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 Irrigated Rice Research Consortium
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Adding a human side to rice research
Dr. Palis, or simply Flor to her colleagues, says that many people are still in the dark when it comes to anthropology, especially if it is applied in the field of agriculture such as in the IRRC. “Anthropology, as an academic discipline, studies human behavior using a holistic approach, considering the past and present, and man as both a biological and cultural being,” says Dr. Palis. “Oftentimes, anthropologists are associated only as archeologists, those who are discovering the material cultures of past societies to understand the present cultures, but there are other fields of anthropology as well. For example, we have socio-cultural anthropology, which is a comparative study of human cultures or lifeways in contemporary societies.” As an applied socio-cultural anthropologist, she studies farmers’ behavior, knowledge, norms and values, relationships among groups, and other aspects of society, including history, in relation to their adoption of IRRC technologies. She has been dealing with research or experimental designs and analysis for various types of data since she first started working at the Forest Research Institute and at the National Crop Protection Center at the University of the Philippines (UP), but she wasn’t an anthropologist then. In fact, she has BS and MS degrees in statistics from UP, which is about as different as night and day from the qualitative methods often employed in anthropology. It was a project in 1990 on environmental and health impact assessment of farmers’ pesticide use that shifted her interest from the science of numbers to the science of humans. Dr. Palis was a senior research assistant then in the Social Sciences Division (SSD) of IRRI. Her team promoted gloves and masks as protective equipment for farmers while mixing and spraying insecticide. It was a shock when they found that the farmers did not use the gloves for spraying but for playing baseball and doing laundry. They discovered that farmers believed that using the gloves during spraying will cause a Filipino folk illness called pasma, characterized by weakness or trembling muscles. Dr. Palis realized then that quantitative data alone were not enough to explain what people do, and it made her appreciate the importance of culture as a significant factor in farmer adoption of technologies. Then and there she decided to add anthropology to her research toolbox and finished a PhD degree in anthropology at UP in 2002. In 2006, she joined the IRRC after almost 20 years at SSD. As an anthropologist working among social and natural scientists in IRRC, she faces challenges such as finding time to read and understand the cultures of different societies and traveling to far-flung areas and engaging with people of different languages. Ideally, anthropologists stay in an area for years to fully understand the culture of others. But, with the IRRC’s focus on many technologies in many countries, Dr. Palis works doubly hard to learn the science behind the technologies and implement anthropological methodologies, given the limited time of stay in a study area. “For example, when I’m working on ecologically based rodent management (EBRM) in Vietnam, I need to know somehow the biology and behavior of rats, and EBRM strategies per se,” Dr. Palis explains. This includes being able to understand Vietnamese culture, farmer knowledge and practices on rodent pest management, people’s norms, values, and other aspects of society (social, economic, political, environmental, historical). Incidentally, her work on promoting EBRM led to one of her most memorable adventures in the field; that of eating roasted rats in Vietnam. When she’s not tasting foreign delicacies or conducting focus group discussions somewhere in Asia, she’s at home in the Philippines, watching TV, reading, going to the gym, and spending time with her husband and three children. But, more often than not, the cheerful, petite anthropologist is thinking of ways to further extend IRRC technologies to farmers. “We need to strategically implement the IRRC country outreach programs and involve the right partners in the network for participatory research and extension,” says Dr. Palis. “Our natural scientists have recognized the importance of farmer participation and partnership in technology development, adoption, and extension, in the research-to-impact pathways. Yes, we are achieving our goals step by step and one at a time.”
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For the Irrigated Rice Research Consortium
(IRRC) to operate smoothly, a multidisciplinary coordination unit is on hand to
support the coordinator and work group leaders as they engage in research across
11 countries in Asia. The IRRC team is an oddball mix, composed of a
communicator, a database specialist, agricultural economists, and socio-cultural anthropologists.Yet, the unusual combination works. And at the right hand of the
IRRC coordinator, evaluating IRRC technologies, developing strategies for
disseminating research products to different stakeholders, and working closely
with partner organizations, is Dr. Florencia Palis, a post-doctoral fellow and
socio-cultural anthropologist.
