Incommensurability and new economic strategies among indigenous and traditional peoples

Abstract

This article takes as a central problem why both a tiny laboratory and an enormous national park were almost simultaneously established in a remote tropical Bolivian indigenous community (Isoso) in the mid-1990s. Both projects – laboratory and the park – were oriented to non-economic values: the laboratory to those of traditional medicine and culture and the park to those of unspoiled nature. However, Isoseño people were particularly attentive to the projects' economic value, exploring the ways these might act as wellsprings of money revenue. The analysis presented here suggests that the tension among divergent orders of value that characterizes the contemporary global situation can present special opportunities, and not just challenges, to indigenous and traditional peoples living in places like Isoso. The essay brings together discussions of "incommensurability" made separately in recent cultural anthropological and ecological economic literature in order to show how and why this is so.Key words: indigenous peoples, economic strategies, traditional medicine, incommensurability, Bolivia, national park

Integrating Ecology and Poverty Reduction

“…In the subsequent participatory development of the KINP management plan, biodiversity and socioeconomic teams that included indigenous and other local technicians generated maps of the PA and integrated these into a new zoning plan that includes additional core protected areas, extensive areas for nonextractive and extractive use (e.g., livestock raising), special use areas for a gas pipeline, and recovery areas. This zoning was reviewed by local communities (see Lowrey 2008 for critique of review process) and approved by the national government.…”

“…Yet, as the administrator of the PA, CABI was able to negotiate with the pipeline sponsors to establish a trust fund to support park management and provide resources for communal land titling and development activities. The case of CABI reveals that participatory zoning can open possibilities for new alliances and/or new forms of negotiating resource access, with signifi cant risks and/or benefi ts for conservation and local rights and livelihoods (Lowrey in 2008 ) .…”

The Expanding Purview of Cultural Properties and Their Politics

“…New forms of cultural or ethnodevelopment, for instance, which may include ecotourism and the cultivation of culturally distinctive export goods, have been implemented as a means for realizing rural economic revitalization, social cohesion, human security, and political autonomy (Andolino et al 2005;Aylwin & Coombe 2010;Laurie et al 2005;Perreault 2003a,b;Radcliffe 2006b;Rhoades 2006). This is a distinctive area of neoliberal governmentality, involving both multilateral institutions and NGOs that seek to empower local communities, recognize traditions as sources of social capital (Bebbington 2004b, Dervyttere 2004, Perreault 2003c, and otherwise encourage people to adopt a possessive and entrepreneurial attitude toward their culture and the social relations of reproduction that have traditionally sustained them (Elyachar 2005, Greene 2004, Lowrey 2008. These representations have their sources in diverse international legal instruments and their interpretation, in the institutional policies (Kingsbury 1999) that respond to them, and in the discourse of human and indigenous rights that shape local, NGO, and transnational responses to these policies.…”

Salamanca and the city: culture credits, nature credits, and the modern moral economy of indigenous Bolivia

“…In attempting to commercialize a trademarked local remedy, it aimed at the generation of revenue from a monopoly on cultural knowledge. (Lowrey n.d. treats the specifically economic aspects of this argument. )…”