Table Of ContentScience Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western
Science
Manuel Ortega-Rodríguez
Hugo Solís-Sánchez E ditors
Costa Rican
Traditional
Knowledge
According to Local
Experiences
Plants, Animals, Medicine and Music
SCIENCE ACROSS CULTURES:
THE HISTORY OF NON-WESTERN SCIENCE
Volume 8
COSTA RICAN TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE ACCORDING
TO LOCAL EXPERIENCES
Editor
HELAINE SELIN, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, USA
The series Science Across Cultures: History and Practice, formerly called Science
Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science, seeks to describe and
document the scientific knowledge and beliefs of the world’s cultures. Comparative
and revealing, the series challenges our preconceived ideas about science and
culture. It is of special interest not only to those in the field of comparative history
and the history of science, but also to social scientists and humanists whose interest
areas are touched by the volumes in this series. This includes people working in
areas such as textiles, ceramics, architecture, farming, parenting and psychology.
Contributions are welcome from those working on topics involving the history and
practice of science and culture around the world.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/6504
Manuel Ortega-Rodríguez • Hugo Solís-Sánchez
Editors
Costa Rican Traditional
Knowledge According
to Local Experiences
Plants, Animals, Medicine and Music
Editors
Manuel Ortega-Rodríguez Hugo Solís-Sánchez
Physics Department Physics Department
Universidad de Costa Rica Universidad de Costa Rica
San José, Costa Rica San José, Costa Rica
ISSN 1568-2145 ISSN 2215-1761 (electronic)
Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science
ISBN 978-3-030-06145-6 ISBN 978-3-030-06146-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06146-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018968346
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
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Introduction
We live in a time dominated by complex thought, and the appreciation of systems of
knowledge can no longer be considered a luxury for just a few. The present volume
represents an effort to make available to the general public a broad sample of
detailed cases of traditional knowledge within Costa Rican culture(s). This is the
first time, to our knowledge, that such a compendium is produced. Although some
ideas discussed in this book have been previously dealt with elsewhere, most of its
contents are not easily accessible—at least in English. The emphasis was placed on
the first-handedness of the experiences.
This book grew out of an attempt, starting in 2011 at Universidad de Costa Rica’s
Physics Department, to bring talks about traditional knowledge to an interdisciplin-
ary audience, not just anthropologists and linguists. (All of the talks, with the excep-
tion of the last one, took place between October 2011 and July 2012.) Given the
success of these activities, and encouraged by several colleagues in Costa Rica and
the United States, it was later decided that the effort was worth reaching out to a
wider audience, which warranted the transcription and translation of the talks into
English language and the inclusion of careful annotations in order to make the ideas
accessible to the general public.
Outlook
This book is about all sorts of knowledge. The tour delves into how plants are used
as food and as medicine throughout Costa Rica, in both rural and urban settings. You
will read about how Costa Rican mothers make use of toxic plant Chinese star anise
to treat baby colic, and all the myths around it; how low-prestige, animal food
ojoche might have saved many Costa Ricans from starvation; how milk was obtained
from plantains; and how the handling of cocoa is avoided because of its symbolic
links to blood, menstruation, and miscarriage. In addition, you will read about the
way people are embarrassed about what they eat at home, even though those meals
seem fascinating to us, and also about how a younger generation in rural areas
v
vi Introduction
refuses to take traditional medicines that work and prefers instead to visit a Western
pharmacy.
Most importantly, you will learn how all this makes sense when understood
against the background of a tradition with its own rich, internal logic. We will also
explore in full the tensions between Western and non-Western knowledge, and the
debate described for plants in the previous paragraph will be echoed with animals,
music, poetry, nature, the environment, abortion, patents, education, and rights to
own land.
In spite of its importance in a globalized world, it is a fact that Latin American,
as a whole, still remains a mystery for many. Stereotypes abound, and sometimes
the continent is treated as a homogeneous entity. Among the nations of this often
misunderstood Latin American culture, Costa Rica is unique in its combination of
features. It has a singular geography, being a tiny country with two oceans and a
burst of microclimates. It is a clean energy promoter but has, at the same time, a
population with a culture of pollution. There is political stability, no army, a first-
world health system, and an impressively high life expectancy, interwoven with a
conservative, paternalistic mentality and an alarming increase of income
inequality.
Because of all this, the present book is, thus, of interest to both layman and
expert. Furthermore, the fact that it was a group of physicists who put together the
present effort has plenty to say about how knowledge search is being reorganized in
academia in the first decades of the millennium. The felicitous contrasting between
different world views is no less important in fields like physics and economics than
in comparative social sciences. The traditional concept of academic field might even
be on its way out.
