Medicine as microcosm: Pharmaceutical bioprospecting and the political epistemology of nature in industrial–capitalist and indigenous Amazonian societies

Pharmaceutical bioprospecting and the greening of capitalism

Pharmaceutical bioprospecting can be seen as a privileged point of insight into capitalist nature. This is because it was, at one point, at the forefront of the campaign for the valuation of nature in economic terms, a trend which Mary Finley-Brook (2007) referred to as the creation of ‘green neoliberal space’, and which Cindi Katz refers to as the shift from a nature that was ‘extensive’ with respect to capitalism to an ‘everyday more intensive nature’ (2002: 46). This process of extending capitalism as a regime of management of nature has now been thoroughly documented in political geography and political ecology (e.g. Asiyanbi, 2017; Bakker, 2010; Bigger and Dempsey 2018; Castree, 2008).

An example of the initiatives to extend the capitalist nature regime to biodiverse spaces was the BIOTRADE programme, run by the UN Conference on Trade and Development, which supported businesses involved in the trade of non-timber (tropical) forest products (often referenced as NTFPs) like brazil nuts and açaí berries, and in small-scale agricultural projects, such as shade-grown coffee (Sierra, 2004). The World Bank’s reporting department outlines the types of production that have received development funding in these zones: ‘apiculture, shade coffee, reduced tillage, NTFPs, extractive reserves, silvopastoral practices [and] ecotourism’ (IEG, 2011: 23) (Figure 1). Evidently, sustainable development plans were seeking to superimpose capitalist nature on the peoples living in tropical forests. They start from the notion that sustainability depends on making ‘the business case for biodiversity’ (Rubino, 2000: 224; Swanson, 1995), rather than considering the pre-existing sustainable practices of indigenous peoples.

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Figure 1.

Ethnographic fieldwork was undertaken in the southeast quadrant of the map, which shows Ecuador’s southernmost region, in zones 23, 25, 29, 30 and 33.

Of all these policy proposals for expanding capitalist nature to the tropical forests, pharmaceutical bioprospecting was at one time the most lauded. Commonly cited were the natural origins of a large proportion of the pharmaceuticals in contemporary use and the fact that even many synthetically produced pharmaceuticals were inspired by naturally occurring molecules in medicinal plants (Thiel, 2000). Indeed, between January 1981 and June 2006, 47% of cancer drugs and 34% of all small molecule chemical entities were derived from natural products (Newman and Cragg, 2007). A heated adjunct to this celebratory tone in the literature was the observation that the knowledge of these plants was often drawn from postcolonial territories with little to no attempt made to share the economic benefits, leading to accusations of ‘biopiracy’ (see Robinson, 2010: 45ff.). Indeed, the contributions of indigenous people, especially women, to the historical development of the science of botany have undoubtedly been widely overlooked or erased (Harding, 2009: 408). With regard to the potential economic value of bioprospecting, however, arguably both critics and advocates of pharmaceutical bioprospecting have been overwrought (Dutfield, 2014: 653).

Nonetheless, with the potential lucrativeness of pharmaceutical bioprospecting in mind, one of the architects of the BIOTRADE initiative argued that it has the potential to generate ‘substantial economic incentives to protect biodiversity and provide biologically rich countries with an opportunity for sustainable development’ (Artuso, 1997: 8), and this argument has certainly been the prime cause for enthusiasm among bioprospecting’s proponents (King, 1992; Reid et al., 2003). Neoliberal economists, of course, took to the prospect of expanding capitalist nature, speaking of ‘the necessity of definitive quantification’ of this new tropical forest capital that may be uncovered through bioprospecting research, even attempting wildly complex and speculative statistical models for estimating the value of these as yet undiscovered medicinal organisms (Artuso, 1997: 99; Pearce and Puroshothaman, 1995).

