On ethnography, hallucinogens, improvised knife, etc.
 

Here's a very interesting short video on the big picture of ethnography and endangered cultures: NatGeo's Explorer-in-Residence on endangered cultures

The trivia and photos along the way are quite engaging. And towards the end of the talk, you'll be pleasantly surprised at how an Inuit made an improvised blade like no other! :eek: :)

Thanks Miguel, very nice presentation. Wade Davis is, of course, the man who wrote The Serpent and the Rainbow, which unfortunately was made into a rather sensational and stupid movie. I had the pleasure of seeing him talk at the Museum of Nature History back in the 1990s. :)

Thank you Miguel, that was delightful .

Have you ever read any of Castenada's books ?

Rick

That was great, Miguel, and that's a knife none of us will ever collect :D :D :D

Personally, I prefer Wade Davis to Castaneda. I sold all my Castaneda books years ago, but I still have an old copy of Serpent and the Rainbow kicking around.

Best,

F

Thanks too, David. I didn't know about Wade Davis until I saw that video. He's an authority all right on the subject :)

Hello Rick. Am not really familiar with ethnobotany, and with the writers on the subject. My cup of tea is more about mayhem and destruction :) But since you mentioned Castaneda, I'll find out more about the guy. Thanks!

Fearn, amen on your view about that DIY [do-it-yourself] 'knife' :D And given the many mentions here about the 'Serpent' book, I think I should really get a copy for myself :)

Miguel,

I'd also recommend Davis' One River. Although it's mostly about ethnobotany (as is Serpent and the Rainbow), there are some weapons related things in there as well. Curare, for instance (in One River), or zombie making (in Serpent and the Rainbow).

As for Carlos Castaneda, if you haven't read any of his books, I'd suggest checking out the Wikipedia articles first, just so you know what you're getting into.

Best,

F

Agree with Fearn on this . ;)

...I think I have seen a knife like that on ebay :D

Nice! I'm a fan of both Davis and Castaneda.

(I even enjoyed the film version of Serpent. :o )

Me too . :o

I hope it is shipped in dry ice ... :eek: :rolleyes:

;)

I find them both interesing, but for me the biggest difference is that Castaneda is fiction, albeit informed (and informative) fiction.

"Fiction"?!? :eek:

Blasphemy. :mad:

Andrew,

Far be it from me to criticize anyone's beliefs. I will leave that to Wikipedia. Link to Carlos Castaneda article.

Other than that, he did write some interesting books. :shrug:

Best,

F

lol. :D ;)

When you come to think of it, remembering that improvised knife and exclaiming "holy $#!+" is actually just being sincere and factual, and not being vulgar ;) :D

Thanks for the additional tips, Fearn!

On Davis, the moment he said ...

"To have that [ethnic psychoactive] powder blown up your nose is rather like being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electricity."

... I instantly became a disciple of Davis ;) :)

What I meant by that is that the guy sure can communicate and captivate his audience's imagination. And for that, I like the man already (better late than never).

But what is really mind blowing for me is not the recreational or meditative uses of these plants among the natives.

Rather, it's the fact that as said elsewhere and everywhere "while 25% of Western pharmaceuticals are derived from rainforest ingredients, less than 1% of these tropical trees and plants have been tested by scientists".

I'm sure the cure for cancer, AIDS, cardiovascular diseases, etc. are just there, lying in those forests!

And it may be that those trees can sing too, to ears who's minds are receptive to that concept.

Sigh. There are already herbal cancer drugs (i.e. taxol from yew) and heart disease (digitalis from foxglove). It's all well and good to wish for a miracle drugs, but things like exercise and safe sex still work best. Boring, isn't it?

Incidentally, it's also worth noting that the archeologists now think that the Amazon (at least along the main, whitewater rivers) was home to a lot more people than we thought even a few years ago. I'm venturing into speculative territory, but I'm guessing that one reason there is this sophisticated use of hallucinogens throughout the Amazon is that it used to be more, well, civilized, and they had the time and numbers of experimenters to work out the drug interactions that Davis talks about. Diseases brought by the Spaniards and Portuguese probably wiped out most of the river cultures, and the tribes we see now are the isolated remnants after 500 years.

Something similar may have happened in the Congo, too, since there's plentiful pottery remains and former cultivated fields in the upper basin, in areas that were once thought to be virgin rain forest.

