| East-West Environmental Linkages Network Workshop 3, Canterbury 8-10 May 1996: draft paper. Please do not reproduce, quote or cite without permission of the authors. scientific and development studies literature A critical assessment Roy Ellen and Holly Harris University of Kent at Canterbury This paper does not seek to demonstrate the superiority, or even the complementarity of local knowledge over dominant global scientific knowledge in particular instances; neither does it seek to enter into any polemical discourse suggesting the converse. It is assumed that most readers will already be persuaded that indigenous environmental knowledge (hereafter IK)1 can hardly be ignored in development contexts, as well as having applications in industry and commerce. And yet, equally, we suspect, most of us will also accept that the claims made for the environmental wisdom of native peoples have sometimes been misjudged and naive, replacing denial with effusive blanket endorsement; presenting an `ecological eden’ to counter some European 1 In this context it is perhaps important to stress that by IK we have in mind local environmental knowledge (knowledge of plants, animals, soils and other natural components) with practical applications, rather than the more encompassing sense of IK associated with environmental philosophies or world-views, or even ITK (indigenous technical knowledge) in its wider sense. However, we accept that such practical, technical and empirical knowledge is characteristically embedded, linked to, and informed by these broader understandings. 1 |
| `world we have lost’. Here our aim is different: to dispassionately yet critically examine the status of, and claims made for, IK in the rhetoric and practice of different academic disciplines, at different times and in different political situations, ranging through environmental movements, states, NGOs and local indigenist activism. We are particularly concerned to focus on the transfer of ideas between these groups and contexts. In short, we take it for granted that IK is useful in particular contexts, but seek to go beyond such demonstrations and statements of the obvious to ask what role it plays in `green arguments’ and scientific and political discourse more generally. Our intention is to focus on several issues and themes: (1) the extent to which IK is still a significant category within Western patterns of production and consumption and the extent to which the development of professional science and technology have undermined or obscured it; (2) the relationship between the great indigenous traditions (such as Ayurvedic medicine) and the local myriad little folk traditions; (3) the way in which IK is constantly changing, being produced as well as reproduced, discovered as well as lost; (4) the often contradictory and changing scientific and moral attitudes towards IK linked to a history in which Western science has by turns absorbed local knowledge (both non-western and folk European) into its own, rejected it as inferior only to rediscover its practical benefits; and (5) competing definitions and conceptions of IK in the context of contemporary theory and practice in development and conservation. In this last respect, we place particular emphasis on how IK has been recorded and represented. We take the view that the distinction indigenous:non-indigenous has many highly specific regional and historical connotations which are not always appropriate to particular ethnographic contexts. Some, indeed, 2 |
| argue that the term `indigenous’ forces us into an oppositional logic of `us and them’, while others assert that the category of IK is wholly compromised by the `hegemonic opposition’ of the privileged us to the subordinated them, and therefore is morally objectionable as well as being practically useless. We try to explain how it has become possible to articulate these positions given the way in which IK studies have developed, without necessarily agreeing with the more extreme formulations. Indigenousness as applied to knowledge: a provisional model What is meant by `indigenous knowledge’ is by no means clear, and part of the purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the variable terminologies, definitions and cognate concepts through their geographical, local-global and various historic and disciplinary refractions. The words we use are not insignificant, since whether we speak of `indigenous knowledge’ (IK), `indigenous technical knowledge (ITK)’, ethnoecology, `local knowledge’, `folk knowledge’, `traditional knowledge’,`traditional environmental (or ecological) knowledge (TEK)’, `people’s science’ , says something of the direction from which we approach the subject and the assumptions we make about it. However, these terms are often used interchangeably, and there is arguably enough overlap between the meanings of these labels to recognise the existence of a shared intersubjective understanding, some `epistemic community’ which permits a sufficient degree of common-sense engagement to allow that they refer to the same focal semantic space. However, if we are to move beyond the level of describing particular empirical bodies of such knowledge and their applications, we cannot proceed far without a more rigorous attempt to deconstruct the subject. Part of the problem is what we mean by `indigenous’. Those to whom we 3 |
| attribute indigenous knowledge must be indigenous people, and yet the terminological difficulties we confront in saying as much uncover a veritable semantic, legal, political and cultural minefield. For Posey [1996: 7] indigenous people are `Indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles’, thus indicating the inevitable immanence of tautology. Moreover, it is impossible to use indigenous in any morally neutral or apolitical way. Peoples identify themselves as indigenous to establish rights and to protect their interests, NGOs are established to support them, and government departments to administer them. We have Survival International, Cultural Survival, the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA), periodical publications with titles such as Indigenous Affairs and The indigenous world 1995-6, which `support indigenous people in their struggle against oppression’, and so on. At the same time, governments claim that peoples so labelled are no more or less indigenous than other minorities or majorities under their jurisdiction. This, for example, is the very clear view of the Indonesian government. Although it may be convenient to seek a technical definition of indigenousness in terms of prior occupancy, length of occupancy, a capacity to remain unchanged, or whatever, such matters are seldom politically neutral. Measuring indigenousness is not an exact science [see e.g. Barnes 1995, Kingsbury 1995, Gray 1995]. Given its conflicting, ambiguous and strong moral load `indigenous’ might seem the least useful way to describe a particular kind of knowledge. `Native’ and `aboriginal’ have similar connotations; `tribal’ is too restrictive and confuses a political condition with a distinct kind of knowledge; `folk’ and `traditional’ are less morally loaded, though `folk’ still has rather quaint associations in some quarters. Of them all `traditional’ seems to have more credibility, and is among the most common ways of describing a particular kind of anthropological 4 |