In short, in the bioprospecting initiative, the endeavour of producing knowledge about nature and valuing nature within the terms of the industrial–capitalist system went hand in hand, a fact which can be viewed within the broader trend towards neoliberalization of research illustrated by Bronwyn Parry (2004: 129–130). If a condition for an entity to continue to exist in industrial–capitalist society is for it to have a degree of monetary value, then any knowledge about that entity will inevitably be framed with regard to its potential monetary value. This is a process described by Evelyn Fox Keller as the ‘tacit instrumental mandate’ governing knowledge production, as it brackets out certain elements ‘in the name of intellectual economy and technological efficacy’ and focuses in on others, particularly the ‘identifiable and controllable agents’ (1995: 63). While Keller’s analysis here centres on the history of the theorization of DNA and the notion of a ‘genetic blueprint’, her description is just as apt with regard to pharmaceutical bioprospecting and, as we shall see, its strategy of seeking out alienable and reproducible chemical and genetic components of medicinal plants.

Industrial capitalist society’s knowledge about nature

The case study of pharmaceutical bioprospecting presented in this section centres on the International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (ICBG) programme led by the US National Institute of Health (NIH), and more precisely the arm of the initiative called the ICBG Aguaruna, named after the indigenous Aguaruna people of the northern Peruvian Amazon, on whose medicinal plant knowledge the project’s collections were based. The ICBG project sits neatly within the introductory context of ‘green neoliberal space’ just recounted; its directors themselves stated that their project aims were medical research, conservation of biodiversity and sustainable development (NIH, 2002: 10–11; Rosenthal, 2006: 119).

The ICBG Aguaruna was one of only two in the overall initiative that collaborated with indigenous peoples to collect locally known medicinal plants as candidates for biochemical research. This followed numerous suggestions from ethnobotanists that such a research design would enhance studies by focusing them on only the most relevant medicinal plants in any area (Balick, 1990; Cox, 1990; King, 1992). This could be viewed as welcome acknowledgement of the value of indigenous knowledge, particularly given the hypothetical economic benefits that could result. On the other hand, such advocacy for the recognition of indigenous knowledge in this context suffered from an arguably patronizing tendency to overemphasize the proto-scientific, empiricist qualities of indigenous knowledge practice and underemphasize those elements less congenial to the philosophically materialist worldview of capitalist nature. Walter Lewis, a biochemist, ethnobotanist and leading advocate of the ICBG Aguaruna, described Aguaruna ethnomedicinal knowledge as based on ‘empirical methodology’ (Lewis and Elvin-Lewis, 1991) and ‘traditional testing and selecting’ of plants (Lewis, 2003: 130). Likewise, Brent and Elois Ann Berlin, ethnobotanists who played a similar role with respect to the ICBG Maya, described Mayan healing practice as ‘an ethnoscientific system […] based on astute and accurate observation that have only been elaborated on the basis of many years of explicit empirical experimentation’ (Berlin and Berlin, 1996: 53). The fact that the project directors favoured this orientation in choosing to work with Lewis and the Berlins in a competitive tender and the fact that these were the only two projects in the overall ICBG programme based on collaboration with indigenous peoples suggest a lack of openness towards the different epistemologies of nature in certain indigenous cultures. As we will see with regard to health-seeking practice among the Aguaruna and Shuar peoples, this epistemology is in certain ways far from the cautious empiricism that Western scientists might hope to collaborate with.

Having succeeded in satisfying the NIH tender, the ICBG Aguaruna proceeded when the research team managed to reach a legal agreement with an Aguaruna federation that permitted them to collect samples of medicinal plants. The plants were identified by Aguaruna people based on their knowledge of their medical use, and the project’s partner corporation, Searle (then part of Monsanto and now part of Pfizer), which paid a know-how licence for the right to make use of Aguaruna collective intellectual property (Greene, 2004: 218), thereby implicitly recognizing the norm embodied in Article 8(j) of the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity to ‘encourage the equitable sharing of the benefits’ from the ‘knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity’. The researchers paid a sum per sample and agreed that a proportion of the earnings ² of any pharmaceutical product ultimately developed would be paid to ‘the Aguaruna people’ (Lewis and Ramani, 2007: 405), which, incidentally, was represented by a federation that included no more than 40% of the total Aguaruna population (Greene, 2004: 215–219). ³ Samples of medicinal plants were ultimately shipped to the United States to be analyzed by Searle (Greene, 2004: 223) and, after their withdrawal from the project, presumably on commercial grounds, to the laboratories of researchers led by Walter Lewis at Washington University in St Louis, Illinois (Greene, 2004: 219).

