This essay explores how indigenous knowledge about plant and animal remedies was gathered, classified, tested, and circulated across wide networks of exchange for natural knowledge between Europe and the Americas. There has been much recent interest in the “bioprospecting” of local natural resources—medical and otherwise—by Europeans in the early modern world and the strategies employed by European travellers, missionaries, or naturalists have been well documented. By contrast, less is known about the role played by indigenous and Creole intermediaries in this (...) process. And yet, the transmission of knowledge between indigenous communities and the European cabinet was neither transparent nor natural, and often involved epistemological, linguistic, and religious obstacles. Drawing on printed and manuscript collections of indigenous remedies, written in colonial Mexico between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, I focus on how local intermediaries, like creoles scholars, sought to overcome such obstacles by observing indigenous uses of remedies, by studying indigenous languages and by producing natural histories and pharmacopoeias in indigenous languages. Ultimately, behind the Creole participation in the transmission of indigenous remedies, one can point to political and cultural interests and to inclusive definitions of knowledge, which cut across oppositions between science and superstition, cabinet and field, centre and periphery. (shrink)

Workplace incivility has gotten a lot of attention in recent decades. Researchers have looked at many forms of aggressive conduct in the workplace and their negative impacts on individuals and businesses. The goal of this study was to see how incivility among supervisors leads to work withdrawal and when this link might be mitigated. We argued that supervisor incivility indirectly influences work withdrawal behavior through job insecurity, and that emotional intelligence moderates this connection. This study attempted to evaluate the influence (...) of supervisor incivility on the job withdrawal behavior of personnel working in several banks Lahore by drawing on affective events theory and conservation of resource theory. Data were gathered from 350 workers of banks in Lahore, Gujranwala, and Sheikhupura to test our assumptions, and SPSS 24 was used to generate and analyze data with Hayes Process. The findings revealed a strong link between supervisor incivility and job insecurity but no link between supervisor incivility and work withdrawal behavior. The idea of moderation was validated, since emotional intelligence moderates the relationship between job insecurity and job withdrawal behavior. There are also suggestions for more empirical studies and theoretical and practical ramifications. (shrink)

This presentation was delivered at the Self, Motivation & Virtue Project's 2015 Interdisciplinary Moral Forum, held at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.