Paper short abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork among indigenous groups in the Philippines, Mexico, and Bangladesh, we highlight specific challenges ethnobotanists face to ensure the protection of biodiversity and intangible cultural heritage rights while researching traditional food-medicines and pharmaceutical development.

Paper long abstract:

In biodiversity-related fieldwork, concerns over the potential commercial exploitation of natural resources can, from the onset, cause severe distrust of a researcher by communities, national governments, NGOs, and informants. This, in turn, can result in hostility and misconceptions about the researcher’s intentions throughout a project. Even the mere presence of an ‘outsider’ may strain already existing tensions between resident groups - or, in the case of Mount Pinatubo, Philippines, the communities, military personnel, and insurgent rebels. In this paper we address the challenges ethnobotanists face in documenting community use-knowledge of traditional foods and medicines as potential phytotherapeutic agents using historical and laboratory-based evidence, while ensuring the protection and preservation of biodiversity and intangible cultural heritage rights of the people with whom we are engaging.

Drawing from our field experiences among indigenous and local groups of Mount Pinatubo, Philippines, Oaxaca, Mexico, and the outskirts of Sylhet, Bangladesh, we reflect on the shifting political and social environments which have dictated the limitations of our studies, required unexpected and sometimes drastic safety interventions, and influenced what methods we ultimately used to build and maintain relationships with community participants. As intermediators between different worlds, ethnobotanists in practice should be informed by, and contribute to, the ethical framework of anthropology; we therefore suggest best practices methods to respect and work with local communities, collaborators, and federal stakeholders within the context of biodiversity and bioprospecting research.