Right, so. I'm going to be using medicine mountains as a point of reference for this, the three.
Specific topics we'll be looking at are Alpine Meadows and plant collection medical
networks around these now our pharmacists and the the changing ecology of the Himalayas.
I think we may get to the question and answer session.
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.
But for the moment, we'll see if we can keep control of some slightly contentious categories, like words like indigenous and sacred.
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,
which is a medicine collection site, a place which the noize called Sillu go up towards Lambton, which is a pilgrimage site for Nawas.
There's a community forest near farming, which is a place where I've lived.
It's my my sausage and my it's my my in-laws home.
There's a place in the Chittagong Hill tracts called Bundarra, one towards the south of the Chittagong Hill Tracts.
And then we'll be looking at kakapo in Yunnan. I want to start with a very old song which comes from the atorvastatin.
This is just a little piece of it here. The song occurs in both receptions at the top of the theatre.
And as with much of the time of it, it's really not very easy to translate.
But the key bits we need here are pretty straightforward.
The earlier parts of this song address a highly poisonous plot, which is called Biche What in in Nepal would be called Bech,
which is still to this day the name for a whole series of acolytes.
Wolfsbane spoke, so it's that sort of thing,
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.
So they say your poison has been taken away from you.
You're surrounded by a group of people who can't be hurt. We're using charms to steal you.
And then towards the end, it says quite bluntly, you're a commodity plant,
pricklier Ostrum or shut it from three community, which means to sell something.
And it makes it very clear that at the time of the attack of Aveda.
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
bound up with the idea of trade commodification and from other evidence in early texts.
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,
so from very far back when we talk about medicinal plants, magical plants, healing plants, we're already talking about things that are traded.
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.
The Himalayas are this wonderful kind of it's not really a contact zone.
It's it's kind of a a random effect zone where every community finds a way of stealing whatever
textural or canonical authorities they need in order to build a reliable local tradition.
So they're constantly borrowing from different communities.
But this is from the Ramayana and in the Ramayana, Honeybun is the ideal sidekick for them.
And Lakshmi has been badly injured by a poisonous arrow during a battle between animal troops.
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.
Being the perfect sidekick, smart, well, no, not smart, not not not particularly smart,
but very capable and very strong hunt endlessly to try and find this power plant,
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.
So this is a very common image of a medical of a medicine mountain that you see in Sanskrit sources,
and there are some wonderful newer versions of this that are that are kind of manga style pictures
of an incredibly muscular Honeyman with kind of taloned feet holding this massive mountain.
But the the older pictures show very clearly the idea that the mountain itself is dripping with herbs.
What's interesting about this is that the.
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,
this myth is used to explain why there are medical forests here and there.
So. A good example of the kind of.
Alternation between good explanations that we're going to see showing up at various points
in this material comes from the community forest that sits right close to fighting,
and it's a community forest which was established under the community forest legislation.
And it involved three different communities, one community of Tamang,
one community of Noize and one community of Horia Jayce Treacy's, agreeing to co manage a forest.
And if you ask folk from any of those three communities. Where the forest comes from, they will give you one of two answers,
they will either give you a political answer that refers to historical changes in Nepal,
the possibility of using the law to get control of local land,
building cooperative arrangements and creating a kind of harmonious political context within which this forest
is well managed and is a resource for finding medicinal herbs and also things like kindling and timber.
Or they will say it's a piece of the mountain that Honeybun was carrying.
It fell off and landed on the ground just here and we discovered it and turned it into a local forest.
OK, so that's. Some sense of what we mean by medicine, mountains,
much of the perspective that I'm going to take on these medicine mountains is from quite a distance.
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.
They live in it in Bohol and then down down below on the other side in Jörgen.
And they are a sub cast of Woori. So they.
That takes some explaining, and I might not do all the explaining right now,
but they are a very small subculture within a cast cluster that includes people like to Teladoc,
long distance Caledonius and Stop It and other other groups that have traditional occupations,
but who were also heavily involved in the trans Himalayan trade networks.
So these are these are communities that these are these are castes that saw themselves as connected to India, connected to Tibet.