How, then, did the US-based research team apprehend the value of this package of biodiverse material and the associated knowledge of local indigenous people, whose sophisticated system of classification of the non-human beings of their environment (Berlin, 1976) reflected their dependence for their livelihood on their knowledge of nature? Once in the USA, all plant samples were screened for single-molecule active ingredients by bioassay machines (Hayden, 2003: 72). As discussed by the chemist George Albers-Schönberg (1995), formerly of the pharmaceutical corporation Merck, these bioassay machines can only scan the botanical samples for pre-specified chemical substances. The desired chemical structure is chosen based on biochemical pathways already known to aid in the treatment or cure of a disease (Albers-Schönberg, 1995: 73), such that ethnomedical information can only be used to help guide the decision of what chemical structure to have the bioassay machines scan for. Thus, the project was, by design, blind to the potential synergistic effects between chemical components of indigenous medicines, as well as to the possibility of completely new biochemical pathways being activated. Instead, it used these plants purely as inputs that were evaluated according to their compatibility with existing avenues of production in the industry.

Overall, the manner in which the ICBG Aguaruna sought to apprehend the value of nature by surveying the pharmacological potential of the medicinal plants in a biodiverse environment demonstrates two key epistemological biases inherited from the socio-historical development of industrial capitalism. First of all, a medicine is not by definition a single-molecular entity. While this would typically be accepted in theory (see Li and Zhang, 2009), the notion of single-molecule active ingredients remains an operational assumption of western medical science, starkly illustrating the distinction between science as a theoretical ideal and science as a social practice. This focus on silver-bullet single molecules is the central assumption around which the United States regulates medicines through the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA requires that all new medicines be isolated chemical entities, or if not – as in the case of non-laboratory-generated plant extracts, which inevitably contain a mixture of components – each chemical entity in the mixture must be isolated and tested individually for safety and efficacy in order to justify its presence in the medicine (Dutfield, 2014: 654; Khalil, 1995: 239). The potential of synergistic action is thereby discounted from the beginning, as plant extracts are not tested for efficacy in their original form.

This critique is corroborated by the ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin (2000), who once returned from the Amazon with a herbal preparation which he had seen cure a woman critically ill with diabetes. The woman, from whom a western-trained physician accompanying Plotkin took blood samples, had extremely elevated blood sugar levels. She was brought to a medicine man, who prepared a herbal formula that she drank immediately and continued to drink during her brief recovery phase. Most significantly, the remedy is a very practical method of treating diabetes in comparison with available treatments in Western medical science; it is taken a few times over a week, typically once per month, if the initial symptoms begin to recur. Plotkin made an agreement with the medicine man to take samples of the plants and the remedy itself to a major pharmaceutical company. After making individual assessments of each of the plants used, as well as of the various chemical ingredients suspected of independently accounting for the remedy’s bioactivity, the company abandoned its testing, in spite of Plotkin’s plea that the medicine’s four constituent ingredients worked synergistically (Plotkin, 2000: 203–206).

