Central & South Americas and the Caribbean
Sarah-Lan Mathez-Stiefel is the ISE representative for Central and South Americas and the Caribbean for the 2010-2012 term. This new regional representative position was created at last ISE General Assembly in Tofino in May 2010, when the Americas Regional Representative position was divided, primarily along linguistic lines.
Sarah-Lan is a Swiss anthropologist and ethnobiologist with extensive working experience in Latin America as well as Eastern and Southern Africa. She has been based with her family in Lima, Peru, since 2006. She works at the Centre for Development and Environment of the University of Berne, Switzerland, within the supporting mandate of the BioAndes Program, an initiative that aims at the conservation of biocultural diversity in Andean regions of Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. She is also the Executive Director of A Rocha Peru, a Peruvian Christian nature conservation organization which is part of the global family of A Rocha International. Her professional interests focus on biocultural diversity, sustainable development and natural resource management, traditional ecological knowledge, and social learning processes. She is currently concluding her PhD research on the transformations of traditional medicinal knowledge in the Andes, with case studies from Bolivia and Peru.
During her term on the Board of the ISE, she hopes to establish bridges between the ISE and the various networks of ethnobiologists that exist in Latin America. She aims to represent the ISE in events in the region and help translate ISE promotional material and Code of Ethics into Spanish and Portuguese. She will also explore concrete possibilities of collaboration with Latin-American societies of ethnobiology and other initiatives active in the field of biocultural diversity.
Code of Ethics and Ethics Toolkit Workshop
II Latin-American Congress of Ethnobiology, Recife, 11th November 2010
The organizers of the II Latin-American Congress of Ethnobiology, VIII Brazilian Symposium of Ethnobiology and Ethnoecology, and III Pernambucan Meeting of Ethnobiology and Ethnoecology kindly provided an auditorium and time in the congress program to run a workshop on the ISE Code of Ethics and Ethics Toolkit.
The workshop was coordinated by Sarah-Lan with the help of Armando Medinaceli, Matias Pérez, Alonso Pérez, and Sebastian Tapia. The objective of the session was to provide background on the history, development and key content of the ISE Code of Ethics, to describe plans underway for a practical toolkit that will assist implementing the Code of Ethics, and to get the feedback from the participants on both initiatives. Seventeen researchers from nine countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Mexico, Switzerland, the US, and Venezuela) actively participated to the workshop, discussing the Code of Ethics and contributing to the creation of the Ethics Toolkit.
It was a great opportunity to get the input from ethnobiologists from a region with an important tradition of action-research, and where a lot of our colleagues are confronted every day by ethical issues involving Indigenous people or other local actors. The participants’ reaction to the Code of Ethics was overall very positive. The importance of giving an ethical framework with concrete tools for ethnobiological research was highlighted, and the possibility of involving governmental agencies in its application was mentioned. A suggestion was to simplify the redaction of the Code of Ethics in order to make it more widely accessible. The participants all agreed on the need for the elaboration of the Ethics Toolkit, but noted that it should be adaptable to the various local contexts. Some interesting questions were raised, such as: “How does the Code of Ethics protects the researchers?”, and “Which organizations can control the application of the Code of Ethics by researchers and how?”.
The workshop results will be taken into account by the ISE Ethics Committee in the revision of the Code of Ethics and elaboration of Ethics Toolkit.
