ABSTRACT
In India, the recent global politics of biodiversity has brought various practices such as “folk” Ayurveda, plant taxonomy, and local anthropology into direct contact. This chapter focuses on a documentation project on “bio-cultural diversity” in a rural state in North India, Uttarkhand. It considers how these different practices are connected and re-differentiated, and further, what forms of knowledge emerge in translation. The chapter pays particular attention to the temporal dimension. The attention to temporalities guides us away from understanding “multiple worlds” within the conventional framework of cultural relativism and liberal multiculturalism, which assumes the existence of different social worlds distributed in spatially different locations. By describing layers of multiple knowledge practice happening in the same place (with different temporalities), the author explores more promising ethnographic engagement with bio-cultural diversity as techno-cultural process, which adjusts to people’s making of effective knowledge in a way that is geared toward the future and avoids representing folk medicine as an existing, static system.
