ontological politics” at play in research that engages – in one way or another, either explicitly or indirectly – with ancestors or spirited beings. In this talk, Breeanna Elliott will introduce participants to a well-known research institute that produces improved traditional medicine products in Madagascar based on researchers’ ethnobotanical fieldwork conducted with healers in rural areas of the country. In the course of their field research, scientists must adhere, at least in practice, to the ritual requirements associated with the spirited work – to wit, labor done in collaboration with spirits – of specific healers who rely on plant-based medicines. Drawing upon my her ethnographic research, she will narrate these moments of collaboration between scientist, healer, and spirit. She will examine how each conceptualizes the work of the other and the ways global scientific methodologies and publication expectations obscure the unresolvable ontological tensions that arise.

Using this case study, Breeanna Elliott will also suggest how contemporary debates on intellectual property rights in the context of traditional medicine reify early modern constructs of exchange that have enabled ongoing colonial violence.

The presentation will be followed by a reception and an Apèro riche.

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