Secondly, the regulatory framework of intellectual property law requires that for a product to be patentable, be it a medicine or otherwise, it must be capable of industrial mass production (Mgbeoji, 2006: 140). That is to say, pharmaceuticals and the industry based around them are regulated within a legacy framework for encouraging invention that dates from the beginning of the industrial era. Medicinal plants, then, necessarily fall outside of the biomedical economic model based on patent protection of new products, as the variance in their active ingredients from plant to plant, season to season and location to location means they do not fit the model of standardized product required by the legal and regulatory system of industrial–capitalist society. As Ikechi Mgbeoji puts it:

Accordingly, the patent system […] is in fact speaking a monologue directed towards a narrow epistemological and economic elite. In this strange but familiar world, marginalized epistemological frameworks take on the status of stunned spectators/victims. The exclusiveness of Western scientific jargon as an elite cultural signifier, along with Western juridical formalism itself (which has been globally positioned as the only legitimate and acceptable narrative framework of science), serves to […] marginalize indigenous cultures. (2006: 149)

It is true that the mutually reinforcing qualities of the economic, legal, regulatory and epistemological levels of industrial–capitalist society are not always perfectly harmonized. This is certainly the case with international law, a field of contest where despite attempts to universalize industrial-era precepts as critiqued by Ikechi Mgbeoji, the imposition of culturally peculiar concepts, practices and assumptions can be seen as clearly unjust. They may be contrasted, for instance, with indigenous Australian norms which governed the knowledge about and appropriate use of medicinal plants, many of which were totemic species (Robinson and Raven, 2019), as well as with the account of a Shuar epistemology of nature presented in the second section of this article. Drawing on such accounts and the broader international indigenous rights movement, advocates of epistemic pluralism have achieved substantive gains in international law since the ICBG projects.

Perhaps, the most notable gain has been the signing of the Nagoya Protocol in 2010, which expanded on the provisions in Article 8(j) in the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (Bavikatte and Robinson, 2011: 41). The preamble to the Nagoya Protocol acknowledges ‘the interrelationship between genetic resources and traditional knowledge [and] their inseparable nature for indigenous and local communities’ (Bavikatte and Robinson, 2011: 47). The agreement thereby effectively recognizes the cultural peculiarity of industrial–capitalist institutions’ reductionist conceptualization of nature, which reduces nature to commercializable chemical components with an emphasis on ‘genetic resources’ (Keller, 1995; McAfee, 2003).

Of course, the degree to which advances in international law are translated into real partnerships between indigenous knowledge holders and industrial–capitalist institutions remains to be seen, and will undoubtedly turn on local dynamics of political power. It has been suggested that the augmentation of indigenous knowledge rights will simply lead to disengagement from bioprospecting on the part of the pharmaceutical industry’s institutional protagonists, particularly in concert with the opening of new possibilities in combinatorial chemistry and digital sequencing (Parry, 2004: 168–170). While such a course would be consistent with the earlier reluctance to engage with indigenous knowledge practices, the enormity of the planet’s biochemical diversity may not allow medical science and the pharmaceutical industry to ignore the promise of bioprospecting or ‘biodiscovery’ (Paterson and Lima, 2016), even if the recent shift in emphasis to the oceans (Jaspars et al., 2016; Reen et al., 2015) is likely undergirded by the impulse to avoid entanglements with local rights-holders.

While it is important to understand the legal and political struggles at play in the global scenario of bioprospecting, the ICBG case is perhaps more significant in the way it evinces not only the characteristics of capitalist nature, but also its resistance to alternative epistemologies of nature on whose behalf such political and legal struggles are waged. Even when ostensibly collaborating with indigenous people, the socio-historically inherited processes and assumptions about knowledge production delimit the ways in which nature is understood. One way of visualizing the process by which knowledge about nature is pre-formed is by analogy with political geography. In the same way that urban space is subdivided so as to allocate a single productive activity to each zone, and in the same way that agricultural space is allocated to the production of a few particular monocultures per ecological zone, likewise pharmaceutical bioprospectors seek out a single lucrative element of nature that can be extracted and then reproduced and distributed en masse. Extrapolating from pharmaceutical bioprospecting as a case study, capitalist nature can thus be understood as the extension of the rationalization of society and space to the molecular and genetic level, such that medicine becomes essentially the microcosm to the macrocosm of industrial–capitalist society. On the one hand, this scheme permits the mass production and distribution of medicines, which can then be prescribed to individuals on a basis roughly standardized according to symptom picture rather than personal idiosyncrasies. The difficulty, though, on the other hand, is that the interconnected biological systems of mind, emotion, body and psyche do not necessarily accord with the narrowly defined, industrial-era emphasis on productive efficiency that characterizes industrial pharmacy and has infiltrated the social being of medical science.

