The researcher investigates how intellectual property laws construct notions of ownership of genetic resources and how these laws impact the local approach to negotiating regulatory governance occurring at the national and transnational level. The project uses the example of a court decision awarding patents to a German pharmaceutical company for the exclusive use of a South African plant, which is an essential element in the production of specific drugs. It examines how various stakeholders wield specific practices and forms of knowledge in order to favorably transform current circumstances to fit or contest existing intellectual property laws.
This project, which lies at the intersection of multiple fields -- cultural anthropology; economic geography; socio-legal studies; and, science and technology studies -- offers the opportunity for opening up new theoretical and methodological avenues of research on intellectual property and governance.
The broadest aim of my dissertation research is to use the current controversy surrounding the procurement and patenting of South African Umckaloabo—a therapy for respiratory diseases that generates hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales across the global North with little associated benefit to South Africans—as a case study to examine tensions between medicine, capitalism, subaltern identity, and regulatory governance in the global South. More specifically, however, I take the Umckaloabo industry as an ethnographic window into the North-South politics of intellectual property disputes and the strategies among actors vying for say as to who should benefit from the knowledge of, and access to, profitable raw materials for medicine. Given the explosion of "indigenous rights" consciousness in South Africa, the rise of Eurocentric intellectual property laws in the global South more generally, and the difficulty postcolonial states face in bringing international legal instruments like the Nagoya Protocol to bear on their populations, I hope to demonstrate how a variety of stakeholders wield novel practices, knowledges and identities in order to change current conditions and shape bioprospecting-related laws to their favor. The dissertation draws upon over 120 structured and semi-structured interviews, extensive fieldnotes, and hundreds of archival documents collected over thirteen months of fieldwork in South Africa. Chapter one of my dissertation provides a historical backdrop to the topic and uses the story of Charles Henry Stevens’ commercialization of Umckaloabo in 1908 as an early case study of traditional medicine’s tumultuous absorption into the biomedical marketplace. In contrast with European imperial botanists emphasized in the literature on colonial-era bioprospecting, Stevens was a British medical tourist seeking a cure for his pulmonary tuberculosis in colonial South Africa. Attacked by the British Medical Association for quackery and fraud, Stevens’ tuberculosis cure provides insights into the political disciplining of African healing practices and the nature of "business with disease" (specifically, the lucrative sanatorium industry with which Stevens was competing). It relatedly foreshadows what Posel (2009) has labeled the "overt politicization of science and scientific claims to truth in the postapartheid era" in South Africa. Chapter two focuses on the present-day Umckaloabo industry and takes the former apartheid homeland of the Ciskei—now part of the Eastern Cape Province—as a critical junction in the global pharmaceutical trade in Umckaloabo (the bulk of Umckaloabo is currently shipped to pharmaceutical companies in the global North comes from this province). I examine how the largely illegal nature of this trade, as well as racialized labor and land tenure insecurity, impact harvester livelihoods. I argue that the combined legacy of apartheid and contemporary neoliberal labor regimes in the former Ciskei has created an economic hinterland for rural blacks, making the procurement of Umckaloabo an attractive endeavor, despite the risk of arrest and a pay rate ten times below the minimum wage for farm workers under South African Labor laws. Chapter three concerns the NGO-led legal challenge against Schwabe Pharmaceuticals of Germany—a company that was granted patents entitling it exclusive European use of Umckaloabo for the development of drugs treating respiratory ailments, AIDS and AIDS-related diseases (such as tuberculosis). I investigate the politics surrounding and consequences of this law-oriented NGO’s effort to overturn Schwabe’s patents by portraying a specific Eastern Cape "community" as a culturally coherent, politically unified and state-acknowledged player in a major pharmaceutical industry. If, as recent scholarship suggests, constructions of collective identity increasingly emerge at the intersections of IP law, the market, and culture, then what work does this particular imagining of collectivity and coherence do—what novel identities, values, and possibilities are arising from it? Chapter four centers on the fraught dynamics surfacing from efforts to govern the source end of the Umckaloabo value chain. Reflecting on the national government’s insertion of the Rharhabe Kingdom to control the procurement of Umckaloabo and the distribution of benefits derived from its trade, I examine how Rharhabe chiefs have utilized strategic discourses of authenticity and custom to negotiate a field of cultural legitimacy and reassert authority over land and subjects in the rural periphery of the former Ciskei. Precisely what kind of "pharmaceutical identity economy" has emerged from this dialectic of nondemocratic, traditional governance and the liberal-modernist project of benefit-sharing? Who benefits from the commodification of "Rharhabe culture. Dissemination: In 2011, I presented my work to audiences at Rhodes University and the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Additionally, a community meeting in my primary rural field site in 2011 served as an excellent platform from which to outline in detail my findings to local residents. My report detailing the land policy implications of my research was presented to the South African Parliament Portfolio Committee in August of 2012. Additionally, I have been invited to present a lengthier version of this report at the Land Divided Conference in Cape Town this coming March.
