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Why “indigenous” knowledge?
Arun Agrawal
To cite this article: Arun Agrawal (2009) Why “indigenous” knowledge?, , 39:4, 157-158, DOI: 10.1080/03014220909510569
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03014220909510569
Published online: 22 Feb 2010.
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Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand: Volume 39, Number 4, December, 2009 1175-8899 (Online); 0303-6758 (Print)/09/3904-0157
157 157-158
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Why "indigenous" knowledge?
Arun Agrawal
If one could spin the wheels of time, one might wish to go back and banish the qualifiers "indigenous" and "scientific" from the dictionary of those writing about knowledge—indeed, even those studying alternative forms and ways of knowing. After all, knowledge can be use ful or useless, politically salient or meaningless, socially relevant or irrelevant, empirically testable or irrefutable, and ideologically open or blind, without reference to whether it is indigenous or scientific. The qualifiers indigenous and scientific, when used in conjunction with knowledge, represent conceptual formations that are internally fractured and categori cally indistinct—even if they represent social issues and political concerns that are coherent, well bounded and durable.
But one cannot spin back the wheels of time. I predict, more than 15 years after having first written about the purported distinction between indigenous and scientific knowledge, that scholars of indigenous knowledge and observers of indigenous strategies of resource use and allocation will continue to use these contrastive terms for at least another 10. The durability of interest in indigenous knowledge is itself interesting—worth understanding better. After all, far more popular phrases that occupied scholarship on development and social change—basic minimum needs, growth with equity, import-substituting industrialisation, and the like—have had far shorter innings (Ingham 1993; Leys 2006).
In fact, this tension at the heart of indigenous knowledge studies needs far more attention than it has received. Research on indigenous knowledge remains vigorous (Nyong et al. 2007; Aikenhead & Ogawa 2007; Berkes 2009 this issue; Berkes & Berkes 2009). It is worth under standing better why this elusive object of investigations—indigenous knowledge—continues to fascinate scholarly observers. What accounts for the ease with which indigenous knowledge is reified in contrast to the social ground and practices from which it emerges, even if there are many excellent studies that link knowledge with its social ground (Moller et al. 2009a,b)? How is it that despite the fact that the terms indigenous and scientific exist to create boundar ies and are used to police them, they continue to be used so broadly in systematic scholarly research on marginalised groups and their ways of knowing and living? And can we explain why even when we recognise that indigenous and scientific are at best redundant and at worst obfuscating adjectives, they continue to be so in vogue?
University of Michigan, School of Natural Resources and Environment, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. email: [email protected]
R09013; Received and accepted 5 November 2009; Online publication date 26 November 2009
Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Volume 39, 2009 158
I do not wish to be misunderstood about the question(s) I am asking. The issue is not whether there are different ways of knowing and understanding the world. (There are poten tially as many different ways of knowing as there are knowers!) Rather, the issue is
whether the categories
indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge contain entities within them that share the same epistemological, methodological, and substantive features—and if they do not, why it is that the terms continue to find appeal (Ellen et al. 2000). Although a real answer must await real research, it is possibly the case that advocates of indigenous knowledge find in the term a particularly potent way to summarise and invoke many of their concerns and hopes about peoples, livelihoods, life styles, and resource systems they view as disappearing. The phrase evokes embattled ways of living-in-the-world that real economic, social, and political pressures are nudging and frog-marching toward further mar ginalisation and oblivion. Because the indigenous/scientific division of knowledge effectively represents durable underlying social confrontations, the study and defense of indigenous knowledge continues to attract attention. Indeed, even as one questions the need to contrast indigenous and scientific knowledges, one underscores this contrast—in the very use of the contrasting adjectives. Indigenous knowledge is here to stay, even if what it represents is forever and always disappearing.
REFERENCES Aikenhead GS, Ogawa M 2007. Indigenous knowledge and science revisited. Cultural Studies of Sci
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Berkes F 2009. Indigenous ways of knowing and the study of environmental change. Journal of the
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Berkes F, Berkes MK 2009. Ecological complexity, fuzzy logic, and holism in indigenous knowledge.
Futures 41(1): 6-12.
Ellen R, Parkes P, Bicker A ed. 2000. Indigenous environmental knowledge and its transformations:
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Ingham B 1993. The meaning of development: interactions between "new" and "old" ideas. World
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Leys C 2006. The rise and fall of development theory. In: Marc Edelman M, Haugerud A ed. The anthropology of development and globalization: from classical political economy of contemporary Neoliberalism. Malden, MA, Blackwell. Pp. 109-125.
Moller H, Charleton K, Knight B, Lyver PO'B 2009a. Traditional ecological knowledge and scientific inference of prey availability: harvests of sooty shearwater (Puffinus griseus) chicks by Rakiura Maori. New Zealand Journal of Zoology 36: 259-274.
Moller H, Kitson J, Downs TM 2009b. Knowing by doing: learning for sustainable muttonbird harvest
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Nyong A, Adesina F, Elasha BO 2007. The value of indigenous knowledge in climate change mitiga tion and adaptation strategies in the African Sahel. Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change 12(5): 787-797.
