1 00:00:18,120 --> 00:00:31,710 Right, so. I'm going to be using medicine mountains as a point of reference for this, the three. 2 00:00:31,710 --> 00:00:36,510 Specific topics we'll be looking at are Alpine Meadows and plant collection medical 3 00:00:36,510 --> 00:00:44,220 networks around these now our pharmacists and the the changing ecology of the Himalayas. 4 00:00:44,220 --> 00:00:46,080 I think we may get to the question and answer session. 5 00:00:46,080 --> 00:00:52,530 It may be the case that some categories try quite carefully to keep suppressed, are going to get loose and start running around the room. 6 00:00:52,530 --> 00:01:00,810 But for the moment, we'll see if we can keep control of some slightly contentious categories, like words like indigenous and sacred. 7 00:01:00,810 --> 00:01:13,950 But we'll see where we go, the places I'm going to be using as references for this tumultuously, which is a mountain to the north of Pokhara, 8 00:01:13,950 --> 00:01:25,020 which is a medicine collection site, a place which the noize called Sillu go up towards Lambton, which is a pilgrimage site for Nawas. 9 00:01:25,020 --> 00:01:30,780 There's a community forest near farming, which is a place where I've lived. 10 00:01:30,780 --> 00:01:36,510 It's my my sausage and my it's my my in-laws home. 11 00:01:36,510 --> 00:01:41,580 There's a place in the Chittagong Hill tracts called Bundarra, one towards the south of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. 12 00:01:41,580 --> 00:01:53,570 And then we'll be looking at kakapo in Yunnan. I want to start with a very old song which comes from the atorvastatin. 13 00:01:53,570 --> 00:02:00,020 This is just a little piece of it here. The song occurs in both receptions at the top of the theatre. 14 00:02:00,020 --> 00:02:04,290 And as with much of the time of it, it's really not very easy to translate. 15 00:02:04,290 --> 00:02:09,110 But the key bits we need here are pretty straightforward. 16 00:02:09,110 --> 00:02:19,220 The earlier parts of this song address a highly poisonous plot, which is called Biche What in in Nepal would be called Bech, 17 00:02:19,220 --> 00:02:26,740 which is still to this day the name for a whole series of acolytes. 18 00:02:26,740 --> 00:02:29,800 Wolfsbane spoke, so it's that sort of thing, 19 00:02:29,800 --> 00:02:42,100 and the collectors are addressing this plant with a medical a magical charm to stop it from hurting them while they try and dig it out of the ground. 20 00:02:42,100 --> 00:02:47,470 So they say your poison has been taken away from you. 21 00:02:47,470 --> 00:02:52,960 You're surrounded by a group of people who can't be hurt. We're using charms to steal you. 22 00:02:52,960 --> 00:03:00,760 And then towards the end, it says quite bluntly, you're a commodity plant, 23 00:03:00,760 --> 00:03:10,300 pricklier Ostrum or shut it from three community, which means to sell something. 24 00:03:10,300 --> 00:03:14,860 And it makes it very clear that at the time of the attack of Aveda. 25 00:03:14,860 --> 00:03:24,760 So this is not as far back as the dictator, but it's really quite a long time ago already the use of medicinal plants was completely 26 00:03:24,760 --> 00:03:32,260 bound up with the idea of trade commodification and from other evidence in early texts. 27 00:03:32,260 --> 00:03:44,040 We know that the plants were moved in trade networks. Across the whole of the Indic area where it was possible, where trade routes were available, 28 00:03:44,040 --> 00:03:53,600 so from very far back when we talk about medicinal plants, magical plants, healing plants, we're already talking about things that are traded. 29 00:03:53,600 --> 00:04:03,230 Now we have this idea of a missionary in Tibetan Medicine Mountain, but you also have this idea of the medicine mountain in Indic cultures. 30 00:04:03,230 --> 00:04:07,610 The Himalayas are this wonderful kind of it's not really a contact zone. 31 00:04:07,610 --> 00:04:15,650 It's it's kind of a a random effect zone where every community finds a way of stealing whatever 32 00:04:15,650 --> 00:04:20,870 textural or canonical authorities they need in order to build a reliable local tradition. 33 00:04:20,870 --> 00:04:24,680 So they're constantly borrowing from different communities. 34 00:04:24,680 --> 00:04:33,500 But this is from the Ramayana and in the Ramayana, Honeybun is the ideal sidekick for them. 35 00:04:33,500 --> 00:04:39,920 And Lakshmi has been badly injured by a poisonous arrow during a battle between animal troops. 36 00:04:39,920 --> 00:04:50,290 And so Honeybun is sent with instructions to go get a medical herb called some Geovani and bring it back from the Himalayas and hunt them on. 37 00:04:50,290 --> 00:04:57,160 Being the perfect sidekick, smart, well, no, not smart, not not not particularly smart, 38 00:04:57,160 --> 00:05:01,570 but very capable and very strong hunt endlessly to try and find this power plant, 39 00:05:01,570 --> 00:05:12,480 can't find it, and simply test the entire mountain out of the ground and leaps from the Himalayas all the way to where it's needed. 40 00:05:12,480 --> 00:05:19,920 So this is a very common image of a medical of a medicine mountain that you see in Sanskrit sources, 41 00:05:19,920 --> 00:05:25,350 and there are some wonderful newer versions of this that are that are kind of manga style pictures 42 00:05:25,350 --> 00:05:30,990 of an incredibly muscular Honeyman with kind of taloned feet holding this massive mountain. 43 00:05:30,990 --> 00:05:38,840 But the the older pictures show very clearly the idea that the mountain itself is dripping with herbs. 44 00:05:38,840 --> 00:05:45,260 What's interesting about this is that the. 45 00:05:45,260 --> 00:05:55,700 This is a rather like the story of the sacrifice of safety and the parts of safety falling all over India to make the pits, 46 00:05:55,700 --> 00:06:02,240 this myth is used to explain why there are medical forests here and there. 47 00:06:02,240 --> 00:06:09,450 So. A good example of the kind of. 48 00:06:09,450 --> 00:06:14,550 Alternation between good explanations that we're going to see showing up at various points 49 00:06:14,550 --> 00:06:21,840 in this material comes from the community forest that sits right close to fighting, 50 00:06:21,840 --> 00:06:27,240 and it's a community forest which was established under the community forest legislation. 51 00:06:27,240 --> 00:06:30,720 And it involved three different communities, one community of Tamang, 52 00:06:30,720 --> 00:06:41,340 one community of Noize and one community of Horia Jayce Treacy's, agreeing to co manage a forest. 53 00:06:41,340 --> 00:06:49,670 And if you ask folk from any of those three communities. Where the forest comes from, they will give you one of two answers, 54 00:06:49,670 --> 00:06:56,150 they will either give you a political answer that refers to historical changes in Nepal, 55 00:06:56,150 --> 00:07:00,620 the possibility of using the law to get control of local land, 56 00:07:00,620 --> 00:07:05,810 building cooperative arrangements and creating a kind of harmonious political context within which this forest 57 00:07:05,810 --> 00:07:13,970 is well managed and is a resource for finding medicinal herbs and also things like kindling and timber. 58 00:07:13,970 --> 00:07:19,820 Or they will say it's a piece of the mountain that Honeybun was carrying. 59 00:07:19,820 --> 00:07:27,800 It fell off and landed on the ground just here and we discovered it and turned it into a local forest. 