“They generate knowledge collectively and place it at the service of society, not the individual”

24/01/2020

Victoria Reyes-García, a 1994 UAB History graduate, has been studying indigenous communities for over 20 years. She lived with the Tsimané people in Bolivia’s Amazonia region, and since 2006 she has been an ICREA research professor affiliated with the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the UAB.

She recently received an ERC Proof of Concept fellowship to create an Indigenous Climate Change Impact Observation Network, geared at bringing indigenous knowledge and perspectives to climate change forums.

 

Why did you decide to study history? 
I’m from Nou Barris, a working-class district, and I was very interested in the issue of social movements and worker struggles, so that’s why I decided to study History. My baccalaureate teachers were scandalised because I was a really good student, and everyone said I should study Engineering, but I was more interested in social aspects. I worked in the mornings, and so I studied in the afternoons in a very different atmosphere alongside older people with many interests. It was extremely enriching.

How did you direct your career towards research?
As I was studying, had close ties with social movements, and I took an Economic History class taught by Joan Martínez Alier, a touchstone in the field of Ecological Economics. After the second year, I combined studying with a job as a research assistant with this professor, and that’s how I first ventured into the world of research.

What about after you finished your History degree?
When I graduated, Joan Martínez Alier took a year’s sabbatical and went to Ecuador, and he told me I should go to there to get a Master’s. I did a Master’s in Amazonian Studies and began to take an interest in indigenous topics. I was involved in a project on how women use natural resources differently than men in Amazonia, and the person in charge of the project, the anthropologist Marianne Schmink, offered me the chance to go to the United States to pursue a PhD in Anthropology. There at the University of Florida I met other professors, and one of them had a project in Bolivia’s Amazonia.

What did your avenue of research during your PhD end up being?
I did my thesis on what happens to indigenous knowledge when communities begin to have access to the market economy, to buy things and to sell their products and cease to be self-sufficient. I also studied the changes in their economy, health and eating habits. There in the USA, I met my partner, who is an agronomist, and he decided to drop everything and come with me to Bolivia to live with the Tsimané people, an indigenous group that lives in the Amazon. We ended up staying four years, and my older daughters were born there.

What is your day-to-day life like when studying an indigenous community? How do you earn their trust?
It is a very lengthy process. In the end we did speak the language a bit, but you usually work with a translator. First you have to secure the national permits, and then you have to speak with the indigenous organisation. They advise you, and then you go to a community where you have to explain what you want to do and ask permission to do it. If they tell you that you can and you like it there, you start looking for a place to live, sometimes with a family or sometimes you can build a house because the constructions are quite simple in terms of the materials they use.

And once you’re there, what’s the first step?
You spend the first few months going to the river, talking to people and interviewing them to understand how they live, how they eat and what they do, because you can’t conduct any research if you don’t first understand the context. After all that time, you feel comfortable and realise that six months have gone by. After that period, you can actually begin to conduct more structured research because you know how to ask the questions. It’s long process and it’s not for everyone. You feel alone because no one talks to you, because people are doing things you don’t understand. But it’s also really enriching because you end up learning about yourself and your limits. Sometimes these societies have been really badly mistreated, and when you go there they don’t know whether you also want to seize their lands. If you’ve got the right character, you can make lots of friends. I just went back to the place where I did my thesis 20 years ago and they are still happy to see me and I them.

So, what is the status of this community?
When I got there 20 years ago, it was a group of hunter-gatherers; they lived in a protected area and did a bit of very simple farming. You could only reach it by canoe, and most people didn’t speak Spanish, only their indigenous language, but over time there has been a process of market integration, such as in the sense that the government has built schools. That’s not bad, but they are schools where they sometimes teach things that are a bit out of context. On the other hand, the lumber companies have gotten there and hire people to work for money, and the farming is no longer just for subsistence. They sell more, and a motorway has been built and there’s mobile phone coverage. There have been really huge changes in 20 years; they’ve gone from subsistence to being a very strong cultural group, to being very exposed.

Have you undertaken any development projects with this community?
Yes, it’s very important for them to conserve the land in order to conserve their identity. They need land in order to maintain their way of life; otherwise they can’t hunt, for example. So, one of our projects was to help them map the territory so that when the government wants to bring colonists or donate these lands, they can demonstrate that they use this land and it’s theirs. We have also done projects to introduce several agricultural varieties which work well with their farming, such as when one crop is finished to plant another short-cycle crop to feed their chickens. But our group’s main objective is research, not development, even though the research I have done contributes to highlighting indigenous knowledge. In the past 20 years, there has been a reassessment of indigenous knowledge, both politically and socially.

And you currently work at the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology (ICTA).
The time came when we were told, “You have to go, otherwise you’ll stay here your entire life”, and we also wanted to get a bit of distance. I secured a job as a researcher at ICREA (Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies), and this enabled me to settle here, but it also gave me flexibility in my personal life. The institution where I currently work is ICTA, because even though I’m an anthropologist and my research is with indigenous groups, it is also related to anthropological issues, and here at ICTA there is a diversity which enables me to interact with people from other disciplines. In recent years, my research was first financed by an ERC (European Research Council) project to study precisely how the local strategy helped adaptation to the environment, and about a year and a half or two years ago I won another grant to study the effects of climate change on indigenous groups with a global perspective. Plus, I also work on how indigenous knowledge could help us deal with the impacts of climate change.

What conclusions have you reached?
Humans’ adaptation to the environment is physical; we have learned how to walk standing up and to use our thumbs, and our bodies have evolved. But there are some anthropologists who say that there has also been a cultural adaptation; we have evolved to a culture that helps us adapt, and part of this culture is socially transmitted. With the study, we wanted to analyse the role of traditional knowledge in this adaptation process. In our society, the more highly educated you are, the more you earn, so the question was: in indigenous cultures, if you have better knowledge of medicinal plants, is your health better?

So, what was the conclusion?
We found that if a person has better knowledge of hunting, for example, they do indeed hunt more, but this person does not necessarily have better diet or health; they’re not related because they share what they hunt. One of the conclusions of this study is that sharing knowledge is what enables a society to adapt. That is, it is not only important to generate knowledge, but the way this knowledge is made available is equally important. In our society, we generate knowledge as patents, “this is my knowledge”; in contrast, in these indigenous societies, first they generate knowledge more collectively, and then it is placed at the service of society, not so much at the service of the individual. Therefore, we analyse the fact that there are other ways of generating knowledge which benefit society more, not just the individual.