Doctoral Dissertation Research: Reconfiguring Local Knowledge of Remedies: Hybridity at the Interface of Production and Consumption

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University of Pittsburgh doctoral student, Nora C. Bridges, supervised by Dr. Kathleen M. DeWalt, will undertake 12 months of field research on how indigenous people inform and build local knowledge of health remedies in a context of increasing engagement with diverse outsiders. She will investigate whether and to what degree local knowledge is a resource through which, 1) health is maintained, 2) indigenous identity is asserted, and 3) sociality is supported. It is hypothesized that agility in local knowledge repertoires provides successful livelihood strategies. This research seeks to examine the simultaneous roles of innovative production and strategic consumption in the provision of scarce medical resources in increasingly pluralistic settings. The research will be carried out among Indigenous Amazonians in the Upper Napo of Ecuador. The researcher will document shifts in local knowledge of remedies shifts across rapidly changing environmental and socioeconomic contexts. Data collection methods will include structured surveys, formal elicitation techniques, participatory mapping, home garden inventories, in-depth semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and document collection. This research will contribute to theories of local knowledge production in contexts where indigenous curing repertoires co-exist with market penetration and altered environments. In addition to theoretical development, this research is intended to help devise a more sophisticated and nuanced framework to better describe how health decisions are made and scarce resources are allocated in order to enhance human health programs, generate recommendations for sustainable livelihoods, and fortify cultural and biological diversity. Funding this research also supports the education of a graduate student.