| Dutch depredations on resources, and redefined as peoples science, as a form of resource management and conservation that was wholly positive [Zerner 1994: 1101-4]. Explicit and full recognition - in developing countries and in the West - together with the rights which are deemed to accompany this, has only come with the failure of top-down approaches, with the quest for appropriate and cheap technologies for development, and with the rise of ethnobotany in the pharmaceutical industry; at a time when the environmental movement has become morally committed to the notion of indigenous environmental wisdom. No wonder then that at this precise historical moment, when IK (through the assertion of intellectual property rights) and the rights of `indigenous’ peoples in more general terms are higher on the political agenda than they have ever been before, `indigenous’ as a label is being reclaimed by the protagonists themselves in pursuance of their own interests. Individual native peoples, though less so in Asia than in, say, the Americas, have seen indigenous knowledge as part of their own cultural identity, and as a very concrete and politically appropriate way of asserting it. Part of the reason for this is because although the guardians of such knowledge are traditionally oriented individuals and groups, those who wish to document it are from Westernised elites or are outsiders. Thus, a very important relationship of unequal power is articulated [Healey 1993]. Both states and NGOs have sought to protect indigenous rights to such knowledge, and this has given rise to a whole set of new issues in merging the philosophies, legal traditions and discourses of the West and the rest of the world. In some cases, cross-fertilisation of different local traditions and the reification of `tribal’ or `folk’ knowledge has occurred. Third World politicians, scientists and others 29 |
| have had to work out for themselves how indigenous or traditional knowledge is to be defined and whether its existence is altogether to be welcomed. When it becomes a means by which to flag problematic local minorities making political and cultural claims against a government it is clearly threatening; if it can be defined in a more inclusive way and commoditised, it is a resource to be exploited. The end of indigenous knowledge? We began this paper with a list of distinctive features of what, for the sake of convenience, we have called IK. However, IK is increasingly criticised for its lack of organising themes, and whatever characteristics might be used to carve out a meaningful intellectual space, the cognate terms we use and concepts against which they are matched suffer from several major epistemological weaknesses. One of these weaknesses concerns the question of context and the relationship between IK and culture in its generality. A second is the extent to which IK involves practices and patterns of thought which might be described as comparable to science. A third is that its use implies the existence of some overarching comparator, what we might call universal reason (or science) which is always ontologically privileged. Each of these issues is closely related to the others, but the emphasis in each case is slightly different. Our purpose here is not to attempt a resolution of the problems, so much as to highlight them. In our discussion of the effects of recording and codifying indigenous knowledge, we have drawn attention to the problem of decontextualisation, in particular the separation of such knowledge from its human agents and from the situations in which it is produced, reproduced, transformed, and (presumably) is at its most effective. It is important, however, to question the extent to which something called IK can ever be successfully de-coupled from the wider cultural 30 |
| context. Despite the rhetoric to the effect that considering `the cultural dimension’ of knowledge is important, in a collection such as the eponymous The cultural dimension of development, the examples provided appear to have little to do with the cultural contexts in which they occur. The result is an ambiguous representation of IK as `indigenous science’, rational knowledge or empirical knowledge. Current literature on IK presents it as largely separate from the cultures in which it originates. At best, reference is made to certain ritual and symbolic factors which should be considered, but any consideration of whether and how indigenous knowledge and culture might differ is ignored. In this way, IK is almost placed outside culture. Thus, in their analysis of farmer experimentation in the Andes, Rhoades and Bebbington [1995: 298] present local knowledge as a sort of free- floating science based on individual creativity. In an effort to liberate small-scale farmers from previous assumptions which presented them as passive and culture-bound, the authors are concerned to illustrate that farmer knowledge is as much a science as that of laboratory scientists, and to separate what is `useful’ from what is not. This approach has the effect of redefining what is useful in a narrow and ethnocentric way, and externalising culture (separating it from what good farmers do), and recasting it as an impediment to successful development. Such experimental techniques are no less cultural than anything else farmers may do or believe6 . The failure to take into account the coexistence and interconnections between both empirically and symbolically motivated criteria within any system of knowledge inevitably leads to limited understandings and perhaps even fundamental failures of understanding about how IK operates and how it is successful. 6 The difficulties of separating rational empirical knowledge from religious, moral or symbolic knowledge, are well illustrated in an analysis by Lemonnier [1993] of Ankave-Anga eel trapping. 31 |
| Indigenous knowledge has been categorised by outside interests stemming from environmental and socio-economic influences which have more to do with the popular perceptions of `others’ that with what `others’ have themselves made clear. In this sense, `indigenous’ becomes relevant and necessary to separate an observer from an observable other. Also, this neat categorisation can be seen as a direct consequence of the limited parameters of Western development or scientific theories which rely on an ordered conceptual framework from which and in which to work. We also need to ask if it is possible to effectively define the shifting boundaries between science and folk knowledge, and whether the distinction is in any way helpful; and whether there is a difference between folk knowledge and folk science. On the one hand, there is a sense in which both traditional and Western knowledge are anchored in their own particular socio-economic milieu, they are all indigenous to a particular context. This is reflected in the failure of scientific solutions due to ignorance concerning particular cultural circumstances [Agrawal 1995: 4]. But is there just good and bad science, or is science qualitatively different in its underlying cognitive organisation? Is it all applied common-sense, the only difference being that one is practised by the folk and the other by professionals, in other words an outcome of some division of intellectual labour? Alternatively, is folk knowledge hopelessly embedded in particular symbolic patterns of thought, while real science is a distinctive kind of uncommon sense, driven by a logic which often results in demonstrating its counter-intuitive character? At this point, of course, the trail leads us into the familiar anthropological thicket of the rationality and relativism debate [Hollis and Lukes 1982, Overing 1985, Horton and Finnegan 1973, Wilson 1970], of `the great cognitive divide’, and the sometimes highly- charged confrontations between defenders of a philosophically narrow definition of how science works, the more broad-minded pragmatists 32 |