La Doble Subordinación de la Etnobotánica Latinoamericana en El Descubrimiento y Desarrollo de Medicamentos: Algunas Perspectivas

Abstract

Medical ethnobotany in Latin America is divided today in at least two dimensions, which determine its sense and direction as a science and a social practice. In the first one, ethnobotany is a step in the research that starts with popular knowledge and eventually ends in the incorporation of drugs into formal medical care. The second dimension studies this aforementioned dependence of the drug development process as it is established worldwide. Both dimensions generate a challenge for researchers and institutions devoted to medical ethnobotany in Latin America, due to the confrontation of an instrumental rationality with a dialogical one in the study of endogenous knowledge and resources related to health caring and curing. The dominance of an instrumental rationality in the search for vegetal drugs disregards the reciprocity subject at different levels. However, the emphasis stressed here is in the potential role of the local and national researchers and institutions within the prospected regions, rather than in the foreign prospectors who transfer resources and knowledge looking for benefits that can appear to be strange and even conflicting to the source countries and populations. As two illustrative elements, an account of some foreign patents containing medicinal species commonly used in Mexico and the recently published Mexican Herbal Pharmacopeia are analysed.