Indigenous knowledge and science are complementary but not the same
Recently, I saw a tweet go around that simply repeated the mantra “Indigenous knowledge is science” eight times in a row. The post blew up…
Recently, I saw a tweet go around that simply repeated the mantra “Indigenous knowledge is science” eight times in a row. The post blew up showing that repetition is just as good for twitter views as it is for confirming experimental results.
Many twittizens, including scientists, objected to this statement, but accusations of “racism” drowned them out. This latest development in a long line of bullying tactics used by those who wish to act as self-appointed thought police easily shuts down almost any debate. Rather than entertaining the possibility that there are good, non-racist reasons to disagree, the tweeter instead tosses in a verbal hand grenade.
Far from being racist, the position that there is a distinction between the two is more helpful to all concerned.
It turns out there is a considerable body of scholarly work on both sides of this debate going back at least to the 1970s, and the idea that indigenous knowledge is science has had some august proponents. Carl Sagan suggested that the hunting tactics of the !Kung San could be considered science because they made use of careful observation and knowledge passed down through generations.
I don’t think that anyone disputes that indigenous people make use of observation, hypotheses, trial and error, passing down knowledge from person to person and generation to generation. Also, there is no reason to suppose that this knowledge is invalid or inferior to scientific knowledge.
This may be the crux of the problem. Since science is assumed to be superior, in order to blow the dark cloud of inferiority away from indigenous knowledge, it must be equated with science. But the problem is in the assumption of superiority. Science often struggles to verify and understand practices that indigenous populations have developed over long periods of time. And there is a long history of racism leading to the the assumption that science is therefore superior.
While the development of these practices shares many of the characteristics of science, it is not science, and the very fact that science and indigenous knowledge have struggled to come together is the best evidence for why.
One key difference between how communities and science have developed knowledge is in the way that science systematically develops hypotheses, tests them by experiment and observation, relying on measurement as its primary means of avoiding subjectivity. Philosophically, science is an enterprise that seeks to break things down in a reductionist way and reassemble them into theories. Likewise, it relies on the collection and sifting of data from many different sources to corroborate theories. Hence, it seeks generality and abstractness at the expense of specificity and concreteness.
The theory of gasses is a good example. We understand gasses to be formed of molecules which behave very much like little balls bouncing around. This theory has little concrete value, however, to someone who wishes to build an internal combustion engine. The more empirical theory of thermodynamics and ideal gasses is far more useful, but science is not concerned with what is useful but reducing theories to their most elementary components.
Indigenous knowledge or as it is sometimes called Indigenous Technical Knowledge (ITK), by contrast, is concrete and rooted in observations, meaning it is empirical and holistic. It is grounded in the workings of nature with human beings as part of that nature, not as distant observers.
ITK is also community based, contextual to a time and a place, does not distinguish between subject and object, observer and observed, and is not based on individualism but collectivism. Science, unlike ITK, is designed to be portable and universal. While it may have emerged initially from the West, it attempts to transcend western communities and apply everywhere. Newton’s law is as true in England as in the Amazon, the Sahara, or the Arctic.
Some, like Agrawal (1995) have argued that science is also community based and contextual and hence no distinction can be made. He bases this argument on his understanding of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). This hand-wavy criticism falls flat on its face when you consider that scientific theory, while expressed in the language of the scientific community and subject to the practices of that community, has different goals and standards than any indigenous one. Indeed, it is for this very reason that science and ITK are not in conflict with one another.
Moller et al. (2004) suggests that ITK and science are complementary because of their differences, which would not make sense if they were the same. Moller says about wildlife monitoring:
Case studies from Canada and New Zealand emphasize that, although traditional monitoring methods may often be imprecise and qualitative, they are nevertheless valuable because they are based on observations over long time periods, incorporate large sample sizes, are inexpensive, invite the participation of harvesters as researchers, and sometimes incorporate subtle multivariate cross checks for environmental change.
Moller suggests (and Bohensky and Maru (2011) reiterates) five distinctions between the two knowledge mechanisms:
(1) science is diachronic, i.e., tends to collect short-term data over large areas, whereas ITK is synchronic, i.e., tends to collect information over long time periods; (2) foci on averages (science) and extremes (ITK); (3) quantitative (science) and qualitative (ITK) information; (4) improved tests of mechanisms (science) and improved hypotheses (ITK); and (5) objectivity (science) and subjectivity (ITK)
To say that science and ITK are the same is like saying mathematics and English are the same. Just because mathematics can be expressed in English and, to some extent, vice versa does not mean they have the same goals, developmental process, or outcomes; nor can you say that anything you can express in English is mathematical. You cannot dispense with one or the other.
One of the points of pain for proponents of ITK is how it has been pushed aside for many years because it was not scientific. This is especially true when Western style governments have attempted to plan the development of indigenous communities, often with little input from those communities. While ITK is not science, that does not make it inferior. In many cases, because ITK is based in communities and is holistic, it is superior to scientific knowledge. It offers insight where science is silent and vice versa and that is far more important than making shallow efforts to harmonize the two by equating them.
Agrawal, A. 1995. Dismantling the divide between indigenous and scientific knowledge. Development and Change 26:413–439. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7660.1995.tb00560.x
Bohensky, E. L., and Y. Maru. 2011. Indigenous knowledge, science, and resilience: what have we learned from a decade of international literature on “integration”? Ecology and Society 16(4): 6.
http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-04342-160406
Moller, H., F. Berkes, P. O. Lyver, and M. Kislalioglu. 2004. Combining science and traditional ecological knowledge: monitoring populations for co-management. Ecology and Society 9(3): 2. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss3/art2/