60 00:07:27,800 --> 00:07:34,680 OK, so that's. Some sense of what we mean by medicine, mountains, 61 00:07:34,680 --> 00:07:40,470 much of the perspective that I'm going to take on these medicine mountains is from quite a distance. 62 00:07:40,470 --> 00:07:51,640 So I'll be talking about them from the perspective of a community called the Bunyah who live in the centre of Kathmandu in two different chokes. 63 00:07:51,640 --> 00:08:00,780 They live in it in Bohol and then down down below on the other side in Jörgen. 64 00:08:00,780 --> 00:08:06,340 And they are a sub cast of Woori. So they. 65 00:08:06,340 --> 00:08:11,030 That takes some explaining, and I might not do all the explaining right now, 66 00:08:11,030 --> 00:08:21,140 but they are a very small subculture within a cast cluster that includes people like to Teladoc, 67 00:08:21,140 --> 00:08:28,220 long distance Caledonius and Stop It and other other groups that have traditional occupations, 68 00:08:28,220 --> 00:08:34,940 but who were also heavily involved in the trans Himalayan trade networks. 69 00:08:34,940 --> 00:08:45,530 So these are these are communities that these are these are castes that saw themselves as connected to India, connected to Tibet. 70 00:08:45,530 --> 00:08:50,990 The other interesting. And that they they don't go anywhere. And the one I'm sorry, the Bunyah interesting. 71 00:08:50,990 --> 00:08:55,400 And they don't go anywhere. They see themselves as as pharmacists. 72 00:08:55,400 --> 00:08:58,190 I'm using the term advisedly here. 73 00:08:58,190 --> 00:09:09,610 What they do is they buy in fresh ingredients in bulk and then they sort and they cure and they sell it either wholesale or retail. 74 00:09:09,610 --> 00:09:17,550 Something else that they do that doesn't directly make them any profit, but it is an extremely important part of. 75 00:09:17,550 --> 00:09:29,890 They're. Engagement with all the communities who come to either buy or sell from them is that they actively tend an extended network of traders, 76 00:09:29,890 --> 00:09:34,320 collectors, prescribers who are involved in the Bettison trade. 77 00:09:34,320 --> 00:09:41,580 I'll come to that in a bit. So this is what it looks like when you buy. 78 00:09:41,580 --> 00:09:47,520 In the picture, you've got an older woman and I think her daughter in law who have just brought 79 00:09:47,520 --> 00:09:53,280 several big bales of material down from the hills and one of the local helpers, 80 00:09:53,280 --> 00:10:04,920 and they've got it out on a balance beam scale and they're weighing it in the the body will assess the material that's being brought in. 81 00:10:04,920 --> 00:10:08,820 So they will hefted. 82 00:10:08,820 --> 00:10:20,860 They'll sniff it, they'll break it to see how it snaps and they will assess whether or not it's actually worth buying and how good it is. 83 00:10:20,860 --> 00:10:31,510 Then it'll be weighed and priced, they'll go through a long negotiation and they'll make an offer on buying the materials if. 84 00:10:31,510 --> 00:10:42,970 That offer may involve extending credit and the the long term interfamily intergenerational 85 00:10:42,970 --> 00:10:48,340 relationships that that exist around these body shops is quite something. 86 00:10:48,340 --> 00:10:54,130 I was allowed we were allowed during our fieldwork to record any number of conversations. 87 00:10:54,130 --> 00:10:59,920 We were allowed to ask all sorts of impertinent questions and sit in on all sorts of deals. 88 00:10:59,920 --> 00:11:04,870 But the hyssop Kitab, the account books were off limits. 89 00:11:04,870 --> 00:11:15,590 We were able to ask how they were being used and we could see that in some cases they went back decades and they. 90 00:11:15,590 --> 00:11:30,290 Created bonds. Which were, I think, not particularly onerous, but they did make it possible for the same dealers, the same collectors, 91 00:11:30,290 --> 00:11:37,910 the same couriers to bring materials into the Bania, they also meant that the same buyers could buy stuff out again over generations. 92 00:11:37,910 --> 00:11:41,570 And oftentimes people would come in and ask, is this the shop of. 93 00:11:41,570 --> 00:11:51,460 And they would use the name of the grandfather or the present owner. So once it's been purchased, it's then cured and stored. 94 00:11:51,460 --> 00:11:56,470 And that involves a lot of skill, that involves knowing how to dry it, how to store it. 95 00:11:56,470 --> 00:12:00,100 It also involves having the wherewithal to put things into warehouses. 96 00:12:00,100 --> 00:12:06,260 They have to go down. It involves. 97 00:12:06,260 --> 00:12:17,060 Quality control and the reputation for quality control, and it also involves being quite smart about knowing how long to hold a commodity for. 98 00:12:17,060 --> 00:12:23,330 So some of these materials are seasonally unavailable. 99 00:12:23,330 --> 00:12:30,110 Some of these materials will come into sharp demand, depending on large ritual's being held in various places. 100 00:12:30,110 --> 00:12:37,280 And the Bunya are acutely aware of long term speculation and the possibility that their goods will rot in the warehouse. 101 00:12:37,280 --> 00:12:45,980 So they're constantly balancing their ability to cure and hold these substances over against the best time to sell them. 102 00:12:45,980 --> 00:12:52,280 They then wholesale them out and they can sell on to restaurants, 103 00:12:52,280 --> 00:12:57,530 they can sell on to incents factories, they sell on to hotels, they sell on diabetic hospitals, 104 00:12:57,530 --> 00:13:08,600 they sell on to regional Ayurvedic Vidia Puzzle shops all around Nepal on one one of the clearest demonstrations 105 00:13:08,600 --> 00:13:19,340 of the worth of the Barnea in the network that they that they maintain and and participate in is that, 106 00:13:19,340 --> 00:13:28,470 for example, we would see that materials had been harvested from mountains above and behind Gorkha. 107 00:13:28,470 --> 00:13:39,730 And brought down to the bunny to be assessed, graded, dried, and they would then be bought by Vidia parcel owners from Glauco. 108 00:13:39,730 --> 00:13:41,710 So whatever it was the Bosnians were doing, 109 00:13:41,710 --> 00:13:51,820 it was worth enough to make it worthwhile for those materials to take quite a long detour before they were actually. 110 00:13:51,820 --> 00:14:01,660 Another important customer for them is Tibetan lovesongs. And again, one evidence of the worth of the bonifas skill, 111 00:14:01,660 --> 00:14:11,490 it is that sitting around the body of shops, one encounters some pretty extraordinary people I met. 112 00:14:11,490 --> 00:14:20,100 The I think his name is Tashi Kashagan, quite a famous Tibetan medical expert from Tibet House in Delhi, 113 00:14:20,100 --> 00:14:27,180 one day at one of the Bunny Apostle and his English was perfectly fine. 114 00:14:27,180 --> 00:14:32,400 He rather left to find me there. And I asked him what he was doing there. And he said, well, it's quite simple. 115 00:14:32,400 --> 00:14:37,650 If you actually know you have to have the right ingredient and it has to be the best quality. 116 00:14:37,650 --> 00:14:41,520 This is the only place you can go. 117 00:14:41,520 --> 00:14:50,700 So from the perspective of this person and from the perspective of a few incarnate lamas who would come by every now and then, 118 00:14:50,700 --> 00:15:00,130 the the Borneo's were unique in their ability to. 119 00:15:00,130 --> 00:15:09,520 Identify and preserve and correct the price and sell on these kinds of medical materials. 