Indigenous Knowledge and I
"under Kaanju law if proper land management is not carried out Pianamu will not allow the land to be sustainable"
Kivu Proverb String
Leigh Star and I got into a conversation the other day about a question that popped up for her: when did the Brits realize that they were living on an island. As we talked, my first reaction (that this was an unanswerable, uninteresting question) turned into my current position - that it's an unanswerable but very interesting question. I think that the British Isles case is relatively easy to respond to. We Brits only ever arrived on our native sod by invasion - it took seafarers to get over here; and I believe that seafaring nations have a good sense that the world is made up of an ocean with various islands around it.
But then you turn the same question to when/whether Native Americans realized that they were living on a continent (that there was sea in every direction) and you are dealing with a much more difficult issue. I can imagine ways in which that kind of knowledge could be created out of a non-universalistic, non-continent wide organization. We know that there was very good lines of communication between tribes (negotiations, capture, wandering sellers) - and indeed the general rule of anthropology is that there was more contact back there in those benighted pre universal culture days than is generally imagined (you should see the Southern European artifacts that the roadbuilders of Denmark uncovered over the past twenty years). And we know that directionality (East, South, West and North) played a big part in tribal culture. What we don't know - I think, I must qualify, because I really haven't ready the literature - is whether this ever turned into a 'shape of the whole' question.
I offer this solely in the form of a thought experiment. And the outcome (verified by my thoughts; double-blinded :-)) is that it is indeed possible to have a system of universal knowledge without (shudder) universities, books and ICT. That's just one of the reasons why I trip over the words 'indigenous knowledge' which are being so overused nowadays in our (Western economic elite) coming to terms with the fact that there are other ways of knowing the world.
Indeed, when it comes to indigenous knowledge, I am somewhat in the position of Bruno Latour, who wrote a great piece about the problems with 'actor-network theory'. There are four problems, he said, the word 'actor', the word 'network', the word 'theory' and the hyphen between 'actor' and 'network'. Well indeed. 'Indigenous knowledge would be similarly flawed if it had a hyphen. Calling it 'indigenous' is silly - does that mean that mestizas can't produce other ways of knowing; does it mean that you have to produce birth certificates over untold generations to prove that something is indigenous? (The latter is, unfortunately, a non-trivial question - the World Bank makes some momentous, generally bad, decisions based on whether a particular community is 'social' or 'cultural' - you can build huge dams on land owned by the former, not the latter).
And the word 'knowledge' is problematic. The overarching issue is that the way the term is used in this context it generally means something that we have and they don't - something which we can recognize coz we know what knowledge is. Well that's completely wrong. There's two images up above. One is of Aboriginal fire management of the land. This took 'us' a long time to recognize - Stephen Pyne has written beautifully on the topic for both America and Australia (as well as one of the most exquisite books on ice, during his cooling-off period). For us - and I won't keep adding the parentheses, just assume it's an ironic use - our way of managing the landscape goes back to our first industrial revolution, in the twelfth century: the invention of the water wheel which in a house that Jack built sort of a way provide a new form of motive power which permitted the accumulation of surplus goods which in turn allowed merchant guilds to arise and an urbanization of Europe which had previously been inconceivable. So we think water. It took the longest time for us to recognize that you can be oriented to the environment by fire (for us, that's destructive, to be fought - something our Forest Service has only recently turned around on). Helen Verran has written a wonderful piece about communication, and lack thereof, between Aboriginal land managers and Australian environmentalists on a controlled burn. So, in order to recognize what we call 'indigenous knowledge' we need to be open to other ways of knowing that we are not at present.
Which leads to the central problem with 'knowledge'. Take the Kivu proverb string pictured above. Not something you would immediately recognize as a mnemonic device holding a wealth of wisdom - just looks like a somewhat eldritch string of translucent objects. Our reasoning about knowledge tends to go this way around. We (oh lucky culture!) have figured out what knowledge is and the packages that it comes in. If it fits into our classification systems and our disciplinary structures, then it's knowledge - otherwise it's just culture. In many case, that wondrous phrase 'pre-literate' culture. Now that seems a little crazy - we know what knowledge is and how to recognize it in other cultures. It's a little like saying we know what democracy is and we can export it holus bolus to other cultures. Almost as if we were living in Bush America... . Consider the option that there are ways of knowing the world which do *not* translate into what we think knowledge is. The wonderful work of the pre-literate epic poets to weave huge transmissible narratives - from Homer to the Yugoslavian singers on - might just encapsulate a form of apprehension of the world which is lost when words are put down on paper. We are not the ultimate arbiters of what knowledge is or of what forms it should take - we are a highly successful culture which really needs to learn about other apprehensions. Our current model is that of the Borg: we assimilate or destroy. The time is ripe for other options.
And a brief coda to this, which I may follow up on some day. I find it very difficult to deal with the question of intelligent design, say. Of course I believe that it shouldn't be taught in schools - it's a classic deus ex machina theory, which makes the world a less interesting and complex place and does not lead to new ways of thinking. On the other hand, I do not believe in the theory of evolution. That's a theory which is a cultural, social, political and scientific creation. To teach it as the truth is absurd. Where this gets difficult to argue is that these observations - because we believe in universal knowledge - can be taken as condoning any attacks on empirical science. No, the issue is that we don't as a culture have a good handle on what 'knowledge' - indigenous or other - is. We have, by the standard definitions, a great indigenous culture where evolutionary theory is proved. Taught that way, I would be totally happy. And I'd have a more honest basis for rejecting intelligent design: it renders the world less interesting, where the role of any knowledge enterprise I respect is making it more interesting.
Geof Bowker
Re: the concept of the island. Note the Turtle Island myth prevalent in North America.
http://www.angelfire.com/mi4/polcrt/TurtleClan.html
Posted by: Steve Cisler | March 25, 2008 at 08:58 AM