Pharmaceuticals at the Borders of Humanitarian and Indigenous Knowledge
The article proposes a view of pharmaceuticals at the border of humanitarian and indigenous knowledge as links and discontinuities are created between what is said to be local and what claims to be global. Based on a multi-sited ethnography conducted in the context of a project of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) within indigenous populations of Brazilian Amazonia, we demonstrate how forms of knowledge observed in indigenous villages of the Médio Solimões can, or cannot, articulate themselves to the larger context of medical humanitarianism. Pharmaceuticals and medicinal plants constitute the respective iconic objects of biomedical knowledge and indigenous therapeutical knowledge permitting a reading of the power/knowledge relations that surround their encounter as they circulate on a humanitarian trajectory.