| other. Like the rest of the terms, it derives its meanings from variations on the modernity: traditional dualism, which we have quite rightly learned to treat with suspicion. We shall return to some of the problems associated with this dualism as applied to knowledge below, where we outline a more critical approach to the distinctive features attributed to indigenous or traditional knowledge. At this stage, however, it is convenient to have some standard by which to operationalise a few arguments, and to this end we can at least provisionally list some of the more commonly asserted characteristics: 1. IK is local: it is rooted to a particular place and set of experiences, and generated by people living in those places. The corollary of this is that transferring that knowledge to other places runs the risk of, quite literally, dis-locating it. 2. IK is orally-transmitted, or transmitted through imitation and demonstration. The corollary is that writing it down changes some of its fundamental properties. Writing, of course, also makes it more portable and permanent, reinforcing the dislocation referred to in 1. 3. IK is the consequence of practical engagement in everyday life, and is constantly reinforced by experience and trial and error. This experience is characteristically the product of many generations of intelligent reasoning, and since its failure has immediate consequences for the lives of its practitioners its success is very often a good measure of Darwinian fitness. It is, as Hunn [1993: 13] neatly puts it, `tested in the rigorous laboratory of survival’. 4. 1 and 3 support a further general observation, that it is empirical 5 |
| rather than theoretical knowledge. To some extent, its oral character hinders the kind of organisation necessary for the development of true theoretical knowledge. 5. Repetition is a defining characteristic of tradition [Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983], even when new knowledge is added. Repetition (redundancy) aids retention and reinforces ideas; it is also partly a consequence of 1 and 2. 6.Tradition is `a fluid and transforming agent with no real end’ when applied to knowledge; negotiation is a central concept [Hunn 1993:13]. IK is, therefore, constantly changing, being produced as well as reproduced, discovered as well as lost; though it is often represented as being somehow static. 7. IK is characteristically shared to a much greater degree than other forms of knowledge, including global science. This is why it is sometimes called `people’s science’, an appellation which also arises from its generation in contexts of everyday production. However, its distribution is still segmentary, that is socially clustered [ Hobart 1993: 13]. It is usually asymmetrically distributed within a population, by gender and age, for example, and preserved through distribution in the memories of different individuals. Specialists may exist by virtue of experience, but also by virtue of ritual or political authority. 8. Although IK may be focussed on particular individuals and may achieve a degree of coherence in rituals and other symbolic constructs, its distribution is always fragmentary: it does not exist in its totality in any one place or individual. Indeed, to a considerable extent it is devolved not in individuals at all, but in the practices and interactions in which people themselves engage. 6 |
| 9. Despite claims for the existence of culture-wide (indeed universal) abstract classifications of knowledge based on non-functional criteria [see e.g. Berlin 1992, Atran 1990]; where IK is at its densest and directly applicable its organisation is essentially functional. 10. IK is characteristically situated within broader cultural traditions; separating the technical from the non-technical, the rational from the non-rational is problematic [Scoones and Thompson 1994: 18]. Using this rather crude checklist of characteristics, we are now in a position to examine a number of substantive areas of critical relevance: the first is what IK and its various semantic cognates might mean in the context of Western traditions of knowledge, what they might mean in the context of Asiatic traditions of knowledge, and what its impact has been on the development of those traditions we call science. Indigenous knowledge at home in the West The West often assumes that it has no IK that is relevant, in the sense of `folk’ knowledge; that it once existed but has now disappeared, and that somehow science and technology have become its indigenous knowledge. Certainly, there is plenty of evidence that the existence of, for example, codified pharmacopoeias such as the De Materia Medica of Dioscorides displaced local knowledge and oral tradition extensively in Europe and the Mediterranean, but uncodified knowledge persisted and gradually filtered into organised texts as the number of modern remedies of European folk origin manifestly attest to [Cotton 1996: 10- 11]. But Western folk knowledge (non-professional, experimental, |
| uncodified, ad hoc, often orally-transmitted) is arguably just as important as it ever has been; just different, informed by science where appropriate, and located in different contexts (domestic horticulture, dog-breeding, bee-keeping etc.). The folk are no less creative. Moreover, in parts of Europe urbane folk actively seek out the authoritative knowledge still regarded as being present in their own peasant traditions, as in truffle-hunting, geese-rearing or the preservation of rare breeds of sheep. This is splendidly illustrated in the work of people like Raymond Pujol [e.g. 1975] in France. Peasant or rural knowledge becomes, in this context, Europe’s own inner indigenous other. Interestingly, and paralleling a development we will examine later for indigenous knowledge elsewhere, such European folk traditions have in the last 40 years or so been reified, reinvented, celebrated and commoditised, as demonstrated in the contemporary cultural significance of living folk museums, craft fairs and such like. One of the ironies of this is that these `folk’ traditions have become highly codified; but the double irony, as we shall see, is that the process of codifying folk knowledge into organised scholarly knowledge has ever been thus. During mediaeval and early modern Europe, proto-scientific knowledge of plants and animals superseded folk-knowledge by classification, analysis, comparison, dissemination (usually through books and formal learning) and thus generalisation. The process was not sudden: for a long time common experience, oral tradition, personal experience and learned authority contributed to the `aphoristic’ knowledge or `received wisdom’ upon which organised specialised knowledge, particularly medical knowledge, depended [Wear 1995: 158-9], and knowing where unorganised folk knowledge, professionally restricted organised knowledge, and proper scientific knowledge began and ended is not at all easy. In such proto-scientific technological practices, it is 8 |