A consideration of some of the analyses of the rationalization of society and space produced by political geographers corroborates the proposal that capitalist nature can be understood as an extension of this schema to the microcosmic level. It is striking the extent to which the descriptors of the rationalization of society and space in capitalist society equally apply to the epistemic procedures employed by capitalist nature. Zygmunt Bauman’s observation, for instance, that industrial–capitalist society strives ‘to spatially separate parts of the city dedicated to different functions’ (1998: 36) parallels the insistence on isolating and separating out the various potentially synergistic chemical constituents of medicinal plants. Henri Lefebvre’s argument that formerly integrated components of urban social life are treated in capitalist cities as ‘ingredients and chemical elements, as raw materials’ (1996: 143) mirrors the way in which the chemical and genetic constituents of non-human beings are reduced to being potentially profitable raw materials. Likewise, Japhy Wilson’s description of modernization and development as a ‘technocratic project that divides the organic unity of everyday life into isolated fragments’ (2011: 996) also appears to pertain at the molecular level. In sum, the same political, economic and social alienation well known in political geographers’ conceptualizations of industrial–capitalist modernity can be seen to recur in industrial–capitalist society’s production of knowledge about nature.

Having said that, clearly not all knowledge of nature within capitalist society is produced under the same conditions or with the same goals. To return to the ICBG Aguaruna case study, on the one hand, in the case of the research carried out by Searle, the information collected by the field researchers from Aguaruna collaborators was actually discarded and considered irrelevant. Searle chose to instead scan the samples for chemical substances known to be active against diabetes, cardiovascular problems and inflammatory diseases (Greene, 2004: 219). Any potential bioactivity of the plant samples for treating other medical problems were rendered irrelevant by this decision. This strategy was clearly motivated by the profitability of marketing drugs to patients suffering from these conditions in the Global North, rather than also investigating diseases of dire significance in the Global South affecting populations with less purchasing power. This is the kind of research about nature produced under the raw conditions of utility-maximizing persons under free-market capitalism.

On the other hand, once Searle withdrew, subsequent research took place in a university-based setting. The lead researcher, Walter Lewis, appears to have found the experience instructive. He discusses how in an extract of a particular medicinal plant used by Aguaruna, one of its chemical constituents demonstrated antimalarial inhibition at a rate of 78%, and another at 60%. However, he says, ‘[W]hen the two were combined in the proportions in which they are naturally found in the medicinal plant’s bark, a rate of 90 percent inhibition was demonstrated’ (Lewis, 2003: 129). The high amount of antipathogenic activity in medicinal plants native to tropical rainforests, he argues, is not surprising ‘given the overwhelming number of pathogens […] potentially active year round’ in the rainforest environment and the ‘shared sensitivities’ between humans and plants to those pathogens (Lewis, 2003: 131). In other words, the medicinal compounds developed by plants for their own survival are in many cases needed for the very same purpose by human beings.