120 00:15:09,520 --> 00:15:19,960 They also do a thriving retail business, so for now, us living in Kathmandu to maintain a positive winning goal is something that you do all the time. 121 00:15:19,960 --> 00:15:24,610 You just go down to the bunny apostille to get a call from it. You go down to the bunny up also to pick up a bit of comfort. 122 00:15:24,610 --> 00:15:29,890 You go down to the bunny apostle to get the organic ingredients that you might 123 00:15:29,890 --> 00:15:38,080 need for a ritual so good to juice the Tomczyk with its priests or just folks. 124 00:15:38,080 --> 00:15:43,520 When families would come down to get things, they get dried fruits and they would also come for a kind of minor ailment. 125 00:15:43,520 --> 00:15:53,920 Service burdens, small burns, coughs, colds, generally not feeling particularly well. 126 00:15:53,920 --> 00:16:02,610 A child who wasn't eating very well and the bunny were acutely aware of their place within a kind of. 127 00:16:02,610 --> 00:16:08,850 Responsible community of doctors would very often say, look, that's that's that's beyond our capacity, 128 00:16:08,850 --> 00:16:20,410 you need to go speak either to a hospital or to a good teacher so they would forward someone onto a better qualified professional. 129 00:16:20,410 --> 00:16:33,460 OK, so several times now I've talked about the money as being within a network and in other presentations I've done on this 130 00:16:33,460 --> 00:16:41,030 work and certainly in the diagrams and writings that we've come up with to try to make sense out of what we discovered, 131 00:16:41,030 --> 00:16:48,250 there are some very complicated diagrams that we've drawn of how materials and money and 132 00:16:48,250 --> 00:16:56,290 knowledge flow back and forth across a very rich network involving lots of different doctors. 133 00:16:56,290 --> 00:17:03,790 But. This is one way the bonnier themselves talk about it, so they see there, 134 00:17:03,790 --> 00:17:11,080 they see a kind of a succession of stages that goes from the mountain to a 135 00:17:11,080 --> 00:17:17,260 collector to the bunya and then onto a healer of some kind of doctor of some kind. 136 00:17:17,260 --> 00:17:20,550 And from there to the patient's body. 137 00:17:20,550 --> 00:17:31,470 What really happens now is that there are often careers involved and the regional medical shops are also very much part of the chain, 138 00:17:31,470 --> 00:17:44,330 but this sequence from mountain to collector, possibly to courier the body of them to the doctor, then to the patient's body is a very important. 139 00:17:44,330 --> 00:17:54,110 Local conceptual framework for understanding where the Bunyah sit, and this is a this is a sequence that others agree on as well. 140 00:17:54,110 --> 00:17:58,820 So the collectors, the doctors, they see themselves as sitting in this chain as well. 141 00:17:58,820 --> 00:18:07,080 And they and they they acknowledge this as a good way of describing how materials flow. 142 00:18:07,080 --> 00:18:15,930 And how they become medicines. So the materials themselves change character. 143 00:18:15,930 --> 00:18:24,690 And they gained specificity. They become better and better defined and they also gain economic value. 144 00:18:24,690 --> 00:18:33,430 As they progress along this chain. So. 145 00:18:33,430 --> 00:18:39,580 When it's at the mountain, it's still a plant, the collector takes it and it's it's it's fresh, 146 00:18:39,580 --> 00:18:46,650 it's Pallava, it's it's you know, it's just it's just been picked in many cases, of course, 147 00:18:46,650 --> 00:18:54,400 the collector knows to go back and pull something out of the ground, which is a a plump root, 148 00:18:54,400 --> 00:19:06,240 which would be invisible if you didn't know that earlier in the season, that then the leaves of a bulb standing up above it. 149 00:19:06,240 --> 00:19:19,370 But the collective's job is to be able to find these plants and get them in the best possible condition. 150 00:19:19,370 --> 00:19:31,460 In the ideal version of this story or this framework which the is tell and which even the collectors don't talk about it this way, 151 00:19:31,460 --> 00:19:35,600 the doctors still do, it goes straight from the collector to the bunny. 152 00:19:35,600 --> 00:19:48,910 But the advent of roads. Has meant that a new element is is there in the system and has been for at least 50 years, which is these these couriers. 153 00:19:48,910 --> 00:19:54,820 So very often the material is brought by a middleman, a courier of some sort in the couriers hands. 154 00:19:54,820 --> 00:19:59,110 This thing is wet or damp, and it's it's very vulnerable. 155 00:19:59,110 --> 00:20:05,120 It's no longer in the ground and it's liable to rot. 156 00:20:05,120 --> 00:20:17,650 And the the the the bargaining that goes on when the body receives the material is often very much around Dugu, this is starting to go off. 157 00:20:17,650 --> 00:20:25,840 But if the money it takes it in, then the money, it transforms it from something which is dangerously moist and vulnerable to rotting, 158 00:20:25,840 --> 00:20:30,970 to something which is correctly identified and correctly cured and dried and sorted. 159 00:20:30,970 --> 00:20:37,170 And it becomes the medical and it then goes on to. 160 00:20:37,170 --> 00:20:47,860 A doctor and is then taken into the patient's body. Now. 161 00:20:47,860 --> 00:20:56,800 The bunny are very interesting because of an interesting for lots of reasons, but one of the ways in which they see themselves. 162 00:20:56,800 --> 00:21:01,480 If we go back to this picture, you see on one side of them, there are collectors on the other side of them. 163 00:21:01,480 --> 00:21:11,230 There are doctors. The couriers are now there and the they position themselves over against the couriers in quite a specific way as well. 164 00:21:11,230 --> 00:21:21,120 But. Bunya. All no eyes, so far as I know, David may be able to correct me on this, but so far as I know, 165 00:21:21,120 --> 00:21:26,520 all of us are supposed to go on pilgrimage to look, to go God at least once in their life. 166 00:21:26,520 --> 00:21:32,260 And there is, of course, the wonderful noir film Sillu. 167 00:21:32,260 --> 00:21:40,860 You're not supposed to go together with your wife or indeed someone you someone you were romantically attached to. 168 00:21:40,860 --> 00:21:50,730 And the Barnea are ritually prohibited from going on pilgrimage to see, so far as I know, that we only know our community isn't allowed to go there. 169 00:21:50,730 --> 00:21:58,130 They say they cannot go there. Because if they did, they would. 170 00:21:58,130 --> 00:22:04,640 The language differs, but but they would be distracted by and countering the actual fresh plants, 171 00:22:04,640 --> 00:22:19,440 they would be either confused and lose their way and not be able to travel through the mountains successfully and or even they would go mad. 172 00:22:19,440 --> 00:22:27,850 They would become so overwhelmed by seeing these these plants growing wild that they would they would just go a little bit. 173 00:22:27,850 --> 00:22:34,760 A bit mad so that bars them from moving towards the mount. 174 00:22:34,760 --> 00:22:40,280 They're not they're not allowed to to to move along this network going towards the position of the collector. 175 00:22:40,280 --> 00:22:48,600 They're also not allowed to take Pulsers. So the skill that a. 176 00:22:48,600 --> 00:23:01,090 A gradual or an isolated doctor coverage has there are many diagnostic tools they have, but reading pulses is one of them in the origin myth. 177 00:23:01,090 --> 00:23:08,690 For how the Bosnia came to live in Kathmandu. 