| construed as arbitrary [Grove 1996: 127-8]. We can see a similar, though in terms of the epidemiology of ideas, less complex process in the work and influence of George Rumphius. Rumphius was a German naturalist employed by the Dutch East India Company, who between 1653 and 1702 lived in Amboina where he systematically recorded the natural history of not only the islands immediately around Amboina, but, through the organisms provided him, island southeast Asia in general. In doing this he relied heavily on local assistants and their knowledge. His most important work, on plants, was published posthumously as the Herbarium Amboinense, and what is remarkable about this work is not only its importance in listing many species hitherto unknown in European botanical descriptions, but his heavy reliance both on native descriptions of plant ecology, growth patterns and habits, and the extent to which he relied upon Malay and other local folk classifications and terms to provide a meaningful and comprehensive account [Peeters 1978, Beekman 1981]. Compared with Van Rheede’s work on western India, however, rather than finding interference from or rejection of classical Javanese and other politically dominant schemes, we find instead a reliance on Malay (essentially a new language at that time in the Moluccas) as a linguistic filter for indigenous ideas and knowledge. In turn, Linnaeus, in particular in 1740, fully adopted the Ezhava classification and affinities in establishing 240 entirely new species, and to a lesser extent relied on the Ambonese and Malay classifications and descriptions provided by Rumphius. The influence of the Herbarium Amboinense and the Hortus Malabaricus immediately established Holland as the centre of tropical botany, and French, English and Dutch naturalists employed by respective East India companies, following Dutch methods, instructed 13 |
| to collect as much indigenous knowledge as possible [Grove 1996: 140- 1]. Their influence on the canonical Linnaean texts meant that subsequent authorities came to depend on essentially Asian organising frameworks: Roxburgh, Buchanan-Hamilton and Hooker in India [Grove 1996: 139], Burman, Blume, Henschel and Radermacher in Indonesia. But more than this, the `seeds of modern conservationism developed as an integral part of the European encounter with the tropics and with local classifications and interpretations of the natural world and its symbolism’ [Grove 1995: 3]. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries local knowledge was increasingly systematically tapped and codified. Such `routinisation’ resulted in the publication of scientific accounts of new species and revisions of classifications which, ironically, depended upon a set of diagnostic and classificatory practices which though represented as Western science, had been derived from earlier codifications of indigenous knowledge. Numerous encyclopaedic inventories began to appear, such as George Watt’s Dictionary of the economic products of India [1889-96] and Burkill’s [1935] similar encyclopaedia on Malaya inspired by the work of Watt, which had all the hallmarks of the scholarly arm of imperialism. Thus, the European relationship with local Asian knowledge was, paradoxically, to acknowledge it through scholarly and technical appropriation and yet somehow to deny it by reordering it in cultural schemes which link it to an explanatory system which is proclaimed as Western. While on a personal level, scientists may have acknowledged the contributions of their local informants, at the professional level the cultural influences which those same informants represented were mute.5 5 One cannot avoid noting the comparison here between nineteenth century field science and modernist (functionalist) anthropology in the tradition of Malinowski. |
| Indigenous knowledge marginalised If, in the context of late European colonial scientific fieldwork in Asia, traditional knowledge was evident but mute, with the inexorable rise of modernity, it become a kind of ignorance [Hunn 1993 13]. Tradition was something to be overcome rather than encouraged, and several generations of `top-down’ development experts, and organisations engaged in resource extraction and management in the underdeveloped world, have either deliberately avoided it on the grounds that their own models were superior, or simply never realised that it might be a resource to be tapped. The dominant model of development has been for some fifty years or more based on useful knowledge generated in laboratories, research stations and universities, and only then transferred to ignorant peasants [Chambers and Richards 1995: xiii]. Such attitudes are now very much on record thanks to the work of, for example, Paul Richards [e.g. 1985]. But not only has IK been grossly undervalued by Western-trained `scientific’ managers in terms of its potential practical applications, when it was at last absorbed into `scientific’ solutions it was curiously insufficiently `real’ to merit any certain legal status or protection from the battery of patents and copyrights which give value and ownership to western scholarly knowledge and expertise. Even when the knowledge was clearly being utilised it was often redescribed in ways which eliminated any credit to those who had brought it to the attention of science in the first place. The point is made by Harris [1996: 11], in her discussion of Azadirachta indica, or `neem’: Whether or not the chemical properties assumed to provide the active substance for cure have been identified by the communities does not appear relevant. Rather, it appeared that the method used by these western firms, and their ability to synthetically reproduce the compounds, was perceived as the true science and consequently, deserving of patent. Because the knowledge held by the local populations is commonly shared, it is deemed `obvious’ and traditional, folk knowledge as opposed to modern, scientific, specialist knowledge. Not only does this distinction seem arbitrary, it also 15 |
| implies certain institutionally-based criteria where laboratory professionals practice recognised science, while indigenous lay peoples are seen to possess folk knowledge. The inherent ethnocentrism and elitism of late twentieth century western science, therefore, has made it difficult for scientists themselves to accept that the folk have any knowledge of worth [Johannes 1981: ix]. This view is reinforced by perceptions that traditional peoples often adopted wasteful, even delinquent, patterns of resource extraction, as classically exemplified in the literature on shifting cultivation [e.g. Dove 1983]; and that when subsistence practices were evidently damaging that this was a matter of preference rather than an outcome of poverty. The rediscovery and reinvention of indigenous knowledge Since about the mid nineteen-sixties the process of marginalising IK as outlined above has been put into reverse, and is indeed accelerating to a remarkable (some would say, alarming) degree. This is due to both romantic and practical reasons. The romantic reasons have their immediate political renaissance in the sixties counter-culture [Ellen 1986], with the notion that traditional, indigenous or `primitive’ peoples are in some kind of idyllic harmony with nature. Such a view was initially prompted by a crisis in the modernist project of science and technology, both in terms of the increasing remoteness and arcane character of science, its perceived arrogance and negative technological outcomes, as well as its inability to explain much about the world which ordinary people sort explanations for. This, as has been suggested on various occasions [Budiansky 1995: 3, n7 p. 251, quoting Kaufman, quoting Chesson] amounted to `good poetry’ but `bad science’. Others have gone even further and questioned the poetry. What this often involved was the 16 |