Discussion on Indigenous Knowledge

"​Take, for example, this child of a Barasana in the Northwest Amazon, the people of the anaconda who believe that mythologically they came up the milk river from the east in the belly of sacred snakes. Now, this is a people who cognitively do not distinguish the color blue from the color green because the canopy of the heavens is equated to the canopy of the forest upon which the people depend."

​(Wade Davis, TED)

"To this day, [The Kogi] remain ruled by a ritual priesthood but the training for the priesthood is rather extraordinary. The young acolytes are taken away from their families at the age of three and four, sequestered in a shadowy world of darkness in stone huts at the base of glaciers for 18 years: two nine-year periods deliberately chosen to mimic the nine months of gestation they spend in their natural mother's womb; now they are metaphorically in the womb of the great mother. And for this entire time, they are inculturated into the values of their society, values that maintain the proposition that their prayers and their prayers alone maintain the cosmic -- or we might say the ecological -- balance. And at the end of this amazing initiation, one day they're suddenly taken out and for the first time in their lives, at the age of 18, they see a sunrise. " (Davis, TED)

On the picture below you see a Cofan shaman preparing ayahuasca, which is a powerful psychoactive preparation. To make ayahuasca, you need two elements, otherwise they don't do the trick (=make you high). To know exactly which two elements to combine, you need exceptional knowledge of the plants. You could approach this problem (which plants to combine) in a Western scientific way. or the indigenous shaman way. Wade Davis explains it as follows in his fascinating TED talk: "[Ayahuasca] is made really of two different sources: on the one hand, this woody liana which has in it a series of beta-carbolines, harmine, harmaline, mildly hallucinogenic -- to take the vine alone is rather to have sort of blue hazy smoke drift across your consciousness -- but it's mixed with the leaves of a shrub in the coffee family called Psychotria viridis. This plant had in it some very powerful tryptamines, very close to brain serotonin, dimethyltryptamine, 5-methoxydimethyltryptamine. [...] the thing about tryptamines is they cannot be taken orally because they're denatured by an enzyme found naturally in the human gut called monoamine oxidase.

They can only be taken orally if taken in conjunction with some other chemical that denatures the MAO. Now, the fascinating things are that the beta-carbolines found within that liana are MAO inhibitors of the precise sort necessary to potentiate the tryptamine. So you ask yourself a question. "How, in a flora of 80,000 species of vascular plants, do these people find these two morphologically unrelated plants that when combined in this way, created a kind of biochemical version of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts? [...] Well, we use that great euphemism, "trial and error," which is exposed to be meaningless. But you ask the Indians, and they say, "The plants talk to us." [...] Well, what does that mean? This tribe, the Cofan, has 17 varieties of ayahuasca, all of which they distinguish a great distance in the forest, all of which are referable to our eye as one species. And then you ask them how they establish their taxonomy and they say, "I thought you knew something about plants. I mean, don't you know anything?" And I said, "No." Well, it turns out you take each of the 17 varieties in the night of a full moon, and it sings to you in a different key."

Reflection: Does the term “indigenous knowledge” necessarily suggest power divisions between a dominant and non-dominant group?

Our world view is shaped by our language, our cultural background and years of education. Yet, the world does not exist in an absolute sense. As Wade Davis illustrates in his TED talk on endangered cultures, we could perhaps speak of 'multiple models of reality' instead. The methods we employ to gather knowledge are heavily influenced by the model of reality we are most familiar with. In some cases these models of reality offer mutually inconsistent explanations and it may be difficult to argue that they can truly co-exist. In others, however, they may complement each other and the range of perspectives leads to better knowledge.

In this context, it is important to remember that how we know and what you accept as knowledge is to some extent dependent on your education, the language you speak and the time in which you were born. At this point in time, a lot of knowledge is produced and passed on via the means of the English language. Much of your thinking is influenced by post-Enlightenment ideals. Knowledge you learn at school is "Westernised" in some sort of a way, even if you are not currently living in "the West". In a way, our knowledge is shaped by post-imperialism. True, many Western countries don't exactly exert explicit political power over their former colonies, but when it comes to values and ideas, their influence arguably still prevails. Although the western scientific paradigm has been fantastic at driving progress in many areas, we should not forget that our adherence to the dominant discourse (=way of thinking and speaking) gives us the illusion that there is only one way of viewing the world. What if, for some reason, Bhutan rather than the UK, dominated over 20% of the world population at the beginning of the 20th century? How would that affect the way you know?

Indigenous communities often live at the edge of societies. They are not only marginalised economically, but also culturally. Their ideas, languages and ways of thinking are slowly disappearing due to the presence of more dominant cultures and discourse.