178 00:23:08,690 --> 00:23:17,530 I won't go through the whole origin mess, but. They first. 179 00:23:17,530 --> 00:23:27,460 Come because one of their ancestors is a very skilled healer who can repulses and heals a princess who's very ill, 180 00:23:27,460 --> 00:23:34,390 but after that they have a number of spectacular failures and are severely punished for it. 181 00:23:34,390 --> 00:23:38,560 And so they choose to avoid being doctors. 182 00:23:38,560 --> 00:23:48,910 They choose to to to not the people who repulses and therefore expose themselves to the risk of a false diagnosis. 183 00:23:48,910 --> 00:23:54,310 And again, that means that they can't move down the network in the direction of being doctors. 184 00:23:54,310 --> 00:24:06,440 They are they have to stay exactly where they are. So we can look at that as being. 185 00:24:06,440 --> 00:24:12,930 A set of prohibitions that pins them in place, but if you turn it on its head. 186 00:24:12,930 --> 00:24:20,430 What it is, is an overt acknowledgement that there is a connected chain. 187 00:24:20,430 --> 00:24:33,130 There's a set of cells, a set of nodes that interact together, and all of them are required to create successful medicine. 188 00:24:33,130 --> 00:24:40,660 And it's the Barnea are defending their necessity where they are in the chain, 189 00:24:40,660 --> 00:24:47,500 but they're also arguing for the existence of this network by taking on these prohibitions. 190 00:24:47,500 --> 00:24:55,540 OK. So. 191 00:24:55,540 --> 00:25:01,910 That's an introduction to the Bunya. When we were doing our research. 192 00:25:01,910 --> 00:25:07,760 We were interested in exploring the whole network that radiated out from the Bunyah, 193 00:25:07,760 --> 00:25:14,990 so we also went to look at local medical shops in the town that were outside the camp and the valley. 194 00:25:14,990 --> 00:25:23,480 We interviewed people who owned the Vidia puzzle in Tripoli and places like that. 195 00:25:23,480 --> 00:25:33,840 But we also. As best as we could. Followed the couriers and the collectors. 196 00:25:33,840 --> 00:25:38,760 And that took us to places that the Bunya themselves could not go. 197 00:25:38,760 --> 00:25:48,790 It took us up to Alpine Meadows. And. 198 00:25:48,790 --> 00:25:53,700 These are very rich places, they are. 199 00:25:53,700 --> 00:26:01,700 They are the primary interaction site between the mountains and the collectors, and that that interaction can be very intimate. 200 00:26:01,700 --> 00:26:11,240 They are, as we will see, ritually created places in the way that Charles Rangel was using the term place a fortnight ago. 201 00:26:11,240 --> 00:26:17,350 They are very much places, the mountains themselves are. 202 00:26:17,350 --> 00:26:26,740 Alive in many different senses, when we start to ask questions about how global heating affects all of what I'm describing here, 203 00:26:26,740 --> 00:26:33,550 we'll see that the fact that the mountains are alive is felt acutely by everybody. 204 00:26:33,550 --> 00:26:44,200 They are seasonal, highly social places, they are sites where experts contend with each other. 205 00:26:44,200 --> 00:26:46,180 Hide their activities from each other, 206 00:26:46,180 --> 00:26:54,130 share knowledge depending on the relationship that they have to other plant collectors in order to collect these commodities, 207 00:26:54,130 --> 00:27:08,110 I should say people will be familiar with the trading Yocha Gompa and the politics and the practise and the territoriality and the sheer kind of 208 00:27:08,110 --> 00:27:17,140 rowdiness of the Gompa trade is something completely different from almost everything else that you do in Himalayan medicinal plant collection. 209 00:27:17,140 --> 00:27:26,530 So this is a bit different from that. And the plant collecting itself requires rituals. 210 00:27:26,530 --> 00:27:32,650 So I, I opened with that ritual that that song from the Ottawa Theatre. 211 00:27:32,650 --> 00:27:36,900 Similar things are still used today. 212 00:27:36,900 --> 00:27:48,540 One of our best collaborators was a person who I'm going to call Barry here that's kind of close to his name, but it wasn't his real name. 213 00:27:48,540 --> 00:27:52,980 And the story that that he had, he thought he was called. 214 00:27:52,980 --> 00:28:00,060 Is that his mother had Driti. His mother had no milk. 215 00:28:00,060 --> 00:28:06,480 So his mother's milk was berries picked from the mountain. 216 00:28:06,480 --> 00:28:11,020 He lived in a community up on the side of him, actually. 217 00:28:11,020 --> 00:28:20,080 And he was known to others as having unusually dark skin because he was constituted by Barrys and he 218 00:28:20,080 --> 00:28:27,070 was also known to himself and to others as having a particularly intimate kinship with the mountain. 219 00:28:27,070 --> 00:28:33,330 The mountain was, in some sense his mother or his his his witness. 220 00:28:33,330 --> 00:28:44,400 And he claimed and others backed him up in this that he had an unusually sensitive relationship to the condition of the Meadow's, 221 00:28:44,400 --> 00:28:51,480 to the the the movement of the plants over time to the weather. 222 00:28:51,480 --> 00:28:57,240 But did that didn't mean that he had any easier life? The life of one of these pot collectors is pretty rough. 223 00:28:57,240 --> 00:29:06,840 And at times he would just go work as a security guard in India when he knew there was an opportunity to make more money off doing the plot, 224 00:29:06,840 --> 00:29:13,050 that he would come back. It's what he likes doing. And he tried to find ways of helping younger people get on with it. 225 00:29:13,050 --> 00:29:21,830 But it was it was not a stable livelihood every year. 226 00:29:21,830 --> 00:29:31,890 So. This is the opening picture I had, this is a Nager pool up on the side of him, actually. 227 00:29:31,890 --> 00:29:47,920 And this is a place that we were brought to. To understand how Barry and others located and harvested plants correctly. 228 00:29:47,920 --> 00:29:52,360 And this pool was a key feature of the system of meadows in the area. 229 00:29:52,360 --> 00:30:05,170 It's an Alpine town. Rodney. And you can just see on the right side of the picture, there's an island there which you can't see. 230 00:30:05,170 --> 00:30:10,740 Is that there's a steak that sits there in the island. 231 00:30:10,740 --> 00:30:24,240 And the the folks we were with, we were up there said that the level of water in the town rose and fell continuously day on, day on day. 232 00:30:24,240 --> 00:30:31,680 You could see it change its level. And that was said to be evidence of the Nago who lived that. 233 00:30:31,680 --> 00:30:38,760 And we were required to perform a ritual when we arrived at the edge of this. 234 00:30:38,760 --> 00:30:44,910 Place in order to enter the place, because we were told quite firmly because we were leading the team, 235 00:30:44,910 --> 00:30:50,650 we had to do the ritual and if we did not do a ritual, bad things would happen. 236 00:30:50,650 --> 00:31:00,960 So we were required to do a small ritual, but it was made clear that we had to do a small ritual when we entered this area. 237 00:31:00,960 --> 00:31:09,030 That stake was associated with quite a quite a story, a story that that we were told in the evening, 238 00:31:09,030 --> 00:31:12,840 and that was intended to be a scary story, but it was a scary story. 239 00:31:12,840 --> 00:31:20,980 The story goes that some years ago when things had not been going well in this meadow. 