Such observations open up a different view of nature from that implied by the ‘capitalist nature’ mode, in which, if it is to be valued and incorporated into the urban and agricultural spaces of industrial–capital society, nature must be objectified and take on the form of a profitable raw material, whether as potentially therapeutic isolable molecules or some other type of commodity. Contrastingly, the research carried out by Walter Lewis’ team emphasizes the evolutionary continuity between humankind and the biodiverse environment and, importantly, the fact that medicinal plants have already developed therapeutic compounds for their own purposes. Lewis ultimately advocated for the FDA to approve multiple, related, complementary chemical compounds as single drugs, and also supported the expansion of ‘nutriceuticals’ made from extracts of plants identified by ethnobotanists (2003: 132). Although this has not led to significant change in industrial pharmacy, Lewis’ research does usefully distinguish public interest research in the university sector – which, with its degree of independence from market forces, was, in this case, able to start from existing indigenous knowledge about nature – and research produced by capitalist firms guided entirely by the profit motive.

The following section extends upon this preliminary consideration of the different forms of social construction of nature by moving into a discussion of an epistemology of nature indigenous to Shuar territory in the southeastern Ecuadorian Amazonia, an epistemology in fact substantially equivalent to the Aguaruna practices that were right under the noses of the pharmaceutical bioprospectors involved in the ICBG research. It is one thing to deconstruct the universalizing pretensions of the knowledge produced about nature in contemporary industrial–capitalist societies by highlighting its socio-historically produced peculiarities. It is quite another to demonstrate, by reference to concrete examples of radical difference, that this epistemological rationalization that characterizes capitalist nature is not, in fact, inevitable to the apprehension of nature. Moreover, as we shall see, such a comparison shows the differential operation of nature as it is enabled and constrained by distinct epistemological regimes. Unless explicitly referenced to earlier ethnographers, all the information presented in the following section is drawn from my own ethnographic fieldwork.

Knowledge about medicine, plants and nature among certain Shuar

Like the vast majority of contemporary populations, the Shuar of southeastern Ecuador are by no means a culturally homogenous group. On the contrary, in spite of their geographic proximity to one another and the widespread sense among Shuar of themselves as a singular, identifiable people, the Shuar population is cross-cut by transnational forces to varying degrees, which produces ample intragroup cultural diversity. The most consequential of these forces in Shuar territory are capitalism and wage labour, Protestant Evangelism and political discourses of a range of stripes. Each of these have a notable effect on the degree to which contemporary Shuar people are committed to, and see the relevance in, their ancestral cultural inheritance and its associated repertoire of knowledge, concepts and practice, which complicates any attempt to present a singular Shuar mode of knowledge about nature.

That said, in certain hinterland regions of southeastern Ecuador, there are still numerous Shuar whose interpretive and practical approach to health, illness, medicine and the surrounding environment shows continuity with the lifeways documented by ethnographers of the Shuar and related groups generations ago (Brown, 1985; Descola, 1996; Harner, 1972). Among this segment of the contemporary Shuar population, on whom the following section focuses, the epistemic approach to the natural world revealed in their health-seeking practices is very different to the procedures of rationalization and isolation characteristic of capitalist nature and evidenced in pharmaceutical bioprospecting. The following analysis focuses on the use of one particular medicinal plant in order to comprehend something of the epistemic approach to nature that Shuar health-seeking practices imply.

One of the most widely used medicinal plants in Shuar territory is known in their language as maikiua, a term that, to the non-expert, seems to refer to multiple species in the Brugmansia genus. ⁴ The plant is applied as a plaster to all sorts of injuries and is reported to reduce swelling, clean wounds and speed the healing of sprains and fractures, this range of uses lending it the nickname ‘el doctor’ among Shuar when speaking in Spanish. There is a ready difference here already between industrial pharmacy’s isolation and mass production of single-molecule active ingredients and the application of more or less a whole plant (in the case of maikiua, discarding the woody parts and the flower) as a medicine. From the point of view of medical science, of course, the argument is that its medicines contain isolated and concentrated forms of the very same active ingredients that would be found in the Shuar’s maikiua plaster; in other words, there is no practical difference between nature and the active components that can be extracted, concentrated and mass produced from it. In addition, one could even imagine, as an evolution of biomedicine’s present modus operandi, that publicly funded, independent medical researchers such as Walter Lewis might experiment with various chemical extracts taken from maikiua so as to determine how the plant itself deploys them synergistically, thereby going some way towards superseding the epistemic bias towards patentable, single-molecule, mass producible entities that biomedicine has inherited from the socio-historical experience of industrial capitalism.