What Is Traditional Knowledge?
A book on traditional knowledge ought to define from the start what one means by
“traditional” and by “knowledge,” a task that is both problematic and necessary. Let
us start with “traditional.” Following Selin (2000), we may define “traditional” (or
the related concept of “non-Western”) as that thought which lies outside the com-
mon European and North American (Anglo United States and Canada) world view
and which derived in large part from (contested and reworked) Enlightenment ide-
als. As Selin points out, the term is not geographical but conceptual. Thus, the native
indigenous Bribri people who live in the eastern and southern parts of Costa Rica
would be considered non-Western under this logic.
We purposely avoid the use of the word “ethno-” (common in the older litera-
ture), as in “ethnoscience,” “ethnomedicine,” and the like, as many scholars con-
sider this term problematic by its derogatory connotations. Even though there is
plenty of neutral, non-derogatory usage of this potentially controversial suffix, we
abide by using the adjective “traditional” instead in titles and comments. Whenever
used during the talks, however, the term “ethno” was faithfully transcribed.
Introduction vii
This discussion thrusts the following question. To what extent can you really talk
about “pure” Western thought (meaning the opposite of non-Western thought)? In a
place like Costa Rica, much more than in, say, the United States, what one would
call Western thought (epitomized by the culture of Spanish-speaking persons in San
José, the capital city) is actually the result of a centuries-old mixture and integration
of Western and indigenous world views. And even if there existed something we
could call “Western” or “mostly Western,” be it in Costa Rica, the United States, or
elsewhere, it would still of course be as idiosyncratic and as “ethno” and historically
bound as any other knowledge.
Let us move now to the concept of “knowledge,” or “science.” Following Selin’s
discussion once again, we need to appreciate that every culture has knowledge and
that this knowledge allows peoples to describe, control, and predict events.
Furthermore, every body of science is legitimate in terms of the culture where it
grew (this is precisely the “emic” view of culture). In particular, the distinction
between science and magic does not carry over to other cultures. It might well be (or
not) that other cultures have a demarcation mental schema between “science” and
“non-science,” but this demarcation line most certainly does not separate what we
would call “scientific knowledge” from other Western forms of practice, which we
would perceive and describe as “more intuitive” or “more cultural” than scientific
knowledge. For example, it might seem at first sight that a discussion on music does
not belong in a book about scientific knowledge. But this would be just our Western
bias standing out, as it is a fact that Bribri medicine cannot be performed without
singing. Thus, it is dangerous to decide beforehand what is science and what is not.
In Costa Rica, the integration of traditional knowledge, we insist, is deeper than
in countries like the United States or European nations. Take the example of tradi-
tional medicinal herbs. In the United States, this sort of medicine is usually used by
persons in upper classes in the spirit of fashionable open-mindedness and only in a
context of complement to more standard forms of medicine. In contrast, medicinal
herbs in Latin American countries are of the first and foremost use by the population
in general. They are usually not an alternative; they are the first (and for many, the
only affordable) place to go. Traditional herb culture blends with a well-established
popular culture.
Goals
We may summarize the main objectives of the present book in the following way:
In the first place, the book intends, of course, to provide factual information
about the particular cultures within Costa Rica, as well as their relation to each
other, and, whenever possible, to external cultures.
Secondly, the present effort should be useful, in the form of a detailed multi-case
study, for the culture theorist interested in the workings of cultures in general (and
in the usually strange logic of the mosaic of cultures within cultures).
viii Introduction
In the third place, and related to our previous discussion, this effort will be help-
ful to those wishing to gain more insight on the complex relationship between
Western and non-Western knowledge. This book also intends to cast a doubt on
categories that allegedly set apart Western knowledge from its traditional counter-
parts, for example, its supposed non-situatedness and objectivity.
This book differs from other ones by the fact that we present transcriptions of
talks rather than summaries. This has the advantage of liveliness and spontaneity,
although it might require the exercise of patient reading. When doing the transcrip-
tions, we sought to strike a balance between liveliness and readability. Because we
wanted to reach a wide audience, the level is somewhat more toward the side of
general educated public and less on the side of scholarly technical discussion,
although readers will verify that there are plenty of technical details throughout the
texts. Whenever technical jargon appears in the readings, we, the editors, have tried
to add clarification notes. One important issue is that the talks were made by Costa
Ricans for Costa Ricans, so many of the cultural and institutional aspects were taken
for granted by the speakers. It is for the benefit of readers outside Costa Rica that we
have added such clarifications. Just to give an immediate example, any discussion
on traditional medicine only makes sense if one understands Costa Rica’s highly
paternalistic medical and social security systems, against which it develops and
which differs substantially from what you would find in other countries.
