Plants, Property and Trade among the Trio and Wayana of Southern Suriname

This paper considers the trade of plant knowledge among southern Surinamese Amerindians. An international NGO specialising in the preservation of ethnobotanical knowledge employs Trio and Wayana ‘shamans’ to treat local people and record their treatments for the NGO’s archives. The politics and practices involved are complex: Trio and Wayana regard knowledge as being of socially extraneous origin, and do not claim exclusive ownership of it, although they do see knowledge as exchangeable; moreover the ëremi songs which are seen as containing the true curative power are not recorded by the NGO. Objections to the project come from the perspectives of local individuals who do not benefit directly, and of ‘Western’ actors sceptical about the eventual legal ownership and benefit sharing of potential financially profitable knowledge. But the ethical issues vary according to the perspective of the actor: although indigenous actors understand the mercantile rationality of the project on its own terms, and accept the coexistence of parallel types of relationship with ‘nature’, they privilege a view which focuses on the advantages of trade rather than the transfer of intellectual property.