The other interesting. And that they they don't go anywhere. And the one I'm sorry, the Bunyah interesting.
And they don't go anywhere. They see themselves as as pharmacists.
I'm using the term advisedly here.
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.
Something else that they do that doesn't directly make them any profit, but it is an extremely important part of.
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,
collectors, prescribers who are involved in the Bettison trade.
I'll come to that in a bit. So this is what it looks like when you buy.
In the picture, you've got an older woman and I think her daughter in law who have just brought
several big bales of material down from the hills and one of the local helpers,
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.
So they will hefted.
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.
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.
That offer may involve extending credit and the the long term interfamily intergenerational
relationships that that exist around these body shops is quite something.
I was allowed we were allowed during our fieldwork to record any number of conversations.
We were allowed to ask all sorts of impertinent questions and sit in on all sorts of deals.
But the hyssop Kitab, the account books were off limits.
We were able to ask how they were being used and we could see that in some cases they went back decades and they.
Created bonds. Which were, I think, not particularly onerous, but they did make it possible for the same dealers, the same collectors,
the same couriers to bring materials into the Bania, they also meant that the same buyers could buy stuff out again over generations.
And oftentimes people would come in and ask, is this the shop of.
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.
And that involves a lot of skill, that involves knowing how to dry it, how to store it.
It also involves having the wherewithal to put things into warehouses.
They have to go down. It involves.
Quality control and the reputation for quality control, and it also involves being quite smart about knowing how long to hold a commodity for.
So some of these materials are seasonally unavailable.
Some of these materials will come into sharp demand, depending on large ritual's being held in various places.
And the Bunya are acutely aware of long term speculation and the possibility that their goods will rot in the warehouse.
So they're constantly balancing their ability to cure and hold these substances over against the best time to sell them.
They then wholesale them out and they can sell on to restaurants,
they can sell on to incents factories, they sell on to hotels, they sell on diabetic hospitals,
they sell on to regional Ayurvedic Vidia Puzzle shops all around Nepal on one one of the clearest demonstrations
of the worth of the Barnea in the network that they that they maintain and and participate in is that,
for example, we would see that materials had been harvested from mountains above and behind Gorkha.
And brought down to the bunny to be assessed, graded, dried, and they would then be bought by Vidia parcel owners from Glauco.
So whatever it was the Bosnians were doing,
it was worth enough to make it worthwhile for those materials to take quite a long detour before they were actually.
Another important customer for them is Tibetan lovesongs. And again, one evidence of the worth of the bonifas skill,
it is that sitting around the body of shops, one encounters some pretty extraordinary people I met.
The I think his name is Tashi Kashagan, quite a famous Tibetan medical expert from Tibet House in Delhi,
one day at one of the Bunny Apostle and his English was perfectly fine.
He rather left to find me there. And I asked him what he was doing there. And he said, well, it's quite simple.
If you actually know you have to have the right ingredient and it has to be the best quality.
This is the only place you can go.
So from the perspective of this person and from the perspective of a few incarnate lamas who would come by every now and then,
the the Borneo's were unique in their ability to.
Identify and preserve and correct the price and sell on these kinds of medical materials.
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.
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.
You go down to the bunny apostle to get the organic ingredients that you might
need for a ritual so good to juice the Tomczyk with its priests or just folks.
When families would come down to get things, they get dried fruits and they would also come for a kind of minor ailment.
Service burdens, small burns, coughs, colds, generally not feeling particularly well.
A child who wasn't eating very well and the bunny were acutely aware of their place within a kind of.
Responsible community of doctors would very often say, look, that's that's that's beyond our capacity,
you need to go speak either to a hospital or to a good teacher so they would forward someone onto a better qualified professional.
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
work and certainly in the diagrams and writings that we've come up with to try to make sense out of what we discovered,
there are some very complicated diagrams that we've drawn of how materials and money and
knowledge flow back and forth across a very rich network involving lots of different doctors.
But. This is one way the bonnier themselves talk about it, so they see there,
they see a kind of a succession of stages that goes from the mountain to a
collector to the bunya and then onto a healer of some kind of doctor of some kind.