240 00:31:20,980 --> 00:31:28,400 And something was perceived to be amiss. 241 00:31:28,400 --> 00:31:34,610 A bull like I, I can't remember and I can't find either a recording of my notes to remember whether it was a bull 242 00:31:34,610 --> 00:31:42,710 or a cow was taken out to the island when the water was low and tied to the stake and left there. 243 00:31:42,710 --> 00:31:48,620 And then everyone retreated. And after a very short space of time, after an hour or so, 244 00:31:48,620 --> 00:32:02,070 the water started to rise and the water rows and rows and rows and the the animal panicked, but it was tied there and it was drowned. 245 00:32:02,070 --> 00:32:07,890 And when the water went back down again. The animal was gone. 246 00:32:07,890 --> 00:32:22,430 So this was told to us as a story of how one makes a living sacrifice to the Nogoa that guards this particular place. 247 00:32:22,430 --> 00:32:36,870 All right. So this Alpine meadow then is it's a ritually constituted place, it's very social, it's a it's a site in transhuman pastoralism. 248 00:32:36,870 --> 00:32:48,180 So people bring their their animals up there during the summer and take them back down slope again in the winter. 249 00:32:48,180 --> 00:32:52,080 It's very rich in medicinal plants. It's generally a fairly biodiverse place. 250 00:32:52,080 --> 00:33:02,540 We didn't do a proper survey. We didn't have the materials or the people with us to do that properly. 251 00:33:02,540 --> 00:33:08,630 So all of this kind of language is very satisfying to people who do work on sacred 252 00:33:08,630 --> 00:33:13,880 sites and people who do work on medicinal plant networks in the Himalayas, 253 00:33:13,880 --> 00:33:21,300 this idea that anthropogenic biodiversity, a kind of biodiversity that arises together with human activity, 254 00:33:21,300 --> 00:33:31,330 this is this is a real prise trying to understand how anthropogenic anthropogenic biodiversity works. 255 00:33:31,330 --> 00:33:40,390 In contrast, this is one of the the interesting problems I'm trying to tackle in this material today, 256 00:33:40,390 --> 00:33:48,650 in contrast to the way in which anthropogenic biodiversity is usually understood in conservation biology. 257 00:33:48,650 --> 00:34:02,080 You can't make sense out of. How that biodiversity is stewarded or protected or created or enhanced in this alpine meadow. 258 00:34:02,080 --> 00:34:11,860 Without looking at the whole chain, the whole network of communities involved in the medicinal plant trade as well, 259 00:34:11,860 --> 00:34:18,860 arguably as other communities as well, for instance, the pastoralists themselves, the herders. 260 00:34:18,860 --> 00:34:31,040 So for comparison, John Salick, who was at Oxford and was the curator of ethnobotany at the Missouri Botanic Gardens for a long time, 261 00:34:31,040 --> 00:34:35,300 and Bob Mosley, Robbie Hart, quite a few other people worked on the kakapo area, 262 00:34:35,300 --> 00:34:40,670 kakapo in Yunnan, which is a a memory, 263 00:34:40,670 --> 00:34:45,470 a medicine mountain that sits in that extraordinary area where the various major 264 00:34:45,470 --> 00:34:53,540 rivers that passed in that part of Asia all sit right close to each other. It's an incredibly rugged and very biodiverse area. 265 00:34:53,540 --> 00:35:00,980 And this team published a series of studies which were very rigorously done. 266 00:35:00,980 --> 00:35:11,120 That explored exactly how biodiversity, plant diversity in particular, worked in areas that were identified as medicine, 267 00:35:11,120 --> 00:35:17,510 maintenance or medicine meadows or sacred forests, and they showed successfully by doing a series of comparisons. 268 00:35:17,510 --> 00:35:24,030 So they would they would choose a site which was identified as being either a sacred site or a medicine not in sight. 269 00:35:24,030 --> 00:35:32,720 And then they would pair it with another site that was in other aspects in terms of, for instance, soil type aspect altitude. 270 00:35:32,720 --> 00:35:37,940 It was the general forest decomposition. It was. 271 00:35:37,940 --> 00:35:42,740 Tightly comparable to this first sight, but it wasn't defined as a sacred site, 272 00:35:42,740 --> 00:35:48,770 and they run through a whole series of pairwise comparisons and showed in a quite 273 00:35:48,770 --> 00:35:54,890 rigorous way that diversity was higher in the sites that were defined as sacred, 274 00:35:54,890 --> 00:35:59,390 sites that were recognised as sacred sites by the community that was recognised. 275 00:35:59,390 --> 00:36:11,800 Them was the community of Mennonite practitioners, Tibetan medicine practitioners that were active around Gulaga. 276 00:36:11,800 --> 00:36:19,790 This is a good comparison to what we're looking at at the haematuria Meadow because. 277 00:36:19,790 --> 00:36:31,580 Their study assumes that the sacred site is identified as as a sacred site after the biodiversity has already come into being. 278 00:36:31,580 --> 00:36:44,620 And. They. Are also assuming, well, they're assuming, therefore, that the identification of a site as a sacred site has a protective effect. 279 00:36:44,620 --> 00:36:49,450 In other words, this place has lots of lovely medicinal herbs. You know, it becomes a sacred site for us. 280 00:36:49,450 --> 00:36:54,370 And because it becomes a sacred site, there are restrictions that come into play around harvesting. 281 00:36:54,370 --> 00:37:00,580 So you can't over harvest, you can only harvest certain times. Only certain people can enter the area. 282 00:37:00,580 --> 00:37:04,510 But it doesn't actually constitute the biodiversity. 283 00:37:04,510 --> 00:37:10,940 So the human activity in the area does not create the diversity. 284 00:37:10,940 --> 00:37:19,780 The same. Jan Salick looking at other places in other parts of the world and the other place that she's well known for having worked on is, 285 00:37:19,780 --> 00:37:27,820 is the case of the young shot in the Peruvian Amazon. She argued when she was working there that a single indigenous community can actively 286 00:37:27,820 --> 00:37:32,530 create high biodiversity in their landscape through active planting measures, 287 00:37:32,530 --> 00:37:37,570 through actually planting out specific things, through introducing plants, through creating gardens, 288 00:37:37,570 --> 00:37:46,320 to creating forest landscapes, by reforesting and specific harvesting methods. 289 00:37:46,320 --> 00:38:00,210 So. This comparison between the way in which Kaukab was being analysed and what we were seeing in Hemel truly shows up a few. 290 00:38:00,210 --> 00:38:11,990 Assumptions that I'd like to question. And those are assumptions that drive a lot of the debates within discussions around. 291 00:38:11,990 --> 00:38:19,550 Conservation, biology and indigenous people and conservation biology and sacred sites. 292 00:38:19,550 --> 00:38:25,550 So sacred landscapes and conservation is a it's a big deal. 293 00:38:25,550 --> 00:38:34,580 There's a lot of there's a lot of talk about it. It's a well discussed field that has lots of publications around it. 294 00:38:34,580 --> 00:38:39,380 There are working groups for the World Conservation Union. 295 00:38:39,380 --> 00:38:43,500 There are films and I, I, I play with these people. 296 00:38:43,500 --> 00:38:50,240 I'm in at least one of these working groups and and I have I've been involved in writing up 297 00:38:50,240 --> 00:38:54,650 some some work that they've done generally from what they take to be a slightly grumpy, 298 00:38:54,650 --> 00:39:03,050 critical perspective. And there are lots of reasons why this idea of sacred landscapes are sacred. 