From Ethno-Science to Science, or ‘What the Indigenous Knowledge Debate Tells Us about How Scientists Define Their Project’
ROY ELLEN∗
ABSTRACT This paper begins by examining the response of the organised scientific community to the claims of the indigenous knowledge lobby, and with some observations on the dichotomy between science and traditional technical knowledge. It reiterates the view that the potency of the distinction arises from a fusion of the general human cognitive impulse to simplify the processes by which we understand the world, reinforced by the socially-driven need of science to maintain an effective boundary around the practices which scientists engage in. The paper goes on to argue that the existence of these two epistemological meta categories obscures the presence of different ways of securing predictive knowledge of the material world, each of which is characterised by a distinctive configuration of cognitive and technical features, and which in several ways cut across the usual dualism between science and traditional knowledge. The argument is illustrated using examples from the history of biology and the ethnography of ethnobiological knowledge. It engages critically with insights drawn from cognitive psychology, the philosophy and sociology of science, and cognitive anthropology, as well as with scientists’ own descriptions of what distinguishes the mental operations in which they engage.
1. The history of ‘indigenous knowledge’
The surge of interest in indigenous knowledge during the eighties and nineties of the twentieth century produced, in its turn, a counter offensive from some scientists concerned at the kinds of claims that proponents of indigenous knowledge were making, an attempt by others to reconcile
∗University of Kent at Canterbury.
c© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2004
Journal of Cognition and Culture 4.3
traditional knowledge and science, and to distinguish both from pseudo science.1 Many otherwise pragmatic individuals were wary of endorsing the utility of ‘indigenous’ knowledge because this seemed to question their own credentials as scientists and professionals. Similarly, some scientists’ detected an embedded anti-scientific tradition, historically rooted in certain formulations of cul
tural relativism, and most recently evident in its post modernist guise. The more extreme versions of this position, it is often said, undermine the possibility of objective science, and go against our common sense experience that enough science ‘works’ sufficiently well to allow us to rely on the predictions upon which medicine and engineering depend. This overcharged interchange has been dubbed the ‘science wars’ (Anderson 2000). In retrospect, both sides were making some outrageous claims, and for the most part there is now a large degree of consensus. I do not wish to revisit this ground here, merely to register its existence. Nor do I wish to return to the terminological squabbles which have confused the issue, or to provide further endorsement of the the value of indigenous knowledge. The important thing is to note the terms, conditions and timing of the debate. For over much the same period other scientists have been embroiled in a parallel and equally acrimonious debate with cultural theorists, sociologists and historians of science, intent, as it was seen, in undermining the ‘objectivity’ and value-neutrality of science. Some, it is asserted, sort to rewrite the great scientific breakthroughs in ways which the authors would claim improved on older, ideological, revisionist and selective ‘presentist’ histories of science, histories which had airbrushed out the inconvenient non-scientific context and presented us with representations of the minds and achievements of great scientists which suited the present day high priests and guardians of scientific method. At a distance, the potency of the sterile dichotamies being drawn here arise from a fusion of a general human cognitive impulse to simplify the processes by which we understand the world (reinforced by the socially-driven need of science to maintain an effective boundary (Nader 1996: xii-xiv, 3-4) around the practices which scientists engage in), and of the West’s mission to preserve its cultural pre eminence. I wish to suggest that the opposition of science and ‘indigenous knowledge’ (which in the minds of the more extreme protagonists becomes 1See e.g. the editorials (Anon. 1999, 1999a) and correspondence (Diamond 1986; Johannes 1987) in Nature. See also ICSU 2002.