And from there to the patient's body.
What really happens now is that there are often careers involved and the regional medical shops are also very much part of the chain,
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.
Local conceptual framework for understanding where the Bunyah sit, and this is a this is a sequence that others agree on as well.
So the collectors, the doctors, they see themselves as sitting in this chain as well.
And they and they they acknowledge this as a good way of describing how materials flow.
And how they become medicines. So the materials themselves change character.
And they gained specificity. They become better and better defined and they also gain economic value.
As they progress along this chain. So.
When it's at the mountain, it's still a plant, the collector takes it and it's it's it's fresh,
it's Pallava, it's it's you know, it's just it's just been picked in many cases, of course,
the collector knows to go back and pull something out of the ground, which is a a plump root,
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.
But the collective's job is to be able to find these plants and get them in the best possible condition.
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,
the doctors still do, it goes straight from the collector to the bunny.
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.
So very often the material is brought by a middleman, a courier of some sort in the couriers hands.
This thing is wet or damp, and it's it's very vulnerable.
It's no longer in the ground and it's liable to rot.
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.
But if the money it takes it in, then the money, it transforms it from something which is dangerously moist and vulnerable to rotting,
to something which is correctly identified and correctly cured and dried and sorted.
And it becomes the medical and it then goes on to.
A doctor and is then taken into the patient's body. Now.
The bunny are very interesting because of an interesting for lots of reasons, but one of the ways in which they see themselves.
If we go back to this picture, you see on one side of them, there are collectors on the other side of them.
There are doctors. The couriers are now there and the they position themselves over against the couriers in quite a specific way as well.
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,
all of us are supposed to go on pilgrimage to look, to go God at least once in their life.
And there is, of course, the wonderful noir film Sillu.
You're not supposed to go together with your wife or indeed someone you someone you were romantically attached to.
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.
They say they cannot go there. Because if they did, they would.
The language differs, but but they would be distracted by and countering the actual fresh plants,
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.
They would become so overwhelmed by seeing these these plants growing wild that they would they would just go a little bit.
A bit mad so that bars them from moving towards the mount.
They're not they're not allowed to to to move along this network going towards the position of the collector.
They're also not allowed to take Pulsers. So the skill that a.
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.
For how the Bosnia came to live in Kathmandu.
I won't go through the whole origin mess, but. They first.
Come because one of their ancestors is a very skilled healer who can repulses and heals a princess who's very ill,
but after that they have a number of spectacular failures and are severely punished for it.
And so they choose to avoid being doctors.
They choose to to to not the people who repulses and therefore expose themselves to the risk of a false diagnosis.
And again, that means that they can't move down the network in the direction of being doctors.
They are they have to stay exactly where they are. So we can look at that as being.
A set of prohibitions that pins them in place, but if you turn it on its head.
What it is, is an overt acknowledgement that there is a connected chain.
There's a set of cells, a set of nodes that interact together, and all of them are required to create successful medicine.
And it's the Barnea are defending their necessity where they are in the chain,
but they're also arguing for the existence of this network by taking on these prohibitions.
OK. So.
That's an introduction to the Bunya. When we were doing our research.
We were interested in exploring the whole network that radiated out from the Bunyah,
so we also went to look at local medical shops in the town that were outside the camp and the valley.
We interviewed people who owned the Vidia puzzle in Tripoli and places like that.
But we also. As best as we could. Followed the couriers and the collectors.
And that took us to places that the Bunya themselves could not go.
It took us up to Alpine Meadows. And.
These are very rich places, they are.
They are the primary interaction site between the mountains and the collectors, and that that interaction can be very intimate.
They are, as we will see, ritually created places in the way that Charles Rangel was using the term place a fortnight ago.
They are very much places, the mountains themselves are.
Alive in many different senses, when we start to ask questions about how global heating affects all of what I'm describing here,
we'll see that the fact that the mountains are alive is felt acutely by everybody.
They are seasonal, highly social places, they are sites where experts contend with each other.
Hide their activities from each other,
share knowledge depending on the relationship that they have to other plant collectors in order to collect these commodities,
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
rowdiness of the Gompa trade is something completely different from almost everything else that you do in Himalayan medicinal plant collection.
