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. :(