2004 Bridges Summer Research Report Meg Stalcup Anthropology "Urban Relations: the example of an open market in Rio de Janeiro"

Introduction

Pierre Bourdieu argues that “Space can have no meaning apart from practice; the system of generative and structuring dispositions, or habitus, constitutes and is constituted by actors’ movement through space… Because social practice activates spatial meanings, they are not fixed in space, but are invoked by actors, men and women, who bring their own discursive knowledge and strategic intentions to the interpretation of spatial meanings” (Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003: 6). At the same time, practices do not just occur in space, but develop with it — and because of it — and are always specific and local to place.

Over this summer, of 2004, I explored some of the practices related to plants of medicinal and ritual use in a Rio de Janeiro market or feira. The weekly marketplace is created in time and in the space of the street through transactions with humans and plants. A transaction is a communicative activity that can involve the animate and inanimate; what defines it is that the parties reciprocally affect or influence each other. Thus a transaction may mean making over a thing from one person, thing or state to another. This mutual transformation clearly occurs for both the person and the plant when people buy plants for medicinal and ritual uses. There is the economic transaction that is the buying and selling of plants, where bundles of green leaves, gnarled bark and fragrant flowers are transformed into therapeutic potentialities. Within this transaction there is another, the commodification of the knowledge of the herbalists about identifying, naming and presenting the species and, to some extent, how to use them. Commodification is generally viewed as an economic activity, but the specific local space of the market reveals that this cannot be separated from the social.

I focused on how interactions between power, knowledge and place were materialized in a neighborhood open market. This project built on ethnobotanical research I did from September of 1998 through the beginning of 2000. I found that the ways herbs and knowledge were commodified reflected regional, Brazilian and global discourses on “natural” medicine and health. The market(place) results from the combination of the natural environment where the plants were collected and the social environment where notions about nature, tradition, spirituality, popular medicine and biomedicine intermingle with the reality of social disparity. The herbalist vendors of medicinal and religious plants come from marginalized social groups, yet their possession of useful botanical materials offered for sale, and their presumed knowledge of species and uses inverts, to some degree, the dominant power relations. However, they are also subject to attitudes towards class and race which are inevitably expressed in the market, and they are economically dependent on the purchasing decisions of their customers.

Methods

The feira was held every Tuesday on a residential street in the middle-class neighborhood of Tijuca. Fruits, vegetables, fish, poultry and other sundry kitchen and household items were sold by municipally licensed vendors, and there were usually four to seven herbalists, who rented their wooden stands from the same organizer but stayed under the radar of government management. Although I took notes on who said what, I did not conduct formal interviews. Rather, I went early each morning and looked over the tables, asking what plants they had that day. I collected species, then photographed and labeled them by where each one had been collected and by whom. Usually conversation ensued about the common name, medicinal or ritual use, and how to prepare it. Although any given specimen was taken from a single herbalist, the discussions included other vendors and customers who happened to be in the vicinity, purchasing or talking about plants.

Of the four herbalists with whom I worked, one lived in a local Tijuca favela and the others traveled about 2 hours by bus from the Baixada Fluminese. Three were female, one male. They all learned their lore from the members of the maternal side of their family, who had come from either Espírito Santo or Minas Gerais a generation or two ago. Each of the four herbalists bought common but non-native aromatics such as basil from the Central Estadual de Armazenamento (CEASA), but also cultivated some of the herbs, and picked others that grew spontaneously in the degraded areas near their house. A large portion of the species they sold, and the time they put into procuring their merchandise, went to collecting native species from the mata atlântica remnants in the Baixada and the National Park Floresta da Tijuca. The non-native aromatics were the most frequently purchased group of plants, but the remarkable diversity of plants found was produced by the native species extracted from the forest. These made up about 40 percent of the 151 species collected in total. The forest species did not require a cash outlay, which was important, although the collecting process was time-consuming and described as unsafe for the female venders to do alone, thus necessitating the accompaniment of a male relative on the expeditions.

The greatest number of plants, 68 percent were for purely medicinal use, 13 percent were for purely ritual use, and the remaining 19 percent were ascribed multiple purposes. In addition to medicinal and ritual uses, the herbalists indicated that their customers bought the plants for use in charms or simpatías, simple rites realized to effectuate white or “nice” magic. The herbalists never gave simpatías as a specific use, but they commented that in their opinion it represented a significant factor in their sales.

Social/Economic

That economic practices are inherently social is unmistakable in the buying and selling of medicinal herbs. The sales occur because a kind of value is ascribed to the conceptions regarding their purpose and efficacy, and because of a social weighting of importance. “Commodities are things with a particular type of social potential,” according to Arjun Appadurai (Appadurai 1986: 6). The plants, and knowledge about them, become commodities because they are exchangeable for something else. “Economic exchange creates value. Value is embodied in commodities that are exchanged” (Appadurai 1986:3) and this means that we don’t exchange things because they’re valuable — they are valuable because we exchange them. Economists have tended to think of a commodity as something with a real, identifiable value before it is exchanged. But an object only becomes a commodity when it is being exchanged, and therefore its value as a commodity is not something essential or intrinsic but something that is only established through the process of exchange.