So this is a bit different from that. And the plant collecting itself requires rituals.
So I, I opened with that ritual that that song from the Ottawa Theatre.
Similar things are still used today.
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.
And the story that that he had, he thought he was called.
Is that his mother had Driti. His mother had no milk.
So his mother's milk was berries picked from the mountain.
He lived in a community up on the side of him, actually.
And he was known to others as having unusually dark skin because he was constituted by Barrys and he
was also known to himself and to others as having a particularly intimate kinship with the mountain.
The mountain was, in some sense his mother or his his his witness.
And he claimed and others backed him up in this that he had an unusually sensitive relationship to the condition of the Meadow's,
to the the the movement of the plants over time to the weather.
But did that didn't mean that he had any easier life? The life of one of these pot collectors is pretty rough.
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,
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.
But it was it was not a stable livelihood every year.
So. This is the opening picture I had, this is a Nager pool up on the side of him, actually.
And this is a place that we were brought to. To understand how Barry and others located and harvested plants correctly.
And this pool was a key feature of the system of meadows in the area.
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.
Is that there's a steak that sits there in the island.
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.
You could see it change its level. And that was said to be evidence of the Nago who lived that.
And we were required to perform a ritual when we arrived at the edge of this.
Place in order to enter the place, because we were told quite firmly because we were leading the team,
we had to do the ritual and if we did not do a ritual, bad things would happen.
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.
That stake was associated with quite a quite a story, a story that that we were told in the evening,
and that was intended to be a scary story, but it was a scary story.
The story goes that some years ago when things had not been going well in this meadow.
And something was perceived to be amiss.
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
or a cow was taken out to the island when the water was low and tied to the stake and left there.
And then everyone retreated. And after a very short space of time, after an hour or so,
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.
And when the water went back down again. The animal was gone.
So this was told to us as a story of how one makes a living sacrifice to the Nogoa that guards this particular place.
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.
So people bring their their animals up there during the summer and take them back down slope again in the winter.
It's very rich in medicinal plants. It's generally a fairly biodiverse place.
We didn't do a proper survey. We didn't have the materials or the people with us to do that properly.
So all of this kind of language is very satisfying to people who do work on sacred
sites and people who do work on medicinal plant networks in the Himalayas,
this idea that anthropogenic biodiversity, a kind of biodiversity that arises together with human activity,
this is this is a real prise trying to understand how anthropogenic anthropogenic biodiversity works.
In contrast, this is one of the the interesting problems I'm trying to tackle in this material today,
in contrast to the way in which anthropogenic biodiversity is usually understood in conservation biology.
You can't make sense out of. How that biodiversity is stewarded or protected or created or enhanced in this alpine meadow.
Without looking at the whole chain, the whole network of communities involved in the medicinal plant trade as well,
arguably as other communities as well, for instance, the pastoralists themselves, the herders.
So for comparison, John Salick, who was at Oxford and was the curator of ethnobotany at the Missouri Botanic Gardens for a long time,
and Bob Mosley, Robbie Hart, quite a few other people worked on the kakapo area,
kakapo in Yunnan, which is a a memory,
a medicine mountain that sits in that extraordinary area where the various major
rivers that passed in that part of Asia all sit right close to each other. It's an incredibly rugged and very biodiverse area.
And this team published a series of studies which were very rigorously done.
That explored exactly how biodiversity, plant diversity in particular, worked in areas that were identified as medicine,
maintenance or medicine meadows or sacred forests, and they showed successfully by doing a series of comparisons.
So they would they would choose a site which was identified as being either a sacred site or a medicine not in sight.
And then they would pair it with another site that was in other aspects in terms of, for instance, soil type aspect altitude.
It was the general forest decomposition. It was.
Tightly comparable to this first sight, but it wasn't defined as a sacred site,
and they run through a whole series of pairwise comparisons and showed in a quite
rigorous way that diversity was higher in the sites that were defined as sacred,
sites that were recognised as sacred sites by the community that was recognised.
Them was the community of Mennonite practitioners, Tibetan medicine practitioners that were active around Gulaga.