Anyway, getting off topic. Fun stuff!

F

Sadly this is not true Fearn or i am sure that my mother would still be alive today.
Again, "while 25% of Western pharmaceuticals are derived from rainforest ingredients, less than 1% of these tropical trees and plants have been tested by scientists".
To keep testing the plants of the Amazon region is hardly "wishing for a miracle drug", it is merely common sense research.
The continued destruction of the rain forest however is nothing but short-sighted stupidity.

It's tough when many poor people need to feed themselves by carrying out the short-sighted stupidity of their overlords... and many of these folks adopt their paymaster's views as well.

Speaking as one of those scientists (I'm a trained botanist), there's this one little problem with that statement. It's incomplete.

Yes, few plants have been tested. There's a reason. Some plant families are rich in drug-type chemicals. The tomato family is a good example of this, and has given us atropine, scopalamine, nicotine, etc. Some families are not rich.

Basically, the are ~800 species of figs in the tropics, and there are hundreds of species of oaks. The chemistry of both groups is known fairly well, they're pretty consistent among species and they're not good sources for new drugs. I could go on at length, but the reason no one is checking the plants that we know about is because there's a very low probability that we'll find anything new in them.

Wade Davis is not neutral in this process. As an ethnobotanist, he has an interest in promoting bioprospecting, specifically by finding out what native tribes use as medicines, and then determining whether those plants work by some new chemistry, whether they work by some chemistry that's already known (the normal case), or whether they work by sympathetic magic (i.e. placebo) alone (also very common).

Bioprospecting goes in and out as a fad among drug companies. Right now, they're bioprospecting in the ocean and in animals, because they're finding new classes of pain killers (cone snails) and antibiotics (frogs, alligators, etc) to study. I'm sure that they will eventually go back to the rainforests, but even then, they're probably going to be looking at things like fungi, bacteria, and animals, as much as the plants.

I'm sorry to hear about your mother, but I'm not sure that the plants of the rain forests held any cure for her. That was definitely true for my late father, by the way.

Best,

F

That's a possibility, though at the moment such claim is classified as pseudoscience I believe :shrug:

Mythbusters if it can regarded as a good experimenter (perhaps it is), is supposed to have busted the belief (though some claim that the same experiment proved otherwise).

Personally, I don't believe that plants or trees are sentient (anatomically, they don't have a brain or a nervous system, etc.). And I'm sure Fearn can elaborate on this more.

But after knowing that those Indians do perceive something from plants and they have evidence to prove such allegation, I'm now having second thoughts ;)

I meant that comment as a half-joke, and half alluding to the fact that these people may be better at discovering the beneficial properties of some plant species than we are. But, some people just have a good sense of the world around them. Some people can just read people. Some just understand dogs, don't know why but they do. Perhaps some people can just tell something about plants. This "tree-listening" is a whole new concept to me, never looked at things that way.... even if technically trees don't speak.. it's the concept I mean, not the actually "communication":shrug:

Agree :)

Talking about having that good sense of one's surroundings, I think it was Jared Diamond in his Guns Germs and Steel who made the same allusion in said book.

IIRC, Diamond said that if you drop a Papua New Guinea (PNG) native in the middle of Manhattan or something like that, the PNG native would be totally disoriented of course.

But in the same manner, Diamond said that if he [Diamond] was dropped in the middle of the PNG rainforest, he won't survive.

Thus Diamond was saying that he's not really smarter than the PNG native. Rather, each one of them merely adapted to his own native surroundings. And having made that adaptation, the heightened sensitivity is there.

To cite another example, Spanish missionaries during the colonial period had often recorded how Filipino seamen masterfully navigate the seas by merely "reading" the cloud formations, the floats encountered in the sea, the type of fishes that swim by, the looks of the waves, etc.

I'm sure seamen who are Polynesian, Mediterranean, etc. also possessed the same heightened sensitivity to his surroundings.

So yes, we are saying the same thing after all :)

PS - Maybe somebody should ask Wade Davis what exactly did the Indians mean when they said that they hear those plants "singing" under the moonlight. It's also possible that something was lost in the translation.

