Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes “prosthetic authority” in the “discovery” of Salvia divinorum: how key figures are erased from the plant’s history, unfolding alongside politically-charged transgression of boundaries. These widespread processes call for profound rethinking of claims to scientific advancement.

Paper long abstract:

Gordon Wasson - professional banker and amateur ethnobotanist – is widely credited with “discovering” Salvia divinorum. Salvia - a psychoactive variety of mint that Indigenous Mexicans have grown and used for centuries – has relatively recently become a global commodity and the substrate for wide-ranging, promising pharmacological research. However, existing histories of the plant’s scientific knowledge ignore what I call Wasson’s “prosthetic authority.” Wasson’s expertise about salvia was based on harnessing and claiming knowledge of others: women – especially indigenous women - whose skills and contributions were at least if not more exceptional and valuable than those of either Wasson himself of the myriad other men who are lauded for the roles they played in furthering scientific discovery of this unique plant. This process - by which key figures are erased from salvia’s discovery narrative - is linked to myriad politically-charged forms of boundary transgression, above all those in which sacred knowledge becomes relocated in the world of secular science, and collective ownership and interest becomes recast in terms of individually owned, commodifiable property. Such processes are central to Western notions of intellectual property rights, whether those undergirding the patents claimed by pharmaceutical researchers or those licensing the sale of salvia extracts by cyber vendors. In this way, the strategies for constructing authority outlined here are not unique to the case of salvia, and call for a profound rethinking of how we understand histories of scientific knowledge and claims to scientific advancement.