This is a good comparison to what we're looking at at the haematuria Meadow because.
Their study assumes that the sacred site is identified as as a sacred site after the biodiversity has already come into being.
And. They. Are also assuming, well, they're assuming, therefore, that the identification of a site as a sacred site has a protective effect.
In other words, this place has lots of lovely medicinal herbs. You know, it becomes a sacred site for us.
And because it becomes a sacred site, there are restrictions that come into play around harvesting.
So you can't over harvest, you can only harvest certain times. Only certain people can enter the area.
But it doesn't actually constitute the biodiversity.
So the human activity in the area does not create the diversity.
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,
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
create high biodiversity in their landscape through active planting measures,
through actually planting out specific things, through introducing plants, through creating gardens,
to creating forest landscapes, by reforesting and specific harvesting methods.
So. This comparison between the way in which Kaukab was being analysed and what we were seeing in Hemel truly shows up a few.
Assumptions that I'd like to question. And those are assumptions that drive a lot of the debates within discussions around.
Conservation, biology and indigenous people and conservation biology and sacred sites.
So sacred landscapes and conservation is a it's a big deal.
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.
There are working groups for the World Conservation Union.
There are films and I, I, I play with these people.
I'm in at least one of these working groups and and I have I've been involved in writing up
some some work that they've done generally from what they take to be a slightly grumpy,
critical perspective. And there are lots of reasons why this idea of sacred landscapes are sacred.
Natural sects are very, very poorly theorised.
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,
and it's saying has also asked a couple of good questions about this.
But but Brosius says quite nicely, the idea of the sacred is part of the grammar of conquest and contemporary indigenous struggles.
So, for instance, we have this film series that Toby McCloud made called Standing on Sacred Ground, which got broadcast widely at film festivals.
It was broadcast on PBS in the in the US.
And he makes a very strong claim that there is indigenous spirituality, which is a thing that's proper to all indigenous peoples.
And it is fundamentally opposed to world religions, which are a well-defined thing as far as he's concerned,
and that whenever world religions come into contact with indigenous peoples,
one of the immediate problems is that it corrodes indigenous spirituality and leads directly to the destruction of biodiversity.
So you can see there's a whole series of essentialism and claims being made here, sentimentalising essentialness and claims being made here that.
Don't really award very much agency to the communities that are in theory,
according to a narrative like this, looking after these extraordinary landscapes.
I don't know how many of you are familiar with the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services,
this is another top level intergovernmental panel that was established a few years ago that is comparable to the IPCC,
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The IPCC has an explicit remit to include indigenous communities and indigenous scientists on their own terms.
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
conservation biologists trying very hard to convince everybody else that they just need to use the language of conservation,
biology and everything will be fine and everyone else. Well, you know, there are culture clash problems.
And it's a little frustrating to me and others, I think, because actually within anthropology and within states,
we've had a lot of people putting good work in on this. So people like Paul Sillitoe, Joy Hendry, John Moore, Helen Varan,
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,
how to. How to support indigenous anthropology as a project that allows for the theories of
these kinds of collaborations from the and from from an indigenous perspective,
but that research hasn't really fed into IPB processes. OK, on the other side.
You have a thing called the ICA consortium, which is I think IKEA keeps on getting unpacked in different ways,
but roughly it means the indigenous and community conserved protected area consortium.
They have a very different language. They talk about territories of life.
They are a well recognised indigenous led biodiversity conservation organisation.
And they. Have had some success.
Where political regimes allow it in building collaborative management schemes and documenting successful practises around
the conservation of biodiversity or the stewarding or the creation of biodiversity in what they call territories of life,
I have a very different way of thinking about all these key terms.
So they're they're very aware of the fact that terms like indigenous and sacred are deliberately mobilised to terms within political struggles.
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,
really how we use the term this week, that sort of thing. So this is a very different community of people.
Again, I, I am working with them to to to some extent have been invited to be an honorary member of the consortium.
And I've been trying to help them build some tools. And unsurprisingly.