299 00:39:03,050 --> 00:39:06,930 Natural sects are very, very poorly theorised. 300 00:39:06,930 --> 00:39:18,120 And a peace process at Georgia has published a series of articles in which he did a very good job of asking why this language is used, 301 00:39:18,120 --> 00:39:21,570 and it's saying has also asked a couple of good questions about this. 302 00:39:21,570 --> 00:39:34,160 But but Brosius says quite nicely, the idea of the sacred is part of the grammar of conquest and contemporary indigenous struggles. 303 00:39:34,160 --> 00:39:42,620 So, for instance, we have this film series that Toby McCloud made called Standing on Sacred Ground, which got broadcast widely at film festivals. 304 00:39:42,620 --> 00:39:47,810 It was broadcast on PBS in the in the US. 305 00:39:47,810 --> 00:39:57,980 And he makes a very strong claim that there is indigenous spirituality, which is a thing that's proper to all indigenous peoples. 306 00:39:57,980 --> 00:40:04,400 And it is fundamentally opposed to world religions, which are a well-defined thing as far as he's concerned, 307 00:40:04,400 --> 00:40:07,670 and that whenever world religions come into contact with indigenous peoples, 308 00:40:07,670 --> 00:40:16,470 one of the immediate problems is that it corrodes indigenous spirituality and leads directly to the destruction of biodiversity. 309 00:40:16,470 --> 00:40:25,430 So you can see there's a whole series of essentialism and claims being made here, sentimentalising essentialness and claims being made here that. 310 00:40:25,430 --> 00:40:32,900 Don't really award very much agency to the communities that are in theory, 311 00:40:32,900 --> 00:40:40,490 according to a narrative like this, looking after these extraordinary landscapes. 312 00:40:40,490 --> 00:40:47,720 I don't know how many of you are familiar with the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, 313 00:40:47,720 --> 00:40:56,390 this is another top level intergovernmental panel that was established a few years ago that is comparable to the IPCC, 314 00:40:56,390 --> 00:40:59,750 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 315 00:40:59,750 --> 00:41:08,630 The IPCC has an explicit remit to include indigenous communities and indigenous scientists on their own terms. 316 00:41:08,630 --> 00:41:18,470 But there are huge culture clash problems and there are times when IPB debates sound as though you've got to you've got sort of 317 00:41:18,470 --> 00:41:24,620 conservation biologists trying very hard to convince everybody else that they just need to use the language of conservation, 318 00:41:24,620 --> 00:41:32,780 biology and everything will be fine and everyone else. Well, you know, there are culture clash problems. 319 00:41:32,780 --> 00:41:42,800 And it's a little frustrating to me and others, I think, because actually within anthropology and within states, 320 00:41:42,800 --> 00:41:50,660 we've had a lot of people putting good work in on this. So people like Paul Sillitoe, Joy Hendry, John Moore, Helen Varan, 321 00:41:50,660 --> 00:42:03,200 and it's saying lots of people have actually sat down and thought quite carefully about how best to create and steward indigenous led collaborations, 322 00:42:03,200 --> 00:42:14,680 how to. How to support indigenous anthropology as a project that allows for the theories of 323 00:42:14,680 --> 00:42:19,120 these kinds of collaborations from the and from from an indigenous perspective, 324 00:42:19,120 --> 00:42:28,540 but that research hasn't really fed into IPB processes. OK, on the other side. 325 00:42:28,540 --> 00:42:36,580 You have a thing called the ICA consortium, which is I think IKEA keeps on getting unpacked in different ways, 326 00:42:36,580 --> 00:42:41,650 but roughly it means the indigenous and community conserved protected area consortium. 327 00:42:41,650 --> 00:42:46,520 They have a very different language. They talk about territories of life. 328 00:42:46,520 --> 00:42:55,060 They are a well recognised indigenous led biodiversity conservation organisation. 329 00:42:55,060 --> 00:43:01,550 And they. Have had some success. 330 00:43:01,550 --> 00:43:11,480 Where political regimes allow it in building collaborative management schemes and documenting successful practises around 331 00:43:11,480 --> 00:43:17,900 the conservation of biodiversity or the stewarding or the creation of biodiversity in what they call territories of life, 332 00:43:17,900 --> 00:43:22,010 I have a very different way of thinking about all these key terms. 333 00:43:22,010 --> 00:43:31,250 So they're they're very aware of the fact that terms like indigenous and sacred are deliberately mobilised to terms within political struggles. 334 00:43:31,250 --> 00:43:42,170 And it can get quite funny listening to folks in those conversations have a proper laugh around what authenticity stands for and who is indigenous, 335 00:43:42,170 --> 00:43:48,290 really how we use the term this week, that sort of thing. So this is a very different community of people. 336 00:43:48,290 --> 00:43:57,830 Again, I, I am working with them to to to some extent have been invited to be an honorary member of the consortium. 337 00:43:57,830 --> 00:44:06,660 And I've been trying to help them build some tools. And unsurprisingly. 338 00:44:06,660 --> 00:44:13,710 You get direct pushback from the state on this. So a couple of years ago, 339 00:44:13,710 --> 00:44:22,560 I was teaching in Bangladesh and I was invited by ICC members to come up to a new community college community university being founded, 340 00:44:22,560 --> 00:44:33,360 Imponderable and. I was invited in part because we were trying to figure out how to use that as a platform 341 00:44:33,360 --> 00:44:40,170 to bring indigenous leaders and people studying land management and anthropologists 342 00:44:40,170 --> 00:44:49,110 and development activists from around Bangladesh to collaborate around some of the 343 00:44:49,110 --> 00:44:54,660 what what were called sacred groves and sacred sites in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. 344 00:44:54,660 --> 00:45:04,290 So that was that was a lovely invitation and. The morning. 345 00:45:04,290 --> 00:45:13,800 After I arrived the morning of the day on which I was expected to give a kind of talk at this new institution, 346 00:45:13,800 --> 00:45:20,000 I was informed by the man who ran the hotel that I was expected at a. 347 00:45:20,000 --> 00:45:23,180 A meeting on the other side of the road. 348 00:45:23,180 --> 00:45:28,400 And I didn't know about this, and I said, well, what's on the other side of the road is that building over there. 349 00:45:28,400 --> 00:45:34,220 I said, Oh, OK, who am I meeting? I'll just go over that. 350 00:45:34,220 --> 00:45:40,610 It was the internal security. It was the it was the the national security force. 351 00:45:40,610 --> 00:45:50,090 And I found myself in a meeting with the local head of security for Bundarra District whether they should have Gunhild Tracts. 352 00:45:50,090 --> 00:45:57,920 And after we politely greeted each other and got a cups of tea, his opening gambit with me was, 353 00:45:57,920 --> 00:46:03,850 you do understand there are no indigenous peoples in Bangladesh. 354 00:46:03,850 --> 00:46:13,930 And we had a long and robust conversation about this, he was he'd done some history at university, 355 00:46:13,930 --> 00:46:22,270 and so we had a long discussion around the genesis and the history of the Chittagong Hill tracts, 356 00:46:22,270 --> 00:46:27,820 the role of Islam in civilising the region and all sorts of other things. 