Nonetheless, this would not, in itself, encapsulate the difference in the epistemic approach to nature that forms parts of the ancestral cultural inheritance of contemporary Shuar people. This is because for those Shuar people pursuing ancestral knowledge practices, they are not deploying an object from their environment with certain qualities that can be made use of; they are placing the plant itself in a position to heal the person. While this might appear as a simple difference in attributing intentionality, in its effects it is not a trite distinction. This is most clear when one considers the common adjunct treatment, particular in the case of severe fractures, of ingesting a small amount of the maikiua sap along with applying the plaster. This causes the person to detach from mundane reality and enter a hallucinatory dream state, a state that is seen as no less real than ordinary reality by many Shuar. ⁵ In that state, a being understood to be the spirit of the plant, often described as a doctor in a white lab coat, comes to soothe the person’s pain and cure their injury. One man reported to me that although the person is experiencing the hallucination in this way, they may, in fact, sit up in an unconscious state and set their own broken bone, an action permitted thanks to the anaesthesia and dissociation produced by ingesting the plant.

What is the fundamental conceptuality of medicine and nature revealed in this practice? For this particular sub-section of the Shuar population, it is the activity of maikiua in going to work on the person’s own self-image in the dream state that forms the groundwork and precondition for the person to experience healing in the mundane reality. For this group, medicine is not the technical activity of intervention upon the biological matter that makes up a person so as to achieve a desired outcome. It is an intervention, but one acting upon a different stratum of reality, with the aim of not just eliminating any present problems, but also redirecting the vision one holds of their own self and their future so as to imbue their life with energy, coherence and strength of will. Moreover, although the maikiua is of course being put to use by Shuar, thenceforth the act of intervention is essentially being effected by the plant itself. The plant is said in Spanish to have an ‘espíritu vivo’ (‘living spirit’), the same term used to describe the state of a shaman in a healing session who has reached the point of being able to perceive and act within this dream state evoked by hallucinogenic plants such as maikiua.

This is why when one asks Shuar people in this segment of the population about medicinal plants, they always first reference either maikiua, ayahuasca or tobacco, all plants that produce visions of this other, more profound stratum of reality. There are certainly other medicinal plants known and used, but these are employed in the same therapeutic manner as herbal medicines are in a western context, and therefore not accorded the same importance. Thus, while ayahuasca is said to aid in treating the flu and stomach aches, these are said to be subsidiary to its ability to improve a person’s ‘power’ and ‘luck’. Similarly, this is why the defence of ‘our medicines’ and ‘our medicinal plants’ takes on a larger than life political significance, as these plants facilitate the experience of a different side to reality that many Shuar consider fundamental, but the experience of which they know is either ignored or vilified within colonial society. In other words, it is the survival of an entire, distinctive epistemic approach to nature that is at stake in the struggles of the Shuar and other indigenous peoples. This helps explain, too, why pharmaceutical bioprospecting is such a controversial topic for many indigenous groups, as it implies the potential incorporation of plants with profound spiritual significance into the reality view of capitalist nature. ⁶ For many Shuar people, it is not that nature is an ensemble of plants and other life forms that can be extracted and studied; rather, ‘nature’ is itself studied through the perceptive capacities activated by medicinal plants that are themselves coexistent with humans in the environment.