You get direct pushback from the state on this. So a couple of years ago,
I was teaching in Bangladesh and I was invited by ICC members to come up to a new community college community university being founded,
Imponderable and. I was invited in part because we were trying to figure out how to use that as a platform
to bring indigenous leaders and people studying land management and anthropologists
and development activists from around Bangladesh to collaborate around some of the
what what were called sacred groves and sacred sites in the Chittagong Hill Tracts.
So that was that was a lovely invitation and. The morning.
After I arrived the morning of the day on which I was expected to give a kind of talk at this new institution,
I was informed by the man who ran the hotel that I was expected at a.
A meeting on the other side of the road.
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.
I said, Oh, OK, who am I meeting? I'll just go over that.
It was the internal security. It was the it was the the national security force.
And I found myself in a meeting with the local head of security for Bundarra District whether they should have Gunhild Tracts.
And after we politely greeted each other and got a cups of tea, his opening gambit with me was,
you do understand there are no indigenous peoples in Bangladesh.
And we had a long and robust conversation about this, he was he'd done some history at university,
and so we had a long discussion around the genesis and the history of the Chittagong Hill tracts,
the role of Islam in civilising the region and all sorts of other things.
But it was very clear that although this is not official policy within the state of Bangladesh,
it is unofficial policy within the Chittagong Hill tracts as an area that requires a
special kind of control that the simple existence of indigenous peoples is denied.
They don't exist. There's nothing prior to the Bangladeshi state.
And just as a side thought, there are some interesting questions around the definition of indigenous people across Asia.
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.
I do wonder if if the Bangladeshis are borrowing some of their policy from the PRC.
OK. So.
That puts us here. What can what can we do to take the kind of ethnographic material that I was describing about medicinal practises?
And these medicinal networks in the Himalayas, especially around Kathmandu, how can we take that?
And connected to these questions of indigenous land conservation.
I think. Trying to understand anthropogenic biodiversity in the Himalayas, we need to make two moves,
and these are not these are not new moves, but I think we need to take them very, very seriously.
So the first thing is that we need to use theory and methods that begin in these messy relations and not above them.
Isabelle Stenger's wrote a very nice piece in.
For a symposium on comparative relativism, Scholte comparison, as a matter of concern, it was published and common knowledge,
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.
Take a third pope to take a third position and take a position outside the conference.
Or Helen Barron's work on politics, where she talks about this idea that things clocked the clock provisionally.
There are sites of encounter that succeed provisionally from that you can build what you need, but it's nothing more authoritative than that.
And it's done some good work on this. Again, there are lots of people who've done really good work on this,
but we really need to take this seriously that it's it's a question of kind of decolonising and disinterring,
accepting a polycentric social science,
accepting a fully decolonise social science and getting the conservation biologists to accept it as a key tool in the toolbox.
And there are plenty of reasons why it's a very hard thing to do. I still think it's doing.
The other thing that we need to do, though, is we need to stretch to the scale of the networks.
And this is a different problem.
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,
and I have a really great respect for her ability to pull this material out of long term heart,
careful studies of social practises and also biodiversity samples in a landscape, but.
They're assuming a kind of old style anthropology model of small societies in small places.
And. We have good textual evidence from something as far back as the type of data,
we have really good ethnographic evidence from looking at the Bunyah and the way in which they integrate and build and construct this network,
and they do they very carefully go recruit people to become part of this network,
very carefully do things like offer very good credit terms or very low or very steep discounts to new collectors or.
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.
We this, this, this this really extensive mesh that stretches from Alpine Meadows to Kathmandu.
And actually it goes to Lhasa. It goes to Delhi. It goes to Beijing.
It goes to. Kuala Lumpur stretches across the region.
And until we understand how complex and how how broad reaching these networks are,
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
theories when in fact what we're looking at is an extremely complex process of generating a lateral mesh of knowledge.
And all of that mesh is what we have to think of when we think about so-called local ecological knowledge.
Yeah, sorry, I've already pointed to this,
so the Bunyah are extraordinary in in in the degree to which they are self consciously aware of themselves as network generators.
And there is an unfolding tragedy and there are very few Barnea left, they do still work quite hard to.
Encourage the trade, but.
