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Medicine as microcosm: Pharmaceutical bioprospecting and the political epistemology of nature in industrial–capitalist and indigenous Amazonian societies

Dynamics of economic and spatial rationalization are widely acknowledged characteristics of industrial–capitalist society, but the way in which these dynamics might shape the incorporation of so-called natural spaces into regimes of regulation and valuation is still being conceptualized in political ecology. Extending on the work of theorists who have documented and theorized the extension of neoliberal governance regimes over nature, this article argues that even the knowledge of nature produced in industrial–capitalist society is circumscribed by the biases inherent in its socio-cultural heritage. The argument, which can be described as a political epistemology of nature, is advanced by reference to medical science and industrial pharmacy, which has sought to understand and apprehend the value of nature via pharmaceutical bioprospecting research on medicinal plants. An analysis of one such project, pursued in the indigenous Aguaruna territory of the Peruvian Amazon, illustrates that the same processes of economic and spatial rationalization characteristic of industrial–capitalist society can be seen to recur in its production of knowledge about nature. Pharmaceutical bioprospecting evidences the extension of the rationalization of society and space to the molecular and genetic level, such that medicine becomes the microcosm to the macrocosm of industrial–capitalist society. The article goes on to compare the pharmaceutical industry’s epistemology of nature with non-profit research on indigenous people’s medicinal plants, and finally with the epistemology of nature evidenced in ancestral health-seeking practices of the Shuar, an indigenous Amazonian group bordering the Aguaruna. Drawing on the author’s fieldwork, a comparative analysis of these distinct epistemologies of nature is developed that illustrates a spectrum of constraints upon the agency of nature, each of which to differing extents pre-forms nature’s modes of action, at the same time as that action can never be fully determined by those constraints.