Leaving the Magic Out: Knowledge and Effect in Different Places

Abstract

International audienceIn 2010, Porer Nombo and I launched a book about indigenous Papua New Guinean plant knowledge to a large audience at a university near to his village on the north coast of that country. Members of the audience commented that the book made a record of important practices. But they asked if those practices were dependent on secret magic to be effective? What gave us the right to include such secrets? Or, if there was in fact something fundamental missing from the book (magical formulae to activate the processes described), then what was the use of publishing the book? Thinking through their questions suggested the need to analyse what ‘knowledge’ is in different places, and why plants might be effective in some, but not others. In this paper I attempt an explanation that does not rely on a ‘social’ explanation of magic but instead suggest that what we call ‘magic’ are mechanisms whereby a gardener (or healer, or hunter) positions an action, or a thing in relation to other things. I liken the way myth works in these systems to the way intellectual property law provides a comparable ‘mythic’ structure that locates effect in the places that have developed ‘knowledge economies’ and I conclude by asking; if places embody their history and politics, and generate different understandings of effect, then what are the implications of calling Porer's practices with regard to plants, ‘knowledge’

Making Room for Magic in Intellectual Property Policy

“…14 For example, anthropologist James Leach describes how the Rai Coast people of PNG have certain magic procedures that are necessary to make plant medicinal knowledge effective for them. Yet he observes that these are left out of descriptions of the processes in order for those processes to appear as 'knowledge' to outside observers (Leach 2012). He argues that taking the magic out of the definition of this knowledge means overlooking the key role that the magic performs-namely, 'the effective positioning of persons in relation to one another' (Leach and Davis 2012:214).…”

Can the subaltern listen? Self-determination and the provisioning of expertise in Papua New Guinea

“…But in Yopno communities, knowledge of these others—of how they have constituted one's person and of how one can influence them to act in order to refashion oneself—is unevenly distributed (this unevenness is a common basis of stratification and differentiation in Melanesia; see, e.g., Lawrence ; Leach ; Lindstrom ). Before Christianity arrived, the men's cult partitioned communities into the initiated (adult men) and the uninitiated (women and children) on the basis of their knowledge of powerful esoterica (Kocher Schmid ).…”

Words of the ancestors: disembodied knowledge and secrecy in East Timor

“…At first sight, this folk epistemology seems to sit at odds with a range of recent anthropological approaches to knowledge, which emphasize the ways in which knowledge is embodied, shaped, or transmitted through practice (e.g. Bourdieu ; Marchand ), emphasizing the relational aspects of knowledge (Leach ) or its role in constituting personhood (Crook ) . How can we reconcile the emphasis in Funar on words as immutable disembodied essences and the anthropological stress on the relational, embodied, and intersubjective dimensions of knowledge?…”