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.
I'm almost finished. So.
The way in which this knowledge is transmitted over time, if we think of this as a broad network rather than single communities,
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?
And we can look at each point in the network and ask, how is knowledge transmitted through time?
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.
They they are bound by textual rituals. They're bound by textual canons.
I've had some lovely conversations about luxury, for example, which is a absolutely ubiquitous fruit that you find in the central Himalayas,
where a very respected Vidia said, look, yes, I know it's a wonderful digestive.
You know, we all eat it after meals to make ourselves feel better. But I can't find its name in any textual source.
It's not in any of the lists of medicine. So I can never prescribe it as a medicine.
I have to prescribe the medicines that are listed there.
On the other side, the collectors, for example, in the case of Barry, he's actually learning from the mountain.
He sees the mountain as a source of knowledge. And he's he's observing it.
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.
There was no sentiment about it at all.
There was a lot of stealing other people's knowledge, stealing people's patches, stealing customers from rivals,
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.
Barry described trying to get into the business because his uncle did it and following his uncle and when his uncle found him following,
his uncle thrashed him properly and from that very learnt simply to follow his uncle more carefully.
So on the side of the doctors, we've got this very rigid textual learning on the side of the collectors, the couriers.
We've got this notion of of of appropriating, stealing, capturing knowledge from your seniors and your rivals.
The Bunyah, though, they do something different.
And again, this this this points to their central city in the network, but also the way in which they generated there.
They are particularist. They are borrowers. They create new kinds of information constantly.
So we were allowed to look at the the new notebook that the child,
the son of one of the of the more famous and the previous generation had made as he was learning.
So he had very carefully gone and taken photographs of every single substance, pasted it onto a page in a three ring binder,
and then put his own notes from various Ayurvedic texts, from Tibetan texts, from whatever sources he could find.
And by the time that we were interviewing them,
they were freely using websites and looking at websites for information about the Irbid or other qualities,
the goodness of these different substances, and checking to see whether or not they were right in their identifications.
So they're very creative and they compile new kinds of document and each generation.
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.
And now for many years now, a great uncle of mine, Zubaan Amontillado.
So he found this sitting in the street in the district where the body is all used to have their shops.
And it was a loose it was a loose leaf notebook.
This is almost certainly copied from a text that was probably published in Hindi or in English in the mid 19th century.
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.
Plus Devanagari and it lists the name of Corpore Kemfert.
And dozens of different languages, Gujarati, Canada, Bangla, Latin, English, and he's also added his own fields.
So there's Arabic, Tibetan. The unity name for it, the Nepali name for it, Parvati, and there are many pages of this,
and in some cases there are sort of multiple layers of commentary sitting on this.
So this is the way in which the bodies themselves are reconstituting knowledge across the network and being highly adaptive and building again,
building new knowledge into the network.
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.
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
didn't mention a really beautiful research project called the Gloria Project, which is a global comparative study of mountain peaks worldwide.
But what we know is that in all of these locations, these alpine meadows, they sit close to them.
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,
but they're basically the trees. It all stopped a little way below. Not very far above that.
You keep going in the plant, stop altogether.
And because of global heating plant, communities are walking up mountains worldwide in the northern hemisphere.
They're walking north. In the southern hemisphere, they're walking south.
A lot of communities that are long established, stable plant communities are breaking up relationships between plants and pollinators.
Plants and herbivores are breaking up because animals can move in ways that plants can't and species are going
extinct left and right because they're literally walking up mountains until there's no place else to go.
So that's another element to all of this, is the mountains themselves are changing very, very quickly.
And that gives us the motivation, the ethical motivation to try and understand this idea of anthropogenic biodiversity.
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.
In various far more complicated ways than the conservation biologists are prepared to accept, even the very good and sympathetic ones.
There are these very rich, not a total local.
Transregional ecological and medical knowledge networks that play now because they become fully politicised,
that play with categories of sacred or indigenous in order to achieve different kinds of goal.
So in the end, really what I'm asking for is just a far deeper and more sophisticated understanding
of what's going on here and trying to provide a bit more evidence to help us do it.
OK, thank you.