357 00:46:27,820 --> 00:46:36,460 But it was very clear that although this is not official policy within the state of Bangladesh, 358 00:46:36,460 --> 00:46:40,990 it is unofficial policy within the Chittagong Hill tracts as an area that requires a 359 00:46:40,990 --> 00:46:46,640 special kind of control that the simple existence of indigenous peoples is denied. 360 00:46:46,640 --> 00:46:52,700 They don't exist. There's nothing prior to the Bangladeshi state. 361 00:46:52,700 --> 00:47:00,560 And just as a side thought, there are some interesting questions around the definition of indigenous people across Asia. 362 00:47:00,560 --> 00:47:13,940 I do wonder whether in the same way that the PRC that Mao borrowed some of his thinking about nations or communities within China from the Russians. 363 00:47:13,940 --> 00:47:21,320 I do wonder if if the Bangladeshis are borrowing some of their policy from the PRC. 364 00:47:21,320 --> 00:47:27,290 OK. So. 365 00:47:27,290 --> 00:47:40,420 That puts us here. What can what can we do to take the kind of ethnographic material that I was describing about medicinal practises? 366 00:47:40,420 --> 00:47:49,460 And these medicinal networks in the Himalayas, especially around Kathmandu, how can we take that? 367 00:47:49,460 --> 00:47:59,150 And connected to these questions of indigenous land conservation. 368 00:47:59,150 --> 00:48:11,290 I think. Trying to understand anthropogenic biodiversity in the Himalayas, we need to make two moves, 369 00:48:11,290 --> 00:48:16,180 and these are not these are not new moves, but I think we need to take them very, very seriously. 370 00:48:16,180 --> 00:48:25,580 So the first thing is that we need to use theory and methods that begin in these messy relations and not above them. 371 00:48:25,580 --> 00:48:29,310 Isabelle Stenger's wrote a very nice piece in. 372 00:48:29,310 --> 00:48:37,740 For a symposium on comparative relativism, Scholte comparison, as a matter of concern, it was published and common knowledge, 373 00:48:37,740 --> 00:48:49,610 I think, and she does a very nice job of exploring what it would be like to do comparison without assuming that it's possible. 374 00:48:49,610 --> 00:48:56,250 Take a third pope to take a third position and take a position outside the conference. 375 00:48:56,250 --> 00:49:03,030 Or Helen Barron's work on politics, where she talks about this idea that things clocked the clock provisionally. 376 00:49:03,030 --> 00:49:14,400 There are sites of encounter that succeed provisionally from that you can build what you need, but it's nothing more authoritative than that. 377 00:49:14,400 --> 00:49:19,440 And it's done some good work on this. Again, there are lots of people who've done really good work on this, 378 00:49:19,440 --> 00:49:27,180 but we really need to take this seriously that it's it's a question of kind of decolonising and disinterring, 379 00:49:27,180 --> 00:49:29,550 accepting a polycentric social science, 380 00:49:29,550 --> 00:49:39,000 accepting a fully decolonise social science and getting the conservation biologists to accept it as a key tool in the toolbox. 381 00:49:39,000 --> 00:49:43,740 And there are plenty of reasons why it's a very hard thing to do. I still think it's doing. 382 00:49:43,740 --> 00:49:49,260 The other thing that we need to do, though, is we need to stretch to the scale of the networks. 383 00:49:49,260 --> 00:49:52,440 And this is a different problem. 384 00:49:52,440 --> 00:50:00,600 I think if we look at the two studies that John Salek was involved in and she's a she's a friend and someone I've learnt a lot from, 385 00:50:00,600 --> 00:50:10,770 and I have a really great respect for her ability to pull this material out of long term heart, 386 00:50:10,770 --> 00:50:20,250 careful studies of social practises and also biodiversity samples in a landscape, but. 387 00:50:20,250 --> 00:50:31,520 They're assuming a kind of old style anthropology model of small societies in small places. 388 00:50:31,520 --> 00:50:40,150 And. We have good textual evidence from something as far back as the type of data, 389 00:50:40,150 --> 00:50:53,680 we have really good ethnographic evidence from looking at the Bunyah and the way in which they integrate and build and construct this network, 390 00:50:53,680 --> 00:50:57,680 and they do they very carefully go recruit people to become part of this network, 391 00:50:57,680 --> 00:51:13,270 very carefully do things like offer very good credit terms or very low or very steep discounts to new collectors or. 392 00:51:13,270 --> 00:51:23,050 New traders working in the network, they try very hard to encourage the spread of the network, and that's part of how they do what they do. 393 00:51:23,050 --> 00:51:31,730 We this, this, this this really extensive mesh that stretches from Alpine Meadows to Kathmandu. 394 00:51:31,730 --> 00:51:36,070 And actually it goes to Lhasa. It goes to Delhi. It goes to Beijing. 395 00:51:36,070 --> 00:51:44,530 It goes to. Kuala Lumpur stretches across the region. 396 00:51:44,530 --> 00:51:54,040 And until we understand how complex and how how broad reaching these networks are, 397 00:51:54,040 --> 00:52:00,280 we're going to be stuck with this idea that that that it's that it's little societies with little ideas and very local 398 00:52:00,280 --> 00:52:10,690 theories when in fact what we're looking at is an extremely complex process of generating a lateral mesh of knowledge. 399 00:52:10,690 --> 00:52:21,460 And all of that mesh is what we have to think of when we think about so-called local ecological knowledge. 400 00:52:21,460 --> 00:52:24,220 Yeah, sorry, I've already pointed to this, 401 00:52:24,220 --> 00:52:35,140 so the Bunyah are extraordinary in in in the degree to which they are self consciously aware of themselves as network generators. 402 00:52:35,140 --> 00:52:47,440 And there is an unfolding tragedy and there are very few Barnea left, they do still work quite hard to. 403 00:52:47,440 --> 00:52:51,310 Encourage the trade, but. 404 00:52:51,310 --> 00:52:58,420 It's it's not a viable livelihood for most of the vast majority of bodies have set aside the business of doing this kind of work. 405 00:52:58,420 --> 00:53:02,850 I'm almost finished. So. 406 00:53:02,850 --> 00:53:09,810 The way in which this knowledge is transmitted over time, if we think of this as a broad network rather than single communities, 407 00:53:09,810 --> 00:53:16,590 if we think of this whole thing as a kind of integrated mesh, then we can also ask how does the network as a whole learn? 408 00:53:16,590 --> 00:53:21,660 And we can look at each point in the network and ask, how is knowledge transmitted through time? 409 00:53:21,660 --> 00:53:36,060 So, for example, a Guruji, a Tomczyk Bhattacharyya Tantric, but doctor or a of Vidia, an IRA Vedic doctor, is deeply constrained by textual learning. 410 00:53:36,060 --> 00:53:39,600 They they are bound by textual rituals. They're bound by textual canons. 411 00:53:39,600 --> 00:53:49,440 I've had some lovely conversations about luxury, for example, which is a absolutely ubiquitous fruit that you find in the central Himalayas, 412 00:53:49,440 --> 00:53:55,620 where a very respected Vidia said, look, yes, I know it's a wonderful digestive. 413 00:53:55,620 --> 00:54:02,010 You know, we all eat it after meals to make ourselves feel better. But I can't find its name in any textual source. 