Sounds good, I agree with your agreement and elaboration :D
Possible... or maybe he chose to translate it and present it literally to the audience for the affect of it... because if he said "they have a culture that has a good sense of its surrounding, especially with regards to plants, which they often observe under moonlight..." then it's not such a cool statement... Hell when I'm in the city I have a general idea of where the restaurants are and what to look for to see if it's a good one or not before risking a trial.... :shrug: but those restaurants don't sing to me unless you could advertisements ;)

Thanks for those comments.

Can I just request for your comments please on my two back-of-the-envelope calculations? :)

Here's quick-and-dirty calculation no. 1 --

[a] there are currently about 13,000 drugs per US Food & Drug Admin., if I understood correctly this webpage;

[b] if the stat we picked up was correct in that 25% of Western drugs came from rainforest ingredients, then that would be 3,250 out of the 13,000;

[c] again if it's true that only 1% of rainforest flora has been tested, then shouldn't that mean that the 99% untested plants ought to give us thousands of more new drugs?

On the one hand, I myself like anybody else will find it ridiculous if someone will say that we expect to see 321,750 new drugs (i.e., 99 x 3,250) once the remaining 99% have been tested.

On the other hand, if we are to say that no significant new drugs are to be expected from the 99%, wouldn't that be swinging to the opposite extreme?

After all, the 1% tested did yield 3,000+ drugs.

Could it be that the most likely scenario will be somewhere in between? (though perhaps skewed towards the scenario you just described, in that the success rate will be much lower this time, on account of the similar traits of many species, etc.).

Just thinking out loud ... :)

I'll post next that second rough calcs :D

... in the same manner that females have greatly honed their shopping instincts :D

Fearn, i am sorry to hear about your father as well. My post was a reaction to your statement that "It's all well and good to wish for a miracle drugs, but things like exercise and safe sex still work best". My mom was a very active woman who practiced yoga and went hiking all the time. She had a good, health, well balanced diet. Yet she battled breast cancer and was finally taken by leukemia. So i stand by my response that "exercise and safe sex" was not the answer there. :rolleyes:
While i understand your comments that the not all plants are viable sources for drugs and that the 1% figure is therefore misleading there are so many species of plants in the Amazon that i am convinced that it is well worth the investigation. My worry is that by the time scientists get done with cone snail and "eventually go back to the rainforests" there nay not be any rainforests to go back to. They are disappearing at an amazing rate. :(

Hi Miguel,

As I noted above, it isn't a linear calculation, because diversity isn't evenly distributed among plant families, and because some groups of plants are far more likely to have potential drug properties than others.

For example, the three most common plant families worldwide are the asters, orchids, and grasses. Of these, we're alive as a civilization because of the grasses (they're our main food source), and we get some interesting herbals (echinacea, wormwood, etc) from the Asters. Orchids? Pretty flowers and vanilla, yet they're the most diverse family in the tropical forests. It isn't that people don't use orchids for various things (like fiber or pretty flowers) but they aren't a drug source.

Figs are another great example. I suspect there are some herbal uses that might even be useful for medicine. There are 800+ species of figs, and they're a keystone of life for tropical forests, because they fruit all year. Yet as far as I know, they all have much the same biochemistry, so no one is looking at figs as a source of medicine. That's another 800 species.

I can keep on going until I run out of space, but the point is that, while most plants have some basic herbal use, often those uses are things we already know about. Finding a genuinely new drug is like finding a needle in a haystack.

Those 1% that were already tested belonged to families that we knew contained drug compounds (like the nightshade family) or were used by indigenous people to do amazing things (like the curare plants or Davis' hallucinogens). Effectively, we've high-graded the forests for their easily accessible drug plants. While I'm sure that there's new undiscovered drugs out there, I don't think it's going to be easy to find, and the cost of finding those unknowns is what's keeping people from testing them.

Hope this helps. It's nothing like a linear calculation. It's more like gold-mining.

