Traditional Knowledge Commons

See the Report: Imagining a Traditional Knowledge Commons. A community approach to sharing traditional knowledge for non-commercial research. IDLO, 2009. By Elan Abrell et al. [1]

Discussion

How Biocultural protocols differ from western intellectual property

"The traditional healers in Rajasthan, India, refer to themselves as gunis. The word guni is derived from the Sanskrit word guna, which has a threefold meaning: knowledge, healing and virtue. A guni is therefore one who not only has the knowledge of healing but is also a person of virtue. The gunis in their biocultural protocol outlined the guni dharma, which is a code that all gunis subscribe to. The term dharma is translated as ‘the virtuous path’ and guni dharma is a code of virtue that gunis are sworn to uphold. The gunis recite an oft-quoted Hindi verse of the saint Tulsi Das that sums up their guni dharma: daya dharma ka mool hai, paap ka mool abhimaan. This can be translated as “compassion is the root of the virtuous path and the root of wrongdoing is self-centeredness.” The gunis believe that it is compassion that makes them serve their community selflessly, care deeply for nature, and share their knowledge for the well being of humanity.

While developing their biocultural protocol, the gunis emphasized that compassion leads to selflessness, which opens oneself up to a deep sense of kinship with nature and one’s community. This biocultural connectedness leads to dreams and intuitions about the healing properties of plants. Like the Bushbuckridge healers, the gunis therefore view themselves as custodians and conduits rather than owners of their knowledge and see their ability to heal as a gift or a calling. For the gunis it is a violation of the guni dharma to profit from their knowledge, and the greatest of transgressions is a refusal to heal the ailing who can ill-afford to compensate the guni. The dharma of the gunis is not an isolated example of an ancient code of virtue but resonates with the codes of virtue of other traditional communities such as the sangomas (traditional healers) of South Africa and the Raika pastoralists of India. These communities perceive their knowledge as an outcome of virtuous relationships with the land, plants and animals. Community values regarding their knowledge vary as much as communities themselves, and for many communities these values are not incompatible with financial-based benefit sharing arrangements. In many others, though, knowledge is not seen as property that can be owned and sold as a disembodied commodity, but rather the very flow of knowledge affirms biocultural relationships within communities and between communities and their ecosystems. Knowledge about the natural world is not purely material but simultaneously cultural and spiritual. Its movement and application promotes a kind of biocultural cohesiveness.

Amongst biocultural communities, the movement of knowledge does not generate profits as in the sale of commodities. On the contrary, the knowledge itself increases by creating a continually widening community of knowledge holders all of whom are bound by the code that insists that they do not profit from what they have received freely. Whereas the profit remains with the seller in a transaction involving the sale of knowledge, the increase follows the knowledge while simultaneously affirming cultural and spiritual bonds within biocultural communities. While biocultural communities, be they healers or pastoralists, do engage in transactions in which they are compensated in money or in kind in exchange for their knowledge, for some of these communities the nature of TK is such that it places a clear limit on the extent to which the knowledge can be commodified.

This limit is important because when knowledge that emerges from certain cultural and spiritual relationships is commodified, it results in an erosion of a value system that creates such knowledge and frays the ties that hold the community together. This has been illustrated by research on the impact of the commodification of TK on ILCs – such as the extensive IIED- led participatory action-research project carried out with 11 ILCs in six different regions, which has documented a shift toward the privatization of communal resources and a decrease in the sharing of TK, often due to a lack of interest or out-migration by younger generations.20 Some of the healers believe that commodification can even affect the efficacy of the knowledge since it separates the healer from the community by restricting their interaction to a material relationship mediated by the commodity. The healers see a large part of healing as involving a spiritual reaching out to the ailing, which is adversely affected if the entire relationship is based on a pure commercial transaction.

The movement of knowledge as a relationship on the other hand blurs the boundaries between the self and others, strengthening the cultural and spiritual bonds that form a community:

When “knowledge” passes from hand to hand in this spirit, it becomes a binder of many wills. What gathers in it is not only the sentiment of generosity but the affirmation of individual goodwill, making those separate parts a spiritus mundi, a unanimous heart, a band whose wills are focused through the lens of the “shared knowledge.” Thus the knowledge becomes an agent of social cohesion, and this again leads to the feeling that its passage increases its worth, for in social life, at least, the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts. If it brings the group together, the “knowledge” increases in worth immediately upon its first circulation, and then like a faithful lover, continues to grow through constancy."