Spirits and Molecules: Ethnopharmacology and Symmetrical Epistemological Pluralism

Abstract

ABSTRACTEthnopharmacology is the scientific study of indigenous drugs. Herein, I discuss some of the metaphysical issues at stake when rendering traditional medicines scientifically legible. I draw on my laboratory experience, my limited experience with Amazonian shamanism, and the ethnographic literature to consider drugs as relational entities animated in their particular cosmological milieu, with wider historical determinants stabilizing their ontologies. In relation to the problem of incommensurability that comes to the fore in ethnopharmacology, I review the broad problems faced by ethnopharmacology researchers, and extending Daston's concept of ‘applied metaphysics’ from history of science, I analyse ethnopharmacology as a process of synchronic translation across distinct regimes of knowledge and practice, offering insights into an anthropology of incommensurability that rests upon symmetrical epistemological pluralism. This theory may facilitate ethnopharmacologists and anthropologists in negotiations between incommensurable regimes of knowledge by fostering recognition of a plurality of ways of knowing.