Appadurai explains this role of the social in economic practice by saying “[the] commodity candidacy of things is less a temporal than a conceptual feature, and it refers to the standards and criteria (symbolic, classificatory and moral) that define the exchangeability of things in any particular social and historical context” (Appadurai 1986:14). Plants and ethnobotanical lore hold multiple and different values not only during their life of exchange (always as part of a process) but outside of it as well. While from one perspective the plants are part of the commodity network, simultaneously from another perspective, their value-meaning/construction may not shaped by the exchange relationship at all, but by other forces that affect meaning-making and consciousness of the meaning-maker.

Several forces are at play in the market that affect the authenticity and value granted to the herbalists and their lore, and provide them with commodity status. Some have to do with popular medicine, others with religious traditions brought from Africa. Historically, the plants, their uses, preparations and names, reflect colonial European botanical knowledge and cures mixed with that of indigenous Brazilian groups and African language and traditions from the slaves. This combination produces popular medicine as it takes form in the fair, and the people who purchase the plants utilize popular medicine for a variety of reasons. Especially for retired people living on a reduced fixed income, purchasing the plants is a more economic way to make home remedies such as cough syrup or arthritis rub than purchasing an industrial product. For others, such treatments are preferable because they are viewed as more natural and the connection to nature is given a positive valence. Some make their own remedies because it is what their own mothers or grandmothers did. For others, herbal concoctions are a last resort because biomedicine has failed.

Although popular medicine is rooted in tradition, people’s choice to use it, its authenticity (once again), and the actual practices are inevitably influenced by the media’s presentation of herbal medicine, which reflect national and international ethnobotanical research and discourses. For example, after a series of print articles and a segment on an evening television program about a friar who advocated aloe vera for preventing and treating cancer, the herbalists were inundated with requests for aloe and even a couple of years later, customers cited this reason for their purchase.

The ritual plants present an interesting situation, as traditionally, species had to be collected in a proscribed way by an appropriately designated person, for a specific, immediate rite. However, this is evidently not feasible for many in the urban environment. In his research on Bahia, Roger Bastide observed that “the herbs used in cleansing rites cannot be picked any which way from any random place; there is a collecting ritual (although it seems to us that this is not always followed in Bahia, due to the facility with which the herbs can be obtained from an herbalist)” (Bastide 1973). Purchase, then, of species for use in candomblé and umbanda ceremonies was already occurring more than 30 years ago in the Bahian capital of Afro-Brazilian culture and was frequently seen in the market. For devotees who buy plants, the knowledge and work of the herbalists is substituted for someone in a traditional role and this accords the herbalists a certain kind of respect and power.

Power/Knowledge

The socio-economic practices connected to valuation of the plants, knowledge and their commodity status that are spatialized in the feira inevitably involve power. Michel Foucault indicated that “to trace the forms of implementation, delimitation, and demarcation of objects, the modes of tabulation, the organization of domains meant the throwing into relief processes — historical ones, needless to say — of power. The spatializing description of discursive realities gives on the analysis of related effects of power” (Foucault 1980: 70). As was seen in the analysis of how social valuations relate to the commodity status of the plants and associated lore, historical processes of power also affect multiple aspects of popular medicine and the role the herbalists play.

Foucault continues by saying that “Once knowledge can be analyzed in terms of region, domain, implantation, displacement, transposition, one is able to capture the process by which knowledge functions as a form of power and disseminates the effects of power. There is an administration of knowledge, a politics of knowledge, relations of power which pass via knowledge and which, if one tries to transcribe them, lead one to consider forms of domination designated by such notions as field, region and territory” (Foucault 1980:70). Although the division of knowledge into fields, regions and territories may be used for domination, there is also a counter-story. The market functions as a site where existing class and race frameworks are resisted by the herbalists, and offers them an opportunity for renegotiation of the dominant power structures.

The herbalists described their profession, which nets them only about two minimum salaries, as a choice that asserts individuality and independence. They feel that their activities provide them with a reasonably secure and dignified economic niche, and do not want to be servants or cleaning women, although the latter certainly earn more money. Theirs is a skilled craft: to the untutored eye, the tables of herbs seem an indistinguishable mass of green, and very few people would know all of the plants on display. This puts the herbalists in a certain position to their customers. Clearly the sellers know their personally collected merchandise, and their knowledge as a kind of power is reinforced by the act of selecting a requested species from the inter-tangled plants on the tabletop. While this is happening, customers usually talk about the herbs and remedies, sometimes seeking advice but as often exchanging information or just discussing someone’s ill-health. The herbalists’ possession of the plants grants a measure of respect and intellectual interaction, a contact distinct from the violence and violation that characterizes the interaction between classes in Rio.

