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
Highlights
Isoso is an indigenous community in tropical Bolivia
Combining the previous two strands, environmental economists are busy hatching methods of harnessing the values of wilderness to the ends of eco-efficiency. Their guiding principle is that if "Bolivia's national parks benefit Bolivians but people everywhere who might benefit from a medicinal compound, a scenic vista, or the knowledge that pink river dolphins have a home,"[24] this benefit is surely calculable in currency
Indigenous and traditional peoples' embrace of capitalist forms of valuation like market-oriented intellectual property and cultural property, or cooperation in environmental initiatives headed and funded by wealthy-nation actors, indicate the dominance of these global forms over local ones
Summary
Isoso is an indigenous community in tropical Bolivia. It comprises twenty-seven villages strung along one hundred kilometers of a seasonally-flooded river in lowland Bolivia's semi-arid Chaco. It abuts Isoseño traditional territories, to which they have – unusually for a lowland South American indigenous group – held collective title since the first half of the twentieth century (see Maps 1, 2).[8] A 2002 internal evaluation offers a short history: Since 1991, WCS (The Wildlife Conservation Society) and CABI have been collaborating on the design and implementation of a community-based wildlife management programme in the Bolivian Chaco based on WCS's extensive field research in Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia. To explain this – to even suggest it – requires thinking in ways anthropologists usually resist; that is, in economic terms
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
