Investigating Local Knowledge by Paul Sillitoe

Author:Paul Sillitoe [Sillitoe, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science, Earth Sciences, Geography, Social Science, General, Sociology, Rural
ISBN: 9780429583148
Google: pTj3DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-05-23T04:54:52+00:00

Chapter 6

The INGO, the Project, and the Investigation of ‘Indigenous Knowledge’: The Case of Non-Timber Forest Product (NTFP)

Sebastian Taylor

In its mainstream model of socio-economic (and ultimately urban-industrial) modernity, ‘development’ has, not infrequently, been indicted as the actualisation or continuation of a Western epistemological hegemony (Fowler 2000; Rist 1997; Escobar 1995; Esteva 1992). Post-modern critiques have attacked Western Enlightenment science and its assertion of an absolute, objective and singular knowledge towards the realisation of which all cultures, in the course of development, are assumed to aspire,1 asserting instead the plurality of culture, and observing a multitude of ‘sciences’, of alternative epistemologies, of ‘knowledges’ – knowledges that are indigenous and concrete rather than universal and abstract. In the practical field of international ‘development’ aid, that reversal of Western emphasis has been championed by the non-government sector (here, international NGOs).

Contemporary INGO discourse privileges diversity of knowledges generated indigenously within the specific geographical and cultural localities of the people whom development is intended to serve – predominantly the subsistent, rural poor.2 That emphasis on indigenous (or ‘local’) knowledge as the true measure of, and guide for, development (ascendant during and out of the ‘lost decade’ of 1980s and dominating structural adjustment aid policies) occurred alongside a sea-change in the kind of organisation deemed proper and best to enact aid. Where modernisation was explicitly state-led, development’s ‘post-modernising’ period, by contrast, has demanded the agency of the non-governmental.

In this shift, development discourse has increasingly evoked (albeit in varying degrees) a kind of foundational political neutrality, situating aid beyond the state in an imperative of humanitarianism (paradoxically universal and local simultaneously) and the assertion, therein, of a consensus underlying the interaction of the Western and the indigenous. Ultimately, otherwise hostile or competitive development interests and interpretations (of Western and ‘non-Western’, state and non-state and so on), are implicitly brought into consensual alignment under the guiding hand of the local, the indigenous and its universal authenticity.

But there are significant problems – in this context – in the way ‘indigenous knowledge’ informs contemporary development theory and practice. In the first place, we can ask how indigenous local knowledge and the international organisation interact. ‘Indigenous knowledge’, arguably, expresses itself predominantly in the immediate practices of the local group. The processes by which it becomes absorbed as knowledge through the far-flung offices of the international organisation involve, necessarily therefore, distanciation and abstraction – the conversion of actual practices into documentary record, the aggregation of incidences into general categories, and their transmission, in an essentially conceptual form, out of the local and upwards through the decision- and policy-making geo-hierarchy of the INGO. Indigenous knowledge as live practice is progressively refined (at the simplest level in the acronym, ‘IK’) into an abstract generalisation, in the worst instance, thereby, simply replacing the idea of the bloc of Western knowledge with an opposing but equally objectified and objectifying concept of ‘the local’.

Moreover, it is arguable that ‘indigenous people’ rarely use a conscious category ‘indigenous’ in considering themselves and the practice of their lives;3 and we

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