| selective remodelling of Asian and other exotic traditions to suit the needs of Western environmentalist rhetoric drawn from an intellectual pedigree which favoured idealised native images. Conklin and Graham [1995: 697] put it this way: Contemporary visions of transcultural eco-solidarity differ in that native peoples are treated not as peripheral members whose inclusion requires shedding their own traditions but as paradigmatic exemplars of the community’s core values. In this new vision indigenous peoples are given central focus because of rather than in spite of their cultural differences. But, as Conklin and Graham point out, this perception and consequent alliance between indigenous peoples and science is a fragile one, based upon an assumed ideal of [indigenous] realities which contrasts with the realities for the local people themselves. Such assumptions are in danger of leading to `cross-cultural misperceptions and strategic misrepresentations’ [Conklin and Graham 1995: 696]. The reconstitution in an Asian context has often involved both the great and the little traditions (the scholarly and the tribal), often failing to distinguish between the two, and confusing ideal symbolic representations with hard-headed empirical practice. It is not altogether surprising, therefore, that this muddle has confirmed some scientists in their worst prejudices and led to the inevitable backlash summed-up in phrases such as `the environmentalist myth’ [see e.g. Diamond 1987 versus Johannes 1987]. Nevertheless, with the discarding of the more fanciful portrayals of the wisdom of traditional peoples, a more practical approach has emerged. This has been encouraged by anthropologists and other development professionals eager to make IK palatable to technocratic consumers and by technocrats themselves already predisposed to see a role for IK. Its dissemination has been part of a rhetoric extolling the virtues of `participation’, `empowerment’, `bottom up’, and `farmer- 17 |
| first’. Some measure of the institutionalisation of this version of IK (and in this version abbreviations of the IK and TEK variety are de rigeur) is the number of networking organisations and research units [see Warren, Slikkerveer and Brokensha 1995: xv-xviii, 426-516]. One of the difficulties with this approach, however, has been that categorisation of IK effectively becomes `a direct consequence of the limited parameters of western development/scientific theories which rely upon an ordered conceptual framework from which and in which to work. As Hobart [1994: 16] observes: there is an unbridgeable, but largely unappreciated gap between the neat rationality of development agencies’ representations which imagine the world as ordered and manageable and the actualities of situated social practices. As a consequence, we seem to end up with a theory which misrepresents the context in which certain knowledges occur and are experienced. Hobart has pointed to the limitations of development and scientific knowledge in that they ignore or undervalue contexts. By uncritically placing local knowledge systems under the umbrella concept `indigenous knowledge’, decontextualisation is necessarily implied, and the unique and important knowledge of specific groups becomes subject to the same limitations and criticisms that we make on behalf of western science and development theories. Moreover, the tendency to define indigenous knowledge in relation to western knowledge is problematic in that it raises western science to a level of reference, ignoring the fact that all systems are culture-bound, and thereby excluding western knowledge itself from analysis. This limits analysis of indigenous systems by narrowing the parameters of understanding through the imposition of western categories. Fairhead and Leach [1994: 75] draw attention to this problem, particularly regarding the tendency to isolate bits of knowledge which are fitted into a `mirror set of ethno-disciplines’ for the purposes of analysis and 18 |
| documentation. By examining local knowledge in relation to scientific disciplinary distinctions, they point to how this can lead to the construction of certain aspects of local knowledge as important, while excluding or ignoring other areas and possibilities of knowledge which do not fall within the selective criteria of western science. They argue, moreover, that this risks overlooking broadly held understandings of agroecological knowledge and social relations. So, for example, research and extension agents examining Kouranko farmers tree management practices in Guinea fail to take into account farmers’ tree-related knowledge which involves knowledge and management of crops, water, vegetation succession as well as the ecological and socioeconomic conditions which influence them. By failing to include the broader constitutive processes surrounding Kouranko tree management, extension workers risk obscuring and decontextualising local knowledge, and jeopardise the potential it may have for development on specific and general levels [Fairhead and Leach 1994: 75]. Thus, in this depleted vision, IK becomes a major concept within development discourse, a convenient abstraction, consisting of bite- sized chunks of information that can be slotted into western paradigms, fragmented, decontextualised; a kind of quick fix if not a panacea. Such approaches are in danger of repeating the same problems of simplification and over-generalisation that Richards and Hobart identify as major limitations in development theory, and in science applied to development `ignoring specific and local experience in favour of a generalisable and universal solution’ [Harris 1996: 14]. Furthermore, in the hands of NGOs - which in the last few decades have become significant `knowledge-making institutions’ - and within the `universalising discourse’ of environmentalism, IK has become further reified. Because environmentalist and Indigenous NGOs are now an 19 |
| influential moral and social force, stimulating public awareness, acting as whistle-blowers and watch-dogs, and moving from the role of critics to offering policy proposals to governments, and since they often use the rhetoric of science, they gain enormous authority [Yearly 1996: 134]. This process has evidently yielded results in terms of projecting a more positive image of IK. In some important respects, the way development professionals have contextualised and scientised IK by codifying it and rejecting the cultural context, has simply repeated what has happened in previous scientific encounters with traditional knowledge, as discussed above. And, similarly, once IK is drawn within the boundaries of science it is difficult to know where to draw the boundaries between it and science. As we have already seen, changing the boundaries is often sufficient to redefine something as science, as what defines it is to a considerable extent determined by who practices it, and in what institutional context the practices take place. However, the danger of turning local knowledge into global knowledge is that `at the empirical level all IK is relative and parochial, no two societies perceive or act upon the environment in the same ways. Science, by comparison, is a system of knowledge in rapid flux that seeks universal rather than local understanding’ [Hunn 1993: 13-15]. It is precisely the local embeddedness of IK which has made it successful. Recording indigenous knowledge In the introduction to The Cultural Dimension of Development, Brokensha [1995: xvii] expresses what is at present central to the indigenous knowledge enterprise - the focus on documenting and recording indigenous systems in order that they be `systematically deposited and stored for use by development practitioners.’ However, when we consider the ways in which indigenous knowledge is perceived 20 |