The herb vendors were occasionally skeptical of those of their customers who held what they perceived as idealistic notions of traditional, natural medicine. They expressed ambivalence about their own craft, wavering on its value relative to biomedicine. They made syrups, tonics, compresses and ointments for themselves and family members, but described it as “making-do,” or poor-folks medicine. One herbalist said that she preferred to take her son to the doctor when ill, but this required a whole day of waiting in lines, along with verbal abuse from bureaucrats and inevitable cash expenses, so was not always possible.

However, as a group they expressed their preference for the independence and flexibility that being vendors afforded them. Selling at the market required extremely early hours, but this was done only two to four times per week, while the species collecting could be accomplished on one’s own schedule, and without a boss. When a child fell ill, a vendor could skip a day and go to another market later in the week, assuming one had the necessary informal personal connections at other markets. Children could also be brought to the market and kept under relative supervision, a common habit of all the herbalists, both male and female, that became quite regular whenever school was out of session.

Certain forms of conduct could also be interpreted as exercises of the independence and acts of resistance to normative behavioral expectations. Although not necessarily close friends, the herbalists generally supported each other. Technically in competition for customers, they present a unified front to the public, going to get a requested herb from another vender’s table and then passing over the money, rather than sending the person there. They also gleefully defied definitions of socially appropriate behavior by beginning to drink beer at 9 or 10 in the morning. Their rationale was that, having begun their day around 3 am, midmorning is past their own noon, in relative terms. And, when not conversing with customers, they kept up a ribald commentary on the surrounding world, relationships between other market vendors and their own lives.

There are counterarguments to this notion of resistance. The herbalists’ role could be seen as playing into stereotypes about the “natural” relationship of blacks to the exotic jungle or tumultuous spirit world. The necessity of attracting clients — who are mostly middle-class or elderly who were formerly middle class and have now slipped to just the edge of the poverty line — and making sales, sometimes occasions subservient behavior.

And, although herb selling was valued as a profession for the autonomy it provided, it was not an easy life by any means and issues related to power, and especially gender, surfaced repeatedly. Of the four relatively regular vendors with whom I worked, the one who was most frequently absent usually ascribed her absence to child care issues, especially a sickly son. Independence was compromised for all the women by the need for a male relative to go along on the collecting expeditions. The Atlantic rainforest remnants where the plants grew were sufficiently isolated that the female herbalists felt it would be unsafe to go alone because of the risk of rape, and because dead bodies were occasionally dumped there. This independence was also problematic in some personal relationships. One of the venders with whom I had worked in 1999 has stopped selling plants, after 13 years in the profession. The other herbalists intimated that she had had problems with her husband who objected to the collecting expeditions and day-long absences of the market lifestyle.

Conclusion

Despite these impediments, the market exercises a vital, and in some sense positive, role in the social and economic life of the herbalists and their clients. The interactions are not, however, limited to these characters but involve a broader ecological and social environment. Several aspects of the collecting and vending of plants in the market were not analyzed here and should be mentioned. The large number of native species sold in the market, extrapolated for the 182 markets held weekly in Rio de Janeiro, indicated that the herbalists’ collecting might have a significant environmental impact. With regards to the herbs’ medicinal use, many herbs and their effects are well-known. For the plants in this study, however, the popular name found in the literature often did not correspond to that commonly cited by the herbalists. People were using plants in a traditional manner but without the background knowledge about the plants themselves and this disconnect raised the possibility of misapplication. As this last element suggests, there is ongoing modification of the lore and practices surrounding, as well as customer demand for, the plants. Returning to Appadurai, “Demand emerges as a function of a variety of social practices and classifications, rather than as mysterious emanations of human needs.” (Appadurai, 1986: 29). There are fluctuations in the popular embrace of the biomedical or what is perceived as “natural”, although there are also stable populations that favor one or the other. The herbalists and their customers reflect such flows of knowledge and valuations, while the interaction between them can be seen as counteracting hegemonic class relations that otherwise characterize contact between the rich and poor in Rio.

References
Appadurai, A. (1986). Introduction: commodities and the politics of value. The Social Life of Things:Commodities in Cultural Perspective. A Appadurai. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 3-63.

Bastude, R. (1973). Estudos afro-brasileiros. São Paulo., Ed. Perspectiva.

Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings: 1972-1977. New York, Harvester Press.

Low, S.M., Lawrence-Zúñiga, D. (2003). Locating Culture. The Anthropology of Space and Place: locating culture. S.M. Low, Lawrence-Zúñiga, D. Oxford, Blackwell Publishing Ltd.: 1-48.