Considering, then, the distinct epistemologies of nature through which medicinal plants have been seen to operate in this article, one can visualize a spectrum of constraints upon the agency of nature. At one end, capitalist nature seeks to accord medicinal plants a very narrow space through which to act, extracting only certain elements which must prove themselves useful under a narrowly circumscribed set of conditions. At the same time, the plants themselves in a sense seek to subvert the epistemology and associated productive structures of capitalist nature, by virtue of revealing their own, more sophisticated medicinal capacities when studied outside the domain of pharmaceutical corporations in the less restrictive academic research environment. The Shuar context then differs further, as there are certain plants which are placed in an equal position to human beings with regard to their agency and consciousness. Under this epistemology of nature, such plants reveal a synergistic mode of operation which integrates hallucinogenic, psychosomatic and physiological mechanisms. Yet across these highly divergent epistemologies of nature, what remains common is that each human approach pre-forms nature’s modes of action, at the same time as the action itself can never be fully determined by those constraints.

Towards a reflective epistemic approach to nature

This article has put forward that the dynamic that drives the socio-spatial rationalization observed by political geographers inheres as much at the epistemic scale as it does at the economic and geographic scales. The impetus to separate out individual elements for production en masse, whether they be agricultural commodities or the less tangible economic products of the city, also biases the way knowledge about nature is produced, even at the microscopic level: in short, the microcosm in industrial–capitalist society is rationalized in the very same way as the macrocosm. From the perspective of proponents of pharmaceutical bioprospecting for sustainable development, the irony is that the very same logic through which it makes sense to rationalize biodiverse spaces as reservoirs of biological material, as part of an overall schema predominately taken up by urban and agricultural commodity producing spaces, prejudices initiatives to apprehend the medicinal value of the biological diversity in those reserves.

It is important to acknowledge, in concluding, that the critique pursued in this article of the manner in which the forces driving socio-spatial rationalization in industrial–capitalist society also shape its epistemic approach to nature does not imply an attack on its legitimacy as a knowledge system. The procedures through which a society develops its knowledge about nature inevitably bear the imprint of the cultural, political and economic heritage of that society. This is surely as much the case with regard to the biases produced by the regulatory and economic structures of industrial–capitalist society as with the effects of the economics and ethics that orient life in Shuar society. Clearly, many Shuar people today are operating under a vastly different understanding of the meaning of medicine and nature than is normalized within industrial–capitalist society, and the potential of this distinct epistemic approach no doubt greatly exceeds the material benefits of pharmaceutical corporations’ bioassays of certain medicinal plants. Regardless, the concern here is not with medical science versus Shuar health-seeking practices; instead, it is with the pretense to universality, a consequence of which is the confusion of nature as understood through the modes of knowledge and practice in industrial–capitalist society with nature itself.

Medical science unfortunately does not appear to self-evaluate with regard to the logic of mass-producing single-entity chemicals, which may then be stored for lengthy periods and dispensed quickly in the brief consultations with patients characteristic of mass societies, as against disadvantages such as the more severe side effects that many be provoked by single-entity medicines, or potential limitations in biological efficacy in comparison with other kinds of medicines. Instead, these epistemological assumptions that have developed during a specific socio-historical experience have become insinuated into the very meaning of what is and what is not a legitimate medicine. As such, when organizations within industrial–capitalist society have set out to produce knowledge about the medicinal value of nature, the exercise has been pre-framed to seek out new materials that fit into the existing rationalized socio-spatial structures, but then discursively framed as neutral and objective knowledge.

Out of an unwillingness to homogenize their representations of nature and a desire to attend to complexity and particularity, political ecologists have by and large implemented a case study approach similar to that employed in this article. Some have suggested that an unfortunate consequence of this has been a proliferation of disparate cases, with little attempt made to draw out their commonalities (Bakker, 2010; Castree, 2005). Yet attempts to construct typologies to address this issue (e.g. Bakker, 2010: 723–725) have arguably overlooked epistemology in their understandable focus on political economy and discourse. In this image of the extension of the rationalization of space and society to the molecular level as a schematization of the essence of the political epistemology of capitalist nature, this article has proposed a terminology through which the epistemological commonalities between cases can be conceptualized.

Highlights

Knowledge about nature produced within the industrial–capitalist milieu is circumscribed by its own socio-historical heritage.