414 00:54:02,010 --> 00:54:06,570 It's not in any of the lists of medicine. So I can never prescribe it as a medicine. 415 00:54:06,570 --> 00:54:10,430 I have to prescribe the medicines that are listed there. 416 00:54:10,430 --> 00:54:17,630 On the other side, the collectors, for example, in the case of Barry, he's actually learning from the mountain. 417 00:54:17,630 --> 00:54:21,110 He sees the mountain as a source of knowledge. And he's he's observing it. 418 00:54:21,110 --> 00:54:31,910 He's he's he's he's studying it constantly. But when we asked for stories about how people became collectors or how they became couriers, it was. 419 00:54:31,910 --> 00:54:34,730 There was no sentiment about it at all. 420 00:54:34,730 --> 00:54:41,000 There was a lot of stealing other people's knowledge, stealing people's patches, stealing customers from rivals, 421 00:54:41,000 --> 00:54:50,570 stealing goods from rivals, bribing officials to not let your rivals through, and quite a bit of violence, quite a bit of being beaten up. 422 00:54:50,570 --> 00:54:59,240 Barry described trying to get into the business because his uncle did it and following his uncle and when his uncle found him following, 423 00:54:59,240 --> 00:55:06,740 his uncle thrashed him properly and from that very learnt simply to follow his uncle more carefully. 424 00:55:06,740 --> 00:55:14,600 So on the side of the doctors, we've got this very rigid textual learning on the side of the collectors, the couriers. 425 00:55:14,600 --> 00:55:21,920 We've got this notion of of of appropriating, stealing, capturing knowledge from your seniors and your rivals. 426 00:55:21,920 --> 00:55:25,220 The Bunyah, though, they do something different. 427 00:55:25,220 --> 00:55:31,940 And again, this this this points to their central city in the network, but also the way in which they generated there. 428 00:55:31,940 --> 00:55:38,810 They are particularist. They are borrowers. They create new kinds of information constantly. 429 00:55:38,810 --> 00:55:48,230 So we were allowed to look at the the new notebook that the child, 430 00:55:48,230 --> 00:55:55,010 the son of one of the of the more famous and the previous generation had made as he was learning. 431 00:55:55,010 --> 00:56:03,380 So he had very carefully gone and taken photographs of every single substance, pasted it onto a page in a three ring binder, 432 00:56:03,380 --> 00:56:15,170 and then put his own notes from various Ayurvedic texts, from Tibetan texts, from whatever sources he could find. 433 00:56:15,170 --> 00:56:18,950 And by the time that we were interviewing them, 434 00:56:18,950 --> 00:56:27,260 they were freely using websites and looking at websites for information about the Irbid or other qualities, 435 00:56:27,260 --> 00:56:35,090 the goodness of these different substances, and checking to see whether or not they were right in their identifications. 436 00:56:35,090 --> 00:56:43,890 So they're very creative and they compile new kinds of document and each generation. 437 00:56:43,890 --> 00:56:55,350 So this is an example from the mid 20th century, this was this was thrown into the streets and picked up by a very dear teacher and friend. 438 00:56:55,350 --> 00:57:00,210 And now for many years now, a great uncle of mine, Zubaan Amontillado. 439 00:57:00,210 --> 00:57:07,980 So he found this sitting in the street in the district where the body is all used to have their shops. 440 00:57:07,980 --> 00:57:10,200 And it was a loose it was a loose leaf notebook. 441 00:57:10,200 --> 00:57:20,010 This is almost certainly copied from a text that was probably published in Hindi or in English in the mid 19th century. 442 00:57:20,010 --> 00:57:28,710 I haven't been able to pin down exactly what text it is. You can see it's got Nivi numbers pencilled in on the page just just there. 443 00:57:28,710 --> 00:57:35,490 Plus Devanagari and it lists the name of Corpore Kemfert. 444 00:57:35,490 --> 00:57:46,290 And dozens of different languages, Gujarati, Canada, Bangla, Latin, English, and he's also added his own fields. 445 00:57:46,290 --> 00:57:59,840 So there's Arabic, Tibetan. The unity name for it, the Nepali name for it, Parvati, and there are many pages of this, 446 00:57:59,840 --> 00:58:04,730 and in some cases there are sort of multiple layers of commentary sitting on this. 447 00:58:04,730 --> 00:58:15,590 So this is the way in which the bodies themselves are reconstituting knowledge across the network and being highly adaptive and building again, 448 00:58:15,590 --> 00:58:19,010 building new knowledge into the network. 449 00:58:19,010 --> 00:58:25,610 But we have to recognise the last thing we have to recognise here is the mountains themselves are learning and they're changing very, very quickly. 450 00:58:25,610 --> 00:58:32,150 And this is part of why this whole question is so important. There was a piece in The Guardian just a couple of days ago which unfortunately 451 00:58:32,150 --> 00:58:41,360 didn't mention a really beautiful research project called the Gloria Project, which is a global comparative study of mountain peaks worldwide. 452 00:58:41,360 --> 00:58:48,230 But what we know is that in all of these locations, these alpine meadows, they sit close to them. 453 00:58:48,230 --> 00:59:01,670 They sit close to the. The line beyond which various black communities won't grow so that that metal in him actually had a few scrubby trees, 454 00:59:01,670 --> 00:59:05,570 but they're basically the trees. It all stopped a little way below. Not very far above that. 455 00:59:05,570 --> 00:59:08,390 You keep going in the plant, stop altogether. 456 00:59:08,390 --> 00:59:14,000 And because of global heating plant, communities are walking up mountains worldwide in the northern hemisphere. 457 00:59:14,000 --> 00:59:16,790 They're walking north. In the southern hemisphere, they're walking south. 458 00:59:16,790 --> 00:59:24,890 A lot of communities that are long established, stable plant communities are breaking up relationships between plants and pollinators. 459 00:59:24,890 --> 00:59:31,760 Plants and herbivores are breaking up because animals can move in ways that plants can't and species are going 460 00:59:31,760 --> 00:59:37,130 extinct left and right because they're literally walking up mountains until there's no place else to go. 461 00:59:37,130 --> 00:59:41,510 So that's another element to all of this, is the mountains themselves are changing very, very quickly. 462 00:59:41,510 --> 00:59:50,120 And that gives us the motivation, the ethical motivation to try and understand this idea of anthropogenic biodiversity. 463 00:59:50,120 --> 01:00:01,660 That's the that's the driver behind why there's a there's a moral imperative here to try and do this work and make sense out of how. 464 01:00:01,660 --> 01:00:09,130 In various far more complicated ways than the conservation biologists are prepared to accept, even the very good and sympathetic ones. 465 01:00:09,130 --> 01:00:14,730 There are these very rich, not a total local. 466 01:00:14,730 --> 01:00:22,590 Transregional ecological and medical knowledge networks that play now because they become fully politicised, 467 01:00:22,590 --> 01:00:30,930 that play with categories of sacred or indigenous in order to achieve different kinds of goal. 468 01:00:30,930 --> 01:00:37,530 So in the end, really what I'm asking for is just a far deeper and more sophisticated understanding 469 01:00:37,530 --> 01:00:43,440 of what's going on here and trying to provide a bit more evidence to help us do it. 470 01:00:43,440 --> 01:00:45,440 OK, thank you.