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Making Heritage Legible: Who Owns Traditional Medical Knowledge?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2007

Sita Reddy
Sita Reddy
Affiliation:
Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution. Email: reddys@si.edu, sitareddy@mac.com
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Abstract

In recent years an increasing number of state-based heritage protection schemes have asserted ownership over traditional medical knowledge (TMK) through various forms of cultural documentation such as archives, databases, texts, and inventories. Drawing on a close reading of cultural disputes over a single system of TMK—the classical South Asian medical tradition of Ayurveda—the paper traces some of the problems, ambiguities, and paradoxes of making heritage legible. The focus is on three recent state practices by the Indian government to protect Ayurvedic knowledge, each revolving around the production of a different cultural object: the translation of a seventeenth-century Dutch botanical text; the creation of an electronic database known as the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL); and the discovery of an Ayurvedic drug as part of a bioprospecting benefit-sharing scheme. Examined together, they demonstrate that neither TMK, nor Ayurveda, nor even the process of cultural documentation can be treated as monoliths in heritage practice. They also reveal some complexities of heritage protection on the ground and the unintended consequences that policy imperatives and legibility set into motion. As the paper shows, state-based heritage protection schemes inspire surprising counterresponses by indigenous groups that challenge important assumptions about the ownership of TMK, such as locality, community, commensurability, and representation.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: My grateful thanks first to Vijayendra Rao and Gayatri Reddy for invaluable discussion and intellectual support; Debra Diamond, Jane Anderson, Lalitha Gopalan, Michael Sappol, Alexander Bauer, and two anonymous referees for extremely useful interdisciplinary insights; and to the Rockefeller Foundation and the Smithsonian's Center of Folklife and Cultural Heritage, particularly Richard Kurin, Carla Borden, James Early, and Peter Seitel, for the ideal fellowship and venue to get this paper written.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Journal of Cultural Property , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , May 2006 , pp. 161 - 188
Copyright
© 2006 International Cultural Property Society

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