The Dialectics of Indigenous Traditional Knowledge
Science can be understood as the process of data collection and validation by which we (human societies) learn new information about the world around us. Science is how human beings have come to understand the laws that govern the universe, life, nature, history, and how we can apply these laws to meet our needs.
However, contemporary western science under exploitative capitalism has largely existed as a version of science that is wrongly assumed to be objective, independent, neutral, detached, and/or completely separate from social processes and human history. This is a positivist and mechanistic view of science. Positivism describes the belief in science that we cannot speculate beyond the boundaries of what is strictly observable. Mechanistic thinking is the idea that all things can only be described strictly in terms of cause and effect. In reality, the phenomena we observe and record (while conducting science) unfold into new ideas, which, once created, begin to exist on their own, independent of the person who originally described them. These ideas (subjective in their origin) — through living a life of their own — become a part of what society believes to be objective reality, and are assumed to be static rather than subject to further evolution and change. The relationship between subject and object has been lost under this dominant version of scientific inquiry.
Whereas a dialectic and (historically) materialist approach (i.e., a Marxist or Marxian approach) to science can help to provide a clearer, more comprehensive, holistic, and unifying perspective on the evolution of life, nature, art, and history, because this method recognizes that science is a social phenomenon that arises within the context of human social history, and is therefore a product of natural history itself. The Marxist method helps us to recognize that science is socially constructed and therefore any notion of genuine objectivity is impossible. That doesn’t mean it’s not still the best method of inquiry that we have available to us, it just means that we should abandon the notion that science is truly independent. Whenever we study anything, there’s always the subject (the observer) and the object (the thing being observed), but anything we come to learn or understand about the object needs to recognize the relationship that exists between subject and object otherwise our understanding would be incomplete. The object does not exist in isolation. Nature abhors a vacuum.
I think that this divide in how we perceive and conduct science is the result of the artificial split that capitalist society has created between what we call STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and the arts, rather than recognizing the crucial interplay (or dialectical relationship) that takes place between the two. STEM fields represent our understanding of the objective external world, whereas the arts represent our understanding of the subjective or internal reality. If our society is tricked into thinking that science is completely independent/objective, rather than subjective and socially constructed, I think that it helps create the stereotypical detached science professionals who don’t really recognize what the results of their science could be used for — such as wealth generation, resource extraction, surveillance, military purposes, and/or mass destruction. We — as a society — have the choice of why we conduct science, whether it’s for the benefit of the capitalist system or to help relieve suffering by addressing the collective needs of humanity.
Indigenous Traditional Knowledge (hereafter referred to as ITK) is another form of science whereby Indigenous cultures and communities have developed an understanding of the land, nature, and ecosystems across various local contexts over the course of thousands of years. This is a body of knowledge which has been cultivated over generations. Indigenous cultures learned ways of living in harmony with the land, which requires a depth of knowledge not only about your surroundings (i.e., your ecosystem) but also about humanity’s place within them (i.e., the interaction between the two). Therefore ITK can be understood as a science that is born of the land, in a relationship with that land, and rooted in the history of Indigenous cultures spanning millennia. It’s the same process of basic science whereby repeated trial and error helps us to better understand our environment and the processes (or scientific laws) that govern nature so that we can use those laws to our benefit. ITK recognizes not only the importance of the environment on people (or communities), but also the role of human communities within the broader ecosystem as well. We play a role that shapes our environment, which in turn shapes how we live as a society within that environment. Therefore, ITK can be understood as an implicitly dialectical form of scientific inquiry, of a similar vein to Marxist science.
There has been a push in recent years — as part of the larger emphasis on reconciliation — to incorporate more ITK into our understanding of the world alongside western science (WS) views. Both ITK and WS are valid forms of scientific inquiry, with the only major difference being that WS is a colonial construct whereby any/all science needs to be conducted in a certain way, written down following specific standards, and it needs to be validated by an independent body of other scientific experts (what’s known as peer review), and then published in academic theses and/or scientific journals. ITK has helped entire Indigenous societies survive across the world for millennia, but because their knowledge wasn’t written down and validated by settler institutions, it was largely (and wrongly) considered as lesser knowledge or untrustworthy. This was despite the obvious strength of ITK as being dialectical, validated over thousands of years, and recognizing the role that human activities play within natural ecosystems.
A popular term in contemporary science in the age of reconciliation is the idea of “braiding” where WS and ITK are considered equally important and complimentary in their efforts to build a comprehensive understanding of ecosystems and/or other natural phenomena. Key aspects of braiding ITK with WS include recognition for relationships, responsibilities, reciprocity, and intergenerational knowledge transfer. These components further emphasise the dialectical (reciprocity) and historical materialist (intergenerational) aspects inherent to traditional knowledge systems, reinforcing their similarity to Marxian perspectives. The integration (or braiding) of ITK with WS is a method by which we can combine two similar — yet distinct — disciplines to come up with a more comprehensive or holistic understanding of natural phenomena through the re-incorporation of dialectical knowledge via ITK. ITK helps us to recognize the role of humanity within our ecosystems, and that the activities that human society undertakes in the process of production are just as much a part of the ecosystem for other species, as those species are for us. Dialectics (and ITK) help us to understand the reciprocal relationship that exists between ecosystems at large and the individual species (including ourselves) which constitute them.
Given the recent resurgence in negative attitudes (and occasionally violence) towards notions of socialism in the popular discourse given the rise of the alt-right, the appearance of anti-vaccination “freedom” groups in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic, and the election of proto-fascist leaders in regions across the world, the potential for the wider public to embrace a Marxist perspective on science seems limited and unlikely. However, given the growing public support for reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples by settler populaces, and the push for the inclusion of Indigenous Traditional Knowledge into our understanding of environmental issues, this may serve as a covert opportunity to promote dialectical and materialist perspectives on science and nature within the scientific community (and maybe even the wider public consciousness), without explicitly relying on the use of Marxist terminology.