In terms of thematic balance, we have made an effort of not falling into the all-
too-c ommon trap of presenting only texts on the indigenous (autochthonous) popu-
lation. Not long ago, “traditional” meant basically “indigenous.” As we describe
below, we strived to achieve a diversity of topics and perspectives. Of course, the
sampling is not by any means exhaustive, but we believe that many of the relevant
issues are covered. There is an emphasis on gender issues, always an important
topic.
We have been inspired from the beginning by the undertakings of others. Above
all, the pioneering and thorough work of the Non-Western Science series edited by
Helaine Selin prompted us to think more intently about traditional knowledge in
Costa Rica. Each of Selin’s Across Cultures volumes (Mathematics, Astronomy,
Nature, Medicine, Childbirth, Parenting, and Happiness) is an invitation to rethink
critically anew what one thought about each of the categories.
To list just a few of other influential books, let us mention John Janzen’s The
Social Fabric of Health: An Introduction to Medical Anthropology, Daniel Lewis’s
book on star navigation in the Pacific islands, Marcia Ascher’s opus about mathe-
matics across cultures, and Anthony Aveni’s Ancient Astronomers, as well as clas-
sics such as Ethnobiological Classification by Brent Berlin and Harold Conklin’s
Fine Description.
As all these references indicate, there is a thirst in the modern academic world
for traditional knowledge and comparative traditional knowledge. The need and
importance of adding cognitive perspective to intellectual endeavors, both for its
own sake and as a source of useful working metaphors, cannot be overstated.
Introduction ix
About Costa Rica
Before describing the contents of the book, and for the benefit of those not familiar
with Costa Rica, let us offer a few words on the administrative division of its terri-
tory and then some more about its cultures.
Costa Rica is divided into seven provinces: San José, Cartago, Alajuela, Heredia
(the “Central Valley provinces”), Guanacaste, Puntarenas, and Limón (the “coastal
provinces”). Provinces are divided into cantons (82 of them), and cantons are
divided into districts (478 of them). All the land abides by the same law and educa-
tional curriculum, and there is only one Congress in the whole country, which is
one-chambered and located in San José, the capital city. Most of the 24 indigenous
territories are located in the southeastern part of the country.
Compared to other Latin American countries, the indigenous (i.e., autochthonous
to the American continent and with no European blood) population of Costa Rica
represents a tiny percentage. According to the last census, performed in 2011 [INEC,
2012], there were only around 104 thousand indigenous inhabitants in Costa Rica,
out of 4.3 million. That is a mere 2.4%, and a quarter of them indicated, when inter-
viewed, that they “did not belong to any particular people.” To place this in perspec-
tive, the largest indigenous groups have populations with sizes which are no greater
than the number of citizens of the United States living in Costa Rica.
Of those who identified themselves as belonging to a specific indigenous people,
one has Bribri, Cabécar, Chorotega, and Ngöbe (also called Guaymí) as the four
largest groups with populations of 18, 16, 11, and 10 thousand, respectively. Smaller
groups include the Boruca (also spelled Brunca), Huetar, Maleku (also called
Guatuso), and Térraba.
The use of the original language is a fair measure of the culture robustness spe-
cific to each group.
It is important to stress that only about 30% of the 104 thousand self-identified
indigenous inhabitants stated that they possessed the ability to speak an indigenous
language. Monolinguals (namely, persons who do not speak Spanish at all) are a
disappearing small fraction of this and restricted to the elderly.
Of all the indigenous groups, all these persons living in a culturally “parallel”
Costa Rica, only the Bribri, Cabécar, and Ngöbe (Guaymí) maintain their language
in a state of vitality (meaning that at least half of the persons still use it on a regular
basis). The other groups make little or no use of their original language (there were
only four speakers of Chorotega in 2011, according to the census). It is important to
mention that, unlike the Bribri and the Cabécar, who live in Costa Rica, most of the
Ngöbe people live in Panama, their total population there being close to a substan-
tial quarter million persons. This means that the question of language and culture
endangerment has a rather different urgency in the case of the Bribri and the Cabécar.
About half of the 104 thousand indigenous inhabitants live in recognized indig-
enous territories, places where they interact mostly with other indigenous persons.
Indigenous persons tend to live in rural areas, and most of them reside in the