Best,

F

I believe that even you and i would be able to hear the plants singing under the moonlight if we were to participate in a peyote ceremony. ;)
I don't make this as a flippant remark. Castaneda was always asking Don Juan, "did that really happen? Is it true or just a hallucination?". Well this "separate reality" thing can get complicated. :)

IT IS QUITE POSSIBLE FOR PLANTS TO TALK TO YOU WHEN USING SOME OF THE VARIOUS PLANTS USED IN CEREMONIES BY SHAMEN AND OTHERS FOR MANY CENTURIES. MANY OTHER THINGS ARE POSSIBLE AS WELL WHILE MUCH THAT IS EXPERIENCED IS NOT POSSIBLE TO PROVE OR FOR AN OUTSIDE OBSERVER TO CONFIRM THINGS ARE SEEN THAT CAN BE CONFIRMED.
OBSERVERS HAVE SEEN A PERSON HANDLE DANGEROUS OR WILD CREATURES OR FOR WILD CREATURES TO WILLINGLY COME TO A PERSON UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF A DRUG. WITH SOME DRUGS THE VISION BECOMES MUCH BETTER SO YOU CAN SEE THINGS YOU NORMALLY CAN NOT SUCH AS COUNT HOW MANY TIMES A FLY FLAPS ITS WINGS AS IT FLIES BY OR SEE THE HEAT RISING ABOVE A PERSONS HEAD IN SWIRLS AND SEE THE GNATS RIDING THE THERMALS ABOVE A MANS HEAD LIKE THE VULTURES RIDE THERMALS. DID YOU EVER WONDER WHY GNATS LIKE TO COLLECT AROUND AND ABOVE YOUR HEAD, THATS WHY.
MANY MORE THINGS CAN BE OBSERVED THAT CAN BE PROVEN BY CAREFUL STUDY BUT MANY OTHER HAPPENINGS CANNOT SUCH AS TALKING TO TREES OR PLANTS AND EVEN KNOWING THE PERSONALITIES OF DIFFERENT ONES. INDEED MANY THINGS HAVE BEEN DONE THAT CAN'T BE EXPLAINED AND THAT GO FAR BEYOND MAN'S NORMAL SENSES AND ABILITIES AND NOT ALL IS FICTION, ITS JUST NOT POSSIBLE TO PROVE OR EXPLAIN.
I THINK WE HAVE MUCH MORE POWER AND MANY MORE SENSES THAT WE CANNOT USE HERE IN THIS LIFE AS THERE IS A GOVENOR SHUTTING THEM OFF AND PERHAPS THE SHAMEN FIND A WAY TO PARTIALLY UNLOCK THESE SENSES THRU THE USE OF THEIR DRUGS AND RITUALS TO HELP THEIR TRIBE. :shrug:

FOR ALL MAN'S ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND KNOWLEGE IT WOULD BE JUST A SMALL SPECK AMONG ALL THAT GOD HAS CREATED. WE HAVE AN AWFUL LOT TO LEARN AND REALLY ARENT THAT SMART AFTER ALL.

Anyone here read 'At Play In The Fields of the Lord' ?

The movie ??
Meh .

We share the same planet but not the same world .

I'd also point out that plants do make sounds pretty routinely. Trees creak and groan under strain, and if you have a stethoscope, you can hear the sounds of fluids moving within the stems.

Yes, I'm aware that this is probably not what the "singing hallucinogenic plants" is about, but it's just as short-sighted to think that plants don't make sounds, move, communicate with each other, or sense their environments. Each of these has been proven by science, and none of these is news to anyone who pays close attention to plants in any culture.

Best,

F

Ain't that the truth. :)
Wow, this conversation sure is getting esoteric....and way off forum topic. Hope those other mods don't shut us down. ;) :D
Yes Fearn, creaking and groaning under stress and fluids running through plant systems is definitely not what we are talking about here, nor is it plants sensing their environments or even communicating with each other. What we are talking about is basically a "shamanistic" journeying experience where information about plant use is brought back from the journey and applied to "real" life situations....and proves to actually be correct and work! Certainly it is next to impossible to verify these experiences in any scientific way, but results are still results and i am not one to argue with them. Anyone who has had a peyote or "magic" mushroom experience can probably relate better to this, but maybe discussions of such personal experiences might be better left to private chats. :shrug: ;) :)
So i get what you are saying Fearn, really i do. The 99% of untested plants in the Amazon are not likely to yield anywhere near the number of medicinal drugs that we have already discovered in that 1 percentile. But what if they yield just a fraction, say 100 new drugs....or just 50....or only 25? What if they yield just one. What if that one is the cure for leukemia?

Hi David,

Check out Vincristine or vinblastine (link). We already have leukemia drugs from tropical plants.

