Intellectual Property Rights -- Local and Indigenous Knowledge

I was chatting with a student yesterday about IPR and local and indigenous knowledge. The topic is interesting. There is more concern now than there used to be about the rights people have to profit from the information they provide to the larger world. I think it is recognized that people will better conserve and preserve genetic diversity when they can benefit from the utilization of that diversity. Moreover, more people are concerned about the ethics of taking traditional remedies and traditional crops, improving them, commercializing them, and not giving anything back to the people who developed and maintained them. So too, the increased political power of indigenous and local populations allows them to militate more effectively that such rights be recognized.

I am here considering knowledge held by tribal peoples, but also by knowledge held in local communities which do not consider themselves and are not considered to be indigenous. In Latin America, Spanish speaking communities have in some cases lived for centuries in the same location -- long enough to have accumulated considerable knowledge and to have transmitted that knowledge from generation to generation through means that have been institutionalized for so long that they may be seen as "traditional institutions". Indeed, I think the urban slum dwellers also may be seen to have build knowledge traditions that don't depend on schools and other "modern" and "modernizing" institutions.

I would note that the knowledge possessed by indigenous and local peoples includes traditional knowledge, gained in the past and passed between generations through traditional institutions. It also includes new information acquired from others or created within the indigenous or local community. To deny that there is a process of knowledge creation in such communities is to deny that they can learn, and seems clearly to be false.

I suggest that, as in other (more modern) communities, indigenous and local knowledge also decays. Sometimes it is lost, as the only members of the community with that knowledge die off. However, sometimes knowledge can be regarded as discarded. Conditions change, and the knowledge of those conditions has to be updated -- the outdated outdated then discarded or at best archived in case conditions change back. Newly created knowledge thus proves more useful than old, and replaces the old.

While most of us think in terms of knowledge as that embodied in the minds of people, there are other embodiments -- in institutions, in machines, and indeed stored in books and now in digital form on the web.

I think of knowledge as most often socially constructed. Think about scientific knowledge. Experimental results are suspect until they have been replicated in other labs. Often experimentalists test hypotheses generated by others. New hypotheses, if they are to be successful, must be consistent with the body of previous, replicated experimental data produced by a community of scientists. Often scientists discuss the meaning of the experimental data and seek alternative conceptualizations of quantitative formulas.

As I have pointed out in this blog in the past, different institutions have different processes for construing knowledge. The judicial system has rules of evidence, formalized roles for judges and advocates, and the jury process. The Congress has hearings, professional analytic staffs, institutionalized systems for consultation with constituents, public debates, and indeed elections to replace legislators who displease their constituents with the ways they have embodied knowledge in legislations.

I am no expert, but it seems to me that local and indigenous knowledge too results from processes of social construction. A farmer, perhaps from and indigenous people, discovers a better way of using his land -- and in many poor farming communities, even those considered very traditional, there are farmers who are innovative and looking for better ways of doing things. If others learn of his success and copy it, the innovation diffuses to other farms. Knowledge of the innovative technique becomes part of the stock of that community, to be shared and passed down.

Similarly, a mother discovers a child ill from a disease unknown in the community. She finds a way to comfort the child, or does not. If the illness pops up again and again in the community, eventually a mother comes upon something that seems to work. Successful approaches can be shared with other mothers, applied to other children who appear to suffer from the same illness. The point being that the knowledge sharing among mothers related to the care of ill children is likely to be socially different from that among farmers related to better ways of farming. The flow of knowledge in the two cases institutionalized into different paths or channels within the communities.

I most often think of intellectual property rights in terms of patents and copyright -- the rights established in law. But of course there are other rights created and enforced in knowledge systems. The knowledge related rights of judges and lawyers in the legal system, or of members of the majority and minority party members in the legislative system differ and are carefully enforced. So too the "rights" of farmers or mothers in local communities in the knowledge systems of those communities seem likely to be related to their individual statuses within their communities. Who then has the right to warrant a finding as legitimate knowledge? Who has the right to discard a piece of knowledge as no longer useful?

I suppose that the situation is most interesting at the interface of two knowledge systems, such as a local and a national system. Whose right to warrant and transmit knowledge is most respected in the community -- the traditional tribal elder or the school teacher? The shaman or the health auxiliary in the government health center?

There are various programs supported by donor organizations dealing with indigenous and local knowledge. Often advised by professional anthropologists, planned and overseen by donor agency managers, and implemented by national agencies or organizations, their projects can reflect the interaction of four or more knowledge systems at the local level. How is knowledge creation and depreciation construed at the interface? What knowledge-related rights are recognized at the interface? By which participants in the processes? To which participants?

As we institutionalize efforts to program in ways that recognize local and indigenous knowledge, recursions abound in the interplay of various knowledge systems.

Of course, the concept of "rights" is itself a cultural construct. I don't suppose it generalizes to all cultures, although I don't know. I also suggest that there are other ways to conceptualize the roles of different participants in the knowledge system. Thus some farmers in a local community are probably known as the most innovative, and are watched by others, but are not seen as having the "right" to create new knowledge. (On the other hand, Michael Faraday and other commoner scientists were not thought by many of their aristocratic scientific compatriots to have the right to do innovative science. In the United States, apparently, there was a battle in the last century as to whether doctors or midwives had the greater right to provide advice and knowledge-based services to delivering mothers -- a battle the doctors won in spite of their worse records in the outcomes of the deliveries.)

There is, I think, a fertile are for intellectual development here, combining understanding of the anthropology of knowledge systems, theories of social construction of knowledge, and organizational theory.