Anyway, I know more about shamanism than I'm willing to talk about here, but that's only half my point. A bigger point is that we're assuming that, because they're hallucinogens, the people must have been hallucinating to hear the song. I don't know that Davis went out to check, but for all I know, you can hear the difference around the different cultivars of that vine. Maybe it has to do with the mosquitos that were buzzing around it, or something. Miguel's comment was right on: most shamans aren't stupid, and the ones I've met are pretty darn observant. Instead of wallowing in the mysticism of the comment, it's good to ask them whether they can teach you to hear that song, so that you can evaluate their evidence for yourself. It might be that all you have to do is stand under a vine and listen, simple as that.

As for the cost of finding a new drug.... That's a complex question. I'll approach it by telling some anecdotes.

1. A lot of the initial scientific research on Echinacea is incorrect, because the researchers were bad taxonomists and chose the wrong species for their sample. Moral: Correct identification is CRITICAL. This week, the New York times ran an article, one of many noting how taxonomy is a disappearing science. Think about the connection for a second.

2. Drug companies can only make money off of novel products. There's a huge number of drug plants out there, but as one herbalist noted, "how many cures for an upset stomach do you need to know, anyway?" A lot of plants have similar chemicals and work in similar ways. Good for the herbalists, but useless for the drug prospectors. If they can't patent it in some form, they're not interested.

2b. How much does it cost to screen plants? Depends on the method. Davis and his cohorts try to short-circuit the screening process by checking out known herbal medicines. Still, it costs around a billion $US to bring a drug to market in the US, and that includes finding something that might work, clearing all regulatory hurdles and safety tests, plus that wonderful 30% of the budget to marketing (When the time is right...Cialis). This raises the question of how much it is worth to go prospecting, considering how big the strike has to be to pay off for the financiers.

2c. Who owns the knowledge? A company in Texas patented bismati rice, and someone attempted to patent yoga, both in the US. The Indian government has been creating a multi-lingual database of ayurvedic healing preparations, so that anyone who tries to patent a traditional Indian drug in another country can have their patent rejected out-of-hand. Nevertheless, people will use the patent process, especially in the US, to take advantage of tradtional knowledge and even to lock out the people who gave them that knowledge as a gift. I think Davis is a strong advocate for traditional knowledge, but there still is the question about whether the healers and shamans should be talking to him at all, if someone else is going to exploit their knowledge without recompensing them.

2d. Similarly, one can look at the drug molecules as a form of knowledge, and talk about whether the drug prospectors are willing to pay to conserve the forest they're prospecting in. In many cases, they are not, because the economics are messy. You only have to find the drug until you can synthesize it in a lab. Once it's synthesized, the forest is irrelevant to the drug company. Whether this is fair and reasonable is an ethical question.

As I noted before, bioprospecting is a fad among drug companies with about a ten-year return interval. What happens is that they send out a bunch of drug prospectors, test whatever they find, and if they're lucky, bring something to market. If not, they get discouraged, and turn to some other field (like combinatorial chemistry or metagenomics, or whatever) to find new sources for potential drugs. When those fields don't pan out, they hear about some new, neat research about a class of novel biologicals, say the antibiotics found in the skins of frogs, and off they go to the jungle again.

And so it goes. Long answer to a short question, David, but bioprospecting really is like any other form of prospecting. It's risky, and as a result, it tends to be faddish. Is it worth it? You tell me. I'm too busy panning for gold, given the current inflated market :D (oh wait, that was last year :D :D).

Best,

F

This thread has drifted way off topic!!!!111!!!11one!! :mad:

Let's get immediately back to fecal blades and penis-bone knives. :D

Pass the Ayahuasca . :D

Sure thing. Fine by me boss.

Actually, it is interesting, because we collector-types don't normally collect improvised or discardable knives. Exceptions out there? Anyone? Still, it's an interesting area for those interested in very basic ideas of design (i.e., the category, "sharp edges, what can I make them from, part XXX.")

Interestingly, there's a howto on how to make an ice knife. Don't know if it works, as it's summer here. Maybe someday I'll find out.

As for the drugs, I'm surprised that no ones gotten into the curare angle. That's as neat a story as any, and it does have collectible artifacts associated with it. Blowguns anyone?

Best,

F